James Schuyler's Romanticism: ‘A little trick I picked up from Bill Coleridge'

The next speaker in our staff and postgraduate research seminar series is Professor Eric Lindstrom (University of Vermont), who will be discussing James Schuyler's Romanticism: ‘A little trick I picked up from Bill Coleridge'.

In a diary entry from 1985, the American poet James Schuyler (1923-1991) volunteers Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" as his own favourite poem, writing: "is it possible my favourite poem is Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’? It may be true, and if it isn’t, so what?” In a letter from back in 1971, Schuyler had alluded to the two drafts of “Frost at Midnight” and to its abbreviated ending — “a little trick I picked up from Bill Coleridge” — as a model for the end of The Crystal Lithium, Schuyler’s first major long poem. Such gestures indicate Schuyler’s close intimacy with and genial affect toward British Romantic Poetry: a sensibility Prof Lindstrom characterizes as his knowledge and practice of a romanticism turned “inside out.” Yet, at his first-ever public reading, late in life, in 1988, his friend John Ashbery introduced Schuyler as “about as far from Wordsworth as you can get.”

Prof Lindstrom's current book project, and this talk, explore the illuminating, sociable, and only-misleadingly casual (“Bill” Coleridge) relationship to romantic poetry and poetics to be found throughout Schuyler’s poetry. Unlike Ashbery’s proactive gesture of disavowal, Schuyler’s professed and lived closeness to romantic poetry inhabits what in another poem (“Salute”) he calls a “various field.” It takes the forms not only of post-romantic natural description, intensive acts of linguistic figuration, and moments of imaginative and sublime vision; but also of the impotentiality and relinquishment seen in the allowance he grants in his diary to “doesn’t matter.” Unlike Frank O’Hara, who wrote several poems inspired by Coleridge, Schuyler wrote just one. The Coleridge-inspired “Distraction: An Ode” might be thought doubly available to the poetics of unactualized experience, as it remained unpublished until the posthumous collection Other Flowers in 2010.

The seminar will be chaired by Toby Lucas.