13 - The Lake School

Summary

The group of poets who gathered first in Bristol in 1795 and later in the Lake District introduced new accounts of the relationship of the mind to nature, new definitions of imagination, and new lyric and narrative forms. Their theories of creativity emphasized the individual imagination, but their practice of writing tells another story, one of collaborative writing. This practice originated in imagining a social community that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey called pantisocracy, or government by all. Coleridge and Southey met in June 1794, planned to emigrate to Pennsylvania with a few friends to set up an ideal community based on abandoning private property, and together composed poetry and delivered public lectures to raise money for their emigration. Pantisocracy proved utterly impractical, and Southey withdrew from the plan in the summer of 1795. Their plans for a community of writers with shared property changed to a practice of collaborative writing, dialogic creativity, and joint publication. When Coleridge met William Wordsworth in September 1795, the two began a dialogue in their poems. Their attempts at joint composition were successful only in minor poems, but their best poems were generated in response to others by members of their circle, and were often addressed to them. Their individual poetic voices were generated in a process of poetic statement and counterstatement within a social context that came to be known to the public as the Lake School.