The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels

(Paperback)

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2019

This is a book of wonders Sunday Times

Spellbinding and intelligent Financial Times

Extraordinary and engrossing Spectator
It was the most extraordinary year. In a book brimming with poetry and nature writing, biography and adventure, Adam Nicolson walks in the footsteps of Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy during the months in the late 1790s they spent together in the Quantock Hills.

Out of it came The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Lyrical Ballads and Tintern Abbey; Coleridges unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood; Wordsworths revolutionary verses and paeans to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. In short, a poetry that sought to remake the world.

Reviews

Dazzling Before I read this book I was something of a Wordsworth-sceptic. But Nicolson is one of the most persuasive advocates of his genius I have read. The Making of Poetry brings the poetry to life, but also the countryside It has paid off brilliantly. He is helped along by Tom Hammicks beautiful illustrations. The Times

Brilliant Adam Nicolson has shown us, in this subtle and masterly book, the cost of the making of poetry New Statesman

The perfect marriage Poetry and place are perfectly braided together in prose whose biographical mood pays tribute to Richard Holmes and whose topographical fervour evokes Robert Macfarlane. Observer

Adam Nicolson takes us deeper into this extraordinary time and place, and these explosive young minds, than ever before in his captivating book It is intensely moving and thrilling. Evening Standard

Spellbinding The Making of Poetry is an excitingly new kind of literary book One of the most imaginative and luminously intelligent books about poetry I have read Financial Times

Sublime Nicolsons prose swoops and sings all over the landscape; his poets embeddings in nature and interconnections of thought are richly evoked, and his enjoyment of their journey into understanding is utterly infectious. Sunday Times

A fabulous book! Passionate, original, intensely personal, and thrillingly observant It will have terrific impact. Completely captivating. It is also truly moving. Above all, he is fascinating on the central relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth. Richard Holmes

One of the most beautiful books Ive seen Spectator

I started underlining particularly beautiful passages, but soon realised that I would end up underlining virtually the whole book Mail on Sunday

Author Bio

Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, travel and the environment. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives on at Sissinghust Castle in Kent. His most recent book for HarperCollins is Sissinghurst, a wonderful and personal biography of a place the story of a heritage, of a vision of connecting once more buildings and garden, fields and farms and of how that dream was realised.