Bloomsbury Poetry Classics are selections from the work of some of our greatest poets. The series is aimed at the general reader rather than the specialist and carries no critical or explanatory apparatus. This can be found elsewhere. In the series the poems introduce themselves, on an uncluttered page and in a format that is both attractive and convenient. The selections have been made by the distinguished poet, critic and biographer Ian Hamilton. William Wordsworth was born in 1770. In 1798, with Coleridge, he published Lyrical Ballads and that work's famous preface is now taken as a key Romantic manifesto. In it Wordsworth argues for everyday subjects and an unornamented diction. Shortly after, in poems like Resolution and Independence and Intimations of Immortality, a childlike responsiveness to Nature's moral teachings is proposed as an ideal. Most of the poems of Wordsworth's great middle period are set in the Lake District, where he lived most of his adult life. In his youth, Wordsworth was a vehement republican (his ideas formed by early contact with the French Revolution) but with fame and middle-age he drifted gradually into the conservatism and self-parody that were much ridiculed in his later years. He died in 1850.