An engrossing review of the 2016 winter school written by
Brandon Chao-Chi Yen shall help prepare your expectation:
by Brandon Chao-Chi Yen
We left Cambridge early on Monday 22 February, the first day of what would turn out to be an utterly unforgettable week. Blackthorn flowers lined the A1 in heavy clusters. Milky-white in the long, mellow light of February, they were a lovely contrast to those yellow tufts of ragwort that blaze under the August sky near Scotch Corner. Cumbria was still recovering from December’s flood damages – roads were being repaired, and debris could be seen along the road, in the woods and fields. Instead of taking the usual route from Keswick to Grasmere, we drove along the western shore of Ullswater, up the Kirkstone Pass, and down the Struggle. As we descended the Kirkstone Pass, Wordsworth’s Kirkstone Ode sprang to mind: ‘Hope, pointing to the cultured Plain, | Carols like a shepherd boy’. Two gravid sheep smiled at us. The promise was great. We reached Rydal in good time to receive Gordon Bottomley and Carrie Taylor’s hearty welcome. Old Rydal was tremendously beautiful in this season, despite the damaged road – another gaping wound caused by the floods – sloping down from Rydal Mount to the A591.
This year’s Winter School – organised around the theme of Wordsworth & Coleridge Reinvent Themselves?
Poetry & Prose after 1814 – featured nine fabulous lectures. Will
Christie and David Chandler elucidated the complexities of three important Romantic
prose works. Will’s lecture delved into the ‘derangement’ of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, asking one
question that has vexed readers since Coleridge’s time: ‘how do we make it
cohere?’. Will suggested that Biographia
Literaria could be read as Coleridge’s attempt to establish a ‘taste’,
‘attitude’ and ‘authority’ and to achieve ‘self-composure’, ‘self-composition’
and ‘personal authentication’. The lecture culminated with a close reading of
Coleridge’s treatment of Michelangelo’s Moses at the end of Chapter 21 of Biographia Literaria, an episode which,
Will argued, epitomised the kind of ‘comprehensive and intensive reading’ that
Coleridge espoused in Biographia
Literaria.
David Chandler’s lecture looked at Wordsworth’s 1815 Preface
and ‘Essay, Supplementary’. David proposed to read these two prose documents – first
published in Poems (1815) – as the
‘outside door’ and ‘inside door’ of the ‘gothic Church’ to which Wordsworth
compares his poetry in the Preface to The
Excursion (1814). These ‘doors’, David argued, reflected not so much the
purpose of worship as that of fortification against a long siege. David offered
a close analysis of the authoritative, but often-ambiguous, manner in which
Wordsworth presented his ideas in the Preface and ‘Essay, Supplementary’,
suggesting that it was in the spirit of the 1815 ‘system’ that ‘the latter half
of Wordsworth’s career commenced’.
Stephen Gill’s lecture, beautifully read by Helen Boyles,
examined Wordsworth’s ‘vocational crisis’ in the context of post-Napoleonic socio-political
and economic turmoil, as well as Wordsworth’s own domestic, financial and
creative anxieties in the period between 1815 and 1819. Stephen focused upon two
poems composed in 1817 and first published in The River Duddon (1820): ‘Ode Composed upon an Evening of
Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty’ and ‘Ode: The Pass of Kirkstone’. The
textual complexities in these odes, Stephen convincingly showed, witnessed how
Wordsworth – even in his ‘vocational crisis’ – remained resolved, as Seamus
Heaney states in his poem ‘A Daylight Art’, to ‘practise the art’.
Three other lectures afforded valuable insights into
Wordsworth’s poetry. Anthony Harding cogently analysed several poems from The River Duddon (1820), Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) and
elsewhere, assessing Wordsworth’s claim to be a ‘national poet’. Anthony
concentrated upon those moments in Wordsworth’s poetry when ‘remote locales’
and ‘local attachments’ became imbued with a national significance capable of reaching
a wide British audience. The lecture looked closely at how Wordsworth regarded
the Church as embodying the nation’s past, present and future, and how
Wordsworth’s poetry, through images such as ruined castles and torrents,
exerted a ‘unifying force’, offering ‘reassuring signs’ of continuity to the
nation.
Richard Gravil’s lecture on Tone presented very helpful ‘notes towards a general theory of
Wordsworthian Dislocation’. The word ‘dislocation’, as Richard pointed out,
came from an 1804 letter to Thelwall, where Wordsworth elucidated how the
‘passion’ of the subject may lead to the ‘dislocation of the verse’, that is,
of the ‘general rule’ of his metrical arrangements. In the letter, Wordsworth
rejected strict ‘limits to the dislocation of the verse’: ‘I know none that may
not be justified by some passion or other’. Richard selected a few prominent passages
– from The Excursion, Home at Grasmere and elsewhere – and
carefully teased out the effects created by varying numbers and positions of
beats and caesuras in individual lines. The lecture also provided fresh
insights into the uses of italics in the 1850 Prelude, with the italicised words contributing to what Wordsworth
called the ‘variety of musical effect’, which could inflect our understanding
of the poem’s meaning.
