Spectator Books: when Coleridge met Wordsworth

Best of the Spectator

The Spectator

News Commentary, News, Daily News, Society & Culture

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2019

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this week’s books podcast, we’re getting Romantic. Sam is joined by the writer Adam Nicolson and the artist Tom Hammick to talk about their new book The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, Wordsworth and their Year of Marvels. In it, Adam describes how — inspired by Richard Holmes’s 'footsteps' approach — he attempted to imaginatively inhabit the worlds of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the crucial year in the late 1790s when they lived near each-other in the Quantocks in Somerset. That meant, for him, living in the same landscape, walking the same paths, reliving the struggles with lines of verse in manuscript. It’s a passionate attempt to fully understand the relationship between the two, and the influences that had their issue in Lyrical Ballads, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and the ‘Prelude'. The book also contains the woodcuts Tom made from fallen trees where they lived, and which form a complex commentary on Adam’s text and on the texts it traces. Sam asks them to expound on such highbrow issues as: who was the Daddy? Wasn’t Wordsworth a bit of a rotter? And: what about Dot?

Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes of Spectator Books here.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator,
0:11.1	and this week my guests are Adam Nicholson and Tom Hammock. Adam is the author and Tom is the
0:16.9	illustrator of a glorious new book called The Making of Poetry, Coleridge, the Wordsworths and their year of marvels.
0:24.3	It's 1797 to 1798, the year that Coleridge and Wordsworth were hanging out together, not as everybody thinks the Lake District, but in the context.
0:35.1	And this was the year that led up towards the Rhyber the
0:38.4	ancient mariner and the prelude and lyrical ballads and Kubla Khan and much else besides.
0:45.6	Adam, what made you decide to do this year? What put you on this subject? I'm always interested
0:51.4	in what puts you on to one of your subject, I had previously written a book about Homer,
0:55.9	and the book about Homer had been utterly vast,
0:59.3	far too vast for its own good.
1:01.5	It stretched from Ireland to Manchuria and 20,000 BC to Chicago today,
1:08.6	and it was just a gopping, great, elephant of a thing and I thought wouldn't it be
1:14.6	good to really concentrate to have a fine very fine very close focus on some equally significant moment
1:22.9	and I knew about this year I know this year it's the most famous year. As you say, all those poems came out of it.
1:29.7	And it had all the kind of Aristotelian unities in place.
1:34.9	You know, it was one place.
1:36.5	It was one time.
1:37.7	It really is one subject, one drama enacted through the course of the year.
1:42.1	And so I thought this would be a very good laboratory, really.
1:45.2	Can you understand great literature from really embedding, really, really being close and intimate with the moment in which it was made?
1:58.8	And so you went to live there?
2:01.0	I mean, well, I think this isn't the obvious kind of way to get, you know, access to a poem.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Spectator and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.