The System of Date Citation
	Dates were assigned to many pieces by Ruskin himself and occasionally by his parents. (Notice is taken of dates in other, clearly later hands—probably Wedderburn’s or Collingwood’s—where the researcher is liable to be distracted by such docketings.) In some cases, Ruskin’s own dates obviously specify, not when he wrote a poem, but when he fair-copied the piece for presentation or when he made the presentation itself. Hence, a New Year’s poem dated by Ruskin “January 1, 1828” may be placed at the head of the chronology for 1828, because that is the best date we have, but it should be regarded as having almost certainly been drafted in late 1827.
	In a few cases, dates were assigned by Ruskin that provide no clue—that, in fact, are almost certainly and even deliberately misleading—concerning the original compositional dates of the pieces in question. This is the case with Ruskin’s spate of fair-copying poems in MS III, all of which he dated 9 March 1829. Any such ambiguity is discussed in the note to a given entry.
	The compositional date is given and the piece is ordered according to that date only when a datable rough draft or some other hard evidence about its composition is available. Where only the fair copy remains, one may often assume only a few months, at most, to have elapsed between beginning composition and fair-copying. Parts of some longer poems such as “Eudosia” appear, in fact, to have been fair-copied almost as soon as Ruskin drafted them. Such assumptions are not uniformly safe, however.
	The composition of some large projects extended so long beyond the starting date assigned to their entries that, in part 1, cross-references are provided at the beginning of subsequent years, alerting the reader to carry forward those entries.