STYLISTIC AND RHETORICAL ASPECTS OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S THE PRELUDE

Abstract

A certain popular and recurring view of the English poet William Wordsworth imagines him as an author without personal style, who rejects, who rejects rhetoric and poetic diction in favor of a natural and spontaneous language. This, however, we argue is an incomplete image, one that results from a partial comprehension of Wordsworth’s own poetic theories (which by themselves formulate an inexact vision of his art), and that is insufficient to describe accurately the poet’s style in more meditative works such as The Prelude. In this essay, we intended to list, describe and exemplify the mains rhetorical and stylistic aspects that compose the text of Wordsworth’s autobiographical work The Prelude. In order to do so, we collected some arguments against the vision that imagines the author as a completely modern, spontaneous, and popular poet. Next, we analyzed how conscious and conventional rhetorical traces are an essential part of the composition of the Prelude, and, finally, we describe the rhetorical resources present in the text. As a result, we ascertained that Wordsworth writes with the style of the good prose of an educated man of his time and that he does not dispense with rhetorical resources, only with their unmotivated use as ornament. We also saw that the Prelude avails itself of the conventions of the literary genres on which it relies, as well as of distinct stylistic resources and figures which make up not a popular language but a language markedly Wordsworthian.