Edinburgh Review (essays attacking the Lake Poets)

“Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me?”

Angela & Uncle Jerry parallel the criticism Taylor faces with the criticism the Lake Poets received in Francis Jeffrey's Edinburgh Review essays. Jeffrey coined the derogatory label 'Lake Poets' and condemned them as 'the school of whining and hypocritical poets that haunt the lakes', a phrase Uncle Jerry reads as anticipating the contemporary dismissal of Taylor's writing as mere breakup-song complaint. The Jeffrey/Lake-Poets dynamic functions as the song's historical anchor for both the Business or Industry theme (criticism of the speaker's professional work) and the Defiance theme (the speaker's continued making despite the criticism).