Seng Won't Publish Wordsworth Poem

The Connecticut College professor who recently discovered a handwritten William Wordsworth poem in the Houghton Library said Friday that he will not publish the work because of previous knowledge of the existence of the poem among academics.

English Professor Peter J. Seng found the poem in early February while compiling an index of variations in post-1800 English poems. At that time he said he hoped to print the poem in a periodical of Romantic literature.

Seng's decision not to publish the poem follows a letter from a Cornell English professor and editor of a series on Wordsworth "who said he had already handled and was aware of the poem," Seng explained.

Calling himself "a Shakespearean," Seng added that he will leave it up to the Cornell Wordsworth to include the poem in their series. "But the Cornell editors told me I could publish the poem if I wanted to," Seng said.

Seng had previously gotten written permission from Houghton to publish the poem. He would also have needed the approval of Wordsworth's trustees, a group of scholars and the poet's descendants, who govern scholarly access to the poet's works and his property in England.

The poem will probably not appear in print until two years from now in a volume that is to include Wordsworth's late poetry from 1820 until 1850, the year of his death, said Mark I. Reed, the associate editor of the series and an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The nine volumes already published in the Cornell Wordsworth Series contain first versions of the poet's works juxtaposed with his later revisions. The editors are attempting to show that the more significant, and often better poems are the ones Wordsworth left unpublished," said Reeve Parker, the chairman of Cornell's English Department.

One of these already published volumes cites the manuscript in which this latest poem surfaced. The manuscript contains numerous changes and revisions that will change the reading of many Wordsworth poems, Seng explained.

Because of Wordsworth's "voluminous output," the discovery of new versions and major rewritings of unpublished poems are not unusual among Wordsworthians, Reed said. "It's business as usual," he added.

Gurney Professor of English Literature Jerome H. Buckley explained that poets and particularly Wordsworth, whose career spanned more than 50 years, will make many changes and publish many additions but "usually achieve what they want in the long run."

Meanwhile, a flurry of scholarly confusion arose after a photograph showing the Houghton manuscript, but not the particular page containing the poem, appeared in The Crimson Reed, the associate editor of the Wordsworth series, said that when he saw the photo he assumed it was of the newly discovered poem, when in fact the photo showed a poem that Wordsworth scholars would recognize already published.

As a result, two articles about Seng in the Chronology of Higher Education contain comments that Reed-made before he knew of the photograph confusion. Reed said that he has written the publication to advise them of the mistak