Obviously I can't go into it here, Matthew,(a) it would take too long and b)
I can't remember any details, but the changes involve more than the glosses
and started when he was intimidated by Wordsworth's rather contemptuous
attitude to his fantastic tale, I think (without having reread all the
commentary to check) . Naturally one can take the rather post-modern
attitude that the more the merrier, as you and others do, but Empson and
after him Ricks seem to have a yen for the unadulterated original, and after
all, Jon, they haven't actually erased it from the scrolls of human memory,
have they? (I prefer the 1805 Prelude to 1850's, like many others, but both
remain available.) By the way, I created an ambiguity with "also... decoy" -
I meant that Eliot's notes had that quality in addition, not that
Coleridge's glosses had it too. I should have said Eliot's notes are meant
to distract one from certain meanings of the poem and are probably a bit of
a Possum legpull.
Cheers, Martin
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|