Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations and Texts -- Foreword: "The Prelude": A Poem of My Own Life? -- Part I Early Years -- Chapter 1 Versions of Home: 1770-83 -- Chapter 2 Hawkshead and Esthwaite: 1783-7 -- Chapter 3 Cambridge: 1787-90 -- Chapter 4 To the Alps: and What Followed: 1790-1 -- Chapter 5 Annette Vallon, Michel de Beaupuy, and the Bishop of Llandaff: 1791-3 -- Part II Writer -- Chapter 6 Salisbury Plain and its Consequences: 1793-5 -- Chapter 7 Racedown: 1795-7 -- Chapter 8 Coleridge and Alfoxton: 1797-8 -- Chapter 9 Lyrical Ballads: 1798 -- Chapter 10 Hamburg to the Harz: 1798 -- Chapter 11 Writing in Goslar: 1798-9 -- Chapter 12 Sockburn to Grasmere: 1799-1800 -- Part III Town-End -- Chapter 13 "Home at Grasmere," the "Ode," "Michael": 1800-1 -- Chapter 14 Hurting: 1800-1 -- Chapter 15 Marrying: 1801-2 -- Chapter 16 Grasmere to Calais and on to Gallow Hill: 1802 -- Chapter 17 Marriage, First Child, and the Trip to Scotland: 1802-3 -- Chapter 18 "The Prelude" I: 1804 -- Chapter 19 "The Prelude" II: 1804-5 -- Chapter 20 "Elegiac Stanzas," Poems, in Two Volumes: 1806-7 -- Part IV The Light of Common Day -- Chapter 21 "The Recluse" and The Convention of Cintra: 1808-9 -- Chapter 22 Loss and Grief: 1809-12 -- Chapter 23 Stamp-officer and Poet of The Excursion: 1812-14 -- Chapter 24 "What though it be past": 1814 -- Part V Sketches of Late Years -- Chapter 25 Poetry, Family, and Polemic: 1815-18 -- Chapter 26 Peter Bell and "the ghosts of what they were": 1819-26 -- Chapter 27 "The Recluse" and "The Prelude": 1827-33 -- Chapter 28 The Past Enshrined: 1834-42 -- Chapter 29 No Resting Place: 1843-50 -- Afterword -- Bibliography -- Index.