1 - ‘This Alabaster Spell’: Poetry as Historicist Method

Summary

In Crucial, inescapable ways, all evaluative writing in English Studies is life writing – a historicisation of professional and personal selves. Thus the seemingly rarefied academic exercise of charting the ‘(re)turn to history’ in Romantic Studies in the introduction to a recent collection of essays on the legacies and current modalities of New Historicist practice became for me a kind of biographia literaria. In the process of anatomising what is still the dominant methodology in the field, and identifying the characteristic moves of my own, and others’, critical negotiations with Romanticism, I was invoking and interrogating not only another age, but also past critical selves. (‘Sir, / I write from less than / ideal times to you in less than / ideal times …’) The introduction to this volume also seemed, rather uncannily, to identify the creative-critical footholds of the poetry that was taking shape alongside my critical-theoretical work, revealing the extent to which the historicist paradigms I had signed up to as a critic informed my practice as a poet.

I had always assumed that the critical and the creative were importantly related in my work, but had not previously dissected my own poetic methods. That would necessarily have involved a kind of (self-)demystification that poets find hard to bear. But New Historicism’s analysis of the strategies of Romantic lyrics within the context of their various constitutive ‘histories’ (cultural, economic, political, readerly) offers the poet-critic who has been trained to be suspicious of Romanticism’s own modes of representation a template for salutary self-evaluation. The present essay is an opportunity to consider the receptivity of my own poems to New Historicist analysis (thus revealing their ‘Romantic’ genetics), and – more intriguingly for me – to ask how the poetry itself might ‘perform’ New Historicism (and thus be configured as a critical tool, resisting insertion and collusion in the so-called ‘Romantic Ideology’).

There was always something ‘creative’ at the heart of New Historicism’s most troubling ‘troubling’ of a Romantic text – Marjorie Levinson’s 1986 reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’. Levinson’s ‘deconstructive materialism’ saw Wordsworth’s poem as an ‘artfully assembled’ ghost, an ‘allegory by absence’ that suppressed the poet’s knowledge of the harsh socio-economic realities of the Wye Valley and the political traumas of his ‘radical years’ in the service of a High Romantic argument in which Nature is rendered subservient to an imaginative reconstitution and transvaluation of the scene.