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The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 (First Edition) (Norton Critical Editions) First Edition

by William Wordsworth (Author), M. H. Abrams (Editor), Stephen Gill (Editor),
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 71 ratings
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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.

There are no fewer than seventeen manuscripts of The Prelude in the Wordsworth library at Grasmere. Working with these materials, the editors have prepared an accurate reading version of 1799 and have newly edited from manuscripts the texts of 1805 and 1850―thus freeing the latter poem from the unwarranted alterations made by Wordsworth's literary executors. The editors also provide a text of MS. JJ (Wordsworth's earliest drafts for parts of The Prelude) as well as transcriptions of other important passages in manuscript which Wordsworth failed to include in any fair copy of his poem. The texts are fully annotated, and the notes for all three versions of The Prelude are arranged so that each version may be read independently. The editors provide a concise history of the texts and describe the principles by which each has been transcribed from the manuscripts.

There are many other aids for a thorough study of The Prelude and its background. A chronological table enables the reader to contextualize the biographical and historical allusions in the texts and footnotes.

"References to The Prelude in Process" presents the relevant allusions to the poem, by Wordsworth and by members of his circle, from 1799 to 1850. Another section, "Early Reception," reprints significant comments on the published version of 1850 by readers and reviewers.

Finally, there are seven critical essays by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Richard J. Onorato, William Empson, Herbert Lindenberger, and W. B. Gallie.
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  1. ISBN-10
    039309071X
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0393090710
  3. Edition
    First Edition
  4. Publisher
    W. W. Norton & Company
  5. Publication date
    December 17, 1979
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    5.2 x 1.5 x 8.4 inches
  8. Print length
    704 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

This book is the first to present Wordsworth's greatest poem in all three of its separate 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 poet's death in 1850. In addition the editors include the two-part version of the poem, composed 1798-99. Each of these poems has its distinctive qualities and values; to read them together provides an incomparable chance to observe a great poet composing and recomposing, through a long life, his major work.

About the Author

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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition (December 17, 1979)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 704 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 039309071X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393090710
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.34 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 1.5 x 8.4 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 71 ratings

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  1. Stephen Charles Gill

    Stephen Charles Gill

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  2. William Wordsworth

    William Wordsworth

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  3. M. H. Abrams

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
71 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

R. J. Karger
5.0 out of 5 stars ... scholarly work on one the lesser read but still great epic poems
Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2014
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A true scholarly work on one the lesser read but still great epic poems. Norton does it every time: gives you so much for such a good price.
2 people found this helpful
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MIchael FPM
5.0 out of 5 stars Well done critical edition.
Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2016
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Wonderful book. Immense editorial effort to publish this work. FineSeller. Quick Delivery.
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dmathewson
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2015
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Classic. A pre-existential venture through Wordsworth's growth of mind. Definitely prefer 1805 to the edited 1850 version.
6 people found this helpful
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Marco LLano
3.0 out of 5 stars NB: The edition I bought was second-hand, it was from an unofficial vendor, so this *may* not apply to every buyer.
Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2013
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The Norton edition is technically three drafts of the same long poem, so you have the delight of seeing Wordsworth's self-retrospective reflection on his creative development--develop--and evolve over a period of years. As always, the criticism and reception at the back of the Norton edition is a useful, wonderful way to introduce yourself to the ambient of the text and its subsequent reception, and the snippets out of Wordsworth's private letters should prove to be very illuminating for those interested in the author's ideas on the work he was writing.

And yet with all of that said, I have to go on to say that I was really disappointed with the product I received. After waiting something like two and a half weeks, you can imagine how happy I was to see my copy finally arrive in the mail. And, until I pinched open and whisked off the shrink wrap and started leafing through the physical book, I was very pleased. But the soft cover that I got in the mail didn't seem to be the WW Norton edition that was posted on the website; and though the front and back covers and the spine of the book were the same, and the type face in the book was the same, something was missing... the covers were flimsy and thin; the pages were like paper out a Xerox machine, almost see-through in quality, wrinkling and creasing easily from even normal, day-to-day use.

When I look back online I can see from WW Norton's website that the book itself goes back to an edition originally done in 1979. The book that I have here does not have a printing date, or a location for that matter, which is really sketchy. I do note, on the other hand, that on the lower spine and on the bottom of the back cover, where the company logo would usually be, there's an insignia: the book was printed by Viva Books Private Limited. Is maybe that Norton just stopped producing the book completely and printings had to be taken over by separate companies? Maybe mine is a bootleg copy? I researched Viva Books and found out that they're based in New Delhi. My guess is that somebody probably used the exchange rates to their advantage by purchasing a bunch of contracted re-prints of old publications in India, carrying them over to the States, and selling them at (relatively) low prices to turn a profit.

