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.2 rough prefaces, footnotes, endnotes, headnotes, half-title pages, epigraphs, advertisements and other paratexts,3 Wordsworth not only presented himself as an important contemporary poet, but as an editor, anthologist, literary and cultural critic. e prose interlacing Wordsworth’s collections from the 1800 Lyrical Ballads to his 1820 Th e 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.