If we are to read Wordsworth at all it must be in bulk, for the best effects in The Prelude (1805, 9253 lines; 1850, 7878 lines) and The Excursion (1814, 8850 lines) depend upon lengthy preparation. If we want to read about Wordsworth’s life, it is because he wrote some poems which we value, not for the sake of the life alone, which was often unexciting. Stephen Gill, in his admirable William Wordsworth: A Life (1990), understood this: Juliet Barker, in Wordsworth: A Life, does not. Gill curtailed details of Wordsworth’s domestic life in order to focus on how his poems came to be written, revised, printed, and received; Barker cites the poems to provide background to her narrative.

Barker’s book first appeared in the U.K. as long ago as 2000 in a text 275 pages longer than this version—which, in turn, came out in 2001 but only now appears in the

 

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