Making of Poetry

The year in the late 1790s that Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy spent together in the Quantock Hills, is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan' as well as Wordsworth's 'Lyrical Ballads' and the greatness of 'Tintern Abbey'. The idea that these poems came from this place, and that only by experiencing the physical circumstances of the year, in all weathers and all seasons, can the genesis of the poetry start to be understood.