Peter Dale’s lecture, Lyrical
Ballads and Ballad Lyrics, explored the influences of sung – as distinct from printed
– ballads upon Wordsworth’s Lyrical
Ballads. Through attention to a series of ballads and songs which had been
enjoyed and sung by the common people long before Percy, Scott and others
printed them, Peter argued that ‘the Lyrical
Ballads share a well-spring with a very deep-stained, penetrating, but not
necessarily immediately visible culture of popular myth, popular religion’. It
was through partaking of this ‘culture’ that traditional ballads distilled a
sense of Englishness. Peter then offered a remarkably nuanced analysis of how
this ‘culture of popular myth, popular religion’ – with particular reference to
the Passion – fed into one of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, ‘The Thorn’. At the
close of his lecture, Peter elegantly and convincingly posited a ‘Common Muse’,
‘a library of stories and symbols and ideas, a frame of mind, that secularises
the originally sacred, that makes numinous the primitively secular’ and that
‘makes connections between the high arts and the folk-loric hand-weave’.
Two brilliant lectures looked at Coleridge’s poems. Joanna
Taylor presented a rich account of how ‘Christabel’ was received in and after
1816, the year of its first publication. The lecture traced the afterlives of
‘Christabel’ in several nineteenth-century re-writings, parodies, burlesques
and sequels, including William Frederick Deacon’s ‘The Dream, a Psychological
Curiosity’ (1824), the anonymous, sexually explicit Christabess (1816) and Martin Tupper’s ‘Geraldine: A Sequel to
Coleridge’s Christabel’ (1839). But despite her focus upon reception, Jo did
not pass over Coleridge’s textual nuances. Rather, she paid admirably close attention
to the ‘chaunt’ and the ‘voice in “Christabel”’. The lecture closed with an
account of Christabel’s significance in Coleridge’s own family, as well as the
recurrence of the name Christabel (on some very unexpected occasions!) in the
1870s and beyond.
Fred Burwick’s lecture looked at ‘Kubla Khan’, another of
Coleridge’s great poems published in 1816. Fred examined the genesis of ‘Kubla
Khan’, noting the nuances involved in Coleridge’s claims of ‘profound sleep’
and ‘Reverie’, as well as contemporary critical reactions to the poem. Bringing
Coleridge’s theory of imagination in Biographia
Literaria to bear upon ‘Kubla Khan’, Fred carefully analysed the ‘primary
and secondary visions’ in the poem, which he regarded as composed of two parts.
Fred’s masterful reading charted out the spatial and conceptual movements in
‘Kubla Khan’, along with the socio-political background and literary sources
such as the story of Arethusa in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
and Mount Amara in Milton’s Paradise
Lost.
On 25 February, we spent the afternoon in the Jerwood
Centre. There, Debbie Pfuntner gave an illuminating lecture on Dorothy
Wordsworth’s re-invention of herself, through her commonplace book, during the
Rydal years. Debbie explained the differences between early modern commonplace
books and commonplace books in the Romantic period, elucidating how Dorothy
Wordsworth’s commonplace book broke new ground in combining personal, literary
works with more conventional materials. Impressively, the lecture showcased
such lovely manuscript details as sealing wax, stitches, a sketch of a landscape
garden, newspaper clippings, and handwriting showing Dorothy Wordsworth’s
compositional processes. The rest of the afternoon was spent in the Wordsworth
Museum, where, after an introductory talk by Jeff Cowton, we enjoyed the
exhibition Shepherds to Char-a-bancs.
Curated by the Grasmere History Society, the exhibition provided precious
glimpses of social life in nineteenth-century Grasmere: real and tangible histories
seen through maps, writings, drawings, photographs, household objects and
tools.
The lectures – jargon-free but nevertheless intellectually
stimulating – were supplemented by seminar discussions, where participants from
different backgrounds shared their ideas about poetry and prose. The seminars
were by no means hair-splittingly academic, and there were moments when some
passing comments – and even smiles and gestures – reminded us of why we loved
and studied literature in the first place. Another attractive feature of the
Winter School was the poetry readings by Richard Gravil and John Rowe, both of
whom did full justice to the musical qualities and tonal complexities of
Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poems. These readings – covering the texts
analysed in the following day’s lectures – helped us grasp the lectures more
easily. On the evening before his lecture, for example, Richard’s spellbinding reading
of passages from The Excursion and Benjamin the Waggoner vividly
illustrated how and why Wordsworth’s varying metrical arrangements are crucial
to our understanding of these poems.
