The Prelude wore the name of its immediate audience on its sleeve. Wordsworth's frequent apostrophe, “O Friend,” addresses the principal reader, auditor and inspirer of this very private poem. We know the friend to have been Coleridge, whom Wordsworth first met in 1795 and with whom he collaborated on the groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads (1798). Coleridge returned the favor with the opening words (“O Friend”) of his 118 lines of iambic pentameter, “To William Wordsworth,” written on the night the poet finished reading aloud the complete 1805 Prelude. There Coleridge installs his friend “in the choir / Of ever-enduring Men.” What these biographical details tell us is that, in its original incarnation, The Prelude was fashioned as a poem in which one man is author and another man is audience. This male-to-male epic is, in Wordsworth's words at the end of the final book, an “offering of my love.”

Maleness is central to the structure, performance and contents of The Prelude—and in that respect is very much like a great many earlier poems, from the Iliad forward, in the history of epic. Women are barely present in Wordsworth's poem, save for the long digression on Julia and Vaudracour in Book Nine, intermittent homages to his sister Dorothy, and tributes to his old “dame” Ann Tyson who mothered him in the years after his actual mother died when he was eight years old. By 1832, the most extensive attention to a woman, the more than 400 lines on the story of Julia and Vaudracour, had been excised for a reason that has long been guessed: it was a veiled analogue to his own youthful affair in France with Annette Vallon and the birth of their daughter Caroline. The future poet laureate was learning to be discreet.

It is no surprise that in what is, essentially, a coming-of-age poem the male figure of the poet is at its center.