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. When he wrote about them twenty years later, De Quincey ignored the constraints and repressions typical of biography in his era, to produce realistic and nuanced portraits. He "certainly made many of his subjects live in the mind of the reader as few others of their biographers have been able to do. The racy, gossipy tone that often prevails makes these works eminently readable; indeed, Tait's Magazine never sold better than when De Quincey's literary reminiscences were appearing in it."

De Quincey was the first person to address the problem of plagiarism in Coleridge's works, a problem that would be ignored or neglected for a century and a half, until modern scholars addressed it in detail.

The degree of candor that De Quincey brought to his portraits of people who were then still living or recently dead was extremely rare, if not unprecedented, in contemporaneous literature and journalism, and provoked strong negative reactions. In the mid-1830s, when the essays were being published, Southey called him "a calumniator, cowardly spy, traitor, base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth" and "one of the greatest scoundrels living!"

Some interested parties, however, responded more calmly. Coleridge's daughter Sarah found De Quincey's treatment of her 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):

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