The Pen and the Spade

Day by day Dorothy Wordsworth celebrated spring’s arrival in her ‘Alfoxden Journal’ while her brother and Coleridge wrote the poems that would make up one of the world’s most famous books, Lyrical Ballads. Nicolson tinkers with the idea that the poem’s incense-laden pleasure ground might have been based on Alfoxden Park, where ‘Wordsworth Khan’ was ‘pregnant with greatness’ and, by implication, about to produce. Coleridge, poet of dreams and shadows, of ‘influxes/Of shapes and sounds’, felt himself ‘infused’ by a living universe, whereas Wordsworth, as solitary as the Bicknoller Post, embedded himself at the centre of his poems and his world.

Source: literaryreview.co.uk