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in Coleridge’s method. Nor, as he clearly told Crabb Robinson, had he any interest in Germanmetaphysics. 29 But Coleridgean-orientated criticism continues to practise such a method of thinkingand, as a result, has continued to misread Wordsworth.Recent Wordsworth criticism has reversed the traditional editorial principles pursued byErnest De Selincourt in the Oxford Poetic Works, and upheld by Raymond Havens in The Mind of aPoet. Stephen Parrish, as Chief Editor of the Cornell Wordsworth; Jonathan Wordsworth, in his workon The Prelude; Stephen Gill, as editor of Oxford ‘Standard Authors’ edition of Wordsworth; andNicholas Roe in his Penguin edition of Wordsworth’s Selected Poetry have all published the earliestversions of Wordsworth’s works and not the final texts that Wordsworth had revised. They all justifytheir editorial positions as intending to represent the original, authentic, historical, Wordsworth – theman who wrote the poems in a particular historical context. I argue, however, that much of that‘original’ Wordsworth still remains undiscovered today, even after the attempts made by recenthistoricist criticism to uncover more about the ‘Hidden Wordsworth’. I suggest that our contemporary‘pre-established codes of decision’ – the enduring legacy of the ‘romantic ideology’ that continues todefine the paradigm by which we read Wordsworth – makes it impossible to recover his actual ethos.These assumptions continue to define a youthful, Romantic, Wordsworth who sadly lost his nerveafter producing his best, and most Romantic poetry during his ‘great decade’ – thanks largely toColeridge’s necessary assistance. Much of the ‘evidence’ for defining such an ethos in the past hasbeen based on romantic readings of the text of his greatest poem, rather than paying closer attentionto historical evidence. More recent ‘new historical’ approaches have claimed to address that problem,but many of these more enlightened critics continue to interpret Wordsworth according to the‘authority’ of Wordsworth’s own descriptions of events, as found in The Prelude. Their reading ofthat text is, I argue, too often coloured by their sympathy for Wordsworthian values that were actuallydefined by Coleridge. It therefore matters a great deal how the text of The Prelude is interpreted, andwhether readers of the earlier text acknowledge that it addresses an argument to Coleridge arguingagainst his understanding of Imagination. It was an argument that set out to refute Coleridge’s beliefthat Wordsworth’s best poetry was the product of the workings of ‘a synthetic and magical power towhich we have exclusively appropriated the name of Imagination’. In Part 2 of this study I present mygrounds for asserting that Cicero provided Wordsworth with a ‘one–life’ philosophy that was opposedto many of Coleridge’s Christian principles and his later more ‘critical’ philosophical ones.Wordsworth’s ‘radically Different’ appreciation of imagination was based on the Stoic principles hehad discovered in Cicero’s philosophical works, and which provided him with the grounds for hisargument of The Prelude (1805).29 Wordsworth told Crabb Robinson the he had ‘never read a word of German metaphysics, thank Heaven’.Correspondence of Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, ed. Edith Morley, 1. 401. Later, in 1844, heis reported as saying, ‘Kant, Schelling, Fichte; Fichte, Schelling, Kant: all this is dreary work and does notdenote progress’, Memories of Old Friends, being Extracts from the Journals and Letters of Caroline Fox,ed. H.N. Pym, p. 215141