The Essay - Land and Sea and Sky - Episode 2

The poet and essayist Jeremy Hooker recalls his early life on the south coast, looking across to Isle of Wight, in wartime. The sea and sky were fascinating, and dangerous, and the land fractured, revealing remants of earlier creations and their stories. Out of these the poet was himself made. Hooker considers other poets of the south country -Tennyson, whose memorial he could see on the Island, and Thomas Hardy. Their poetry has a Victorian melancholy which he resists in his own. He contrasts the meeting of land and sea and sky he knew as a boy with that in west Wales, where storms shifted the furniture in his seafront room. And for Hooker the meeting of land and sea and sky, its shifting, its re-arranging and it rhythms provides an example, a poetic discipline.