Tag Archives: Coleridge

Looking Back on Fall 2011 and What’s to Come . . .

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As this semester winds down, we’d like to recap some of our accomplishments from the past few months:

  • Our inaugural event in September on ‘Visionary Poetry and Romanticism’ featured a lively discussion of Blakean and Coleridgean takes on Visions, the Visual, the Visionary, and the aesthetic sphere. We were fortunate to have various GSAS students and fellow NYC-area Romanticists in attendance along with special guests Larry Lockridge and Maureen N. McLane.
  • In October, we held a Graduate School of Arts and Science-wide event on “Getting it Published,” a talk with William Germano and Cliff Siskin about the tricks of the trade to getting an article published or a dissertation converted to a book. We were pleased to host over 50 grad students and were able to sell copies of Germano’s two books, Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious About Serious Books and From Dissertation to Book.
  • After submitting a proposal for a staged reading of Byron’s Sardanapalus to the artistic directors of the Red Bull Theatre (http://www.redbulltheater.com/), they have agreed to collaborate with us on this potentially large event scheduled for next Fall 2012!  In addition to hosting a staged reading of the play at their venue with professional actors, we expect to turn this performance into a larger discussion among textual and performance scholars as well as performers and artistic directors. This conversation will conceive of Byron’s play as a mode of inquiry into the varied approaches these various players bring to a text. We imagine that a collaborative essay will arise from examining this complex process from the moment rehearsals begin at Red Bull through the discussion that follows the staged reading. More info to come shortly!
  • As a team, the organizers of our group are also working on a collaborative essay on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Wordsworth’s  “Lines . . . above Tintern Abbey” based on some valuable discussion from our inaugural event on Romanticism and Visionary Poetry. More on this soon, too!
  • We have reached out to representatives from Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) to give a talk to our English department about their new software, Mediathread, an analysis tool (similar to Blackboard) that can import images and videos from a range of digital collections into a course-specific website. These visual objects can then be annotated, organized, discussed, and embedded into multimedia essays. Definitely very cool stuff! We expect to plan this talk for February 2012.

As we look ahead to next semester, we will naturally continue working on our “Kubla Khan”/”Tintern Abbey” paper, solidify our plans with Red Bull Theatre for the staged reading of Byron’s Sardanapalus (did we mention professional actors?), and set a date for Mark Phillipson’s talk on MediaThread for the faculty and grad students of our English Department.

However, we are hoping to organize some additional events. Ideally, we’d expand the ideas we considered with the visionary and visual from our inaugural event by looking into notions of prophecy and futurity. We are thinking about having a faculty panel focusing specifically on this rich and complex material; perhaps the structure would include one main talk and one faculty respondent.

We are also considering hosting one broader NYC-wide Romanticist event featuring some local scholars chatting about some cool Romantic-specific topics. We’ve only just begun thinking about this, but please stay tuned for more info soon!

On a final note (for now), we couldn’t be more pleased with the results this blog medium has helped produce; it has not only served as a record of our many conversations but has also helped generate additional thoughts and ideas. Moreover, we’re grateful to our many followers that we’ve been able to gather in such a short time. Excited for the new and multiple possibilities ahead, we hope you’ll continue to follow along, and, as ever, we encourage your contributions, responses, and attendance at our events!

Yours sincerely,

Veronica Goosey, Omar F. Miranda, and Randie Sessler

www.nyurrg.org

Coleridge, Plotinus, and the Materials of Poetry

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This post examines the scholarly implications of the unique circulation history of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Specifically, this post asks what is lost when we privilege the material history of poetry? What role should the recitation history of a work like Kubla Khan play in our readings of the poem? What does the act of recitation represent to Coleridge himself?

