SUMMER NEWSLETTER AUGUST 2021

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I have begun with an image of Coleridge and Wordsworth because their  collaborations  and mutual support was so significant. I highly recommend reading the Lyrical Ballads and its Advertisement in the first edition of The Lyrical Ballads which sets out their revolutionary vision of poetry.

"It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves.

The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title".

I do like the birdy spelling of awkwardness evoking the spirit of the albatross. And I love the attack on "modern writers".

The Preface of the Second Edition expands on the Advertisement and was hugely influential in shaping some of the principles of what can  broadly be called Romantic Poetry. Together with The Prelude,  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner  and Wordsworth's poem Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During A Tour  , July 13, 1798 (both of which were first published in the Lyrical Ballads) it sets out a kind of manifesto linking poetry (which they hoped they had made accessible to a new range of readers and writers) and nature. 

Manifesto is not the right word- it lacks the almost religious passion and awe they both felt for the natural world.

Here is a link to the 1798 edition of the Lyrical Ballads.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9622/9622-h/9622-h.htm

And a link to the Wordsworth Trust Grasmere website which is full of interesting articles. I have used an article on the Lyrical Ballads as the gateway to the site.

https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2014/08/13/a-new-species-of-poetry-the-making-of-lyrical-ballads/


And here is an extract from  Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. I have included it for personal reasons as I do not know the Lake District (only brief visits when travelling to Scotland) but  I know Tintern Abbey and the Wye Valley very well indeed). I have looked upon them in the hours of thoughtless youth and throughout my life and always been deeply moved. It's a landscape and poem which inhabits my mind and which I love.

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, 

And what perceive; well pleased to recognize

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being."




OTHER BITS AND PIECES
I have been squirrelling away various things I have read that people may enjoy.
The first is an article on Emily Dickinson which as well as considering the slave trade  and "queerness" also has an Emily Dickinson cake recipe which contains 19 eggs. I can only assume the Dickinsons were rich in chickens

And an essay on her poem The Last Night That She Lived. Emily Dickinson wrote some remarkable and powerful poems about grief and death. My own favourite is After great pain a formal feeling comes but this is also an astonishingly powerful poem. The essay writer also reference's  Walt Whitman's Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking which I can never hear or read without sobbing.

The shared reading of The Ancient Mariner with readers as diverse as Iggy Pop and Tilda Swinton is available again for anyone who missed it the first time around.

Here is an interesting article on Sylvia Plath
I have been reading Red Comet the new biography of Sylvia Plath which is a weighty and impressive tome .
Here is a link to an article about it 

I was thirteen when she committed suicide but she sometimes feels like a contemporary rather than a generation before. I particularly marvelled at an extract from Adlai Stevenson's A Purpose for Modern Women speech which he gave to Sylvia's Graduating class at the all female Smith College in 1955. My American friends assure me that he was one of the good guys- a Democratic senator who was well educated and held progressive views and was twice defeated in the Presidential race by Eisenhower.
Here are some choice paragraphs, from a short speech.

 "I think part of your job is to keep him Western, to keep him truly purposeful, to keep him whole. In short—while I have had very little experience as a wife or mother—I think one of the biggest jobs for many of you will be to frustrate the crushing and corrupting effects of specialization, to integrate means and ends, to develop that balanced tension of mind and spirit which can be properly called "integrity."

This assignment for you, as wives and mothers, has great advantages. In the first place, it is home—you can do it in the living-room with a baby in your lap or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hand. If you're really clever, maybe you can even practice your saving arts on that unsuspecting man while he's watching television!

Now, as I have said, women, especially educated women such as you, have a unique opportunity to influence us, man and boy, and to play a direct part in the unfolding drama of our free society. But I am told that nowadays the young wife or mother is short of time for the subtle arts, that things are not what they used to be; that once immersed in the very pressing and particular problems of domesticity, many women feel frustrated and far apart from the great issues and stirring debates for which their education has given them understanding and relish. Once they read Baudelaire. Now it is the Consumers' Guide. Once they wrote poetry. Now it's the laundry list. Once they discussed art and philosophy until late in the night. Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of contraction, of closing horizons and lost opportunities. They had hoped to play their part in the crisis of the age. But what they do is wash the diapers. (Or do they any longer?)

In modern America the home is not the boundary of a woman's life. There are outside activities aplenty. But even more important is the fact, surely, that what you have learned and can learn will fit you for the primary task of making homes and whole human beings in whom the rational values of freedom, tolerance, charity and free inquiry can take root."

O dear. 

It's Faber's 90th anniversary for all you T.S. Eliot fans.

Finally, it's the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante.  The Uffizi has a free virtual exhibition of some very fragile Renaissance illustrations by the artist Federico  Zuccari. Below is a link to an article which will give you access to the illustrations.



Two outstanding questions from our last session.
  • The term Lascar was used as a general term for Indian sailors in Wordsworth's day ( coined by the Portuguese in Goa) who began arriving in England in the 18th and 19th centuries  when the British East India Company were recruiting thousands of lascars (often Bengali Muslims from Sylheti (which then would have been in Assam and is now in Bangladesh) but also Konkani-speaking Christians from the northern part of Portuguese Goa and Muslims from  Maharashtra) to work on British ships. There's a particularly rich history of lascars in Tower Hamlets where many lascars were from Sylheti in Bangladesh, and their presence had a significant impact on establishing the Bengal and Bangladeshi community in the Brick Lane area. Below is a link to a Guardian article which is worth reading. I highly recommend the book it mentions Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers  a work of oral history amongst the Sylheti community in Tower Hamlets which was written in 1987 but it is not easy to obtain- even Abe Books does not have a reasonably priced copy which is a great shame.
 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/08/featuresreviews.guardianreview21
  • Below is a link to a paper written by Brynn Hammond entitled The Search for Fletcher Christian: The Resounding Tumult. Wordsworth and Fletcher Christian  attended the same school and Hammond postulates that Fletcher Christion may have been in the crew of the Abergavenny (the East Indian man vessel captained by John Wordsworth, William's brother).I can venture no opinion as I have not yet read it.


FINALLY
I hope everyone has had a good summer and is thriving. 
Janet is bringing the poem on September  8th  when we will meet on Zoom, possibly for the last time.
No extra poem in the hope  that people will follow the link to read Tintern Abbey
Best Wishes,
Elizabeth






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