The Great Poet Boreateship Debate

In which, after employing a bad pun in the title, our blogger indulges in a Brooker-esque ejection of bile about the continuing press babble ... paradoxically adding to the mountain of superfluous words that have already been sacrificed to the great poet laureate debate.

There was a time when people in the media wrote about all sort of fancy things. There was a time when poetry did not even make the book section of national newspapers. There was a time when people I met found out I liked poems and mocked me, shunned me or patted me on the head as if it was a great wonder I had managed to get along like a normal human being. Those happy days are gone. Now the only thing anyone cares about is who is going to be the next Holder of an Archaic Monarchical Office that Impairs Creativity and Causes Poetry to be Belittled in the Public Eye, to give it its full, official name. Don't get me wrong, I am against the role entirely. In my time the laureates have done some great things for poetry: the Poetry Archive is fantastic and I hope it continues to expand, but we don't need royal permission for websites (Poetcasting is good example of how a similar--and in many ways more diverse though smaller-scale--project can be gotten off the ground without the Queen's help.)

Here comes the Romanticism bit...

The only plus to the furore I can see is that it makes a handy point of modern reference when I show visitors Wordsworth's royal warrant and tell them how Robert Peel himself wrote to convince him to take the laureateship in 1842. Wordsworth had turned down the post twice. The official line, I believe, is that he thought a younger poet should take up the position rather than any antipathy toward the role. When he did finally agree to the laureateship it was under the stipulation that he didn't have to write any official poetry unless the inspiration took him. And so he spent seven years not writing official poetry. At this stage in the tour I make a joke about how laureates would probably like it to be that way now. Sometimes it even gets a laugh. The fact is it was different. In Wordsworth's time poetry was revered by the public, a poet was a great figure; manly, inspiring and relevant. It wasn't his job to make people care about poems, but that's the way the office has been interpreted in recent years. But is the best way of encouraging debate, pluracy and engagement with poetry--hell, of just getting people to read it--to have a figurehead? Or are the internet forums and blogs, the journals, the increasing culture of putting poetry into and onto buildings and landscapes a better route.

So, I don't care whether the person appointed is male, female, straight, gay, black, white, English, or actually any good. I don't think the office is going to be scrapped. It may be renamed and the process for appointment may be changed. But when the next person asks me who I think it should be, I'll tell them as I have told everyone else that I hope it's someone I don't admire, so that I'm not pained by their acceptance, possible decline and inevitable embarrassment. I couldn't sneer at anyone I knew or liked taking it because for most poets £5000 is a fortune. And they might take the role willingly, enthusiastically and light-heartedly--realising that it's not the beginning and end of contemporary poetry.

Thomas De Quincey and Dove Cottage

The 14 Steps

The most famous tenants of Dove Cottage were of course the Wordsworths, but the house was occupied much longer by the family of Thomas De Quincey who inhabited for almost 30 years intermittently. He'd visited the house while Wordsworth lived there, having been a fan and finally finding the courage to meet his literary idol, and while his admiration for Wordsworth waned, his love for the cottage grew. It was, if nothing else, so far north that his debtors would not make the journey to repossess his library and other belongings. In most contemporaries' accounts he is reported as being a remarkably short man, but since he was never one to flatter in his representations of his acquaintances' physical appearance maybe this was a caricatured feature, a riposte.

De Quincey is vastly entertaining to read, lambasting and debunking the Lake Poets as he is in the very process of memorialising them and cementing their reputation--it seems to me that many of the ideas, the myths, we have about poets as people today are in part De Quincey's fault, certainly he sold well enough to spread that particular virulent strain. Yet, despite being guilty of the approach to poetry I despise, I love De Quincey. I love him with the shameful lust for gossip, and because he can be as warmhearted and generous as he can spiteful. It was him that I read after my own first visit to the site. Confessions of an English Opium Eater was great, but better still the essay on Levana and the Three Mothers, which inspired Dario Argento's sprawling trilogy of films.

