ABSTRACT
The shorter, early version of the Preface (1800) was written probably in the late summer of 1800, certainly in September, and on 1 October Dorothy Wordsworth ‘corrected the last sheet’ of the manuscript (Journals, i. 61–2; the manuscript is preserved, in part, in Yale University Library). Lyrical Ballads actually appeared in January 1801, and by June of that year had sold well enough to enable Longman, its publisher, to call for a new edition; this was in print by April 1802, and to it Wordsworth contributed an enlarged version of the Preface and the Appendix on poetic diction: see EY, 337; The Library, 5th Series, xii (1957), 94. Some of the new material in the expanded Preface suggests that the revision took place in the early months of 1802: see Prose, i. 112. Wordsworth reprinted the Preface, more or less in this enlarged form, and the Appendix in all later collected editions of his poems; in the edition of 1836–7 he cut the Preface somewhat and made stylistic revisions, especially by removing the pronoun ‘I’ as far as possible. Because the material cut in 1836–7 is important in the understanding of this document, I have preferred to print here, not Wordsworth’s final text of 1849–50, but the full second version of the Preface, and in the text of Lyrical Ballads (1805), in which some differences of pointing and spelling from that of 1802 (there are no verbal revisions) suggest that Wordsworth looked over the copy or proofs of this edition with a view to establishing a text authoritative for the time being. Details of the important differences between the texts of 1800 and 1802–5 can be found in Prose, i. 118–59, my Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 143–51, or my edition of Lyrical Ballads 1798 , 153–79; my annotations to the present text indicate the broad lines of Wordsworth’s revisions. My text, as indicated above, is based on Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems, London, 1805, i. i–lxiv (for the Preface), and ii. 237–47 (for the Appendix).
