Wordsworth, revision, and personal identity. (William Wordsworth, romantic poet)

"THE CURRENT CONSENSUS"

My interest in the problem of Wordsworth's revisions began in the early 1980s, in the face of an awkward pedagogical reality: many of the upper-level undergraduates to whom I taught the English Romantic poets simply could not afford the books I was assigning, particularly the bulky two-volume Penguin Wordsworth and the parallel-text Penguin Prelude. Yet cheaper alternatives, at least for Wordsworth, were either too selective, or forbiddingly inclusive, cramped, and unannotated.(1) It was not until 1984, and Oxford University Press's publication of an inexpensive one-volume Oxford Authors Wordsworth, edited by Stephen Gill, that a solution seemed at hand. This solution, though, turned out to raise as many problems as it solved.

The Oxford Authors series aims to offer "authoritative editions of the major English writers for the student and general reader." Each edition prints what it calls "the best texts available" in a selection that seeks out "the essence of a writer's work and thinking." In the case of Gill's edition, though, other, and potentially conflicting, aims are at work. "Here, for the first time," the blurb tells us, Wordsworth's poems "are presented in order of composition and in texts in which their original identity is restored." That is, in versions Wordsworth revised in subsequent editions.

Wordsworth's career as a poet spanned sixty-five years, from 1785 to 1850. Between 1793 and 1850, Wordsworth published fifteen books of new verse, and nine collected editions, the first of which appeared in 1815. These collected editions were arranged topically rather than chronologically, and contained both fresh poems and the latest revised versions of older poems. According to Ernest de Selincourt, editor of what is still the standard edition (until, at least, the completion of the Cornell Edition, to be discussed later), "it is probable that no poet ever paid more meticulous or prolonged attention to his text."(2) As Gill himself puts it, in a textual note to the Oxford Authors edition, and amply documents in his richly informative 1989 biography, Wordsworth: A Life, "over revision the poet expended enormous vigilance and the labour did not end until his death."(3) That death followed hard on the heels of the publication in 1849-1850 of a six-volume Poems, the last collected edition worked on by Wordsworth himself. Though Wordsworth was eighty when he died, and incapable of the major revisions of, for example, the 1836-1837 and 1845 collections, he was, as Gill's biography puts it, "alert enough to attend to details."(4) There is little reason to question the edition's status as "the poet's final authorized text," or to suppose he ever changed his mind about the importance, as he wrote to Alexander Dyce in 1830, of "following strictly the last Copy of the text of an Author."(5)

Gill's motives for ignoring Wordsworth's final texts relate only indirectly to the aims of the Oxford Authors series. On the back of the edition, right next to the general rubric (with its talk of "best" texts and "the essence of a writer's work and thinking"), is a one-paragraph description beginning as follows:

This edition enables today's readers to share something of the

experiences of Wordsworth's contemporaries. Keats and Shelley,