{"id":733,"date":"2015-07-03T08:55:04","date_gmt":"2015-07-03T08:55:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=733"},"modified":"2015-07-03T11:10:35","modified_gmt":"2015-07-03T11:10:35","slug":"report-from-romanticism-and-the-south-west-day-conference-29th-june-2015-university-of-bristol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=733","title":{"rendered":"Report from \u2018Romanticism and the South West\u2019: day conference, 29th June 2015, University of Bristol"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bristol2\"<\/a>

Goldney Hall, Bristol<\/p><\/div>\n

I arrived in Bristol on a rainy Sunday. Fortunately, the summer weather soon returned and by Monday morning on the 29th<\/sup> July I was in the beautiful surroundings of Goldney Hall, Clifton, feeling thoroughly inspired by the talks at the conference on \u2018Romanticism and the South West\u2019. It was a day that reminded me just why a non-sentimental evaluation of the significance of place for Romantic authors is so important. As the conference blurb<\/a> explains:<\/p>\n

The South West is sometimes no more than a tableau for Romantic writers, a wild region of myth and mystery, exciting because so different from the urbanity of London. But for other writers the region is essential to their writing, less a concept than an active element in how they thought and wrote.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The day was organised by Ralph Pite and his doctoral students and colleagues. The conference incorporated a wide range of papers on both established and lesser-known connections between the Romantic period and the South West (including Bristol, Devon, Somerset, and South Wales). There was a clear focus throughout on well-researched discoveries of connections, on crucial insights and on the appreciation of the texts written by the authors discussed. There were some fantastic readings of poetry given in detailed context revealing just how important this area of the world was for the Romantics, and still is to the study of Romanticism.<\/p>\n

The conference\u2019s legacy is embodied in an exciting new app called \u2018Romantic Bristol: Writing the City\u2019. This can be found on Apple\u2019s App Store and downloaded for free (just search \u2018Romantic Bristol<\/a>\u2019). The app features an interactive map of Bristol locations associated with Romanticism. If you allow the app to see your location, the app will also \u2018supply GPS data […] to a secure database in the University, that will show users\u2019 pathways through the environment, their choices, preferences and explorations.\u2019 This will allow researchers to \u2018study how people choose to walk through a city, with raised awareness of its history and culture but not following a guidebook track\u2019. I\u2019ve already had a go: it\u2019s easy to use and full of detailed information about the city and its links to this period in history.<\/p>\n

The first plenary talk at the conference was by Nick Groom, and he discussed the Bristolian writer Thomas Chatterton as a Gothic\/Romantic author but not in the traditional sense of Walpole\u2019s Gothic; instead he considered Chatterton in the context of the Gothic of antiquarian political\/social history (therefore less the Gothic of medievalist terror). This was an interesting reading of the poetry Chatterton wrote as he began his (albeit very short) poetical career in the West Country before moving to London.<\/p>\n

The panel following this considered \u2018Landscape and Verse\u2019: Adrian J. Wallbank discussed S T Coleridge\u2019s Kubla Khan<\/em> and the Valley of Rocks near Lynton, Exmoor. Could this \u2018desolate\u2019 landmark have been a vital inspiration for the astounding imagery in that poem, written during Coleridge\u2019s residence in Somerset? Sites like this in the West Country allowed Coleridge to explore his study of science (it being a natural phenomenon) and also his interest in the supernatural. Wallbank\u2019s talk was taken from a chapter that will appear in the forthcoming book Romantic Sustainability<\/em>. A joint paper by Catherine Boyle and Phil Vellender followed, discussing the materiality of P B Shelley\u2019s verse: in particular his sonnet \u2018On Launching Some Bottles Filled with Knowledge into the Bristol Channel\u2019. There were some fascinating close readings here, as after considering the early materialism in Shelley\u2019s poetry (in contrast to his later immateriality), Boyle and Vellender considered the concept of the Romantic sonnet and the links to Leigh Hunt\u2019s writing circle, and Shelley\u2019s experimentation with poetical forms. Sue Edney concluded the panel with a discussion on Chatterton and William Barnes. She considered \u2018semantic redundancy\u2019, the purity of language as a suitable medium for classical expression, and the paradox of Romantic ideas of purity and the Gothic. Her talk also included prose from Ruskin and concluded with Coleridge\u2019s stunning lines from \u2018Frost at Midnight\u2019, composed of course, at Nether Stowey, a small town less than 40 miles from Bristol, and the birthplace of Lyrical Ballads: <\/em><\/p>\n

But thou<\/em>, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze<\/p>\n

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags<\/p>\n

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,<\/p>\n

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores<\/p>\n

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear<\/p>\n

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible<\/p>\n

Of that eternal language, which thy God<\/p>\n

Utters, who from eternity doth teach<\/p>\n

Himself in all, and all things in himself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Attention to the Gothic and landscape in this panel conjured up the image of the South West as a wild, untameable place, and a definite contrast to London.<\/p>\n

