I, like many of the posts below, am not a fan of The Prologue. I do not understand the reasons why Wordsworth would revoke the creative license of his audience. I mean, I understand why he did it; he wanted to clearly (although whether The Prologue is clear is debatable) explain not only his process, but the intention behind his poetry. But the reader no longer has an individual reading. I feel a very close connection with Wordsworth's Prologue to Bowles' idea of the picturesque. He believed that it was something to be taken generally, and that the parts of the whole were not as important as the whole itself. I feel like Wordsworth comes across with this mindset, that his general concept of the poem (political themes, for example) is more important than any other individual reading that the poem could be interpreted in. It makes me feel as if Wordsworth had little to no faith in not only his audience, but in his poetry.
But The Prologue wasn't all bad. I really liked how Wordsworth explained the differences between poetry and prose and why he chose to convey his message through poetry in the first place. But I find it ironic that he eventually resorts to a very prose-like prologue to convey what he felt poetry was better at conveying.