For William Wordsworth, poetry was “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. Yet in his preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads — missing from the first edition published in 1798 — Wordsworth was careful to qualify that poems should reflect “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. The poet distils the passion of the event, but in a more considered, meaningful way.
Politics, for Chris Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury, and former UK culture secretary under prime minister Tony Blair, shares a similar space. “Politics and government,” he says, as we tour his two-bedroom flat in trendy Clerkenwell, central London, “are always going to be a compromise of adjusting ideas to reality; you’re never going to achieve everything you want to, but you have to keep the flame of ambition and intention as alive as you possibly can”.
Wordsworth famously recanted his radical youth, rewriting chunks of the earlier 1805 edition of his great epic work, “The Prelude”, in a more reactionary cast in 1850. Smith, who did his PhD on Wordsworth and fellow Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, resists the tempting parallels with his younger, lefty self. “No, no, no,” he says now, unconsciously echoing former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, not known for her left-leaning tendencies.