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.
Recollections of the Lake Poets father to be insightful and generally fair. De Quincey wrote about the figures of the "Lake School," especially Wordsworth and Coleridge, repeatedly throughout his canon. The essays that make up the collection are primarily these (each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" article): After their initial publication, several of the essays appeared in the second volume of "Selections Grave and Gay" (1854), the first British collected edition of De Quincey's works. For that edition, the author edited his essays, trimming some passages but adding others. The essays were reprinted again in a separate volume, as "Recollections of the