Byron’s antagonism to the so-called Lake School of poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, began early and continued long. In 1809 it is improbable that he had any acquaintance with any one of the three; yet he placed them in a conspicuous and unenviable position in English Bards. His primary motives in attacking them have already been indicated. Considering them as faddists who were lowering the dignity of the author’s calling and degrading poetic style, he followed the Simpliciad in condemning them for the contemptible nature of their subject-matter, for their simple diction, for their fondness for the wild and unnatural, and for their studied avoidance of conventionality.
Southey’s first verse had appeared in 1794; while Wordsworth and Coleridge had been really introduced to the public through Lyrical Ballads. Opposition to them and their theories had begun to be shown almost immediately, allusions to Southey, in particular, being fairly common in satiric literature before 1809. Mathias had said ironically with reference to Southey’s first poem:
“I cannot ...
Quit the dull Cam, and ponder in the Park
A six-weeks Epick, or a Joan of Arc.”[90]
In the Anti-Jacobin Southey’s poetry had been ludicrously parodied, and the members of the Lake School had been branded as revolutionists. Epics of the Ton had ridiculed Southey and Wordsworth,[91] and the Simpliciad had accused all three of “childish prattle.”[92] Byron, then, was no pioneer in his satire on the romanticists, nor did he contribute anything original to the controversy. The frequency and rapidity with which Southey had published long epics had impressed others before Byron cried in English Bards:
“Oh, Southey! Southey! cease thy varied song!
A bard may chaunt too often and too long.”[93]
In this early satire Byron showed no personal animosity towards Southey; he introduced him merely as a too prolific and too eccentric scribbler, to be jeered at rather than hated. The fierce feud between the two men was of a later growth.
Picking Southey as the leader of the romanticists, Byron treats Wordsworth as merely a “dull disciple,” silly in his choice of subjects and prosaic in his poetry, “the meanest object of the lowly group.” Perhaps the most striking defect in the satire levelled at this poet is the lack of any recognition of his ability, an omission all the more noticeable because Byron, in the last two cantos of Childe Harold, was influenced so strongly by Wordsworth’s conception of the relation between man and nature. Coleridge receives even less consideration. He is “the gentle Coleridge—to turgid ode and tumid stanza dear,” and is ridiculed mainly because of his Lines to a Young Ass, a poem which had previously excited the mirth of the Simpliciad.[94] The slashing manner in which the boy satirist disposes of his great contemporaries is almost unparalleled.[95]