If this book were nothing but its content I would give it five stars, easily; given the copy that I received, however, and the low caliber of the printing and the materials, I am afraid that I don't have any choice but to give it three stars. Wordsworth I recommend, and Norton's editions of almost everything they publish I recommend. Viva Books Private Limited, however, I don't feel I can condone. If you are going to buy this book, go ahead by all means, but make sure for God's sake that it is the actual Norton Critical Edition and not a shoddy imitation.
20 people found this helpful
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Harper Curtis
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful
Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2013
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This is a great edition of The Prelude. It's wonderful to have the 1805 and 1850 versions en face. Thank you, Norton.
2 people found this helpful
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CSS
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2015
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thanks
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Stanley Crowe
5.0 out of 5 stars fine edition, but know what you're getting into
Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2013
The thing to remember about "The Prelude" is that it covers roughly the first twenty-seven years of Wordsworth's life -- i. e. from 1770 to around 1797 -- and seems to be about how he came to consciousness of himself as a poet, though you have to keep in mind that by "poet" Wordsworth didn't mean exactly what we mean by that word. He meant something like " an imaginative person who realizes the importance of imagination for the healthy mind." That sense of the word places him (and writers like Blake and Coleridge, different as they all were) in relation to the idea, coming out of what we now call the "enlightenment," that "reason" is the quintessentially human faculty -- the faculty that makes us human. In different ways, the romantic poets challenged that simplification, and in Wordsworth's case, the insufficiency of reason as a guarantor of human happiness and human mental health is shown not just in the limits of mathematics and "science" to give our lives meaning but also in the failure of the rationalistic politics of the French Revolution, to which Wordsworth had been, in the early 1790's, committed. The loss of his faith in this "reason" precipitated a spiritual or moral crisis, the overcoming of which is the focus of the second half of "The Prelude." In that part of the poem Wordsworth is concerned to demonstrate the roles of "nature," memory, and visionary experience in enabling his recovery from this crisis.

You also have to remember, though, that while the poem covers his first twenty-seven years, the poem was written over about seven years (roughly 1798-1805), during which time his ideas about nature, memory, and visionary experience were not static -- so this is a book about growth written by a man whose mind was changing (growing?) in the process of writing it. The three versions of the poem that this Norton edition prints gives you some idea of that, but this edition should be supplemented by information from studies that (a) allow you to see in more detail exactly what parts of the poem that Wordsworth was working on at specific times; (b) enables you to think about that process of composition in relation to the other poems of the 1798-1805 period; and (c) discourages you from worrying about the aesthetic status of the various stages of the poem and encourages you to focus instead on the process of the thinking and the writing.

The Cornell edition of Wordsworth is invaluable for this, and works like the chronologies of Mark Reed and studies by Geoffrey Hartman and Kenneth Johnson are also helpful. What's interesting about Wordsworth -- in a way that is less true of, say, Keats -- is the process of engagement over time with difficult questions of what we would now call epistemology and phenomenology in relation to a vision of a desirable human life.
6 people found this helpful
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Ed Earl
3.0 out of 5 stars Prelude
Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2011
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Nothing special - needed it for class.

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John Wootton
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic with contemporary resonance
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 31, 2023
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Classic with contemporary resonance
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Anindita Bhowmik
5.0 out of 5 stars It's Wordsworth, blah.
Reviewed in India on March 12, 2021
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Needed it for my MA class. Wordsworth is the most overrated of all Romantic poets. Period.
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Daria Essop
5.0 out of 5 stars The book was received in good condition
Reviewed in Canada on February 8, 2019
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I am satisfied with the book so far.
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ss
5.0 out of 5 stars 書を捨て野に出よう。
Reviewed in Japan on November 26, 2011
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「詩の金字塔」。ワーズワースの不滅の傑作です。学問に疲れたら、書を捨て野に出よう！！東大駒場で初めて読んだとき感動したので又読みます。Ｒecommended By 週刊東洋経済 11/26.too.
One person found this helpful
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Frank Moore
5.0 out of 5 stars He also illuminates the spiritual condition of joy, an experience he recognizes as coming to one ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 18, 2014
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The Prelude is Wordsworth's remarkable psychological exploration of his relationship, when he was a growing boy, with the natural world. In the first two books he investigates the interface between his imagination and the Lake District rising up all around him in all its grandeur and awe. The Prelude is an early 19th century meditation on the environment and is profoundly reverential in its impact on the 21st century reader. He also illuminates the spiritual condition of joy, an experience he recognizes as coming to one in some way from the natural world:
"...when from excess of happiness my blood appeared to flow for its own pleasure and I breathed with joy."
5 people found this helpful
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