“An Inspiration / Of a Peculiar Sort”: The Romantic Verse Letter

Abstract

AN INSPIRATION / OF A PECULIAR SORT”: THE ROMANTIC VERSE LETTER JAMES MULVIHILL U n iversity of A lberta J . HE Romantic verse letter is a humble form, neglected or deprecated by critics and poets alike. Even well-known poems like Keats’s epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds1or Coleridge’s “Letter to [Sara]” are treated largely as secondary materials, documents of their authors’ psychological and poetic development. The “Letter to [Sara],” to be sure, has received significant attention, and not only because parts of it evolved into the Dejection Ode. William Empson and David Pirie print it in place of “Dejection” in their selective edition of Coleridge’s poetry, and in a lengthy essay Pirie makes a case for viewing the “Letter” as “a poem ofgreat unity” (“Letter” 325). Pirie at least considers the “Letter to [Sara]” in itself, but his controversial claim that it is a better poem than “Dejection” has its basis in the assumption that the two poems are generically equivalent. Thus he disregards the earlier poem’s epistolary nature in favour of its lyrical qualities. My premise is that the Romantic verse letter is best understood in terms of its epistolarity— that is, how it functions as a letter written in verse, a distinct poetic form arising, in the words of Keats’s epistle “To Charles Cowden Clarke,” from “an inspiration / Of a peculiar sort” (lines 105-06). I While the verse letter is largely neglected as a genre, some relevant work has been done on other epistolary forms.2In her study of the epistolary novel, Janet Gurkin Altman defines “epistolarity” as “the use of the letter’s formal properties to create meaning” (4). Altman’s epistolary model is character­ ized by polarities and paradoxes. A product of absence, the letter seeks to recreate presence, though in doing so only creates a new sense of absence: it is difficult to imagine an absent friend or lover as being present without re­ flecting more intensely on the absence that has made such imaginative shifts necessary.3The letter is, then, both a bridge and a barrier, in that while it seeks to alleviate circumstantial limitations, it necessarily exacerbates the consciousness of them as it attempts to redress real circumstances through ideal means or, in terms of the real, wishful thinking (13)—for it is absence that defines presence in epistolary writing, and, inevitably, redefines it. As English Stu d ies in C a n a d a , 19, 4, December 1993 Samuel Richardson reflects, “Who then shall decline the converse ofthe pen? The pen that makes distance, presence; and brings back to sweet remem­ brance all the delights of presence; which makes even presence but body, while absence becomes the soul” (qtd. in Roussel 375). Notwithstanding the dualistic metaphysics of transcendence he employs, with its concomitant suppression of the temporal and the material in favour of an idealistically conceived “soul,” Richardson presents here an almost Derridean sense of the letter in its textual role as supplement, which “adds only to replace. It in­ tervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of” (Harvey 218). For Richardson “absence becomes the soul” of presence in letter writing, supplementing, and finally becoming, presence. In making “distance, presence” the letter does not represent presence but, like the feminine “discourse of absence” described by Barthes, “gives shape to absence” (Kauffman 56). The circumstances of absence and distance entail certain rhetorical as­ sumptions on the letter-writer’s part. According to Linda S. Kauffman, The fundamental category of epistolarity is that it must be written to be read. It does not necessarily follow that the letter w ill be read, much less that it will evoke a response, but as an utterance, it is “dialogic”; its existence depends on sustaining the illusion of a dialogue with the reader. (36) Addressing the actual from the hypothesizing perspective of the virtual, the letter is distinct from the conventionally mimetic work, which only appears to address the actual and which in fact never looks beyond the virtual realities it constructs: one actually addresses someone while the other only appears to do so—or does so in a diffusive, public way. Barbara Herrnstein Smith premises her study On the Margins...