The Making of Poetry: Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2019 - Hardcover

Adam Nicolson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 000812647X ISBN 13: 9780008126476

Publisher: William Collins, 2019

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2019

Wordsworth and Coleridge as you’ve never seen them before in this new book by Adam Nicolson, brimming with poetry, art and nature writing. Proof that poetry can change the world.

It is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came The Ancient Mariner and ‘Kubla Khan’, as well as Coleridge’s unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, Wordsworth’s revolutionary verses in Lyrical Ballads and the greatness of ‘Tintern Abbey’, his paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. 

Bestselling and award-winning writer Adam Nicolson tells the story, almost day by day, of the year in the late 1790s that Coleridge, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and an ever-shifting cast of friends, dependants and acolytes spent together in the Quantock Hills in Somerset.

To a degree never shown before, The Making of Poetry explores the idea that these poems came from this place, and that only by experiencing the physical circumstances of the year, in all weathers and all seasons, at night and at dawn, in sunlit reverie and moonlit walks, can the genesis of the poetry start to be understood.  

What emerges is a portrait of these great figures as young people, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but still in urgent search of the paths towards it. 

The poetry they made was not from settled conclusions but from the adventure on which they were all embarked, seeing what they wrote as a way of stripping away all the dead matter, exfoliating consciousness, penetrating its depths. Poetry for them was not an ornament for civilisation but a challenge to it, a means of remaking the world.

About this title

About the Author

Adam Nicolson is a prize-winning writer of many books on history, nature and the countryside including Sea Room, God s Secretaries, The Gentry and the acclaimed The Mighty Dead. His 2017 book, Seabird s Cry was picked as Waterstones Book of the Month in Scotland and won the prestigious Wainwright Prize for nature writing and the Jeffries Prize. He is the winner of the Royal Society of Literature s Ondaatje Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award and the British Topography Prize. He has written and presented many television series and lives on a farm in Sussex.

From the Back Cover

The Making of Poetry
Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels
Adam Nicolson
The Making of Poetry tells the story of how two young men of genius, living on the edge of the Quantock Hills in Somerset, developed a new understanding of the world, of nature and of themselves. Bestselling and award-winning writer Adam Nicolson recreates this ‘year of miracles’ by embedding himself in the lives they led in Nether Stowey, over 200 years earlier.

The sixteen months these poets spent here has a claim to being the most famous moment in the history of English poetry. It has always been portrayed as a time of unbridled delight and overabundant creativity, from which extraordinary poetry emerged. In fact, it was a time of adventure and perplexity, of Wordsworth and Coleridge both ricocheting away from the revolutionary politics of the 1790s in which both had been involved and both to different degrees disappointed. Wordsworth was unheard of, and Coleridge was still under attack in the conservative press. Both were in retreat: from cities; from politics; from gentlemanliness and propriety; from the expected; towards nature; and – in a way that makes this year foundational for modernity – towards the self, its roots, its forms of self-understanding, its fantasies, longings, dreads and ideals.

The poetry they produced was astonishing: ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’, ‘Kubla Khan’, The Ancient Mariner, ‘Christabel’, ‘Frost at Midnight’, ‘The Nightingale’, Wordsworth’s strange and troubling poems in Lyrical Ballads, ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Thorn’, the grandeur and beauty of ‘Tintern Abbey’, and, in his notebooks, the first suggestions of what would become passages in The Prelude.

Adam Nicolson relived the months the poets spent in the Quantocks, immersed in their notebooks and the facsimiles of their rough drafts, lowering himself into the pool of their minds. The poets in this book are not literary monuments but living people, young, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but confronted again and again by the uncertain and contradictory nature of what they understood of the world, of each other and themselves.

The driving and revolutionary force of this year was the recognition that poetry was not an aspect of civilisation but a challenge to it; not decorative but subversive, a pleasure beyond politeness. This was not the stuff of drawing rooms. Its purpose was to give a voice to the voiceless, whatever form that voicelessness might have taken: sometimes speaking for the sufferings of the unacknowledged poor; sometimes enshrining the quiet murmuring of a man alone; sometimes reaching for the life of the child in his ‘time of unrememberable being’, beyond the grasp of adult consciousness; sometimes roaming in the magnificent strangeness of Coleridge’s imagined worlds.

Wordsworth called poetry ‘the first and last of all knowledge’: poetry comes both before and after everything that might be said. Its spirit and goal is to exfoliate consciousness, to rescue understanding from the noise and entropy of habit, to find richness and beauty in the hidden or neglected actualities. The strange, unlikely and unfashionable claim of this year stems from that recognition: poetry can remake assumptions, reconfigure the mind and change the world.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Collins
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 000812647X
• ISBN 13: 9780008126476
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336