The Allure of Lodore: Painting Sensation as well as Scenery

by William C. Snyder

Created at Lodore Falls in the Lake District in 1777, Thomas Hearne’s Sir George Beaumont and Joseph Farington Sketching a Waterfall (Figure 1) is a work that resists the usual categorizations of late eighteenth-century landscape painting. A scene in pen-and-wash, it allows us to glimpse an early model of English visual artists embracing elements of native landscape on its own terms.

In executing this image, Hearne discounted a Claudean approach, eschewing imaginary persons occupying wistful atmospheres, or pastoral figures roaming beneath relics of architecture. And, while the painting contains some picturesque elements––a rugged scene mixing beautiful and sublime–– Hearne avoided placing a frame around the view, disqualifying it as a “prospect” favoured by contemporaries William Gilpin and Uvedale Price.

Instead, Hearne requires of us a fluency of gazing: to perceive a location where nature is active instead of static, to discern his own friends in the exercise of capturing a wilderness within which they are actors, and to behold an experiment in conveying atmosphere. Yet even as it edges toward such “romantic” qualities, the painting does not aspire to the naturalism, chromatic intensity or imaginative power found in the next generation of British painters, a number of whom paid homage to Lodore Falls in later decades (including Constable, Turner, Ibbetson, Towne, de Loutherberg, Sunderland and Girtin).

Figure 1. Thomas Hearne, Sir George Beaumont and Joseph Farington Sketching a Waterfall, 1777, pen and wash drawing, 41 x 28.5 cm. Digital image courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.

 

Lodore Falls first gained notoriety in the mid-eighteenth century, via descriptions offered by writers Thomas Gray, John Dalton and John Brown, whose verbal accounts from the 1750s and 1760s were poetic and pictorial. In his 1769 touring journal Gray depicted “Lodoor” Falls as a stream “nobly broken, leaping from rock to rock, & foaming with fury” . . . from a height “about 200 feet” with a “towering crag, that spired up to equal, if not overtop, the neighbouring cliffs” with the surrounding area consisting of a “rounder broader projecting hill shag’d with wood & illumined by the sun, wch glanced sideways on the upper part of the cataract”. These impressions were included in a collection of Gray’s works, edited by William Mason, in 1775.

Joseph Farington (1747-1821), an understudy to Richard Wilson (1714-1782), appears to have been struck by Gray’s exalting rhetoric. According to John Murray, Farington traveled to Keswick in 1775 proposing to illustrate Gray’s views, but that plan was not realized. Nevertheless, Farington was able to trek through parts of the Lakes during that autumn and the following summer, explorations which provided familiarity with topographical features, allowing him to guide Hearne and Beaumont the next year. 

Farington, Hearne and Beaumont all shared some interest in non-idealized landscapes. Each had previously traveled to the west and north of England and to Scotland––where terrain was wilder, more dramatic or more surprising than the gracious plains and hills of Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, or Worcestershire. At Derwentwater they came to realize that familiar or academic approaches to image-making needed expansion; sublime panoramas and the capricious weather and modulating atmospheres of the mountainous lakes urged all three artists to enlarge their vision. For a few weeks in August of 1777 the men traveled to the North Lakes to indulge their desire to paint pure landscapes together, on location, drawing upon each other’s technical and academic skills as well as upon one another’s perspectives and approaches.

The plan to work around Derwentwater probably arose from Farington’s standing desire to pictorialize Gray’s tour. Taking into account dates given on his sketches, we might infer that Farington took three tours in 1777: working in and around Grasmere and Keswick in June, heading to Carlisle to paint Corby Castle in July, and tracing through the northern Lakes from mid-August to mid-September.  (Sketches and drawings indicate that this third outing  took him from Cockermouth on 14 August and back to Keswick by 10 September. Dates affixed to pencil sketches of High Crag and Gatesgarth suggest that after the stay at Lodore his itinerary followed Honister Pass, ending at Cockermouth, where he produced a sketch of the northwest view of the castle).

The Low Door Hotel, situated at the entrance to the Borrowdale Valley, served as a pied-à-terre for the three artists. This location provided vistas that could be enjoyed from Derwentwater’s southern shoreline. The marsh in front of the hotel supplies choice views of Skiddaw, six miles to the north, looming above Keswick with the breast of the Lake in the foreground. A nearby pier makes access to other points on the Lake possible, and images from these locations were produced by these painters as well as by many others in later years. Today, lower Lodore Falls is actually within hotel property, an un-demanding ten-minute climb on foot, about twenty minutes with equipment. 

