The version of how Lyrical Ballads came into existence has been cited as fact by generations of editors, critics, biographers, and scholars, not to mention the petrified forest of Readers, Companions, student texts, anthologies, and other instruments of indoctrination. Coleridge's story of how Lyrical Ballads was conceived places the following events in the following order: (1) conversation about ‘two sorts’ of poetry; (2) proposal that a book be written containing them; (3) its writing by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Coleridge's ersatz history established him as one of the architects and principal creators of Lyrical Ballads, a much-needed corrective to the popular misconception of it as wholly Wordsworth's. Wordsworth wrote Gothic poetry even as a schoolboy at Hawkshead and several lyrical ballads interrogate the genre. But that does not prove Lyrical Ballads was intended to showcase ‘two sorts’ of poetry.