William Wordsworth (1771-1850) is the foremost of the English Romantic poets. He was much influenced by the events of the French Revolution in his youth & he deliberately broke away from the artificial diction of the Augustan & neo-classical tradition of the eighteenth century. He sought to write in the language of ordinary men & women of ordinary thoughts sights & sounds & his early poetry represents this fresh approach to his art. Wordsworth spent most of his adult life in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy & his wife Mary by whom he had four children. His remarkable autobiographical poem ' The Prelude' was completed in 1805 but was not published until after his death & it is included in this full edition of Wordsworth's poetry.