<P> 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 Lake Poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, and others in their circle . Together, the essays "form one of the most entertaining of Lakeland books ." </P> <P> De Quincey wrote from direct 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, to produce realistic and nuanced portraits . He "certainly made many of his subjects live in the mind of the reader as few others of their biographers have been able to do . The racy, gossipy tone that often prevails makes these works eminently readable; indeed, Tait's Magazine never sold better than when De Quincey's literary reminiscences were appearing in it ." </P>

Recollections of the lakes and the lake poets