When Wordsworth said “Poetry is…emotion recollected in tranquillity,” He Referred to His Multiple Personality

Compare William Wordsworth’s famous saying from his preface to Lyrical Ballads [2nd ed., 1800]:

“I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

…to the lines I recently quoted from his autobiographical poem, The Prelude:

“A tranquillising spirit presses now

On my corporeal frame, so wide appears

The vacancy between me and those days

Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,

That musing on them, often do I seem

Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself

And of some other Being.”

He is saying that one of his beings, the one with a tranquil consciousness, is aware of itself, but also aware of another of his beings with its own separate consciousness, the one who originated in his “school-time” (the heading of that section of The Prelude), who apparently is more emotional.

It is hard to be sure how many “beings” with “consciousness”—i.e., alternate personalities—are being referenced. Is the “tranquillising spirit” the same one as “me,” or a separate one who “presses” on “me”? Are any of these personalities Wordsworth’s regular, social, host personality?

All I can say is that he describes having multiple personality, and that he uses it to write poetry.