To revise or not to revise...

Wordsworth was a habitual revisionist. Stephen Parrish of Cornell University quotes Wordsworth’s editor, Ernest de Selincourt as saying, "it is probable that no poet ever paid more meticulous or prolonged attention to his text".

To say that Wordsworth over revised would be an understatement. Selincourt, in the end, skipped over much of Wordsworth’s work that went unnoticed during the editing process. “The Ruined Cottage was one such lost poem until 1969; Adventures on Salisbury Plain was another, until the appearance of Gill's volume; the magnificent two-part Prelude is a third—unknown until 1964 and still unpublished in Britain (in the U. S. it appeared recently in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and it will be the second volume in the Cornell/ Harvester series).” (Parrish page 241)

Wordsworth's text and manuscripts were a mess from over revision. I could not imagine being an editor for one such as him. As a poet myself I am well aware that a limit needs to be set on the amount of revision a particular text may need. Do we trust Wordsworth that his poetry did not lose it's original meaning at the time her first put pen to paper? His work was years in the making due to his obsession with revision.

Works cited:

Parrish, Stephen. "The Worst Of Wordsworth." Wordsworth Circle 42.4 (2011): 240-241. MLA    .
     International Bibliography. Web. 22 Apr. 2013