![]() One note: “Book One” is long, so I am NOT including the text in this letter (my usual practice), or the letter would be so lengthy no one would read it. That’s why you are getting a letter I originally wrote for my son alone. Why don’t you send it to your poetry letters list?” My wife asked to read what I had written for David, so of course I gave it to her. Who gets to teach a seminar to one’s son? What an honor, what a delight!. It was, for me, one of the high points of my teaching life: A one-on-one seminar with my own son, about a work that is of surpassing greatness. To help David read “Book One,” I told him I would write about it, and then write about further books as he was prepared to read them. Half of the deep insights and the delights of The Prelude come in “Book One,” so that is where a reader should begin. 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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