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The Prelude, or Growth of a poet's mindd, Text of 1805. Ed. from the MSS. with introd. and notes : by Ernest de Selincourt

William Wordsworth's autobiographical masterpiece The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet's Mind was written between 1798 and 1805. As Wordsworth himself appreciated, it was a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself. But his revolutionary work was not published ; it was merely prefatory to a projected magnum opus and just as he had revised whilst writing, so almost immediately he began to amend the thirteen-book Prelude. At the time of his death in April 1850 there were fourteen books, of which no fair, definitive copy existed: it fell to his executors to finalise the text which was published posthumously in July 1850 and which this edition accurately reproduces without editorial emendation. Twentieth-century editors of alternative versions have questioned the merits of many of Wordsworth's "improvements", but the 1850 text remains a literary landmark, the form in which arguably his greatest work was first known.

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