‘The modern “epic”’, Lawrence Lipking has observed, ‘is dominated by one story and one story only: the life of the poet.’ The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is the classic example. But if Wordsworth's is the model of a modern ‘literary career’, it is so because of its insufficiency as a model, its incapacity to offer anything so generic. For one thing, The Prelude addresses itself not to the poet's life but to his Mind and, even if that mind's making is revealed through life events, its material is something altogether more elusive than is the stuff of autobiography. For another, the subtitle, Growth of a Poet's Mind, conveys, in that small detail of the indefinite article, a gesture of humility that demonstrates complete specialness: ‘a’ Poet, this Poet, can never be ‘the’ Poet whose attributes are common to poets in general, or whose skills aim to be transferable to others. Of the closing lines of ‘There was a Boy’ Coleridge memorably remarked that, ‘had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out “Wordsworth!”.