Lake Poets was mostly a prose writer and did not particularly subscribe to the Wordsworthian vision of the Lakes. Southey, like Wordsworth, started out on the republican left, but, by the time the threat from Napoleon had dwindled, he had become the embodiment of a Tory extolling the virtues of nation and patriotism, and using the Lakes as a touchstone, and as "the symbol of the nation's covenant with God." Letitia Elizabeth Landon's sketch, "Grasmere Lake, A Sketch by a Cockney", in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1834, is a spoof on the Lake Poets, whom she admired (especially Wordsworth) but regarded
Recollections of the Lake Poets Lakes and the Lake Poets" (1862); that title may or may not have originated with De Quincey. There were three twentieth-century editions of the essays. Edward Sackville-West's "Recollections of the Lake Poets" (1948) and John E. Jordan's "Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets" (1961) both relied primarily upon the 1854 revised texts; for his 1970 edition, David Wright returned to the original magazine texts and to the title of the 1862 collection. Recollections of the Lake Poets Recollections of the Lake Poets is a collection of biographical essays written by the English author Thomas De Quincey. In these essays, originally