Scholarcast 37: 'At the Dying Atlantic's Edge': Norman Nicholson and the Cumbrian Coast

UCD Scholarcast - Series 7: The Literatures and Cultures of the Irish Sea

This lecture is concerned with the mid-twentieth-century Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson. Far from being a late Lake District poet', Nicholson is chiefly a poet of northern England's Atlantic edge, the Cumbrian coastal strip. Yet his contemplative gaze almost never turns westward. He also refuses to produce a historical narrative of the area: here history is episodic, incoherent. Nor is Nicholson the poet of an `organic community'. He is rather a messianic poet for whom the coastal strip is an absolute boundary and spatial constraint. This forces the mind to think the impossible, vertical transaction, within which the idea of justice is crucial.