Arrival at Racedown

Arrival at Racedown is an edition variable woodcut included in Adam Nicolson’s The Making of Poetry, which celebrates the creative synergies between the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In this edition, Hammick illustrates Racedown Lodge, a country house deep in rural Somerset, where Coleridge and Wordsworth stayed in June 1797. Hammick depicts Racedown Lodge as a place of seclusion as well as colourful creation, and the inviting path leads to affinities between the two poets. Hammick describes that “this coming together of these two great poets conjured up the beginning of a new poetry” which celebrated the “cerebral relationship between man and his/her natural surroundings”.