I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District.
But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.
I've got a farm in Somerset, and I think it's God's own country. I love it.
When I was young, I overheard a Brit say Canada wasn't a real country because it doesn't have any poets. Even then, I kind of knew that was wrong, but I still thought, 'Wow, here's my chance to do something, to be of service to my country.'
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.
It's been really nice to see different counties that I might never have visited before.
I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.
Over the years, I've lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament.
Country people give me more than writers, and country places than towns.