In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge relies upon Plotinus to describe the labor of the philosopher. Addressing the concept of philosophical creation, Coleridge quotes from Plotinus’s Third Ennead, “My contemplation creates what is contemplated, as the geometricians draw figures as they contemplate. But it is not in drawing figures but in contemplating that the lines of the forms are settled” (144). Coleridge agrees with Plotinus’s claim that “contemplation” gives rise to “the lines of the forms.” The lines exist in the mind of the geometrician before they are put onto paper. The paper, for Plotinus as well as for Coleridge, becomes simply the means through which the contemplation of the geometrician can have material existence. The excerpt that Coleridge chooses speaks to Plotinus’s concept of the hypostases, or stages of emanation. In The Enneads, Plotinus describes a central, unified divinity called the One that emanates outward to become part of all things in existence. However, some things are closer to and more intimately connected with the One. The human soul, for example, is much closer to the One than material objects. In fact, according to Plotinus, material things are at the greatest possible distance from the One. Yet, all art must exist in something. The sculptor, painter, and poet all must rely upon material in order to express what they contemplate. Plotinus’s Fifth Ennead provides a context for better understanding what the transformation of an immaterial speech act to a printed text means for Coleridge.

At the start of The Fifth Ennead, Plotinus describes the current condition of humanity.The philosopher asks, “What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, andthough members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It?’ (Mackenna 1). Despite the fact that human souls are “members of the Divine,” humanity has forgotten its own divinity as well as the source of that divinity, God. Plotinus argues that exertion of “self – will” leads human souls away from “the Divine” (Mackenna 1). It is this distance from the source of all divinity that hinders the development of individual souls: “ A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature” (Mackenna 1). Souls fail to develop properly because they do not recognize their own worth. Rather than admiring their own inherent divinity, souls “misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves” (Mackenna 1). Plotinus believes that the soul must study itself in order to once more recognize its connection to the One. Plotinus posits that the One is “all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not all things; all things are its possession – running back, so to speak, to it – or, more correctly, not yet so, they will be” (Mackenna 16). The One is the source and owner of all things. It does not belong to or have the characteristics of anything in the world but everything in the world exhibits, to a greater or lesser degree, some aspects of the One. According to Plotinus, the soul who wishes to regain the honor of her rank will begin “running back” to its divine source, back to the One.

The philosopher goes on to argue that there are three initial hypostases or stages that proceed outward from the One. The first, and therefore the closest to the One, is the “Divine Intellect” (Mackenna 16). Plotinus locates the “Divine Intellect” not in the sensory of material world, but in “what Plato calls the Interior Man,” or the soul (Mackenna 14). For Plotinus, the intellectual part of the soul remains pure: “The reasoning phase of the soul, needing no bodily organ for its thinking but maintaining, in purity, its distinctive Act that its thought may be uncontaminated – this we cannot err in placing, separate and not mingled into body, within the first Intellectual” (Mackenna 14). In this passage, there is a clear division between the sensory world and the pure realm of “the first Intellectual.” “The reasoning phase of the soul” needs “no bodily organ for its thinking” because the One has already bestowed upon it, in the words of M.H. Abrams, the “totality of the fixed Platonic forms” (Abrams 147). The forms are, for Plotinus, the “permanent Right” that guides that “reasoning in our soul” (Mackenna 14). The Soul, the second hypostasis, springs from the Divine Intellect: “The Soul arises as the idea and act of the motionless Intellectual – Principle” (Mackenna 16). The Soul “takes fullness by looking at its source,” namely the Intellectual – Principle or Divine Intellect. Abrams rightly points out that, “These hypostases descend along a scale of ever increasing “remoteness” from the One” (147). That is, the divine intellect directly springs from the One and the Soul in turn springs from the Divine Intellect.

