The country’s soaring peaks, quiet valleys, and rugged coastlines have provided comfort to some of literature’s most brilliant yet tormented minds.
From John Clare’s tender depictions of rural life to Sylvia Plath’s haunting verses on the Yorkshire moors, these poets found both inspiration and escape in nature. While five of them are well-known, one – Violet Jacob – remains an overlooked voice of poetic sorrow.
Here’s how Britain’s wild landscapes shaped their words.
British poets inspired by the countryside
John Clare
John Clare (1793–1864) was a rare thing in the 19th century: a poet from the ‘labouring classes’ whose work actually found recognition. Sadly, ‘the Northamptonshire peasant poet’ was also prone to a mental illness that saw him spend the last third of his life in asylums.
A poverty-stricken young man, he wrote his first collection – Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery – to earn money to keep his parents from destitution. His country upbringing gave him a keen eye for the rhythms of nature, as seen in his poem 'Hares at Play'.
The birds are gone to bed, the cows are still,
And sheep lie panting on each old mole-hill;
And underneath the willow's gray-green bough,
Like toil a-resting, lies the fallow plough.
The timid hares throw daylight fears away
On the lane's road to dust and dance and play,
Then dabble in the grain by naught deterred
To lick the dew-fall from the barley's beard;
Then out they sturt again and round the hill
Like happy thoughts dance, squat, and loiter still,
Till milking maidens in the early morn
Jingle their yokes and sturt them in the corn;
Through well-known beaten paths each nimbling hare
Sturts quick as fear, and seeks its hidden lair.
Several other of Clare’s volumes met with acclaim, but sales dwindled until he could no longer support his wife and seven children. The poet was then beset by bizarre delusions. Fearless of mockery, he first claimed he was a prize fighter, then Lord Byron, then Shakespeare. The asylum beckoned. He continued to write poems while confined, including one, published in 1848 – ‘I am!’ – that’s considered among his best.
Find out more about John Clare: The cottage where he found his voice, so to speak, now contains a museum dedicated to his memory. Clare Cottage is in the village of Helpston in Peterborough.
Violet Jacob
The First World War broke the hearts of countless mothers. One of those mothers was the Scottish poet Violet Jacob (1863–1946), who one day in 1916 received the dread news that her only child, Harry, had been killed at The Somme.
No red poppy would ever bring him back and she was wracked by grief for the rest of her life, often pouring her sadness into her poetry.
One of her best known poems is ‘The Wild Geese’, a conversation with the north wind written in her habitual Scots vernacular. It dwells on a yearning to be home in the countryside she loved. Here's its final stanza.
And far abune the Angus straths I saw the wild geese flee,
A lang, lang skein o’ beatin’ wings wi’ their heids towards the sea,
And aye their cryin’ voices trailed ahint them on the air –
O Wind, hae maircy, haud yer whisht, for I daurna listen mair!
Find out more about Violet Jacob: Jacob, a great-grandaughter of William IV, was born in the rather grand and extravagantly baroque House of Dun. Visit the House of Dun in autumn or winter and you may see the thousands of wild geese that flock to the estate each year.
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Dylan Thomas
A Child’s Christmas in Wales, the play for voices Under Milk Wood, and the call to his readers to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” – these are what have made romantic poet Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) a legendary figure far beyond his native Wales.
Sadly, Thomas’ reputation as a lover of the bottle was hard-earned. He began drinking seriously at 17, possibly as an affectation, and simply never stopped. His constant money troubles and tempestuous marriage no doubt fuelled his alcoholism. A force of nature himself, it’s perhaps not surprising that Dylan was inspired by the forces of nature. His poem ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, written when he was just 19, is full of nature’s boundless restless energy:
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto
my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
Find out more about Dylan Thomas: For some insights into the poet’s troubled life you can visit his birthplace at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea and the wonderfully picturesque Dylan Thomas Boathouse at Laugharne where his writing shed enjoys exhilarating views over three estuaries.
Sylvia Plath
The American poet (1932–1963) carved a new furrow in the field of English-language poetry with her brutal and unrelenting honesty when writing about her depression.
Sadly, although her insights into the illness gave rise to some of the 20th century’s most striking poetry, the mental distress it caused her was to prove her undoing.
At least she was able to take some solace from nature. The young poet once wrote to her mother, ‘I cannot stop writing poems!… They come from the vocabulary of woods and animals and earth.’ In a verse called ‘Wuthering Heights’ that recalled visits to Top Withens (which we included in our round-up of the best literary trails in Britain) – the lonely ruined farmhouse on the moors near Haworth in Yorkshire that inspired Emily Brontë – she wrote:
There is no life higher than
the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and
the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
Find out more about Sylvia Plath: Plath packed a good deal into her short life, writing three children’s books, a novel (The Bell Jar), a play, a host of journals, a thesis about the work of Dostoyevsky (posthumously published in 1989), and, of course, the poetry that made her name. As she once wrote: “Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it…”
Edward Thomas
The folklore that clings stubbornly to Edward Thomas (1878–1917) is that he was a war poet. This is principally because he was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917.
However, he actually penned very little poetry about war. Once he turned his hand to poetry at the suggestion of his great friend, Robert Frost, his principal subject was the English countryside. But underneath, all was not well. Thomas considered that he was not like other human beings in that he could not love. He loathed his domestic life and suffered periods of acute depression, perhaps not helped by an addiction to laudanum.
In his very darkest times, he would take off for long walks in the countryside, hikes that in turn inspired his poetry.
Although he started writing verses while living in the Hampshire village of Steep, he is best known for his well-loved poem about Adlestrop, a somnolent Cotswolds railway station (so sleepy indeed it was later closed). The four short stanzas chart a brief halt made by Thomas’ train in June 1914. This is the final stanza:
And for that minute a
blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As on the famous occasion when Coleridge’s flow was interrupted by the notorious (though possibly fictional) ‘person from Porlock’, the poet could often be found in a laudanum-induced haze.
The co-founder of the Romantic movement first used the opium-based drug for medicinal reasons as a young man but soon became reliant on it. Despite repeated attempts and professional help, he was never able to give up the drug with which his name is fated to be associated for evermore.
Coleridge (1772–1834) loved the Lake District. He made the first recorded sporting climb in history when he undertook a somewhat foolhardy nine-day expedition from Greta Hall in Keswick, making the first-known ascent of England’s highest mountain, Scafell Pike.
Though best known for his ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, other poems such as ‘Frost at Midnight’ hint at the many midnights Coleridge spent roaming about in the midst of nature.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds
Find out more about Samuel Taylor Coleridge: For a taste of Coleridge, visit Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset, where he lived from 1796 to 1799 and wrote his most famous works.
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Main image: Welsh poet Dylan Thomas/Getty
