William Wordsworth, The Five-Book Prelude. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997. ISBN: 0-631-20548-9 (hardback) 0-631-20549-7 (paperback). Price: £40 - $55 (hardback) £11.99 - $19.95 (paperback)

For some six weeks in early 1804 Wordsworth planned to complete his autobiographical poem to Coleridge—the poem that was to become The Prelude—in "five parts or books." On March 6, he wrote to Coleridge that he would within a matter of days commence the fifth and final book of the poem. Plans had changed radically by March 12, and Wordsworth, now referring to the autobiographical poem as a much more extensive undertaking on which he was "advancing rapidly," reshaped his materials into the first five books of a new poem, the eventual length of which was probably as yet undecided. By March 18, Coleridge had received as part of the manuscript of Wordsworth's poetry that he would take with him to Malta (MS. M; Dove Cottage MS. 44) these first five books of the poem that was to become the thirteen-book Prelude, and Wordsworth was hard at work on verse to be incorporated into later books. How close did Wordsworth come to finishing his relatively modest, five-book poem before deciding to commit himself to the work that would grow to thirteen books by May of 1805? What shape would the finished poem have taken? What led to the decision to abandon the five-book poem, finished or not, and how much of what Wordsworth did compose for the five-book poem is recoverable from the extraordinarily difficult manuscripts that contain this work (MSS. W and WW, Dove Cottage MSS. 38 and 43)? These are tantalizing questions, as they take us to the heart of the creative process out of which a great poem was born. Jonathan Wordsworth's 1977 article, "The Five-Book Prelude of Early Spring 1804," first made the case that a five-book poem was probably "either finished or within easy striking distance of completion" in March 1804, and that it could be reconstructed in considerable detail from the available manuscripts. The poem that he describes through close attention to progress reports among the Wordsworth circle and to details in MSS. W and WW probably would have begun in a manner identical to the 1805, thirteen-book poem, with the first three books corresponding to books I-III of 1805 (I and II closely, III more generally). Book IV probably combined the contents of 1805, Books IV (vacation) and V (books). Book V, the most difficult of the books to reconstruct in detail, probably began with material that would eventually form the first third of 1805, Book XIII (the ascent of Snowdon and a version of XIII, 70-165), and included about the last two-thirds of 1805, Book XI (ll. 123-388), ending with the "spots of time." This poem, Jonathan Wordsworth argued, is "in many ways the most impressive of the Preludes, bringing together in a densely packed, unique, and formally satisfying unit the great poetry of Wordsworth's original inspiration at Goslar in 1798, and the new magnificent sequences of early 1804" (1). On the question of why this formally satisfying whole, which was either complete or nearly complete by ca. 10 March, was almost immediately cannibalized in the process of pursuing much larger plans, Jonathan Wordsworth suggests that the poet was motivated by dissatisfaction with having left out biographical information (particularly the 1790 visit to France) and by a more general "unwillingness to make an attempt at the central philosophical section of The Recluse" (24). The 1977 article stops short of the claim that MSS. W and WW provide sufficient evidence on which to base an edition of the poem: "The poem does not survive as a whole in fair copy and cannot be printed, as can 1799 …