Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century

Mark Sandy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317061472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Concerned with the intermingled thematic and formal preoccupations of Romantic thought and literary practice in works by twentieth-century British, Irish, and American artists, this collection examines the complicated legacy of Romanticism in twentieth-century novels, poetry, and film. Even as key twentieth-century cultural movements have tried to subvert or debunk Romantic narratives of redemptive nature, individualism, perfectibility, and the transcendence of art, the forms and modes of feeling associated with the Romantic period continue to exert a signal influence on the modern moment - both as a source of tension and as creative stimulus. As the essays here show, the exact meaning of the Romantic bequest may be bitterly contested, but it has been difficult to leave behind. The contributors take up a wide range of authors, including Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, W. H. Auden, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Hart Crane, William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Franzen. What emerges from this lively volume is a fuller picture of the persistence and variety of the Romantic period's influence on the twentieth-century.

Chapter 1 Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and Virginia Woolf

Nicholas Roe

DOI: 10.4324/9781315606958-2

London. Tuesday 29 November 1927, evening. The Charles Lamb Society is gathering at Bedford Square. G.K. Chesterton is here, in cloak and wide-brimmed hat. So are Siegfried Sassoon and Frederick Downing, lawyer of Gray's Inn and Secretary of the Elians. Augustine Birrell rises to introduce their speaker, the soldier-poet Edmund Blunden, who has ‘returned … from the land of flowers’ to address the Society on Leigh Hunt. Sassoon tells us that Blunden begins to speak haltingly, yet with unaffected intensity. His face appears pale and gaunt in the lamplight. ‘Adonais in the flesh’, Sassoon thinks, as if John Keats is present in the modernist decade of The Waste Land, Ulysses, and To the Lighthouse.¹

¹ Barry Webb, Edmund Blunden A Biography (New Haven; London: Yale UP, 1990), pp. 161–2. Hereafter EB.

We should not be too surprised by this Elian gathering, or by Edmund Blunden's decision to offer a ‘defence and panegyric of Leigh Hunt’.² Hunt's pacifism held understandable appeal after the First World War, and not least to Blunden, who survived the Western Front and would publish his recollections, Undertones of War, in 1928. The 1920s also saw the publication of Humphrey Milford's edition of Leigh Hunt's Poetical Works, and the decade closed with Blunden's biography of Hunt in 1930. Woolf spoke of Hunt as her ‘spiritual grandfather’; like Percy Shelley, Hunt was one of those ‘free, vigorous spirits [that] advance the world’.³ Woolf was also an admirer of Charles Lamb, whose Essays of Elia she pronounced unsurpassed by any other writer. Suddenly Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt seem thoroughly at home in the 1920s, welcomed by Chesterton, Birrell, and Sassoon, and also by the most daringly experimental novelist of the time: ‘These free, vigorous spirits advance the world’, Woolf said ‘& when one comes across them in the strange waste of the past one says Ah you’re my sort’ (DVW, 2, p. 130).

² Webb, EB, p. 161. ³ The Diary of Virginia Woolf, eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1977–84), II, p. 130. Entry for 13 August 1921. Hereafter DVW.

In what ways were Hunt and Lamb a ‘sort’ with whom Woolf could identify? This essay attempts to explain her curious alliance with two male figures one might have thought uncongenial to a twentieth-century feminist. I am deliberately not addressing Keats's ‘great spirit’ William Wordsworth – ‘He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake’ – or Matthew Arnold's tradition of a Wordsworthian ‘high Romanticism’. Instead, I shall focus principally upon Keats's second ‘great spirit’,

He of the rose, the violet, the spring,

The social smile …⁴

⁴ John Keats, ‘Addressed to the Same’, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1979), 2; 5, p. 67.

–Leigh Hunt. As Keats's lines intimate, Hunt's poetry is sociable and conversational, graceful and mannered – in a word, un-Wordsworthian. From his first collection, Juvenilia (1801), Hunt developed an intimate lyrical voice in poems that were widely anthologised during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even now, almost everyone knows Hunt's most widely anthologised poem ‘Abou ben Adhem’. If Wordsworth was the most significant English Romantic poet for critics such as Harold Bloom and M.H. Abrams, there is another tradition of English lyricism in which we find poets such as John Betjeman, Edmund Blunden, Andrew Motion, and Edward Thomas – all of them inheritors of the more sociable Romanticism first announced in the poetry and prose of Leigh Hunt. These poets forsake the summit of Snowdon with its ‘mighty cataracts’ for the suburban vistas of the South Downs, the Beaulieu River, Margate, Middlesex, and Upper Lambourne – landscapes, in short, that were also presences for Virginia Woolf.

