William Wordsworth's the Prelude: A CasebookWilliam Wordsworth's long poem The Prelude is a fascinating work as autobiography, the fruit of many attempts at understanding the formative period of Wordsworth's life; as a fragment of historical evidence from the revolutionary and post revolutionary years; as an unstable literary text, which mutated through at least five discernable versions from 1799 1839; and as a poem offering the pleasures of blank verse in a variety and to an intensity