Hello and welcome to the third episode of The Lives of Stonehenge, this short podcast series from the London Review of Books with me, Rosemary Hill.

Over the four episodes, we're looking at what people have thought about Stonehenge for the past few hundred years,

why it's come to matter so much in so many different ways in the story of this country.

In the first two episodes, we were in the 17th and 18th centuries with the architects, Inigo Jones and John Wood, who were inspired by Stonehenge to transform British Town Planning, and with the antiquaries, John Aubrey, William Stucley, who pioneered modern methods of archaeology as they tried to work out what Stonehenge is and why it's there.

Well, today we're moving towards the 19th century and have to imagine ourselves again roaming

across Salisbury Plain, this time with the eyes and the mind of a romantic.

To see how, for the likes of Wordsworth, Blake, Turner and others, Stonehenge became a gloomy, menacing,

richly psychological presence, a scene lit by intense personal and political drama against

the background of the French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars, crowded more than ever

with mysterious and often violent druids. Joining me in this uncanny landscape, I'm delighted to say, is Seamus Perry,

Professor of English at Oxford, who regular LRB podcast listeners will know well for his

contributions with Mark Ford to the Close Reading series.

Well, welcome, Seamus, and tell us what was it that Stonehenge did to the romantic imagination.

Well, thank you. The way you've characterized the antiquarian writers of the 18th century,

I suppose summarizes exactly the opposite of what the romantic poets and other writers saw

in Stonehenge and in standing stone circles more generally.

They're absolutely not interested in speculating in a historical way about the origins of these structures.

They become important for Wordsworth and for Blake and for other people who we might touch on as incidents within the story of an individual

consciousness within individual subjective life. So there's a big switch in a way between the

things you were talking about in your last podcast, which were attempts, however cranky they

may seem now to establish the objective truth about Stonehenge, a big shift away from that

to Stonehenge becoming a subjective phenomenon within the life of an individual poet.

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