Gavin D. Smith

I bought this lovely book in Sam Read the bookseller in Grasmere on my recent holiday. It looks at the lives and poems and other works of: William and Dorothy Wordsworth; Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his less well known son, (David) Hartley Coleridge; Robert Southey; and Thomas de Quincey, tracing their interrelationships, and how the landscape of the Lakes was reflected in their works, richly illustrated with photographs. I was particularly taken by a couple of poignant poems Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in the early 1830s as she was progressively succumbing to the mental illness that blighted the last two decades of her life, Thoughts on My Sick Bed and When Shall I Tread Your Garden Path? A lovely book for anyone interested in the Lakes or the Romantic poets.

I must just record one howler, in a photo caption on page 12 which mentions a visit by John Keats (not a Lakes poet) to the Castle Rigg stone circle in "1882", 61 years after his tragically young death from tuberculosis at the age of 25.… (altro)