On Grasmere as a centre for poetry
This year it will be twenty years since I left London and moved north to start a phd at Lancaster University in collaboration with the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere. A large part of my doctoral research was concerned not only with the poetry of the past – how Grasmere came to be Grasmere – but with the poetry of the present – with all those who followed in the footsteps of the lake poets. I gave multiple conference papers on this topic from 2007-2015, and various lectures on the ongoing influence of the lake poets, often with a version of the title of this post, also the title of the seventh chapter of my thesis.
It comes from William Wordsworth’s tricksily self-declared pastoral ‘Michael’, in which claims he retells the narrative of the poem:
For the delight of a few natural hearts,
And with yet fonder feeling, for the sake
Of youthful Poets, who among these Hills
Will be my second Self when I am gone.
These lines were taken as inspiration and justification for a poet-in-residence scheme based at The Wordsworth Trust, which brought dozens of poets to stay and write in Grasmere from the early 1990s onwards. In papers and in my thesis I wrote about the residency as cross-temporal creative collaboration, enabling an extension of Wordsworth’s ecopoetic project, despite, in some cases, the poets’ resistance to this very notion.
This idea of youthful poets as a second Wordsworthian self became a central part of my research, and my thinking about what Grasmere was doing in contemporary culture. I began to gather poetry about and from the Lake District during that time, something I’ve never stopped doing. In 2023 I was asked to share some of the poems with a reading group visiting Grasmere, which meant I thought I well prepared when, a few months later, I was asked by Candlestick Press to edit a Ten Poems from the Lake District pamphlet, which eventually came out in July 2025.
In the introduction to that pamphlet I write:
The Lake District has been inseparable from poetry for over two centuries, since the critic Francis Jeffrey identified a suspicious ‘sect of poets’ with alarming anti-establishment tendencies in both poetry and politics haunting the lakes in 1802 (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey). When he declared this ‘lake school of poetry’ mercifully ‘pretty nearly extinct’ in 1822 he could not have dreamt they would become so widely renowned that in 2021 global superstar Taylor Swift would be singing about emulating their rural retreat, reframing the lakes as a ‘poet district’ where artists may flee a busy world that is killing them, whether in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first.
Like Taylor Swift and many generations of writers before her, from LM Montgomery to Michael Ondaatje, I came to the Lake District because of the Lake Poets, though to study their legacies for doctoral research, not to weep on their graves. The Lake District I moved to in 2007 was a place overspilling with poets and poetry. I was delighted to find the literary history of the Lake District fed thriving contemporary creative communities as well the never-ending stream of visiting writers and writing visitors.
Polly Atkin (ed.) Ten Poems From The Lake District (Candlestick Press, 2025)
The final chapter of my book Recovering Dorothy (Saraband, 2021) also talks about that creative community I found when I moved here. I wanted to include it in that book not just because I think Dorothy’s creative legacies are important and even more understudied than Williams, but because I never published the academic monograph of my thesis I hoped to (partly because I simple did not have the time and energy to give to it when I was also trying to hold down an academic job, partly because by its nature it perpetually needed to be updated). In my thesis, handed in in December 2010, I described the Wordworth Trust as ‘a global tourist attraction, contemporary arts organisation, archive, scholarly resource, and hub of a community’, writing of how ‘it offers a distinctive combination of functions and meanings which memorialise and reiterate its past, at the same time as working to create its future.’ Those words record a place that is materially different now, and functions differently, but still has exactly the same potential to feed contemporary creativity.
The poets I found in community here twenty years ago included poets-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust; poets who came to read at the summer season of poetry readings run by the Wordsworth Trust; local writers from Cumbria and more from all over the North who came to events here; and writers who, like me, were given this extraordinary access to poetry of the present and the past by volunteering at the trust (who include Esther Morgan, Eileen Pun, Penny Boxall, Emily Hasler, Rebecca Watts). Then there are the poets who have worked at or for the trust since it began, from those who have worked and lived on site, like Pete Laver, Sally Woodhead and Mark Ward, to those who have and continue to do freelance teaching and facilitating work for the trust, like Kim Moore, Clare Shaw and Katie Hale, or volunteer facilitators like Ilse Pedler (who currently coordinates Dove Cottage Poets).
I gave so many papers over my attempted academic career about these connections because I couldn’t understand how so little critical attention seem to have been paid to Grasmere’s role in supporting and encouraging new poetry.
I was constantly dismayed by the dismissing of Romanticism as both a-political and fusty in some way. I started one paper I presented on this in 2015 with a quote from an endorsement for an anthology of north-western English poetry released in 2013, in which Daisy Goodwin declared: ‘Lake Poets are history; if you really want to take the poetic pulse of the North West, read Sculpted, a salty sassy anthology of England’s top left bits’. This identified the Lake District with a pastoral past, an out-dated notion of Romantic poets and poetics seemingly disconnected from the urban centres of twenty-first century living. It implied any poetry associated with the area would be irrelevant; redundant; not sassy or vital. This seemed to be a commonly held view I found repeated over and over in different ways in those years. In 2010 I had started trying to get funding for a project I called C21st Field, which would look at rural creativity and the lakes as a place where everything – past, present, future – the hyperlocal and the global – collided. I never got any funding, from any of the organisations I applied to, as is so often the way.
