The remembered boy
A self retrieved from lakes, thefts of boats, and mountain fear.
Romanticism · Autobiographical poem · 1850
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
A long poem on the growth of a poet’s mind: Lake childhood, Cambridge, revolutionary hope, and the return to nature as a moral home.
Romantic epic
Characters
Coleridge
The addressed friend who makes the epic a letter as well as a monument.
Themes
Bildung
The mind is a landscape that can be narrated.
Revolution and disappointment
Politics enters the poem as a crisis of hope.
Motifs
Memories that retain a renovating virtue.
Sublime fear as the beginning of inwardness.
Echoes
Other works that share a motif with this one.