16,146 research outputs found
Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge : the poetics of relationship
No full textMy thesis studies Hartley Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth to redress the unjust neglect of Hartley’s work, and to reach a more positive understanding of Dorothy’s conflicted literary relationship with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I provide a complete reassessment of the often narrowly read prose and poetry of these two critically marginalized figures, and also investigate the relationships that affected their lives, literary self-constructions, and reception; in this way, I restore a more accurate account of Hartley and Dorothy as independent and original writers, and also highlight both the inhibiting and cathartic affects of writing from within a familial literary context.
My analysis of the writings of Hartley and Dorothy and the dialogues in which they engage with the works of STC and William, argues that both Hartley and Dorothy developed a strong relational poetics in their endeavour to demarcate their independent subjectivities. Furthermore, through a survey of the significance of the sibling bond – literal and figurative – in the texts and lives of all these writers, I demonstrate a theory of influence which recognizes lateral, rather than paternal, kinship as the most influential relationship. I thus conclude that authorial identity is not fundamentally predetermined by, and dependent on, gender or literary inheritance, but is more significantly governed by domestic environment, familial readership, and immediate kinship.
My thesis challenges the long-standing misconceptions that Hartley was unable to achieve a strong poetic identity in STC’s shadow, and that Dorothy’s independent authorial endeavour was primarily thwarted by gender. To replace these misreadings, I foreground the successful literary independence of both writers: my approach reinstates Hartley Coleridge’s literary standing as a major poet who bridged Romanticism and Victorian literature, and promotes Dorothy Wordsworth as one of the finest descriptive writers of nature and relationship
Wordsworth & Basho—Walking Poets
No full text‘Wordsworth and Basho: Walking Poets’ is a group exhibition based in the Wordsworth Trust, in Grasmere, UK. The exhibition builds on momentum developed through previous collaborations between the Wordsworth Trust, the University of Sunderland and Bath Spa University, in which a range of contemporary artists created fresh and challenging perspectives on Wordsworth’s poetry and Basho's work.
Dr Manny Ling collaborated with the Japanese sumi painter Christine Flint Sato and produced a series of work that explored East Asian and western contexts.
Dr Manny Ling also designed and curated the exhibition catalogue (ISBN: 978-1-906832-20-9
Susanna Blamire, Medicine, and Romantic Women's Poetry
No full textThis event took place on 28 April 2022 and was in collaboration with the University of Northumbria.
Romantic poet Susanna Blamire (1747-1794) was a prolific Cumbria-based writer who explored topics including healthcare, religion and travel in both verse and prose. Little of her body of work was published during her lifetime.
Over the last 25 years the Wordsworth Trust worked with Christopher Hugh Maycock, Blamire’s descendent and biographer (A Passionate Poet, Hypatia Press 2003; Selected Poems, Bookcase, 2008), to preserve her surviving manuscript works. Her writings not only reveal the hidden history of women’s medical work in the 18th century but form a starting point for exploring what good healthcare looks like in past, present and future.
In this event our speakers took an in-depth look at Blamire’s life and writing, and showcased manuscripts and objects from the Wordsworth Trust’s collection. They explored topics including the experience of illness and disability in the late 18th century, how women influenced healthcare while being barred from medical school, and how creativity can interact with wellbeing.
This event accompanied ‘(Re)Acting Romanticism: Disability and Women Writers’ at Wordsworth Grasmere, an exhibition that took place from April-May 2022.
If you enjoyed this video, please consider making a donation to the Wordsworth Trust: https://wordsworth.org.uk/support
Staging imagination: transformations of Shakespeare in Wordsworth and Coleridge
No full textThis thesis examines the ways that Wordsworth and Coleridge transform the works of Shakespeare, in order to stage the imagination as it functions in the lives of the characters in their poetry. I look especially at the importance of the play A Midsummer Night 's Dream to their poetic project, and show how elements of the play resurface in various poems, prefaces and prose writings of the two poets over a span of nearly twenty years. I argue that Wordsworth's transformations of Shakespeare contribute to a democratising of poetry, and a valorising of 'our common human heart'. Chapter one discusses Lyrical Ballads as a series of poems, which have Theseus' speech on Imagination as their unifying theme, emulating Shakespeare’s staging of passion. Chapters two and three examine Alexander Tytler's Essay on Translation as a 'negative' stimulus for Wordsworth's challenging poetic theories, and a source for some of his earliest 'transformations' of Shakespeare. Chapter four is a detailed survey of the critical background, and the Romantic reception of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and examines key themes in the play to elucidate the poets' poetry and prose. Chapter five is a comparison between 'The Last of The Flock' and The Merchant of Venice, showing how Wordsworth 'imitates' the tale, and transposes the 'tone' of the comic play into a quieter and sadder 'music'. Chapter six analyses 'Michael', as a transformation of Gaunt in Richard into the 'history homely and rude' of Michael the shepherd. Chapter seven is on Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, which re-tells the tale of the genesis of Lyrical Ballads, and Wordsworth's transformative poetics, as a 'translation' of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chapter eight returns to Alfoxden, and Hazlitt's 'First Acquaintance with Poets', to revisit the poets as the protagonists of 'the dream' that was, and became, Lyrical Ballads
William Knight at Dundee, St Andrews and Grasmere
No full textSurvey of the career of William Angus Knight, Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Distinguished critic and editor of William Wordsworth, and a founder of the Wordsworth Trust
Wordsworth and Basho: Walking Poets
No full textThis exhibition of manuscripts (original and facsimile copies) of William Wordsworth and Matsuo Basho, shown alongside work by contemporary UK and Japanese artists working individually and collaboratively (painters, poets, musicians, sculptors and calligraphers), aims to show that there is much to be gained by comparing and contrasting Eastern (Japanese) and Western (Romantic) views of nature.
