The Late Poetry Of The Lake Poets

This book explores the significance of the late poems of the Lake Poets and the establishment of their later careers.

The long-established association of Romanticism with youth has resulted in the early poems of the Lake Poets being considered the most significant. Tim Fulford challenges the tendency to overlook the later poetry of no longer youthful poets, which has had the result of neglecting the Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey of the 1820s and leaving unexamined the three poets' rise to popularity in the 1830s and 1840s. He offers a fresh perspective on the Lake Poets as professional writers shaping long careers through new work, as well as the republication of their early successes. The theme of lateness, incorporating revision, recollection, age and loss, is examined within contexts including gender, visual art, and the commercial book market. Fulford investigates the Lake Poets' later poems for their impact now, while also exploring their historical effects in their own time and counting the costs of their omission from Romanticism.

A delightful and comprehensive look at the lives and works of some of England's finest poets.

This 2004 volume offers an introduction to British literature that challenges the traditional divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. Contributors explore the development of literary genres and modes through a period of rapid change. They show how literature was shaped by historical factors including the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism and the expansion of commercial society and empire. The first part of the volume focuses on broad themes including taste and aesthetics, national identity and empire, and key cultural trends such as sensibility and the gothic. The second part pays close attention to the work of individual writers including Sterne, Blake, Barbauld and Austen, and to the role of literary schools such as the Lake and Cockney schools. The wide scope of the collection, juxtaposing canonical authors with those now gaining new attention from scholars, makes it essential reading for students of eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism.

The very word "culture" has traditionally evoked the land. But when such writers as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and, later, Matthew Arnold developed what would become the idea of modern culture, they modeled that idea on Britain's imperial command of the sea. Instead of locating the culture idea’s beginnings in the dynamic between the country and the city, Samuel Baker insists on taking into account the significance of water for that idea’s development. For the Romantics, figures of the island, the deluge, and the sundering tide often convey the insularity of cultures understood to stand apart from the whole; yet, Baker writes, the sea also stands in their poetry of culture as a reminder of the broader sphere of circulation in which the poet's work, if not the poet's subject, inheres. Although other books treat the history of the idea of culture, none synthesizes that history with the literary history of maritime empire. Written on the Water tracks an uncanny interrelationship between ocean imagery and culturalist rhetoric of culture forward from the late Augustans to the mid-Victorians. In so doing, it analyzes Wordsworth's pronounced ambivalence toward the sea, Coleridge's sojourn as an imperial functionary in Malta, Byron's cosmopolitan seafaring tales, and Arnold's dual identity as "poet of water" and prose arbiter of "culture." It also considers Romanticism's classical inheritance, arguing that the Lake Poets dissolved into the idea of culture the Virgilian system of pastoral, georgic, and epic modes of literature and life. This compelling new study will engage any reader interested in the intellectual and literary history of Britain and the lived experience of British Romanticism.

This book comprises a collection of essays written by Thomas De Quincey. Within them, he furnished some of the earliest, most authentic, and most enlightening accounts of the Lake Poets-a group of poets that included Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets" is a fascinating read and is highly recommended for those with an interest in the Romantic movement. Contents include: "Early Memorials of Grasmere," "Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Born 1772; Died 1834," "William Wordsworth. Born 7th April 1770; Died 23rd April 1850. Buried in the Green Churchyard of Grasmere, between a Yew-tree of his own planting and an Aged Thorn-tree," and "Robert Southey. Born 12th August 1774; Died 21st March 1843. Buried in the Quiet Churchyard of Crosswaite, near Keswick.." Thomas Penson De Quincey (1785 - 1859) was an English essayist most famous for his book "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" (1821). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly rare and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.