Parodying The Prelude: The Autobiography of John Cowper Powys

Abstract

This essay reads the 1934 prose Autobiography of the twentieth-century British novelist John Cowper Powys as a parody of Wordsworth’s Prelude. It argues that Powys revises Wordsworth’s trajectory of emotional growth, loss and recovery in ways that sometimes endorse and more often satirise the poet’s youthful love of nature and his adult transcendental imaginings. In doing so, Powys anticipates the revisionary readings of recent critics who have interpreted Wordsworth’s ‘language of the sense’ in materialist terms. Powys represents Wordsworth as a poet of physical – and sexual – sensation, registering The Prelude’s openness to physiology-focused interpretation. Powys self-mockingly rewrites the story of the growth of Wordsworth’s mind, debunking The Prelude’s climactic encounters with transcendence. Ultimately however, for Powys as for Wordsworth, nature leads him beyond nature. Powys’s Autobiography thus helps to suggest the limits of approaches focused on what Powys calls ‘the physical quality of Wordsworth’s flesh and blood’.