Making of Poetry
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’; Coleridge’s unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood; Wordsworth’s revolutionary verses and paeans to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. In short, a poetry that sought to remake the world.
Adam Nicolson is a prize-winning writer of many books on history, nature and the countryside including Sea Room, God’s Secretaries, The Gentry and the acclaimed The Mighty Dead. His 2017 book, Seabird’s Cry was picked as Waterstones Book of the Month in Scotland and won the prestigious Wainwright Prize for nature writing and the Jeffries Prize. He is the winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award and the British Topography Prize. He has written and presented many television series and lives on a farm in Sussex.