The Coleridge Summer Conference 20-26 July 2006

Paul Cheshire

From The Coleridge Bulletin, New Series 28, Winter 2006.

(Thanks to Alan Rawes, editor of the British Association for Romantic Studies Bulletin and Review,
for allowing the publication of this expanded version of a review first printed in his journal, October 2006)

Our Conference theme was “Coleridge and Wordsworth in the West of England”. Like all the previous biennial conferences, it was held at the atmospheric Clifford Hall at Cannington, now a part of Bridgwater College. The conference has a well-established ethos of conviviality and plenary proceedings throughout, and successfully achieves the ideal its director Nick Roe set out in his recent tribute to Mary Wedd in the Charles Lamb Bulletin: “Literary study thrives best in surroundings of friendliness, good humour, and convivial exchange rather than amid the jostle and backbite of ‘the profession’.” As Peter Kitson pointed out in a review of the 2004 conference, anyone presenting a paper at the Coleridge Conference can be sure that most of the group will be there to hear it, and when notes are compared during the intervals, there is the satisfying sense that everyone has been at the same event and been stimulated by the same ideas. This is unusual for an academic conference, where parallel panels are the norm. Another point for appreciation is that the conference theme is not exclusive – anyone’s current line of  research is welcomed provided it relates to Coleridge studies. There is no need to bend a paper’s topic or take any unwanted detours to comply with a centrally imposed mono-theme.

We opened with a garden reception for John Beer celebrating his 80^th birthday. Many of his books written over a long career were arranged on a special display table and John responded to the tributes deservedly paid to him by describing the view from what he called academic nirvana. He defined this as a blissful state where applause is showered on you just for existing. Nirvana, as ani Buddist kno, is a state beyond ego, and John - happy birthday! you’re there – a glowing example of Buddhist ego-loss.

The first evening lecture was given by our Chairman Tom Mayberry who presented the little known phase of Coleridge’s West Country life when he lived in Wiltshire with the Morgans from 1813 to 1816. And lo, at the end of the first day, after further refreshments, we rested and we saw that it was good; Coleridge Conference 2006 was in full swing as if we had never been away. The programme started in earnest early the next morning. Singling out individuals from a packed programme of 60 papers is downright impossible. The general verdict was that 2006 was a particularly rich crop. All aspects of Coleridge’s works were covered: the non-theological metaphysics of Opus Maximum; the theological readings of Ancient Mariner; peripheral figures brought to life through archival research; Coleridge’s knowledge of Hebrew; his paganism; his symbols, prosody, melancholy, conversation poems, notebooks, newspaper squibs. Even his summer holidays.

Evening lectures included Julie Carlson, whose Mary Shelley imbibed Coleridge from infancy; Richard Cronin presented Joseph Cottle the proto-Wessex Regionalist. The Wye Valley was travelled though the double vision of Bruce Graver’s stereoscopes. Stephen Hebron’s survey of Ancient Mariner illustrations reminded us of the Protean adaptability of the Rime. On the last night, poet Don Paterson mixed a reading of his own work with an appreciation of Hartley Coleridge. A living poet is a good foil to our obsession with a dead one, and the vulnerability of his unscripted reading was a reminder of the fragility of lines and lives that are still in the process of being written.

Conference lecturers included David Fairer on Coleridge’s purposeful arrangement of his 1796 Poems; Tim Fulford on how the infant Samuel was shaped by the Arabian Nights; Marilyn Gaull’s finger puppets gave a whole new meaning to the term “digital revolution”; Anthony Harding connected the prophetic call to justice with Unitarian radicalism; Peter Kitson’s Tartarology unpeeled another layer of the Kubla Khan onion; Seamus Perry read volumes from and into Coleridge’s page layouts; Anya Taylor championed the human and erotic Coleridge, and Fred Burwick and James McKusick proposed Coleridge as the hitherto anonymous translator of Goethe’s Faust.

The excursions rounded out the West County theme. We visited Coleridge's birthplace at Ottery St Mary, starting in the church where his father had been vicar. The day after being reminded of Coleridge’s exotic childhood reading, it was striking to realise he must also have spent his childhood reading/absorbing this Christabellian environment where reclining fourteenth-century stone effigies of the “aged knight” Sir Otho de Grandisson and his Lady Beatrix lie under the eyes of bosses “carv’d with figures strange and sweet”. Locals told us that village children still play in the Pixies’ Parlour, thus adding a further sense of continuity. Two eminent Coleridgeans stripped off and plunged gleefully into the River Otter, proving that the child is father to the Romanticist.  

The advance publicity tempted fate by promising “balmy midsummer nights” but, amazingly, the weather gods delivered. Cannington boasts several pubs where we could wind down from the stimulation of the day in good cheer and goodly company. We left for home at the finish, short of sleep and short of clean laundry, but gladder and wiser for the experience. The conference director Nick Roe, and the secretary, Graham Davidson, work hard behind the scenes to build in air the sunny dome of this West Country paradise where Coleridgean imagination blossoms every two years in such an apparently spontaneous way. Weave a circle round them thrice: they deserve our thanks.  

Our next conference is set for 23-30 July 2008. The format has been expanded – it will start with a 6:30 pm reception on the first Wednesday, and end with a conference banquet on the final night. The delegates will set off for home after breakfast the following morning. We will not be adding any more papers to the programme, the additional free half day will allow more time for breaks, expeditions and intellectual conviviality. The conference is not limited to academics or those presenting papers. Members of The Friends of Coleridge from all walks of life and stages of expertise can be sure of a  welcome, whether they come for the whole conference or for shorter periods.