About this Event
We're delighted to welcome Dr Noreen Masud (University of Bristol) to deliver her seminar, Encounters on Salisbury Plain
5pm, Wednesday 27 March 2024
Rehearsal Room 2, ArtsOne, Queen Mary University of London
Abstract
Many commentators have written with puzzled interest about the contrast between the visions and dramatics played out on Salisbury Plain in Wordsworth’s poems of the same name, and the matter-of-fact description of his Plain walk in an 1838 letter to John Kenyon:
… in my 23d year, I passed a couple of days rambling about Salisbury Plain, the solitude & solemnities of which prompted me to write a Poem … parts may be perhaps be thought worth publishing after my death among the 'juvenilia'. Overcome with heat and fatigue I took my siesta… but was not visited by the muse in my Slumbers…
The poem, Wordsworth implies, is only partly a success: parts might be worth incidental interest via the juvenilia. It is not a great work. And yet Wordsworth could not leave the poem alone. The incident was, as he noted in The Prelude, a ‘spot of time’ to which he would return over and over again. ‘Salisbury Plain’, ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’, ‘Incidents on Salisbury Plain’. There seems to be something about the plain that Wordsworth could not satisfy himself about: something which could not be worked through, like mourning that shades to melancholia. In this paper, I suggest that that strange letter to Kenyon might be one way of thinking about this repetition, this failure to reach satisfaction. How does one write about a space whose solemnity ‘prompts’ a poem – and yet is remembered as an experience in which the Muse was absent?
Speaker Bio
Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker 2020. Her books are Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language (Oxford University Press, 2022), which won the MSA First Book Prize 2023, and A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton [Penguin], 2023), which has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Rehearsal Room 2, ArtsOne, Queen Mary University of London, 327 Mile End Road, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00