Tag Archives: 18th-Century Poetry

The Collected Poems of Gavin Turnbull Online
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Dear Sir, if my unnotic’d name,

Not yet proclaim’d by trump of fame,

Has reach’d your lugs, then swith attend, 

This essay of a Bard unkend.

–Turnbull, “Epistle to a Black-smith” (1788)

The Scottish poet Gavin Turnbull (1765-1816), a younger contemporary of Robert Burns, published two books of poetry in Scotland before emigrating to America in 1795, where he contributed poetry to South Carolina newspapers.  The Collected Poems of Gavin Turnbull presents the first-ever full collection of Turnbull’s writings.

Turnbull, born in the Scottish Borders, started writing poetry as a teenage carpet-weaver in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, in the 1780s.  He published his first book, Poetical Essays, in 1788, followed by Poems in 1794, when he was an actor with a theatre company in Dumfries.  In 1795, he emigrated to the United States, settling in Charleston, South Carolina, where he continued to act and write poetry, publishing not only in Charleston but also in the prestigious Philadelphia magazine Port Folio.  He became a U.S. citizen in 1813 and died in Charleston in 1816.  While he twice issued proposals for a new collection of his writings, and a further invitation to subscribers was published after his death, no collection ever appeared.  Only a handful of his earlier poems have been available in anthologies or online, and his Charleston poems have never previously been collected.

turnbullbannerThe Collected Poems of Gavin Turnbull contains 89 individual poems and songs, organized according to the date of their first publication.  The poems are grouped into one of four sections, following the sequence of the books, manuscript, or periodicals in which they are first found.  Turnbull’s two prose prefaces to the poetry (1788, 1794) and his short play The Recruit (also 1794) are included, but placed last, after the poems, as appendices.  A list of the individual poems and songs in each section and links to the texts are available in the gray drop-down menu on the left-hand side of the screen.  With the few exceptions noted below, this edition only includes each poem once, under the date of its first appearance, and poems that Turnbull subsequently reprinted are not repeated in the later section(s).

This edition aims to reproduce Turnbull’s texts as they were encountered by their first readers.  The text used is therefore taken from the first published version, and where a poem was printed two or more times, the earliest text is used, though any substantive differences between early and later texts are fully noted.  The one exception to this general policy is for Turnbull’s poem “The Cottage,” first published in 1788 with four stanzas, for which the edition uses Turnbull’s expanded version with a fifth, more political stanza, from the 1794 collection, also subsequently reprinted in a Charleston newspaper.

The first section contains 50 poems and songs, all probably written while he was still living in Kilmarnock, and published in Turnbull’s first book, Poetical Essays (1788), published by subscription and appearing with the imprint of a Glasgow bookseller.  The next short section prints three of Turnbull’s songs which Robert Burns forwarded in a manuscript letter by Robert Burns to George Thomson (October 29, 1793) for possible inclusion in Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scottish Songs.  The second major section contains the twelve poems or songs that were first published in Turnbull’s second volume, Poems, printed in Dumfries in 1794.  As noted above, Turnbull’s play, The Recruit, which had been included in the 1794 volume, is placed separately with the “Appendices.”

After he emigrated to Charleston, South Carolina, Turnbull’s contributions to local newspapers included reprinting some earlier poems, as well as newly-written items.  The third major section of the edition contains twenty-five poems, ranging in date from 1796 to 1809.  Of the twenty-five, twenty-one are items that Turnbull had never previously published; the four reprinted items are the four songs that Turnbull himself extracted from his play The Recruit for separate newspaper publication, and which are therefore given similar separate status here.  Though he also wrote an ode to General Washington, both in the theatre, where he appeared in such Scottish plays as Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd and Home’s Douglas, and in the poetry he published, Turnbull continued after emigration to identify himself as a Scot.

chfergussonmar2196The online edition of The Collected Poems of Gavin Turnbull allows for fuller annotation than will be provided in the planned print edition, especially in glossing words that might cause difficulties for students outside of Scotland, as well as linking to related material, such as contemporary images and music, where Turnbull often specifies the tune to which he has written new song-text.  The first note on each text records its publication history, both first publication and any reprinting in Turnbull’s lifetime.  The first note may also contain general background information relevant to the poem.  Subsequent notes linked to specific lines gloss difficult or distinctive words, suggest literary sources or allusions, and provide historical or background information.  Turnbull’s own footnotes to some of the poems, in Poetical Essays (1788) and Poems (1794), have been included but are placed in square brackets, and introduced as “GT’s note,” to differentiate them from the editors’ notes.  The annotations are numbered sequentially rather than by line number and can be accessed in one of two ways.  The user can move the cursor over a superscript number in the body of the text, so that a dialogue box will appear with the annotation alongside the line it is explaining, or the user can scroll down the poem and find the relevant numbered annotation where the notes are grouped together in sequence at the end of the text.

turnbulscreen2The texts and annotation are supplemented by Patrick Scott’s introductory essay on Turnbull’s life and writings and by a reference bibliography.  All text files have been marked-up and prepared in accordance with TEI P5 guidelines—the standard XML language in the humanities—to allow for greater interoperability, both in this edition and future projects.  Work on the edition was supported by an ASPIRE grant from the Vice-President for Research, University of South Carolina.  The online edition is complete in itself, but Patrick Scott’s selection, A Bard Unkend:  Selected Poems in the Scottish Dialect by Gavin Turnbull (Scottish Poetry Reprints no. 10, 2015), is also available, as a print-on-demand paperback and on-line, and a parallel print edition is under consideration.

