Robert McCrum on Adam Nicolson's The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels

In The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels, Adam Nicolson investigates English Literature circa 1797–1798, the year, McCrum writes at The Guardian, "in which two young men of genius and their muse found the inspiration for Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Lyrical Ballads, among many others, and transformed the English literary imagination for ever." 

From June 1797 to the autumn of 1798, while Britain was at war with revolutionary France, Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, known as “Dolly”, lived on the edge of the Quantock Hills in Somerset and began to explore a new way of looking at the world, and their place in it, as devotees of nature and the unfettered mind, almost single-handedly inventing the Romantic movement in whose long shadow we live today. This is Adam Nicholson’s subject in The Making of Poetry.

As its subtitle (Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels) suggests, this is a romantic book about some young Romantics, but it sets off by offering a revisionist interpretation of an experience that its principals – Dorothy in particular – celebrated as an ecstatic moment of “unbridled delight and wellbeing”. Furthermore Nicolson, in the footsteps of Wordsworth, comes with his own Coleridge, the prodigiously gifted and colourful artist Tom Hammick, whose dreamy woodcuts and paintings are scattered through the narrative. Quite soon, despite Nicolson’s first intentions, most revisionist thoughts have been quietly put to sleep with biographer and artist in full flow.

Read more at The Guardian.