Poetry and espionage …

… A Communion of Pathless Solitudes: On Adam Nicolson’s “The Making of Poetry.” (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As Coleridge would put it, they’d snapped the “squeaking baby-trumpet of Sedition.” Still, Nicolson makes the case that, insofar as poetry can pursue political ends by other means, “Wordsworth and Coleridge were moving faster and further than the most famous radical in England,” John Thelwall. For though their activist friend experienced “failed encounters between the champion of the poor and the poor themselves,” the Somerset poets “were wanting to understand them as people,” not “as a political problem.”