The Making of Poetry by Adam Nicolson

The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels
By Adam Nicolson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

The famous “year of wonders” referenced in the title of Adam Nicolson’s new book The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels is the long year stretching from June of 1797 to the autumn of 1798, a time, as Nicolson puts it, that’s been characterized as a galvanizing moment in the course of English literature, “a time of unbridled delight and wellbeing, of overabundant creativity, with a singularity of conviction and purpose from which extraordinary poetry emerged.”

It was during this comparatively short stretch that Wordsworth wrote his Lyrical Ballads poems, plus “Tintern Abbey,” “The Idiot Boy,” and “The Thorn,” and that Coleridge wrote “Christabel,” “Frost at Midnight,” “Kubla Khan,” The Ancient Mariner and other signature poems, each man inspired by the other and by the natural glories of the Somerset hills and dales. 

Those Somerset glories end up being the highlight of The Making of Poetry, figuratively but also literally, since the book features many woodcuts by Tom Hammick that were made from the fallen timber around Alfoxden, the picturesque old Somerset house where the Wordsworths lived for a year. “Here in the visions of the poets, in the luminous shadowed trees, in Coleridge’s dream worlds and Wordsworth’s sense of winter loneliness and springtime gaiety,” Nicolson writes, “Hammick summons a visual vocabulary that reconnects the present to those foundations of modern sensibility.” Nicolson hopes that the feeling of connectedness that bound the poets together will touch the reader through these woodcuts “made from the trees under which Wordsworth and Coleridge, their friends and families, sat, talked, and read.” 

The woodcuts won’t be everybody’s cup of tea (they certainly weren’t mine), but the effect of connectedness is achieved in delightful amplitude by Nicolson’s own warm and colorful prose. It’s little wonder that Nicolson, the heart and soul of the legendary Sissinghurst Castle Garden, should be so eloquent in evoking the same natural world that filled the dreams of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Despite its title, the book is less about poetry than it is about place. When it Nicolson comes to write about Alfoxden, for example, distant readers can feel like they’re walking the grounds in person:

The house is now decrepit, and the park broken and ragged. It is scarcely visited. Unlike Coleridge’s spruced-up cottage in Nether Stowey, no National Trust care is applied to the flaking and rotting surfaces of these buildings. Little wrens play on the cornices and pied wagtails pick through the gravel where the moss roses used to flower. The roof in places is breaking through, and the paint on the doors looks as if it has been peppered with gunshot. The walled garden is abandoned, and the trees lie collapsed and broken where they have fallen, vast twisted and spiralled chestnuts lying riven on the hillside, as if a war had been fought through them.

“That very condition,” Nicolson continues, “on a thick summer evening, with the leaves darkening in the dusk, the bats flicking and scouting overhead, and the deer rustling their anxious, hidden bodies somewhere up in the bracken, has over the centuries absorbed, ironically enough, a Wordsworthian atmosphere.”

It’s a Wordsworthian rather than a Coleridgean atmosphere that permeates The Making of Poetry, a sharp and sympathetic assessment of a literary miracle suffused with what Nicolson at one point refers to as “this potent otherness.” 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.