So long since my last post?

In Town End the weeks hurtle through as quickly as the tourists. Some posts to come which have been brewing for a while, but first a quick update.

I've begun research on the poets who are coming here as part of my work. First up is Tomas Venclova. I'm looking forward to comparing his readings to the translations I've read as I'm unclear on his relation to meter and rhyme; some of the English versions hold form but later poems by other translators don't, I'm intrigued to see whether it's a change in Venclova's style. The programme displays from the start an international feel which I think is great.

Well, that's all that is necessary for you to know for now. Posts to come on De Quincey and Romanticism, Poetry and Science.

Emily xx

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.

Up-to-date

Having resolved to keep a journal Dorothy Wordsworth wrote that she continued to do so "because I will not quarrel with myself". An excellent determination for a diarist and a sentiment that I think a good one generally.

In my first post I wondered whether the fires had been lit for the Wordsworth's arrival in darkest last winter of the eighteenth century. I now know that they were welcomed by the warmth that had been fostered for them by Molly Fisher, who lit the fires in the cottage for two weeks before they came. Welcomes here are still warm, and we even have a Molly amongst us, though in our house the fires are thanks to Mark Ward who makes these happen as well as poems and many other things. It's been a fortnight since I arrived here and a happily busy one, so apologies for the lack of frequent posting to those of you who have complained which flatters me and scares me at the thought that my little blog has readers. Town End as it is now appears to me a fitting tribute to the Wordsworths and their poetic community. Living, working and writing together gives the place a lively and unique atmosphere.

The only slight disappointment has perhaps been the postponement of the Tony Harrison Robert Woof Memorial Reading, but this will still take place on March 3rd. There is also the exciting 2009 programme of 'summer' poetry readings now up on the website to look forward to.

So, I shall be back soon with more to say. If you want to read about anything in particular let me know and I shall endeavour to satisfy your curiosity.

For now,
Emily xx

Read and recommended

Jonathan Morley's 'Backra Man'--buy it and buy me the accompanying CD.
Mario Petrucci's 'somewhere is january'--looking forward to the extended sequence and frankly in love with Perdika Press.
Dorothy Wordsworth's 'Grasmere Journals' as edited by Pamela Woof--strikingly beautiful introduction.
Thomas De Quincey's 'Lives of the Lake Poets'--TDQ's a master of the anecdote though hardly the most reliable, like Heat but with literacy.
Selima Hill's 'Gloria' and Christopher Middleton's 'Collected Poems'--working my way through both of these hefty portions. Hill's poems are a constant delight, Middleton I'm newer too but like very much.

Arts and Books Festival 2: Walter Scott

Early 19th century social-networking

In a weekend of informative and engaging talks, Stuart Kelly's was perhaps the one I enjoyed most, despite the fact I have never fostered an interest in his topic or read any of Scott's books. Kelly has a book called 'Scottland' coming out, and the subject is Scott and Scottishness.

Kelly talked about how Scott engaged in a literary marketplace and became a canny manipulator of the influence exerted by authorship. For years, Scott's books--and some that were not written by him at all--appeared under the name of 'The author of Waverley' or other enigmatic pseudonyms as Scott continued to veil himself in mystery. He took imitators and satirists in his stride, seeing that this rather nurtured than damaged his status as the great iconic author, able to be torn apart as he was so well-known. Much of his work, especially the later produce, was increasingly heavily editted by his son-in-law and later biographer John Gibson Lockhart. And when Lockhart himself came to write the life of Scott, James Hogg (who had a relationship with Scott that could be seen to fit the Wordsworth-Coleridge model of friendship combined with rivalry) offered his name as a guise in which Lockhart might write more freely about his father-in-law. Thomas de Quincey translated a work from the German that was claiming to be by the author of Waverley himself, when he knew full well it was not. Such discrepancies, dissimulations and psuedonomy tell us much about Scott's incredible popularity (Kelly reckons him to have been read by just about every literate English speaker of the time judging by sales and probable circulation), but it also tells us something about the attitude there was to authenticity and authorship. Just as Hogg accused Scott of stealing his plots, so did Coleridge bequeath his great idea to Wordsworth.

The closer we look at the writing process, at manuscripts and drafts, the more we see that poetry is not begotten onto the page by the author in one easy birthing. It bothers me greatly that people think of Romanticism as principly about 'the Poet' and 'solitude'. Romanticism is so much a collective and communal project, working through couplings and rivalries, evoking and representing voices.* These poets were concerned with community from a familial to a national level. Dove Cottage was an experiment in a new type of communal living for Wordsworth and Dorothy, when they left it was for lack of rooms to house the family and friends.

Even on a deserted hillside, Wordsworth will see a rock or raggedy thorn bush and attach to it a whole human life. The famous C D Friedrich painting, The Wanderer, is often used to demonstrate what Romnaticims is about, the man alone--stranded or willfully apart--in the sublime natural scene. And yet, what are we looking at? If we are being asked to consider what it is to be alone, then the frame should be an unobstructed porthole, but still here at the top of the mountain we see a man. This is much what happens in the poetry of Wordsworth; the nature is peopled, or we view the poet in his solitude, in even closer commune with him because our sensory prospects are aligned, but always distinct as he exerts a personal pronoun view of the world, an interpretation onto the scene--floating over it like a veil so that we may see through it, but certainly present in a rendering of its shifting changing forms.

Romantic poets, like poets today, did not live and work in isolation. The current poet-in-residence here was berated on a Guardian blog a few months back for using the internet rather than shutting the window, the door and all links with the outer world in order to write. But this is simply the modernisation of the communications that Romantic poets were involved in; letter writing, editing manuscripts, visiting. We only need to glance at Dorothy's journals to see the traffic of visitors that came and went through Dove Cottage on a daily basis, visitors including Walter Scott.

