Back

STC 2004 Conference Report

 

There were six plenary lectures presented at STC 2004, the ninth Coleridge Summer Conference. Tom Mayberry started the proceedings with an illustrated lecture on 'Coleridge Lecturing and Preaching in the West Country'. Tom was on his best form, and his engaging, witty, informative talk set the keynote for a number of later presentations, as well as the Conference excursion to STC's Taunton. Plenaries that followed took up the Conference theme of 'Coleridge and Poetry'. In 'Coleridge's Fantasizing Imagination' John Beer took another look at - and cast fresh light upon - the psychology of Coleridge’s ‘unacknowledged borrowings’, drawing in Henry James’s ‘The Coxon Fund’. Frederick Burwick's lecture on ‘Coleridge on Words, Thoughts and Things’ was an erudite investigation of Coleridge’s use of the terms ‘Positiveness’, ‘Certainty’ and 'matter of fact'. In '"The Gleam of those Words": Coleridge and Shelley', Michael O’Neill traced intertextual aspects of the Coleridge/Shelley relationship, revealing Shelley as an extremely subtle, discriminating reader of STC. Michael Raiger's close reading in ‘The Recantation of Liberty in Coleridge’s France: An Ode’ showed how STC's rejection of millenarian violence revealed continuities between his early poetics and the conversation poems. The final plenary by Nicola Trott revisited some of Southey's early lyrics, and made a refreshing case for the virtues of his 'low' Romantic poetic.

 

There were more than fifty Conference lectures and papers, addressing all aspects of STC. Coleridge and Poetry was to the fore from the first, with presentations on STC's career early and late including 'Frost and Midnight', 'The Ancient Mariner', and 'Love'. Seamus Perry explored 'Coleridge and the Unpoetic'; Graham Davidson explained STC's celebration of 'unapproved' life and love in 'The Garden of Boccaccio'. Several papers focused on STC's friendships (James Losh, Humphry Davy); others probed his poetic/literary relationships (Shelley, Byron, Defoe, Anna Seward, Robert Southey, and Tennyson). Thematic approaches included STC on love, dreams, biography, beauty, systems, the supernatural, war, the picturesque, polarity, astronomy and magnetism, alchemy and allegory. Our academic programme concluded with David Fairer's skilful interweaving of poetry and context, in an account of how Sheridan's parliamentary speech on a French invasion found its way into the 'small and silent dell' of the Quantocks, and STC's 'Fears in Solitude'.

 

Conference excursions included the traditional visit to Coleridge Cottage at Nether Stowey on the Saturday afternoon. Some delegates opted for the more strenuous five (or was it eight?) mile hike along the Quantocks to Beacon Hill with its breathtaking prospects of the Brendon Hills, Exmoor, and the 'shadowy main, / Dim tinted'. Our second excursion was to the Unitarian Chapel in Mary Street, Taunton, where Coleridge preached in 1796-7. The interior of the chapel remains exactly as it was in STC's day, and - after hymns - Seamus Perry in clerical garb bravely ascended to the pulpit and presented an extract from STC's ‘Lecture on the Slave Trade’. Two hundred years on, STC's voice resonated once again around the wooden pews, the galleries, and the ancient stone memorials along the walls. A tour of the town followed with our expert guide Tom Mayberry, who had laid out a fascinating display of literary manuscripts from the collection in Taunton Museum. That evening Heather Diamant gave one of her evocative readings from Coleridge’s poems.

 

Conviviality at STC 2004 included three receptions in the green pastures surrounding Cannington College. We marked significant anniversaries of our house journals The Coleridge Bulletin, Romanticism, and The Wordsworth Circle. W.W. Norton sponsored a party to launch the Norton Critical Edition of Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose edited by Nick Halmi, Raimonda Modiano and Paul Magnuson. We also celebrated the publication of Literature, Science and Romanticism: Bodies of Knowledge, a co-authored book by Debbie Lee, Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson, published by Cambridge University Press. Alex Alec-Smith made a welcome visit to STC 2004, and her Romantic book stall at the back of the lecture hall was a busy scene of browsing and purchases (between papers, of course).

 

As ever, the organisers are grateful to all participants for making STC 2004 an enjoyable and stimulating occasion, and this year we can relive some of it through the photographs by Nora Meurs and Paul Cheshire now posted on the Friends of Coleridge web site. Who is that reclining in the 'small and silent dell'?

Nick Roe, September 2004 

 

  top of page