Updating literature
This is more of a discursive, get-my-thoughts-down-quickly post. Apologies to anyone who isn’t at all interested in this.
This mainly comes from my recent work on (you guessed it) Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets. Now, this is a collection of some hundred-odd poems, and to be quite frank, I’m not going to write an essay that includes all of them. I don’t even want to have to read them all, to find out which ones are easy. So, I sat down with the book and a bit of paper, and noted down which ones dealth with, for instance, the art of poetry (so looking for reference to the Muse, to poetry, other poets, etc).
Without paying for a research assistant, I don’t want to do this myself. It’s a tedious task that takes up time that could be spent doing other things, like actually reading and responding to the poems themselves. Oh, and then of course I need to find poems by other authors, or other poems by the same author in different books, that treat the same subject. Admittedly, often there will be introductions that give you some kind of overview of a writer’s context, but what if you’re not reading an edition aimed at students? An older edition, perhaps, or a website?
What we need - and by ‘we’ I mean lazy literature students like myself, and by ‘need’ I mean ‘could do with to let us be even lazier’ - is some kind of metadatabase of poetry. Google are already digitizing books and making them searchable, but I’d like to see this go further. Why show you the whole book, when you need only the one chapter on the history of the sonnet for your essay? For poetry, it should suggest other poems that are similar - sorted by importance. Poems by the same author on the same subject would be ranked highest, and then other authors, those closest chronologically ranked highest. Some kind of weighting could be factored in to show a known connection - we know Wordsworth read Smith, so perhaps he should rank higher than Shelley, for instance.
The only problem is, such a database would require a vast amount of work. All books currently digitized would need cutting up into individual poems, chapters - perhaps so far as paragraphs (which would return Wordsworth’s ‘There are in our existence spots of time’ verse-paragraph out of Book XI of the Prelude). And then tagging: form, style, period, author, subject (this would be a little subjective). I don’t know how it would work. I’d just like it to! It would also help to make concordances and other geeky English things like that.
Maybe there is something already quite like this, maybe not. Perhaps I should spend my summer scanning out-of-copyright books and making my own database. But maybe I shall just wait for Google Books to come out of beta.
Work, work, work.
So I decide to write an essay on Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets ( first edition pub. 1786), which is a wonderful sonnet sequence I thoroughly recommend a read of. There are some really interesting ideas in there, and she had an influence on later Romantics including Wordsworth (who read the fifth edition while in his final year at Cambridge, and visited her on his way to France).
However, an essay on her poems isn’t just an essay on those poems. Oh no. Imagine my horror at the prospect of writing an essay that could include (in a vague order of importance):
- a discussion of her (100+, depending on how I’m counting) poems,
- a discussion of her poems in relation to other elegies and sonnet sequences (notably Petrarch, as she takes a lot from him)
- a discussion of her influence on later Romantics treating the same subject (think melancholy, think nightingales)
- an exploration of the feminist elements to her work (so think also some Mary Wollstonecraft).
- a look at Goethe, for the five sonnets ‘Supposed to be written by Werter’ (this isn’t going to happen as the library’s copies of the Sorrows of Werter are all in stores, and reference-only. I’m not going to read the whole thing sitting in the library under armed guard!).
All this in 3-4,000 words, constituting 1/160th of my overall degree (16 tutorial essays over 2 years is one module out of ten). Great. Time to knuckle down!
