In the first volume of his Coleridge biography, Richard Holmes describes Coleridge and Dorothy and William Wordsworth working 'like plein-air painters, taking elaborate notes on the varied effects of light on the landscape, of plants and water, of wind and cloud and starlight'. They were under surveillance, suspected of Jacobin sympathies. A Home Office report provided

a classic description of Romantic poets at work, because it is recorded in absolute ignorance - or innocence - of the literary significance of what was being done . . . 'man has Camp Stools, which he and his visitors take with them when they go about the country upon their nocturnal or diurnal excursions, and have also a Portfolio in which they enter their observations.'

LRB 26 February 2009 | PDF Download