Lake poets

Press, 18 October 1980, Page 13

Lake poets

Between 1798 and 1812, the wild, beautiful country of the English Lake District saw an intense, concentrated flowering of literary genius. At its centre was the poet William Wordsworth. born in the Lake District, who lived there almost all his life, with his beloved sister, Dorothy.

Around him, as the genius of the age, gathered other poets and writers — Robert Southey. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. and Thomas de Quincey. They shared the passionate devotion to nature, and the belief in revolution and libertarianism that was sweeping Europe when they were young, at the turn of the nineteenth century. They were the pioneers of Romanticism — the philosophic, artistic, and literary movement that was to engulf European art and literature for years to come and change irrevocably the way in which Western man looked at his world. Out of the rich material of their interwoven lives, the team of the writer, Melvyn Bragg the director, Ken Russell; and the producer Norman Swallow has made two films — “William and Dorothy” and "The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner” — collectively entitled “Clouds Of Glorv.”