As schoolboys at Christ's Hospital, Hunt and Lamb did not coincide. Lamb left before Hunt was ‘cloathed’ and this near miss would be characteristic of their later relationship as close friends who were not quite in perfect sympathy, whose literary conversations were most animated when circumstances kept them apart. It was not until 1811 that Hunt and Lamb joined forces in a single publication. The first issue of Hunt's Reflector magazine had attracted Lamb's attention, and he sent three contributions to the editor: ‘On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged’, ‘On the Dangers of Confounding Moral with Personal Deformity’, and ‘On the Probable Effects of the Gunpowder Treason in this Country if the Conspirators had Accomplished their Object’ – a piece of speculative sedition on the ‘mighty benefit’ of a ‘tremendous explosion’.⁵ Lamb's presence in the Reflector signalled the emergence of a major English writer, the first of Hunt's many literary discoveries and protégés. And Lamb helped Hunt discover his own voice as an essayist in his Reflector essay, ‘A Day by the Fire’.

⁵ Charles Lamb, The Reflector, A Quarterly Magazine, on Subjects of Philosophy, Politics, and the Liberal Arts. Conducted by the Editor of the Examiner, 2 (2 vols., London, 1811–12), I, 433, 434.

Hunt takes the opening of Coleridge's Frost at Midnight as a prelude to his own evocation of fireside communing:

Twilight comes; and the hour of the fireside, for the perfection of the moment, is now alone. He was reading a minute or two ago, and for some time was unconscious of the increasing dusk, till on looking up, he perceived the objects out of doors deepening into massy outline, while the sides of his fireplace began to reflect the light of the flames, and the shadow of himself and his chair fidgeted with huge obscurity on the wall. Still wishing to read, he pushed himself nearer and nearer to the window, and continued fixed on his book, till he happened to take another glance out of doors, and on returning to it, could make out nothing. He therefore lays it aside, and restoring his chair to the fireplace, seats himself right before it in a reclining posture, his feet apart upon the fender, his eyes bent down towards the grate, his arms on the chair's elbows, one hand hanging down, and the palm of the other turned up and presented to the fire, – not to keep it from him, for there is no glare or scorch about it, – but to intercept and have a more kindly feel of its genial warmth. … The evening is beginning to gather in. The window, which presents a large face of watery grey intersected by strong lines, is imperceptibly becoming darker; and as that becomes darker, the fire assumes a more glowing presence. The contemplatist keeps his easy posture, absorbed in his fancies; and every thing around him is still and serene. The stillness would even ferment in his ear, and whisper, as it were, of what the air contained; but a minute coil, just sufficient to hinder that busier silence, clicks in the baking coal, while every now and then the light ashes shed themselves below, or a stronger but still a gentle flame flutters up with a gleam over the chimney. At length, the darker objects in the room become mingled; the gleam of the fire streaks with a restless light the edges of the furniture, and reflects itself in the blackening window; while his feet take a gentle move on the fender, and then settle again, and his face comes out of the general darkness, earnest even in indolence, and pale in the very ruddiness of what it looks upon. – This is the only time perhaps at which sheer idleness is salutary and refreshing. How observed with the smallest effort is every trick and aspect of the fire! A coal falling in, – a fluttering fume, – a miniature mockery of a flash of lightning, – nothing escapes the eye and the imagination.⁶

⁶ Leigh Hunt, ‘A Day by the Fire, – Poetically and Practically Considered’, The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, gen. eds. Robert Morrison and Michael Eberle-Sinatra, 6 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), Periodical Essays, 1805–14, ed. Greg Kucich and Jeffrey N. Cox, I, pp. 231–2.

Present in this remarkable passage are numerous poems of twilight meditation: Anne Finch's ‘Nocturnal Reverie’, Edward Young's Night Thoughts, odes to evening by Joseph Warton and William Collins, Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’, and Anna Barbauld's Summer Evening's Meditation: ‘’ Tis now the hour/ When Contemplation …/ Moves forward’.⁷ Hunt deepens the interiority of such moments, as the visible world gradually withdraws to leave the mind receptive to what Collins called ‘Pensive Pleasures sweet’.⁸

⁷ Anna Barbauld's Summer Evening's Meditation, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, eds. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterbrough, ON: Broadview, 2002), pp. 17–23, p. 99. ⁸ William Collins, ‘Ode to Evening,’The Poetical Works of Gray and Collins, eds. Christopher Stone and Austin Lane Poole (1919; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1957), 28, p. 274.

Hunt's word ‘intercept’ alerts us to how the passage catches contrasting sensations and textures: approaching dusk, reflected light, shadows, and ‘a kindly feel of genial warmth’. Like Keats's ‘close bosom-friend’(1) in ‘To Autumn’⁹ , ‘kindly feel of genial warmth’ has a doubled presence that affirms a centre, or ‘intercept’, around which light and dark, silence and sound are mingled, while spatial and temporal dimensions resolve in the ‘perfection of the moment’.

⁹ Keats quoted from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (1978; Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1979).

