The Romantics and the Landscapes of Child of Conquest

When I was shaping the landscapes of Child of Conquest, I found myself returning again and again to the Romantics. Wordsworth’s quiet reverence for the “still, sad music of humanity” in Tintern Abbey, Coleridge’s dreamlike caverns in Kubla Khan, and Keats’s tender images of hedgerows and autumn skies all reminded me that nature is never just a backdrop. For the Romantics, the natural world was alive, breathing and restless, carrying both beauty and danger within it.

I was especially drawn to John Clare, whose poems capture the rawness of the countryside with an honesty born of lived experience. His verses about fields, birds, and seasons carry both joy and melancholy, as if he knew that to write about nature is also to write about loss. That sense of the land holding memory seeped into my own writing—the windswept plains and shadowed forests of Child of Conquest echo that same spirit. They don’t just set the scene, they shape the lives of those who walk through them. A storm can be as much a turning point as a battle; a mountain view can carry both hope and foreboding.

In writing these landscapes, I felt I was in conversation with the Romantics, drawing on their way of seeing the land as something that remembers, resists, and reveals. For me, that’s what makes Romantic poetry so enduring. It reminds us that the world outside us is also the world within us, and the landscapes we walk through are inseparable from the stories we tell.

And then there is Tennyson—often considered a Victorian, but deeply shaped by Romantic sensibilities. His Lady of Shalott is not only about yearning and fate, but also about how the natural world reflects inner longing: the river carrying the Lady to her death is as much a character as she is. Like the Romantics, Tennyson used landscape to mirror love, death, and desire, and his imagery lingers with the same haunting intensity.

If you’d like to explore the Romantics yourself, I’d recommend Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Clare’s I Am, and Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott. Each in their own way wrestles with love, loss, and death—universal themes carried on the breath of the natural world.