Ian Mckellen visits Wordsworth museum Ambleside

The famous actor that played Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy visited the museum for a reading by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. 

Michael McGregor, the director of Wordsworth Grasmere showed Ian around the new exhibits at the museum, including his own reading of The Prelude by Wordsworth, which is often considered his magnum opus. 

However, Ian was mainly at the museum to see another Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, who got the title in 2019 after Carol Ann Duffy stepped down from the role. Simon performed some readings at the museum of his own poetry on September 13 in The Daffodil Hotel, where Wordsworth wrote some of his best poetry. 

Poet Simon Armitage meeting the Queen (Image: Newsquest)

Simon's poetry is often centred around his experiences in his home town of Marsden in West Yorkshire. He has published poetry collections such as Zoom! and Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems. He has also translated classic poems such as the Odyssey and the Death of King Arthur. 

Michael said: "Ian has been a long-time supporter of the Wordsworth museum. In our museum we have readings of Wordsworth that have been performed by Ian, so he was pleased to see that. 

"He is very understanding, very engaged, very calm, he really enjoyed the whole experience. I know he has visited the Lake District, Ian was born in the north-west so he has always had that connection with the Lakes. I think that was part of it for him when he came up as well." 

About Simon Armitage, Michael said: "He was reading his poetry, it is an annual pilgrimage for him to come here."

When asked about why tourists and locals should go to the Wordsworth Museum, Michael said: "Just over two hundred years ago Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge started a new radical form of poetry. They would write about people who were on the margins of society, like beggars and soldiers. People who at the time were not considered relevant subjects for poetry. They changed what poetry means."