‘Nether Stoical? Re-Walking Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Quantocks Paths as Post-Pastoral Spaces’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using the methodology of ‘narrative scholarship’ to explore walks today made by Coleridge and the Wordsworths out of Nether Stowey this essay relates their themes to contemporary environmental concerns by thinking of this Quantocks space as ‘post-pastoral’ – a site of both beauty and alarm. This tension is summed up as one between the political stoicism that might emerge from the nether world of the Anthropocene and the well-being of walking this space in times of pandemic. This tension is created in original poems that punctuate the critical and historical enquiry. The scholarship of Jonathan Bate’s Radical Wordsworth (2020) and Adam Nicolson’s The Making of Poetry (2019) is discussed, leading to reference to Samantha Walton’s Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of a Nature Cure (2021). Finally, John Muir’s framing of ‘going out’ for a walk as really ‘going in’ leads to the conclusion that both are needed now.