The historical context of “A Complaint” is biographical. Any anthologized printing of “A Complaint” involves a footnote explaining that Wordsworth first composed the poem about his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge after Coleridge’s departure in 1804 for Malta. Coleridge saw the sunny Mediterranean island as retreat therapy to help him overcome his addiction to opium (which it did not). The two friends would not meet again for more than three years. The poem, composed nearly a year after Coleridge departed, reflects Wordsworth’s distress over losing that friendship.

Much like other creative friendships between young writers that would lead to historic and often revolutionary reconceptions of literature—for instance, Hawthorne and Melville, Emerson and Thoreau, Eliot and Pound—the friendship between Coleridge and Wordsworth ultimately changed literature. They met in 1795 through mutual friends in London. Unlike the other later Romantics whose work Wordsworth would later influence, Coleridge was nearly the same age as Wordsworth. Their friendship shaped the poems that would appear in Wordsworth’s landmark Lyrical Ballads (1798). Because the poetry the two envisioned was radically out of step with the poetry of their own era, the two used each other as a sounding board to dispute their artistic vision, critique each other’s work, and ultimately to help each other through the difficulties of the creative process.