Today I'll be proofreading Wordsworth's Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads" (1800), which I haven't read carefully since college--if I read it carefully then, which is doubtful. I was not an ideal college student: far too prone to wallow in unassigned Dickens instead of poring over assigned Ruskin, still struggling to decode syntax and contemporary plot devices. (Virginia Woolf was hard for me to manage, and Thomas Pynchon was almost unreadable.) I was such a rube then that I found it hard to understand why any college might have wanted me. Yet now that I'm helping J apply to schools, I have finally realized that all 17-year-olds are rubes, which, after all these years, still turns out to be a comfort . . . for both his sake and mine.

Anyway, I'll keep you posted about the Preface. I expect it will be far more interesting than I remember. However, after yesterday's immersion in wacky William Blake, I'll require some time to adjust to rational explanation and predictable punctuation.

Here's my new theory: Blake's punctuation and capitalization (or lack thereof) are directly related to the way in which his visionary and workaday lives intersected. For instance:

But none can know the Spiritual Acts of my three years Slumber on the banks of the Ocean unless he has seen them in the Spirit or unless he should read My long Poem descriptive of those Acts for I have in these three years composed an immense number of verses on One Grand Theme Similar to Homers Iliad or Miltons Paradise Lost the Persons & Machinery intirely new to the Inhabitants of Earth (some of the Persons Excepted) I have written lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will. the Time it has taken in writing was thus rendered Non Existent. & an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life all produced without Labour or Study. I mention this to shew you what I think the Grand Reason of my being brought down here

Now go ahead: write your doctoral thesis on this idea because I will never be able to.