Norman Nicholson's guest appearances

Norman Nicholson

UCDscholarcast

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

Brenda Chamberlain

Eavan Boland

W.B. Yeats

Thomas Carnduff

Harry Clarke

Ian Russell

Anne Fogarty

Thomas Moore

James Stephens

Menna Gallie

Eddie Holt

Elaine Sisson

PJ Mathews

James Joyce

Roddy Doyle

OwlTail

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.

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