The Literary Landscape
The area around Malvern has inspired many literary talents and continues to do so today. In 2022 Black Pear Press published a book of poems, Elgar Country, by local poet Peter Sutton. From it comes the poem below, where Peter links the good health the Malverns bring to mind and body, to those who have been inspired by them
The Healing Hills by Peter Sutton
Here doctors ordered daily draughts
of Malvern water, wet sheets, walking,
slimming and sitz baths, douches and sluices,
healthy, wholesome, homely living,
amid the modest, mild-mannered shires,
Hereford and Worcester, weathered and warm.
Here Langland penned his poem Piers Plowman,
here Roget arranged his rambling Thesaurus,
here Wordsworth wandered, and Walter de la Mare,
Joseph Cottle, Michael Drayton, Drinkwater, Dyer,
William Bowles, Rupert Brooke and Lizzie Barrett Browning,
C.S. Lewis, C. Day-Lewis and Lascelles Abercrombie,
Harvey, Housman and Auden, Radclyffe Hall,
Edward Thomas, Wilfrid Gibson, Tolkien and Trease,
Siegfried Sassoon and Swinburne and Symonds,
Francis Brett Young, Eleanor Farjeon and Frost,
Shaw and Masefield and many, many more.
and you will be welcomed with a well-spring of words
if you open your eyes and your ears and your mind.
So, pack away your pills and potions,
liniments, salves, elixirs, lotions,
leave the lethal, leaden, gritty,
unclean air of every city.
Come to quiet, country hills
and shrive yourselves of secret ills.