The healing power of Grasmere

William Wordsworth’s life is the foundational version of the nature cure. After a disrupted, troubled childhood, sent to live with unsympathetic relations after his mother’s death, a chaotically disaffected time at Cambridge and a muddled youth, fathering a child on a woman he loved but scarcely knew in France, Wordsworth refused all his family’s urgings to a nice career in the church or the law. Instead, he stumbled towards the kind of poetry he wanted to write and looked, with his sister Dorothy, for a sense of home in Dorset and Somerset. Finally, he returned to the Lake District, and in December 1799 came to Dove Cottage and Grasmere, where nature felt like the parent he longed for and, surrounded by his coterie of women supporters, the years of agony could be over.

The irony, of course, is that the poetry he is largely remembered for – the extraordinary, homeless voice of the poems in Lyrical Ballads, the sudden surge of grandeur in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the first self-reshaping versions of The Prelude – were written before the cure was applied.