English · 1770–1850
William Wordsworth, with Coleridge, launched English Romanticism with the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. The Prelude — his autobiographical epic of the growth of a poet's mind — is among the great long poems in English. He served as Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death. His Preface to Lyrical Ballads is the single most important manifesto of Romantic poetics.