In this revisionary study of the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and their friends during the ‘revolutionary decade’ this book questions the accepted literary history of the period and the critical vocabulary we use to discuss it. It examines why, at a time of radical upheaval when continuities of all kinds (personal, political, social, and cultural) were being challenged, this group of poets explored themes of inheritance, retrospect, revisiting, and recovery. The book charts their struggles to find meaning not through vision and symbol but from connection and dialogue. By placing these poet ... More

In this revisionary study of the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and their friends during the ‘revolutionary decade’ this book questions the accepted literary history of the period and the critical vocabulary we use to discuss it. It examines why, at a time of radical upheaval when continuities of all kinds (personal, political, social, and cultural) were being challenged, this group of poets explored themes of inheritance, retrospect, revisiting, and recovery. The book charts their struggles to find meaning not through vision and symbol but from connection and dialogue. By placing these poets in the context of an 18th-century ‘organic’ tradition, the book moves the emphasis away from the language of idealist ‘Romantic’ theory towards an empirical stress on how identities are developed and sustained through time. Locke's concept of personal identity as a continued organization ‘partaking of one common life’ offered not only a model for a reformed constitution but a way of thinking about the self, art, and friendship, which these poets found valuable. In this context of a need to organise diversity and give it meaning, the book offers original readings of some well-known poems of the 1790s, including Wordsworth's ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘The Ruined Cottage’, and Coleridge's conversation poems. Chapters also discuss the poetry of Southey, Lamb, Lloyd, and Thelwall.