Simon Armitage has spoken of his high regard for William Wordsworth, and how the Romantic poet “pressed the reset button on poetry”, rescuing it “from something that was about to become a very elitist and aloof practice … to make it of public interest once again”.

The poet laureate was talking on Radio 4 with Roger McGough, presenter of Poetry, Please. This year marks the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth. Armitage said that since the laureateship he had been writing a lot “about nature and the environment”, which was “central to my way of life, where I grew up” in the village of Marsden in West Yorkshire.  He spoke of Wordsworth’s poem ‘Michael’, which he read at school, but now can’t look at without welling up, as his father is 84, around the same age as Michael in the poem.

He said he had been writing “a little piece” about his allegiance and debt to Wordsworth, “in terms of him building on those traditional cornerstones of poetry, storytelling, narrative, rhyme, pattern, metre … he finds these clear channels of language within the language”.  

Armitage added: “I’m not sure that poetry can ever be meaningful to every single person”. But Wordsworth succeeded in “reminding us that it could be very powerful to non-specialist readers”.  

In other selections, he chose Thomas Hardy’s ‘A Light Snow-Fall after Frost’, describing him as “a great scene setter in English poetry”, and Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, with its biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, and devastating final lines: “But the old man would not so, but slew his son, / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.”

He also picked out a passage from Shakespeare’s Richard II, as well as poems by Alison Brackenbury, Lorna Goodison, and Shivanee Ramlochan. Armitage also read a section of his translation of a medieval poem, ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’, and conceded that its subject-matter was fairly down to earth. He described it as a “ ‘comedy debate’ poem … a right old barney in a wood”. Its lines include references to people going to a place “to squat and pee … where people bend and bare their rear”, and conclude: “To blame the fledgling is unjust / it toilets when and where it must.”

Writing about nature and the environment, indeed.

You can listen to the programme here

PHOTOGRAPH: GREG FREEMAN / WRITE OUT LOUD