The English countryside is full of grand stately homes surrounded by large landscaped estates. Once exclusively private, today many are struggling to survive, as a result they have had to call in bodies like the National Trust and English Heritage in order to survive. A favoured few have become sucessful places of tourism. The tables have been turned!
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John Keats greatly admired Wordsworth’s poetry and called it ‘poetry of the heart’. These 33 Duddon Sonnets reveal Wordsworth’s heart for this insignificant, forgotten river. It was one of his favourites since his youth.
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Landscape becomes alive to us when its beauty fills us with personal delight and a fulfilling sense of wonder. This was certainly true of 19th century country writer Richard Jefferies. For him, his own native Wiltshire was his ‘beloved land’.
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Did William Wordsworth ‘wander lonely as a cloud‘ through the Lakeland Fells? Was he the solitary poetic genius writing some of the greatest nature poetry in the English language? His sister Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal reveals a slightly different picture.
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A Listening Heart 