Re-enactment and Romanticism: Wordsworth, Southey, and R.G. Collingwood’s An Autobiography (1939)

Wordsworth called The Prelude ‘the history of a Poet’s mind’. But what, this essay asks, is the weight of the word ‘history’ here? Does a poem ‘enshrining … the spirit of the Past / For future restoration’ match R.G. Collingwood’s demanding mid-twentieth-century account of history as ‘re-enactment’, the present rethinking of past thought? Myself repeating Alan Liu’s thought experiment with re-enactment in a series of suggestive footnotes in Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989), I attempt here to (re)forge a Wordsworth-Collingwood connection, reviving – at least prospectively – one abandoned Romantic new historicist itinerary. Asking both how far Wordsworth contributes to this genealogy of historicism, and what may be gained for understanding Collingwood’s An Autobiography (1939) by attending to the encapsulation of the Lake Poets within it, this essay proposes re-enactment – as influential and controversial as ever – as a key concept for literary history of the humane, imaginative kind.