Article: Affecting Retreats and Academic Follies
In Jerusalem, William Blake makes it clear that he sees universities as complicit in processes of mechanisation that threaten to destroy creativity and enslave minds: ‘I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe | And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire | Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton’. However, surveying Romantic-period poetry more generally reveals that Blake’s view is an unusual one, breaking from eighteenth-century modes that remained the dominant discourses for addressing university life during the Romantic period. Poems on academic environments – particularly Oxford and Cambridge—commonly combined gentle satire on scholarly characteristics with presenting colleges as tranquil retreats. More pointedly, many university-educated poets sought to inscribe the special value of the elite subjectivities they imagined that their university experiences inculcated: this essay examines poems by William Mason, John Duncombe, Richard Polwhele, Thomas Dermody, Frederick William Faber and Christopher Pearse Cranch that work in this vein. However, such claims did not go unresisted, as shown through verse by Mary Alcock, Joanna Baillie, Phillis Wheatley, Lydia Howard Sigourney, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and George Crabbe and in more active models advanced by John Wilson and John Mayne in their depictions of the University of Glasgow. As higher education was diversified through urban foundations and institutions, spearheaded by the University of London, a project initiated in large part by the Glasgow-educated poet Thomas Campbell, the privileged scenes of eighteenth-century university verse became increasingly atypical. Nevertheless, the powerful ideal of the college-idyll lingered for a considerable time, being both reinscribed and ironised in writings such as Charles Lamb’s ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, which combines a sense of the attractiveness of academic retreat with evocations of its fragility and performativity. Continue reading