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In December of 1974, Thomas Weiskel must have looked back on the past several years as a time of encouraging fullness. Only ten years out of high school, he was already an assistant professor of English at Yale University, specializing in Romanticism. Not yet thirty years old, he had spent the past year on sabbatical, completing the manuscript that was to become his first book, The Romantic Sublime. He was happily married, with a three-year-old daughter, Shelburne, and another child on the way. Around this time, Weiskel himself wrote that he found life, "exhausting, difficult, wonderful. Literature is a close second"(vii); and he remarked enthusiastically in his journal in the fall of 1974, "I wouldn't trade my life for anyone's"(xi).
I'm certain such was his mood on Sunday, December 1st of that year, when he went ice skating on the pond behind his Massachusetts home, pulling Shelburne and her sled along in his wake. I'm equally convinced that the following lines from The Prelude were in Weiskel's mind then, as the literary and the literal converged:
And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile
The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,
I heeded not the summons; happy time
It was indeed for all of us, to me
It was a time of rapture. Clear and loud
The village clock tolled six; I wheeled about
Proud and exulting, like an untired horse
That cares not for its home. All shod with steel
We hissed along the polished ice in games
. . .
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle. With the din,
Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed; while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away. (I.452-473)
Reading Wordsworth and Weiskel, we realize the importance of
returning to this moment, of reimagining that "alien sound of
melancholy" that must have overcome them both.
According to the Yale Daily News, "the accident was discovered by a neighbor who had been skating on the pond. He sighted a sled floating on the water 200 yards from shore late in the afternoon"(1). With gathering recognition, we remember another Wordsworthian narrative, in Book 5 of The Prelude, of a "spot of time" located near Esthewaite Water:
Twilight was coming on, yet through the gloom
Appeared distinctly on the opposite shore
A heap of garments, as if left by one
Who might have been bathing. Long I watched
But no one owned them; meanwhile the calm lake
Grew dark with all the shadows on its breast.(5.435-40)
Confronted with unclaimed possessions in the waning daylight, and
on the edge of a silent lake, observers begin to realize that
something has gone horribly wrong. Weiskel's own comments on
this passage from The Prelude seem uncanny in retrospect,
particularly as he pauses to wonder with a kind of desperate
impatience, "why Wordsworth hadn't run for help" immediately
(176). In fact, Weiskel's neighbor did contact the police after
noticing the sled, but it was too late. They found Shelburne's
body that night around 8 o'clock, and did not locate Weiskel's
until morning. Like Yeats, "he disappeared in the dead of
winter" (Auden). Like Shelley, he drowned at the age of 29.
Perhaps, in returning to this story, I resemble those "others" in The Prelude, who "hung o'er the deep/ Sounding with grappling-irons and long poles," until
At length, the dead man, 'mid that beauteous scene
Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright
Rose with his ghastly face... (5.470-77)
After all, as Geoffrey Hartman has said, "Whenever we read, we
are in danger of waking the dead," or of reencountering the
trauma that produced the work of literature. Yet in such
encounters, we may find solace, as Wordsworth does in remembering
the Drowned Man of Esthewaite. Weiskel himself writes that
Wordsworthian "spots of time were in their origin 'tragic facts',
for which time has provided a kind of redemption, permitting
their association with 'Far other feelings.'"(176)
Twenty years have passed since that afternoon, when, snatched from all effectual aid, Weiskel and his daughter perished, each alone. Weiskel's book, The Romantic Sublime, prepared for publication by Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman, begins with a moving foreword written by his widow Portia, a moving "forward" which in fact discourages doing so, for it paralyzes the reader with emotions and concerns even larger than those taken up by the encompassing topic of Weiskel's book. She writes that, "Tom in his death, following by seconds his daughter's, sudden, unfathomable, and tragic, knew in an instant both the sublime and the terror of the nature he wrote about"(x). Full fathom five thy father lies; and Weiskel's death, as we encounter it, has become something rich and strange. Indeed, it approaches the status of Romantic myth.
Curiously enough, the deadline for submissions to this "Wake of Romanticism" conference marked the 20th anniversary of Weiskel's death; and I mean to consider the submission to a lineage of the dead incumbent upon scholars of Romanticism working in Weiskel's wake. Around the Wordsworthian and Coleridgean center of Romantic studies lies a circle of responses to the works of dead young men: Chatterton, Kirke White, Keats, Shelley, Byron. To be chosen by death in the dawning of one's powers signifies imaginative election. Indeed, Milton knew of death's propensity to claim youthful genius. He mourns "young Lycidas," "dead ere his prime," who "hath not left his peer," and grimly recognizes that
...the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out in sudden blaze,
Comes the Blind Fury with the abhorred shears,
And slits the thin spun life.
