The Tale Goes On and On

To commemorate UNESCO's World Poetry Day last Wednesday, I organised a reading group based around two newspaper articles which had appeared in the preceding week, the idea being to discuss the rather nebulous topic of contemporary problems with teaching poetry. The two articles, one from the Guardian, the other from the Telegraph, agree that 'old' poetry is in some way irrelevant to modern society; the Guardian reports on Italian human rights organisation Gherush92's claim that Dante's Divine Comedy is "offensive and discriminatory," whilst the Telegraph questions why, in the year of Dickens's much-publicised bicentenary, Robert Browning's has been forgotten. It concludes, with somewhat lacklustre conviction, that Browning deserves to be read despite the off-putting obscurity of many of his poems. An academic reading group is perhaps an unfair place to objectively assess the apparent overall message of these articles; we weren't exactly sympathetic, for example, to an ignorance of Browning's sources being a legitimate excuse to not reading his poetry. But then, that's to be expected. The whole group consisted of researchers at different stages in their education and careers, and with different levels of knowledge about the modern state of poetry (although it was interesting that the music student in attendance felt that very similar slights were levelled against his subject). We have all, essentially, publicly acknowledged that we like the obscure stuff - so much so, that we're willing to base our professional lives around proposing ways to decode it. Naturally, then, we sprung to an animated defence of Dante's now-outmoded religious and social views, and disdained the Guardian writer's apparently Wikapedia-derived knowledge of Browning's works.

But we did agree that we are not entirely representative of the modern reader. Both newspaper articles engage with poets long-forgotten in popular culture; discussing them at all will, in all likelihood, result in at least a handful of new readers. But what happens when future generations, those reared with TV as the place to go for all knowledge and entertainment, grow up? Our reading group could already share tales of despair; we all knew of students who had actively avoided modules purely because they contained poetry in the reading lists. Telegraph and Guardian readers are, at least, exactly that: readers. The Telegraph wondered why Dickens's memory has survived so much more robustly than Browning's; I suggested (in, I admit, a comment spurred by a moment of defensive fury on Browning's behalf) that it was because Browning's poetry cannot be translated into a film or TV series. More objectively now, I stand by that theory; we have less and less readers, and more and more 'viewers.' So how will poetry fare in an increasingly multimedia age?

Naturally, my first concern was for my own research. How would Coleridge survive this death of the reader? (By now my worry had reached apocalyptic proportions, resulting in terrifying visions of a bookless world, where the occasional reader, ostracised by society, remained alone in the remnants of a library, remembering their glory days.) I did the only sensible thing. I searched for him on YouTube.

I was pleased to see that a search for 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge' returned nearly 900 results, many of which were readings of his poetry. Undoubtedly, these 900 videos will provide me with hours of 'productive' procrastination over the next couple of years; there's all sorts to be said about reader engagement through video. The first page, however, threw up a result which I found particularly exciting: an Iron Maiden song entitled 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' released on the album Powerslave in 1984.

The song, although still a mammoth thirteen minutes long, essentially summarises the tale of the Mariner, although it does include several stanzas, unaltered, from Coleridge's poem. Being a complete novice regarding anything musical, the only thing I can say about the musical qualities of this song are that it sounds, to me, like most Iron Maiden songs - but that the consistent beat does subtly mimic the original rhyme scheme, and that the quotations from the poem are 'marked' by elaborate musical parentheses. (If anyone can say anything more about the reflection of the poem in the music itself, I'd be delighted - it's an interesting angle, I think.) From our current perspective - the modern state of reading poetry - there is one aspect of the song which is particularly relevant. Coleridge's 'Rime' has a complex narrative structure, but most of the poem is told in first person from the point of view of the old sailor. Iron Maiden's lyrics, on the other hand, are written almost entirely from a third-person perspective. There is one exception: after the mariner has killed the albatross, bringing a curse to all the crew, that curse extends beyond the boundaries of the song: "The curse goes on and on and on at sea / The thirst goes on and on and on for them and me," Dickinson wails, the higher note at the end of the line implying the first-person desperation. 'Me' - the singer, and by extension the singing listener - is absorbed into the song, and so the poem. The 1980s listener was drawn into the eighteenth-century poem, and the 'Rime' is drawn into twentieth century popular culture.

At the end of Coleridge's poem, the Mariner describes how he must tell his "ghastly tale" over and over again, teaching others the moral of his story. The wedding guest becomes 'a sadder and a wiser man' thanks to the Mariner's tale. That is not the end of Iron Maiden's rendition: the tale, they say, "goes on and on and on." Which brings us back to the Telegraph, the Guardian and the future generations of readers. The tale of poetry continues to go "on and on," a process that events like World Poetry Day encourage. But the reader's tale goes on and on too, and as the Telegraph and Guardian go some way towards recognising, perhaps the only way to engage new students with poetry is to approach it from a twenty-first century perspective. Better ask Justin Bieber what he thinks of Browning, then...

