Alfoxden

Abstract

By the time Wordsworth made the move from Racedown to Alfoxden he had found a public; but it was a public defined in a very particular and limited sense. The nature of the readership he had secured for his work was to have a profound and lasting effect on the way he subsequently developed as a poet. It consisted of a small coterie of primarily literary but also political friends and acquaintances that linked London with Bristol and his native Cumberland. Two members of this group could be said to have achieved public reputations in the wider sense; they were Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects had sold out in its year of publication, 1796; and it was Coleridge who was clearly becoming the most seriously impressed with what he had seen of Wordsworth’s poetry.