The Person from Porlock 354

Images in this ongoing series are inspired by the work and life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, polemicist, political activist and utopian visionary. He was one of the founding figures of the English Romantic movement, which started out as a radical response to the political, social, technological and industrial upheavals at the turn of the nineteenth century. This was a series of revolutions that created the modern world, at great cost to individuals, to societies and to nature itself.

I live in the south-west of England, a part of the world where the young Coleridge walked and looked about him every day, This remarkable person, charismatic, eloquent, idealistic, but also deeply flawed by self-obsession, encourages me to look at the world that surrounds me (as it once did him) with the intensity and attention he brought to it. Like Coleridge, I wish to see deeper into the structures of nature and human society. And, like him, I seek to connect the world we inhabit with our deepest feelings, desires and ambitions, fused in the crucible of the imagination.