I think you have one of the greatest Substacks in existence! When I taught about the First World War, I would often use poetry and fiction: one poem I would often use was “Adlestrop” and the story was “Big Two-Hearted River.”
The fun of teaching both of them, of course, was that the students would come into the class and say that these have “nothing to do with the war.”
Lots of his work is, but not all! We've featured "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and "The Second Coming" here so far, and I'm sure there will be more to come.
In UK and EU, if I've got it right, copyright extends 70 and a bit years after author's death. Berne Convention would this be? So I shan't be reprinting Wallace Stephens until 1 Jan 2026 (when it'll be Poem that took the place of a mountain). But you seem to have different rules and I was so pleased to get Emperor of Ice Cream. Even though I have it in print at my bedside anyway...
Generally, at least under US copyright law, works published before January 1, 1929, are considered to be in the public domain, regardless of the author's year of death. So for example, poems from Wallace Stevens's first book, Harmonium, published in 1923, are in the public domain --- whereas post-1929 Stevens would not be.
That's one reason why we often make a big deal here about when and in what book a poem appeared, and are careful to use the version of the poem that appeared in that book, and not a later version from a Collected Poems still under copyright. (See the Emily Dickinson poem from last Friday for an instance of a markedly different version!).
But also it's just interesting. I like tracking down these poems in books (often readily available on Project Gutenberg, which is handy), seeing them in their original context, and getting a sense of the poet's development along a personal timeline, as well as looking at the poet in his or her place in the larger tradition.
So you can use early Stephens while I can use late Yeats...! Wikipedia seems to suggest that US copyright lasts for 95 (?) years from publication OR author's death + 70 years whichever is earlier - but it's not all that clear.
Wordsworth kept revising The Prelude all his life. But most W-lovers find the first version, 1805, the most satisfying.
Sally, you might, or probably more likely might not, recall that someone posted this poem as one of the 52 Poems that I did on my blog a while back. I had never read it before and thought "That's pretty," and not much more, until I sort of zoomed out and saw it in its context: the summer before the war, the European catastrophe that was taking shape, and Thomas's own death. Then it became hugely resonant, and much more than pretty.
Oh, yeah, that was a good series! I don't remember that particular installment, but now I'm going to go back and look it up. One of the real blessings of doing something like that would be that everyone reading and contributing would eventually (or even frequently) have that experience of discovery and epiphany. You've done so many good things on that blog through the years, but I really liked that project.
Thank you. The blog is now in its 21st year, which boggles my mind. However, you needn't bother with the post, as it's just the poem, no discussion, and only a few remarks in the comments.
I suppose "emotion reconnected in tranquility," as Wordsworth writes, necessitates a sort of composite place, one in which multiple emotions can be cast. And if, as he says in the sentence prior, poetry requires "spontaneous overflow" then, like spontaneity, it cares little for historicity. When he watches his sister enjoying the beauty on the trails above Tintern Abbey, he remembers a collage of visits there in his youth, sometimes the product of his wild drive to be loose in such a place. His older minds's tranquility allows for reflection, but the force of emotional memory is what nudges the specific memories to the fore.
Rod Serling, in a Twilight Zone episode, played around with the idea. A man, going to work, with his briefcase, on the morning train, which stops, unexpectedly, at a new train stop. He looks out, looks around, walks about, and spends a day there, before getting on the train and returning home. It is peaceful, no bustle, quiet and relaxed. When he wants to stop again the stop is gone. He does manage to get back there, somehow. Another version of a spot in time, but in the Twilight Zone, instead.
It's interesting to think of Wordsworth's spots of time as having a double nature. 'Adlestrop' itself is, in miniature, the combination of more than a single moment: his journal for 23 June 1914 records stopping at Adlestrop and hearing blackbirds through the willows and steam hissing, and then later that same journey stopping in Chipping Campden, where he sees willowherb and meadowsweet, and 'one man clears his throat'. So the poem is already a composite of peace experienced on a journey before, as you suggest, it is overlaid with the unspoken contrast of the war two months later.
