Year of marvels …

… Nicholas Roe - The Pen & the Spade | Literary Review | Issue 476. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It’s worth reminding ourselves that there was nothing inevitable about any of this. Living day by day, wandering here and there across the hills, none of them had any sense at the time that something extraordinary was happening. Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ came to him by chance at a lonely farmhouse on the edge of Exmoor, a consequence of taking opium ‘to check a dysentery’. Nicolson tinkers with the idea that the poem’s incense-laden pleasure ground might have been based on Alfoxden Park, where ‘Wordsworth Khan’ was ‘pregnant with greatness’ and, by implication, about to produce. As it turned out, Wordsworth would not make any significant poetry until at least the spring of 1798, and arguably not before July, when he wrote ‘Tintern Abbey’.