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The year, or slightly more than a year, from June 1797 until the early autumn of 1798, has a claim to being the most famous moment in the history of English poetry. In the course of it, two young men of genius, living for a while on the edge of the Quantock Hills in Somerset, began to find their way towards a new understanding of the world, of nature and of themselves.

These months have always been portrayed – by Wordsworth and Coleridge and by Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy as much as by anyone else – as a time of unbridled delight and wellbeing, of overabundant creativity, with a singularity of conviction and purpose from which extraordinary poetry emerged.

Certainly, what they wrote adds up to an astonishing catalogue: ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’, ‘Kubla Khan’, The Ancient Mariner, ‘Christabel’, ‘Frost at Midnight’, ‘The Nightingale’, all Wordsworth’s strange and troubling poems in Lyrical Ballads, ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Thorn’, the grandeur and beauty of ‘Tintern Abbey’, and, in his notebooks, the first suggestions of what would become passages in The Prelude.

The grip of this poetry is undeniable, but its origins are not in comfort or delight, or, at least until Wordsworth’s walk up the Wye valley in July 1798, any sense of arrival. The psychic motor of the year is something of the opposite: a time of adventure and perplexity, of Wordsworth and Coleridge both ricocheting away from the revolutionary politics of the 1790s in which both had been involved and both to different degrees disappointed. Wordsworth was unheard of, and Coleridge was still under attack in the conservative press. Both were in retreat: from cities; from politics; from gentlemanliness and propriety; from the expected; towards nature; and – in a way that makes this year foundational for modernity – towards the self, its roots, its forms of self-understanding, its fantasies, longings, dreads and ideals. For both, the Quantocks were a refuge-cum-laboratory, one in which every suggestion of an arrival was to be seen merely as a stepping stone.

The path was far from certain. One of Wordsworth’s criteria for pleasure in poetry was ‘the sense of difficulty overcome’, and that is a central theme of this year: their poetry was not a culmination or a summation, but had its life at the beginning of things, at a time of what Seamus Heaney called ‘historical crisis and personal dismay’, emergent, unsummoned, encountered in the midst of difficulty, arriving as unexpectedly as a figure on a night road, or a vision in mid-ocean, or the wisdom and understanding of a child.

It was not about powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity. Wordsworth’s famous and oracular definition would not come to him until more than two years after he had left Somerset. This was different, a poetry of approaches, journeys out and journeys in, leading to the gates of understanding but not yet over the threshold. Even now, 250 years after Wordsworth’s birth, it still carries a sense of discovery, drawing its vitality from awkwardness and discomfort, from a lack of definition and from the power that emanates from what is still only half-there.

This book explores the sources of this effusion. ‘I wish to keep my Reader in the company of flesh and blood,’ Wordsworth would write a couple of years later, and that has been my guiding principle too. The place in which these poets lived, the people they were, the people they were with, the lives they led, the conversations they had: how did all of that shape the words they wrote?

The received idea of these poets puts its focus on the immaterial, the floatingly high-minded. But here, in 1797, that is at least partly the opposite of the case. Thought for them, as the young Coleridge had written in excitement to his friend Robert Southey, was ‘corporeal’. He would later coin both ‘neuropathology’ and ‘psychosomatic’ as terms to describe aspects of this new interpresence of body and mind. The full life was not the enjoyment of a view, nor any kind of elegant gazing at a landscape, let alone sitting reading, but a kind of embodiment, plunging in, a full absorption in the encompassing world, providing the verbal life and ‘nervous energy’ that came from what Heaney would call ‘touching territory that I know’.

Here, then, was the invitation to which this book is an answer. If this was one of the great moments of poetic consciousness, it could best be understood as physical experience. By feeling it on the skin I could hope to know what had happened in the course of it. This was the subject that drew me: poetry-in-life, poetry-in-place, the body in the world as the instrument through which poetry comes into being.

The implication of that idea is that all currents must flow together. The way to approach this moment, its involutions and complexities, was to do, as far as possible, what the poets had done, to be in the Quantocks in all the moods and variations of the year at its different moments, to look for what happened and what emerged from what happened, to see how they were with each other, to feel the ebb and flow of their power relations and their affections. The timings and geography are closely known, often day by day, almost always week by week: what they were discussing, who they were meeting, how they were behaving, who their enemies and friends were, how poetry came from life-in-place.

Richard Holmes, the biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has, unknown to him, long been my guide. When I was a young writer in the early 1980s he sent me a postcard out of the blue, encouraging me to keep going. So I have, and I think of this book as a tributary to the great Holmesian stream. Its method is his: to follow in the footsteps of the great, looking to gather the fragments they left on the path, much as Dorothy Wordsworth was seen by an old man as she was accompanying her brother on a walk in the Lake District, keeping ‘close behint him, and she picked up the bits as he let ’em fall, and tak ’em down, and put ’em on paper for him’.

So I went to live in the Quantocks. I started to imagine the poets’ lives. I bought the maps, I read what they had been reading, I immersed myself in their notebooks and the facsimiles of their rough drafts, starting to lower myself into the pool of their minds. Slowly I began to see these poets – and Dorothy Wordsworth should be included in that term – not as literary monuments but as living people, young, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but confronted again and again by the uncertain and contradictory nature of what they understood of the world, of each other and themselves.

It was a year focused on writing, on the search for forms of language that could, as Wordsworth later wrote of his own poetry, be ‘enduring and creative’, with ‘A power like one of Nature’s’. But it was not a sequence of solitudes. Coleridge’s profoundly lonely need for others guaranteed that they were not alone. It was a busy, social, talkative time. The two great poets were almost constantly surrounded by friends, acolytes, followers, patrons and relations; Wordsworth’s sister, Coleridge’s wife Sara, and the children they had with them. All provided the frame in which they lived. It is striking how often the poetry appears at the edges of that sociability, when the others have just gone, or their arrival is just expected, another of the margins at which this margin-entranced sensibility dwelt.

What emerges is something more nuanced than a straight-forward tale of miraculous productivity. Everywhere there are eddies in the stream: an interfolding of love and worry, ambition and doubt, a sense of possibility and of guilt, the patterns of human friendship oscillating between admiration and the recognition that the person you admire may not be entirely admirable, and may have the same hesitations about you.

The poets’ differences pulled and rubbed against each other. Their friendship, with its intermingling of affection and doubt, was a mutual shaping. Each became a source for the other, and each moulded himself in opposition to the other. It was intriguingly gendered. Coleridge could detect in himself elements of the female, but ‘Of all the men I ever knew,’ he wrote, ‘Wordsworth has the least femineity in his mind. He is all man. He is a man of whom it might have been said, – “It is good for him to be alone.”’

The driving and revolutionary force of this year was the recognition that poetry was not an aspect of civilisation but a challenge to it; not decorative but subversive, a pleasure beyond politeness. This was not the stuff of drawing rooms. Its purpose was to give a voice to the voiceless, whatever form that voicelessness might have taken: sometimes speaking for the sufferings of the unacknowledged poor; sometimes enshrining the quiet murmuring of a man alone; sometimes reaching for the life of the child in his ‘time of unrememberable being’, beyond the grasp of adult consciousness; sometimes roaming in the magnificent and strange disturbedness of Coleridge’s imagined worlds.

Wordsworth called poetry ‘the first and last of all knowledge’, using those words precisely: poetry comes both before and after everything that might be said. Its spirit and goal is to exfoliate consciousness, to rescue understanding from the noise and entropy of habit, to find richness and beauty in the hidden or neglected actualities. The strange, unlikely and unfashionable claim of this year stems from that recognition: poetry can remake assumptions, reconfigure the mind and change the world.