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 three Lake Poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, and others in their circle. Candor De Quincey wrote from 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, and produced realistic and nuanced portraits. De Quincey was the first person to address the problem of plagiarism in Coleridge's works, a problem that was ignored or neglected until modern scholars began addressing it. Responses The degree of candour 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 it provoked strong negative reactions. In the mid-1830s, when the essays were first being published, Southey called De Quincey "a calumniator, cowardly spy, traitor, base betrayer of