The Lake Poets
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey became known as the Lake Poets in the early years of the nineteenth century when critic Francis Jeffrey conferred this designation on them. In an 1817 article published in The Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey referred to the three poets as belonging to the "Lake School." The term refers to the Lake District of England, where all three poets resided for a time.
Jeffrey began writing about the group of poets as early as 1802. In a review of Southey's Thalaba (1801), Jeffrey began his harsh criticism of a "sect" of poets that included Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Attributing a number of characteristics to the writings of the Lake Poets, Jeffrey argued that their work was based on anti-social principles and that while it reflected the simplicity and energy inspired by nature, it was also both harsh and quaint in its use of "ordinary" language and themes. Other critics, including Thomas De Quincey, have argued that there existed no such "school" of poetry. According to these critics, the Lake Poets shared only friendship and brief periods of collaboration, not similar philosophies or poetic styles.
Southey and Coleridge met in 1794, at Balliol College in Oxford. There they hatched a plan to create a Utopian community in America called "Pantisocracy." They collaborated on works that reflected their radical political beliefs, such as the drama The Fall of Robespierre (1794). Southey soon gave up on their political agenda, and Coleridge terminated the friendship. The two were married to sisters, however, and these familial bonds soon encouraged the poets to reconcile.
By 1797, Coleridge had begun a close friendship with Wordsworth. They worked together closely in and near both the Lake District home that Wordsworth shared with his sister Dorothy and Coleridge's nearby residence. Together they wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection of poetry that was prefaced by a statement of Wordsworth's poetic theory and that helped define the Romantic Movement. During this period, the two poets influenced each other greatly, with Coleridge encouraging Wordsworth to explore philosophic poetry and Wordsworth offering Coleridge his insights and perspectives on nature.
As Coleridge's relationship with Wordsworth continued to develop, Southey's and Coleridge's friendship cooled. Even so, Southey and his wife took up residence with Coleridge and his family in Keswick, a part of the Lake District, in 1803. This was a time of increasing marital discord for Coleridge. During this period, Coleridge traveled extensively and lived with the Wordsworths for several years. Meanwhile, Southey helped raise Coleridge's children, frequently admonishing Coleridge to stop using opium and to write with some regularity in order to provide for his family.
Despite their distinctly different styles and philosophies, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth are all considered Romantic poets. The Romantic fascination with the unusual and the supernatural is reflected in many of the works of Coleridge and Southey, most notably in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). Wordsworth and Coleridge both possessed an active imagination as well as a strong sense of perception. While Wordsworth used his imaginative powers to idealize the familiar, Coleridge explored the philosophical aspects of poetry. Southey's Romantic efforts centered on travel and adventure. He used exotic historical settings, such as Spain and the Orient, in his examination of the mythic and supernatural, but on the whole he was regarded more for his prose and literary criticism than for his poetry.
The connection of the Lake Poets to Romanticism also encompassed a love of liberty and radical political convictions. The poets had, to varying degrees, sympathized with the French Revolution, believing that France was Europe's champion of liberty. Immersed in their love and worship of nature, the Lake Poets also believed in the spirit of reform through revolution, while maintaining that the union of the soul with nature was of primary importance. During the end of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth century, they were sheltered from the affairs of the world in their Lake Country homes. But in the aftermath of the French Revolution they began to regain interest in worldly events, and their attitudes became increasingly conservative. Their early revolutionary fervor was severely diminished and their hopes for France dashed as the nation, under Napoleon's rule, began conquering other countries. Their love of liberty was transformed into nationalism as they became convinced that England's constitutional monarchy and the guiding force of the Protestant Church were the only guarantors of freedom.
This transition of the Lake Poets to conservatism has been a major focus of study by twentieth century critics. Hoxie Neal Fairchild and others have attributed the change primarily to the Lake Poets' reaction to the French Revolution and its aftermath. Fairchild has also suggested that the transition was part of a greater maturation process and that personal events in each of the poets' lives may have influenced their growing conservatism. These incidents include the death of Wordsworth's brother and Coleridge's immersion in German philosophy as well as his battle with opium addiction. While nineteenth-century critics such as George Brandes have condemned the Lake Poets as traitors to liberty, most recent critics have found a number of justifications for the shift from liberalism to conservatism.