\"Bristol1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The afternoon plenary talk (after an al fresco lunch in the stunning gardens of the venue) was by Tim Fulford. One of his many academic roles is editor of the letters and works of Robert Southey. Entitled \u2018Oxygenating Romanticism; or, Humphry Davy goes to Tintern\u2019, this paper considered the eighteenth-century scientific experiments in \u2018vital air\u2019 or oxygen and how this corresponds to stimulation as a factor in poetic inspiration: i.e. inspiration revitalises the mind of the poet, and \u2018over-stimulation\u2019 and \u2018under-stimulation\u2019 were considerations in the progressions of health science. Fulford considered Humphry Davy\u2019s excursion to the Wye and his experiments with a eudiometer. In going to Tintern Abbey, Davy wanted to back up Wordsworth\u2019s enthusiastic nature-worship with objective measures \u2013 this would also validate his own poetry. Fulford reminded us that the great Romantic lyric is a creation of the 1790s in the West Country. Coleridge appeared in this paper too: in Wordsworth\u2019s \u2018Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798\u2019 the poet echoes Coleridge\u2019s \u2018Frost at Midnight\u2019 by being soothed in nature, a consequence of being over-stimulated by the city:<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0And I have felt<\/p>\n

A presence that disturbs me with the joy<\/p>\n

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime<\/p>\n

Of something far more deeply interfused,<\/p>\n

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,<\/p>\n

And the round ocean and the living air,<\/p>\n

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:<\/p>\n

A motion and a spirit, that impels<\/p>\n

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,<\/p>\n

And rolls through all things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Bristol4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The two final panels entitled \u2018Landmarks\u2019 and \u2018The Radical South West\u2019 presented four more fascinating papers. Annika Bautz gave a history of Plymouth Public Library, built in 1811-13. Plymouth\u2019s geographical location produced a need for such an establishment so that people could access key texts. Julia S. Carlson discussed Wordsworth\u2019s \u2018The Discharged Soldier\u2019: I found this talk particularly interesting in the way in which it considered Dorothy\u2019s role as a collaborator in 1798 and the start of the Alfoxden journal. Dorothy\u2019s prose response to a place would later initiate Wordsworth\u2019s developments in blank verse. John Williams continued the discussion on Wordsworth with a paper on The Ruined Cottage <\/em>and the influence of William Crowe, an eccentric public orator at Oxford who wrote \u2018Lewesdon Hill\u2019. Crowe\u2019s work referred to areas around Racedown, Dorset that Wordsworth knew well. Kerry Sinanan\u2019s talk on John Stedman\u2019s \u2018Tiverton connections\u2019 considered the role of irony and satire in abolitionist and anti-slavery texts, and how this links to Tiverton, a town in Devon, where Stedman eventually settled with his wife and children.<\/p>\n

The keynote address was given by Tim Dee<\/a>: writer and BBC radio producer, editor of The Poetry of Birds<\/em> (with Simon Armitage) and author of \u2018The Running Sky \u2013 A Birdwatching Life\u2019. His talk, entitled \u2018The Mild, Mild West\u2019, is difficult to sum up because of its range: its content included personal recollections, an \u2018album of snapshots\u2019 attempting to capture the concept of \u2018Romanticism in the South West\u2019. As Bristol PhD candidate Rachel Murray put it on Twitter:<\/p>\n

\n

Highlight of @RomanticismSW<\/a> was @TimDee4<\/a> keynote on The Mild Mild West, part love letter to Bristol, part elegy to the ‘placeyness of place’<\/p>\n

\u2014 Rachel Murray (@murrayrachel89) June 30, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dee considered Bristol in a tender and engaging way as the most rurally inflicted of the UK\u2019s major cities. Dee\u2019s work and time spent with Simon Armitage links to Armitage\u2019s own 2015 expedition of the South West Coast Path, documented in his book Walking Away<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and recently featured on Radio 4\u2019s \u2018Book of the Week\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Coleridge was again the star of the show here, as Dee\u2019s favourite Romantic poet. Coleridge\u2019s \u2018The Nightingale\u2019 is the first recorded reference to a nightingale in the West Country \u2013 it is not a bird usually found in those parts. Dee has lived in Bristol most of his life, and therefore his talk included comic notes on \u2018romantic\u2019 (i.e. personal) love and affection which were very touching and clever, but he also included serious comments on the ephemeral nature of life. Dee placed emphasis on the brilliant effects one can experience if they visit a favourite poet\u2019s former abode \u2013 such as Coleridge\u2019s house in Clevedon where he wrote \u2018The Eolian Harp\u2019 \u2013 and how amazing it feels to be there and be surrounded by the same air as that which the poem was written in. Though Dee\u2019s talk was very broad and touched on so many subjects, it also felt at times like we were tracing a part of Coleridge\u2019s journey through the West Country in the years leading up to the creation of Lyrical Ballads<\/em>. Dee\u2019s talk included one of my favourite quotes from Coleridge\u2019s notebooks, on the inquisitiveness of his first-born son, Hartley:<\/p>\n

Tuesday \u2013 Hartley looking out of my study window fixed his eyes steadily & for some time on the opposite prospect, & then said \u2013 Will yon Mountains always<\/em> be?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Overall, the day represented for me a recent focus in academia\/Romantic studies on the importance of literary places \u2013 by focusing on the South West, this conference took us from Pre-Romanticism and Chatterton to Shelley and Coleridge and beyond. Don\u2019t forget to download the app (\u2018Romantic Bristol\u2019)!<\/p>\n

– Anna Mercer<\/a>, PhD Candidate at the University of York<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Bristol3\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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