Yet Lycidas becomes, "the genius of the shore,/...To all that
wander in that perilous flood," a guiding spirit who "sunk low,
but mounted high."
When the remorseless deep closed o'er the head of Thomas Weiskel, he had completed the manuscript that was to become The Romantic Sublime, which A.Dwight Culler predicted would be "one of the finest books ever to come from the Yale English Department." Harold Bloom wrote that he was "immensely moved" by Weiskel's study, and placed Weiskel in the tradition of the Greek critic Longinus, whose Peri Hypsous became one of the founding treatises of sublime theory. In such critical evaluations, and in others even more explicit, we feel the informing work of grief. Frances Ferguson, for example, would write in a review of The Romantic Sublime, "one can only feel regret that [Weiskel's] death at the age of twenty-nine has silenced so vigorous a mind and personality."(237)
"To be Romantic," Jerome McGann has remarked, "is to exist under the sign of longing." The early deaths of so many writers in the Romantic tradition -- Weiskel among them -- both immortalized their youthful longings and left those who came after to muse longingly on the promising careers cut short. Not only that; we come to their corpses, their bodies of work, as belated mourners, visiting their graves in the tracks of others, asserting our own lamentations amidst a throng of echoes, attempting eulogy over long-settled handfuls of dust. Faced with the more than twenty years that separate the hour of Weiskel's death from this one, I can only recognize that my grief over Weiskel and his daughter Shelburne is hopelessly belated and inevitably useless. It therefore mirrors my imaginative responses to the literature and biography of the Romantic period.
As graduate students of Romanticism, as young men and women in the generation after Weiskel, we find ourselves both mournful and belated, torn between our deep emotional responses to the lives and works of these dead authors of our approximate age, and our sense that our own professional survival requires not only their death but their dismissal, so that we now have a conference whose title implies, a bit hopefully, that Romanticism has passed and we are left to cry at its funeral or laugh at its wake. Indeed, we write in a tradition of scholarship whose hand is ever at its lips, bidding adieu to the Romantic ideology whose margin fades forever and forever when we move.
Most notably in our recent critical horizon, Jerome McGann's The Romantic Ideology (1983) called for an end to modes of interpretation bound up in Romanticism's self-representations. He writes, "To generate a polemic for Romantic poetry on its own ideological terms at this point in time is to vitiate criticism and to court mere intellectual sentiment"(37). McGann's tireless powers of resistance to Romanticism's beguiling arts produce stunningly valuable criticism. Yet, as for all Romantics before him, McGann's eminently embattled stance is grounded in prophetic agon, partaking of the imaginative mode of Wordsworth's "Intimations" Ode and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Ultimately, their quests for interpretive priority amount to the removal of a film of familiarity from our perceptions, an imaginative refusal to capitulate to outward forms and the passive tyranny of the eye. The importance of McGann's The Romantic Ideology, like the importance of Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime, rests on the author's own internalization of the quest- myth, the mental fight that is the Romantic project.
Yet while critics such as McGann, Bloom, and Hartman wrestled with the angel of Romantic ideology and received their respective blessings, Weiskel perished in medias res, leaving fragments. And while we may work to situate ourselves within the powerful critical lines established by those former critics, we can look to Weiskel only in submission to a lineage of the dead. He becomes an absent critical father, a lost leader. Confronted with a struggle that the case of Weiskel and The Romantic Sublime throws into relief, the graduate student specializing in Romanticism must answer a difficult question: what critical rhythm can be appropriate after the caesura of Weiskel's death? Can we envision a criticism that synthesizes the hermeneutic urge and the work of mourning?
It is perhaps no longer fashionable to be emotionally affected by literature, yet presumably we all are here because some book somewhere moved us in a way we had not expected, and found nowhere else but in another book. Here and now, in the wake of the theoretical meltdown of the past few decades, we may rediscover that response and combine it profitably with subtle and cogent reading, developing an approach to literature that is, like the one Weiskel attempts in The Romantic Sublime, both emotionally honest and intellectually sophisticated. At the convergence of these opposites lies the Longinian sublime: passionate utterance that is at once spontaneous and calculated, a synthesis of emotional inspiration and rhetorical technique.
Weiskel attempts this type of utterance and becomes, like Longinus, the great sublime he draws. Such is his legacy in Romantic studies: he calls us toward a critical language inflected by subject and self -- a criticism in which body is not bruised to pleasure soul, in which we often cannot know the dancer from the dance. Those of us who chose to claim this legacy look at Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime in the same way that Wordsworth looks at Peele Castle, remembering one who drowned with the thought that, although "the feeling of [our] loss will ne'er be old," it is "Not without hope that we suffer and we mourn."
copyright 1997 Andrew M. Stauffer
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