William Wordsworth

English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, co-founded English Romanticism with the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads, contributing its 1800 Preface, which called for poetry written in the real language of ordinary men rather than the elevated diction of the previous century. His long autobiographical poem The Prelude, revised across his lifetime and published only after his death in 1850, became one of English poetry's central accounts of the growth of a poet's mind.