Guide to the Lakes prose-poem about light, shapes, and textures, about movement and stillness ... It is a paean to a way of life, but also a lament for the inevitability of its passing ... What holds this diversity together is the voice of complete authority, compounded from experience, intense observation, thought, and love. Wordsworth was born in the Lake District and spent much of his life living there. Wordsworth and his friends Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge became known as Lake Poets not only because they lived in this area but also because its landscapes and people inspired their work. By 1810,
Literature of Birmingham The rationalist philosopher William Wollaston – best known for his 1722 work "The Religion of Nature Delineated" – was a master for a period at the Birmingham Grammar School. The poet Charles Lloyd was born in Birmingham, the son of one of the partners in Lloyds Bank. Noted for his radicalism, he was a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and Thomas de Quincey; and was widely attacked by conservative publicists in the aftermath of the French Revolution for poems such as his 1798 "Blank Verse", celebrating "the promis'd time … when equal man /