The Cornell Wordsworth

"Lyrical Ballads, published as a single volume in 1798, then in 1800 as a two-volume set including new poems, is widely regarded as having inaugurated the Romantic Revolution in poetry. The present edition provides the first comprehensive textual history - from earliest manuscript to final lifetime printing - of the poems published in Lyrical Ballads, and of contemporaneous short poems by Wordsworth. For those poems originally published in 1800, this edition is the first to be based on the printer's manuscript approved by Wordsworth."--BOOK JACKET. "A richly detailed editors' introduction examines the conception of the Lyrical Ballads, the chronology of composition of its contents, the roles of the two authors, Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, their complex dealings with publishers and printers, and the reception of the volumes. Drawing on 78 different manuscripts, the edition provides 113 photographic facsimiles accompanied by transcriptions on facing pages. It offers an extensive apparatus incorporating all variant readings and nonverbal variants, as well as appendixes including variants in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the other poems that he contributed to the collection."--BOOK JACKET. "Among the distinctive features of this edition are the Mathew elegies, three texts for "Nutting," and a chronology of the work of the fertile Goslar period in which The Prelude was begun. A dozen poems are printed here for the first time, or are printed in previously unpublished versions, and hundreds of fresh readings are supplied, many of them from the largely unpublished early manuscripts of "Michael.""--BOOK JACKET. "Presenting a full record of three of the most important years in Wordsworth's career, this long-awaited addition to the Cornell Wordsworth will be an essential resource for scholars and students of English romanticism."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume is made up of work from the beginning of Wordsworth's career, when he was a Hawkshead schoolboy, until the end of this time at Racedown in mid-1797. Like other volumes in The Cornell Wordsworth series, this book is based on detailed study of the relevant manuscripts. Each poem or fragment is accompanied by a headnote that explains that item's provenance among the manuscripts and examines its literary or biographical background. Most of the work in this volume was never published in Wordsworth's lifetime. (Early works that appear in other volumes of The Cornell Wordsworth have been omitted, but all other work from Wordsworth's early manuscripts, whether a finished piece or a mere jotting, has been included.). The editors draw heavily on seventeen notebooks or other manuscripts. Fifteen of them are presented in photographic copies; all are described fully in bibliographical terms. Although some writing from the notebooks has appeared in print since the poet's death in 1850, the Landon and Curtis edition supersedes earlier versions in the thoroughness and overall reliability. The editors present a plausible new organization of the Vale of Esthwaite materials, an improved sequential version of the two dirges written at Cambridge, and a substantially enlarged text of the Wordsworth-Wrangham "Imitation of Juvenal." The incomplete "Greyhound Ballad" is one of several fragments appearing in print for the first time.

This book presents much of Wordsworth's poetic output from the last three decades of his life. Approximately two hundred poems are featured, including On the Power of Sound, the sequence of Evening Voluntaries, and the poet's tributes to the dead, such as those to Sir George Beaumont, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Hogg, Charles Lamb, Owen Lloyd, and Robert Southey. Lost Poems provides reading texts of all the poems in their earliest finished versions, variant readings from all surviving manuscript and print forms over which the poet exercised control, Wordsworth's and the editors' notes to each of the poems, and photographs and transcriptions of selected manuscripts.