The Worst of Wordsworth

Abstract

On the whole poets are known by the best versions of their works: Wordsworth is almost exclusively known by his worst, remarked Jonathan Wordsworth as he presented in Music of Humanity (1969) the earliest and die best versions of Wordsworth's great poem, Ruined Collage. history of lifts poem illustrates die problems of reading, and of editing, Composed when the poet was in his twenties and just reaching die height of his powers, Ruined Collage was left in manuscript, rewritten several limes and patched into another poem called Pedlar, then after some twelve mote years published, with blither alterations, as part of the first book of Excursion, which was put together alter the poet's powers had begun to decline. But even the original Excursion was then layered over with continuing revisions, and the text of die world knows is the one dial appeared in the final collection of Poetical Works in seven volumes which began to issue from the press in Wordsworth's eightieth year. If die ageing Wordsworth Tailed to serve himself well, he has been little better served by his editors. poet's final text is the one which Ernest de Selincourt chose to present in his great standard edition of the Poetical Works in five volumes. Recognizing die problems of this text, de Selincourt accompanied with an apparalus criticus which purported to show all variant readings. This strategy, lie explained, was made necessary Wordsworth's persistent, obsessive. habit of revision: it is probable dial no poet ever paid more meticulous or prolonged attention to his text. A lifelong habit of revision would have meant little to the text of Keats; Wordsworth, no more meticulous, perhaps, had the uncertain advantage of living three times as long. While he was still Reats's age he was showing an uncommon anxiety about his work. Dependent on the critical approval of friends and subject to physical distress whenever he took up a pen (an uneasiness at my stomach and side, and a dull pain about my heart). Ire began to keep his major writings by him, unpublished. As he grew older his opinions naturally, altered, his orthodoxies hardened, his creative energy fell off and the old anxieties intensified, from the age of thirty onward, he turned compulsively, again and again, to his manuscripts to reshape, alter, and extend his poems, and when this open-ended Struggle for perfection was I mm time to lime interrupted by publication he would introduce changes in successive printings, These appear tight up through the several collected editions that he published in the last decade of his life. De Selincourt's record of printed variants, which purports to he complete, is in fact fragmentary, and no full textual history of any Wordsworth poem had been published until the first volume of a new international edition of Wordsworth appeared at the end of last year: Salisbury Plain Poems, edited by Stephen Gill, Inaugurating The Cornell Wordsworth. a series to be published in the U.S. by Cornell and in Britain by Harvester Press, this volume contains an unpretentious poem of 270 lines called Female Vagrant, which Wordsworth composed in has twenties and printed in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. For the second edition of Lyrical he rewrote three lines and made three other scattered verbal changes. Bui die following year Wordsworth discovered dial the diction of his poem was often vicious and its descriptions often false, giving proof's of a mind inattentive to the true nature of the subject on which was employed. He went on (writing to Anne Taylor) in specify some corrections which would bring die language nearer to truth. These required die cancellation of three stanzas and some rewriting of five others. In 1802, when he published the poem for a third time, he introduced these corrections, cancelled one more stanza, and rewrote twenty-eight other lines scattered through die poem. …