English Romanticism: Is it really all over?

No it isn’t, so long as people keep climbing up Helvellyn – ideally in the dark [1800 words 7 mins

Romanticism: it's a turbulent world of the emotions, involving art, music, and the written word. Its English version dates from the publication by Wordsworth and Coleridge of the ‘Lyrical Ballards’ in 1798¹. And although superseded by new movements, English Romanticism is still around.

Take the notion that the proper subject for a poem is the poet's own interesting feelings. Chaucer, Milton, Donne, Blake, Burns: they wrote about mice, or talking roosters; prostitutes, their lovers, or God; meanwhile their own emotions, whether current or recollected in tranquillity, really weren't that interesting. But the Romantic assumption (“the proper subject of mankind is ME”) stands at the back of much of today's poetry – and virtually all of today's bad poetry.

But the Romantic project embraced more than just poetry. It involved experiments in politics and communal lifestyle, experiments with opium and laughing gas. It involved a new technique of looking at the natural world. And it involved, right from the start, the pursuit of fellwalking. The very first Lakeland walkers may have been involved in a Gothic project, involving brigands and horrible rockfalls. But the Romantics – the Wordsworths William and Dorothy, Coleridge, sidekicks Southey and Lamb and De Quincey - brought a whole new way of going up hills. Their mountains were made of actual rock and earth. They walked up them attempting to see what was actually there, if also to see what was invisible behind what was actually there. And they enjoyed storms, sunrises, and the actual exercise of foot on foothold. Coleridge, circling Lakeland in August 1802, was not just going up the same hills as today's fellwalkers, but going up them for the same reasons.

High altitude Romanticism: Byron’s ‘Manfred’ on the Jungfrau (John Martin 1837)

Keats walked all the way to Fort William and climbed up Ben Nevis specifically as part of his training into being a poet. One of Shelley’s greatest poems is about Mont Blanc – even if all he did was look up at it admiringly out of Chamonix. The young Byron ascended Lochnagar by an interesting scrambling route – indeed, his in 1805 is the first recorded ascent. His cheerful and enthusiastic verse about it is still belted out by folk singers in Scottish pubs. And the million people who go up the path above the New Dungeon Ghyll are, all of us, pursuing the Romantic Agenda.

Most of us on the Stickle Tarn path are, however, unaware of our status as English Romantics. The English Romantic tradition in verse, and the English Romantic tradition in fellwalking, have oddly moved apart like Robert Frost’s two paths in the wood. The English poetry of the hills and mountaintops is like the tarn in Gillercomb above Borrowdale. It ought to be there, but it isn’t.

The English pastoral tradition, by contrast, is trivial. And yet it’s given us the entire output of John Clare, while TS Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ is, among much else, a treatment of the small English village. Londonerism as a cultural strand doesn’t even exist. Yet the Thames runs deep and odorous through the work of Blake, Dickens, and, again, TS Eliot. Fellwalking, fundamental as it is, offers us in verse almost nothing at all.

The Thames trickles through ‘Our Mutual Friend’ – not to mention Great Expectations, David Copperfield etc.

Among post-Romantics, WH Auden has written occasionally but memorably of the fells. Auden knew his mountains, and knew his mountain men: “those unsmiling parties, clumping off at dawn in the gear of their mystery”. His brother, indeed, was in the Karakoram with the explorers Shipton and Tilman in 1937. Auden himself suffered from poor eyesight – just one reason why his hillwalking involved his imagination almost equally with his feet. In ‘The Ascent of F6’, Auden put Pillar Rock above Wastwater rather than Ennerdale, and in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ preferred the tramlines and slagheaps of Wolverhampton to the view from Scafell Pike. Wordsworth placed Pillar Rock where it actually is, in Ennerdale: but his poem leads us through rather a lot of lines to the conclusion that people die, which is a sad thing. Auden’s mountain satire, written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, explores death and fame and politics, transcendence and the absurd.

Meanwhile Auden’s poem ‘Mountains’ manages to suggest that the English Lake District doesn’t even exist:

Am I
To find in the Lake District, then
Another bourgeois invention, like the piano?

Lake District. Another bourgeois invention? Grasmere, from Thomas West’s ‘Guide to the Lakes’

But it’s Auden’s poem ‘In Praise of Limestone’ that follows Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ in my rather short list of English mountain poems that matter:

… Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance fo thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits: hesar the springs
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle²

Hamish Brown was the first person to cross all 278 of Scotland's 3000ft summits in a single continous walk. His poem ‘The Harlot’ on Ben Nevis, combining love and disgust, for me outweighs his half-dozen accounts of very long walks. Scotland’s poet Hugh MacDiarmaid has written on Liathach in a verse that embraces all of the mountain and its peculiar sandstone grimness.

This small selection leaves a lot of work to be done by one short sonnet of Gerard Manley Hopkins. ‘Mind Has Mountains’ was taken to name an exhibition of Kanchenjunga paintings by Julian Cooper at Wordsworth’s former house, Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Emerging from the gallery, I wandered into the bookshop to buy Rochard Holmes's excellent biography of Coleridge. Sitting on Coleridge's bench in the garden of Wordsworth’s house, I turned to the account of Coleridge’s walk on Scafell—to find the same Hopkins poem quoted in a footnote. Indeed, the present essay was aimed towards a future book called ‘Mountains of the Mind’; but Robert MacFarlane wrote a book called that before I could.