The summer of 1914 was perhaps a collective spot of time for those alive when the Great War broke out. Paul Fussell (“The Great War and Modern Memory”): “[A]ll agree that the prewar summer was the most idyllic for many years. It was warm and sunny, eminently pastoral. One lolled outside on a folding canvas chaise, or swam, or walked in the countryside. One read outdoors, went on picnics, had tea served from a white wicker table under the trees. You could leave your books on the table all night without fear of rain. Siegfried Sassoon was busy fox hunting and playing serious county cricket. Robert Graves went climbing in the Welsh mountains. Edmund Blunden took country walks near Oxford, read Classics and English, and refined his pastoral diction. Wilfred Owen was teaching English to the boys of a French family living near Bordeaux. David Jones was studying illustration…. For the modern imagination that last summer has assumed the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrecoverably lost.”
A few other works celebrating or mourning that summer include Vera Brittain ("A Testament of Youth"), John Galsworthy ("Told by the Schoolmaster") and British poets Alice Meynell (“Summer in England, 1914"), John Masefield ("August, 1914"), and perhaps Wilfred Owen ("1914").
That's interesting --- and of course, that's really how poems operate, not as actual, literal snapshots of actual experiences (i.e., not reportage), but as composites of details which on their own would not make a work of art. It's probably more right and accurate to speak of the idea of the "spot of time" as a poetics (or part of one, since that's really what The Prelude is working out), defining what a poem is and does, than as a category or subgenre.
Well, it's kind of a manufactured connection, maybe! On the other hand, anyone coming after a writer of that stature and influence is inevitably, I think, going to be in conversation with that writer in some way, as with the whole tradition . . .
I think any real artist is inevitably going to be in conversation with tradition, and maybe more with some elements and figures in that tradition than with others. But it's so often not straightforward, and might not even be entirely conscious on the artist's part. You can be talking to the furniture in your mind and not even realize what you're doing, except maybe in hindsight (or when somebody else points it out).
Interesting speculation on Coleridge and Cusa, and I appreciate the link to the book on the railway and modernity. One of the interesting and (to me) amusing developments related to the spread of the railway and standard time was the commodification of time via transmission of the "correct" time via telegraph, like time and temperature on the phone when I was a kid. To understand Thomas's poem in this context is delightful.
This is all marvelous and illuminating --- thank you! I had not really thought about teasing apart time and space in this way, mostly because for Wordsworth, memory (time recovered imaginatively) is so embedded in place. But the whole overlay of railway time --- with its dreary linearity, but also its departures from itself at these stopping places, adds yet another dimension to what looks like such a simple poem. Thank you again!
Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence has some very striking reflections on the change in consciousness wrought by the railroad. Sorry for not quoting it, it would take more time than I want to spend. But with or without it, I think anyone who puts a little effort into envisioning the countryside of one's choice without railroads and modern highways can begin to feel the revolutionary impact.
I think you have one of the greatest Substacks in existence! When I taught about the First World War, I would often use poetry and fiction: one poem I would often use was “Adlestrop” and the story was “Big Two-Hearted River.”
The fun of teaching both of them, of course, was that the students would come into the class and say that these have “nothing to do with the war.”
Happy to have found this newsletter. What excellent poems you choose. Note: wb Yeats is out of copyright now!
Lots of his work is, but not all! We've featured "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and "The Second Coming" here so far, and I'm sure there will be more to come.
In UK and EU, if I've got it right, copyright extends 70 and a bit years after author's death. Berne Convention would this be? So I shan't be reprinting Wallace Stephens until 1 Jan 2026 (when it'll be Poem that took the place of a mountain). But you seem to have different rules and I was so pleased to get Emperor of Ice Cream. Even though I have it in print at my bedside anyway...
