In the footsteps of the Romantic poets

Shelley, walking as a boy through his ‘starlight wood’, looking for ghosts and filled with ‘hopes of high talk with the departed dead’, found nothing in reply. Nothing reverberated. The ghosts were silent. But he felt something else non-human: the springtime breezes bringing a sense of the marvellousness of life itself. And so in that instant (or so he says) his mind changed. No more seeking after gothic horrors or pining for the worst; no more listening to the dead. Instead, ‘the spirit of beauty’ descended on him, illuminated him, shaping his life, becoming his goddess, the only force he could imagine that ‘could free/ This world from its dark slavery’.

Fiona Sampson’s account of ten shortish walks, mostly in the southern half of England, are in pursuit of that spirit of Romanticism. She is a poet and scholar, with some of the astringency that comes with both disciplines, so the book is no casual stroll through the Lake District. ‘Romanticism isn’t a cultural artefact,’ she writes. ‘It’s a way for thought to move.’ She is taking her own mind for a walk and, although there is quite a lot about keys, cars, satnavs, dogs and arriving late at rental cottages, the essence is intellectual and fully freighted. The cast list is long and international and the method shifting, subtle and demanding.

A visit to the Quantocks, for example, where in the late 1790s the Wordsworths and Coleridge went walking day after day and night after night, composing the poems that went into the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, turns out to be only obliquely about them and the hills. Their walks, as Coleridge later described them, in ‘which moonlight or sunset was diffused over a known and familiar landscape’, became the foundations of a frame-busting poetry that attended both to ‘the truth of nature’ and ‘the colours of the imagination’ – the raw material, surely, of an exploration of the ‘Romantic countryside’?

But it is not in their company that Sampson walks there.