William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 - 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic (Romantic poetry) poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age (Romanticism) in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworths magnum opus (masterpiece) is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which the poet revised and expanded a number of times. The work was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Englands Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.