quotation because of its importance in the Romantic canon but, as I will argue throughout this essay, Wordsworth was not the first to draw together these concepts: twenty years earlier William Cowper published The Task, one of the central concerns of which was the connection between time and memory, and within which past and present exist simultaneously. The concept of specific points resonating beyond the limits of linear time, nourishing the past, present and future poetic self, is an enduring legacy of Wordsworth’s project in this poem. This quotation, from Book XI of the 1805 Prelude, has become one of Wordsworth’s most famous passages, one which links ideas of memory, imagination and place with the nature of time.
