Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850

This volume is the first to present Wordsworth's great poem in all three of its forms. It reprints, on facing pages, the version of The Prelude that was completed in 1805, together with the much-revised work published after the poets death in 1850. In addition, the editors include the two-part version of the poem, composed in 1798-99. Each of these poems possesses distinctive qualities and values; to read them together provides an incomparable chance to observe a great poet composing and re-composing, throughout a long life, his major work.

M. H. Abrams (1912—2015) was Class of 1916 Professor of English, Emeritus at Cornell University. He received the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Prize for The Mirror and the Lamp and the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize for Natural Supernaturalism. He is also the author of The Milk of Paradise, A Glossary of Literary Terms, The Correspondent Breeze, and Doing Things with Texts. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Postwar fellowships, the Award in Humanistic Studies from the Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984), the Distinguished Scholar Award by the Keats-Shelley Society (1987), and the Award for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1990). In 1999 The Mirror and the Lamp was ranked twenty-fifth among the Modern Library's "100 best nonfiction books written in English during the twentieth century." Stephen Gill is Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford. He holds an M.A. and a B. Phil. from Exeter College and a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh and has taught at Edinburgh and at Cornell. He has edited the volume on The Salisbury Plain Poems for the Cornell Wordsworth series. Jonathan Wordsworth was a Fellow of Saint Catherine's College, Oxford, and Faculty Lecturer in Romanticism in the English Faculty, Oxford University. He was also Chairman of the Trustees of Dove Cottage, Grasmere (the Wordsworth Archive). The author of The Music of Humanity and William Wordsworth, The Borders of Vision, and editor of Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, he was at work on several other Wordsworth editions and studies.