Fifty years ago, shortly after my son was born, the poet Philip Pacey and I walked over the Sussex Downs, sleeping out one night under a harvest moon. Philip recorded the experience in his poem ‘Walking the Sussex Downs’. He captured the heat of the days and the toil and pleasures of our walk in the poem. But ‘Walking the Sussex Downs’ is more than merely descriptive, since his way of looking constitutes a vision of downland that is at once immediate and traditional. Paul Nash was one of the artists we talked about, and Philip’s image of a field of flints calls Nash to mind:

   where this field ends
or seems to end, in our vision

another begins. The flints in its
tight furrows mere specks to these
all-downland-contracted-to-a-stone

prodigious ploughwreckers before us, pitted
with hollows, knobbled with hill-forts
and tumuli.¹

Samuel Palmer was another painter we talked about on that walk in 1974, and we were alive to the tradition of art and literature associated with the pastoral world around us. Thinking of this now, in the light of Pacey’s later poetry, especially Charged Landscapes (the sequence of poems published by Enitharmon in 1978), I can see that from one point of view he may be described as a neo-romantic poet – that is to say, a poet close in spirit to the artists, such as Nash, John Piper and David Jones, who revealed the expressive power of British landscape, rich in history and myth, and representing the identity of particular ...