Textual Issues

Students of Wordsworth are confronted with an unusual array of different editions, especially of the poetry, which represent much more than commercial competition. Some of the leading issues in contemporary textual criticism have been pioneered in the conception of these editions as they have progressively sought to redefine the poet's works. So much is this so that an informed choice of texts must nowadays be the basis of any serious engagement with Wordsworth's writings.

The prevailing questions have been long standing. Wordsworth’s extraordinary lifelong habits of constant revision presented his nineteenth-century editors with the problem of judging the relative status of many considerably variant readings and versions. Though his final intentions were authoritatively registered in his latest edition of Poetical Works, 1849–50, those readings indirectly efface previously completed works which had in many cases already produced a separate history of reception. Also, from Poems, 1815 the poet arranged his poems according to a psychological or subject focus system which for the most part ignored a chronological reading. While Edward Dowden followed Wordsworth’s final wishes in respect of versions and arrangement (the ‘Aldine’, 1892–3), as did Thomas Hutchinson in his edition of Poetical Works (the ‘Oxford’, 1895), William Knight attempted to reconstruct a chronological ordering in his (1882–9; the ‘Eversley’, revised and corrected, 1896), though the dates of composition were often uncertain, and yet to retain the final versions for the main texts.