Coleridge and Wordsworth's Friendship Discussed at Literary Hub

Read an excerpt from Adam Nicolson's The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels, tucked within the pages of Literary Hub. "In Wordsworth’s notebooks," writes Nicolson, "the scattered lines read as if gobbets of music and language are pushing out through his pen on to the surface of the visible world." Picking up from there: 

The atmosphere is of retrieval, of quite literally the re-collection of ideas and associations, the memory of sights and sounds he had gathered when out in the woods and on the high tops of the Quantocks. It is tempting sometimes, from these ragged, scratched-at, fragmentary pages, to think that they must have been written on site, notations from the living world, from his presence in that world; but that was not his method. He was clear, when asked about this late in life, that for poetry to surface it had first to pass through the great digestive organ of his mind. Poetry did not lie out in the fields and woods like mushrooms or autumn leaves. Poetry existed only in the meeting of mind and world. Poetry was that act of becoming, feeding on what had been ingested long before.

He told Aubrey de Vere, the Irish Victorian poet and his lifelong admirer, that he “had hardly known anyone but [himself] who had a true eye for Nature,” and talked about another poet, but did not name him, who

went out with his pencil and notebook, and jotted down whatever struck him most—a river rippling over the sand, a ruined tower on a rock above it, a promontory, and a mountain-ash waving its berries. He went home, and wove the whole together into a poetical description.

Is this, darkly, a description of Coleridge, for whom no friend was more loyal or trustworthy than his notebooks, and without which he never went out of the door? Or even Southey, who as Hazlitt noticed, was never without his notebook in hand?

Read on at Literary Hub.