A detail from an illustration by Tom Hammick in The Making of Poetry. Quite soon, despite Nicolson’s first intentions, most revisionist thoughts have been quietly put to sleep with biographer and artist in full flow. This investigation into the birth of the Romantic movement is the perfect marriage of poetry and place. Coleridge and the Wordsworths passed their time scurrying between one another’s houses, busily observing, thinking, talking and jotting down ideas and impressions. – remains at once the key to its allure and also its bewitching riddle. It is not that one of these speakers is Wordsworth and the other is Coleridge; rather that the poem, one in a collection of works born of extraordinarily fertile disagreement, makes room for two contradictory points of view and leaves them to co-exist without resolution. Here, Nicolson has hardly more interest in the fashionable “Matilda effect” than Wordsworth or Coleridge. To Coleridge, she was Wordsworth’s “exquisite Sister – a woman indeed!” He loved her in a way he did not love Sara, his wife. He has, moreover, incorporated welcome reflections from his own life which add lustre and a different tilt of insight to the fascinating story of these three Romantic poets. But his book remains a witness to the rewards of immersion in a particular place; to the realisation that our identity and wellbeing are bound up with the rhythms of nature. A word must be said about one of the most striking features of this book: its numerous illustrations by the artist Tom Hammick. As Coleridge puts it: “All things shall live in us & we shall live/In all things that surround us.”. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy had moved to the Quantocks in Somerset to be close to Coleridge, who with his wife and children occupied a damp and musty cottage (he called it a hovel) at Nether Stowey from 1797 to 1799. Where is the wellspring of. And the words, the words come alive and get a kind of personality when they are involved with it for me. John Walsh. 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. Her observation of nature, especially of the famous daffodils, was superior to her brother’s and was prodigal in its gift of raw material. 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. Nicolson, whose method is “to lower myself into the pool of their minds”, paints a memorable triptych of the two poets and their Dolly in nonstop discussion about nature, art and life itself, carried away, in Coleridge’s account, with “an ebullient Fancy, a flowing Utterance, a light and dancing Heart, and a disposition to catch fire”. The older man became withdrawn and solitary. And why not? Paying for myself by writing about it in newspapers and magazines, I walked thousands of miles here in England, the same in France, and then in Europe, in Greece and Italy, not in pursuit of anything in particular except perhaps the reassurance of being able to engage with the physical world day after day, in fog and rain and snow, in the burnishing sunshine, usually alone, sleeping out in a small tent or in mountain bothies or in Greece inside the flea-ridden chapels. Unlike William Wordsworth, Coleridge was said to prefer composing his verses while on uneven ground, “or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood”, terrain he considered more likely than a smooth, uninterrupted surface to foster the making of poetry. The deepest mysteries of this “marvellous year” remain happily unplumbed, if much more famous. There is also plentiful testimony from their contemporaries as to the suspiciously radical character of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle.

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