Recollections of the Lake Poets 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 published in "Tait's Edinburgh Magazine" between 1834 and 1840, De Quincey provided some of the earliest, best informed, and most candid accounts of the Lake Poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, and others in their circle. Together, the essays "form one of the most entertaining of Lakeland books." De Quincey wrote from direct personal familiarity, having known all three men during the first two decades of the nineteenth century.
Sara Coleridge was completed by her daughter, and published in 1873, together with some of her letters, under the title "Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge". The letters show a cultured and highly speculative mind. They contain many apt criticisms of known people and books, and are specially interesting for their allusions to Wordsworth and the Lake Poets. Sara Coleridge died of breast cancer in London on 3 May 1852. Coleridge suffered a number of miscarriages and only two of her children, Herbert and Edith, survived to adulthood. Two of Coleridge's children died in infancy. Her son, Herbert Coleridge (1830–1861), won a