In Wordsworth’s footsteps, a national poetry centre for Leeds

As the Royal Horticultural Society laid out the first spring daffodils in tribute to William Wordsworth, on the occasion of his 250th anniversary, his successor sowed the seeds for a new generation of writers.

Simon Armitage, who is separated from Wordsworth by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and nine other laureates, said his newly-announced National Poetry Centre in Leeds would bring “lasting benefit” to the city and place poetry on a par with the theatre, portraiture and other art forms which could boast their own headquarters.

“Poetry needs a home, along the lines of the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn or Poet’s House in New York – a place where poets can borrow or buy books, perform readings, showcase their work, get on with their writing, teach, eat, drink, debate, argue, host classes, organise conferences, publish magazines and run workshops” he said.

Mr Armitage, a native of Marsden, near Huddersfield, who became the nation’s chief poet last year, also said it was important the national base be kept outside London, in “a relatable part of the country”.

“Leeds is an ideal location – accessible, central, dynamic, contemporary, future-minded, people-oriented, community-aware, committed to cultural regeneration”, he said.

His new centre, which he is developing with Leeds University, where he is also professor of poetry, should develop an international reputation befitting that of English poetry itself, he hoped.

It will open in time for the international cultural festival planned for Leeds in 2023, although a site has yet to be identified.

“The minute Simon mentioned his vision to us, we knew it was something we wanted to do,” said Ruth Pitt, the festival’s chair. “Poetry speaks to everyone and any of us can pick up a pen and write.”

It was exactly what Dorothy Wordsworth had done, two years before her brother wrote of daffodils in I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. Resident in Halifax at the time, she accompanied him to the Lake District and wrote in her Grasmere Journal of how they “tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake”.

“There’s a strong possibility that William revisited this journal entry and then wrote the poem as a result of that,” said Melissa Mitchell, assistant curator at the Wordsworth Trust.

It would have been the native species of narcissus pseudonarcissus, transplanted from the wild into cottage gardens in Wordsworth’s day, that had enchanted the poet and his sister, said Paul Cook, curator at the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Harlow Carr in Harrogate.

Its seasonal display, accompanied this year by verse, extends beyond the garden itself along a “golden mile” of planted roadside verges between Harrogate and Beckwithshaw.