Working from the original manuscripts of Wordsworth and the romantic poets held by the Wordsworth Trust and both original or facsimile copies of texts by the Haiku master, Matsuo Basho and his contemporaries, the show will emphasize the importance of reflecting upon our emotional response to nature. It will argue for a rebalancing a view of the world that has, since the Enlightenment, placed greater importance on measuring and recording experience, whilst de-valuing our emotional responses to the natural world.
The exhibition focuses on two related themes. Related in that they explore the importance of re-developing an embodied relationship to our environment.
Firstly, it explores a relationship between the act of walking and creating (art) through the work of two inveterate walker/poets – Wordsworth and Basho. Thomas De Quincey reckoned that Wordsworth “must have traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles - a mode of exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is most excellent in his writings."
Two of the most important experiences related in The Prelude, for instance, found their origins in mountain walks (when overawed by the Ravine of Gondo, the “gloomy Pass” and during a night walk to the top of Snowdon).
Basho’s art reached its greatest form during his five-month trip to the Deep North in 1689, during which he wrote his masterpiece The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In this poem/travel book,he recounts the last long walk he completed with his disciple Sora—some 1,200 miles covered over five months beginning in May 1689.
Secondly, the exhibition proposes that there is a close relationship to the form and framing of the script used by Wordsworth and Basho and the landscapes (natural and social) in which the texts were written and through which the writers/poets walked. The exhibition will explore the idea developed by writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth that there is a specific relationship between the word used to describe an object or thing and the object itself – a poetic, embodied relationship. Coleridge believed that ‘words can embody and not just stand for thoughts and things’ … and he ‘puts his faith in words as “living things” – as plants, as live bodies.
Indeed, one the artists in the show (calligrapher Ewan Clayton), has a long-standing interest in the calligraphy and writing of the Far East (including the poetry and manuscripts of Basho). In his recent book (The Golden Thread – The Story of Writing), he explores how the ‘experience of sensing movement in the natural world and transferring it into the felt movement of writing is shared across many traditions’ … both East and West. Basho and Wordsworth explored the world by walking through it – and their resulting embodied experiences were mediated by the medium of pen or brush on paper.
A series of new essays in an accompanying publication will expand on many of these issues as well as exploring the relationship of the self to the world – reflecting on the similarities and differences between the Romantics’ embodied view of the world and the Japanese (Eastern, Buddhist) view of the self’s ‘emptying-out’.
The idea for this exhibition arose, initially from a study produced by the Wordsworth Trust and the Arts Council called Beyond Words: Understanding and Sharing the Meaning of Manuscripts. In it Jeff Cowton, Curator at The Wordsworth Trust, described handwriting as a visual form which can ‘mimic the texture of thought’, revealing valuable clues as to the state of mind of the creator
Their Colours and their Forms, Artists' Responses to Wordsworth
No full textBringing together the works of nine artists who made work in response to the manuscripts of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, this book provides a critical analysis of the work and considers the complex relationship between walking and artistic endeavour both historically and within the contemporary
Their colours and their forms: artists' responses to Wordsworth [curators]
No full textThis exhibition features the work of a number of notable contemporary artists, and offers a series of imaginative responses to the English romantic poet, William Wordsworth.
The project uses Wordsworth’s life and poetry – and the manuscripts of William and Dorothy displayed in the Museum – as the inspiration for sculpture, poetry, calligraphy, electronic music, AV work and a number of ‘creative walks’ in the Grasmere area of the picturesque Lake District
Trust should correspond to Trustworthiness: a Formalization of Appropriate Mutual Trust in Human-Agent Teams
No full textIn human-agent teams, how one teammate trusts another teammate should correspond to the latter's actual trustworthiness, creating what we would call appropriate mutual trust. Although this sounds obvious, the notion of appropriate mutual trust for human-agent teamwork lacks a formal definition. In this article, we propose a formalization which represents trust as a belief about trustworthiness. Then, we address mutual trust, and pose that agents can use beliefs about trustworthiness to represent how they trust their human teammates, as well as to reason about how their human teammates trust them. This gives us a formalization with nested beliefs about beliefs of trustworthiness. Next, we highlight that mutual trust should also be appropriate, where we define appropriate trust in an agent as the trust which corresponds directly to that agent's trustworthiness. Finally, we explore how agents can define their own trustworthiness, using the concepts of ability, benevolence and integrity. This formalization of appropriate mutual trust can form the base for developing agents which can promote such trust.Interactive Intelligenc
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