Bad harvests and malnutrition had stunted people’s growth. Civil liberties were suspended during the war, and spies were dispatched around the country to sniff out radicals who might be conspiring with the French-even Coleridge and Wordsworth were surveilled by an itinerant spy. The spirit of the French Revolution had crossed the channel, causing great alarm and paranoia throughout the nation.
The Quantocks year is often portrayed as an idyllic time of creativity and delight in nature-a writer’s retreat in Arcadia. The artist Tom Hammick accompanied Nicolson for much of the year, creating woodcuts from the fallen timber of Alfoxden, where the Wordsworths lived-and his images, hauntingly beautiful, illustrate the book. Part biography, part cultural history, part nature writing, The Making of Poetry explains how the people, places, and ideas that the poets encountered shaped the words that they wrote. He walked where they walked that year, read what they read, and immersed himself in the early drafts of the poems they wrote, trying to understand what inspired these singular minds and how their creative process unfolded. He set out to live as Coleridge and the Wordsworths did. Having written insightfully about great literature in previous books, Nicolson adopts a more journalistic method in this one. How did these two young, troubled men-together with Dorothy, the third person in their creative trinity-manage such a feat, and over such a short period? In his book The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels, the British writer Adam Nicolson re-creates that legendary year in vivid, memorable detail. Their opposing spirits pushed and pulled against each other that year, unleashing some of the most celebrated poems in the English language, from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” and “Tintern Abbey.” Their time together culminated in the publication of Lyrical Ballads, which ushered in the Romantic movement, forever changing the course of English literature. The tension in their ways of being ultimately undid their friendship, but not before it spurred their poetry. Wordsworth, brooding and distant, had a keen sense of his own greatness and was once seen walking in the moonlight in a black fur cap and green gown looking like a “grand Signior,” as Dorothy recalled.
He had a strong religious, even mystical, sensibility. Coleridge, a bit slovenly, was generous, expressive, and easily moved by the iridescent beauty that he sensed around him. They were different in so many ways, each embodying distinct strains of Romanticism. The two men had previously met, corresponded, and admired each other’s work Coleridge already thought Wordsworth “the best poet of the age.” Now, in the refuge of the Quantocks from that summer to the next, their friendship blossomed, and so did their writing. In June 1797, with Britain at war with revolutionary France, 24-year-old Coleridge retreated to the Quantock Hills of Somerset County, where he befriended another poet, the then-unknown William Wordsworth, 27, who lived nearby with his beloved sister, Dorothy. The interconnectedness of all things was one of the main themes of Coleridge’s poetry that year, a momentous one in the history of English literature. The fisherman had risked his life trying to save the boy, explaining, as Hazlitt later remembered, that “he did not know how it was that they ventured, but, Sir, we have a nature towards one another.” In the spring of 1798, a young William Hazlitt was walking with his idol, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when the two men encountered a fisherman who told them about a boy who had drowned the day before.
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