Wordsworth spent fifty years writing and revising this autobiographical poem about the growth of a poet's mind, and it was published only after his death. Fourteen books of blank verse trace his childhood in the Lake District, his time at Cambridge, his experience of the French Revolution, and his recovery of imaginative power through nature. The poem contains some of his finest passages: the skating scene, the crossing of the Alps, the ascent of Snowdon. It is the great poem of memory and self-formation in English. The child is father of the man. Wordsworth kept rewriting himself into being.