Hunt's sensitivity to the interplay of space and time was related to long months spent in Horsemonger Lane prison, 1813–15. Following their prosecution for an alleged libel on the Prince Regent in the Examiner essay ‘The Prince on St Patrick's Day’, Hunt and his brother John were sentenced to two years in jail. After a distressing period in a cell with unglazed windows, Hunt's always precarious health gave way. He was transferred to a disused infirmary building in the prison where, as was usual, his family would join him.

The rest is Romantic myth. Hunt converted the infirmary rooms into a poet's bower to be shared with his sister-in-law and would-be lover, Elizabeth Kent. ‘I papered the walls with a trellis of roses’, Hunt recalls, ‘I had the ceiling coloured with clouds and sky; the barred windows I screened with Venetian blinds; and when my bookcases were set up with their busts, and flowers and a pianoforte made their appearance, perhaps there was not a handsomer room on that side of the water’.¹⁰ Charles and Mary Ann Lamb were Hunt's most assiduous visitors, arriving at Horsemonger Lane in all weathers and even during the harsh winter of 1813–14.

¹⁰ The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, 3 vols. (London, 1850), II, p. 148. Hereafter ALH.

Thursday 2 February 1815 brought Hunt's release, and it was a moment of unexpected turmoil. Busts and portraits were taken down. The library came off the bookcase. Manuscripts and back issues of the Examiner were gathered together, and a carrier took away the piano. When Hunt left his rose-trellised bower he was abandoning a sanctuary rather than embracing liberty. Delighted as he was to be free, he didn't hurry back to Hampstead as he had many times longed to do. Nor did he go to the Examiner office for a reunion with his brother. He stepped just a few yards along Horsemonger Lane, and stayed with his friend Thomas Alsager, still in sight of the prison that had caged him for two years.

Hunt's sentence had started out as a torment, but once he was established in his infirmary-bower, prison quickly became a reassuring enclosure in which he could enjoy his fame, aware of being sought after, cossetted through illnesses, and free to read and write. Expelled from his poet's paradise, he fell prey to nervous attacks and agoraphobia – that is, fear of open spaces like the streets and squares of London. An obvious explanation would be that he had been held in prison for so long that he had difficulty accustoming himself to wider horizons. Yet as that last sentence will have suggested, agoraphobia, as Hunt experienced it, may also have a disturbing connection with the way he experienced time. Having crossed-off the days, literally, until his release, ejection from prison confronted him with a terrifying expanse of time. From now on he would try to recover the shelter and security that prison had given him, by turning back the clock to recreate the scene in Surrey Gaol. In years to come, living amid beautiful landscapes in Tuscany, Hunt was still in doubt ‘whether I would not rather have been in jail’.¹¹ And at such times his thoughts turned to his most loyal visitor in prison: Charles Lamb.

¹¹ ALH, 2, p. 159.

While Hunt's prison sentence made him a martyr for the liberal cause, the shock of release rendered time and space peculiarly oppressive, and during such episodes memories of his prison bower and of Charles Lamb became a kind of psychic refuge for him. To suggest how Hunt's post-prison trauma explains his appeal to Virginia Woolf, who also experienced mental suffering and channelled this into her creative life, here are two versions of Hunt's years in Italy, 1822–25.

Scenario 1: Hunt anticipated that Italy would be a haven of happy love, but one week after his arrival Shelley's death left him shattered and adrift: ‘One has been taken, & the other left. Instead of the health which I looked for in his society to restore the springs of life, I waste them with the perpetual pall of sorrow’.¹² Such reflections might preface a version of Hunt's Italian years that dwells on the failure of the Liberal; his ill-feelings about Byron and Mary Shelley; his intractable money problems; his quarrel with his brother John; his wife's illness; the bleak Tuscan winters; and his separation fro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Persistence of Romantic Presences
• 1 Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and Virginia Woolf
• 2 ‘Strong Ghosts’: Romantic Presences in Yeats’s Poetry
• 3 Flexible Genealogies and Romantic Poetics
• 4 ‘Altered Forms’: Romanticism and the Poetry of Hart Crane
• 5 The Measured Chaos of Gary Snyder’s Post-Romantic Poetic Form
• 6 Webs of Interlocution: Interaction with Others in Wordsworth and Auden
• 7 Seamus Heaney and Romanticism
• 8 Romantic Presences and the Latency of a Nascent Theory of Literature in Romantic Poetry
• 9 Romanticism’s Fragmentary Unities: Melville, Faulkner, and Lessing
• 10 ‘Fiery Particle’: Keats’s Romantic Presences in the Writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald
• 11 ‘Here then is a maze to begin, be in’: Michael Ondaatje’s Byronic Inheritance
• 12 The Ordinary: Wordsworth, Richard Ford and the Lie of Literature
• 13 ‘Putting the Mind Back into Nature’: The American Novel and the Science of Mind
• Selected Bibliography
• Index