STC 2002: Conference Report
Nick Roe, Conference Director
STC 2002, the eighth Coleridge Summer Conference, featured six plenary lecturers and over sixty paper presentations. The theme of ‘Coleridge and Women Writers’ (announced after STC 2000) was explored in Anne Mellor’s plenary lecture ‘Coleridge and the Question of Female Talents’ and in papers relating Coleridge to Mary Hays, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and the ‘learned ladies’. In her plenary lecture, ‘Observant Fathers’, Gillian Beer traced Coleridge and other writers engaging with the ‘speaking child’, and during the Conference many papers brought in the figure of Coleridge the father and the child Hartley in ‘Frost at Midnight’. Jim Mays traced the biographical background of STC’s father John Coleridge; John Beer took as his keynote theme ‘Coleridge on Religion and Psychology’. Poetry was a key preoccupation in two plenaries, Paul Sheats on ‘Coleridge and the Idea of Lyric’ and Nick Groom on Hurdy-Gurdy/aeolian ‘folkmuzak’ and STC. The poet and novelist John Burnside read his poems and lectured on the poetry of motion in STC and other writers.
The Conference excursion was to the picturesque castle and village of Dunster, a ‘small town between the brow of a hill and the sea’, where participants relished the most exquisite strawberries and cream in Somerset. We returned to Cannington, and on a balmy July evening in the college gardens, delegates celebrated the completion of the Collected Coleridge Series at a reception hosted by Princeton University Press. Three editors of the series were present—John Beer, Reg Foakes, and Jim Mays—and their speeches made the occasion moving and memorable. The Conference also saw a pre-publication copy of the final volume (5) of the Notebooks, edited by Anthony Harding, and a re-issue of the Collected Letters by OUP. So now STC really is almost completely published. In the evening we welcomed Richard Garnett who presented an illustrated talk on the history of the Collected Coleridge.
It’s not possible here to summarise the sixty conference papers which formed the brilliant ‘parts and proportions’ of the academic programme. Papers explored STC and William Gilbert; Italian poetry; Coleridgean blessings, cursings, homoerotics, and the adultery bill; The Eolian Harp, twice; the Coleridgean symbol; Plotinus; Humboldt; The Ancient Mariner; China, Aztecs, Bristol poets; Pantisocracy; the poetry of Citizen Thelwall; the Watchman tour, and many more, a few of which are printed in the Winter 2002 edition of the Coleridge Bulletin with some to follow in the next. The Friends of Coleridge now have in place a scholarship scheme, funded jointly by royalties from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (OUP, 2001) and by funds donated from the Friends. At STC 2002 scholarships supported a number of postgraduates who attended the Conference. The scheme will continue in future Conferences and further details will be announced in due course.
The organisers thank all participants for the success of STC 2002, and look forward to the programme in 2004.