‘Shy, occluded brilliance’: Dorothy Wordsworth circa 1850. It seems that Coleridge never drew breath, spinning first Kubla Khan and then The Rime of the Ancient Mariner out of thin air, his head reeling with opium. When the poets were not at home, they were walking and talking, sometimes 20, 40, even 70 miles at a stretch, often “by the light of the good moon”. On top of these influences, Nicolson embeds himself in the story of this year, as if a part of him longs to be a fly on the wall in Nether Stowey and Alfoxden. On this occasion, poetry and place are perfectly braided together in prose whose biographical mood pays tribute to Richard Holmes and whose topographical fervour evokes Robert Macfarlane. Nicolson has long nurtured a penchant for “great literature” (books on Homer and the King James Bible) and our landscape (Sissinghurst, the Somerset Levels and the national coastline). Nicolson, whose method is “to lower myself into the pool of their minds”, paints a memorable triptych of the two poets and their Dolly in nonstop discussion about nature, art and life itself, carried away, in Coleridge’s account, with “an ebullient Fancy, a flowing Utterance, a light and dancing Heart, and a disposition to catch fire”. When the poets were not at home, they were walking and talking, sometimes 20, 40, even 70 miles at a stretchĪnd why not? Wordsworth and Coleridge, at 27 and 24 respectively, with Dorothy in between, make an enthralling, quotable trio. Quite soon, despite Nicolson’s first intentions, most revisionist thoughts have been quietly put to sleep with biographer and artist in full flow. Furthermore Nicolson, in the footsteps of Wordsworth, comes with his own Coleridge, the prodigiously gifted and colourful artist Tom Hammick, whose dreamy woodcuts and paintings are scattered through the narrative. This is Adam Nicholson’s subject in The Making of Poetry.Īs its subtitle ( Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels) suggests, this is a romantic book about some young Romantics, but it sets off by offering a revisionist interpretation of an experience that its principals – Dorothy in particular – celebrated as an ecstatic moment of “unbridled delight and wellbeing”. This was the year in which two young men of genius and their muse found the inspiration for Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Lyrical Ballads, among many others, and transformed the English literary imagination for ever.įrom June 1797 to the autumn of 1798, while Britain was at war with revolutionary France, Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, known as “Dolly”, lived on the edge of the Quantock Hills in Somerset and began to explore a new way of looking at the world, and their place in it, as devotees of nature and the unfettered mind, almost single-handedly inventing the Romantic movement in whose long shadow we live today. Still, the record of their imaginative frenzy is off the Richter scale. But none is more famous in English poetry than 1797-98, partly because its leading characters made it so, mythologising as they went. How to explain Shakespeare’s sonnets? Where is the wellspring of Moby-Dick? And what is the spell of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel?Įnglish literature has many such magic moments: 1599 – the year of Hamlet, As You Like It and Julius Caesar – is one 1922 – the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land – another. The enigma of creativity – whence does inspiration spring? – remains at once the key to its allure and also its bewitching riddle. I n the 21st century, the creative act of authorship is the magic moment of the liberated and expressive self that is simultaneously more idolised and tantalising than ever before.
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