Another area of interest for recent scholars has been the relationship of the Lake Poets to each other and to their contemporaries. Critics such as Earl Leslie Griggs, Malcolm Elwin, and Raimonda Modiano have focused their attention on the Lake Poets' opinions of each other, and on the intense collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge. The debate centering on Wordsworth's and Coleridge's relationship continues, with scholars questioning which poet more strongly influenced the other.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
†"This Bower My Prison" (poem) 1798
†The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (poem) 1798
‡The Fall of Robespierre (drama) 1794
Thalaba (poem) 1801
‡Lyrical Ballads (poetry) 1798
†"Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey" (poem) 1798
†First appeared in Lyrical Ballads
‡Collaboration with Coleridge
SOURCE: A review of Thalaba, the Destroyer, in The Edinburgh Review, Vol. I, No. I, October, 1802, pp. 63-83.
[In the following excerpt, Jeffrey identifies Southey as one of a "sect of poets" that included Wordsworth and Coleridge, and offers a harsh assessment of this group and its aim to focus on "ordinary" language and themes.]
Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question; and that many profess to be entirely devoted to it, who have no good works to produce in support of their pretensions. The catholic poetical church, too, has worked but few miracles since the first ages of its establishment; and has been more prolific, for a long time, of doctors than of saints: it has had its corruptions, and reformation also, and has given birth to an infinite variety of heresies and errors, the followers of which have hated and persecuted each other as cordially as other bigots.
The author who is now before us, [Robert Southey] belongs to a sect of poets, that has established itself in this country within these ten or twelve years and is looked upon, we believe, as one of its chief champions and apostles. The peculiar doctrines of this sect, it would not, perhaps, be very easy to explain; but, that they are dissenters from the established systems in poetry and criticism, is admitted, and proved indeed, by the whole tenor of their compositions. Though they lay claim, we believe, to a creed and a revelation of their own, there can be little doubt, that their doctrines are of German origin, and have been derived from some of the great modern reformers in that country. Some of their leading principles, indeed, are probably of an earlier date, and seem to have been borrowed from the great apostle of Geneva. As Mr. Southey is the first author of this persuasion, that has yet been brought before us for judgment, we cannot discharge our inquisitorial office conscientiously, without premising a few words upon the nature and tendency of the tenets he has helped to promulgate.
The disciples of this school boast much of its originality, and seem to value themselves very highly, for having broken loose from the bondage of ancient authority, and re-asserted the independence of genius. Originality, however, we are persuaded, is rarer than mere alteration; and a man may change a good master for a bad one, without finding himself at all nearer to independence. That our new poets have abandoned the old models, may certainly be admitted; but we have not been able to discover that they have yet created any models of their own; and are very much inclined to call in question the worthiness of those to which they have transferred their admiration. The productions of this school, we conceive, are so far from being entitled to the praise of originality, that they cannot be better characterised, than by an enumeration of the sources from which their materials have been derived.
The greatest part of them, we apprehend, will be found to be composed of the following elements: 1. The antisocial principles, and distempered sensibility of Rousseau—his discontent with the present constitution of society—his paradoxical morality, and his perpetual hankerings after some unattainable state of voluptuous virtue and perfection. 2. The simplicity and energy (horresco referens) of Kotzebue and Schiller. 3. The homeliness and harshness of some of Cowper's language and versification, interchanged occasionally with the innocence of Ambrose Philips, or the quaintness of Quarles and Dr. Donne. From the diligent study of these few originals, we have no doubt that an entire art of poetry may be collected, by the assistance of which the very gentlest of our readers may soon be qualified to compose a poem as correctly versified as Thalaba, and to deal out sentiment and description, with all the sweetness of Lambe, and all the magnificence of Coleridge.
The authors of whom we are now speaking, have, among them, unquestionably, a very considerable portion of poetical talent, and have, consequently, been enabled to seduce many into an admiration of the false taste (as it appears to us) in which most of these productions are composed. They constitute, at present, the most formidable conspiracy that has lately been formed against sound judgment in matters poetical; and are entitled to a larger share of our censorial notice, than could be spared for an individual delinquent. We shall hope for the indulgence of our readers, therefore, in taking this opportunity to inquire a little more particularly into their merits, and to make a few remarks upon those peculiarities which seem to be regarded by their admirers as the surest proofs of their excellence.
