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.
Lake Poets on the mantle of Wordsworth as the "new Sage of the Lakes, the Picturesque Figure, the Old Man of Coniston." Nicholson saw him as the "Picturesque Figure" "for in him are combined its three main phases - the aesthetic, the scientific and the moral...". His scientific approach to the rocks and water of the Lakes, Nicholson argues, was an attempt, not to understand his subject, but to teach people how to react to it in a "practical and moral" way. Lake Poets The Lake Poets were a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England,