by Steven Matthews and Paul Whitty  Steven Matthews, poet, and Paul Whitty, composer, share some insight into their exhibition ‘Sounds of Wordsworth’, which was on display at the Wordsworth Trust throughout June 2017. This exhibition presented work from an on-going and evolving project to ‘map’ sounds in the landscape, as they continue at the sites […]

by Jeffrey Peters   In 1973, Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence described the struggle of the Romantic poets to find a voice in a world dominated by Paradise Lost, but he did little to discuss the legacy of John Milton’s lesser poems. Just as the sun overwhelms the twinkle of distant stars, so too did […]

by Tiffany Francis   We had gorged on sticky ginger loaf until, feeling plump, we stepped out into the garden to admire the garlic mustard and bluebells drooped in the April air. Through the tall grasses we followed a pathway to the back of the garden where Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself sat reluctantly beneath that […]

by Sarah Doyle   As my husband, Allen Ashley, and I have each written a couple of articles for the Wordsworth Trust’s blog, we’d been invited to Rydal Hall in the Grasmere area of the Lake District, along with other blog contributors, for a weekend of talks, walks, and all things Wordsworth, kindly organised by […]

by Ellen O’Neill   “It has been estimated that at the time of Keats’ death, the combined sales of the three books published during his lifetime amounted to 200 copies.”  Andrew Motion, The Guardian, 23 January 2010   Yet here we are, two hundred years later, and the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association is running an international prize for […]

by Allen Ashley   This part of the Lake District – Grasmere and its environs – has lately rebranded itself as “Wordsworth Country”. And we are told literacy is dying out! Not while there is culture to be gleaned. So, here we all are: writers for The Wordsworth Trust’s Romanticism Blog, gathered for a weekend […]

by Nick Smith   “I have fifty days to live …” So begins the ‘Hoggblog’ in my novel, Drowned Hogg Day, just published by Justin Roseland Books. My narrator/blogger, Alex Hogg, is convinced that he will drown on 30th December 2016 and he sets himself the task of chronicling the last fifty days of his […]

by Rodger Kamenetz At the beginning of the nineteenth century, William Wordsworth, who was keenly interested in psychology, began looking into the power of images to heal psychological damage. His quest was quite personal, in fact it was a matter of life and death to him. Like many young English people in his generation he […]