The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels, by Adam Nicolson
HAMISH ROBINSON
The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels In June 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge walked the 35 miles from Nether Stowey in Somerset to Racedown in Dorset to visit his fellow poet William Wordsworth.
The two men, both in their twenties, belonged to the same radical milieu, were acquainted and had corresponded, but the visit marked the beginning of an intense, year-long collaboration, the chief fruits of which were collected as the
Lyrical Ballads, published anonymously in October 1798. It was a joint production that was to mark the beginning of an epoch in English poetry.
The volume contains some of the best-loved poems in the language, but at the time Wordsworth saw fit to warn readers in an unsigned ‘Advertisement’ that those ‘accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of modern writers … will frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness [sic]’.
Some of that novelty has not worn off. One poem in particular, The Thorn, Wordsworth’s tale of a jilted bride distracted by grief and guilt at the death of her infant, as seen through the eyes of a local busybody, has proved a stumbling block to generations of readers. Lines such as the following have to some seemed ludicrously pedestrian:
‘Not five yards from the mountainpath,/ This thorn you on your left
espy;/ And to the left, three yards beyond,/ You see a little muddy pond/ Of water, never dry;/ I’ve measured it from side to side:/ ’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.’
All too many have failed to see in the artifice of this plain and workmanlike language a sustained exhibition of poetical low flying. The diction may not be elevated but, wherever you care to look, the poem is one inch off the ground. The fabrication is meticulous. One has to wait until Hardy or Frost to find anything as coiled and oblique: tragedy seen through the filter of the mild but rather trifling disposition of an artless narrator. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, perhaps the most popular poem in the collection, may roam all over the globe in search of chills and thrills, but is slap-happy pastiche in comparison. Any book of poetry that can still so sharply divide opinion after 200 years is worthy of study.
Adam Nicolson shows himself to be a dedicated student. He ‘embedded’ himself for a year at the foot of the Quantocks close to Coleridge’s cottage and to Alfoxden, the house subsequently rented by Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, and walked the landscape in all weathers and seasons in imitation of his subjects. Part memoir, part literary biography, part travelogue, part literary criticism, with passages of nature writing and social criticism thrown in, the book tracks month by month the fortunes of the little group, as well as the genesis of individual poems.
To do this, he draws on the testimony of visitors such as Lamb and Hazlitt, the publisher Cottle, and Thelwall the radical agitator, as well as on the journals of a local vicar, William Holland, and even the records of the Home Department, which had the group under surveillance.
Above all, he ‘embedded’ himself in the poets’ own poems, drafts, letters and notes. At one point, he records suffering aches and pains similar to those that afflicted the poets themselves – Coleridge was already self-medicating with laudanum. There are many brilliant moments. Nicolson is surprised by the quality of Wordsworth’s silk waistcoats preserved in the museum at Dove Cottage. He accurately gauges the group’s ambiguous social status. He records that ‘a Kubla’ (‘Khan’ was rhymed with ‘man’) was the coterie’s name for a water container (as in can); he even locates the likely position of the eponymous thorn. The text is further enlivened by woodcuts made using local timber by the artist Tom Hammick.
The last chapter finds them on the Yarmouth packet bound for Germany, the seasick Wordsworths boarded up in their bunks, a drunken Coleridge lying out on deck under his heavy overcoat, gazing ecstatically at the luminescence. It was the first time he had ventured abroad. This final, raffish note of triumph accords with Nicolson’s clear preference for the more dispersed and dissolute genius of Coleridge.