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Although I thoroughly enjoyed reading J. Douglas Kneale's “Wordsworth's Images of Language: Voice and Letter in The Prelude” (101 [1986]: 351–61), I would like to quarrel with one of its basic concepts and with a few passages. Kneale establishes a false dichotomy between “speaking” and the “engraved or inscribed or imprinted word” in that he ascribes “voice, audience, and hence the idea of a rhetor” (351) only to speaking. Using Bakhtin in opposition to Saussure and Derrida, I would argue that both the spoken and the written consist of utterances and that every utterance has voice as one of its characteristics. This voice is invested in the utterance by both the utterer and the hearer or reader. This false dichotomy leads to certain mistaken emphases, such as the concept that all writing is a “dead letter” in contrast to a “living voice” (356). A legal will exemplifies the living voice present within the “dead letter” of a text. And how much stronger is the voice of the Wordsworthian narrator within the written text of The Prelude each time a reader reads the poem and renders it once more an utterance invested with a voice that mingles Wordsworth's initial voicing with the reader's own conception of the narrator's voice and the dual perceptions of the utterance's meanings—the author's perception integral to the formation of the utterance and the reader's perception brought to that utterance from his or her own cultural context.