William Hazlitt recorded many peculiarities of his teenage idol Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among which was the habit of walking zig-zag fashion in front of his companion, “unable to keep on in a straight line” while endlessly, brilliantly, talking. Unlike William Wordsworth, Coleridge was said to prefer composing his verses while on uneven ground, “or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood”, terrain he considered more likely than a smooth, uninterrupted surface to foster the making of poetry.
Such descriptions might prompt scepticism, and not only because Hazlitt was writing many years after his first meeting with Coleridge. They seem too conveniently to display, with the benefit of hindsight, what were soon to become glaringly obvious fault lines in temperament between Coleridge and Wordsworth; between a mind that was capriciously rangy, self-destructive, ill disciplined and a mind that was determined, judicious, self-possessed. “The style of Coleridge and myself,” as Wordsworth told a friend, “would not assimilate.” They certainly made an odd-looking pair: the gaunt, intensely purposeful Wordsworth quaintly kitted out in stripy pantaloons, and Coleridge, inclined to flab and prone to distraction, with jutting brows, thick lips and bad teeth.
In the late 1790s, the period in which their writing partnership blossomed into Lyrical Ballads (1798), creative differences between the two men were just beginning to crystallise. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy had moved to the Quantocks in Somerset to be close to Coleridge, who with his wife and children occupied a damp and musty cottage (he called it a hovel) at Nether Stowey from 1797 to 1799. Others came to join them in what Adam Nicolson aptly describes, in his retelling of their annus mirabilis, as a refuge-cum-laboratory. Coleridge and the Wordsworths passed their time scurrying between one another’s houses, busily observing, thinking, talking and jotting down ideas and impressions. Often heading out for nocturnal rambles, they took for inspiration the landscapes and people around them. But as Wordsworth increasingly sought to dedicate himself to quarrying his memory, and argued for a conception of poetry as faithfully committed to the palpable truths of the real world, Coleridge strove all the more ardently for an apprehension of the divine and supernatural. Each came to define himself against the other; both of them were often in pain.
From this sometimes agonised recognition of difference sprang two of the most arresting and celebrated English poems ever written: Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”. While the mariner is condemned to repeat his penitential tale to strangers who do not want to listen to him and who try in vain to escape the narration of his crime, it is a precondition of “Tintern Abbey” that its auditor, a “dear, dear Sister”, will attend to the speaker with love, delight and sympathy.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the poems included in Lyrical Ballads stage arguments or failed encounters between two people who cannot understand one another. Garrulous or obtuse figures insistently rehearse their perceptions of the world, while their auditors with equal determination fail to be persuaded. Take the gentleman speaker of “We Are Seven”, who wants to convince an eight-year-old girl sitting in a churchyard that, because two of her siblings are dead, they shouldn’t numerically count in a list of her brothers and sisters. He cannot persuade the child to understand his undeniable logic – that she is now one of five offspring, not seven – while she cannot get him to accept an entirely different way of conceiving things and people (not that she is bothered by what he thinks). It is not that one of these speakers is Wordsworth and the other is Coleridge; rather that the poem, one in a collection of works born of extraordinarily fertile disagreement, makes room for two contradictory points of view and leaves them to co-exist without resolution.
Sometimes alone and sometimes in company, Nicolson sets out in the footsteps of the two poets and their associates to discover, by familiarising himself with the surroundings in which they lived and moved, where their work came from. He pays minute attention to physical textures and seasonal changes, weaving into his lyrical and rhapsodic descriptions of the natural world passages of biographical and critical analysis. There is also plentiful testimony from their contemporaries as to the suspiciously radical character of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle. His sad conclusion is that the poets’ great “hope for integration, for the general understanding that a love of nature needed to be intimate with a love of self and a love of man”, has failed. But his book remains a witness to the rewards of immersion in a particular place; to the realisation that our identity and wellbeing are bound up with the rhythms of nature.
A word must be said about one of the most striking features of this book: its numerous illustrations by the artist Tom Hammick. Many of these woodcuts were created using fallen timber from the park at Alfoxden where the Wordsworth siblings lived. Populated by blobby, generally faceless figures, Hammick’s brightly coloured landscapes stand in an uncertain relationship to the text that surrounds them, and indeed to Wordsworth and Coleridge. They look rather like album covers from the 1970s or 80s. In a book that partly celebrates inaptness and mismatching, perhaps such incongruity is fitting.
• The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels is published by William Collins (RRP £25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
