Gothic Ruins and Revivals: The Lake Poets’ Architecture of the Past

This chapter discusses Gothic history and Gothic selfhood in the writings of the Lake Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Wordsworth’s ‘Michael, A Pastoral Poem’ is the central text, and the chapter traces the mixture of traditionalism and ‘temporalization’ in this ‘history / Homely and rude’ of family breakdown and generational crisis. The chapter then relates ‘Michael’ to the personal and artistic context of a gradually ‘materializing’ Gothic ‘Plan’ (Coleridge’s phrase), from Lyrical Ballads (1798) to The Excursion (1814) and The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), and argues that these works reflect the turn from a ‘revolutionary architecture’ of the Gothic to an influential ethos of ‘self-evolving’ ‘insularity’. The chapter ends with a discussion of ‘global’ presences in the ‘national theodicy’ of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Preserving and erasing lines on China after the loss of his brother John to the Canton trade, Wordsworth replays the historical drama of ‘Michael’ in personal and global form.