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.
Joseph Cottle to Coleridge and Southey, and entered into details of Coleridge's opium habit. ‘The confusion in Cottle's "Recollections" is greater than any one would think possible,’ said Southey; the book is inaccurate in its dates, and documents quoted are garbled. It has details on others such as Robert Lovell and William Gilbert. It has youthful portraits of Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb. A second edition was published in 1847 under the title of "Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey". The appendix to the fourth edition of his "Malvern Hills" (1829) contains several essays, including an account of his tutor Henderson, a