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cannot rely on inspiration for such a work. The overjoyed poet is definitely not capable of ‘building upa Work that should endure’ (Prelude XIII 288), and his ‘harp was soon defrauded’ (I 104-5).When Wordsworth utilises one of the ‘Figures of Emotion’ recommended by Quintilian, toopen his ‘glad preamble’ in The Prelude – liberatus sum respirari – he would have expected hiseducated reader to recognise what he was doing. An eighteenth century translation of this passage inQuintilian reads:The figures, which are calculated for enlivening and giving strength to the passions, arefounded chiefly on a sort of pretence; for we often pretend anger, joy, fear, admiration, grief,indignation, wishes and the like. Whence those sayings: “Now I find myself quite free and atease; now I draw breath”. 11The ‘glad preamble’ sets out a representation of the character of the inspired poet, utilising suitabletopoi to do so. That the representation is intended to portray the youthful Wordsworth is also the case.Wordsworth constructs this identity knowing that this earlier portrayal of himself is – to use modernterminology – the representation of a ‘false consciousness’. In the ‘glad preamble’ Wordsworth iscelebrating his youthful folly, and in his youthful state of mind he had not yet realised that his relianceon enthusiasm, and his glorification of the belief that he was ‘a chosen son’, was a hindrance to thedevelopment of any substantial identity as ‘a Poet’. In order to become a ‘capable’ poet, a true‘Prophet of Nature’, he must first surrender his enthusiastic role as ‘nature’s priest’, take off his‘priestly robes’ and become a Man, ‘descending’ into matter and engaging with human life in ‘thisworld’. He must also recognise that heaven is to be found on earth, not in some utopian conceptsituated far beyond this earthly existence.Wordsworth’s figuration of himself as a youthful enthusiast in the ‘glad preamble’ to ThePrelude is not what it at first seems. The whole passage employs the ultimate figure of dissembling –that of Irony (which Quintilian discusses a few pages later), but the reader does not discover the extentto which this is the case until the whole poem has been read, and its argument understood. 12 Coleridgefailed to hear Wordsworth’s argument, and several leading critics have also failed to recogniseWordsworth’s ironic stance as they read The Prelude as a ‘Romantic’ narrative that celebrates poetic,or prophetic, election. Many of those critics’ opinions were influenced more by what Coleridge had tosay about Wordsworth’s imagination, rather than listening to Wordsworth himself and discerning therhetorical form of argumentation that operates throughout the poem. When Wordsworth speaks as a‘Prophet of Nature’ in the final lines he announces that through his life experience he has acquired acapability, one that will enable him to ‘speak / A lasting inspiration, sanctified / By reason and bytruth’ (XIII 442-444). His confidence in his capacity to act in such a manner in 1805 is founded on hisbelief that he has both the ‘power’ and the ‘knowledge’ that gives him authority to do so. The Prelude11 De Institutione Oratoria IX 2. Trans J. Patsall. (II. 112).12 In commenting on the ‘figures of emotion’ he has listed, Quintilian comments that, ‘all sentiments of this sortwhen they proceed from real feelings of the mind, are not figurative in the sense we now speak of; yet are soundoubtedly when feigned, and the work art’. He is making a distinction that lies at the heart ofWordsworth’s theory of poetry in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.49