Poets compose new Lyrical Ballads to highlight social relevance of Romantics
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http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/09/poets-new-lyrical-ballads-romantic-wordsworth-coleridge Version 0 of 1. The poems are full of waterfalls, frosty moors, sunlit summer days, crumbling cottages – and a focus on the real lives of “ordinary” people. Two centuries after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge pioneered the Romantic poetry movement, 23 of their best-known modern successors, including the former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, have contributed freshly minted pieces for a new version of the pair’s landmark collection, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems. The 23 converged on Bristol, a spiritual homeland of the movement, where Wordsworth and Coleridge both worked and where their Lyrical Ballads was first published, at the weekend to unveil their poems and show that Romanticism is alive and kicking. A series of Coleridge lectures is also being held, inspired by the fiery debates the poet organised in Bristol while a new guide to the sights of Bristol associated with the Romantic movement – such as the spot where Wordsworth composed the final passage of Tintern Abbey – has been produced. Poets and organisers suggest the project could spark fresh interest in the Romantic movement and argue that the sort of social and environmental issues Wordsworth and Coleridge were interested in have as much relevance in 21st-century Britain as they did in the late 18th and 19th-centuries. Gillian Clarke, Alice Oswald and Liz Lochhead are among the poets who have contributed new works to the collection, which will be published in due course and feature in a two-part Radio 4 documentary in the spring. Another, Ruth Padel, said it was a wonderful project with social as well as artistic relevance. “The Romantic movement was the beginning of a new look at the world,” she said. “It wasn’t about being romantic and gauzy about landscape. It was the start of putting the vernacular and vernacular lives into poetry. It was looking at real lives in landscape, which is a heritage we are pursuing today. Today we’re looking more and more at regionalism, regional language, regional dialects, the language people really speak, the lives people really live.” Motion’s poem is entitled The Concern – the term Wordsworth and Coleridge gave to their relationship. He writes about what he calls the “almost lover-like intensity” of their friendship in the beginning (which soured in later life): Briefly to all intents and purposes they are one man joined to the other - they have become one another - Mr Colesworth or Wordridge.. (Continued below) Motion suggested there could be a “breaking wave” of new interest in the Romantics – though he also argues that adoration of them has never really gone away. “The poems [in the original Lyrical Ballads] are full of evidence of a very divided society. They tend to concentrate on people at the poor end, the vagabonds and vagrants, the ex-army people who can’t find employment. They are full of ideas about dislocation and impoverishment. That has resonance today.” Alice Oswald’s poem, Dead Bird, begins with the vivid image of a “rotted swan ... hurrying away from the plane-crash mess of her wings.” Adam Thorpe’s contribution focuses on Joseph Cottle, the bookshop owner who published Lyrical Ballads in 1798. He points out there is a Tesco Express in Wine Street, Bristol, where Cottle had his shop. The supermarket: “boasts ‘a whole cucumber for 49p’.” Andrew Kelly, the director of Bristol Festival of Ideas, which is leading the project, said: “Coleridge and Wordsworth lived and worked at a time of revolution, youthful democratic politics and the wide debate of ideas. Their work looked at nature and the emotions, place and the environment. The present-day looming ecological crisis makes a renewed focus and debate essential. We hope our series will create a new battle of ideas about the environment, society and the world.” The Concern by Andrew Motion One has tramped forty miles, but at the sight below him vaults the field-gate into the corn and, with the hard heads rasping against him, bounds forward taking for once a straight line rather than roundabout, while the other man stops digging the vegetable-rows in his garden to watch this face which will keep disappearing then rising in the ocean of green becoming gold. * This face is the face of an angel already falling, the mouth open, voluptuous, gross, eloquent; the chin good-humoured and round; the nose, the rudder, small, feeble, nothing. But dramatic. The other is gaunt, internal, plain, solemn, lyrical, not yet granite from effort or suffering, although thrust beyond the pale of love already, his likings running along new channels, the old ones dry. * Old things have passed away, and new violence – the rage and dog-day heat – that has died out too. One says at the fireside: I am no longer for public life. I have snapped my squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition. Meanwhile the other, woken by this strange tenderness, breaks the silence in himself. He thinks it is possible now to describe the attraction of a country in romance, and reasonable to live like a green leaf on the blessed tree. * Briefly to all intents and purposes they are one man joined to the other - they have become one another - Mr Colesworth or Wordridge, the Concern, settling here at the hard roadside in the guise of a vagrant, or there unfolding into an albatross and skimming over the packed streets and slavers of Bristol docks as if they were both one sailor who fell overboard; a lost soul labouring north towards the ice and sun. * Then they find and make their chosen resort a fold where a stream falls down a sloping wall of rock to make a waterfall considerable for this country, and across the pool: an ash tree, with its branches spindling up in search of light. For want of that the shaking leaves have faded almost lily white, while downwards from the trunk hang ivy-trails a-sway to prove the breathing of the waterfall. * This is a fine place to talk treason, if not a place to forget there is any need for treason. And yet sequestered as it might be in wild Poesy, the mind still becomes illegible unto itself for no good reason. And yet, external things will lose the sense of having their external life, and men that cannot fly will grow and stretch their wings in the abyss of their ideals, then grieve that all they have is just the feel of flight. * One says nothing. The other says, two giants leagued together, their names are called BREAD & CHEESE. The other says nothing. One says: my past life seems to me like a dream, a feverish dream! all one gloomy huddle of strange actions and dim-coloured motives! The other says nothing. One says: it is a painful idea that our existence is of very little use; I have left my friends, I have left plenty. The other says nothing. |