Comments are most welcome!! “It is clear that your adversary has never read almost any poetry at all for he blames your Lordship most bitterly for copying things from Scott, Wordsworth, and so forth, which any boarding-school miss that has read the Elegant Extracts could have told him had been copied by them from the English poets of the two preceding centuries-which any Eton lad, again, could have traced to Greek and Latin-and any puppy that had spent a year abroad in the Alps would have taken a pleasure in showing him, over and over again, embalmed in that beautiful dialect, of whose beauty no English writer (since Gray) appears to have had the real feeling but yourself. To beat along the plain of Windermere With rival oars, and the selected bourne Was now an Island musical with birds That sang for ever now a Sister Isle Beneath the oaks umbrageous covert, sown With lillies of the valley, like a field And now a third small Island where remaind An old stone Table, and a moulderd Cave, A Hermits history.

This draft followed several earlier shorter drafts, and has been the text. This edition of Wordsworths masterpiece follows the text of one of the Trusts greatest treasures, the fair copy made by Dorothy Wordsworth in 18056 known. I've published the second half as the essay 'Mourning Life: William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley' (in the journal Romanticism), but have not been able yet to gather the first half into a proper form! The topic and projected title of the materials on Wordsworth and Byron is 'Wordsworth, Byron, and the Poetics of (~Rough) Surface Reading.' The start is an epigraph from John Bull's Letter to Lord Byron and gives a flavor of the texts and treatment. Wordsworth completed a full-length draft of his masterwork, The Prelude, in 1805. The 1805 draft contains the clearest statement of Wordsworths philosophy and is fresher and more vigorously written.

This is the extended text of a talk delivered at the Wordsworth Winter Conference, Rydal Lake, UK (February, 2013). Home William Wordsworth: The Prelude, 1805: Edited from the Manuscripts and Illustrated, with an Introduction, Maps, Notes, Glosses, and Chronology.

Wordsworth the prelude 1805