The unwavering strength and unity of purpose which underlie it also help it to soar. Frequently verbose, diffuse, and bathetic, the verse is carried by those rare moments when it flashes fire or reaches a resounding note of rich poetic song. At times, particularly in the latter half of the work, the narrative dries up altogether, and the reader must pick his way through a welter of disconnected disquisitions. Unfortunately, this results in a certain definite unevenness in the development of the narrative.

The general procedure in The Prelude is to record an experience from the poet's past and then to examine its philosophical and psychological significance and relate it to nature and society at large.

To this type, Wordsworth, with his unconventional ideas of diction, brought a natural and conversational tone. The resulting form came to be called the 'literary' epic as opposed to heroic and folk epics. A revival of interest in Milton led to the establishment of Miltonic blank verse as the standard medium for lengthy philosophical or didactic poetical works. In the middle of the eighteenth century, there was an eclipse of interest in the rhymed heroic couplet. The poem is written in blank verse, unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter with certain permissible substitutions of trochees and anapests to relieve the monotony of the iambic foot and with total disregard for the stanza form. The Prelude takes its unity from the fact that the central 'hero' is its author.

The epic is customarily defined as a long narrative poem which recounts heroic actions, commonly legendary or historical, and usually of one principal hero (from whence it derives its unity). The Prelude may be classed somewhat loosely as an epic it does not satisfy all the traditional qualifications of that genre. Its comparison with the great seventeenth-century epic is in some respects a happy one since Milton was (after Coleridge) Wordsworth's greatest idol. Initially inspired by Coleridge's exhortation that Wordsworth write a work upon the French Revolution, The Prelude has ultimately become one of the finest examples of poetic autobiography ever written a fascinating examination of the self that also presents a comprehensive view of the poet's own creative vision.' The Prelude is the greatest long poem in our language after Paradise Lost,' says one critic. The great Romantic poem of human consciousness, it takes as its theme 'the growth of a poet's mind': leading the reader back to Wordsworth's formative moments of childhood and youth, and detailing his experiences as a radical undergraduate in France at the time of the Revolution. First published in July 1850, shortly after Wordsworth's death, The Prelude was the culmination of over fifty years of creative work.

The prelude poem by william wordsworth