Early Poems and Fragments, 1785–1787. By William Wordsworth. Edited by Carol Landon and Jared Curtis. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998. Pp. xxiii + 891. $117.

Last Poems, 1821–1850. By William Wordsworth. Edited by Jared Curtis. Associate Editors Apryl Lea Denny-Ferris and Jillian Heydt-Stevenson. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xix + 852. $110.

The two volumes reviewed here capture Wordsworth's literary output at the beginning and at the end of his long career. As the editors of these volumes note, others of Wordsworth's early and late poems are presented in other volumes in the Cornell Wordsworth series, including some that are not yet published. As this remarkable editorial project draws to a close, its character and achievement merit notice. Begun by its general editor, Stephen M. Parrish, in collaboration with Mark L. Reed, James Butler, Jared Curtis, and others who have edited individual volumes in the series, the Cornell Wordsworth is dedicated to the retrieval of the earliest versions of poems Wordsworth later (and often) revised, on the grounds that the older Wordsworth's obsessive habits of revision radically muted or altered poems of his youth and middle periods; these poems are at the center of the Wordsworth that modern readers have tended to prefer, poems like The Prelude, early versions of what he late in life published as Guilt and Sorrow, and the many lyrical and narrative experiments that appeared in Lyrical Ballads and Wordsworth's 1807 edition of Poems, in two volumes. Modern editors are of course not alone in this judgment. Dora Wordsworth complained about her father's unwillingness to let work go, to stop revising ( Last Poems, p. 449).

Theresa M. Kelley
University of Wisconsin, Madison