*Romanticism on the Net (I refuse to admit it's become Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net...) had an issue with excellent essay by scholars who have been valuable to me in formulating ideas about and looking at the idea of Romantic couplings and rivalries (issue 18, 2007). The latest issue is all about Romanticism and selfhood, a subject that for brevity I tried to cull from this post. Much more twittering on to be done about the self in Romanticism in future blogging I fear...

Arts and Books Festival 1: Edward Lear in England

'Hail, Snow and Desolation!'

I know little about Edward Lear, but even the most eminent experts have been forced to reconsider their conceptions because of the findings of Charles Nugent. Nugent's research deepens our understanding of Lear by drawing attention to an overlooked aspect of his career; a sketching tour of the Lake District in 1836. The unique exhibition, Edward Lear in England, will be in the musuem here at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere later this year.

Lear's letters from this period, which Nugent sampled in his talk, are charming. He greatly enjoyed his trip to the area, but it appears he didn't fail to notice the region's shortfall--which is properly speaking the opposite, an overabundance. For several weeks after his arrival he saw no lakes at all, 'water being an unpleasantry too superfluous [...] to seek for more.' One town is particularly mauled in his epistolary accounts; Kendal is 'nature's slop basin, where it always rains' and there 'babies are born with fins, webbed feet and umbrellas under their arms'. He produced a sketch of the ladies on market day bearing their weapons against the weather and titled it 'Umbrellifera' as though they were an example of local flora.

Things combined for him, ideas and things seeping into one another or simply unable to be disentangled:

The castle, Mrs. Hornby, the prison and the lunatic asylum are all balanced in my mind and are all exquisite in their own way.

[You] sit among the armour and starched ruffs till you find yourself growing stiff.

The technique might be called surrealism (I think it is a worn out word these days, and an inaccurate one for his time) but it is less method than presentation. It is not illogical to see things connected surely, but rather madness to try to trim them back. In an admiring but almost baffled phrase he described the cultivated gardens at Levens Hall with 'the grass shorn short' as 'looking like fable and nonsense'; an odd description of stately fashion by a man famed now for not making sense himself. As a young man, to 'buy his bread and cheese', Lear drew pictures of parrots.

Winter Wordsworth

Friday, 23rd January 2009

I am now - to conjure a verb - interned. The smattering of snow that fell last night remained this morning and seduced some of us into a small trek. We headed up the lane that separates our terraces from Dove Cottage to reach the footpath that forks in two, one way along the old coffin path, the other our chosen route up to Alcock Tarn. It's a steep if brief ascent. The tarn is preluded by a series of smaller pools along the way, each one larger and deeper than the last, glints of encouragement as the path inclined and grew icier. We celebrated our small conquest over nature when we finally made our goal, the tarn was high enough up to be surrounded by a foot-deep covering of unreceding snow. Then we began the tricky descent, hesitantly picking our stepping through the slush and loose rocks. On our way down, we were passed by a fell-runner. Ten minutes and a quarter of a mile or so further along, as we were wishing man never had the audacity to shed the status of quadraped, he hurtled past us in the opposite direction this time.

On our comparatively ponderous journey back, we recalled that snow and ice, all the accoutrements of winter, are largely absent from Wordsworth's poems. There are a few exceptions (in Lucy gray the snow reveals the path of the lost child) but where it occurs snow is something forborne not delighted in. Climatic conditions in Europe would have caused snow on the peaks around Grasmere to have persisted yet longer each year in Wordsworth's time. However, he chose to concentrate on Spring and - a phrase more often heard about the economy these days - green shoots. At first this seemed odd - snow is at least initially delightful and plenty of poets revel in it as much as schoolchildren do - but it is understandable. With even longer and harsher winters, how much more apparently miraculous the re-emergence of flowers; their shock of colour and scent after the stifling frost. The irrepressibility of it, as if it became more not less unlikely that the world could survive another yearly freezing. And flowers are so slender-necked as to appear yet more unlikely. To us they can often seem unnecessary even; used as a decoration, given as a gift whose precise charm is in their practical purposelessness. We forget sometimes their role: sex organs, productive, vital. In Wordsworth's time such considerations were more immediate perhaps (botany was a common passion in that era). Flowers were a part of the seasons, not an adornment.

Of course the first flowers to conquer the white are snowdrops. Today they can be seen on William and Mary's grave, heads bent toward the element from which it issues but which it will survive.



To a Snowdrop

Lone flower, hemmed in with snows and white as they
But hardier far, once more I see thee bend
Thy forehead, as if fearful to offend,
Like an unbidden guest. Though day by day,
Storms, sallying from the mountain-tops, waylay
The rising sun, and on the plains descend;
Yet art thou welcome, welcome as a friend
Whose zeal outruns his promise! Blue-eye May
Shall soon behold this border thickly set
With bright jonquils, their odours lavishing
On the soft west-wind and his frolic peers;
Nor will I then thy modest grace forget,
Chaste snowdrop, venturous harbinger of Spring,
And pensive monitor of fleeting years!

William Wordsworth, 1819

Grasmere

Coming from Felixstowe, a dock town in famously-flat Suffolk, there are immediately noticeable differences on arrival in Grasmere.

Water
Inland forms in abundance. Clearer. And it tastes different, from the tarn and the tap.

Birds
Saw my first goosander today. She was very fine, wore her ginger crest like a bonnet. Goosanders are one of those rare species where the females are more showy in appearance than the males it seems to me. Our girl was swimming with the mallards, perhaps searching for a mate worthy of her good looks.

Air
No salt to it.

Woodsmoke

Night
Real dark, real quiet. No dock noise, no orange tinged black.

Hills
It's ups and downs.