TOP POET Simon Armitage has paid his latest visit to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in readiness for his high-profile exhibition.

Armitage, the museum’s creative partner for 2017, has curated the Haworth visitor attraction’s headline exhibition for the year.

Mansions In The Sky will be unveiled on Wednesday, February 1 as the museum opens its doors to the public again, ready to celebrate the 200th anniversary year of Branwell Brontë’s birth.

Armitage, accompanied by Grant Montgomery, production designer for the recent BBC Brontë biopic To Walk Invisible, checked progress on building the exhibition’s centrepiece.

Branwell’s studio is being recreated at the museum, following its construction by Montgomery for the BBC film, itself in collaboration with the parsonage’s Brontë experts.

Armitage’s exhibition invites visitors into the mind and world of the Brontë brother to discover who he really was.

Mansions in the Sky aims to provoke new insights into the brother of Charlotte, Emily and Anne, who went on to surpass him with their novels Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Armitage explores Branwell’s colourful personal history through his writings, drawings and possessions.

Highlights include a series of new poems by Armitage in response to Branwell’s belongings in the museum collection, and a letter and poem he posted to Wordsworth.

Armitage said that amongst the Brontë Society’s planned five years of Brontë anniversaries, 2017 belonged to the “charismatic and complicated” Branwell.

He said the recreated studio, a “chaotic and frenzied” space, would give an insight into Branwell’s own mind.

He said: “We dare you to discover more about the notorious Branwell whose personality and imagination were so integral to the Brontë story as a whole.

“As a poet of this landscape and region I recognise Branwell’s creative impulses and inspirations.

“I also sympathise with his desire to have his voice heard by the wider world, a desire encapsulated in a letter sent to William Wordsworth in 1837, when Branwell was a precocious and determined 19-year-old, seeking the great man’s approval.

“The poem he enclosed describes the dreams and ambitions of a young and hopeful romantic, star-struck by the universe and building ‘mansions in the sky’.

“But those mansions were only ever hopeful fantasies, and Branwell was to die unrecognised and unfulfilled, forever assigned the role of the dark and self-destructive brother, doomed to be eclipsed by the stellar achievements of his sisters.”

The Brontë Parsonage Museum reopens on Wednesday, February 1. Visit bronte.org.uk for further information.