Today we revisit an engaging short lecture by Jeffrey Robinson — perhaps best known as co-editor, with Jerry Rothenberg, of Poems for the Millennium Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry — who retired as Professor of Romantic Poetry at the University of Glasgow, Scotland in 2019. He delivered this talk, "Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833: Fibres of These Thoughts," at his home institution in 2018.
This nearly forty minute video presentation, essentially a distillation of Robinson's Anthem Press book of the same name, begins with this foundation:
Scholars of the working manuscripts of poets often assume that drafts exist primarily to highlight the pathway to a poem's final and eventually-published version. Interest in them, in other words, is an instrumental one. In my book ... I enact a contrasting possibility: that a manuscript, no matter where it stands on that pathway, may be taken seriously in its appearances as a poetic event in itself. The French call such a manuscript an avant texte. In the present case an unusually complex and intensely-worked manuscript of Wordsworth might in itself indicate a moment of dedicated poetic exploration relevant not only to the material on the page, but to other poems written at roughly the same time.
Robinson then launches into the specific manuscript under discussion — "Dove Cottage Manuscript #89," which contains a half dozen whole or drafts or partial drafts of "The Unremitting Voice of Nighly Streams," along with pieces of three other late poems, "On the Power of Sound," "The Triad," and "The Sonambulists" — where, he attests,"we can observe poetry thinking." This marvelous video is intensely visual and also includes performances from Andrea Brady, Judith Goldman, and Peter Manson. It's a very welcome addition to our PennSound Classics collection, and you can watch it here.
