William Wordsworth second generation romantic : contesting poetry after Waterloo Receiving a mixed reception at best The Excursion was still recognized as the periods most significant bid to create a major philosophical poem an epic for the post revolutionary age. Wordsworth as the co author of Lyrical Ballads and the creator of Poems in Two Volumes had established himself as a lyric poet. Had he early on published The Borderers (1796 97) or the 1805 Prelude his profile as a poet and perhaps our sense of romanticism would have been different: rather than elevating lyric to the heart of his corpus he would have been seen attempting the two traditionally central forms of tragedy and epic