Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

327 Pages·2018·1.46 MB·English

by  Chris Jones

FOSSIL POETRY

Fossil Poetry
Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism
in Nineteenth-Century Poetry
CHRIS JONES
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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© Chris Jones 2018
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First Edition published in 2018
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For Edward Mendelson and Tara Quinn
Out of love, not ambition.

Acknowledgements
Edward Mendelson told me to write this book ‘out of love, not out of ambition’.
To write it out of ambition, he counselled, might result in disappointment, but to
write it out of love, would, whatever else it might achieve, make the book its own
reward. If time spent on a labour is some measure of the love invested in it, then
Fossil Poetry is a much-loved book, perhaps even a book rather too much loved.
I first began work on it a little over ten years ago, and I am grateful to the Arts
and Humanities Research Council of the UK for funding a research fellowship
entitled Fossil Poetry (2007) that helped me to work on this project. This book has
appeared much later than I told the AHRC it would, but it is also twice as long as
I told the AHRC it would be. That will have to do. I am also grateful to Vincent
Gillespie and Gail Owen-Crocker, and to the Medieval and Anglo-Saxon research
seminars at the universities of Oxford and Manchester, who invited me to present
papers on Fossil Poetry in 2007; feedback from the participants of those seminars
was invaluable at that stage in my thinking, and significantly changed the early
phases of this work.
There are many reasons why a book can end up taking so long, some profes-
sional and some personal, and it is all too easy to be rather hard on oneself as a
result. But one can also reflect on the fact that had it been finished earlier, it would
have been quite different, and perhaps not as good. In 2010 I began to co-teach
evolutionary theory with wonderful colleagues from Biology, Geology, Psychology,
and History on the interdisciplinary first-year course ‘Great Ideas’ at the University
of St Andrews. Without that experience I would not have come to my present
understanding of how the metaphor of the ‘fossil poem’ relates to the themes of
this book. In particular I am grateful to Tony Prave for his brilliant lectures on the
history of the Earth, which spurred me to read James Hutton and Charles Lyell, as
well as to worry a little less about the small stuff; book-writing anxieties seem less
consequential in view of Earth’s long spin cycle of constantly recycling us all out of
the material of a dead star.
Moreover, if one waits long enough, sometimes external events can also end up
speaking more insistently to the materials of a project in ways one did not anticipate
at its inception. When I began studying the ways in which ideas about what is
‘native’ or ‘pure’ English were constructed in nineteenth-century poetry, I did not
foresee that those enquiries would come to have pressing political resonances with
aspects of the debate around the United Kingdom’s referendum on leaving the
European Union that sought to mobilize ethnicity and nationalism, still less in the
resurgence of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as a defensive term of an identity perceived as under
threat from multiculturalism in the United States of America, as became manifest
during the Charlottesville riots of 2017. I hope that Fossil Poetry speaks to, rather
than shies from, these new political developments.
viii Acknowledgements
I am aware that in offering such apologias I seek to narrate the past in order to
justify a compromised present. What else can one do? The compromised present is
where we find ourselves; this is one of the major themes of Fossil Poetry.
Throughout all this, Jacqueline Norton, commissioning editor for literature at
Oxford University Press, has been both patient and encouraging in equal measure.
I am extremely fortunate in working with her, but so is my discipline in having an
editor of her calibre at one of its most important presses; good books are as much
the product of an editor’s care and nurture as of an author’s. Nor could I have been
luckier in having Joanna North copy-edit this typescript as skilfully as she did.
I am also very grateful to the three anonymous readers who produced reports for
OUP on the full draft of this book; their intellectual generosity was evident in the
detail and the helpfulness of their suggestions for improvements. I have fixed what
I can and hope they can forgive the rest.
St Andrews is a good place to be blocked, which is another way of saying it is a
good place to overcome being blocked, and Andy Murphy, Gill Plain, Neil Rhodes,
and Susan Sellers have encouraged and supported me through the times I thought
I was stuck, as did Eric Langley, whom I think of as an honorary St Andrean.
Simon MacLean was a terrific reader of in-progress drafts. Other colleagues whom
I should thank include the staff of the libraries of the University of St Andrews, the
National Library of Scotland (including the staff of the Advocate’s Library there,
and of Walter Scott’s library at Abbotsford), the British Library, the Bodleian, the
Houghton Library at Harvard, the Morgan Library in New York, and the Library
of Congress, Washington. Michael Alexander, Louise D’Arcens, Clare Lees, David
Matthews, Matthew Reynolds, Donald Scragg, and Eric Stanley have all, at differ-
ent times during my work on Fossil Poetry, generously given helpful suggestions,
information, or corrections, for which I am most grateful. I am also thankful to
Elaine Treharne and Graham Caie for their kind support and mentorship. Ron
Caldwell was always ready to lend a bed to a weary scholar who needed to work in
the libraries of New York, as was Paul Medley in Oxford. Their conversation and
friendship are deeply appreciated.
A book can only get written if one’s family also put up with it, if not happily,
then at least with forbearance. Eve and Anya: this book probably feels like it’s been
going on for as long as you can remember. I’m pleased to say that whenever I was
faced with the choice between working on it, or spending time with you—helping
with homework, baking cakes, watching films, making music, or talking about boy
problems—I’m pretty sure I chose the latter. I don’t think that was true when I was
writing Strange Likeness, and I’ve no regrets that I changed my priorities. You’re
going to find this pretty boring, I’m afraid. There’s a bit about Jabberwocky in
the middle, but it’s not as much fun as reading the poem out in a scary voice to
you at bedtime was.
Ever since Tara Quinn met me I have been working on this, so she will be
particularly glad to see the back of it. Sometimes explaining what you’re trying to
do to someone not invested in your field generates the best feedback of all. It was she
who, after listening more patiently than I deserved, first told me I was working on
two slightly different, but linked phenomena: two books really, not one. Without
Acknowledgements ix
that insight I doubt I could have finished this. I dedicate this book to her, but
I hope she won’t mind sharing it with Edward Mendelson, who could have easily
skewered a somewhat cocky young man whose first book had just come out, yet
chose to be kind and forgiving instead. Later, when we met in person, Edward told
me an anecdote about being punished himself at the start of his career by a senior
academic who should have known better. I realized an historical injustice was
being put right by Edward in his treatment of me, and in that moment I learned
more about how to be an academic than years of reading and writing could teach me.
I hope I will always remember to pass that lesson on.