Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Friendship That Invented English Romanticism

Literary history has its great partnerships, but only one that founded an entire movement on foot. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge – the steady Cumbrian and the dazzling, doomed Devonian – talked, walked and argued English poetry into a new age, publishing together the little book, Lyrical Ballads, from which Romanticism is conventionally dated. Their friendship blazed, faded and broke, like a love affair, and much of it happened here in the Lake District: on the road over Dunmail Raise between their two households, in the smoky rooms of Grasmere and Keswick, on fell walks that make our modern hiking look timid. Here is the story of the friendship – and the landscape it left annotated.

Somerset, 1797: combustion

They met glancingly in 1795, but the detonation came in June 1797, when Coleridge – 24, brilliant, already famous as a talker – vaulted a gate at Racedown in Dorset and burst into the lives of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Within weeks the Wordsworths had moved to Alfoxden in Somerset to be near him at Nether Stowey, and for a "wantoning" year (the Annus Mirabilis, scholars call it) the three were inseparable: walking the Quantock hills by day and night, planning poems, dreaming of a new kind of literature. Out of it came the joint volume of 1798: Lyrical Ballads, opening with Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and closing with Wordsworth's lines composed above Tintern Abbey – published anonymously, reviewed with bafflement, and now regarded as the founding book of English Romanticism. The division of labour, as Coleridge described it, was perfect: he would make the supernatural feel real; Wordsworth would make the everyday feel miraculous.

Two households among the mountains

The Lakes chapter began at the century's turn. The Wordsworths settled at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, in December 1799; within months Coleridge had followed, taking Greta Hall at Keswick, thirteen miles north over the Dunmail Raise pass. Those thirteen miles became the most-walked stretch in literary history: the poets thought little of striding between the two houses – Coleridge sometimes descending on Dove Cottage near midnight, talking till dawn – and Dorothy's journal records the constant traffic of visits, manuscripts and moods along the road our tours drive through the very heart of the National Park. Coleridge, ecstatic among the mountains, threw himself into fell-walking on a scale that makes him a pioneer of the sport – his solo 1802 descent of Scafell by the rock-climbers' route of Broad Stand, scribbling euphoric notes en route, is legend – and his notebooks of these years contain some of the finest mountain prose ever written.

But Greta Hall also staged the tragedy. Coleridge's marriage was failing; he had fallen hopelessly for Sara Hutchinson, sister of Wordsworth's future wife; and the opium he took for pain and despair was tightening into the addiction that would consume his middle life. The great collaborative engine slowed. When the Wordsworths moved to Allan Bank in Grasmere in 1808, the ailing Coleridge actually lodged with them – dictating his periodical The Friend to Sara Hutchinson in an upstairs room – but the household strain of his habits told, and worse followed.

1810: the wound

The break, when it came, was banal and devastating. In 1810 Wordsworth privately warned a mutual friend, Basil Montagu – with whom Coleridge was to lodge in London – about his friend's drinking and habits; Montagu, disastrously, repeated the conversation to Coleridge, garnished. Coleridge, shattered that his "beloved" Wordsworth had (as he heard it) denounced him, broke off relations; the estrangement lasted nearly two years and scarred both men. A formal reconciliation was patched together in 1812, and the friendship resumed – affectionate, but never again incandescent. They even toured the Rhineland together with Dora Wordsworth in 1828, elderly celebrities retracing a youthful format. When Coleridge died in 1834, Wordsworth – not a man who wept easily – called him the most wonderful man he had ever known, and mourned him, witnesses said, like a brother.

What the friendship built

Tally the joint legacy and it is staggering: Lyrical Ballads and its Preface (the movement's manifesto, written by Wordsworth under Coleridge's constant pressure); The Prelude itself, which began as a poem addressed to Coleridge and remained, through fifty years of revision, a letter to him – Wordsworth read it aloud to his friend over a fortnight of evenings in 1806–07, and Coleridge answered with a poem of heartbreaking generosity; and between them a re-founding of English poetry on imagination, feeling and the natural world that every poet since has had to reckon with. Their manuscripts and portraits are displayed at the Wordsworth Trust's museum in Grasmere (wordsworth.org.uk); Greta Hall still stands above Keswick, and Coleridge's Lakeland notebooks can be explored through the British Library's collections at bl.uk.

The third man: Southey and the "Lake Poets"

One footnote completes the picture. When Coleridge left Greta Hall, his brother-in-law Robert Southey – future Poet Laureate before Wordsworth – took it over, raising both families' children there for forty years; and a hostile reviewer, lumping the three friends together as the "Lake School", accidentally coined the label under which they entered history. The poets themselves disliked the tag – their styles differed profoundly – but geography won the argument: Wordsworth at Grasmere, Coleridge and then Southey at Keswick, thirteen walkable miles apart, really did make these valleys the headquarters of English Romanticism, and the name has stuck for two centuries.

Driving the friendship's road

For visitors, the friendship has a shape you can travel: the A591 from Grasmere over Dunmail Raise towards Keswick is the poets' own corridor, with Helvellyn – which Wordsworth and Coleridge both climbed repeatedly – walling it to the east, and Thirlmere in its trench below. On our small-group Wordsworth tours from Windermere and Ambleside – maximum seven guests – the tale of the two poets is told on the move through exactly this landscape, from Dove Cottage's fireside to the pass they crossed to reach each other. Two centuries on, it remains the best commute in English literature – and the views that fuelled the conversation are entirely intact.

This article is part of our Wordsworth guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.