Clairvoyant Wordsworth

Download or read book Clairvoyant Wordsworth written by Robert B. Zimmer and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2002-04 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is almost universally accepted that William Wordsworth never took seriously the idea of pre-existence, or life before birth. In this study, Robert Zimmer shows that this is an unjustifiable presumption. Evidence from Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," from The Prelude, and from the "Essay Upon Epitaphs" shows that Wordsworth firmly believed in pre-existence. Nor was this an idea he adopted out of curiosity or for its poetic utility. Wordsworth, like Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne, remembered life before birth, and retained a kind of clairvoyance in his infancy. As Zimmer shows, it is only because of the religious and philosophical prejudices of critics since Coleridge that Wordsworth's recollections have seldom been properly recognized for what they are.