Lecture The 19th century literature. Romanticism

3. Lake Poets

After Blake, among the earliest Romantics were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends, including William Wordsworth ['wɜ:dzwəθ](1770–1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge ['kəulridʒ](1772–1834), Robert Southey [sauði] (1774–1843).

In the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballad (1798) Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men". Here, Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry, as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" which "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." The poems in Lyrical Ballads were mostly by Wordsworth, though Coleridge contributed, one of the great poems of English literature, the long "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", a tragic ballad about the survival of one sailor through a series of supernatural events on his voyage through the South Seas, and which involves the symbolically significant slaying of an albatross.