Wordsworth, Coleridge – and a biography so beguiling it’s poetry in itself
For just over a year, two of the greatest poets in the English language lived within a few miles of one another, in the Quantock Hills in Somerset.
They were both bristling with energy. William Wordsworth, aged 27, had once walked 3,000 miles through France and Switzerland. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, three years his junior, thought nothing of walking 40 miles in a day. In fact, he probably walked considerably more than that, since he never went in a straight line, preferring to zigzag across lanes and paths, even if it meant that any companion was forced to duck and dive. Walking in great, long, leaping steps, Coleridge would talk non-stop, on every subject under the sun. ‘In digressing, in dilating, in passing from subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on ice,’ recalled his young admirer William Hazlitt. ‘I observed that he continually crossed me on the way by shifting from one side of the footpath to the other.’
Coleridge (right) in 1815 and William Wordsworth in 1831 (left)
He was, in the words of Adam Nicolson, ‘a volcano of ideas’, full of plans and projects. One of his long-term plans was to devote 20 years to composing an epic poem. For this, he was going to put aside ten years to master several disciplines, including medicine, geology, mathematics, and chemistry, five years to write the epic poem, and the final five years to correct it.
Wordsworth, on the other hand, was more of a sobersides, more cautious, less scatty, and determined, above all else, to prove his heroic genius to the world. ‘His own sense of his own greatness was also his greatest weakness,’ writes Nicolson.
He arrived in the Quantocks in June 1797, with his put-upon sister Dorothy, who was happy to place her sharp intelligence at his service. Nicolson is particularly good at conveying the importance of Dorothy in the set-up. She loved robins, he says, ‘and there was something robin-like about her: the needle brilliance of their song, their alert restlessness, the tiny, flicker-instant acuity of body and being’.
For his part, her brother William loved her and took her for granted in roughly equal measures. ‘There is no suggestion of equality between them,’ observes Nicolson. ‘She is the servant, he the walking hero; she quietly attends, he struggles with his greatness.’
As you can see from these brief excerpts, Adam Nicolson is the perfect author to chart the ups and downs of this historic year for Romantic poetry. He has an acute eye for the human foibles of the poets, but never lets it undermine the power of their work. At the same time, he shares their empathy with the natural world, and many of his own phrases and sentences hum with a poetic sensibility.
Reading The Making Of Poetry, I started by underlining particularly beautiful passages, but soon realised that I would end up underlining virtually the whole book. Take this, on the song of the owl, for instance: ‘The owl is muted, like a trumpet with a cushion in its mouth… If a cough could sing, it would sound like this.’ Or, this, when he spots the first violet of spring, with a ‘smell so faint that it was like the memory of a smell’.
He is also a master of the long sentence, blessed with a rare ability to match the rhythms and cadences of his prose to the subject of his gaze. To take just one example: I am a particular fan of larks, and thought I knew them well, but with this marvellous sentence, he let me see and hear them afresh: ‘Skylarks jump up from among the gorse, silent for the first ten or 15 feet, bouncing up steps as if there were storeys in the air, and only then, when they have reached the upper floors, do they begin their song, bubbled, chaotic, as full of unexpectedness as a dream, strings of scarcely corrected notes, a long and lyric account of a life fit to burst, the tale of unstoppability, the incontinent lark singing in and of a filterless world.’
Nicolson himself went to live in the Quantocks to write this book, walking where the poets walked, reading what they read, immersing himself in their notebooks, charting the comings and goings of the seasons. Between the two of them, Wordsworth and Coleridge created some of the greatest poems in the English language that year – among them Kubla Khan, The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey – and it is Nicolson’s belief that their creations ‘could best be understood as physical experience. By feeling it on the skin I could hope to know what had happened in the course of it’.
Coleridge’s cottage in Nether Stowey. Nicolson has an acute eye for the human foibles of the poets, but never lets it undermine the power of their work
He has, then, constructed a peculiar sort of immersive biography, crackling with life, exciting and original, a million miles away from the solemn, dried-up outpourings of literary academia. If from time to time his attempts to ‘feel it on the skin’ drift into absurdity, then that is only testament to the boldness of his experiment. At one point, he invites an array of artists and intellectuals down, as stand-ins for Coleridge’s gang of bohemian friends. While they walk, they chatter away about art and politics and everything else under the sun, but Nicolson struggles to come up with any lasting insights into Coleridge or Wordsworth from the experience, other than the somewhat wishy-washy ‘friendship seemed wonderful in a lonely place’.
At another point, he even starts feeling the same sort of bodily pains – a tightening of the chest, a numbing of the arm, muscular spasms – as the poets themselves suffered, all those years ago. Could this really be true? There is something about the intensity of his understanding of Wordsworth and Coleridge that convinces me that it is.
But he is careful never to let his personal travails overshadow the story of the poets. And what a story it is! That year in the Quantocks was much more than one of larks and daffodils. Wordsworth and Coleridge were both political radicals, fired up by the French revolution, and under surveillance from the security services.
They came to the Quantocks partly in retreat from scrutiny, and partly to set up a community of radicals: when a rabble-rouser called John Thelwall came to stay, he was followed everywhere, with reports on his movements posted back to Whitehall. Nicolson offers striking evidence of the poverty that prevailed in Somerset at that time, with dispossessed farmers, press gangs roaming the country grabbing men for the navy, and maimed soldiers desperate for food. ‘If you owned a cow and kept it in a field, you could expect it to have been milked by the hungry overnight.’
The characters who populate this book are all wonderfully colourful and eccentric. Virtually everyone is, in Nicolson’s phrase, ‘touched or teetering around the fringes of madness’. Coleridge himself was famously addicted to opium, composing his most mesmerising poem, Kubla Khan, under its hallucinogenic spell. But he was also capable of the most lucid and tender work: Nicolson describes Frost At Midnight as ‘the greatest hymn to fatherly love ever written’.
There were inevitable tensions in the friendship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, exacerbated by Wordsworth’s lordly condescension. Wordsworth thought Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner bogus and badly written, while Coleridge secretly wondered if Wordsworth’s poetry wasn’t too prosaic and unimaginative.
But their shared vision for a new form of poetry triumphed over any personal differences. Nicolson persuasively argues that, perhaps now more than ever, their poems from that year still affect the way we view ourselves: we are part of nature, not its masters.
No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards.
We are no longer accepting comments on this article.