Though Byron was better known in his day, Wordsworth is now thought of as the center of English Romanticism. Because of his collaboration with Coleridge, his influence on Shelley, Keats, and the Victorian generation, his range of work from simple-seeming ballads to philosophical blank verse, his campaign against artificial poetic diction, and his expression of reverent love of the natural world, especially as he found it in the Lake District where he lived most of his long life, the history of English poetry since about 1800 is inconceivable without him, and certain of his lines and phrases have entered the English language as those of Shakespeare have, notably in the first two of the poems below.