Lyrical Ballads

In 1798 two young poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published a small anonymous book of poems that changed English poetry. It opens with Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner', the sailor who shoots an albatross, and closes with Wordsworth's 'Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey', with simple poems in between about country people, children and feeling.

In the preface to the second edition Wordsworth defined poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and called for the language that people really speak. The book is usually taken as the beginning of the Romantic movement in England. Continue with Keats and Byron.

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born in Cockermouth in the Lake District and orphaned young. As a student he went to France during the Revolution and was swept up in its hopes, and he left behind a French daughter. Back in England he formed a close friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and together they published Lyrical Ballads in 1798.

He settled with his sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage in Grasmere and spent his life writing about nature, memory and the growth of the mind, above all in his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, published after his death. He became Poet Laureate in 1843.