ABSTRACT
When Matthew Arnold undertook to publish a selection of Wordsworth’s poetry in 1879, he was guided by a concern for the poet’s diminished reputation and a belief that the weighty corpus of his poetry needed to be rescued from itself if it was to be rescued from undue neglect. “He is not fully recognized at home; he is not recognized at all abroad” (x), Arnold lamented, and then went on to propose his remedy: “To be recognized far and wide as a great poet, to be possible and receivable as a classic, Wordsworth needs to be relieved of a great deal of the poetical baggage which now encumbers him”—starting with his “poems of greatest bulk” (xx). Accordingly, Arnold’s distillation of Wordsworth’s “best work” included only part of the first book of The Excursion—the story of Margaret—and nothing at all of The Prelude except for those few passages that Wordsworth had himself published as short poems.
