The document summarizes the three main groups of Romantic poets in England: the Lake Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey), the Scott Group (Campbell, Walter Scott, Thomas Campbell), and the Younger Group (Byron, Shelley, Keats). It then provides more detailed biographies of the three Lake Poets - Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey - focusing on their origins, works, philosophies, and influences in spearheading the Romantic movement in poetry through their rejection of conventional styles and embrace of naturalism and the supernatural.

1. POET OF ROMANTIC AGE
The poets of Romantic Age can be classified into
Three Different Groups:-
1.LAKE POET
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey
2.SCOTT GROUP
Campbell, Walter Scott, Thomas Camphell
3.YOUNGER GROUP
Byron, PB Shelley, John Keats

2. Lake Poet
• lake Poets formed a ‘school’ in the sense that they worked in close
cooperation, and their lives were spent partly in the Lake district.
• Only Wordsworth was born there, but all the three lived there for a
shorter or longer period. Linked together by friendship.
• They held many of the poetic beliefs in common. Wordsworth and
Coleridge lived together for a long time and produced the Lyrical
Ballads by joint effort in 1798.
• They had original genius and what they achieved in the realm of
poetry was supported by Southey who himself did not possess
much creative imagination. The literary revolution which is
associated with their name was accomplished in 1800, when in the
second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge
explained further their critical doctrines.

3. • Wordsworth thus registered a protest against
the artificial ‘poetic diction’ of the classical
school, which was separated from common
speech. He declared emphatically: “There is,
nor can be, any essential difference between
the language of prose and metrical
composition.

4. William WORDSWORTH
• William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was the greatest poet of the Romantic
period.
• The credit of originating the Romantic movement goes to him.
• He refused to abide by any poetic convention and rules, and forged his
own way in the realm of poetry.
• He stood against many generations of great poets and critics, like Dryden,
Pope and Johnson, and made way for a new type of poetry. He declared:
“A poet is a man endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm
and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a
more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among
mankind.” The truth of this statement struck down the ideal of literary
conventions based on reason and rationality, which had been blindly
worshipped for so long.
• By defining poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” he
revolted against the dry intellectuality of his predecessors. By giving his
ideas about the poetic language as simple and natural, he opposed the
“gaudiness and inane phraseology” of the affected classical style.

5. • Wordsworth wrote a large number and variety of
lyrics, in which he can stir the deepest emotions
by the simplest means
• Besides lyrics Wordsworth wrote a number of
sonnets of rare merit like To Milton, Westminster
Bridge, The World is too much with us, in which
there is a fine combination of the dignity of
thought and language. In his odes, as Ode to Duty
and Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, he
gives expression to his high ideals and philosophy
of life.

6. S.T.Colridge
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The genius of Coleridge was
complementary to that of Wordsworth.
• While Wordsworth dealt with naturalism which was an important
aspect of the Romantic movement, Coleridge made the
supernatural his special domain, which was an equally important
aspect. In his youth Coleridge came under the spell of French
Revolution and the high hope which it held out for the
emancipation of the oppressed section of mankind.
• He gave poetic expression to his political aspiration in Religious
Musings, Destiny of Nations and Ode to the Departing Year (1796).
But like Wordsworth, he also began to think differently after the
excesses of the Revolution. This change of thought is shown in his
beautiful poem France: an Ode (1798) which he himself called his
‘recantation’. After that he, like Wordsworth, began to support the
conservative cause.

7. • Coleridge was a man of gigantic genius, but his lack of will
power and addiction to opium prevented him from
occomplishing much in the realm of poetry. Whatever he
has written, though of high quality, is fragmentary. It was,
however, in the fields of theology, philosophy and literary
criticism that he exercised a tremendous and lasting
influence.
• His two best-known poems are The Ancient Mariner and
Christabel, which represent the high watermark of
supernaturalism as some of the best poems of Wordsworth
represent the triumph of naturalism, in English poetry. In
these two poems Coleridge saved supernaturalism from the
coarse sensationalism then in vogue

8. • Christabel, which is a fragment, seems to have been planned as the story of a pure
young girl who fell under the spell of a sorcer in the shape of the woman Gerldine.
Though it has strange melody and many passages of exquisite poetry, and in sheer
artistic power it is scarcely inferior to The Ancient Mariner, it has supernatural
terrors of the popular hysterical novels. The whole poem is suffused in medieval
atmosphere and everything is vague and indefinite. Like The Ancient Mariner it is
written in a homely and simple diction and in a style which is spontaneous and
effortless.
• Kubla Khan is another fragment in which the poet has painted a gorgeous Oriental
dream picture. The whole poem came to Coleridge in a dream one morning when
he had fallen asleep, and upon awakening he began to write hastily, but he was
interrupted after fifty-four lines were written, and it was never finished. Though
Coleridge wrote a number of other poems—Love, The Dark Ladie, Youth and Age,
Dejection: an Ode, which have grace, tenderness and touches of personal
emotion, and a number of poems full of very minute description of natural scenes,
yet his strength lay in his marvellous dream faculty, and his reputation as a poet
rest on The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan where he touched the
heights of romantic poetry

9. Robert southey
Robert Southey (1774-1843) was the third poet of the group of Lake Poets.
Unlike
Wordsworth and Coleridge he lacked higher qualities of poetry, and his
achievement as a poet is
not much. He was a voracious reader and voluminous writer. His most
ambitious poems
Thalaba, The Curse of Kehama, Madoc and Roderick are based on mythology
of different
nations. He also wrote a number of ballads and short poems, of which the
best known is about
his love for books (My days among the Dead are past.) But he wrote far better
prose than poetry,
and his admirable Life of Nelson remains a classic. He was made the Poet
Laureate in 1813, and
after his death in 1843 Wordsworth held this title.