The Inscrutable William Wordsworth

Wordsworth wrote to Sir George Beaumont in 1805 that it was “a thing unprecedented in Literary history that a man should talk so much about himself”. He was referring to the poem first published after his death in 1850 as The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (a title chosen by his family), which is now regarded as his masterpiece and one of the great long poems in English literature. He needn’t have worried. In composing and revising his autobiographical poem over many years, he wrote thousands of words about himself while giving very little away.