The Prelude: A Parallel Text [Penguin Classics] - Softcover

William Wordsworth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140422145 ISBN 13: 9780140422146

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1976

Synopsis

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About this title

From the Back Cover

The great Romantic poem of human consciousness, The Prelude takes as its theme 'the growth of a poet's mind'. In its search for the origins of the adult personality, The Prelude takes the reader back to the formative moments of childhood and youth: the baby at the breast, the boy ranging over the Cumbrian fells, the revolutionary undergraduate. In many ways it can be seen as the first modern poem, challenging Milton in its redefinition of epic, as Milton challenged Homer and Virgil. This new Penguin English Poets edition of The Prelude contains the brief first draft, Was It for This, composed in 1798; The Prelude in two books completed in 1799; and The Prelude in its 1805 and 1850 versions, printed here in parallel texts. The editor provides an invaluable introduction to the texts and fuller, more detailed notes than in any previous edition, as well as significant textual variants and a biographical table of dates.

About the Author

William Wordsworth was born in the Lake District in April 1770, and died there eighty years later on 23 April 1850. In his youth Wordsworth experienced the French Revolution first hand and spent his twenties wandering throughout Europe. In 1794 Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge with whom he wrote Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and to whom he addressed his epic work, The Prelude. Wordsworth gradually established himself as the great poet of the Romantic period and in 1843 he became Poet Laureate.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1976
• ISBN 10: 0140422145
• ISBN 13: 9780140422146
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 576
• Editor: J.C. Maxwell