The material universe is the third and most remote stage. While there are many issues that Plotinus’s discussion of material raises, I want to focus on the relationship between art and the material that it occupies. Plotinus sets out to understand the ways that the objects produced by intellectual labor can guide individuals back to the One. At the start of On the Intellectual Beauty, the Eighth Tractate of The Fifth Ennead, the philosopher imagines an individual moving through the three hypostases to return to the One: “It concerns us, then, to try to see and say, for ourselves and as far as such matters may be told, how the Beauty of the divine Intellect and of the Intellectual Cosmos may be revealed to contemplation” (174). Through the “contemplation of art,” progress through the hypostases is possible. Plotinus seeks to separate the idea behind a piece of art from the materials that it manifests itself in. According to the philosopher, a sculpture is not beautiful because of the stone that it is made out of but “in virtue of the Form or Idea introduced by” it (174). Although the artist must use materials, the “Idea or Form” that these materials express makes the art objects potentially beneficial. Yet, it is important to recognize that the idea that leads to the creation of art belongs to a higher hypostasis: “Then again every prime cause must be, within itself, more powerful than its effects can be: the musical does not derive from an unmusical source but from music; and so the art exhibited in the material work derives from an art yet higher” (175). A musical derives from music and a poem derives from poetry. The ideal form or idea of each type of art belongs to and resides with the One.

Plotinus’s desire to draw a distinction between objects of art and the ideas behind them becomes more evident as On the Intellectual Beauty progresses. The immaterial idea of a work of art is more beautiful than any embodiment of it: “Now we can surely not believe that, while the made thing and the Idea thus impressed upon Matter are beautiful, yet the Idea not so alloyed but resting still with the creator – the Idea primal, immaterial, firmly a unity – is not Beauty” (176). In this passage, Plotinus emphasizes the action of an artist. While the “Idea” itself rests “still with the creator,” artists must labor to make their materials manifest their Idea. The “primal” and “immaterial” Idea is not beautiful; it is serene and resting “Beauty.” Ultimately, Plotinus concludes that “One way, only, remains: all things must exist in something else” (180). He then attempts to make all matter the result of an Idea. The material world emerges as “an Idea – the lowest – all this universe is Idea and there is nothing that is not Idea” (180). Although the material world is “the lowest” expression of a form or idea, it still has potential. For Plotinus, material that is sculpted, painted, or written on has the capacity to help wayward souls rediscover their value and connection to the One.

Plotinus’s hypostases and thoughts regarding artistic material provide us with a context for interpreting the recitation history of Kubla Khan. Commenting on the attraction to the reciter, Coleridge writes in his Biographia, “For this is really a species of animal magnetism, in which the enkindling reciter, by perpetual comment of looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive faculty to his editors. They live for a time within the dilated sphere of his intellectual being” (283). According to the OED, enkindle means “to cause a flame, to blaze up.” The phrase “enkindling reciter,” then, invites two principal readings. First, the reciter becomes the source, the catalyst that is able to ignite feelings of sympathy in his/her audience. Second, and more important, the reciter is a consuming force. Through recitation, the material object of the poem is consumed and becomes an immaterial speech act. The “enkindling reciter” also utilizes his “looks and tones” in order to perpetually “comment” on the words he/she is speaking and further engage his/her audience. The shift from material object to spoken, “enkindling” performance enables the reciter to lend “his own will and apprehensive faculty to his editors.” The auditory editor is able to become part of the expanded “sphere” of the poet/reciter’s “intellectual being.” Instead of the artist conveying meaning to a passive audience, Coleridge’s framework suggests that artist and auditory editors, at least temporarily, inhabit the same intellectual space. In the context of Plotinus, this shared space means the reciter and the listener contemplate the idea behind the poem together.

The live recitation and publication of Kubla Khan, therefore, result in very different experiences for the audience as well as for Coleridge himself. The “enkindling reciter” consumes the manuscript materials of poetry and turns them into an immaterial speech act. From 1798 to 1816, Coleridge himself functioned as the vehicle through which the poem circulated. The physical presence of the reciter in the room allows for lively discourse and, according to Coleridge, the sharing of intellectual space. In the context of Plotinus, Coleridge and his audience are able to discuss and contemplate the idea or form behind the poem together. The transformation from immaterial recitation to published text exposes the problems inherent in artistic materials. The “lantern of typography” reduces the poem to mere letters on a page. While the recitation of the poem brings “heaven and Elysian bowers” to Lamb, contemporary readers confront what they believe to be “nonsense.” Also, when he recites his work, Coleridge occupies a higher hypostasis. The poet does not rely upon the materials of art and is able to use his “looks and tones” to help guide his audiences to the idea behind his poetry. In other words, there is one less layer of mediation to overcome on the journey back to the divine One. By not relying on the materials of poetic creation, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan can remain “a miracle of rare device.”

Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Ed. George Watson. New York: Dutton, 1962.

______. Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose. Eds Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano. New York: Norton, 2004.

Plotinus. The Divine Mind, Being the Treatises of the Fifth Ennead. Trans. Stephen  Mackenna. Boston: The Medici Society, 1926.

_______. “The Fifth Ennead: Eighth Tractate On the Intellectual Beauty.” The Norton Anthology  of Theory and Criticism. Eds. William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara Johnson, John McGowan, and Jeffrey Williams. New York: Norton, 2001. 171-185.

R. A. Sessler

A Brief Summary of Nigel Leask’s “Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited”

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Because of our recent interest in exploring the vast connections between Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, I came upon this article by Nigel Leask that I found quite fascinating. Below I summarize the text briefly and offer the hyperlink to Romanticism online where it can be found.

Brief Summary:

In “Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited,” Nigel Leask urges a new reading of Coleridge’s poem free from the 1816 preface that he believes distances the reader from its geo-political significance. To read Kubla Khan free from the modifications (sans preface) invites a view of “literary orientalism,” not focused entirely on the poem’s specific imagery, structural properties, or narrative voices but on its larger geo-political structure. Instead of the opiate-inspired dream vision to which the 1816 version alludes, Leask wishes to “restore” and “recover” the lost cultural narrative of Coleridge’s “geopolitical specificity” and the unexplored travel narratives (Staunton and Bruce’s writings specifically) that inspired him.

Agreeing with Marilyn Butler, Leask links Coleridge’s poem to Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer because it celebrates oriental exoticism, the return of an “ideal republican simplicity,” and a parallel transition between Cathay and Abyssinia. He sees a loose connection between the third stanza’s “vision” and Southey’s assassins who “yearn to be readmitted to the paradise of false consciousness.” Leask believes, however, that Coleridge seems to be advancing a more hedonistic participation in the pleasure-dome rather than the poetics that the “brutal revolutionary idol-smasher Thalaba”inspire.

Leask wishes to extend Butler’s fruitful argument by drawing attention to the contemporary writings on Chinese gardens and their introduction to Europe–proposing that “Kubla Khan, despite a vast amount of criticism, is a poem about an emperor’s garden” (jardin anglo-chinois). He discusses the importance of Sir William Chambers’ Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), a text describing the garden’s division into three categories or qualities: 1. pleasing (the fragrant shrubs, blossoming trees, winding waterways, etc.), 2. terrible (deep valleys inaccessible to the sun, impetuous cataracts, blasted and shattered trees, deep caverns in the rocks), and 3. surprising (quaking garden tourist in deep gloomy valleys, sepulchral monuments, colossal figures, sudden violent gusts of wind, trembling earth, noises of war). Chambers’ text ultimately connects England to his description of the Chinese garden where George III represents the western version of Emperor Qianlong.

Next, Leask explores Sir George Staunton’s Authentic Account . . . of the Earl of Mccartney as its author describes Emperor Qianlong’s gardens in detail. In his examination, those gardens “betrayed a regularity of design” and, though commanded and created for the pleasure of Qianlong, were made by the labor of thousands–expressing the political and class tensions inherent in oriental despotism. According to Leask, Staunton’s writings are expanded by Sir John Barrow, whose Travels in China reveal that the Earl of Mccartney was a landscape gardener; he recounts how the eastern and western parts of the garden recall the beautiful and sublime elements that Chambers witnessed.

