WANDERING, LONELY AS A ROMANTIC POET
Starlight Wood: Walking Back To The Romantic Countryside
Fiona Sampson Corsair €24
L★★★★★ ike so many, the poet and biographer Fiona Sampson seized every opportunity to get out into nature and walk during the pandemic. Accompanying her were her dogs, eager Zed and saturnine Dee, her husband, the novelist Peter Salmon, and a host of long-dead painters, composers and wordsmiths, among them Shelley, right, Constable and Turner.
These spectral companions, who make themselves felt through Sampson’s analysis of their inspiration, beliefs and liberally quoted works, were all, of course, Romantics, members of a movement that has helped shape our encounters with the natural world.
Their artistic peregrinations set Sampson’s course in Starlight Wood, a nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue that seeks to restore to Romanticism its radicalism, and also show just how much the countryside shaped its manifesto.
Each of the book’s 10 chapters is inspired by a different walk taken over the course of some 12 months.
Her observations as she goes are bracingly untwee, liberating these picturesque landscapes from cliche. Here she is on Romney Marsh in southeast England, for instance: ‘The wide sky is pure silver, light seems to press down on everything with a weight I find almost physical: it’s like a kind of eye-strain.’
Meanwhile, Romanticism’s agents bound to life as she strives to capture the complexities of their interlocking relationships and the sheer verve of their questing creativity. Despite knowledge of all manner of history – agricultural, philosophical, scientific – she puts a 21stCentury spin on some of their passions. Shelley’s food fetishes, she suggests, could well have been ‘anorexia by proxy’, and she’s discomfited by some elitism in Wordsworth’s desire to keep the railways and the ‘uneducated persons’ who rode on them out of the Lake District, where he lived.
She asserts that the Romantics must be viewed in the context of a Europe-wide movement. And far from being progress-resistant conservatives, they were disruptors and politically engaged free thinkers.
The countryside, she writes, is ‘discursive’, and in a way that feels perfectly apt and organic. Her prose at intervals flows from the historical to the personal, offering glimpses of her childhood, or of working in a psychiatric unit.
Her father, in particular, gently haunts these pages. He died as she was writing the book, alone with Covid restrictions at their most severe.
His final utterance, she reports, echoed the last words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Beautiful’.
Accompany Sampson on her varied rambles and you’ll find your eyes opened anew to the beauty not only of nature, but also of creative engagement with every aspect of the world.