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The Making of Poetry by Adam Nicolson review – when Coleridge met the Wordsworths

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This investigation into the birth of the Romantic movement is the perfect marriage of poetry and place

In the 21st century, the creative act of authorship is the magic moment of the liberated and expressive self that is simultaneously more idolised and tantalising than ever before. The enigma of creativity – whence does inspiration spring? – remains at once the key to its allure and also its bewitching riddle. How to explain Shakespeare’s sonnets? Where is the wellspring of Moby-Dick? And what is the spell of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel?

English literature has many such magic moments: 1599 – the year of Hamlet, As You Like It and Julius Caesar– is one; 1922 – the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land– another. But none is more famous in English poetry than 1797-98, partly because its leading characters made it so, mythologising as they went. Still, the record of their imaginative frenzy is off the Richter scale. This was the year in which two young men of genius and their muse found the inspiration for Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Lyrical Ballads, among many others, and transformed the English literary imagination for ever.

When the poets were not at home, they were walking and talking, sometimes 20, 40, even 70 miles at a stretch

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