ABSTRACT
The author have been using the word 'collaboration' in a sense both very broad and very specific, different from our dominant idea of collaboration, the idea of two writers contributing contemporaneously to a single text. Wordsworth and Coleridge did collaborate in the way over the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, and their writing for the next few years seems to have been conditioned and sometimes motivated by the opportunities and constraints of imagined conversation. In this sense Wordsworth is always collaborating with a former self, and the archetypal text is the autobiography, The Prelude. Wordsworth had an idea about Scott's readership, but he may have felt that collaboration with Beaumont should be contemplated in a different way, involving different media and a conceptualised difference of social class. Wordsworth's line in 'Yarrow Visited', 'The Water-wraith ascended thrice' refers to Logan's poem; and Coleridge reprinted the poem in The Watchman, remarking that it was 'Simple, deeply pathetic and even sublime'.