On 27 August the three painters, along with a footman and a dog, bundled materials of composition and climbed a path alongside the cascade of boulders to their right. A Farington pencil sketch includes the script “Lodore Cottage from the Waterfall” in the lower left corner. On the back is “27 8 1777”. This artifact is likely Farington’s view in the Hearne canvas. (See Figure 2.)

‘An extraordinary idea somehow transpired: Beaumont and Farington resolved to paint from within the waterfall.’

Figure 2. Joseph Farington, Lodore Cottage from the waterfall, 27 8 1777. Enhanced digital image, The Wordsworth Trust.

Before the rocky channel got too steep, they unpacked and began to set up. An extraordinary idea somehow transpired: Beaumont and Farington resolved to paint from within the waterfall. They secured two easels on top of large boulders. Hearne, the antiquarian and architectural draughtsman so familiar with composing from a distance, found a spot about eighty feet away, under a small clearing beneath a coppice of trees. On the same plane as his mates, with the falls tumbling aside a 35-foot limestone wall, he positioned to record his colleagues situated against the impressive backdrop, as they went about the unusual action of sketching in ink, outdoors, from an atypical point of view, surrounded by movement and moisture.

Hearne had been comfortable working outdoors from his years of rendering buildings.  But the scene at Lodore Falls presented a pure landscape, and was less subject to conceptual control than a house or ruined abbey. So the painter nodded to a few familiar techniques of the continental picturesque tradition. The appearance of figures below an imposing rock façade with rugged features is a consistent idiom in the work of Salvator Rosa, Italian master of sublime landscapes and an influence on English nature painters in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Also, terrestrial elements—the canopy of trees at the top, and the array of boulders below—hint at a frame for the scene, a pattern from Italian and Dutch landscapes introduced by Wilson to English places.

Yet Hearne’s effort, as well as the initiative of Beaumont and Farington, crosses boundaries into entirely new territory.  First, the figures are not only real, but known by the artist. Hearne is, for the era, surprisingly personal as he breaks from his training as an objective historian and provides a kind of visual diary entry. And, while picturesque or antiquarian painting typically includes animals, peasants, or children, they tend to be anonymous reference points who serve to convey a sense of proportion. Here Hearne names the performers, divulges clues about sensibility and motive, and implies his own participation by capturing the same subject as his colleagues. He punctures the standard screen of seeing the world, of presenting the view as “out there”.

With a rigid neo-classical frame elided, and with no long view or vista, Sir George Beaumont and Joseph Farington Sketching a Waterfall conveys a sense of enclosure, if not intimacy––between man and nature, and among the painters.  Without a horizon, the margin between subject and observer is reduced, as Hearne refuses to artificially position trees or rocks to frame the figures. Beaumont and Farington are affiliated with the scene that they are involved in capturing—artists as subjects––woven into the larger visual web. Enveloped in the waterfall, their figures do not command immediate attention; we are prompted by the title to seek for them—and then to enter into the image, to assemble it ourselves.Hearne captures a moment in time integrating real subjects, natural elements, and local atmosphere, thus separating from historical or mythological landscapes which transport us to a different era, far removed from current life and conditions. Here we are in the present day viewing men at work at a specific time in a known place.

The paraphernalia of the artists––the brushes, umbrellas and tripods–– insinuate shapes found elsewhere in the painting: the sloping tops of boulders, or the trunks and branches of some of the trees. Also, seeming to borrow from Rosa, Hearne takes license to accentuate the rock wall, bending it toward the artists for dramatic effect, as the axis of the actual slab is more vertical in proximity to the stream. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3. Author’s photograph of rock face, Lodore Falls, October 2016.

The placement of the two artists––not just in proximity to the water, but inside the rock channel of the falls—is striking for the time. The germ of the idea to attempt composing from such a position may never be known, but Beaumont and Farington might have been seeking immediacy, to paint sensation as well as scenery. In any case, they were undertaking quite a challenge.  At Lodore Falls, the set-up of equipment required of oil painting (involving larger canvases than pads or sketchbooks) would have been physically difficult. The unevenness of the boulders and the variation of their size, in addition to the wetted surfaces and slippery moss, required extensive preparation before any brush touched canvas.

