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.
The Feast of the Poets on the British Romantic poetry, including "Lyrical Ballads", that sought to overcome the standards of neoclassical poetry with emphasis on the problems inherent in the French standards created by those like Nicholas Despreaux-Boileau. As such, Hunt praises Wordsworth as the leader of a new type of poetry. Although Byron is not fully discussed in early editions of the poem, he is discussed in the notes as an individual who would become an important person who had already "taken his place, beyond a doubt, in the list of English Poets". By the 1815 edition, Byron was introduced and was praised by