William Wordsworth’s life is the foundational version of the nature cure. After a disrupted, troubled childhood, sent to live with unsympathetic relations after his mother’s death, a chaotically disaffected time at Cambridge and a muddled youth, fathering a child on a woman he loved but scarcely knew in France, Wordsworth refused all his family’s urgings to a nice career in the church or the law. Instead, he stumbled towards the kind of poetry he wanted to write and looked, with his sister Dorothy, for a sense of home in Dorset and Somerset. Finally, he returned to the Lake District, and in December 1799 came to Dove Cottage and Grasmere, where nature felt like the parent he longed for and, surrounded by his coterie of women supporters, the years of agony could be over.

The irony, of course, is that the poetry he is largely remembered for – the extraordinary, homeless voice of the poems in Lyrical Ballads, the sudden surge of grandeur in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the first self-reshaping versions of The Prelude – were written before the cure was applied. Wordsworth’s greatness is tied to unhappiness, and to a sense that a longing for connection to nature, rather than the connection itself, is the fuel of what he has to say.

Esther Rutter’s memoir of her year as an intern at Dove Cottage piggybacks on Wordsworth’s life story. Her account mirrors his own: an unhappy, gifted childhood, with parenting that was not ideal, followed by an Oxford degree and a year in Japan. There she had a frightening breakdown, which left her unable to see a way forward. The prospect of a placement as a guide at Dove Cottage was both alluring and alarming. She dared to try it out and her gradual absorption in the community there of writers and Wordsworthians brought her increasing self-esteem, some confidence about who she was and what she might be, entrancement with the landscape and, finally, love, marriage, children and happiness.

QOSHE - Books / The healing power of Grasmere - Adam Nicolson
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Books / The healing power of Grasmere

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24.03.2024

William Wordsworth’s life is the foundational version of the nature cure. After a disrupted, troubled childhood, sent to live with unsympathetic relations after his mother’s death, a chaotically disaffected time at Cambridge and a muddled youth, fathering a child on a woman he loved but scarcely knew in France, Wordsworth refused all his family’s urgings to a nice career in the church or the law. Instead, he stumbled towards the kind of poetry he wanted to write and looked, with his........

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