• Idle Singers, Idle Songs:The Birth of Poetry from the Spirit of Idleness
• Irmtraud Huber (bio)

In the opening lines of The Prelude (1850), William Wordsworth invokes a feeling of liberty and ease, since "escaped / From the vast city, where I long had pined," the speaker finds that "Long months of ease and undisturbed delight / Are mine in prospect."¹ This is, he suggests, when he felt the first stirrings of what the 1805 version of The Prelude calls a "mild creative breeze" (I: 43), which, after many abortive attempts to embark on more epic or philosophical themes, finally results in the autobiographical narrative of The Prelude. Idleness, liberty, and a quiet enjoyment of rural scenes are thus framed as the seeds of creative production. Creative production itself is envisioned as "active days urged on by flying hours," but this activity, too, is based on leisure: "Days of sweet leisure, taxed with patient thought / Abstruse" (I: 42–44).

In Elizabeth Barrett Browning's version of a poet's autobiography, Aurora Leigh (1856), a work which clearly takes up and reacts to The Prelude in many ways,² the conditions for poetic production sound strikingly different. Early in the story, Barrett Browning has Aurora reject not only her cousin's hand in marriage, but also his intended gift of a comfortable financial settlement. This rejection forces the poet-protagonist into a life of constant industry rather than idleness. Instead of producing her poetry in the ease of the countryside, Aurora sits in a garret in Kensington where she "worked on, on. / Through all the bristling fence of nights and days / Which hedges time in from the eternities" to the point where her health suffers from the constant strain.³ Wordsworth, for his part, tells us in the introductory verses of The Prelude how, his hopes for poetic production having been repeatedly thwarted, he falls back on an idle enjoyment of the moment: "Be it so; / Why think of any thing but present good?" He is content to wander on, with not "one wish / Again to bend the Sabbath of that time / To servile yoke. What need of many words?" (I: 99–100, 103–104). Aurora, in contrast, celebrates work for its own sake: "Get leave to work / In this world—' tis the best you get at all; / . . . Get work, get work; / Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get" (III: 161–168). [End Page 403] In turning her heroine into a martyr figure of poetic labor, Barrett Browning offers a notable contrast to the Wordsworthian poet, whose creative spark strikes from moments of idle enjoyment of nature. While Wordsworth never concluded the projected masterpiece to which The Prelude should have served, precisely, as a prelude (though, of course, The Prelude, arguably, came to stand in for the projected work in the process of composition), the fictional Aurora does complete her masterpiece. It is not idle contemplation which eventually leads to this success, however, but constant exertion.

It is not unrelated to this marked difference in their speakers that the two poems, though somewhat similar in outward form, are also strikingly different in the way they shape their narratives. Even though the subtitle of Wordsworth's poem, The Growth of a Poet's Mind, suggests a Bildungsroman plot, no one could mistake the poem for a novel. While the poem dramatizes a number of false starts, an accumulation of experiences which predicate the final epiphany, Herbert Lindenberger has noted that "[t]here is no real progression in The Prelude," and suggests "to look at the poem as saying essentially the same thing again and again."⁴ The primary narrative logic of the poem, which becomes emblematic in the Wordsworthian "spots of time," is one of return and revision. While there is ambition at the heart of the poem, the speaker's aim is to prove himself what he already believes himself to be: a great poet. In The Prelude, the dynamics of narrative desire, which Peter Brooks, in Reading for the Plot, has so closely linked to progressive ambition,⁵ recede largely into the background. It seems safe to say that few readers would be driven to read through the...

• 歌唱者，歌谣：诗歌从诗歌的精神中诞生
• Irmtraud Huber（生物）

在《前奏曲》（1850年）的开场白中，威廉·华兹华斯（William Wordsworth）唤起了一种自由和轻松的感觉，因为“逃离了/我长期以来一直呆在的广阔城市中”，演讲者发现“长期的轻松和不受干扰的愉悦/是我的前途。” ¹他建议，这是当他感到1805年版的《序曲》所称的“温和的创意微风”（I：43）的最初搅动时，经过多次失败的尝试，他们尝试了更多的史诗或哲学主题，最终得出《前奏曲》的自传体叙事。因此，闲散，自由和宁静的乡村风光被构想为创造性生产的种子。创意生产本身被设想为“飞行时间促成的活跃日”，但是这种活动也基于休闲：“甜蜜的休闲日，要耐心地思考/深思熟虑”（I：42-44）。

伊丽莎白·巴雷特·布朗宁（Elizabeth Barrett Browning）的诗人自传版本《奥罗拉·利（Aurora Leigh）》（1856年），显然在很多方面都对《前奏曲》产生了反应，[ ^2]诗歌创作的条件听起来截然不同。在故事的早期，巴雷特·布朗宁（Barrett Browning）让奥罗拉（Aurora）不仅拒绝了表弟的婚姻之手，而且拒绝了他打算提供的舒适的财务解决方案。这种排斥迫使诗人主角进入了一个持续不断的行业而不是无所事事的生活。奥罗拉没有在乡下的乡村里写诗，而是坐在肯辛顿的一个小阁楼里，在那里她“继续努力。/穿越了所有昼夜狂热的篱笆/掩盖了从永恒中的时光”。她的健康承受着持续的压力。³华兹华斯就《前奏曲》的介绍性经文告诉我们他对诗歌创作的希望如何一再受到挫败，他又回到了当下的闲暇时光：“是这样； /为什么除了呈现美好的事物之外，还想其他什么？” 他满足于继续游荡，而不是“一个愿望/再次屈服那个时代的安息日/奴役轭。需要很多话吗？” （I：99-100、103-104）。相比之下，奥罗拉（Aurora）则出于自己的喜好来庆祝工作：“请假去工作/在这个世界上-就是您所能获得的最好的东西； / ... ...得到工作，得到工作； /确保'比您自己得到的更好”努力获得”（III：161–168）。[结束页403]巴雷特·布朗宁（Barrett Browning）将女主人公化为诗意的烈士，与华兹华斯诗人形成了鲜明的对比，华兹华斯诗人的创作火花源于对自然闲置的享受。虽然华兹华斯从来没有就《前奏曲》应作为前奏曲的作品成功得出结论（尽管当然，《前奏曲》可以说是作曲过程中的前言作品的代表），但虚构的Aurora确实做到了完成她的杰作。最终导致成功的不是空洞的沉思，而是不断的努力。

这两首诗虽然在外表上有些相似，但在塑造叙事方式上也有惊人的不同，这与他们的说话者之间的显着差异无关。即使华兹华斯诗歌的副标题《诗人的心灵的成长》暗示了毕尔杜斯罗曼的情节，但没有人会把这首诗误认为是一部小说。虽然这首诗戏剧化了许多错误的开端，但积累了许多经验，这些结论预示着最后的顿悟，赫伯特·林登伯格（Herbert Lindenberger）指出“序幕中没有真正的进步”，并建议“从本质上看这首诗”一遍又一遍相同的事情。” ⁴这首诗的主要叙事逻辑在华兹华斯时代的“时间点”中具有象征意义，是回归和修正之一。尽管这首诗有雄心壮志，但演讲者的目的是证明自己已经相信自己的力量：一位伟大的诗人。彼得·布鲁克斯（Peter Brooks）在《为故事情节的阅读》（Reading for the Plot）中，叙事欲望的动态与进取的野心如此紧密地联系在一起，在《前奏曲》中⁵逐渐消退。可以肯定地说，很少有读者会被迫阅读...