Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2019 The Making of Poetry Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels Adam Nicolson The Making of Poetry tells the story of how two young men of genius, living on the edge of the Quantock Hills in Somerset, developed a new understanding of the world, of nature and of themselves. Bestselling and award-winning writer Adam Nicolson recreates this 'year of miracles' by embedding himself in the lives they led in Nether Stowey, over 200 years earlier. The sixteen months these poets spent here has a claim to being the most famous moment in the history of English poetry. It has always been portrayed as a time of unbridled delight and overabundant creativity, from which extraordinary poetry emerged. In fact, it was a time of adventure and perplexity, of Wordsworth and Coleridge both ricocheting away from the revolutionary politics of the 1790s in which both had been involved and both to different degrees disappointed. Wordsworth was unheard of, and Coleridge was still under attack in the conservative press. Both were in retreat: from cities; from politics; from gentlemanliness and propriety; from the expected; towards nature; and - in a way that makes this year foundational for modernity - towards the self, its roots, its forms of self-understanding, its fantasies, longings, dreads and ideals. The poetry they produced was astonishing: 'This Lime Tree Bower My Prison', 'Kubla Khan', The Ancient Mariner, 'Christabel', 'Frost at Midnight', 'The Nightingale', Wordsworth's strange and troubling poems in Lyrical Ballads, 'The Idiot Boy', 'The Thorn', the grandeur and beauty of 'Tintern Abbey', and, in his notebooks, the first suggestions of what would become passages in The Prelude.

Adam Nicolson relived the months the poets spent in the Quantocks, immersed in their notebooks and the facsimiles of their rough drafts, lowering himself into the pool of their minds. The poets in this book are not literary monuments but living people, young, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but confronted again and again by the uncertain and contradictory nature of what they understood of the world, of each other and themselves. The driving and revolutionary force of this year was the recognition that poetry was not an aspect of civilisation but a challenge to it; not decorative but subversive, a pleasure beyond politeness. This was not the stuff of drawing rooms. Its purpose was to give a voice to the voiceless, whatever form that voicelessness might have taken: sometimes speaking for the sufferings of the unacknowledged poor; sometimes enshrining the quiet murmuring of a man alone; sometimes reaching for the life of the child in his 'time of unrememberable being', beyond the grasp of adult consciousness; sometimes roaming in the magnificent strangeness of Coleridge's imagined worlds. Wordsworth called poetry 'the first and last of all knowledge': poetry comes both before and after everything that might be said. Its spirit and goal is to exfoliate consciousness, to rescue understanding from the noise and entropy of habit, to find richness and beauty in the hidden or neglected actualities. The strange, unlikely and unfashionable claim of this year stems from that recognition: poetry can remake assumptions, reconfigure the mind and change the world.