Focused on the Lake Poets' prose writing-including their journalism and correspondence-this collection of essays challenges some widely held assumptions. Much of the narrative is Bristol-based, as the city's reference library holds not only much of Southey's personal library, but the borrowing registers of the old subscription library which still record the titles that Coleridge and Southey borrowed in the 1790s.It places the poets' American Susquehanna project, customarily dismissed as the idealistic dreams of Oxbridge students, in the context of European emigration schemes prompted by the...