To navigate this problem, the men likely customized their supports, scanning the ravine’s bed for small sandy pods flat enough to allow sturdy footholds. Still, the painting presents the canvases as a bit askew; the ruggedness of the landscape is complemented by the ruggedness of the process, which invites another potential interpretation: was the sight of his fellows climbing over slick rocks to install two easels so unique that Hearne decided that such an act of human enterprise was just as worthy of portrayal as the falls? In any case, Hearne shows the challenges involved in painting landscapes on-site, revealing to us that era’s tools of the trade, from the mountings to the multiple umbrellas to the mahlsticks. (See Figure 4.)

‘…a kind of visual diary entry’

Figure 4. Thomas Hearne, Beaumont and Farington Sketching a Waterfall, detail.

Hearne’s preliminary and larger sketch for this tableau lays out another interesting subplot in the Lodore story.  A pencil drawing (17.8 x 19 cm) (Figure 5) archived in the Wordsworth Trust adds nuance to the finished work. Most notably, the preliminary sketch includes facial expressions of two of the men, gazes of satisfaction or pleasure. The closest figure, likely Sir George Beaumont (Figures 6 and 7), appears to be looking at the canvas with serene approval while he holds a brush; the standing figure, probably Beaumont’s attendant, with hands in pocket, casually admires the waterfall. The expression of the middle figure is not apparent, but the curve of the chin suggests Farington, who had a full, round face. The pencil rendition includes a dog, who is looking at Hearne, providing a point of entry into the scene for the viewer, and disrupting any sense of picturesque distance.  All four figures are interconnected, yet all are looking in different directions.

Figure 5. Thomas Hearne, Beaumont and Farington Sketching a Waterfall, pencil sketch, 17.8 x 19 cm, the Wordsworth Trust.
Figure 6. Enlarged detail from pencil sketch.

The final work switches the positions of Beaumont and Farington, and obscures their expressions. The attendant is shown as sitting and is darkened, nearly lost in the composition. The dog has been erased. Different too are the posts for the easels (less rugged in the painting) and Farington’s easel has two intersecting spires with no apparent footing.

As Hearne worked the tableau into the final, larger canvas, he traded the intimate detail of the figures for the impact of boulders, slab, and waterfall. The sketch is realistic; the painting is artistic. The sketch betrays the pleasure and contentment of connections—to nature and to art, even of a brotherhood of picture-making. The painting zooms out to a view that allows natural elements—and some sense of sublimity—to prevail. 

Nevertheless, the two versions of the men at their canvases allow two perspectives of an experiment in process. The three artists were outside their usual spheres, and certainly beyond the compass of their masters. Castles, priories, goddesses, shepherds, estates, engravers and a picturesque frame were not in play. Instead, the focus is on flesh-and-blood British gentlemen enjoying an actual British place in a specific moment of time. John Constable, who eventually became good friends with Sir George, might have titled this work “Waterfall: Noon.”

Finally, while Hearne’s execution is remarkable enough, his point of view is rare for the time. Standing on a small plateau, a twenty-first century visitor to the Falls can approximate Hearne’s position and gaze upon the disheveled boulders that upheld Beaumont, Farington and their easels, imagine the two painters putting pencil to palette after studying the cascade, and perhaps occasionally glancing back at Hearne, thinking that the Falls were his subject, little realizing that they were subjects themselves, part of the scene, being immortalized.

Somewhere during their long friendship, Hearne made a gift of his Lodore watercolour to Sir George, and, except for occasional exhibition, the canvas evidently was in the Beaumont estate until obtained by the Wordsworth Trust in 1984.

If it is accurate to say that the “Lakers” of the Romantic age found qualities in Cumberland and Westmoreland that were already inside themselves, we should see Farington, Hearne and Beaumont as belonging to an earlier sensibility, teasing out a new kind of art in an elemental way––where classical vision and technical training were tentatively fused with a varied and spectacular topography.  In the Lakes, and especially at Derwentwater, the three men began to extend the boundaries of their academic preparation so that they could do justice to Cumbria’s unique terrain, atmosphere, and history. The vicissitudes of the Lakes provoked their imaginations, summoning them to dabble with effects, perspectives, techniques and moods which presaged their later works, and which would become standard in the painting of the next generation.

