This study focuses on the poetry and prose relations, bibliographic forms, competitive poetry markets, readerly negotiations and parodic responses that informed the creation of Wordsworth's published collections of poetry from 1800 to 1820. Two intertwined stories govern the chapters that follow. The first describes how Wordsworth used supplementary writings to shape and engage readers in his poetic collections from Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800), to Poems, in Two Volumes, by William Wordsworth (1807), The Excursion (1814), Poems by William Wordsworth (1815) and The River Duddon volume (1820). The second relates how Wordsworth's critics and parodists responded to and were connected with the designs of those collections.

Beginning with the publication of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth employed a variety of supplementary writings to make a case for his poetry as a valuable addition to the ‘Old Canon’ of poets, an innovation on ballad collecting, and a means of lending authority to his singular poetic credentials. Through prefaces, footnotes, endnotes, headnotes, half-title pages, epigraphs, advertisements and other paratexts, Wordsworth not only presented himself as an important contemporary poet, but as an editor, anthologist, literary and cultural critic. The prose interlacing Wordsworth's collections from the 1800 Lyrical Ballads to his 1820 The River Duddon volume provided him with opportunities to guide readers through his poems and draw their attention to how his work as a collector and commentator added aesthetic, cultural and historic depth to his books of poetry.