Many of these editors have been inclined to disregard the physical evidence contained in the grubby, fire-damaged, ink-smudged, or scribally-imperfect page, and have instead sought to provide the scholarly world with the poems "as they should have appeared." Initially, this might seem to be an overstatement. This is particularly true for poetry, both because it frequently remains in only one copy, and because it has traditionally been respatialized into half-line pairs, emended to conform to our perception of alliteration rules, and in general "cleaned up" by editors throughout the twentieth century. in which we apprehend that which we call "text" when it is written down, is primarily governed by the manuscript versions in which it appears. This statement raises the critical issue that forms the focus of this discussion. Read moreįor early vernacular works (whether oral or written in origin), the trans-mitting manuscript does not merely ensure the survival of the work as a text through the operation of a technology of preservation it actually deter-mines conditions for the reception and transmission of the work" (O'Keeffe 1990, 5).
Wordsworth’s concern with the relationship between the individual and experience, between time and the development of the poetic self, can therefore be seen as a natural extension of ideas which emerged in the late eighteenth century ideas given full form by writers like Cowper, and developed by writers like Yearsley before their adoption as key tenets of what would come to be recognized as a ‘Romantic’ movement. Equidistant between Cowper and Wordsworth, sits Ann Yearsley, the ‘Bristol milkmaid poet’, who sought to further explore these complex issues in her rather shorter poem, ‘Soliloquy’, written in 1795 and published in 1796 as part of Yearsley’s final volume of poetry, The Rural Lyre.
quotation because of its importance in the Romantic canon but, as I will argue throughout this essay, Wordsworth was not the first to draw together these concepts: twenty years earlier William Cowper published The Task, one of the central concerns of which was the connection between time and memory, and within which past and present exist simultaneously. The concept of specific points resonating beyond the limits of linear time, nourishing the past, present and future poetic self, is an enduring legacy of Wordsworth’s project in this poem. This quotation, from Book XI of the 1805 Prelude, has become one of Wordsworth’s most famous passages, one which links ideas of memory, imagination and place with the nature of time.