Revision, Gloss, Choice

Abstract

Coleridge’s revisions to the poem in its first version, discussion of how much they owe to Wordsworth’s reaction and how much to other circumstances; plus his further revisions that have led to the odd situation of the poem existing in three distinct versions centred on 1798, 1800, and 1817. A questioning on several grounds of the last and most favoured of these during the twentieth century, which includes the prose gloss, and a questioning of a direction in recent digital editing that could leave readers adrift in an unreal world of indecision between texts. This is a chapter that connects the main part of the argument, which has to do with literary–critical and philosophical–theological matters with a debate about means and ends in presentation.

Poetry, like schoolboys, by too frequent & severe corrections, may be cowed into Dullness!—

S.T. Coleridge ¹