Abstract
If there is one critical issue that dominated academic discussion of The Prelude in the twentieth century, it was whether or not any such poem properly exists. Since its publication in 1850 The Prelude has been the subject of inexhaustible textual scholarship. A summary of this work is to be found in the Norton Critical Edition of the poem edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. First published in 1979, the Norton Edition includes an essay, ‘The Texts: History and Presentation’, and there we find described the composition of a two-Part Prelude of 1799, the subsequent evolution of a five-Book Prelude of 1804, a thirteen-Book Prelude of 1805, and a fourteen-Book Prelude published in 1850. A more detailed account of the procedures involved in textual scholarship of this magnitude, and of the detective work involved, is available in Mark L. Reed’s edition of the thirteen-Book 1805 Prelude, published in 1991 in the Cornell series. This is a two-volume giant of almost 2500 pages, of which just 435 are given over to a reading text of the poem. Prior to this Stephen Parrish published a Cornell edition of the 1798–99 Prelude in 1977, and in 1985 W. J. B. Owen edited the fourteen-Book Prelude in one volume of 1222 pages, also for Cornell.
What can be toilsome in these pleasant walks?
Here let us live, though in fallen state, content.
(John Milton, Paradise Lost Book XI, ll. 179–80)
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Notes
Susan J. Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry ( Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1986 ), p. 135.
John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth Century England (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 157, 161–2.
John Barrell and Harriet Guest, ‘The uses of contradiction: Pope’s “Epistle to Bathurst”’, in Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 79, 80, 89.
W. H. Pater, ‘Wordsworth’ (1874), in Wordsworth: The Prelude, ed. W. J. Harvey and Richard Gravil ( London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1972 ), pp. 67–8.
E. A. Horsman, ‘The Design of Wordsworth’s Prelude’, in Words-worth’s Mind and Art, ed. A. W. Thomson ( Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969 ), p. 95.
Bernard Groom, The Unity of Wordsworth’s Poetry ( London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1966 ), p. 66.
Ashton Nichols, The Revolutionary ‘I’: Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation (London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. xi.
H. W. Garrod, Wordsworth: Lectures and Essays, 2nd edn 1927 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 59, 190.
Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature ( London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1992 ), p. 109.
David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement ( New York and London: Methuen, 1987 ), p. 120.
Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 174. Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination, p. 114.
John Donne, ‘Twicknam Garden’, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward ( London: Nonesuch, 1941 ), p. 20.
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry ( Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1971 ), p. 218.
Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘Words, Wish, Worth’, in The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 104–5, 108. The Gospel According to John, Chapter 1, v. i.
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© 2002 John Williams
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Williams, J. (2002). The Poem and the Poet in Exile: Issues of Textual Identity: The Prelude (1). In: William Wordsworth. Critical Issues. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-26601-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-26601-9_7
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