In 1797-98, Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced his poems "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," while his friend William Wordsworth wrote "Tintern Abbey." With the publication of their collaborative Lyrical Ballads, these young men capped the single greatest year for English poetry. How did they do it, and why? Here the author of The Seabird's Cry tells the story, almost day by day, of the year that Coleridge, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and an ever-shifting cast of friends and acolytes spent together in the Quantock Hills in Somerset. Adam Nicolson's Costa Book Award nominee is a group portrait of the nonconformists who staked everything on their belief that poetry is a means of remaking the world.