Pausing to Think in English Romanticism

Instructor:
Prof. Christoph Bode
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Abstract:
There are many poems in English Romanticism in which situations or moments of pausing to think are thematized or even dramatized, the difference between the two being that when you thematize these moments you can put a temporal distance between yourself now and yourself then and you can try and define the difference it made, but when you try and dramatize the experience in the poem, you write as if you were still in that situation and you pretend to record the changes as they happen.

Now, as we know from Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, the moment of original emotion is rarely, if ever, identical with the moment of composition, and for very good reasons, too. In this laid-back talk, I will walk you through a series of such poems – poems that in one way or another deal with ‘pausing to think’ – and I will try and address the following questions: Often, the moment in which you pause to think is not the moment in which what is within you can already be verbalized. How do the poems attend to this matter of bringing thought to language, of the labour of bringing forth the adequate expression (“Could I embody and unbosom now / That which is most within me, – could I wreak / My thoughts upon expression…” Byron, Childe Harold III, 97)? Then, often moments in which you are lost in thought seem to be characterized by an obliteration of the dividing line between subject and object – you are lost in thought and you become forgetful of yourself, while at the same time you can be said to be fully with yourself, forgetful of the world. How is that particular state addressed in these poems? Thirdly, “pausing to think” (an admittedly weak translation of the German Innehalten) is marked by a curious experience of time: on the one hand, the transience of time seems to be suspended, on the other, it seems that you experience time far more intensely than under normal circumstances.

My examples will be taken from William Wordsworth (a carefully selected passage from the Prelude, namely the “Blind Beggar episode”), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“Frost at Midnight”), and, perhaps not surprisingly, from John Keats (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to Melancholy”, “To Autumn”): it is in John Keats, and in his odes in particular, that we find an attempt to write poetry ‘to the moment’, that is, a poetry that pretends to be a record of time passing this very moment: poetry as a logbook of inner experience.

If we abstract from our readings, we find that the characteristics of the poetry of ‘pausing to think’ can be subsumed either under temporality or under mediality and in a way that connects the two. The leading questions are these: What happens to time in moments when we pause to think? What happens to time when this experience is put into words to make it communicable? What happens to time when the result of this process of medialization (putting it first into speech, then into print) reaches its final destination, the reader? A tentative explanation of the above-mentioned contradictions – the antinomies that occur once we try and fix the experience of pausing to think in a medium, in language – might be found along the lines of the Kantian antinomies.

The workshop itself should be regarded as a courteous invitation to pause to think. We hope to practice what we preach.