This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic includes a glossary and reader's notes to help the modern reader more fully appreciate the richness and unique vision of these Romantic innovators.When, in 1798, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and other Romantic poems were published in Lyrical Ballads, the book did not immediately capture the public's imagination. Today, however, most modern critics consider the collection extremely important and influential-it ushered in what came to be known as the English Romantic Era in poetry and moved from the contrived and intellectual poetic language of the Enlightenment to a celebration of the simple, the pure, and the natural.The poems in this anthology represent, not necessarily the most famous, but certainly the best poetry produced by the six great English Romantic poets-Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. These twenty-two poems reveal the heights of ecstatic inspiration, the depths of grief and utter desolation, and the ideologies of these mystics, revolutionaries, and free thinkers. Mini-biographies of the poets accompany their works and tell the stories of the fascinating, and often scandalous, lives of the modern world's first true literary celebrities