The Lake Poets and Professional Identity [Hardcover]

Goldberg analyses the strategies Romantic poets employed to present their work as comparable to the traditional professions.In this 2007 work, Goldberg argues that Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge - the Lake school - aligned themselves with emerging constructions of the professional gentleman that challenged the vocational practices of late eighteenth-century British culture.In this 2007 work, Goldberg argues that Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge - the Lake school - aligned themselves with emerging constructions of the professional gentleman that challenged the vocational practices of late eighteenth-century British culture.The idea that the inspired poet stands apart from the marketplace is considered central to British Romanticism. However, Romantic authors were deeply concerned with how their occupation might be considered a kind of labour comparable to that of the traditional professions. In the process of defining their work as authors, Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge - the 'Lake school' - aligned themselves with emerging constructions of the 'professional gentleman' that challenged the vocational practices of late eighteenth-century British culture. They modelled their idea of authorship on the learned professions of medicine, church, and law, which allowed them to imagine a productive relationship to the marketplace and to adopt the ways eighteenth-century poets had related their poetry to other kinds of intellectual work. In this work, Goldberg explores the ideas of professional risk, evaluation and competition that the writers developed as a response to a variety of eighteenth-century depictions of the literary career.Acknowledgements; Introduction: professionalism and the Lake School of Poetry; Part 1. Romanticism, Risk, and Professionalism: 1. Cursing Doctor Young, and after; Part II. Genealogies of the Romantic Wanderer: 2. Merit and reward in 1729; 3. James Beattie and The Minstrel; Part III. Romantic Itinerants: 4. Authority and the itinerals*