I'm reading Bate 's biography of Wordsworth , and he recommended The Prelude , by saying it was his greatest work. I started reading it today. Thick old library book from 1959. "Trances of thought and mountings of the mind Come fast upon me: it is shaken off That burden of my own unnatural self" I guess American Transcendentalists were influenced by Romantic poets. I'm not taking the heavy The Prelude camping to read but I want to. It's a 1959 book that is not mine, so I won't risk taking it. Reads like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass . I guess Wordsworth wrote Prelude first 1799, to Leaves of Grass in 1855. Wikipedia : According to Monique R. Morgan's "Narrative Means to Lyric Ends in Wordsworth's Prelude," "Much of the poem consists of Wordsworth's interactions with nature that 'assure[d] him of his poetic mission.' The goal of the poem is to demonstrate his fitness to produce great poetry, and The Prelude itself...