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William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Adam Nicolson 2019
Cover illustration © Wordsworth in Darkness by Tom Hammick
All woodcuts photographed by Leigh Simpson
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008126490
Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008126483
Version: 2020-01-13
For Tom Hammick
On the island of his self
The making of verses, the making of works, occurs in the edges of your life, of your time, in your late nights or early mornings … And my words, the words for me, seem to have more nervous energy when they are touching territory that I know, that I live with … I can lay my hand on [a place] and know it. And the words, the words come alive and get a kind of personality when they are involved with it for me. The landscape is image. It’s almost an element to work with, as much as it is an object of admiration.
Seamus Heaney, speaking to Patrick Garland on Poets on Poetry, BBC 1, October 1973
Contents
1 Cover
2 Title Page
3 Copyright
4 Dedication
5 Epigraph
6 Contents
7 1 Following
8 2 Meeting – June 1797
9 3 Searching June 1797
10 4 Settling – July 1797
11 5 Walking – July and August 1797
12 6 Informing – July and August 1797
13 7 Dreaming – September and October 1797
14 8 Voyaging – November 1797
15 9 Diverging – December 1797 and January 1798
16 10 Mooning – January and February 1798
17 11 Remembering – February 1798
18 12 Emerging – March 1798
19 13 Polarising – March 1798
20 14 Delighting – April, May and June 1798
21 15 Authoring – June 1798
22 16 Arriving – July 1798
23 17 Leaving – August and September 1798
24 Acknowledgements
25 A Note on Tom Hammick’s Pictures
26 Notes
27 Bibliography
28 Index
29 Also by Adam Nicolson
30 About the Publisher
LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter
