32313_wwc_43-3\\jciprod01\productn\W\WWC\43-3\WWC301.txt Sheet No. 1 Side A 08/14/2012 13:12:09 unknown Seq: 1 14-AUG-12 12:16 THE WORDSWORTH CIRCLE VOLUME XLIII, NUMBER 3 Summer 2012 From the Editor ................................................................................. 118 Faustus on the Table at Highgate J. C. C. Mays ................................................................................ 119 Charles Lamb’s Art of Intimation David Duff .................................................................................. 127 William Godwin’s “School of Morality” Susan Manly ................................................................................ 135 From Electrical Matter to Electric Bodies Richard C. Sha ............................................................................. 143 Wordsworth’s Folly Matthew Bevis .............................................................................. 146 Wordsworth, Loss and the Numinous Phil Michael Goss ........................................................................... 152 The Gothic-Romantic Nexus: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Splice and The Ring Jerrold E. Hogle ............................................................................ 159 The Romantic Roots of Blade Runner Mark Lussier and Kaitlin Gowan ............................................................ 165 Mary Berry’s Fashionable Friends (1801) on Stage Susanne Schmid ............................................................................ 172 Louisa Stuart Costello and Women’s War Poetry Clare Broome Saunders ..................................................................... 178 English Iambic Verse: The Syllable Dan Lechay ................................................................................. 183 32313_wwc_43-3 Sheet No. 1 Side A 08/14/2012 13:12:09 “Go Quotiently” : On Peter Larkin, Leaves of the Field (Rpt. Kenyon Review, Spring, 2012) G. C. Waldrep .............................................................................. 186 The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association is sponsoring a lunch and three sessions at the 2013 meeting of the Modern Language Association in Boston. LUNCH: Cash bar at 11:30 a.m., banquet at 12:00–1:15 p.m. on Friday, January 4, 2013. For information, location, price, and reservations: Jonathan Farina ([email protected]) or Marc Levi ([email protected]) SESSION 91: BRITISH ROMANTIC EXPATRIATES Thursday, January 3—3:30–4:45 p.m., Back Bay C, Sheraton—Presiding: Toby Benis, Saint Louis University 1. “From Wales to Western Pennsylvania: Robert Southey’s Madoc,” Juliet Shields, U. of Washington, Seattle 2. “Robert Merry’s Expatriation and the Pains of Memory,” Amy B. Garnai, Tel Aviv University 3. “George Templeton Strong Interprets Beethoven through Byron,” John Clubbe, University of Kentucky SESSION 542: PINING FOR SCOTLAND: AN ARBOREAL NATION Saturday, January 5—1:45–3:00 p.m., Riverway, Sheraton—Co-sponsor, The Scottish Literature Discussion Group 1. “John Evelyn and the Forestry of Imagination,” James C. McKusick, University of Montana 2. “Importing Trees and Exporting People: Walter Scott’s Transatlantic Ecology,” Susan Oliver, U. of Essex 3. “The Great Caledonian Forest of the Mind: Michael Newton, St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia SESSION 687: BRITISH ROMANTIC BOOKS Sunday, January 6—8:30–9:45 a.m., Fairfax A, Sheraton—Presiding: Jonathan Farina, Seton Hall University 1. “Shakespeare Re-Imaged: Grangerized Collections in the Romantic Era,” Michael Macovski, Georgetown U. 2. “Publishers and Lawyers,” Gary R. Dyer, Cleveland State University 3. “The Parliamentary Anthology and the Romantic Author,” Katie Homar, U. of Pittsburgh 4. “The Piper at the Gates of Paradise: William Blake and Joseph Johnson,” Joseph Byrne, U. of Maryland 117 32313_wwc_43-3\\jciprod01\productn\W\WWC\43-3\WWC301.txt Sheet No. 1 Side B 08/14/2012 13:12:09 unknown Seq: 2 14-AUG-12 12:16 From the Editor: Norman Fruman, a friend to many, died at age eighty-eight on April 19, 2012, at home in Laguna Beach, Calif. The date resonates: April 19, 1775, Concord, Massachusetts, rebels fired “the shot heard round the world,” starting the American Revolution. In Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (1971), Norman fired such a shot with broad academic and literary targets. Expecting a rebel, a revolution, some high drama, Richard Wordsworth and I invited him to the Wordsworth Summer Conference at Rydal Mount in 1971. However, from the first greeting, Norman was as affable, beaming and sunny as his wife and children who came with him, the start of lifelong friendships and genial exchanges with those who had disputed his work but never his talent, intelligence, character, or charm. The son of Russian immigrants, Fruman was born in New York, on December 2, 1923, attended a school for gifted students, then, City College of New York, from which at age twenty-one, he was drafted into the wartime army and became platoon leader. Running out of ammunition while defending the Alsatian town of Offendorf, he was captured, imprisoned, and, after attempting and failing an escape, was liberated in April, 1945. After the war, Norman completed his CUNY degree, earned an MA at Columbia Teachers College, wrote adventure and science-fiction stories for comic books, and, in 1957, split the top prize with another contestant on the television quiz show “The $64,000 Challenge’.” With a Ph. D. from NYU, he became an award-winning professor at California State University, Los Angeles from 1959 to 1978, with visiting appointments in Tel Aviv and in France, before moving to the University of Minnesota where, in 1994, he helped initiate the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW). In 2010, in an interview, Norman acknowledged that Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel “made me both famous and infamous.” Published in 1971, by a trade press, George Braziller, at over 600 pages (and only $12.50), it was both a popular success and an academic scandal. In the New York Times, Thomas Lask said it was “relentlessly and devastatingly polemical and one of the most exciting I have read in years.” Geoffrey Hartman wrote on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, “There has rarely been a more arduous attempt at decanonization. Coleridge’s genius is acknowledged, but only to emphasize the mystery of its ruin.” The Journal of European Studies concluded, “This is an important, scholarly, definitive, misguided and curiously perverse book.” In The Wordsworth Circle (III [1973] 177). Paul Magnuson wrote, Fruman “writes, not as a judge, but as a prosecutor, who has sifted through the evidence prior to the trial and, in his opening statement, says that if it were ‘possible to imagine that [Coleridge] was cunning and deceitful, at times treacherous, vain and ambitious of literary reputation, dishonest in his personal relations, an exploiter of those who loved him, a liar—surely his own testimony on his intellectual history would not be so automatically accepted as true’ (xiv). With these possibilities in mind Fruman proceeds through much of his argument often dismissing, not only Coleridge’s claims to originality, but also his claims to intelligence. .. I would argue,” Magnuson concluded, “that for all his reliance upon the thoughts and sentences of others, for all his intellectual 32313_wwc_43-3 Sheet No. 1 Side B 08/14/2012 13:12:09 posturing and deceptions, and for all his weaknesses, Coleridge was still a mighty wrestler. He fought against those writers from whom he borrowed most to keep his intellectual integrity. .” Tom McFarland, who passed in September, 2011, at age eighty-four, was invited to Rydal Mount the same year as Norman for similar reasons: the conflict, the drama, some fiery moments, arising from his first book, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969), which began with a chapter refuting the claims of Coleridge’s plagiarism. No conflict, fire, or even a spark. However opposed intellectually, these two had much in common (also a child genius, a Quiz Kid, a boxer, from obscure roots through elite schools), ideal companions, convivial, generous, full of good energies and conversation. Tom discovered a great love of climbing and attended every year, often completing a new book and always a new lecture. Robert Barth, whose Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (1970), took yet another position on Coleridge, invited to Rydal that very same year, for the same reasons, this brilliant, modest, and social Jesuit priest and scholar may have been the great catalyst, the one who tempered the dramas, reconciled the differences. In 1984, he wrote a profile of Tom for The Wordsworth Circle (XV, No.3, 95-97), which begins: “Stories tend to cluster around Tom McFarland. Some of them may even be true. One I will vouch for—at least in some measure—is his famous first ascent of Scafell in the Lake District. Not that I was on the mountain with him. Having taken my measure on such less arduous climbs as Helm Crag and Helvellyn, I was comfortably back in Grasmere. As the day wore on toward the dinner hour, the weary climbers returned in bands of two and three. Tom, not yet then the seasoned climber he is today, was still to come. We all knew how much the climb meant to Tom, and we knew that he would finish, no matter what the cost in weariness and discomfort. When he finally appeared down the street in Grasmere, walking-staff in hand, footsore and weary, the welcoming band of us gathered in front of the Moss Grove Hotel broke into cheers of triumphant welcome. Why had he done it? Not . because the