Walter Savage Landor: Imaginary Conversations

Abstract

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) remained a political radical after Coleridge and Wordsworth had given up their early enthusiasm for the democratic phase of the French Revolution. He was a great traveler as well as a prolific author of verse and of prose, of which his Imaginary Conversations are probably the best-known works. They were published over a period of thirty years from 1824. Many are historical. The selection here, however, deals with an event of Landor’s own time. It is a Romantic view of what many took to be a romantic act—the murder of Kotzebue (a popular conservative dramatist in the employ of the Russian government) by Karl Sandt, a probably unbalanced member of the Burschenshaften, the liberal and nationalist student movement that grew up just after the Napoleonic wars. The act itself served as a pretext for the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, which brought the German universities under strict governmental control and disrupted the liberal movement.