/ AN EXPLANATION by Jeffrey Robinson /
ABOVE
Untitled visual poem, Susan Howe
“Romanticism asserts itself as a continuum”(André Breton)
THE LAST WOLF IN ENGLAND: a manifesto
Romanticism here is not a comfortably long-ago past, but an electric event of the shared present. It’s an urgent re-configuring, an empowering that rejects the rising fascistic tendencies in our 21st Century world.
The 19th Century is the Age of Revolution, but the poetry of revolution, that is to say, the poetics of revolution, in Romanticism has mostly been forgotten or dismissed or undervalued by literary history; the Romantic poetics of revolution may be Romanticism's greatest contribution to the future of innovative poetry.
Here is a continuum of those Revolutions, still spinning: first a condensation or precipitate of Romantic manifestos (an unusual feature of the Romantic Period was the storm of manifestos), and second, an insistence, by means of 21st-century poetic and text-art responses, that the principles of radical Romantic poetry can fulfil themselves through modern and post-modern realization.
Denkbild: language art
The contemporary responses to the Manifestos fulfil a tenet of radical Romantic poetics, breaking out of the mental as well as visual linearity of ordinary print to an open “field”, locating a utopian vision-space for poetry. In the 1790s early Romantic Johann Gottfried Herder anticipated this space-of-writing as a Denkbild, or thought-figure — today language art, text art, visual poetry. The illuminated texts of William Blake (1757-1827) constitute a Romantic highpoint of the Denkbild.
A happy intervention by British visual poet and curator of text-art Philip Davenport has led us to collaborate on this set of 21st-century Romantic visual and textual-visual responses by artists and visual poets, including some poetry representing voices from “outsiderdom.” In Romantic Manifestos Manifest, not only the representation of voices of those “outside” but the forces that put them there become a central intention of radical Romantic poetics.
In Refuge from the Ravens: New Lyrical Ballads for the 21st-Century (edited by Davenport & Grime, 2022) people who have experienced homelessness, rewrote Wordsworth’s original Lyrical Ballads many of which were originally poems of homelessness, and disenfranchisement; “Outsiderdom” renewed the canon and reconnected Wordsworth to the radical continuum. The Ravens project, for which I advised and wrote a commentary, was the startpoint for Davenport and me to move onward into Romantic Manifestos Manifest. Some Ravens poems do appear in RMM; however the related but more recent The Last Wolf in England poems (2024) act as counterpoint in this online gathering. The wolf walks outside our circle, often wordless, occasionally making its presence known.
Radical Romantic poetics (indeed all radical poetry) operates on the “circumference” (Blake, Dickinson), twisting and untwisting the familiar with the unfamiliar, the doggedly linear with brilliant explorations of the spatial. It presents the perception and valuation of the familiar as small, narrow, while the unfamiliar allows us “To see the world in a grain of sand.” In Davenport’s project The Last Wolf in England, poems which include the accompanying aphorisms “Wolfisms”, Davenport and collaborators (many homeless) also explore circumference.
The Last Wolf in England: a Manifesto is a name put to what is essentially un-nameable, un-wordable — this first online iteration of Romantic Manifestos Manifest and the responses that spiral us into yet further outliers:
Ear to the human tree
Hear their prayer
The wolf has ghosts on speed dial.
(From WOLFISMS, by Davenport & others)
ABOVE
Untitled, Jon Sarkin
Ink on card
Image courtesy Henry Boxer Gallery
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