By Lechi Eke
You must have read somewhere that Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) or one or two others were the Lake Poets. Coleridge was one of the two poets whose joint publication in 1798 with Wordsworth birthed the literary movement called Romanticism in England. He and Wordsworth and Robert Southey were the first generation Romantic poets while Lord Byron, P. B. Shelley and John Keats were the second generation Romantic poets.
In between these two groups are a horde of other notable romantic writers. But the big six have been named above, although, later William Blake became very highly acclaimed and was named by BBC’s poll as the 38th person in 100 Greatest Britons.
During the English Romantic period, some of the writers were referred to as the Lake Poets. Who are the Lake Poets?
These were poets who lived around the Lake District of England in the early 19th century. This area boasted of great landscapes with immense beauty and serene ambiance of nature. Remember that the Romantics believed that Beauty is Truth and Truth is Beauty – whatever is touched or modified or enhanced, is no longer in its true form.
Wordsworth wrote that his poetry came from “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” This is unrestrained feeling, untamed, uncontrolled inspired by solitude.
A quick look at the Characteristics of Romanticism shows that they include:
- A focus on the emotions or inner world of the writer or narrator,
- Celebration of nature, beauty and imagination
- Rejection of industrialization and social convention
- Idealization of women, children and rural life
- Experimentation with poetic form, among others.
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines Romanticism as “a style and movement in art, music, and literature in the late 18th and early 19th century, in which strong feelings, imagination and a return to nature were more important than reason, order and intellectual ideas – compare Realism.”
The Romantics identified with the emotional part of man, that part that cannot conform to order, rationalism, etc. This is because they believed that order, rationalism, industrialization, and all such things, are no longer in their original form or true state.
William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, were raised in the Lake District of England, and later returned to the area as adults to live and write. Samuel T. Coleridge met them around the area and decided to relocate to the area. Robert Southey was also a resident in the area. Nature inspired them.
These men wrote great poetry that reflected nature, freedom and individuality. They became so popular in their time that their readers made pilgrimage to the area just to see their heroes. The area also attracted the second generation Romantics.
However, the term, ‘The Lake Poets’, was actually a myth made up by people who read them. Initially it was a term used to disparage those poets who lived around the area and wrote poetry. Later, the term took on prestige. Southey’s early ‘liberty and equality’ poetry attracted P. B. Shelley to the area.
Shelley on getting to the Lake District (Keswick) in 1811 and spending three months there, became disenchanted with Southey’s new views and the fact that the manufacturers (it was the beginning of industrialization), had despoiled the Lakes).
John Keats also became disenchanted with the Lake District having arrived there in 1818 to visit his hero, Wordsworth, only to meet fashionable people in his home, and Wordsworth himself off on a political campaign canvassing for a local Tory candidate!
Remember that the Romanticists loved nature in its unmodified beauty; the wild uncultivated life (both in man, plants and animals); nature untamed. Romantics did not believe in civilsation. Whatever was natural, whatever had not received control or taming was acceptable to them. They preferred the wild, the savage, and the ferocious!
So, you can imagine Keats’ disenchantment with what he met at Wordsworth’s house. The young poet left the Lake District and proceeded to Scotland where he found the inspiration he sought and the influence of one of the oldies, Robert Burns (1759-1796).
Byron did not visit the Lakes. He had no interest in them and he thought that the isolation the older romantic poets had, gave them a certain narrowness of mind. He also scoffed at their abandonment of radical politics.
Other writers of the time who had different views about the Lakes included Scottish Missionary, educationist, Orientalist, and writer who would have been regarded today as a health fiend, John Wilson (1805-1875). Wilson also moved close to the Lakes and knew the trio of the Lake Poets. In his poem, Isle of Palms, he gave his own take on the Lake scenery.
Wilson emphasized on energy and companionship (what can be derived from nature outside the adoration of it), maybe because he was a mountain climber and a walker. This was in direct deviance from Wordsworth’s idea of nature’s quiet and solitude which he effused in his poems.
On the other hand, Romantic writer, social theorist, feminist and novelist and children’s writer known for her work in combining fiction and economy, wrote about the Lakes District, how the area needed to connect more with the outside world. She observed that the area needed good sanitation and hailed the new railways running through the district. Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) wrote a book titled, Complete Guide to the Lakes which is a description of the area and the condition of the people who lived in it, with no bias to the beauty of nature around it.
Thomas Penson De Quincey (1785-1859), essayist, Romantic English writer best known for his Confessions of an English Opium Eater was another disenchanted worshipper of the Lake Poets and the district. Wordsworth was his hero, but going to settle in the Lakes area and marrying a local girl whom Wordsworth refused to meet, made De Quincey had a rethink. For him the famous poet was more interested in the landscapes (nature) than in the humans around nature.
So, De Quincey reversed his idea of the Picturesque of using the imagination to transform and distort nature rather, he used the external world (beauty and nature), to feed his dreams and imagination.
Two representative poems from the first and second generations
John Keats (1795-1821)
To Autumn
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a graden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
This is the last stanza of John Keats’ poem, To Autumn. Compare it to some stanzas from Robert Southey’s poem, The Well of St. Keyne. The poems describing untamed, untouched, wild nature.
The Well of St. Keyne
By Robert Southey
A Well there is in the West Country,
And a clearer one never was seen;
There is not a wife in the West Country
But has heard of the Well of St.Keyne.
An oak and an elm-tree stand beside,
And behind doth an ash-tree grow,
And a willow from the bank above
Droops to the water below.
A traveler came to the Well of St. Keyne;
Joyfully he drew nigh,
For from the cock-crow he had been travelling,
And there was not a cloud in the sky.
