The Prelude.

luka

Well-known member
Craner is in a dark place at the moment. I'm very worried about him I really am. Something bad has happened.
 

luka

Well-known member
I've known him drunk and incoherent, tilting at windmills, falling over furniture, but it always had an innocence about it, never with this Undisguised hostility and rage. Hopefully he can get through it if we all support it and blanket him in cosy cuddly love.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Just smashed the 1st book in a couple of hours. Amazing. Hoping it won't get more boring after this, but if it does its already been worth it.

Great thread btw.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The mere sight of pages and pages of poetry scrambles my brain and makes me want to do something easier like cleaning the bathroom.

I managed to get over this with Paradise Lost by listening to someone reading it as I read. Perhaps I can do that with the Prelude one day.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I'd have thought this would be right up your street tbh Corpsey.

Halfway through book three now (university) Still really, really good although I doubt anything is gonna top the first book, but we'll see. The bits where he goes iceskating and where he steals a boat at night and the huge black mountain towers over him are stunning, but there's loads of good bits.

Determined to read the whole thing and I've got a copy of lyrical ballads on the way now so it looks like I'm gonna be in Wordsworth land for the next couple of months at least.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
On book 7 now, gone to live in London after Cambridge and a tour of the Alps. This fucker's just used the word 'gorgeous' twice on the same page.

Totally brilliant so far though, the pages are flying by. You should have kept at it, Luka, don't let Craner put you off. If you found book three boring you should just skip it, I reckon it really picks up again at book 4 when he goes back to the Lakes on a summer vacation. Book 5s got a great trippy dream sequence in it too.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Got Blake on the brain recently cos I'm reading him properly for the first time too and projecting him in everything I read lately, but finding so many parallels with Wordsworth in their thinking. Blake much much crude and extreme and immediate, WW much more long winded and inward-turned and pensive, but both vionaries and incredibly sensible to their time. Would have been cool if they'd met, but I suppose that never happened.

And the influence of WW on Prynne's white stones is obvious after reading this, to bring it forward a bit.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Anyone thinking of giving the Prelude a go (probably no one else here now, but fuck it) and put off by the length, I'd recommend reading the much shorter two-part 1799 version - it basically covers the first two books of the later longer versions, where all the real juice is (those amazing childhood passages of stealing birds eggs, stealing a boat, the ice skating on the lake and the drowned man) but in a looser form. Seems WW was a terrible reviser of his own work, 'tightening up' his lines in the later versions while simultaneously adding a lot of pointless detail and more conservative, Christian stuff. The 1799 version also includes the famous and amazing 'spots in time' section in its proper place with his other childhood memories, rather than buried in a much later book in the long versions.

If you read the short 1799 version and like it, then go on to read the 13 book 1805 version for all the extra stuff about going to university and the French Revolution is my advice.

Also Tintern Abby from Lyrical Ballads is superb and goes so well with the Prelude - another way in.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Nice one, how you getting on with them? Just letting it flow over you without reading notes I presume, since you're reading it on the shitter.

I'll be diving back into them later this year I reckon, never did read all of it and I really want to reread the early ones especially
 

catalog

Well-known member
I have been opening it at random and my thoughts so far are thatg there is a lot o fx historical information about Chinese emperors and what they owned
 
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