Classic poems about long walks

‘I like long walks,’ Noel Coward is said to have once quipped, ‘especially when they’re taken by people I dislike.’ The Romans had a phrase: Solvitur ambulando, meaning ‘it is solved by walking’. The Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough used it as the epigraph for his long epistolary poem, Amours de Voyage. There is a long-standing and deep-rooted relationship between walking and poetry, as these classic poems demonstrate.

Thomas Traherne, ‘Walking’. In terms of having the longest wait for a posthumous poetic reputation to begin, the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Traherne (c. 1637-74) may take first prize. Over a century before Romanticism, Traherne describes how walking amongst nature can provide us with an appreciation of the beauty all around us. Read the rest of this entry →