To Wordsworth

Trawled through various online resources today collecting references and articles to mull over for the next while.......thanks to John Greening for providing something different in the midst of it all..........

To Wordsworth
On the bicentenary of the completion of The Prelude

The sonnets are ‘okay’, but if you could
imagine what a fog of teenage scorn
obscures The Prelude . . . if you had been born
last century, you might have understood –
a different revolution in your blood,
your room in Hawkshead blazing rock and porn,
poetry in the junkmail, your hair shorn,
tongue pierced and neck tattooed: you’d have been good
at English, though you would have stayed off school
to go to Glastonbury, taken dope
and doubtless knocked some French girl up again.
But could it these days be considered ‘cool’
to blog your mind’s growth, just in the hope
of someone logging on to hear your brain?

Greening, J. (2005). "To Wordsworth. On the bicentenary of the completion of The Prelude." Critical Quarterly 47(4): 93-93.