Leask concludes his essay by focusing on Coleridge’s shift from the “Thalaban programme of destruction” in Kubla’s “decree” (the first stanza) to an alternative, positive vision of the Abyssinian maid’s “symphony and song,” a transition from “idolatrous Tartary” or Xanadu to “an ancient Christian culture” or Abyssinia. The religious allusion works as an “antistrophic rebuke” to the Khan’s aesthetic idolatry because of its untainted, “pure” perception in Europe. Despite Purchas’ links to “Mount Amara” as an ancient seat of pagan worship, the poem’s greater significance lies in its conversion to a pure form of Christianity that opposes both pagan and contemporary Christian culture.

-Omar F. Miranda

Source:

Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited

Citation Information. Romanticism. Volume 4, Page 1-21 DOI 10.3366/rom.1998.4.1.1, ISSN 1354-991x, Available Online 1998.

http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/rom.1998.4.1.1

Romantic Drama and Romantic Theatre

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Some time ago, we posted some thoughts on the staging of unstaged Romantic-era plays and on the phenomenon described by critics as mental theater.  I’d like to return to the subject of Romantic-era drama. When was the last time your English department offered a course examining the dramatic material of the Romantic period as drama? While staging is acknowledged to play an important role in understanding a Shakespearean tragedy and what’s being staged is a political issue in the early eighteenth century, Romantic drama is not widely viewed as dramatic, and the drama being staged in the period is not often made an object of study.

Romantic drama, and particularly the dramatic works of the “big six” Romantic poets, is generally viewed as poetry rather than as drama. For one thing, the drama of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron is lyrical, often employing long soliloquys and other marks of interiority. For another, few of these plays were ever staged, and in some cases the authors claim that they are not intended for the stage. However, there is evidence that the writers sought to have their plays staged without theatrical success, or in several cases, without acceptance by the managers. Wordsworth could find no one
to take The Borderers. Coleridge’s early Osorio was revised into Remorse before it took to the stage. Although The Cenci was the only work of Shelley’s to go into a second edition in his lifetime, no public performance made it onto a London stage until well into the nineteenth century. The vexed relationship between Byron’s dramas and their staging I’ll leave to my esteemed colleague Randall Sessler to discuss at another time. Joanna Baillie, one of the most esteemed dramatists of the period both critically and popularly, published multiple editions of her Plays on the Passions, and had several of her plays staged, but none achieved commercial success on the stage. Baillie, like the Romantic poets, was more concerned with tracing a character’s psychology than with spectacular stage effect. Critics have suggested that this focus on interiority and lyric
expression may have made the plays difficult to stage.

Some of the poets themselves suggest that they lack stage success because the stage is degenerate. As Jane Moody indicates in Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770-1840, Romantic poets dismissed the theaters as “places of noise, dirt, spectacle and unbridled sexual commerce, where Shakespeare was being mangled into opera, and ignorant audiences preferred performing dogs to the pleasures of Sheridan and John Gay” (2-3). Nor are these criticisms without basis. In addition to physical and moral contributions to “illegitimacy” to which Moody refers, the stage was subject to censorship and supervision unmatched by any other medium in the period, thanks to the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, which, although relaxed by the Theatrical Representations Act of 1788 and the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, was not repealed until the passage of the Theatres Act of 1968. Plays intended for performance had to be approved by the Licenser, a position in the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and could be censored by him. The Act particularly censored political commentary and satire. Although political statements would generally be excised from performance texts, the published versions of plays were not often censored. So although drama remained a legitimate form for political commentary, dramatic compositions approved by the Licenser could be viewed with suspicion.

Moreover, the plays being staged emphasized sentimentality and spectacle. The gothic dramas of Matthew Lewis and others, the Orientalism of, for instance, George Colman the younger’s Blue-Beard, the spectacle of trained animals as in The Quadrupeds of
Quedlinburgh, and the popularity of pantomime are only a few examples of what poets and other critics denounced as the degeneracy of the stage. Additionally, changing stage practices and public taste made adaptations of Shakespeare more popular than the original works—Nahum Tate’s happy-ending version of King Lear was rather popular throughout the nineteenth century. Yet despite condemnations of the theater from poets rejected by the managers of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, at various points Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Baillie all sought to have their plays staged as a way of legitimizing their dramatic efforts.

