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.
To William Wordsworth The poem ends with the narrator describing the overall effect that "The Prelude" had upon him: "To William Wordsworth" summarises the themes within "The Prelude" and deals with Wordsworth's understanding of his mind and its relationship with nature. As such, Coleridge favours Wordsworth's own views and contradicts feelings found within his own poetry, especially in "Dejection". The poem also attacks Coleridge in a masochistic manner and places the writer and his own ideas in an inferior position. One such emphasis was on Wordsworth being able to find bliss from solitude and Coleridge being unable to find anything but pain, which