For many, William Wordsworth personifies the Age of Romanticism. The Prelude, his masterpiece, is one of the finest poems in the English language, and the Lyrical Ballads, written with his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a defining text of the Romantic movement. This new selection of his poetry, prepared by his biographer Stephen Gill and the Wordsworth scholar Duncan Wu from Gill's authoritative Oxford Authors edition, offers generous extracts from The Prelude, his work from Lyrical Ballads, as well as many of his fine shorter lyrics. It charts the growth of this great poet's mind from his early radical years as a champion of the French Revolution, to his later years as Poet Laureate and political conservative.