My research focuses on poets and poetry, largely from the Romantic period onwards. I have written a book, Lyric Individualism (Palgrave, 2020), about four lyric poets – John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Ivor Gurney – each of whom finds subtle and affecting ways of conveying a sense of place and the significance of home in their writing. My next project is a new edition of the correspondence of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Shelley’s letters breathe an imaginative apprehension of the natural spirit and cultural inheritance of the places across Europe from which they were written.
Alexandra Harris got together with Professor Kate McLoughlin, who is researching the history of silence, to think about texts that seemed particularly meaningful in the first weeks of lockdown and isolation.
William Cowper’s summerhouse in Olney
They recorded four short podcasts: on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 23, DH Lawrence’s ‘Silence’, a moment of pause in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, and William Cowper’s defence of quiet home life in The Task.
Podcast 4, on William Cowper, is especially concerned with place. Cowper rarely travelled far from home, and much of his poetry considers what might be gained by attending seriously to domestic life and local surroundings.
The text discussed by Kate and Alex is from Book 3 of The Task:
How various his employments, whom the world
Calls idle, and who justly in return
Esteems that busy world an idler, too!
Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps his pen,
Delightful industry enjoyed at home,
And nature in her cultivated trim
Dressed to his taste, inviting him abroad—
Can he want occupation who has these?
Will he be idle who has much to enjoy?
Me, therefore, studious of laborious ease,
Not slothful; happy to deceive the time,
Not waste it; and aware that human life
Is but a loan to be repaid with use,
When He shall call His debtors to account,
From whom are all our blessings; business finds
Even here: while sedulous I seek to improve,
At least neglect not, or leave unemployed,
The mind He gave me; driving it, though slack
Too oft, and much impeded in its work
By causes not to be divulged in vain,
To its just point—the service of mankind.
He that attends to his interior self,
That has a heart and keeps it; has a mind
That hungers and supplies it; and who seeks
A social, not a dissipated life,
Has business; feels himself engaged to achieve
No unimportant, though a silent task.
A life all turbulence and noise may seem,
To him that leads it, wise and to be praised;
But wisdom is a pearl with most success
Sought in still water, and beneath clear skies.
One of the many remarkable things that happened towards the end of the eighteenth century was that local feeling and the life of particular places became great literary subjects. You wouldn’t expect to find a Jacobean poet writing about the River Duddon (unless perhaps it was a symbol of national prosperity), but of Wordsworth you would expect nothing less. Paying close attention to the changing cultural status of local particularity, Stafford asks how and why this came about, and how Romantic writers, poem by poem, made places matter.
A revelatory example of what happens when the great movements of national and international history are explored from a particular on-the-ground vantage point. Morebath is a small village on the edge of Exmoor; the priest there in the mid seventeenth century kept detailed parish records, and these form a core around which Duffy builds up a portrait of rural Catholic life and how people responded to the changes they faced. It’s a good starting point for exploring the varied field of historical writing in which skilled and painstaking archival work is made to yield precious clues about the experience of rural and working people whose lives have been otherwise forgotten.
A pioneering work of local history. Richard Gough was a Shropshire yeoman who wanted to write about his parish community: its past and its present. In 1701 he published a study of the antiquities in Myddle, following more or less the newly established conventions for antiquarian place studies. But he wanted to write about more than the pedigrees of manorial lords and the relics of monastic houses, so he invented a form to suit him and embarked on his ‘Observations concerning the Seats in Myddle and the families to which they belong’. By ‘seats’ he meant pews in the church. He drew a plan of St Peter’s, labelled the pews, and wrote a portrait of each member of the congregation, seat by seat. Though he was imagining them all in church, he was writing lives that strayed far from the orderly Sunday formation, into fields and towns, into bedrooms, backrooms, affairs, and quarrels. It was a simple and evocative method of group biography; no-one seems to have used it before, or since.
Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought, Queen Mary University of London
My work on place has two interrelated strands: the study of literary coteries and how aspects of these coteries’ settings are enacted in their writing; and critical engagement with writing about Italy (its landscapes, cityscapes, and cultural heritage) from Milton to Barrett Browning. I have recently published an essay—‘Vallombrosa Visited, 1638–1851’, Modern Philology 118 (2021), 364-389—that attempts to distill about ten years of thinking on how writers approach places they’ve previously encountered on the page.
Other relevant publications include: the edited collection Re-evaluating the Literary Coterie (Palgrave: 2016), a monograph The Italian Idea (CUP, 2020), an essay on verse and the weather (‘Byron’s Rhyming Clime’, Essays in Criticism 69, (2019), 157–177), and another on Romantic tourism (‘Italian Travel, English Tourism, and Byron’s Poetry of Exile’, Litteraria Pragensia 23:46 (2013), 86–102).
I am (slowly) working on a book on the Holland House circle, a Romantic literary salon which hosted and patronised British and European authors, and on editing the letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley for a new edition of his correspondence. Shelley’s letters are particularly suited to Arts of Place: both as a record and description of travel through England and Europe, and as a meditation on a poetic maturity in exile, one spent trying to establish imaginative roots and to find the comforts of home.
Often called the ‘graveyard school’, but more specifically focussed on the churchyard, the poets I work on begin their poems with a strong attachment to place. As the centre of British rural life for centuries, the material place of the country churchyard kept the ancestral dead at the foundation of a local, living community. It was also a prominent symbolic space in the cultural imaginary, defining the inherited, intergenerational relationship between the living and the dead. During the eighteenth century, the country churchyard’s significance was continually reaffirmed in poems that were attentive to both its physical landscape and its emblematic position at the intersection of nature, history, death, and the sacred.
My book project, provisionally entitled Written in the Country Churchyard: Place and Poetics, 1720–1820, refocuses critical debate on poems by Thomas Parnell, Edward Young, Robert Blair, and Thomas Gray, but also an expanded range of texts including poems by Elizabeth Carter, William Cowper, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and John Clare. I use the country churchyard topos inhabited by these poems to examine how this place was not a formulaic backdrop for melancholy mood-pieces, but a central site for their contemplative poetics. My project also includes a special issue of the European Journal of Life Writing (2020) with an essay on the dramatic revisions to ‘graveyard school’ formulations of the dead, place, and community in Charlotte Smith’s ‘Sonnet XLIV. Written in a Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex’ (1789) and a forthcoming chapter on Elizabeth Carter’s ‘Ode to Melancholy’ (1739), interrogating the role of the churchyard in Carter’s negotiation of ideas of active sociability and contemplative solitude.
This work is constellated around eighteenth-century preoccupations with the body and its relationship to the phenomenal environment, drawing on themes including landscape and the earth, the body and labour, and self-reflexive attention to the procedures of poetic making that cross the boundaries of physical and cognitive dwelling in a simultaneously real and imagined place. These ideas continue to animate my research, including a new project on eighteenth-century poetry and the objects unearthed, collected, and interpreted in contexts of geology, natural history, and antiquarianism. I am exploring how materials such as fossils, bones, fragments of rock strata, and made artefacts were ‘unearthly’ in a layered sense: extracted from the earth, they also stimulated both estrangement and excitement in their unknown origin, composition, and relation to the history of the earth. At the centre of geohistorical inquiry, these unearthly objects were also a source of imaginative vitality for poets in this period. I am reading their work to investigate how these materials test the limits of literary representation and compel new forms of thinking and writing about the nonhuman—an issue made urgent and compelling in our Anthropocene epoch.
(Oxford, 2010)
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