The Infancy of Affection

Abstract

Chapter 2 considers Wordsworth’s accounts of very early life and its passions, from early drafts of the poem that would become The Prelude to the 1807 ‘Ode’. It reads Wordsworth’s poems as ambivalent narratives of human development, placing them alongside related accounts of genesis and individuation in psychoanalytic writing and criticism. It puts Wordsworth’s poetics of infancy into dialogue with Didier Anzieu’s tactile account of an early ‘skin ego’ and Mutlu Konik Blasing’s developmental theorization of lyric. In this context, Wordsworth’s poems resist normative narratives of development, and testify to a kind of early pleasure spread so widely that it becomes an inseparable element of perception itself, suggesting a formative role comparable to (but pointedly at odds with) psychoanalytic accounts of an ‘original’ trauma.