Some of our greatest poets have been pre-eminently poets of place. I immediately think of Wordsworth – “a mountain youth, a northern villager” - and the sublime grandeur of the Lake District or the American poet Robinson Jeffers and his life-long celebration of the savage beauty of Carmel Bay, California. For such poets the poetry and the place seem one and indissoluble. What they testify to is the interconnectedness of the human spirit and the character of the landscape, as within so without, as without so within. This, surely, is the western version of the perennial eastern wisdom: ‘I am that’.
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