Arts & Culture
Lake poet
English literary circle
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Lake poet, any of the English poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, who lived in the English Lake District of Cumberland and Westmorland (now Cumbria) at the beginning of the 19th century. They were first described derogatorily as the “Lake school” by Francis (afterward Lord) Jeffrey in The Edinburgh Review in August 1817, and the description “Lakers” was also used in a similar spirit by the poet Lord Byron. These names confusingly group Wordsworth and Coleridge together with Southey, who did not subscribe in his views or work to their theories of poetry.