Author of the semi-autographical work The Prelude, the English poet William Wordsworth was born in the Lake District in 1770. His first collections of poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, were published in 1793, and he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge two years later. Their joint publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 effectively set the British Romantic Movement into motion, and together with Robert Southey they formed part of the group of ‘Lake Poets’.