The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels

The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels
Adam Nicolson

Wordsworth and Coleridge as you’ve never seen them before in this new book by Adam Nicolson, brimming with poetry, art and nature writing. Proof that poetry can change the world. It is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came The Ancient Mariner and ‘Kubla Khan’, as well as Coleridge’s unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, Wordsworth’s revolutionary verses in Lyrical Ballads and the greatness of ‘Tintern Abbey’, his paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding.   Bestselling and award-winning writer Adam Nicolson tells the story, almost day by day, of the year in the late 1790s that Coleridge, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and an ever-shifting cast of friends, dependants and acolytes spent together in the Quantock Hills in Somerset. To a degree never shown before, The Making of Poetry explores the idea that these poems came from this place, and that only by experiencing the physical circumstances of the year, in all weathers and all seasons, at night and at dawn, in sunlit reverie and moonlit walks, can the genesis of the poetry start to be understood.   What emerges is a portrait of these great figures as young people, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but still in urgent search of the paths towards it.   The poetry they made was not from settled conclusions but from the adventure on which they were all embarked, seeing what they wrote as a way of stripping away all the dead matter, exfoliating consciousness, penetrating its depths. Poetry for them was not an ornament for civilisation but a challenge to it, a means of remaking the world.

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Copyright (#ua519b068-4881-5a28-88c6-63d9fc5559fd)

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Adam Nicolson 2019

Cover image © In Xanadu (Island Studio)

All woodcuts photographed by Leigh Simpson

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008126476

Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008126483

Version: 2019-05-20

Dedication (#ua519b068-4881-5a28-88c6-63d9fc5559fd)

For Tom Hammick

On the island of his self

Epigraph (#ua519b068-4881-5a28-88c6-63d9fc5559fd)

The making of verses, the making of works, occurs in the edges of your life, of your time, in your late nights or early mornings … And my words, the words for me, seem to have more nervous energy when they are touching territory that I know, that I live with … I can lay my hand on [a place] and know it. And the words, the words come alive and get a kind of personality when they are involved with it for me. The landscape is image. It’s almost an element to work with, as much as it is an object of admiration.

Seamus Heaney, speaking to Patrick Garland on Poets on Poetry, BBC 1, October 1973

Contents

1  Cover (#u65b75faf-fb21-544e-940d-b45e286c2c22)

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Epigraph

6  Contents (#ua519b068-4881-5a28-88c6-63d9fc5559fd)

7  1 Following

8 2 Meeting – June 1797

9 3 Searching June 1797

10  4 Settling – July 1797

11  5 Walking – July and August 1797

12  6 Informing – July and August 1797

13  7 Dreaming – September and October 1797

14  8 Voyaging – November 1797

15  9 Diverging – December 1797 and January 1798

16  10 Mooning – January and February 1798

17  11 Remembering – February 1798

18  12 Emerging – March 1798

19  13 Polarising – March 1798

20  14 Delighting – April, May and June 1798

21  15 Authoring – June 1798

22  16 Arriving – July 1798

23  17 Leaving – August and September 1798

24  Acknowledgements