Wandering restlessly around the Gates of Fairyland

My first blog post is a daunting prospect, and one that has been haunting me since I started my PhD back in September. To blog or not to blog has been the great question, and it is only in the last couple of weeks that 'to blog' has become the obvious answer.

I'll be honest, I've never really had much time for social networking generally; too often, it seems to become a space for bemoaning the trivial tragedies of life which, face to face, probably would never be mentioned. This immediacy of social networking can, then, be a problem: you don't need to think before you share your views with the whole world any more. But, it is this immediacy which gives bloggers, Tweeters and Facebookers the world over an unprecedented advantage: we can share our ideas as soon as we have them, get feedback as soon as we have readers, engage with a whole interactive planet without ever walking out the door. On the whole, it seems that the relationship between researchers and social networking is one which is set only to grow stronger and become more integral to academic life (Amber Regis and Charlotte Mathieson have each written excellent posts on the unforeseen advantages of becoming an active social networker). Besides these professional advantages, for the lonely PhD student, or in fact any lone worker, this sense of a community being literally at your fingertips, perpetually just one click away, can keep you in contact with an outside world that it's quite frighteningly easy to forget.

So, basically, this blog is a way of keeping connected with both the academic and wider worlds, and of doing so as a part of a dialogue (as opposed to, say, only reading online journals and checking the Guardian once an hour). Having been convinced that entering into this community of social networkers is a good thing, I had then to agonise over what to call the blog. Unlike my Twitter name (I opted for as close to my real name as it's possible to get for someone with one of the most common names on the planet), I wanted a blog name that reflected all of my reasons for embarking into the wide, wide sea of the blogosphere: disseminating my research, communicating with people inside and outside academia, and, inevitably, deploring the hard lot of the PhD student. Where it should come from was easy: my focus is on the Coleridge family, and who better to go to than the most famous member of it: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a writer who experimented with pretty much every thinkable mode of discourse. Were he alive today, I have no doubt he would be among the Stephen Frys of the online world: his notebooks and letters acted then in much the same way as the tweets and blogs of today. His notebooks recorded fragments of his thoughts, and, although they were written for his personal perusal, he was always aware of their potential to be published. His letters, meanwhile, discussed all aspects of contemporary life, from his own deeply private issues, to long theses on, amongst other things, politics, religion, travelling, finances, publishing and biography. Again, Coleridge was constantly aware of the ways that his correspondence was disseminated beyond the person to whom it was addressed. To Coleridge's letters, then, I turned to find a name, and found one in a letter of advice to his second son, Derwent. Coleridge is 'anxious' about Derwent's 'dissipated' student lifestyle, and worried about the distractions of 'society' upon Derwent's academic life. Coleridge advises him to sequester himself from 'extra-academic Society,' using himself as an unlikely example for studious habits:

'In my first term... Six nights out of seven, as soon as Chapel was over, I went to Pembroke, to Middleton's (the present Bp. of Calcutta) Rooms - opened the door without speaking, made and poured out the Tea and placed his cup beside his Book - and went on with my Aeschylus, or Thudydides, as he with his Mathematics, in silence till 1/2 past 9'. [Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Derwent Coleridge, January 11th 1822]

Coleridge may not, in reality, have been quite the academic paragon he implies here, but the idea of this kind of student lifestyle may sound familiar to the PhD student, even as it has undergraduates snorting in derision. Gone are the days of constant 'dissipation;' 'extra-academic Society' now means research seminars; it often feels like you are, or should be, at your desk 'Six nights out of seven' - and even if you're not stationed there, chances are you're thinking about something that you should have got done at least two days before. Reading in silence with many cups of tea sums up my early PhD career rather neatly - even if my subject ('old Books') is something that Coleridge thought could only 'dissipate your time and thought'. (I can't help feeling that, if it does, at least some part of me is becoming 'dissipated' on a regular basis.)

The last hurdle - of course - had to be what to write about. I turned to another Coleridge for inspiration: Mary. Mary complained that she felt 'condemned to wander restlessly around the Gates of Fairyland, although I have never yet passed them.' Mary's 'Fairyland,' like her great-great-uncle's, was that mystical place reserved for canonical literature; mine is that mystical place where academics go. The 'academic' or 'critic' is still another beast, and I am still looking at them from the wrong side of the Gates. I suppose my main feeling since starting the PhD has been one of exclusion: neither student nor professional, the PhD seems to float around a liminal space, anchored down only by the hope that it will, one day, be the key to the Gates. This blog, then, will I hope be one of the ways by which I search for that key - and if anyone knows where it might be, please feel free to let me know!