That 2015 paper was for a conference about the New/Next Generation Poets. I talked that day about how one of the New Generation Poets (Bill Herbert), four of the Next Generation Poets (Paul Farley, Jacob Polley, Owen Sheers and Henry Shukman ) and three of the Next Generation 2014 Poets (Sean Borodale, Emma Jones, Helen Mort) held residencies at the Wordsworth Trust at formative points in their poetic development. As far as a glance through past poetry programmes showed, from 2001 to 2015 alone at least 13 of the New Generation poets read their poetry at The Wordsworth Trust (John Burnside and Sarah Maguire additionally were booked but cancelled); 16 of the Next Generation 2004, and 12 of the Next Generation 2014. Some of these poets developed deep connections with the Wordsworth Trust and with Grasmere through repeated visits and correspondence.
Then there are the many poets who visit Grasmere for other reasons – from the Canada Council trip in 1978 which brought Michael Ondaatje, Earl Birney and PK Page to Dove Cottage – to those just on holiday, or those brought here by their own research or literary pilgrimages. In an extension of the participant-observer role I was placed in during my doctoral research, in 2015 my partner Will and I brought Karen Solie, Megan Fernandes and Wanda O’Connor here, as part of a Canada-Lancaster Knowledge Exchange project we had funding for. We were recreating the connections we’d studied from the past.
I’m always thinking about these connections, but a few things have thrown them into the front of my mind again recently, from re-finding notes from my thesis, meeting an academic from Finland who similarly gathers Lake District poems, to the publication of my third poetry collection this month.
Today I was looking for a list of poets-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust and realised the only one I could find was my own, from the appendix to my thesis, which I’d last updated before the long residencies ended at the end of 2014. I struggled to find details of the more recent poetry residencies at Wordsworth Grasmere from my desk in Grasmere, ironically enough, now google is no longer the oracle it was. I’ve filled in what I could remember but I also know I’ll be missing far more. I’d love to gather knowledge from all of you. Who am I missing? Have I got dates wrong? What other poets worked in Grasmere – either at the Wordworth Trust or elsewhere entirely – who I don’t know about? I’m missing I’m sure a lot of information about more recent interns and staff at the museum who have written and published poetry. I’ve included a couple in this list, but I’m sure there are more I do not know about or who I’ve lost in the labyrinths of my foggy brain.
I haven’t included the recent short residencies at Rydal Mount here yet, but I will, as they become even more relevant since the announcement of its acquisition by the Wordsworth Trust.
Likewise, I haven’t made a list of all the poets who came to read here over the twenty years of the summer reading programme, or at any of the festivals that used to run here (the winter Arts and Books Festival, and the Dorothy Wordsworth Festival of Women’s Writing), or the many poets who have come here for short visits to run workshops. I hope these lists will keep growing as a record and keep growing into the future too.
Poets- and artists- in-residence at The Wordsworth Trust
Single-month Residencies (2017-2023)
Suji Kwock Kim (June 2023)
Rommi Smith (September 2022)
Katie Hale (2019)
Matt Howard (2019)
Nick Makoha (2019)
Holly Corfield Carr (2017)
Harry Man (2017)
David Tait (2017
Residencies (1990 – 2014)
Zaffar Kunial (2014)
Judy Brown (2013)
Carola Luther (2012) [residency became 10 months from 2012]
Helen Mort (2010-2011)
Emma Jones (2009-2010)
Adam O’Riordan (2008-9) [residency limited to a year by funding agreement]
John Hartley Williams (2007-8) [3 months over winter]
Kate Davis (2007)
Lucy Gunning (2007)
Judith Dean (2006-7)
Neil Rollinson (2005-7)
Hamish Robinson (2005)
Hadrian Pigott (2005)
Rebecca O’Connor (2005)
Matthew Hollis (2005-6)
Sarah Hall (2005)
Dan Sturgis (2004)
Helen Farish (2004-5)
David Esslemont (2004-5)
Christopher Bucklow (2004)
Owen Sheers (2003-4)
Henry Shukman (2002-3)
Simon Morley (2002-3)
Jack Mapanje (2002-4)
Jacob Polley (2002)
Paul Farley (2000-2)
Sean Borodale (1999) [actually a Northern Arts fellow]
Matthew Clegg (1999-2001)
Bill Herbert (1997)
Gerard Benson (1994-6)
Poets who work(ed) at the Wordsworth Trust and live(d) in Grasmere
Pete Laver
Sally Woodhead
Mark Ward
Esther Morgan
Polly Atkin
Emily Hasler
Penny Boxall
Rebecca Watts
Tavia Panton
Jessica Sneddon
Notable Mentions
Seamus Heaney – long standing connection, opened the Jerwood Centre in 2005. Made an amazing documentary William Wordsworth Lived Here: Seamus Heaney at Dove Cottage, dir. by David Wilson (BBC, 1974).
Fleur Adcock (1977-78) – writer-in-residence at Charlotte Mason College, Ambleside. Resulting pamphlet Below Loughrigg (Bloodaxe Books, 1978).
Neil Astley – started Bloodaxe Books in 1978 whilst working for Robert Woof fundraising for the Wordsworth Trust in its Newcastle University office:
‘When the day spent working in the cause of William Wordsworth was over, my evenings belonged to the living poets as the Dove Cottage office became the administrative base of Bloodaxe books.’
(Neil Astley, In Person: 30 Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), p.241.)
Simon Armitage – annual readings in Grasmere from 2007 – present.
Shadow Dispatches 