We can contextualize and historicize the retreat from the stage of the Romantics and other major poets working in dramatic genres during this period. But if, as argued in our earlier post Romantic Drama: Experiments, Mental Theater, and Media, the retreat from the stage of some of the period’s most talented dramatists led to the invention of a new dramatic form, and a new dramatic space, what does that do to our study of the Romantic-era stage and the drama performed there? How ought we to approach a dramatic performance? As scholars and critics of English literature, we are trained, at least primarily, to study texts. Text and performance are significantly different objects of study, and should be treated differently, but in what ways? How can we, as textual scholars, contribute to a reading of the staging of Byron’s Marino Faliero or Baillie’s
De Montfort, in addition to the texts?

~Veronica Goosey

Romantic Drama: Experiments, Mental Theater, and Media

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In the introduction to the Cornell edition of The Borderers, Robert Osborne claims that William Wordsworth’s inability to find a theater manager willing to stage the 1797 early version of his play makes the poet’s dramatic effort a failure. Osborne notes that Wordsworth “justifiably attributed his failure ‘to the depraved State of the Stage at present,’ and was ‘underdetemin’d’ whether to wait for a change in theatrical taste ‘or publish it immediately’” (5). It is important to recognize that publication of the text of the play was not Wordsworth’s original intention. Only after his drama was rejected by the managers of both Covent Garden and Drury Lane did Wordsworth consider seeing whether his “experiment” was “adopted for the closet” (Letters 6).  Wordsworth’s own classification of his play along with the fact that he originally wrote with an eye towards the stage has led many critics to dismiss The Borderers as a dramatic experiment that ultimately failed. The success of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, a collection that Wordsworth again called an “experiment,” therefore presents critics with a convenient transition from experimental failure to experimental success. However, such critical narratives depend upon the manner in which one defines success as well as where one locates Wordsworth’s experimentation. Is contemporaneous stage production or publication of a drama necessary for one to label it a success? Is Lyrical Ballads more successful than The Borderers because it made it to the press and thus reached a contemporary audience?

The Borderers begins to show the complex position Romantic dramas occupy in modern scholarly discourse. Wordsworth and Coleridge famously looked to the staged drama as the first vehicle that would help them create the taste by which they would be received. If, as I have proposed above, we define contemporary staging as the marker of success of a given Romantic drama, then only the 1813 production of Coleridge’s Remorse and the 1821 staging of Lord Byron’s Marino Faliero would qualify for such distinction. Alan Richardson’s landmark study A Mental Theater argues for a new understanding of the Romantics’ foray into drama. According to Richardson, “Whether condemned for his elitist pose and disdain for the public, or defended as a well-meaning but anachronistic reformer, the Romantic poet as dramatist is judged against his alleged “retreat” from the theater, rather than for the invention of a fundamentally new poetic form” (3). While Richardson’s work does a tremendous amount of valuable work to resuscitate the dramatic efforts of the second generation Romantics, his book, as the preceding passage makes clear, places Romantic dramas in the larger genre of poetry. The mental drama, a phrase that first appears in Byron’s letters, or closet drama becomes part of a greater poetic history. Building on Richardson’s foundational work, Daniel P. Watkins’s A Materialist Critique English Romantic Drama attempts to implement a materialist methodology that will allow scholars to more accurately engage with the dramas of Byron, Shelley, and other prominent Romantic figures. Watkins creates what he calls the “drama – theater distinctions” (4). That is, the text of a play is a drama while its staged production is an entirely different object of study.

Together, the work of Richardson and Watkins shows the rich areas of inquiry that demand further examination. Watkins is right to recognize the medial distinction between a staged production and a text of that production. If we follow his formulation, studying Coleridge’s Remorse involves much more than simply looking at the text of the play. Scholars should ask where does each iteration of the play occur – in what can it be found? In order to examine Coleridge’s drama fully, we need to look at the original 1797 written version of the drama, titled Osorio, the excerpts that appear as poems and are retitled in the 1798 and 1800 editions of Lyrical Ballads, the context and response to the 1813 production of Remorse at Drury Lane, and the publication of the text of that production.

