ABSTRACT
This document and the Essay, Supplementary (No. 12) were written in January 1815; on 22 December 1814 Wordsworth told R. P. Gillies that he would not write a new preface to the new edition of his poems (1815), but he was writing to De Quincey on 8 February 1815 about ‘rough Copies of the Preface’ and ‘the after draught’, and on 14 February to Gillies about ‘an additional preface and a supplementary Essay’ on which he had been engaged ‘for some weeks past’ (MY, ii. 180, 195, 196). They first appeared in Wordsworth’s Poems (1815), and were reprinted, with revisions, in all subsequent collected editions of Wordsworth’s poems. My text of both is based on Wordsworth’s final version, in Poetical Works (1849–50), v. 233–50 (Preface), and v. 196–230 (Essay); with certain corrections, from earlier texts, of obvious errors introduced by Wordsworth during revision. The illogical order in which the works appeared in 1849–50 was first used in Wordsworth’s Poems (1845), and emerged from the Poetical Works of 1836–7, where, for some inexplicable reason, Wordsworth indicated that the Essay was supplementary to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In all earlier texts (1815, 1820, 1827, 1832) it was rightly referred to the Preface of 1815 ; see Prose, iii. 55. Early texts of the Preface (1815–36) contain somewhat more material than is given here. The more important omitted passages are recorded in my notes; for the others see the apparatus in Prose, iii. 26–39. The final text of the Essay is on the whole the fullest, except that it omits, as do all Wordsworth’s texts after the first (1815), an opening paragraph of cool insult aimed at Jeffrey.
