In his youth, Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) painted like a Romantic poet. The moonlit field of ‘The Harvest Moon’ (1831–32) glows with uncanny significance; for Palmer, as for Tolstoy’s Lieven, the bowed forms of the peasants at the harvest are shadows of divinity. Palmer aged like a Romantic poet too. The long-haired mystic became a High Church Tory: like Coleridge, but without the drinking. ‘The Past for Poets, the Present for Pigs,’ was Palmer’s opinion of England after the Reform Act. But did the poetry of Palmer’s seven-year sojourn in the ‘Valley of Vision’ at Shoreham, Kent also decline into prosaic commerce and pastoral nostalgia?
In Samuel Palmer: Shadows on the Wall, William Vaughan, an expert on the painter, reminds us that our two Palmers were only ever one. Palmer was not a rebel hermit in his Shoreham period. He took to the woods in 1826 with a small inheritance, and returned to the city regularly, as Thoreau was to commute from Walden Pond to Concord.
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