On Wordsworth's Prelude

As Europe entered the nineteenth century, those forces that would shape her political and cultural destiny were already in place. From 1799 to 1815 the most powerful figure in Europe was Napoleon Bonaparte. During his meteoric rise and fall France was at war with the rest of Europe, and after his defeat Europe's political structure was changed forever. The goal of self-determination that Napoleon imported to Holland, Italy, Germany and Austria affected not only nations but also individuals. England's metamorphosis during the Industrial Revolution was also reflected in the outlook of the individual, and therefore in the art produced during the first half of this century. Heightened sensibility and intensified feeling became characteristic of the visual arts as well as musical arts and a convention in literature. “What happened, in fact, in the late eighteenth century, was not a discovery of romanticism, but a conversion to it. The awful threat of ‘subjectivism’, pushing its rude w...