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.
Robert Lovell Robert Lovell Robert Lovell (1771–1796) was an English poet. He was born in Bristol, the son of a wealthy Quaker, and probably followed some business. He estranged himself from his original circle by marrying, in 1794, Mary Fricker, a girl of much beauty and some talent, who had gone on the stage. He made Robert Southey's acquaintance, and Southey became engaged to his sister-in-law, Edith; this was before Samuel Taylor Coleridge's visit to Bristol in August 1794. Lovell introduced the two poets to their patron Joseph Cottle, and shortly Coleridge was betrothed to a third sister, Sara Fricker, whom he