Engaging Students in The Digital Eighteenth Century
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In fall 2014, Dermot Ryan—an associate professor in the Department of English at Loyola Marymount University—and Melanie Hubbard—the university’s digital scholarship librarian—designed and taught The Digital Eighteenth Century, a class which culminated in the creation of a digital space that showcases the digital projects students completed over the course of the semester.  You can find a video introduction to our class and the various student digital projects at dh@lmu.

Our concept for the class was simple:  students would better grasp the literature and culture of the eighteenth century by drawing connections between the eighteenth-century print revolution and aspects of the current digital communications revolution.  The incorporation of digital tools and assignments was intended to illustrate and provide hands-on experience with this technological shift as well as give students a new way into the study and presentation of eighteenth-century cultural materials.

The assignments were fairly basic.  Students used the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database not simply to locate specific texts but rather to answer basic research questions.  How many titles containing the adjective “lyrical” appear before the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads?  Can we trace any other literature on children chimney sweepers before William Blake’s poem on the subject?  Can we locate sources for the figure of the hermit in Charlotte Smith’s poem Beachy Head?  Students used TimeMapper to track the development of eighteenth-century literary or cultural events across space as well as time (see example).  Poetry Genius, an online annotation tool, was used to become more familiar with eighteenth-century poetry (see example).  Students brought eighteenth-century visual and literary culture together by creating digital essays in Tumblr (see example).  Because their work would be public, students were required to keep their audience in mind and ask themselves the following types of questions:  What helps me understand the literature and cultural artifacts that we are studying in this class?  How do I present these materials in a manner that a broader audience would find accessible and compelling?

The students’ projects are now part of dh@lmu, a site that Melanie created to be a hub for LMU’s current and future DH projects.  In a sense, The Digital Eighteenth Century was our practical response to a series of interrelated challenges that many of our colleagues face:  How do you foster digital humanities at a university that is largely focused on undergraduate education and has many of the trademarks of a liberal arts college?  How do you get from zero with little or no resources and a minimum of institutional support?  How do you do that when you yourself have had little or no institutional exposure to professional training in the tools, practices, and methods of DH?

We discussed our experience of designing and teaching this course at the 2014 Digital Scholarship Colloquium organized by the Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship at Case Western Reserve University’s Kelvin Smith Library.  Our presentation entitled “The Promise of Digital (Undergraduate) Research:  A Perspective from a Liberal Arts College” is available for viewing.  In this presentation we explain that our discussions about DH began with our desire to engage more humanities students in undergraduate research (UR).  We speculated that DH could help us overcome some of the difficulties with sustaining UR culture in the humanities.  Such difficulties include:

  • Research in the humanities tends to be non-collaborative.
  • UR in the humanities has traditionally involved student-led initiatives with students working on topics related only tangentially to a faculty member’s own research.
  • Research in the humanities cannot be easily “segmented” into manageable units for undergraduate researchers.
  • There is a high threshold to entry into humanities research.
  • There is no incentive:  in universities that do not have large Ph.D. or postdoctoral programs, the sciences “need” undergraduates to conduct research; conversely, UR potentially distracts humanist scholars from their research.

Ways in which we feel DH can potentially address these challenges include:

  • DH can challenge the canard that research in the humanities is inherently non-collaborative.
  • Research projects in DH can be parsed into manageable units.
  • DH can allow us to generate online research projects that allow for ongoing student/faculty collaboration while contributing to faculty scholarship, rather than diverting attention from faculty research.

The eighteenth century is a particularly rich time period for these kinds of faculty and student collaborations not only because eighteenth-century print culture with its focus on social networking and media storms bears some striking resemblances to our particular moment but also because there are a number of rich online eighteenth-century resources, like ECCO, on which our students can draw.

Sheffield: Print, Protest and Poetry, 1790-1810

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SheffieldSheffield:  Print, Protest and Poetry, 1790-1810 is an ever-growing digital anthology of protest poetry printed in Sheffield’s radical press at the end of the eighteenth century.

Directed by Dr. Hamish Mathison and researched by Dr. Adam James Smith, the anthology was born of an AHRC-funded cultural engagement project focusing on the full collections of The Sheffield Register (1787-1794) and The Sheffield Iris (1794-1825), newspapers held in University Library Special Collections.  The Register was edited by Joseph Gales, the Iris by Sheffield’s legendary poet and prolific champion of cause, James Montgomery.