Their most distinguishing symbol, is undoubtedly an affectation of great simplicity and familiarity of language. They disdain to make use of the common poetical phraseology, or to ennoble their diction by a selection of fine or dignified expressions. There would be too much art in this, for that great love of nature with which they are all of them inspired; and their sentiments, they are determined shall be indebted, for their effect, to nothing but their intrinsic tenderness or elevation. There is something very noble and conscientious, we will confess, in this plan of composition; but the misfortune is, that there are passages in all poems that can neither be pathetic nor sublime; and that, on these occasions, a neglect of the establishments of language is very apt to produce absolute meanness and insipidity. The language of passion, indeed, can scarcely be deficient in elevation; and when an author is wanting in that particular, he may commonly be presumed to have failed in the truth, as well as in the dignity of his expression. The case, however, is extremely different with the subordinate parts of a composition; with the narrative and description, that are necessary to preserve its connexion; and the explanation, that must frequently prepare us for the great scenes and splendid passages. In these, all the requisite ideas may be conveyed, with sufficient clearness, by the meanest and most negligent expressions; and, if magnificence or beauty is ever to be observed in them, it must have been introduced from some other motive than that of adapting the style to the subject. It is in such passages, accordingly, that we are most frequently offended with low and inelegant expressions; and that the language, which was intended to be simple and natural, is found oftenest to degenerate into mere slovenliness and vulgarity. It is in vain, too, to expect that the meanness of those parts may be redeemed by the excellence of others. A poet who aims at all at sublimity or pathos, is like an actor in a high tragic character, and must sustain his dignity throughout, or become altogether ridiculous. We are apt enough to laugh at the mock-majesty of those whom we know to be but common mortals in private; and cannot permit Hamlet to make use of a single provincial intonation, although it should only be in his conversation with the grave-diggers.
The followers of simplicity are, therefore, at all times in danger of occasional degradation; but the simplicity of this new school seems intended to ensure it. Their simplicity does not consist, by any means, in the rejection of glaring or superfluous ornament,—in the substitution of elegance to splendour,—or in that refinement of art which seeks concealment in its own perfection. It consists, on the contrary, in a very great degree, in the positive and bona fide rejection of art altogether, and in the bold use of those rude and negligent expressions, which would be banished by a little discrimination. One of their own authors, indeed, has very ingeniously set forth, (in a kind of manifesto, that preceded one of their most flagrant acts of hostility), that it was their capital object 'to adapt to the uses of poetry, the ordinary language of conversation among the middling and lower orders of the people' [William Wordsworth, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads]. What advantages are to be gained by the success of this project, we confess ourselves unable to conjecture. The language of the higher and more cultivated orders may fairly be presumed to be better than that of their inferiors; at any rate, it has all those associations in its favour, by means of which a style can ever appear beautiful or exalted, and is adapted to the purposes of poetry, by having been long consecrated to its use. The language of the vulgar, on the other hand, has all the opposite associations to contend with; and must seem unfit for poetry, (if there were no other reason), merely because it has scarcely ever been employed in it. A great genius may indeed overcome these disadvantages; but we scarcely conceive that he should court them. We may excuse a certain homeliness of language in the productions of a ploughman or a milk-woman; but we cannot bring ourselves to admire it in an author, who has had occasion to indite odes to his college-bell, and inscribe hymns to the Penates.
But the mischief of this new system is not confined to the depravation of language only; it extends to the sentiments and emotions; and leads to the debasement of all those feelings which poetry is designed to communicate. It is absurd to suppose, that an author should make use of the language of the vulgar to express the sentiments of the refined. His professed object, in employing that language, is to bring his compositions nearer to the true standard of nature; and his intention to copy the sentiments of the lower orders, is implied in his resolution to make use of their style. Now, the different classes of society have each of them a distinct character, as well as a separate idiom; and the names of the various passions to which they are subject respectively, have a signification that varies essentially, according to the condition of the persons to whom they are applied. The love, or grief, or indignation of an enlightened and refined character, is not only expressed in a different language, but is in itself a different emotion from the love, or grief, or anger of a clown, a tradesman, or a market-wench. The things themselves are radically and obviously distinct; and the representation of them is calculated to convey a very different train of sympathies and sensations to the mind. The question, therefore, comes simply to be—Which of them is the most proper object for poetical imitation? It is needless for us to answer a question, which the practice of all the world has long ago decided irrevocably. The poor and vulgar may interest us, in poetry, by their situation; but never, we apprehend, by any sentiments that are peculiar to their condition, and still less by any language that is characteristic of it. The truth is, that it is impossible to copy their diction or their sentiments correctly, in a serious composition; and this, not merely because poverty makes men ridiculous, but because just taste and refined sentiment are rarely to be met with among the uncultivated part of mankind; and a language fitted for their expression, can still more rarely form any part of their 'ordinary conversation.'
