Analysis of the Poems of William Wordsworth William Wordsworth is widely considered one of the most influential English romantic poets. In the preface of his book, Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, Wordsworth declared that poetry should contain language really used by men. This idea, and many of his others, challenged the old eighteenth-cuntury idea of formal poetry and, therefore, he changed the course of modern poetry (Wordsworth, William DISCovering). Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, England, to John, a prominent aristocrat, and Anne Wordsworth, but with his mother's death in 1778, William and his family began to drift apart. William w