The parallel history of the verse autobiography, from strong Victorian foundation with Wordsworth's "The Prelude" (1805, 1850), to decline with Modernism and later twentieth-century revival with John Betjeman's "Summoned by Bells" (1960), Walcott's "Another Life" (1973), and James Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover" (1982), is also striking. The forms are distinct, but many verse novels plainly deploy autobiographical elements, and the recent Commonwealth examples almost all offer detailed representation of the (problems besetting) post-imperial and post-colonial identity, and so are inevitably strongly personal works.