Since I've been here again, I'm reading the memoirs Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets. De Quincey had a great line in anecdotes, many almost definitely fabricated, and an anecdote can be a tricky beast to get down into print well. Indeed, we should never forget that he is hardly the most reliable of writers. At one point he miscalculates Wordsworth's age, despite knowing how long the poet had been resident at Dove Cottage, he doesn't appear to know Wordsworth's date of birth. But we don't read Lake Poets for an accurate or an exhaustive reportage, we read it because it contains so much flavour, and moreover--I think--because De Quincey writes so well. Most of his work, if not all, was produced at great speed to meet financial demands or the irregular Westmoreland post. It is also written to sell, containing gossip and 'colour'. There are points where you can tell that he has forgone the editing process but these are rare and show what a skilled hand he was at what we might not-inaccurately term hack writing. His sentences incorporate many clauses and he adds flourishes of parenthetical humour or exclamation. It's writing where you forget you're reading off a page and the long, dense paragraphs become long, indulgent, one-sided conversations.

De Quincey's notorious inaccuracy is easy to spot because, knowing how much readers love the local and exact, he peppers his prose with details, with measurements to the hour or inch. The effect is fantastic, we totally believe in the enormous, insatiable memory of our author, we understand his sprawling disorganised style as if we had upset a cupboard containing the whole world and its falling out upon us could not be controlled or condemned. He notes the number of stairs between the ground floor and the upstairs of Dove Cottage--14--so we feel him tripping up each step, awake to the significance; a man who knows greatness when he's near it and will never forget. A slight-of-hand of course, he had years in which to measure the rooms length and breadth and height, to count all the steps and yet he presents it as if these calculations and remembrances were burnt into his mind, singed into him then and there like a pail of hot coals on pine. Surely we would follow such a man anywhere? Into the bowels of opium dependence, into his nightmares, behind the curtain of fame to see what our heroes really are? I have a feeling even later De Quincey did no more than make an approximate guess at the dimensions of the house, I can't imagine him with a tape-measure.

There are 12 stairs to the first floor.

Welcome

Dove Cottage was a home to William Wordsworth for just under a decade. Here he lived with his sister Dorothy, and later was joined by his wife Mary Hutchinson and their children. Wordsworth and his sister moved here in on December 20th 1799. This was around the same time of year that I visited the museum for my interview, and the view from our century was of the Cumbrian landscape quilted in snow. The lakes as black as pupils, holding the image of the white peaks all the more clearly. Under the climate of Europe's Little Ice Age we can assume that such sights greeted the siblings on their arrival. Then the house, previously the Dove and Olive inn, would have looked out over the mere itself as our terraces a future obstruction. When they took up their tenancy the building had been unoccupied since the inn had closed for business in the early 1790s. I wonder if someone had kindly gone in to make a fire before their arrival, so the flagstones should not be as unwelcomingly cold. I think for all the Romantic feeling in the world it is perhaps hard to fall in love with a house if it does not give some relief from the harsh natural world it is set within.

I had been to the cottage once before, and the memory had belied how small the place is. The rooms are not cramped--most citizens of the country at the time would surely have considered their proportions palatial--but they are not large, and the ceilings are low (which makes me feel of a normal stature for once). In that first experience my mind had adhered to peculiar historical facts, most insistently that tea was locked in a caddy while opium was less well guarded. On the subject of opium, Thomas de Quincey, author of the Confessions of an English Opium Eater, stayed with Wordsworth and loved the cottage so much that he took up the tenancy after the family left. De Quincey was far form being their only guest, and it seems one of the reasons for the Wordsworths left was apparently the lack of space, friends--among them many famous figures of their day--sleeping on the flagstone floor. However, such numbers pale in comparison to the present day; Dove Cottage now sees approximately 70 000 visitors a year.

It is less than a fortnight until I am resident in Grasmere. I will be part of a year-long internship programme at the Wordsworth Trust with nine others. At this stage I'm excited and totally unorganised for the move. As interns we will be working at Dove Cottage and the museum there, living just across the road in the terraced houses that make up most of Grasmere's beautifully monikered 'Town End'.

This blog will be about a multitude of things, including the conservation and heritage work I will be getting an education in. It will also be a space for writing about the Romantics, both those who made this place famous and those connected to them (and they are mostly connected, Romantic writing is about and of a community), and about contemporary poetry, which also has its place in the Wordsworth Trust.

It's this complementarity of Romantic and contemporary poetry that has brought me to the Wordsworth Trust. I hope you enjoy reading this journal.