The glorious weather lasted all week, making the daily walks
and excursions immensely enjoyable. The walkers conquered Nab Scar, Alcock Tarn
and Helm Crag. The excursionists visited three Cumbrian churches, Brantwood,
Swarthmoor Hall and Cumbria Crystal. The Italianate Hoy Trinity Church was
serenely perched upon a hilltop in Brathay. Under a sturdy yew tree, the
churchyard of Holy Trinity bloomed with daffodils, and there were a couple of
Celtic crosses – very beautiful indeed. Jesus Church in Troutbeck is celebrated
for its Pre-Raphaelite east window. There, we basked in the light cascading
through the richly patterned garments of the saints. We admired the exuberant
greenery designed by William Morris and then spotted the four trout that gave a
local flavour to the magnificent stained glass. The churchyard was
breath-taking: snowdrops endowed the place with an ethereal otherworldliness,
and the pair of Irish yews flanking the gate exuded a dignity not to be matched
by marble and gilded monuments. St Mary’s Church in Ambleside was equally good,
even though, situated in a bustling town, it did not partake of so much mountain
solitude. There we stood amazed by Gordon Ransom’s 1944 wall painting of
Ambleside’s ‘rush bearing’ ceremony.
The second excursion took us to Brantwood. We marvelled at
Ruskin’s manuscripts, drawings, and various household objects. Ruskin’s gardens
were still enjoying their sweet winter slumbers, but the Zig-Zaggy – a garden
based upon Ruskin’s sketches and representing Dante’s Purgatorial Mount – was
refreshingly interesting even in this season (with a tremendous woollen knot on
the terraces symbolising ‘the choices in your journey from Anger’!). Below
Brantwood, Coniston Water throbbed with life. White yachts shimmered under the
clear blue sky. The lake and the snow-capped hills on the far side looked like
a pastel drawing, so soft and harmonious.
The final excursion brought us to Swarthmoor Hall, a
stern-looking sixteenth-century mansion known as the cradle of the Quaker
movement. The tour guide brought back to life the early days of the Religious
Society of Friends, shedding light on those furnishings, carvings, costumes,
draperies and paintings that quietly preserved the history of a vastly influential
movement in a secluded nook of Ulverston. We wrapped up the excursion by
visiting Ulverston’s Cumbria Crystal Factory, where we observed the glassmaking
processes and feasted our eyes on the exquisite glassware.
Under the new directors Gordon Bottomley and Claire Lamont,
this year’s Winter School had two innovations. The evening of 24 February saw a
lively debate, Fred Burwick and Will Christie on one side, Richard Gravil and Patricia
Welch’s Rabbit (!) on the other. The motion was: ‘This House believes that STC
was more influential than WW in the post-war years, 1815-1820’. Arguing for
STC, Fred highlighted Coleridge’s international reputation in Italy and
Germany. Richard, on the other hand, admitted that Wordsworth’s influence was
much more visible in the later nineteenth century and the twentieth century,
but he also underscored Wordsworth’s generative influence upon writers in
1815-1820, such as Byron in Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage and Shelley in ‘Mont Blanc’. Countering Richard’s
argument, Will suggested that if we considered literature in a wider sense,
Coleridge’s influence could be seen in Mill, Carlyle, Arnold and others, and
this influence survived into the twentieth-century English curriculum and
beyond. Lastly, through Richard’s mouth, the Rabbit (now revealed as Sir
Herbert Read!) eloquently argued for the ‘magnitude’ of Wordsworth’s influence:
‘the course of literature in the nineteenth century was determined by
Wordsworth’. The debate ended in a jovial mood, with Richard and the Rabbit
winning the laurels.
The second new event was an amusing play written and
directed by David Chandler: The Siege of
Dove Cottage; or, The Savage Tamed. The excellent cast included David
Chandler himself, Peter Shrubb, Peter Christie, Tony Reavell, Joanna Taylor and
John Rowe. The play – featuring Coleridge’s (John Rowe’s) mesmerising
recitation of ‘Kubla Khan’, which ‘tamed’ an English outlaw – earned much
hearty laughter. The actors deserved to be commended for their subtle
interpretations of the roles, particularly demanding if you were The Door. It
is hoped that performances of a comparable nature will be staged again in the
future.
The traditional last night of readings and music on 26
February proved to be a splendid gallimaufry of items ranging from the musical
to the dramatic to the poetic, with a walk-on part for Piet de Jong’s dog Joop.
And a good time was had by all, in expectation of meeting again in twelve
months’ time.
