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narrative to include more intimate details of his transition from youth to maturity, incorporating amoral theme, and bringing the history of his life up to the period when he ‘wantoned in wild poesy’with Coleridge at Alfoxden. This ‘justification’ of his own life was not limited to providing the detailsof his personal history, it was also composed as a carefully constructed argument, a disputation,addressed to Coleridge, that defined, and defended his own understanding of the role that Imaginationand Fancy played in his own poetic productions. In his ‘poem to Coleridge’, Wordsworth gives adetailed justification of his own position in a work that also demonstrates his ‘knowledge’, and the‘power’ of his imagination, as he attempts to persuade Coleridge to change his mind on the matter of‘Imagination’. In concluding the poem Wordsworth hoped that the two men might resolve theirdifferences and work together again as ‘joint labourers in a work…Of …redemption’ (Prelude XIII439-441).That The Prelude addresses an argument to Coleridge about the nature of Imagination issomething that does not appear to have been understood by later criticism, which originally focussedon the published 1850 text in which that argument was obscured. In studying the poem here in itsoriginal form I stress that form as an ‘Address’, and refer readers to Ernest De Selincourt’s 1925parallel text edition in which he reproduced a photograph of the beautifully executed calligraphy ofthe ‘title page’, for the fair copy of the 1805 poem (Ms B) which then had no title:Poemg|àÄx ÇÉà çxà y|åxw âÑÉÇUçWilliam WordsworthTwwÜxááxw àÉS.T. ColeridgeWordsworth changed his mind on certain matters after 1806, when Ms A and B were finallycompleted, and in revising parts of the poem after 1816 to make it more suitable for a generalaudience, he upset the ‘logic’ of his original, carefully balanced, argument. He also added passagesthat reflected a new sense of Christian piety that was at odds with elements of his earlier classicalhumanist ideals. This has led to some confusion about interpretation of The Prelude, with the latertext being read as justifying different beliefs about Imagination to those intended by Wordsworth in1805. I read the 1805 poem as Wordsworth’s attempt to have the ‘last word’ in an argument withColeridge over ‘Imagination’ and poetic theory that had begun in 1802 in the wake of the publicationof the additions to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.But any hope Wordsworth had entertained that Coleridge would be able to understand hisargument, or be won over to his side, would have been dashed when he met Coleridge again after hisreturn to England. Coleridge was in a worse state of mental and physical health than before he left,and the entire Wordsworth circle were deeply shocked by the great change in his character. Thepathetic character sketch, ‘The Complaint’, penned by Wordsworth a few weeks before he actuallyread his ‘poem to Coleridge’ to him, paints a poignant picture. It marks the end of any hopeWordsworth might have had of recovering a real sense of companionship with Coleridge again:100