William Wordsworth's centrality to any review of English Romantic period writing continues fundamentally undisturbed. Critical fashions and methodologies change, but as regards English Romanticism they are tested against a canonical core of writers. Of those, Wordsworth almost always takes centre stage either as the best support of the new theories, or as the writer whose authority they must displace in order to show their innovative power and originality. One might risk saying that, for good or ill, Arnold has proved right in his predictions and Swinburne wrong: it is Wordsworth and Byron, not Coleridge and Shelley, who have remained the touchstones of canonical English poetry of the romantic age. In Wordsworth and Byron inhere the definitive contrasts of the period's sensibility and style, the consistent Englishness of the former and the cosmopolitan inconsistency of the latter. But the recognition Wordsworth received in his own lifetime was not so straightforward.