The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse

Blank verse

Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century" and Paul Fussell has claimed that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."The first...

 by the English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 poet William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....

. Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life without publishing it. He never gave it a title; he called it the "Poem (title not yet fixed upon) to Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...

" and in his letters to Dorothy Wordsworth

Dorothy Wordsworth

Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth was an English author, poet and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close for all of their lives...

 referred to it as "the poem on the growth of my own mind." The poem was unknown to the general public until published three months after Wordsworth's death in 1850, its final name given to it by his widow Mary.
There are three versions of the poem:

• The 1799 Prelude, called the Two-Part Prelude, composed 1798-99, containing the first two parts of the later poem.
• The 1805 Prelude, which was found and printed by Ernest de Sélincourt
  Ernest de Sélincourt
  Ernest de Sélincourt was a British literary scholar and critic. He is best known as an editor of William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth. He was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1928 to 1933 and a Fellow of University College, Oxford...
  
   in 1926, in 13 books.
• The 1850 Prelude, published shortly after Wordsworth's death, in 14 books.

The Prelude was the product of a lifetime: for the last part of his life, Wordsworth had been "polishing the style and qualifying some of its radical statements about the divine sufficiency of the human mind in its communion with nature".
The poem was intended as the prologue to a long three-part epic and philosophical poem, The Recluse.