(c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. Lyrical Ballads opened with a voyage out – the Ancient Mariner bursting into frozen seas – and closed with Wordsworth returning after five years to the view above Tintern Abbey on the River Wye. In her review of Adam Sisman’s book, “The Friendship, Wordsworth and Coleridge,” in The Telegraph, Frances Wilson takes issue with Sisman’s somewhat unsympathetic view of the troubled and dreamy Coleridge. This book explores some of the exultant visions inspired by Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s close scrutiny of the night sky, the natural world, and the domains of science. This research reinstates many relationships which the poets had with scientists and their sources. Her most recent book is How to Survive the Titanic, or the Sinking of J Bruce Ismay. Using the language of everyday speech, Coleridge would describe the supernatural world and Wordsworth the natural world but both poets, Nicolson shows, relied on narrators who were in equal measure loquacious and uncertain; the poems “retract from reliability in the way a snail’s horns pull back when touched”. This book explores some of the exultant visions inspired by Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s close scrutiny of the night sky, the natural world, and the domains of science. Donate now, and keep the great information coming! Nicolson’s aim is to get as close as possible to the sources of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetic power in 1797-98, when they collaborated on Lyrical Ballads: he therefore moves to the Quantocks. The image of the all-powerful poet, he suggests, is caught by Coleridge in the demonic figure of Kubla Khan. The book begins, however, with the most famous arrival in literary history. philosophy, Adam Nicolson It examines a set of scientific patterns drawn from natural, geometric, celestial, and astronomical sources which Wordsworth and Coleridge used to express their ideas about poetry, religion, literary criticism, and philosophy. Decoded Everything is a non-profit corporation, dependent on donations from readers like you. This article appears in the 02 August 2019 issue of the New Statesman, Summer special, All change: the fortunes of Coleridge (left) and Wordsworth were reversed during 1797, The end of the affair: how Tory MPs are falling out of love with Boris Johnson, Donald Trump has shown how he plans to use far-right violence to try to retain power, Palantir IPO: why the secretive data giant is cosying up to Donald Trump, NS Recommends: new books from John Mullan, Marilynne Robinson, Sebastian Strangio, and Clive James. When they met, Wordsworth was weak and Coleridge was strong; by the end of the year this was to be reversed. University College London. Having walked from Nether Stowey to Racedown, the West Dorset home of the Wordsworths, Coleridge leaps over the gate and bounds through the field to where William and Dorothy are working in their garden. Log in, Janet Cameron has a BA (Hons) 2.1 with the Open University in literature and philosophy, (1994-96) including “The Philosophy of Art.” She holds an MA in modern poetry with the University of Kent at …. He is 24 and nearly famous; Dorothy is 25 and on the run; Wordsworth is 27 and pregnant with poetic genius: bliss it was to be alive that dawn but to be young was very heaven. The most striking feature of the sublime “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”, Nicolson suggests, is the absence of Coleridge, whose guidance had ensured that Wordsworth arrived at his destination. He would later move his family to the Lakes in order to be on Wordsworth’s native soil, but the Wordsworths now moved to Alfoxden, two miles from Nether Stowey, to be nearer to Coleridge. Your email address will not be published.

Inverting this pattern, The Making of Poetry opens with a destination and closes with a sea-voyage: the Wordsworths and Coleridge on the packet boat to Germany in September 1798, having deposited Lyrical Ballads with a radical Bristol publisher. The image of the all-powerful poet, he suggests, is caught by Coleridge in the demonic figure of Kubla Khan. It examines a set of scientific patterns drawn from natural, geometric, celestial, and astronomical sources which Wordsworth and Coleridge used to express their ideas about poetry, religion, literary criticism, and philosophy. No one has described better the strange and obsessive nature of biographical pursuit, and the business of “footstepping” has since become associated with the Holmesian style of method-biography, in which the biographical subject returns from the dead with a palpable physical presence. This website uses cookies to help us give you the best experience when you visit our website. Exploring the structures behind Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poems and metaphysics stakes out a return to the evidence of the Romantic imagination, not for its own sake, but in order to reveal that their analogical configuration of the world provided them with a scaffold for thinking, an intellectual orrery which ordered artistic consciousness and which they never abandoned.
All Rights Reserved. The power of Wordsworth's autobiographical poetry lay partly in his ability to capture an experience that was generational, true; but it stemmed, too, from an audacious originality of purpose that was Wordsworth's and no-one else's: "high theme by Thee first sung aright," as Coleridge had put it in the lines to Wordsworth (1.4 Poems 436). religion, It is hardly surprising that this dishevelled crew, walking, talking, arguing in all weathers and at all times of day and night, attracted the attention of the government, which assumed they were spies. Adam Nicolson makes plain his debt to Richard Holmes: “I think of this book as a tributary to the great Holmesian stream,” he says in the introductory chapter to The Making of Poetry. We can find ref…, Jean-Jacques Rousseau – We are Good by Nature but Corrupted by Society, Plato’s Argument: Art is an Imitation of an Imitation, Adam Smith (1723-1790) – The Father of Modern Capitalism, Ferdinand de Saussure – Language is a System of Differences, The Hamburg Bombing of 1943: Lessons Still Relevant, Duns Scotus: Britain’s Forgotten Theological Genius, A Shadowy Monarch: In Search of King Raedwald. Get the New Statesman's Morning Call email. The Making of Poetry is indeed a tributary to the great Holmesian stream, and also a tribute to the Romantic art of observational note-taking. William Wordsworth, His laugh, when it came, apparently sounded lecherous. Coleridge, meanwhile, effectively abandoned his own wife and child in order to devote himself full time to Wordsworth-worship. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and a fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry. Lyrical Ballads opened with a voyage out – the Ancient Mariner bursting into frozen seas – and closed with Wordsworth returning after five years to the view above Tintern Abbey on the River Wye. Coleridge, on the other hand, was raised in London, "pent 'mid cloisters dim," and questions Wordsworth's easy identification of childhood with a kind of automatic, original happiness; instead, in this poem he says that, as a child, he "saw naught lovely but the stars and sky" … A “lyrical ballad”, Nicolson explains in a brilliant analysis of the poems, combines “the storytelling and quick rhythms of the ballad with the close emotional focus and intensity of lyric poetry”.