The low-bred heroes, and interesting rustics of poetry, have no sort of affinity to the real vulgar of this world; they are imaginary beings, whose characters and language are in contrast with their situation; and please those who can be pleased with them, by the marvellous, and not by the nature of such a combination. In serious poetry, a man of the middling or lower order must necessarily lay aside a great deal of his ordinary language; he must avoid errors in grammar and orthography; and steer clear of the cant of particular professions, and of every impropriety that is ludicrous or disgusting: nay, he must speak in good verse, and observe all the graces in prosody and collocation. After all this, it may not be very easy to say how we are to find him out to be a low man, or what marks can remain of the ordinary language of conversation in the inferior orders of society. If there be any phrases that are not used in good society, they will appear as blemishes in the composition, no less palpably than errors in syntax or quantity; and if there be no such phrases, the style cannot be characteristic of that condition of life, the language of which it professes to have adopted. All approximation to that language, in the same manner, implies a deviation from that purity and precision, which no one, we believe, ever violated spontaneously.
It has been argued, indeed, (for men will argue in support of what they do not venture to practise), that, as the middling and lower orders of society constitute by far the greater part of mankind, so, their feelings and expressions should interest more extensively, and may be taken, more fairly than any other, for the standards of what is natural and true. To this, it seems obvious to answer, that the arts that aim at exciting admiration and delight, do not take their models from what is ordinary, but from what is excellent; and that our interest in the representation of any event, does not depend upon our familiarity with the original, but on its intrinsic importance, and the celebrity of the parties it concerns. The sculptor employs his art in delineating the graces of Antinous or Apollo, and not in the representation of those ordinary forms that belong to the crowd of his admirers. When a chieftain perishes in battle, his followers mourn more for him than for thousands of their equals that may have fallen around him.
After all, it must be admitted, that there is a class of persons (we are afraid they cannot be called readers), to whom the representation of vulgar manners, in vulgar language, will afford much entertainment. We are afraid, however, that the ingenious writers who supply the hawkers and ballad-singers, have very nearly monopolized that department, and are probably better qualified to hit the taste of their customers, than Mr. Southey, or any of his brethren, can yet pretend to be. To fit them for the higher task of original composition, it would not be amiss if they were to undertake a translation of Pope or Milton into the vulgar tongue, for the benefit of those children of nature.
There is another disagreeable effect of this affected simplicity, which, though of less importance than those which have been already noticed, it may yet be worth while to mention: This is, the extreme difficulty of supporting the same low tone of expression throughout, and the inequality that is consequently introduced into the texture of the composition. To an author of reading and education, it is a style that must always be assumed and unnatural, and one from which he will be perpetually tempted to deviate. He will rise, therefore, every now and then, above the level to which he has professedly degraded himself; and make amends for that transgression by a fresh effort of descension. His composition, in short, will be like that of a person who is attempting to speak in an obsolete or provincial dialect; he will betray himself by expressions of occasional purity and elegance, and exert himself to efface that impression, by passages of unnatural meanness or absurdity. . . .
Thomas De Quincey
SOURCE: "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge: From 1807 to 1830," in Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets, 1839. Reprint by J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1907, pp. 189-201.
[In this essay De Quincey offers his reflections on the personalities of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and compares their poetic styles and philosophical views.]
