Lake Poets Lake Poets The Lake Poets were a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England, United Kingdom, in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known. They were named, only to be uniformly disparaged, by the "Edinburgh Review". They are considered part of the Romantic Movement. The three main figures of what has become known as the Lakes School were William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey. They were associated with several other poets and writers, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles
The White Doe of Rylstone the reviewers were at best lukewarm. The "Eclectic Review" did concede that "where he comes in contact with the ordinary sympathies of human nature, no living poet leaves so strongly the impression of a master genius", but Francis Jeffrey of the "Edinburgh Review", a long-time foe of the Lake Poets, thought it had "the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume". Coleridge, by then in a state of uneasy reconciliation with Wordsworth, quoted a passage from "The White Doe" in his "Biographia Literaria", praising its beauty and imaginative power. John Ruskin, in