The Making of Poetry - Adam Nicolson (2019)

I had intended this book to appear on the website a short time before the club’s visit to Selworthy at the end of October as Nicolson set out to walk, physically and spiritually, in the footsteps of the two poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy in their roamings from June 1797 to September 1798: at that time Coleridge was living with his wife and babies in a cramped cottage in Nether Stowey, while the Wordsworths rented a nearby 17th century mansion called Alfoxden. They were joined by a throng of friends, fellow writers (including Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt) and activists such as the orator John Thelwall. Most days they would set out together at dusk for moonlit walks on the combes, meadows and valleys of the Quantocks.

As Nicolson demonstrates in his study of the poets’ 15 months that produced The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight, Tintern Abbey, The Idiot Boy, The Thorn, and early passages of The Prelude,Wordsworth’s brain was full of new-found sympathy for England’s poor, while Coleridge’s head was spinning with theories of pantheism, ‘the One Life’ in everything, and how he might transform them into poetry.

At the time Britain was at war with France and the Home Office suspected the Quantock visionaries of treason; Wordsworth had only recently returned from France where he had a lover and daughter. But what was afoot in the Quantocks wasn’t sedition but an experiment in poetic diction.

To a degree never shown before ‘The Making of Poetry’ explores the idea that these poems came from this place, and that only be experiencing the physical circumstances of the year, in all weathers and all seasons, at night and at dawn, in sunlit reverie and moonlight walks, can the genesis of the poetry be understood.

This is what Nicolson says of The Prelude, Wordsworth’s long poetical autobiography, with 2 short extracts from the poem itself:

‘It is always dangerous to use Wordsworth’s own account of his development in ‘The Prelude’ as any kind of evidence, but Wordsworth’s love of the road (ie.‘The Prelude’ itself), is both the greatest hymn to walking ever made and a testament to his own deep-reaching humanity. The road was, for him, not an escape from reality but a plunging into it, an engagement with people and with the depths of time beyond anything a drawing room, a public platform or a library could offer.’ There were of course no cars so it’s probably better to think of a ‘public road’ as a footpath or similar.

“I love a public road : few sights there are
That please me more: such object hath had power
O’er my imagination since the dawn
Of childhood , when its disappearing line,
Seen daily afar off, on one bare steep
Beyond the limits that my feet had trod,
Was like a guide into eternity;
At least to things unknown and without bound.”
And,
“I prized such walks still more; for there I found
Hope to my hope, and to my pleasure peace
And steadiness; and healing and repose
To every angry passion. There I heard ,
From mouths of lowly men and of obscure
A tale of honour.”

Wordsworth: The Prelude

Nicolson’s enjoyment of the two poets’ (and his) journey into understanding is utterly infectious, and in this instance, there is no need for social distancing.