On Christmas Day, 1804, William Wordsworth wrote to Sir George Beaumont detailing his current and projected work on two poems: one, nearly complete in thirteen-book form, “on my earlier life or the growth of my own mind” (known to us as The Prelude); the other, never finished, and “to be called … ‘The Recluse’ … concerning Man, Nature, and society.” The letter is the earliest mention of Wordsworth’s plans to translate some of Michelangelo’s poetry for Richard Duppa, a project he undertook jointly with Robert Southey: “Duppa is publishing a life of Michael Angelo and I received from him a few days ago two proof sheets of an Appendix which contains the poems of M. A – which I shall read, and translate one or two of them. If I can do it with decent success. I have peeped into the sonnets, and they do not appear at all unworthy of their great Author.” Duppa’s Life and [End Page 68] Literary Works of Michel Angelo Buonarroti was first published in 1806; Southey contributed translations of three sonnets and a madrigal and Wordsworth one sonnet: “Ben può talor col mio ardente desio.” A fair copy of the latter was transcribed for Beaumont by Dorothy Wordsworth in October 1805 in a letter which referred back to Wordsworth’s discussion of Michelangelo “some time ago” at Christmas 1804. Ten months later, by October 1805, Wordsworth had “attempted at least fifteen of the sonnets but could not anywhere succeed,” considering them to be “the most difficult to construe I ever met with,” and sending Beaumont “the only one I was able to finish.” Before the publication of Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807, however, Wordsworth met with a little more reward for his efforts and three translations of Michelangelo, counting the one which featured in Duppa’s volume, made it into the “Miscellaneous Sonnets” of that collection.