The Natural Sublime Leading to the Human Sublime (on Book 8 of Wordsworth’s The Prelude)

Abstract

This article seeks to trace the connection between two kinds of the Romantic sublime envisaged in Book 8 of Wordsworth’s great autobiographical poem The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1805, 1850). Our focus is primarily on the 1850 text. I read Book 8 against passages from Wordsworth’s fragmentary essay “The Sublime and the Beautiful” (c. 1811/1812), attempting to grasp how the components of the natural sublime, highlighted by Wordsworth, — power, duration, individual form — got modified in Book 8 to produce the sensation of the human sublime. My interpretation posits a new pattern of emphasis on aesthetical issues encapsulated in the title of the Book 8 “Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man”: unlike the Burkean sublime, arousing fear and awe, the Wordsworthian sublime is capable of inspiring heartfelt adoration akin to love, when, in the course of The Prelude, an ordinary human being appears “ennobled outwardly before sight”.

Keywords

• British Romanticism
• William Wordsworth
• natural sublime
• human sublime
• the fanciful pastoral
• the imaginative sublime
• images of shepherds
• ‘spots of time’
• ‘love of man’