William Wordsworth's verse was the embodiment of the Romantic age, with its evocation of a unifying spirit running through all things. This collection brings together a rich and diverse selection of his works, from the epic autobiographical masterpiece The Prelude to much-loved shorter poems such as `I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' and `She Was a Phantom of Delight'. Alongside his more personal and introspective compositions, poems such as `Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey', `She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways' and `The Idiot Boy' demonstrate, in an era of political and social ferment, the manner in which Wordsworth, together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, forged a revolutionary new poetic style through the publication of Lyrical Ballads -one that embraced the vernacular and subjects previously deemed unworthy of poetry - and thus changed the literary landscape of England for ever.

Perhaps the most enduringly popular figure of the Romantic age, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) continues to be considered one of the world' s great poets, with a career spanning more than half a century that saw him rising from the radical young wanderer , experiencing the French Revolution at first hand, to the august Poet Laureate.