Wordsworth

The main part of the essay is devoted to The Prelude, in which the author finds some important points of resemblance to Paradise Lost. Although The Prelude is ostensibly an autobiography, it deals with the loss of the paradise of childhood and in some respects raises the long autobiographical poem to the level of epic. The final section considers the sonnets and The Excursion, Wordsworth's later and more sombre meditation on the central problems of human life. The essay explains in many contexts, both in Wordsworth's prose and his verse, his fundamental conceptions of the poet as a human being who shares the joys and sorrows of all mankind with a more than common enthusiasm.