Literature is supposed to be a serious, solitary profession. Then why were William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and their best friend Samuel Coleridge having so much fun together in the English Lake District in 1798? The three of them were inseparable, wandering the countryside together, Coleridge often high on opium and the Wordsworths tripping on nature. In “The Prelude,” Wordsworth would later recollect that they “wantoned in wild poesy.” They walked for miles every day, talking to beggars, communing with birds and flowers, and lying in ditches staring into the sky. The two men produced an amazing body of work in this annus mirabilis that they published jointly in “Lyrical Ballads.” Wordsworth’s ballads about the lives of the rural poor and Coleridge’s visionary poems such as “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” enlarged the discourse and transformed the aesthetic and language of English poetry.
more from the LA Times here.