Iona Glen meets award-winning poet, Polly Atkin, to discuss her recent biography Recovering Dorothy, how Dorothy Wordsworth’s illness has been overlooked in academic scholarship, the marginalisation of those with chronic ill health, poems as time machines and much more.
Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals shine with moonlight and rain-washed landscapes, but did her later illness inhibit such vision? No, writes Iona Glen, who, when considering the poetry and criticism of Polly Atkin, sees Wordsworth’s creativity flourish in her periods of ill health.