The Prelude is Wordsworth's surprisingly fresh and modest account of growing up and developing his ideas about poetry, as seen through a series of key encounters with people or (mostly) with the natural world. We learn about his childhood in the family home and later at Hawkshead school, his Cambridge days, walking over the Alps, his experiences of the French revolution (omitting the bit about his unplanned French daughter...), and his love for Dorothy and for Coleridge.

The blank verse is firm, plain and natural - he has a few annoying habits like winning a syllable to pad a line by using a double negative, or throwing in a "poetic" elision or archaism, but he does this sort of thing far less often than most poets of the time, and a reader in 1805 (had anyone been allowed to read it then) might well have found the language astonishingly direct and plain. Nowadays the archaisms are more noticeable to us than the "plain" language, of course, and it's hard not to get irritated with his habit of describing people and things instead of naming them. Your heart leaps down when you behold a "that ... who/which ... " construction. But those minor things aside, this is a poem that you can - and should - read "like a book". It's a wonderfully open intellectual autobiography by someone who would most definitely not like to think of himself as an intellectual.

Never published in Wordsworth's lifetime, it started off as a 150 line poem in 1798, grew into two books of blank verse in 1799, achieved what most people regard as its definitive form in 13 books in 1805, but was then revised several more times before it was published posthumously in 14 books in 1850. Wordsworth was an incurable tinkerer, and constantly worked on his earlier poems, tweaking punctuation and orthography, changing a word here or there, sometimes even deleting and inserting long passages. The Penguin edition prints the 1805 and 1850 versions as parallel text, so that it's easy to see what was changed, but sometimes very difficult to fathom out why. More often than not, you feel that Wordsworth got it right the first time - wording that was tight and clear to start with becomes weak and woolly in the revised text. Some of the changes obviously reflect the way he became more and more conservative in old age - sympathy for radical ideas is played down, religious experiences that were undoctrinal and almost pantheistic in their expression are forced into language that will fit in with the ideas of mainstream Victorian Christianity. ( )