MEMORY OF THE POETS OF THE LAGOS forms a unique section within Thomas de Quincey's prolific production (Manchester, 1785–Edinburgh, 1859), which taken as a whole is one of the great autobiographies of English tradition.
In this volume, which had to wait in the early twentieth century to see the light autonomously, the essays that De Quincey devoted to commenting on the life and work of three key figures of English romanticism are gathered: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey, of whom he was an admirer, disciple, friend and neighbor until circumstances forced him to settle in Edinburgh , away from Grasmere and the Lakes region that had been home for about fifteen years. These articles, published in the years following the death of S. T. Coleridge, in 1834, caused a literary scandal and the anger of the surviving protagonists by the frankness of their author.
"A man who gives such an example is in my eyes a plague for society," would say Wordsworth, who never forgave his former disciple.
Written when the romantic movement had already reached its peak and Wordsworth reigned as patriarch of English letters, these episodic memoirs combine biography, autobiography, literary criticism, topography, sociology and gossip in a bright and mischievous prose that constitutes one of De Quincey's greatest achievements, as the countless readers of Confessions of an Opium Eater and Murder know as one of the greatest achievements of De Quincey, as the countless readers of Confessions of an Opium Eater and Murder know.
This volume is also the portrait (and story) of an obsession, that of its author by William Wordsworth, whose poetry he discovered in the first youth and to which he always kept devotion. De Quincey recounts in these pages his difficult dealings with the poet, whose selfishness and exasperating altivez gave him a deep disappointment, and along the way leaves one of the most vivid, ferocious and entertaining biographies of the author of EL PRELUDIO.