Generally, at least under US copyright law, works published before January 1, 1929, are considered to be in the public domain, regardless of the author's year of death. So for example, poems from Wallace Stevens's first book, Harmonium, published in 1923, are in the public domain --- whereas post-1929 Stevens would not be.
That's one reason why we often make a big deal here about when and in what book a poem appeared, and are careful to use the version of the poem that appeared in that book, and not a later version from a Collected Poems still under copyright. (See the Emily Dickinson poem from last Friday for an instance of a markedly different version!).
But also it's just interesting. I like tracking down these poems in books (often readily available on Project Gutenberg, which is handy), seeing them in their original context, and getting a sense of the poet's development along a personal timeline, as well as looking at the poet in his or her place in the larger tradition.
So you can use early Stephens while I can use late Yeats...! Wikipedia seems to suggest that US copyright lasts for 95 (?) years from publication OR author's death + 70 years whichever is earlier - but it's not all that clear.
Wordsworth kept revising The Prelude all his life. But most W-lovers find the first version, 1805, the most satisfying.
Yes, it's endlessly confusing, and I'm always anxious about it. Never sure I'm getting it right.
I definitely prefer the "spots of time" passage in the 1805 edition, though I'm fascinated by his later revisions.
Sally, you might, or probably more likely might not, recall that someone posted this poem as one of the 52 Poems that I did on my blog a while back. I had never read it before and thought "That's pretty," and not much more, until I sort of zoomed out and saw it in its context: the summer before the war, the European catastrophe that was taking shape, and Thomas's own death. Then it became hugely resonant, and much more than pretty.
Oh, yeah, that was a good series! I don't remember that particular installment, but now I'm going to go back and look it up. One of the real blessings of doing something like that would be that everyone reading and contributing would eventually (or even frequently) have that experience of discovery and epiphany. You've done so many good things on that blog through the years, but I really liked that project.
Thank you. The blog is now in its 21st year, which boggles my mind. However, you needn't bother with the post, as it's just the poem, no discussion, and only a few remarks in the comments.
I suppose "emotion reconnected in tranquility," as Wordsworth writes, necessitates a sort of composite place, one in which multiple emotions can be cast. And if, as he says in the sentence prior, poetry requires "spontaneous overflow" then, like spontaneity, it cares little for historicity. When he watches his sister enjoying the beauty on the trails above Tintern Abbey, he remembers a collage of visits there in his youth, sometimes the product of his wild drive to be loose in such a place. His older minds's tranquility allows for reflection, but the force of emotional memory is what nudges the specific memories to the fore.
Thanks to everyone for this marvelous conversation so far --- please keep it coming!
Rod Serling, in a Twilight Zone episode, played around with the idea. A man, going to work, with his briefcase, on the morning train, which stops, unexpectedly, at a new train stop. He looks out, looks around, walks about, and spends a day there, before getting on the train and returning home. It is peaceful, no bustle, quiet and relaxed. When he wants to stop again the stop is gone. He does manage to get back there, somehow. Another version of a spot in time, but in the Twilight Zone, instead.
Risky beyond belief, but paying off: "mistier" and "Gloucestershire."
This poem is so quiet, but it's so dazzling.
It's interesting to think of Wordsworth's spots of time as having a double nature. 'Adlestrop' itself is, in miniature, the combination of more than a single moment: his journal for 23 June 1914 records stopping at Adlestrop and hearing blackbirds through the willows and steam hissing, and then later that same journey stopping in Chipping Campden, where he sees willowherb and meadowsweet, and 'one man clears his throat'. So the poem is already a composite of peace experienced on a journey before, as you suggest, it is overlaid with the unspoken contrast of the war two months later.
