Note 478 — A WORDSWORTH BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reading edition
Simon Lee was probably the first poem of Wordsworth’s published in a Literary Journal in America, and is the beginning of Wordsworth’s Bibliography in U.S.A. A note in “The Port Folio” (vol. i. p. 24) is as follows: “The public may remember reading in some of the newspapers the interesting little ballads, We are Seven, and Goody Blake and Harry Gill. They were extracted from the ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ a collection remarkable for originality, simplicity, and nature.… The following, Simon Lee, is from the same work.”
It is evident from this that two, at least, of Wordsworth’s poems were copied into American newspapers as early as 1800, and that Joseph Dennie, the founder, as well as editor, of “The Port Folio”—the first purely Literary Journal established in this country—was the first American champion of Wordsworth.
C. M. St. John.