Figure 7. Joshua Reynolds, Sir G. Beaumont, Baronet, 1807, National Portrait Gallery

William C Snyder is an independent Romantics scholar based in Pennsylvania

Pioneers of Local Thinking: Polly Atkin

As our fourth speaker in the ‘Pioneers of Local Thinking’ series, we’re pleased to welcome

Polly Atkin

“From towers of joy to sickroom gardens: revisiting Dorothy Wordsworth’s dwelling-places of the mind”

Join us online on Monday 7th October at 5pm for a talk that will explore the resonances of place and body across creative and critical writing.

Register for the Zoom link here.


At the confluence of nature-writing, life-writing, and disability studies, Atkin’s work is underpinned by a rich understanding of the Lake District and expertise in Romantic literature.

Atkin is the author of Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021), a ground-breaking biography that focuses on the mental and physical illness that Dorothy Wordsworth suffered in the final decades of her life.

RDW_cover

Atkin’s most recent book, Some of Us Just Fall: on Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre, 2023) is a profound reflection on the experience of inhabiting a body and a place in the context of disability and illness. She is also the author of poetry collections including Much With Body (2021), Basic Nest Architecture (2017), and Shadow Dispatches (2013), as well as works of literary criticism, biography, and short form non-fiction.


Atkin introduces her subject here:

“This talk will take a wander through places both of the earth and the mind as Dorothy experienced them, with a focus on the parallels between her acute sensory experience of material place, and her ability to conjure places from her imagination, both remembered and created. I trace her ability to inhabit both real and unreal places from the dream cottages she imagined as a unsettled young woman without a home of her own, to the gardens she brought into her sickroom when she was housebound later in life. During those housebound years, writing and reciting poetry becomes a way of both reigniting memories, and bringing the natural world into her mind and her room, even when she cannot leave her bed. She brings the outside in, literally, and in memory and poetry. In this talk I bring those late imaginative travels back into parallel with her youthful attempts to ‘build castles’ or ’tower(s) of joy’ as she dreamt of a home in which happiness might arise from ideal company, ‘retirement and rural quiet’. In doing so, I question whether everything we value about her place-writing – her intense attention to the intricacies and particularities of place – is what enables her to travel so satisfactorily through the many mansion of her mind too.”


Between the Kingdoms of Sleep and Waking

By Hannah Christopher (BA English Literature, University of Birmingham)

I am surprised to have woken up in the dark. In my mind, September feels like it should be clutching onto summer more than it has. My weather app informs me that the sun will rise whilst I am underground, screeching through the rabbit warren of tunnels that link London Bridge to Euston. Although I never usually rise with the sun, I want to see it this time and the thought of missing its first appearance is disappointing.

It is 6am but the tube is far from empty. Next to me there is a traveller with matching coral suitcases and opposite me a commuter with hair still swirled upwards by recent contact with a pillow. To my right, four lads are shouting and laughing at alarm clock volume, their drunk conversation is surreal and cyclical, sips of phrases pass between them, echoed and repeated. Some of us have slept, others will soon shut the curtains on the sunlight and sleep through the day. For now, we shuttle under the dark city together. I think about how strange the tube is, necessity or desire has united us to this mobile waiting room before we are called out to our real destinations. I think about trains, the infrastructure which supports these tunnels and our dependence on these technologies, mechanical and digital, which enable us to live between places, ignoring nature’s rhythms: long distances are contracted by transport, night and day blurred by electric light, hot and cold levelled by air conditioning, the internet dividing friends between embodied and online experiences. As I emerge from the tube station and turn into the rail station, I am strangely relieved that it was a cloudy sunrise, I feel I have missed nothing. I face away from the dawn and take a picture of the glowing underground sign instead.

Sunrise at Euston Station

My destination is the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester for the WomenTalkPlace symposium Talking Place. There are five panels throughout the day, aiming to facilitate conversations between contemporary place writers. The panels on place memoirs, novels, writing about places as magical experiences, and writing politically through landscape consider different writers’ methods and reasons for engaging with places in literary ways. Throughout the day, what came across most strongly, is that there are many ways to exist in a place; no approach to place is quite the same and many approaches combine seemingly opposite narratives of natural and digital, past and present, personal and geological, fiction and non-fiction.

