Wordsworth was the longest-lived of the major Romantic poets. The brief, tragic lives of Keats, Shelley and Byron are often remarked upon, and their early deaths add to their mystique. Wordsworth, by contrast, lived to be eighty, long enough to become a member of the establishment, to change his mind on many issues and, arguably, to lose some of his poetic brilliance.

The different versions of The Prelude track this change. Wordsworth worked on the poem throughout his life, and today there are three main versions, those of 1799, 1805 and 1850. Although Wordsworth changed his social and political opinions over that time, the changes in style are much more evident from the poem. Take, for instance, the lines from the 1805 poem:

O welcome messenger! O welcome friend!
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon city’s walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured.

Compare this with the version from 1850:

Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free.

What immediately strikes the reader is the diminution of intensity. In the first version, Wordsworth cries out to the breeze as a messenger and a friend, apostrophizing it directly and personifying it. The words "captive" and "prison," as well as the insistence that he is "immured" in "a house of bondage" suggest a great deal more than the "discontent" of the second version. The same lessening of intensity is evident throughout the poem, as Wordsworth, in the 1850 version, calmly contemplates nature rather than being thrilled and emancipated by it.