The Lake District poets. Wordsworth. Coleridge, Southey, Keats.

So called the Lake poets were eager revolutionaries in their youth. With many other Romantics, they believed in individual liberty and the Brotherhood of men, and sympathized with those who rebelled against injustice and tyranny. Later, when the revolutionary France they had so much admired became Napoleon’s empire and Britain herself seemed to be in danger, they up these early opinions.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) in his poetry argued the enlightenment philosophy, however, in his views we can see the idea of a natural man and that people by nature are equal. Wordsworth is the inheritant of the ??? ideal of nature, he believes in her good essence.

In his poetry of Nature he makes his chief originality. It doesn’t mean that the fact of his being a poet of nature makes him so unique. There had been many poets of nature before and more were to come after him. It is not even the minute, precise, loving observation of her aspects that makes him prominent. Certainly, he was one of the most truthful describers when his task was to describe. Though, for accuracy or (subtlety of outward detail), he may have been equaled, nay, surpassed, by other poets who, at the same time, were botanists or naturalists, writers as different from each other as were Crabbe and Tennison. Of lowers, insects and birds they knew more than Wordworth. His undisputed sovereignty is not there. It lies in his extraordinary faculty of giving utterance to some of the most elementary, and at the same time, obscure, sensations of man confronted by natural phenomena.

In 1798 he published his famous “Lyrical Ballads” with Coleridge, a small volume of short poems.

The preface written by Wordsworth to the edition is a kind of Manifesto of English Romanticism. The poet speaks of the necessity of choosing matter-of-facts events and depict them in the aspect of political imaginary, which as well depicts them in unusual aspect.

Poetry should deal with rural life as in simple and modest life human passions are revealed with more utterance.

His frequent use of children’s images is determined with the poet’s ideal that only child’s conscience has the imagination which is necessary for romantic poetry. In the childhood, in Wordsworth opinion, a human being is closer to God. In the poem “We are seven”, the poet astonishes at a 8-year old girl’s ignorance, who doesn’t know what life and death are. When he asks her How many they are in the family, she innocently answers: “We are seven.” She doesn’t realize that two of them – her brother and her sister are dead.

Coleridge’s poetry is characterized with s fantastic element, with something dreadful and supernatural. And the most characteristic for his poetry is the poem “The time of the Ancient mariner”. Coleridge develops the Christian idea that suffrage makes a man wise and repentance redeems sins. The plot contains a supernatural element; and the general atmosphere is dark, full of facts and terror.

A ship was driven by a storm, to the cold waters of the South Pole. A good sign appeared as an Albatross. It was as if the bird had a supernatural power: and the ship set the right course. But the old seaman killed the bird. And the killing caused retribution: the ship stopped because of a still. The crew got dead, outrageous marine reptiles creep onto the ship. The oldman suffers from his solitude. He understands that he is the cause of his follows’ death. Sprites, forgive him for his repentanel and a miracle takes place. In windless weather the ship heads homeward. But the old seaman is to wander from one place to another and tell his story as a punishment.

Southey “The Battle of Blenheim”.

John Keats did not take an active part in the political struggle of his time, but the enmity of his contemporary critics, the mutual sympathy that linked him with Byron and Shelley, and the whole tenor of his poetry allow him to be placed among the progressive romanticists of his time.

His appearance on the literary scene met with hostile criticism in conservative magazines, but the young poet steadily followed his path, living in poverty and not comprising to the taste of the aristocratic and bourgeois public. Taken ill with T.B. he traveled to Italy, but his health was completely ruined. He died in Rome and was buried there.

Keat’s works include a number of lyrics, sonnets and long poems of which themost important are Endymion, Lamia, Isabella, Hyperion.

Like Byron and Shelley, Keats admired the art of ancient Greece and he drew the subjects of many of his poems from the Greek legends and myths. The renaissance was another source of his inspiration, and the third was nature of those beauty. Keats was never tired of signing. His cult of beauty was a relation against the ugliness of the life, of the aristocratic and bourgeois society from which he sought refuge in poetry and art.

So this is an extract from his “On the grasshopper and Cricket” where he proclaims that beauty is found in real life and nature.