Lake Poets Critical Essay | Ernest Bernbaum

Ernest Bernbaum

SOURCE: "The Romantic Movement and Selected General Bibliography," in Guide Through the Romantic Movement, revised edition, The Ronald Press Company, 1949, pp. 300-22.

In the following essay, originally published in the 1930 edition of Guide Through the Romantic Movement, Bernbaum offers an overview of the Romantic Movement and discusses the differences in the beliefs of Romantic poets, including Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge.

Differences Among the Romantics.—The chief Romantics differed from one another in origin, schooling, personality, conduct, and many other respects. Some, like Landor and Shelley, were of aristocratic birth; others, like Blake and Keats, of the humblest. Some had next to no formal schooling, others were forced to end theirs at an early age, and only about one half of their number attended a university. Some of them acquired sufficiently extensive knowledge to be considered scholars, e.g., Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, Scott, Southey, De Quincey, and Carlyle; others died too...
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