Revolution and Romanticism

FRANCIS JEFFREY

On the Lake Poets

Francis Jeffrey, founder and editor of the Edinburgh Review, and the great reactionary critic of his age, described Christabel as a ‘miserable piece of coxcombry and shuffling’ and The White Doe of Rylstone as ‘the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume’. This selection of his reviews is a reminder of the opposition that Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey had to overcome.

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If the printing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted.
(On Wordsworth’s Alice Fell)

Upon the whole, we look upon this publication as one of the most notable pieces of impertinence that has yet been made on the patience or understanding of the public.
(On Coleridge’s Christabel; Kubla Khan; The Pains of Sleep)

This will never do.
(On Wordsworth’s Excursion)

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Poetry of the 1890s