Although Norman Nicholson identifies himself as a poet, he has also written regional geography, literary criticism, autobiography, literary biography, and novels. Nearly all of his work reveals deep feeling for the South Cumberland coastal area bordered on the west by the Irish Sea and on the east by the Lake District. An area settled in the ninth and tenth centuries by Vikings from Ireland and Iceland, its rugged landscape has inspired in Nicholson a nature poetry less idyllic than that of Lake District poets such as Wordsworth.

Much of Nicholson's poetry depicts life in Millom, a small South Cumberland industrial and mining town, where, except for nearly two years during 1930-1932 that he spent in a tuberculosis hospital in Hampshire, Nicholson has lived all his life in the house where he was born. His writing reveals his conviction that an individual can find the wisdom of the universe...