Authors Electric

 An Introduction to Romantic Poetry This month I was completely out of ideas but then I remembered Elizabeth Kay's excellent piece about poetry on AuthorsElectric last month. I looked back on the subject in my files and there I found A n Introduction to Romantic Poetry, relating to a course I taught in Northampton not so very long ago. I was also reminded of a fantastic group of poetry students, some of whom I still meet up with on Zoom. We read through this introduction together at the beginning of the course, breaking off to discuss various points, such as my visit to Christchurch Priory below in 1970, so here goes... Christchurch Priory   ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven’, so wrote Wordsworth in his 13 book poem,  The Prelude , which was subtitled,  Growth of a Poet’s   Mind , and which wasn’t published in its entirety until after his death in 1850. The lines are about the French Revolution and in 1791 Wordswor...

          I n my last blog, I suggested that it was time I stopped faffing around and got on with some proper writing.  So I’ve done just that and have now passed (I hope) the point of no return with The Second Man From Porlock ,  my latest attempt  to  get the  old, failed novel about Samuel Taylor Coleridge right at last and out of my system.   STC.   The man himself           Trying to write novels centred round real people presents many difficulties.  They aren’t biographies: conversely, they ca n’t be pure fiction.   It takes a braver writer than I am to dare even to think of writing a book like  Milton in America , Peter Ackroyd’s wonderful ‘What if?’ novel, which turns what might well have been Milton’s fate into something which actually happens.   This makes for a stunning piece of literary and historical understanding, not ...