posted on 27 Sep 2019

The Making of Poetry by Adam Nicolson

Literary biography and literary criticism can often be a difficult read if you’re not an avid student of those genres or an eager enthusiast for the principal subject of the book. But I can’t imagine that anyone inspired to pick this book up in the first place is going to cast it aside because of boredom. There may well be points of analysis here to disagree with but I would be very surprised if the main beef is that it is dull – either as a book of ideas or as a work of art.

Nicolson is trying to do something which seems to me to be, if not original, then certainly unconventional. He sub-titles his book Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels and, as this suggests, he is seeking to make the claim that 1797-8 is not only a pivotal year in the lives of the poets but a special year for English poetry itself. So not only do we get an enthralling and exhaustive mapping of the ideas and opinions of the key players in all of this, he grafts on an added dimension – the notion that to really understand what they were doing and why they were doing it, it is necessary also to understand the impact of the physical environment in which they were writing. To do this, he and an occasional companion retrace the journey of Coleridge and Wordsworth to Somerset and walk again the paths the poets would have taken. And, as if not content with this double-hander, Nicolson recruits the skills of woodcut artist and painter, Tom Hammick to provide stunning illustrated plates throughout the book. The effect is genuinely enthralling and gives the whole enterprise a superb added dimension.

Claire Harman writing in the Evening Standard puts it in this way:

“Adam Nicolson takes us deeper into this extraordinary time and place, and these explosive young minds, than ever before in his captivating book. Spending a year living in the same terrain, walking, reading and observing, he seeks an immersive experience, “not any kind of elegant gazing at a landscape but a kind of embodiment, plunging in”. This involves the sights, smells, sounds, even the light conditions in which the writers lived and wrote. Whether recreating the look of dusk, the sound of the sea, the intimate near-silence of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy at Racedown, or dreaming with Coleridge in his lime-tree bower, Nicolson opens his senses and his eyes to the “beautiful connectedness” which the Romantic poets celebrated... It is intensely moving and thrilling. There are meditations on dusk, rain, wind, the exciting darkness and strangeness of “winter power”; there are wonderful words like “rhyne”, “laminar” and “haulms” and brilliant readings of the poems, the lives and the temperaments of the two poets, feeling the spiritual ley lines running between our time and theirs.”

This is very much a book about the creative spirit and about how that crosses over with notions of friendship and relationships. Two things in particular jumped out at me in the reading of this book – the extraordinary vivacity of Dorothy Wordsworth and the remarkable, almost symbiotic relationship she had with her brother. It doesn’t feel to me to be too big a claim to make that Wordsworth’s poetry leading up to and including the Lyrical Ballads would not have been possible without her – both as inspiration and as creative muse.

The other notable issue for me was the always tenuous friendship and creative bond that existed between Wordsworth and Coleridge. For a short moment in time they found common ground and created something remarkable – individually and collectively – before diverging onto very different paths. I can’t help but feel Nicolson himself was enchanted by Coleridge: he emerges from this book in fully rounded form, a physically unprepossessing character but a huge personality and he manages to somehow overshadow the more diffident Wordsworth.

I sometimes think the focus on nature and the space devoted to re-experiencing the landscape was an unnecessary diversion but I’m sure that there will be those who find this part of the book even more enjoyable than the literary revelations. But I stand with Miranda Seymour in her Financial Times review when she says:

“ Occasionally, Nicolson’s delectable prose pudding tastes over-egged. Standing in a water-filled ditch is oddly compared to sinking into the folds of a brain. A cushion-stuffed trumpet is said to mimic the muffled hoot of an owl. Such infelicities offer the only irritations in one of the most imaginative and luminously intelligent books about poetry I have read.”

All in all though this is a triumph of a book – as good to read as it is to look at. It’s new and so it’s still in hardback only as I write this. That really shouldn’t put off anyone who finds this book a recipe they are interested in because it is undoubtedly an object of desire in its own right.

 

Terry Potter

September 2019