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Title deed HOW DID CELEBRATED BOOKS GET THEIR NAMES? Continuing our series, we look at the story behind William Wordsworth's The Prelude

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From: The Sunday Telegraph London
Date: 20050410
Author:GARY DEXTER

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH's blank-verse epic The Prelude remained unpublished during his lifetime and was known to family and friends simply as ``the poem to Coleridge''. After his death in 1850 it was published and given its familiar name by his wife, Mary. Her choice of title has a melancholy history. Throughout his life Wordsworth worked on an immense philosophical poem called ``The Recluse'', which was to be the 19th century's version of Life, the Universe and Everything. The Prelude was merely its introduction. But despite sweating over it, Wordsworth completed only one section of ``The ...

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