David Simpson
There are further rewards for attending to this translation, for it includes many of the passages that had already been important to Wordsworth's published poetry, most of all to The Excursion.... Perhaps most important of all, these findings and this volume should remind us that the boy who labored over his exercises at Hawkshead School never entirely forgot his lessons, and that the list of formative books famously acknowledged in The Prelude does not begin to exhaust the tributaries of his stream of knowledge.
From the Publisher
Like all the other volumes in the superb 'Cornell Wordsworth,' this one provides reading texts of the works involved, a generous selection of photographic manuscript facsimiles with indispensable transcriptions, and a richly detailed critical apparatus. Graver's lengthy introductions to the Chaucer and Virgil sections add significantly to the reader's understanding of Wordsworth's ideals as a translator and his relation to the past.... Libraries will want to acquire this title... because there is much here to engage the attention of Chaucer and Latin students, upper-level English majors and graduate students with a particular focus on Romanticism, or, indeed, anyone with a serious interest in translation and the creative process.
