There is a neat symmetry to the presence of James Rebanks in an anthology of the work of the Lake poets, as though a decontextualised, and profoundly articulate, version of ‘Michael’ were repaying, in eloquence, the faith of Wordsworth in the sheep farmer’s natural integrity. For Rebanks and Michael share an affinity for the landscape, its disposition and sympathetic management, that amounts, almost, to a symbiosis. The ecological responsibility that is Rebanks’ métier is second nature to Michael, and to his reimaginer, by default, respectively, of instinct and philosophical apprehension.

Not that much affinity, or goodwill, between poet and the inhabitants of his landscape seems to have been tendered contemporaneously, if the testimony of Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, a vicar at Grasmere some thirty years subsequent to the laureate’s death, is any guide. Rebanks’ inclusion of this vignette in an illuminating Introduction confirms the natural antipathy of the hardened, and probably mostly illiterate Lakeland artisanry to poetic endeavour. Moving forward 150 years and we find a Grasmere swamped in ‘offcumdens’ and demographically calibrated to sell itself to a view of the mountains that is steeped in the Romantic sublime, a vision of wonder and astonishment so pervasive that crowds pay ubiquitous homage to hills, valleys, and to the home of a small group of poetic seers called Dove Cottage.

That the clock has turned full circle is evidenced by James Rebanks himself, whose own juvenile resistance – he emerged from a long ancestral line of farmers in nearby Matterdale – was tempered by a natural curiosity and, in the context of poetry, a counter-intuitive insight that opened the door wide enough to let in the many-angled light of psycho-geographical experience. His revised view is that Romanticism has added immeasurably to that experience, by alerting us all to the danger that inheres to collective ignorance in an age of burgeoning ecological catastrophe:

‘To pay attention to nature, to love it, and to think deeply about how we must live, is not the stuff of teenage daydreams – they are the great subjects of our age.’

This small group of poets, whose efforts towards shaping a way of seeing will still induce torpor in bored teenagers, has achieved something remarkable almost by sleight of hand: as we look in invigorated wonder at the mountain’s moving shadows or the shimmering lake’s surface, our sense of astonishment pays lip-service to Wordsworth and Coleridge, and to the distillation of beauty in the moment, whether we recognise the association or no.

And what distinguishes Notting Hill Editions’ fine and handsomely-bound, anthology from any number of collections in an already-saturated marketplace is the efficacy of its selections. Concise, focused, and including poems and prose pieces from several of the major architects of the Romantic movement, The Lake Poets successfully resolves a huge expanse of contemplative thought into satisfying precis. Giving latitude to Wordsworth himself, to Coleridge, Southey and Lamb, in poems, diary entries, letters and meditations, a fulsome picture of an echoing age is disclosed. Most heartening is the inclusion of several examples of Dorothy Wordsworth’s work, restoring to her the intellectual parity she justifies, beyond the appellation of beloved helpmeet and editorial assistant accorded her by the Grasmere patriarchy.

Dorothy’s contributions, here, are distinct, conceived in a style that is integrated within a unitary framework of thought, but remarkable for its insight and uniqueness of vision, not least the late poem ‘Thoughts on My Sick-Bed’ whose backward glance from the perspective of a present undermined by age and illness gives moving testimony to the power and displaced promise of memory. Such thoughts ‘recollected in tranquility’ are her brother’s own, the sense of elegy for a lost time as palpable in Dorothy’s poem as Wordsworth’s in ‘Tintern Abbey’. The latter’s appearance here, amongst a fulsome selection of his work, including excerpts from his preface to the Lyrical Ballads and several of his Grasmere poems, foregrounds an over-arching sense of loss that may well be a binary condition of the intensity of aesthetic pleasure distilled in repose. Wordsworth’s celebrated couplet is rightly included in The Lake Poets: conceived at the age of thirty-four, the lines give definition to his grief, to the ‘failing powers’ that are summarily contradicted by the beauty of his words, even though the light would properly gutter and fade within a couple of decades:

‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?' (‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’)

The raw-edged vitality of Coleridge’s work - the two were initially inseparable – is a fitting counterpoint to Wordsworth’s own. If the shared philosophical affinity finds an outlet in several of the Lake Poets selections, then each of the former’s is distinguished by its stylistic nuance and emotional conviction. Coleridge’s investment in his own poems is immeasurably reinforced by an approach that is near visionary: whether in a work of the autonomic imagination like ‘Kubla Khan’, or in a luminous reconstruction of domestic atmosphere, like ‘Frost at Midnight’, the heightened drama of Coleridge’s poems is palpable, and it is a testament to Notting Hill’s perspicacity that both are present in this volume. Even in silence, a sense of apprehension is conspicuous as the poet/narrator whispers to the reader:

‘The frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind.’ ('Frost at Midnight')

And if we were harbouring doubts as to the creative range of this small group of poets, we find, in a short selection of Southey’s poems, ‘The Cataract of Lodore’, whose velocitous and onomatopoeic rhythms precisely imitate the downward surge of Borrowdale’s waterfall. Removed, utterly, from the meditative peregrinations of his peers, Southey’s awed celebration of speed and natural beauty is a synonymic triumph, a striving for linguistic possibility that foreshadows, in its joyous intensity, the poetry of Clough and Hopkins:

‘Flying and flinging,
Writhing and ringing,
Eddying and whisking,
Spouting and frisking,
Turning and twisting,
Around and around’.

The fact of Charles Lamb’s early but severe stutter is ironised by the compensatory eloquence of his prose. For whilst the poet lacks the lyrical focus of his fellow Romantics, he is set free by the wit and seductive charm of his essays and letters, whose broad-ranging themes barely restrain a natural enthusiasm. Open, pragmatic and profoundly honest, the piece which more or less concludes The Lake Poets is a generous homage to Coleridge and others, whose hospitality on a visit to Keswick is of a piece with the beauty of the high fells by which they are temporarily ‘enveloped’. Lamb’s view is metropolitan but without cynicism, sensitive but disarmingly frank, a refreshing counterweight to a fine book of love and immersion:

‘After all, I could not live in Skiddaw. I could spend a year – two, three years among them, but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine away.’ (‘A Letter to Thomas Mannion, 24 September, 1802’)


The Lake Poets: An Anthology, Introduced by James Rebanks is published by Notting Hill Editions (2025)

More information here.