Asserting that psychoanalytical readings of the "infant babe" passage in The Prelude apply a flawed model of infant development to the poem and in so doing misread the passsage, this essay seeks to demonstrate the relevance of currrent empirical psychology to romantic scholarship and to literary theory. After citing the ovewhelmingly psychoanalytic cast of readings of the Book II passage, the first part of this essay maintains that, in spite of differences with Freud, neo-Freudianisms share his primary tenets regarding infant experience; taking for granted such notions as primary narcissism and infant sexuality, psychoanalytic theorists provide a fundamentally agonistic view of infant development. Drawing on contemporary developmental psychology, this essay points out that current students of infant behavior cast doubt on he concept of primary narcissism and infant sexuality, depicting an essentially productive relationship between infant and mother.

The second half of the essay applies the research of Daniel Stern, John Bowlby, and others to Wordsworth's passage, and also suggests that this passage ultimately explains the need to "render back" that the poet describes in Book I. Rather than stressing the child's relations to the mother's breast, this reading cites Wordsworth's emphasis on eye contact, which serves as the medium for mother-child emotional communication and the development of the primary affective bond. This is congruent with the psychologist Daniel Stern's claim that "the mother's face [is] an initial focal point of importance for the infant's early construction of his salient visual world." As Stern and attachment thorist John Bowlby explain, all further growth, including language development and attachment to others, is predicated on this primary bond; describing the mother's gaze as a stimulant that encourages the infant to attend to the outside world, Wordsworth intuits the fundamentally productive role of maternal nature.

Because Wordsworth's description of mother-infant interaction corresponds so well to current developmental theory, it evinces a profound recognition of the essential importance of this relationship to all that follows in the individual's life. Logically, then, the passage identifies what no other does in the first books of he poem--why it is important, through poetic utterance, to "render back" to nature. Hence, in the reading presented here, the "infant babe" passage explains the necessity of writing. [N.E.]