SOURCE: “Keble and Wordsworth,” in John Keble: Priest, Professor and Poet, Croom Helm, 1976, pp. 73-89.

In the following essay, Martin probes William Wordsworth's impact on Keble's poetry.

Keble had been introduced to Wordsworth's poetry, when he was a young undergraduate at Corpus Cristi College, Oxford. Keble was there in 1806; and in 1809, John Taylor Coleridge, later a prominent High Court judge arrived there. He was the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's brother James, and he took to Corpus with him copies of The Lyrical Ballads and Wordsworth's Poems in Two Volumes. Apart from John Coleridge, it does not seem probable that any of the Corpus undergraduates had known Wordsworth's poetry before going up to the University. Later, John Coleridge, who was to become the first biographer of John Keble, wrote that the influence of Wordsworth's poetry undoubtedly played upon Arnold, one of the Corpus group, bringing out in him...