Rye Arts Festival The Making of Poetry, Adam Nicolson

The year 1797–1798 is the most famous in English poetry. Out of it came The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as Coleridge’s unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, Wordsworth’s revolutionary verses in Lyrical Ballads and the greatness of Tintern Abbey – his paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding.

Adam Nicolson tells the story of the year that Coleridge, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and an ever-shifting cast of friends, dependants and acolytes spent together in the Quantock Hills in Somerset. What emerges is a portrait of these great figures as young people, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but still in urgent search of the paths towards it.

To research The Making of Poetry, Adam spent a year living in the Quantocks in Somerset where Coleridge and Wordsworth had stayed towards the end of the 1790s when they were young aspiring poets dreaming of a world changed by poetry, so that he could fully explore the genesis of the poems that came from that place and which were to become some of the most famous in the English language.

Adam was accompanied for much of the time by the artist Tom Hammick, who made woodcuts from fallen timber from the trees under which Wordsworth and Coleridge had sat with friends and family. In the second half of this event the artist joins Adam to screen his woodcuts and discuss the nature and foundations of the Romantic revolution.

This event will be hosted by best-selling writer Alex Preston.

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 most recent book, Seabird’s Cry was picked as Waterstone’s Book of the Month and won the prestigious Wainwright Prize for nature writing. He has written and presented many television series and lives on a farm in Sussex.

Tom Hammick was the winner of the V&A Prize at the International Print Biennale, Newcastle, UK in 2016, and the print Violetta and Alfredo’s Escape, 2016, was acquired by the V&A. Hammick has worked in many major public and corporate collections including the British Museum (Collection of Prints and Drawings), Victoria & Albert Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Collection of Prints and Drawings), Deutsche Bank, Yale Centre for British Art and The Library of Congress, Washington DC.