Adam Nicolson's The Making of Poetry

The book's subtitle is "Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels." The year ran from June 1797 to September 1798, culminating in the publication of Lyrical Ballads. The place, Somerset, where William and Dorothy were ensconced in Alfoxden and Coleridge in Nether Stowey, all three walking up the Quantock constantly and with their visitors Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, among others. A gem of a book, most valuable for the close tracking of the intertwined lives, loves, and writings of Coleridge and the Wordsworths. It quite corrected my mistake that Coleridge learned interfusion from Wordsworth, when the truth was the other way. Nicolson makes his partisanship on behalf of Coleridge clear throughout, a note of ill balance that I must admit rubs me up the wrong way, being a Wordsworthian. Some of the nature writing shows a tinge of purple, but hat off to a man who immersed himself so thoroughly in the life of nature and poetry. The book is part of a bag of books from JG.

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