A Romantic year in the shoes of the slob and the dandy
Adam Nicolson is admirably qualified to write about Wordsworth and Coleridge, the founders of English Romanticism. He has written extensively about walking (Coleridge often covered 40 miles in a day, and Wordsworth composed his verses aloud as he walked), and about great literature (Homer, the King James Bible), and about nature. Coleridge, he writes, “was always able to dance and balloon into unbridled delight at the beauties of existence”. So too is Nicolson, and his own writing is appropriately Romantic, combining snail-horn sensitivity with galloping enthusiasm.
The Making of Poetry charts the “Year of Marvels” Wordsworth and Coleridge spent in the Quantock Hills of Somerset, from the summer of 1797 to the early autumn of 1798, which resulted in their revolutionary Lyrical Ballads. To feel his way into their lives, “to lower myself into the pool of their minds”, Nicolson himself spent a year living in the district, tramping the combes and hills by day and night, and he brilliantly demonstrates the intimate relationship between the landscape and the poetry. He even suffered, as he worked at his desk, “bodily pains much as they did”, psychosomatic but real: “intense muscular spasms, a low-level tightness and then sharper stabs of tension followed by a kind of paralysis”. The two poets were wildly different yet complementary, “powered by opposite visions, opposite virtues, opposite failings, opposite modes of being”. Coleridge “thought of himself as belonging to and infused by the world at large”, while Wordsworth, “at some depth and with some justification, given the scale of his being, saw the world as belonging to and infused by himself ”. Though he said of his poetry that it was meant “to shew that men who did not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply”, Wordsworth was rather a dandy, affecting cream silk waistcoats and breeches, and during that year he lived with his sister Dorothy at Alfoxden, a stately pile with panelled rooms and a deer park. (It is now a romantic ruin, and some of its fallen timber has been used by Tom Hammick to make the beautiful woodcuts that illustrate this book.) Coleridge, by contrast, was frankly a slob, and lodged with his wife Sara at the nearby village of Stowey, in a damp cottage with no mousetraps and an unweeded garden, to demonstrate the liberty he allowed to all living things. What they shared, besides a love of poetry, were their radical and republican politics, sharpened by the state of the neighbouring peasantry. “You need,” admonishes Nicolson, “to shed any sense of Arcadian wellbeing”. Subsisting on gruel and the occasional badger, the poor were on average less than five feet tall, had a life expectancy under 40, and were preyed on by pressgangs as fodder for the war with France. As his “farewell to the year” Nicolson walked the 50 miles from Stowey to Bristol, through some of the poorest country in England, and found an anti-pastoral: “At the back end of the beautiful, in its hidden corners, is a rotten and broken world. The degraded life of the rural poor in Somerset now… is as shocking and disturbing as it was two centuries ago.” Among the poets’ visitors that year was the orator John Thelwall, “the most famous radical in England”, who wandered the country, pursued by informers and wearing a “cudgelproof hat”, and walked down to Stowey from London. In the spring of 1798 Coleridge wrote to his brother that he had snapped his “squeaking baby-trumpet of Sedition”, and left its fragments “scattered in the lumberroom of Penitence”, and decades later, in his Biographia Literaria, claimed of his time at Stowey “how opposite even then my principles were to those of Jacobinism”. Thelwall, though, wrote indignantly in the margins of his copy that Coleridge “was a down right zealous leveller & indeed in one of the worst senses of the word he was a Jacobin, a man of blood”. The poets’ egalitarianism did not extend to Sara Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth, who were “subservient in a way modern social consciousness finds difficult to accept”. Nicolson celebrates Dorothy’s poetic eye (“the moonshine like herrings in the water”), and laments her status as her brother’s “amanuensis, his enabler, his sister, his other self, his loveground, his designated inferior”. He supplies an acute analysis of the Romantic reaction against Augustan wit and polish. These poets offered “not the neat consumable amusegueules of well-made deliciousness… but long, loping excursions out into the wider and wilder country of the imagination. If the heart of the 18th-century aesthetic had been the elegant and well-framed view from a window, the new poetry belonged out here, on the long walk, high on the moors…” Much as he admires him as a visionary walker, he acknowledges Wordsworth’s “comico-lugubrious peculiarities” and, identifying The Thorn as “the archetypal Lyrical Ballad”, accepts that it veers “into the ridiculous, repetitive and loquacious”. The poem is set at Bicknoller Post, by the track to Crowcombe, which Nicolson naturally visits, and has been widely parodied, by Walter de la Mare among others, for its description of “a little muddy pond”: I’ve measured it from side to side: ‘Tis three feet long, and two feet wide. Nicolson wisely prefers Coleridge’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads (first published anonymously) for their “magnificent and strange disturbedness”, especially Christabel, which dares to engage “with the unaccommodated lusts that lurk in the psyche”, and he gives some startlingly original readings of them. Kubla Khan he sees as an oblique depiction of “Wordsworth Khan” in his pleasure dome at Alfoxden, while in The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere “the friendship and brotherhood between Coleridge and Wordsworth finds its reflection in the friendship and brotherhood of mariner and albatross”. As Wordsworth’s ego grew ever vaster, and Coleridge drifted into opiumhaunted doubt, there arose between them, as Nicolson beautifully puts it, “a thread of reservation and mutual uncertainty, the dark line in the flesh of the lobster’s tail”. The legacy and triumph of that marvellous year, he persuasively argues, was Coleridge’s influence on Wordsworth. This emerged only after their parting in the marvellous Tintern Abbey, and eventually on us all, since “we all now think, to a greater or lesser extent, that a tide floods and ebbs through us… a dynamic psychic geography that makes us who we are”: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
Wordsworth’s ego grew ever vaster, and Coleridge drifted into opium-haunted doubt