Robert Knox's Blog - Posts Tagged "coleridge"
The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb
[By the author of Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography|3237684]
The title of this largely entertaining peek into the lives of creative artists in the early 19th century by Stanley Plumly, "The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb," mentions the names of three literary worthies likely to create an interest in lovers of poetry. Particularly the great age of English Romantic poetry. It does not include the name of the artistic figure, Benjamin Robert Haydon -- who was a painter, not a poet -- who was the host for this "immortal evening." He is not remembered the way the three poets are, though at one time paid, public exhibitions of his ambitious historical paintings drew thousands of visitors in London and other sites.
So the title, given to this gathering in his studio lodgings by Haydon, retains its insight into the value of the careers of the three writers, especially the poets Keats and Wordsworth. Lamb was most successful as a storyteller and informal essayist, popular in his time and for generations after, though not in a way that either made him rich in his own day or widely read today.
But Haydon has been largely forgotten. His genre, "historical painting," entirely superseded first by photography and then by film. The painting he was working on (and would for six years) when he invited his literary friends for Sunday dinner, followed by supper later, and apparently a good deal of wine throughout, was "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem." The particular reason for inviting the three writers (a few other guests were invited as well) was that all three had posed for Haydon and their faces, given period dress, appear among the crowd of observers depicted witnessing the momentous arrival of the great religious teacher.
I found it hard to warm up to this painting. Plumly makes no case for as great art either, and the central preoccupation is what is wrong with Haydon's art his view of himself as an artist, and Haydon himself -- what keeps him, despite his out-sized confidence in his own genius, from being among the immortals. What interests us today, it turns out, is what the obsessive journal-keeping artist has to say about this times, the memorable 'evening' that serves as the book's lens into the characters of the 'immortal' figures, and his reflections about them as other times.
But much of the book focuses on Haydon's "unsuccessful" life and this is the limitation of Plumly's approach. Almost anything else that Plumly writes about here is more interesting than his analysis, often repetitious, of Haydon's failings. It was the kind of book where you leaf ahead to see when the names of the people you are interested in, Wordsworth or Keats or Coleridge -- who, though unavailable for the feast, or to serve as an extra in the portrait -- gets a lot of ink here.
So the hook here -- three great period writers, who sort of knew each other get invited to dinner by a guy who appears to be a better host than he is an artist, works, but the book delivers less of what I wanted as a reader and more than what I wanted to know about the impinging subject of a Romantic painter who happened to write an awful lot of diary and memoir stuff. At one point Plumly says he should have been a writer.
Plumly, himself a poet, is a very good writer, with interesting insights into all his figures. I would read anything he has to tell me about Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge -- does he have a book Shelley or Byron or Blake in the works? I would be happy with any of those mighty subjects. But Haydon, like his paintings, may invite our sympathy, but as a subject he's ephemeral.
The title of this largely entertaining peek into the lives of creative artists in the early 19th century by Stanley Plumly, "The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb," mentions the names of three literary worthies likely to create an interest in lovers of poetry. Particularly the great age of English Romantic poetry. It does not include the name of the artistic figure, Benjamin Robert Haydon -- who was a painter, not a poet -- who was the host for this "immortal evening." He is not remembered the way the three poets are, though at one time paid, public exhibitions of his ambitious historical paintings drew thousands of visitors in London and other sites.
So the title, given to this gathering in his studio lodgings by Haydon, retains its insight into the value of the careers of the three writers, especially the poets Keats and Wordsworth. Lamb was most successful as a storyteller and informal essayist, popular in his time and for generations after, though not in a way that either made him rich in his own day or widely read today.
But Haydon has been largely forgotten. His genre, "historical painting," entirely superseded first by photography and then by film. The painting he was working on (and would for six years) when he invited his literary friends for Sunday dinner, followed by supper later, and apparently a good deal of wine throughout, was "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem." The particular reason for inviting the three writers (a few other guests were invited as well) was that all three had posed for Haydon and their faces, given period dress, appear among the crowd of observers depicted witnessing the momentous arrival of the great religious teacher.
I found it hard to warm up to this painting. Plumly makes no case for as great art either, and the central preoccupation is what is wrong with Haydon's art his view of himself as an artist, and Haydon himself -- what keeps him, despite his out-sized confidence in his own genius, from being among the immortals. What interests us today, it turns out, is what the obsessive journal-keeping artist has to say about this times, the memorable 'evening' that serves as the book's lens into the characters of the 'immortal' figures, and his reflections about them as other times.
But much of the book focuses on Haydon's "unsuccessful" life and this is the limitation of Plumly's approach. Almost anything else that Plumly writes about here is more interesting than his analysis, often repetitious, of Haydon's failings. It was the kind of book where you leaf ahead to see when the names of the people you are interested in, Wordsworth or Keats or Coleridge -- who, though unavailable for the feast, or to serve as an extra in the portrait -- gets a lot of ink here.
So the hook here -- three great period writers, who sort of knew each other get invited to dinner by a guy who appears to be a better host than he is an artist, works, but the book delivers less of what I wanted as a reader and more than what I wanted to know about the impinging subject of a Romantic painter who happened to write an awful lot of diary and memoir stuff. At one point Plumly says he should have been a writer.
Plumly, himself a poet, is a very good writer, with interesting insights into all his figures. I would read anything he has to tell me about Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge -- does he have a book Shelley or Byron or Blake in the works? I would be happy with any of those mighty subjects. But Haydon, like his paintings, may invite our sympathy, but as a subject he's ephemeral.