The summer of 1914 was perhaps a collective spot of time for those alive when the Great War broke out. Paul Fussell (“The Great War and Modern Memory”): “[A]ll agree that the prewar summer was the most idyllic for many years. It was warm and sunny, eminently pastoral. One lolled outside on a folding canvas chaise, or swam, or walked in the countryside. One read outdoors, went on picnics, had tea served from a white wicker table under the trees. You could leave your books on the table all night without fear of rain. Siegfried Sassoon was busy fox hunting and playing serious county cricket. Robert Graves went climbing in the Welsh mountains. Edmund Blunden took country walks near Oxford, read Classics and English, and refined his pastoral diction. Wilfred Owen was teaching English to the boys of a French family living near Bordeaux. David Jones was studying illustration…. For the modern imagination that last summer has assumed the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrecoverably lost.”
A few other works celebrating or mourning that summer include Vera Brittain ("A Testament of Youth"), John Galsworthy ("Told by the Schoolmaster") and British poets Alice Meynell (“Summer in England, 1914"), John Masefield ("August, 1914"), and perhaps Wilfred Owen ("1914").
That's interesting --- and of course, that's really how poems operate, not as actual, literal snapshots of actual experiences (i.e., not reportage), but as composites of details which on their own would not make a work of art. It's probably more right and accurate to speak of the idea of the "spot of time" as a poetics (or part of one, since that's really what The Prelude is working out), defining what a poem is and does, than as a category or subgenre.
I hadn't made any connection between this poem and Wordsworth before - Thank you for pointing it out.
Well, it's kind of a manufactured connection, maybe! On the other hand, anyone coming after a writer of that stature and influence is inevitably, I think, going to be in conversation with that writer in some way, as with the whole tradition . . .
I love that "in some way..."
I think any real artist is inevitably going to be in conversation with tradition, and maybe more with some elements and figures in that tradition than with others. But it's so often not straightforward, and might not even be entirely conscious on the artist's part. You can be talking to the furniture in your mind and not even realize what you're doing, except maybe in hindsight (or when somebody else points it out).
I think the Wordsworth connection very suggestive, and not one I've seen argued elswhere. Two things occur to me: one is the issue of time -- Wordsworth's is a spot of time, after all, not of space -- and the railway. There's been quite a lot of work <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rz3R0vJNqZoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Railway+and+Modernity:+Time,+Space,+and+the+Machine+Ensemble&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=The%20Railway%20and%20Modernity%3A%20Time%2C%20Space%2C%20and%20the%20Machine%20Ensemble&f=false">exploring the ways the development of the railways, railway timetables</a>, and relatedly WW1, that shifted the sense of time from an older, more organic rhythm, to a modern rigid clock-time, time as a grid that traps us (alarm wakes us in the morning, clock-in to work, clock-out). This poem articulates a kind of escape from railway-time, an unscheduled stop of indeterminate length that connects the speaker with a deeper temporal epiphany. The other is the question of dreariness, a crucial element in the original Wordsworthian spot-of-time. I hate to link to my own stuff, but I talk about this here: https://medium.com/adams-notebook/the-spot-of-time-is-eternity-wordsworth-coleridge-and-nicholas-of-cusa-8c501c77ca7
Interesting speculation on Coleridge and Cusa, and I appreciate the link to the book on the railway and modernity. One of the interesting and (to me) amusing developments related to the spread of the railway and standard time was the commodification of time via transmission of the "correct" time via telegraph, like time and temperature on the phone when I was a kid. To understand Thomas's poem in this context is delightful.
This is all marvelous and illuminating --- thank you! I had not really thought about teasing apart time and space in this way, mostly because for Wordsworth, memory (time recovered imaginatively) is so embedded in place. But the whole overlay of railway time --- with its dreary linearity, but also its departures from itself at these stopping places, adds yet another dimension to what looks like such a simple poem. Thank you again!
Also, I have to credit Jody with starting the spots-of-time conversation, which took me back to The Prelude for the first time in a long, long time.
Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence has some very striking reflections on the change in consciousness wrought by the railroad. Sorry for not quoting it, it would take more time than I want to spend. But with or without it, I think anyone who puts a little effort into envisioning the countryside of one's choice without railroads and modern highways can begin to feel the revolutionary impact.