Liptrot’s memoir responds to the complexity of navigating a digital and natural world simultaneously

In the first panel Amy Liptrot read from her Berlin memoir, The Instant. The chapter documents how she embarks on a series of excursions to traffic islands around Berlin with a new lover. The chapter drifts between romantic anecdotes of hands held and emails exchanged, before washing up on these traffic islands every so often; each island has a ‘mission report’, narrated like a Springwatch segment. The digital journey threads through the natural, a theme which runs throughout the book. Liptrot names the chapters after extended metaphors, many of them synthesising the technological and the natural: ‘a google maps tour of the heart’, ‘traffic islands’, ‘digital archaeology’. Liptrot’s memoir responds to the complexity of navigating a digital and natural world simultaneously which is reflected in the way that she writes.

Later, in a panel discussing magic and connections, Jeff Young’s reading from Ghost Town took us through the streets of Liverpool, unlocking stories from the city’s past by exploring the marks on the landscape that stories have left behind. Young describes the visibility of the past in a present landscape, making this vibrant city simultaneously a kind of Ghost Town. His memoir combines layers of civic history as well as his own story; in doing so, he writes himself into this landscape. He receives emails from readers who identify with his story, saying things like ‘you have written my childhood’. There is a continual repositioning of whose story is the story of this aggregate place which spans both distance and time.

Another memoir writer, Nicola Chester, discussed her new book On Gallows Down as part of a panel about ‘belonging’. Chester’s book claims to be a ‘story of a life shaped by landscape’, yet as she spoke about her life, which she describes as being able to see ‘laid out’ in their chapters from atop a local hill, I felt that she was instead giving us a landscape shaped by her life. Chester’s narrativization of her personal life interwoven with the topography of West Berkshire goes on to shape our perceptions of this place, even as her life was shaped by the landscape initially. The individual and the landscape become synthesised and invite the reader into an active dialogue with place.

Throughout the day, there were a number of questions raised concerning the struggle of separating fiction and non-fiction in place writing. In the first panel, Amy Liptrot, Anna Fleming and Lily Dunn acknowledged, as non-fiction writers, that ‘memoir can slip precariously into fiction’. Later, Fleming addressed this indirectly as she spoke about the distance between herself and her work. Fleming used an illustration from Melissa Febos’ Body Work which describes memoir writing, not as an egotistical project, but as a process in which the self is made transparent for other people to inhabit. The self becomes detached from the work, simply a skin through which a reader can see the world from a different perspective, or an unfamiliar landscape with clarity. This distancing process steps onto the slippery slope between non-fiction and fiction. I also feel this tension as I write this blog post, emphasising some things and not others in an attempt to curate this day into a sort-of conclusive story, a kind of fiction itself. Yet, on the flip side, fiction writer Fiona Mozley, noted how her books were a kind of non-fiction, reflecting places and experiences in her life. She noted a similar feeling of vulnerable exposure that Liptrot felt in publishing her intimate memoir, The Instant. The relationship between writer, place and story is entangled, creating unique works which sit along a spectrum between fiction and non-fiction.

The relationship between writer, place and story is entangled, creating unique works which sit along a spectrum between fiction and non-fiction.

It was between the last two panels when I noticed a jazzed up literary notice by the door, ‘sleep and waking are two opposed kingdoms. Please be considerate and keep noise to a minimum.’ Perhaps this statement was true when night meant sleep and darkness and the waking kingdom was built anew each day with the dawn chorus, but our nights, more and more, take on their own luminosity and night life.

I thought back to the tube this morning and my shared journey joined with my unlikely travel companions, and the blurring of waking and sleeping kingdoms under artificial light — not opposing but operating simultaneously. As if sitting between kingdoms, like the crossed paths of unlikely travellers, the way writers complement landscape with digital spaces, overlay the past with the present, combine internal emotional life with geographical topography, and blend fiction with non-fiction in ways that are not oppositional but complementary, seems to speak into this current moment. Many of these writers’ responses to place are grounded in the natural place, the urban place, the digital place, the historic place etc., sometimes weaving a narrative from all of these at the same time, giving a richer and deepening experience of what it means to exist in a place in our time.

Sunset at Manchester Piccadilly Station

Table Talks

 On Monday 5th December at 5pm we went online with the table set for an intriguing Advent treat!
 
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Image: Claude Pratt, ‘Still Life of Newspaper, Pipe, Decanter, and Jar’ (1935, Birmingham Museums Trust)

 Dr Heber Rodrigues from the UK Centre for Excellence on Wine Research explored the cultural contexts of wine appreciation, and Dr Will Bowers (QMUL) introduced his new research on the dynamics of eighteenth-century dining circles!