Oh the mind, mind has mountains; cliff of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Mock them they may
Who ne’er hung nor clung there.³

Hopkins wrote the ruggedly pastoral ‘Inversnaid’ about a waterfall on the West Highland Way. He got there on the tourist boat up Loch Lomond: when it came to mountain experiences, as a busy Jesuit Priest he didn’t have very many of them.

Which brings us right back to the Romantics. And to the odd discovery that Wordsworth and Coleridge managed to write round and round the mountain without ever actually going up it.

It's true that Wordsworth climbed Snowdon in the 1780s, and wrote about that in Book 13 of ‘The Prelude’. Today’s ‘Centre for English Romanticism’ is the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage. Its late director Robert Woof considered that The Prelude is what Wordsworth’s all about, and that Book 13 is the pivot of The Prelude. I find it slow-moving, interrupted as it is by an encounter with a hedgehog on the upward path. Shorter, more readable, and much more important in the interaction between the mountain and the mind of William W are the ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’. Those lines were written beside the River Wye, somewhere near Symonds Yat. Their altitude above the sea is approximately 18m.

Of Wordsworth it was written (by JK Stephen) that ‘he has two voices: one is of the deep / And one is of an old half-witted sheep’. Much of Wordsworth's later Lakeland verse is pure Herdwick; and so I pass over ‘Thou hast Clomb upon Helvellyn’ and even the Sonnets down the River Duddon.⁴

If Wordsworth was a sheep, Coleridge can be counted as a mountain goat. Nimble-footed, mischievous, and with a nasty pair of sharp horns on him. In 1798 he set out with both Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, for a four-day hill walk over the Quantocks and Exmoor. And in the course of the walk, they shaped out the definitive Romantic poem, a masterpiece of wild landscape and exploratory travel. And while Tintern Abbey is set at an altitude of 20m, the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ takes place entirely at sea level... Meanwhile ‘Kubla Khan’, infused as it is with the landscape of the Mendip Hills and the Somerset Coast Path, is set in the far East and disguised as a poem about opium rather than the outdoors.

Okay, so there’s a bit more Romantic hilly verse than I realised… if the email version gets clipped at the end, please go back to the top for ‘browser version’

This mountain-free mountaineering does begin to seem more than coincidence. Coleridge's best-known poem about an actual hillwalk has the poet stuck at home, his foot scalded by a kitchen accident⁵, while everyone else goes off up Bicknoller Post: ‘This Lime-tree Bower my Prison’. Okay, so he did write one about Mont Blanc (without having seen it or been there). It happens to be one of his worst.

Coleridge's finest fellwalking went into his notebooks, as raw material for poems that remained, in the end, unwritten. Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals were raw material for poems by her brother William that did get written though we might have preferred it if they hadn't.⁶ Dorothy's account of the seasonal changes of light over Rydal Water are simply superb - how fortunate that she never got hold of a camera, the pictures could never have come close. While Coleridge's notebooks are, for me, the finest writing about the Lake District there has ever been. Here he is on Helvellyn, an overnight walk in August 1800:

Ascended that steep and narrow ridge. On my right that precipice and the morass at its feet. On my left the two tarns and another precipice twice as lofty as the other, but its white stones more coated and lined with moss. Am now at the top of Helvellyn … Travelling along the ridge I came to the other side of those precipices and down below me on the left - no - no! No words can convey any idea of this prodigious wildness. That precipice fine on this side was but its ridge, sharp as a jagged knife, level so long, and then ascending so boldly. What a frightful bulgy precipice I stand on and to my right how the crag which corresponds to the other, how it plunged down like a waterfall, reaches a level steepness, and again plunges!

Nighttime crossing of Helvellyn. Coleridge managed it without a head-torch.

Somehow, the mountain that’s in the middle of the Romantic world view never really made it into Romantic verse. It’s there in Romantic prose, magnificent from Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth, through Ruskin to the English explorers of the Alps and the weekly Guardian column (while he was still alive) of Harry Griffin. But most of all it’s there under the foot of the four million fellwalkers, up Red Pike every August afternoon in pursuit of English Romanticism.

Great Gable looking suitably Romantic on a winter evening

1. ‘Lyrical Ballads’ included ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ – as well as the dreadful ‘We are Seven’ .

2. Full text of the poem here . My post about it from last autumn:—

3. Full text of the sonnet here . My earlier post about Gerard Manley Hopkins and ‘No worst, there is none’:—

4. For readers not familiar with the UK: the Herdwick is the traditional Lake District sheep breed, brought, it’s supposed, in the boats of Viking raiders; the Duddon’s a river running from the heart of the hills out to Morecambe Bay. Helvellyn is England’s third highest hill and very popular, rising above Ullswater; the ‘Thou’ who clomb on it was Dorothy Wordsworth.

5. His wife Sara had spilled boiling milk on him. We have to wonder what the poet was doing, lounging with his feet out in between the stove and where Sara needed to put down the saucepan… There’s no doubt STC was a most tiresome husband.

6. Sorry, but I really can’t be doing with those damned daffodils.