A circumstance which, as much as anything, expounded to the very eye the characteristic distinctions between Wordsworth and Southey, and would not suffer a stranger to forget it for a moment, was the insignificant place and consideration allowed to the small book-collection of the former, contrasted with the splendid library of the latter. The two or three hundred volumes of Wordsworth occupied a little, homely, painted bookcase, fixed into one of two shallow recesses, formed on each side of the fireplace by the projection of the chimney in the little sitting-room up-stairs, which he had already described as his half kitchen and half parlour. They were ill bound, or not bound at all—in boards, sometimes in tatters; many were imperfect as to the number of volumes, mutilated as to the number of pages; sometimes, where it seemed worth while, the defects being supplied by manuscript; sometimes not: in short, everything showed that the books were for use, and not for show; and their limited amount showed that their possessor must have independent sources of enjoyment to fill up the major part of his time. In reality, when the weather was tolerable, I believe that Wordsworth rarely resorted to his books, (unless, perhaps, to some little pocket edition of a poet, which accompanied him in his rambles,) except in the evenings, or after he had tired himself by walking. On the other hand, Southey's collection occupied a separate room, the largest, and, every way, the most agreeable in the house; and this room was styled, and not ostentatiously, (for it really merited that name,) the library. The house itself, Greta Hall, stood upon a little eminence, (as I have before mentioned,) overhanging the river Greta. There was nothing remarkable in its internal arrangements: in all respects, it was a very plain unadorned family dwelling; large enough, by a little contrivance, to accommodate two or, in some sense, three families, viz. Mr. Southey, and his family; Mr. Coleridge, and his; together with Mrs. Lovell, who, when her son was with her, might be said to compose a third. Mrs. Coleridge, Mrs. Southey, and Mrs. Lovell were sisters; all having come originally from Bristol; and, as the different sets of children in this one house had each three several aunts, all the ladies, by turns, assuming that relation twice over, it was one of Southey's many amusing jests, to call the hill on which Greta Hall was placed, the ant-hill. Mrs. Lovell was the widow of Mr. Robert Lovell, who had published a volume of poems, in conjunction with Southey, somewhere about the year 1797, under the signatures of Bion and Moschus. This lady, having only one son, did not require any large suite of rooms; and the less so, as her son quitted her, at an early age, to pursue a professional education. The house had therefore been divided (not by absolute partition, into two distinct apartments, but by an amicable distribution of rooms) between the two families of Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey; Mr. Coleridge had a separate study, which was...
(The entire section is 7739 words.)
C. H. Herford
SOURCE: "Poetry," in The Age of Wordsworth, 1897. Reprint by G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1930, pp. 146-284.
[In the following excerpt, Herford discusses the poetic styles of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey and comments on the influence that the three poets had on each other.]
[Wordsworth and Coleridge] were at once profoundly akin and strikingly different, and both their points of kinship and their points of divergence go to the heart of English Romanticism. It is therefore necessary to define these with some care. On a first glance the two men seem, physically and psychologically, of wholly different make. Wordsworth, a rugged...
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David Watson Rannie
SOURCE: An introduction to Wordsworth and His Circle, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907, pp. 1-17.
[In the following excerpt, Rannie discusses the Romantic characteristics and influences of Wordsworth's work and the poet's association with Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, and Charles Lamb.]
In one sense it seems a dubious use of metaphor to regard Wordsworth as the centre of any circle. For, if we think of a body of men as a circle, we must think of the centre as one of a group who shares its qualities; one who gives and takes, who lives in intellectual community and not alone. Yet no fact about Wordsworth is more certain and more...
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SOURCE: "The Lake School's Conception of Liberty," in Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature: Naturalism in England, Vol. IV, translated by Mary Morison, William Heinemann, 1905, pp. 85-89.
[In the following essay, originally published in 1875, Brandes compares the views of liberty held by the Lake Poets with those of the later Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley.]
Coleridge and the other members of the Lake School would never have dreamt of calling themselves anything but warm friends of liberty; the days were past when the reactionaries called themselves by another name. Coleridge wrote one of his most beautiful...
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Abrams, M. H., ed. English Romantic Poets. 1960. Reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1968, 384 p.
Collection of critical essays focusing on the major English poets of the Romantic period. Includes essays on Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Barfield, Owen. What Coleridge Thought. Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971, 285 p.
Analysis of Coleridge's philosophy and beliefs regarding a variety of topics, including nature, imagination, science, and religion.
Barth, Robert J. The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition. Princeton:...
(The entire section is 592 words.)