Have a taste of the two talks below! First up, Heber introduces us to thinking about wine, place and terroir. Under the concept of terroir, Heber introduces, the place of wine is not only the place in which the vines are grown, but is also imbibed with the characteristics of their surrounding context—in all its complexity.

Will introduced us to the transformative place of the dining room at Holland House, an essential creative context for Romantic London, facilitating discussion and hospitality between British and European cultural and political figures. This room, Will argues, was a “literary and political space” that “gave coherence to the ramshackle organisation of the Whig party” alongside hosting literary salons at the heart of the definition of taste. It was above all a space of both literary and political opposition.

The Living Mountain

Nan Shepherd.  Introduction by Robert Macfarlane. Canongate 2011

Recommended by Martin Stott

I re-read The Living Mountain on a recent hiking trip in the Scottish Highlands. It speaks of the mountains in such a contemporary voice that it could have been written yesterday. In fact, it was completed in 1945 and only published in 1977 a few years before Nan Shepherd’s death. It remained practically unknown until about a decade ago when her writing, including a book of poetry In the Cairngorms (published in 1934) was re-discovered and championed by Robert Macfarlane.

Shepherd records her feelings about the views, the rocks, the wildlife and the hidden joys of a part of the Highlands close to where she spent her whole life – the Cairngorms. Her approach to this wilderness was less about conquering the peaks and more about listening to the landscape, becoming one with it: ‘…I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain. I am a manifestation of its total life as is the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan’ (p. 106).  The Living Mountain gleams with the insights of a prose poet in her chosen landscape.

 

The Heart of the Country

By James and Robin Ravilious, foreword by Ronald Blythe (Scholar Press, 1980)

Recommended by Martin Stott

The Heart of the Country captures — in the words of Robin Ravilious and the photographs of James Ravilious — a slice of rural north Devon between the Taw and Torridge rivers. Structured around four themes (The Land, Farming, Village Life, and Occasions), each with a short introduction by Robin, James records in over a hundred photographs what Ronald Blythe calls ‘the poetry of the commonplace’.  Taken over a six-year period in the 1970s within a ten-mile radius of Beaford (covering three towns and about thirty villages), the photographs have an immersive quality which Blythe describes as ‘saying something very memorable about the deeper actuality of rural experience’. Forty years later, they evoke a romantic, almost wistful, air of a community where the threads of people’s lives—the Post Office, the village shops and pubs, hedge laying, foxhunting, the village forge, and winter snows with all the challenges they brought for farmers and their livestock—entwine to create a record of a rural society to which the authors themselves belong, connecting a lingering yesterday to the present.

An Oxfordshire Market Gardener

The Diary of Joseph Turrill of Garsington 1863-67

Edited by E. Dawson & S.R. Royal (Alan Sutton, 1993)

Recommended by Martin Stott

Joseph Turrill was a young man working as a market gardener in the Oxfordshire village of Garsington when he kept his diary. As a working-class lad, he experienced the landscape less through the views and more by what he could grow. His detailed observations of the seasons, the weather, the wildlife, and what would sell, as well as the habits and quirks of his neighbours, customers, family and girlfriend, reflect a very different experience of life and locality from contemporary diarists such as Francis Kilvert in Clyro, or earlier natural historians such as Gilbert White in Selborne, let alone his neighbour in Garsington Manor, Lady Ottoline Morrell and the galaxy of literary stars that she entertained there. Whether it is the progress of a row of beans, gathering walnuts for pickling, or gardening by moonlight (’the parish lantern’) after a late shift in his mother’s pub, the diaries shed a fascinating and distinctive light on a much written about locality.

Diary of Joseph Turill

 

William Cowper, Art and Afterlife

William Cowper lived in and around Olney in Buckinghamshire from 1768 to 1795. It was here that he wrote Olney Hymns (1779) (with John Newton), Poems (1782), The Task (1785), and his translations of Homer. The poet’s experience of his immediate surroundings, his close attention to the natural world, and the importance he attached to domestic life gave particular energy and vision to his poetry.

On 3rd and 4th of September 2021, Arts of Place members Andrew Hodgson and Will Bowers hosted a conference at The Olney Centre, focused on Cowper’s career in verse. The event included a visit to the Cowper and Newton Museum where attendees toured Cowper’s home and the beautiful garden in which he worked.

