ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the way in which the writing stages of The Excursion run parallel to the shifting poetic relationship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth until the poem itself, in its distance from the original conception, comes to represent the division between them. Coleridge's private correspondence and criticism of Wordsworth frequently anticipates his later public criticism in ways which illustrate the subtle modulation of voice and changes of tone by which he turns apparent praise into censure. Lack of involvement in the early stages of Wordsworth's thinking about the poem continues, after Coleridge's return, in his distance from the work as it is written. From September 1808 to the spring of 1810 Coleridge lived with the Wordsworths at Allen Bank whilst working on The Friend with Sara Hutchinson as his amanuensis. It is clear that Coleridge's grand design rapidly became inappropriate when put into practice by Wordsworth.
