And yet, and yet, Wordsworth was pursuing deep truths, and I think he found them. All of it, even though it is written in Shakespearean/Miltonic blank verse, is relatively unadorned: The mellifluous delights of Keats’s “To Autumn,” about which I was currently writing, are not a major feature of the lines. Some of it is, as I discovered in rereading it, turgid.
I has been my constant companion for a lifetime. Why I gave it to him was no mystery, at least to me. There was no way I was going to hand it to him without some sort of explication to help him read it. Now The Prelude is a very long work: It was meant to be an epic, or the prelude to an epic. In any case, it had the text of The Prelude and lots, lots, of paintings, etchings and drawings contemporary with it. I think it was a vanity project by one of the book’s editors, a wealthy corporate financier. Meandering among the remaindered books, I found a lushly illustrated copy of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. When I was out in Seattle, we went to its premier bookstore, the Elliott Bay Book Company.
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