Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (London, 1798).

William Wordsworth is one of St John's College's most famous alumni. He found academic life in Cambridge unstimulating and conservative, and did not strive for anything other than an ordinary degree, which he obtained in 1791. Lyrical Ballads, which he produced with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who attended Jesus College, was published in 1798. It includes such famous poems as The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere and Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, but initial reviews were very bad. Sales of this first edition of only 500 copies were so low that the publisher made a loss.