The example of Remorse raises a series of crucial questions: What is the relationship between media and meaning? Where did major Romantic dramas originally appear? What role did the poet himself play in the appearance/placement/presentation of a particular drama? What we can learn from that placement? And, how do we negotiate artistic intent?

Retrospective: Visionary Poetry Event

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At our meeting on September 29, the Romanticist Reading Group discussed visionary poetry.  Our discussion encompassed the works of Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth as we threshed out the concepts of vision and the visionary as they apply to Romantic poetry, starting with a set of questions: how do we begin to define vision and the visionary? Do these definitions vary from poet to poet and from poem to poem? How are we as critics to negotiate the fact that vision serves as a central trope as well as a generic classification during the period? While Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancyent Marinere or Kubla Khan, Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion—or  any of his prophecies—or even Byron’s apocalyptic masterpiece Darkness may seem more appropriate to the topic, we found ourselves preoccupied with Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798.” More particularly, we found the similarities between the framing of the “Tintern Abbey” poem and the framing of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” intriguing. In both cases, the writer increasingly distances himself from the visionary portions of the poem.

In “Kubla Khan,” the poet says he had a vision of “A damsel with a dulcimer” but he cannot describe or even recall the vision; he says, “Could I revive within me / Her symphony and song,” acknowledging the impossibility of actually reviving the vision. The section of the poem containing the reference to the vision is set off from the rest of the poem by its change in meter. The poet is distanced from the poem by events of the paratext referenced in the title, “Kubla Khan: Or a Vision in a Dream.” The poem recounting the vision is ostensibly the result of a dream he had during a “profound sleep, at least of the external senses” in which he “composed” a long poem, of which the printed poem is but a fragment, produced before he was interrupted by the man from Porlock. He describes the composition process as an almost magical moment: “all the images rose up before him [Coleridge] as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions.” This unlikely framing of the poem’s genesis is countered by another story found in Coleridge’s note to the Crewe manuscript of the poem, in which he says the fragment was “composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery.” While considerably less mysterious, that the poem was composed during an opium high is considerably more credible than the preface’s account of it being composed during a dream. However, these changing accounts of the poem’s composition reveal the poet’s anxiety about recounting the visionary experience as the poet increases the distance between writer and the visionary moment.

Wordsworth displays a similar pattern of distancing in his revisions of “Tintern Abbey”. Over the course of its publication history, “Tintern Abbey” undergoes some subtle but crucial changes. When it first appeared as part of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, the full title of the poem was “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798.” In 1815, Wordsworth changed the lengthy title to “Lines Composed” instead of “Written.” Andrew Bennett reads the change in title as the poet’s attempt to disengage “the site of composition from that of inscription” (Wordsworth Writing 45). In the poem, the poet’s thoughts receive far more description than what the poet sees from his location on the Wye. In this case, ‘vision’ is more an act of the mind than of the eyes. Wordsworth wants to create distance between his experience of the River Wye and the act of writing. “Tintern Abbey” was actually written in Bristol and Bennett makes the provocative suggestion that a more accurate title would be “The Bristol Poem.” In the context of this discussion, we see two poets carefully presenting how their respective works came to be.

Both poems demonstrate their authors’ skepticism about writing their visions. Through various paratextual additions and alterations, Wordsworth and Coleridge increase the distance between themselves as authors and the visionary moments represented in their texts. Tintern Abbey was published in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, and although it wasn’t published in print until 1816, Kubla Khan was written in the autumn of 1797 and circulated through recitation for several years, so both poems partake of a historical moment which may have contributed to their skepticism regarding the possibility of accurately recording or reporting individual perception. What might account for this anxiety about recounting visions, whether of sensory perception, mental reflection, or revelatory imagination? What about England in the 1790s promotes this skepticism?

~Veronica Goosey