ABSTRACT
The sprawling and disparate collection of generic forms and subjects that the notion of literature had once encompassed had to be sternly reined in, to the exclusion of everything apart from the imaginative and the visionary, as found in poetry, plays and novels. The efforts of the Lake Poet protegees went unrecorded. The protegees floundered when they were forced to speak in the language of commerce. The Lake Poet protegees found themselves uncomfortably straddling two very different notions of what literature was. On the one hand, they were committed to an ideology, espoused by their mentors, that located in the act of writing an imaginative otherworldliness that offered profound communion with the very depths of the human condition. Yet, on the other hand, they found themselves bereft of the culture of manuscript circulation and literary patronage that their mentors had seen the last of, and were confronted, instead, with a more contemporary notion of literature as ‘manufacturing’ and ‘trade’.