 

‘William Cowper’ by George Romney (1792)

A range of papers explored formal and stylistic elements of Cowper’s writing (Gregory Leadbetter discussed the ‘exploded couplets’ of the blank verse of The Task; Samuel Diener examined warring lyric and narrative impulses in ‘The Cast-away’; Jessica Fay looked at Cowper’s handling of movement and stillness in the closed stanzas of the Hymns). There were also papers focused on Cowper’s critical heritage (Tim Fulford traced an association of ideas about church-bells from Cowper to Coleridge and the Wedgwood family; Alexandra Harris explored Virginia Woolf’s appreciation of Cowper’s ‘white fire’, while Andrew Hodgson read Cowper’s fear and dread through Donald Davie). Meanwhile, Will Bowers offered a paper on Cowper’s conception of time, Andrew Newell introduced Cowper’s ‘exegetical poetics’, and Tess Somervell presented Cowper as a key poet of the anthropocene.

The highlight of the conference was Fiona Stafford’s lecture on ‘Cowper’s Hare Care’. Cowper owned a number of pet hares but alongside an exploration of his personal attachment to these characterful animals, Stafford showed that a close reading of Cowper’s poetry can open up the extended literary heritage of the hare — a heritage that stretches from John Gay to Seamus Heaney.

The conference also included an informal discussion of the value of teaching Cowper’s poetry at a time when many of his preoccupations have renewed pertinence in the classroom.

 

 

Featured image: ‘William Cowper’ by George Romney (1792), National Portrait Gallery

The conference was supported by the British Association for Romantic Studies, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Queen Mary University of London

Listen to Alex Harris and Kate McLoughlin talking about Cowper’s poetry here.

Collected Poems, 1956-2001

Thomas Kinsella (Wake Forest University Press, 2006)

Recommended by Trish Halligan

Thomas Kinsella (born 1928, Inchicore, Dublin) is a poet of the random and of restoration: ‘order’ is one of his most-used words, though he uses it in the sense of reconciliation rather than of restriction.

Kinsella came from a family of stone cutters and this inheritance somehow comes across in his writing: he puts shape to the stone but doesn’t always dress it. Similarly, his explorations of nature and his recollections of his native Dublin are neither bucolic nor nostalgic, and even more rarely are they consolatory. Kinsella often savagely satirises contemporary Dublin city planning, especially with reference to Ireland’s frequently catastrophic lack of conservation.

His other great recurring interest is the exploration of the physical similarities and differences across generations of his family. While his thoughts are often rooted in the sensuous and tactile (‘His Father’s Hands’, for example), he frequently describes hands which stroke, twist, clench and work, but which also touch to communicate when words fall short or as a silent assurance of trust.  These poems are vivid fragments: they possess the quality of memories bursting upon the mind, like light cast into a room by a door suddenly thrown open.

Kinsella is not interested in tidiness or pat conclusions: there is rarely a sense of an ending in his work; even his later (much shorter) poems end by creating ripples of thoughts and evoke other times and places.

The Poetics of Space

Gaston Bachelard (1958)

Recommended by Trish Halligan

This book is difficult to categorise but this is where, to me, the joy of it dwells. In describing the domestic spaces that both give us shelter and provide an untrammelled place in which to think and feel, Bachelard explores poetry, philosophy, observation and memory (sometimes simultaneously). He offers reflections on drawers, chests, nests, wardrobes and corners; there is also a seemingly contradictory but completely revelatory chapter on what Bachelard terms ‘intimate immensity’.

I especially love this latter chapter and the one on corners. Somehow I never realised that I most comfortably read, think and work in the shelter of a corner, either a naturally occurring one or one I have managed to construct. Bachelard removes entirely the negative connotation of being “cornered” and in these chapters beautifully aligns the absence of claustrophobic thinking with its opposite of being present in vast exterior spaces: on the sea or in forests. It summons to my mind Woolf’s recognition of the need for the ‘queer amalgamation of dream and reality, the perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow’.

‘Housed everywhere but nowhere shut in’, writes Bachelard, ‘is the motto of the dreamer of dwellings… A daydream of elsewhere should be left open therefore, at all times’. This also puts one in mind of anchoresses or of William Cowper in his beloved alcove at Olney. In both cases their bodies are sheltered by a small space and their external vision is only fixed on one point, yet this provides their internal vision with endless space to explore.