William Allingham, already famous for ‘Up the airy mountain down the rushy glen’ visits Thomas Carlyle in Cheyne Row on 24 June 1872. Carlyle is working behind a screen in a lower room and calls out ‘Are you there, Mr A?’ Allingham sits quietly and waits an hour.
A servant appears and says earlier that day Carlyle has been reading Sordello by Robert Browning. Sure enough, every so often Carlyle can still be heard calling out to Browning (who is nowhere ‘What the devil do you mean?’
Sir Andrew Motion was British Poet Laureate from 1999-2009. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, and co-founder of the Poetry Archive, an online collection of poets reading their own work (www.poetryarchive.org).