Writing under the close scrutiny of suspicious local authorities both the Register and the Iris presented their most controversial material in a section referred to affectionately by readers as “Poetry Corner.”  This section saw the publication of a different poem each week (either written by a Sheffield resident or aggregated from elsewhere) but usually addressed to one of a series of recurrent themes:  religious integration, racial equality, worker’s rights, universal access to education, and political enfranchisement for all.

An overarching concern was that if the government could not legally be criticized, then there remained no safe-guard against tyranny.  As one reader’s poem warned in April 1793, this seemed to be increasingly the case:

We may speak (it is true) if we mind what we say;

But to speak all we think, will not suit in our day.

These lines proved prophetic, with the Register coming to an abrupt close a few months later.  Charged with “conspiracy against the government,” Gales was forced to abandon the paper to start a new life in America as a fugitive.

The Sheffield: Print, Protest Poetry, 1790-1810 project has been releasing a different poem every week, and online readers have been surprised and excited by how prescient they have proved.  One poem titled “On the Effects of Gold” warned that political reform was never likely whilst politicians were more interested in lining their own pockets.  This poem was made live on the Sheffield: Print, Protest Poetry, 1790-1810 website the day before the Panama Papers story broke.

The first installment of the anthology focuses on poems printed between 1794 and 1796, marking the transition from the Register to the Iris.  This transition was brought about when the editor of the Register was charged with conspiracy against the government and forced to flee to America.  There will also be a printed anthology titled Poetry, Conspiracy, Radical in Sheffield (Spirit Duplicator, 2016), and new recordings of some of these poems have already been released on Soundcloud.  We also have a Podcast, which seeks to situate these poems in broader national contexts.  You can follow Sheffield: Print, Protest and Poetry, 1790-1810 on Facebook and Twitter.

The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive

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Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive

The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA) is a digital project in support of the teaching, study, and research of the poetry of the long eighteenth century.  It comprises a full-text collection of richly-encoded digital texts and a research project that aims to integrate texts and (digital) scholarship into a curated research collection.  ECPA is based on the principle of user participation, the corpus is edited and annotated collaboratively, and will grow and evolve with the requirements and interests of its users.

ECPA was originally intended as a way of providing literary and historical context for its sister project, the Thomas Gray Archive, covering the lives and works of contemporaries of Gray’s such as William Collins, Mark Akenside, Joseph and Thomas Warton, Christopher Smart, and James Thomson.  As the project evolved and widened in scope, its initial contextual focus shifted to an analytical one.

ECPA builds on the texts created by the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) from Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).  The transcription and encoding has been enriched with additional descriptive (e.g., author attributions on poem level) and analytical markup (e.g., recording verse, stanza, and poem form, assigning of themes and genres, assigning rhyme scheme, assigning metrical pattern, recording of syllable pattern, addition of explanatory/editorial annotations) in support of a computationally assisted close reading process.

As readers engage with texts in different ways and with different objectives, we have modeled these different types of user engagement into distinctive “views” of the text.  So far, we have focused on views that support a first reading of a text (“reading” view) and the initial analysis of a text (“analysis” view) in the form of a close reading.  Over time, the ECPA research project will enable new modes of engagement and allow for increasingly sophisticated ways of interacting with the texts.

ECPA is currently available in public beta and is in active development.  Current developments are concerned with increasing the number of poets and poems represented, and exploring the possibility of including other European languages.  We welcome any feedback about issues, feature requests, or general feedback about the content, functionalities, or design of the Website.  Please e-mail <[email protected]>.

Digital Archives and Pacific Cultures

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Faculty and students at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg are working on a long-range digital project (Digital Archives and Pacific Cultures) to code and analyze the voyage narratives of eighteenth-century European expeditions to the Pacific, together with the English poetry and print media that responded to the published accounts of Pacific voyages.  We are attempting to study the cross-cultural significance of European voyages in the Pacific and cultural contact experiences in Oceania and Australia, using digital coding and “text-mining” to collect information from very long voyage records in systematic ways through computational methods.

One phase of our work involves preparing digital editions of Pacific voyage publications by Hawkesworth, Cook, and the Forsters in TEI XML (the language of the Text Encoding Initiative) to meet a world standard for accessible and consistently encoded digital texts.  (For more on the Text Encoding Initiative, please see http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml).  Some of the voyage accounts we have prepared for the site have not been freely available online in any searchable form before.  Some are available in proprietary or public databases but have not, to this point, been united in one place.  In addition to preparing editions, we have collected the geographic coordinates recorded in these publications using regular expression matching and autotagging, in order to generate Google Earth & Map views of the voyages.  Our Google Earth projections of Wallis’s and Cook’s voyages offer a clickable interface, so that selecting a compass rose point along the voyage brings up a paragraph or block of text from a voyage record describing events recorded in connection with this place.  Here is an example.

We have also been preparing TEI XML editions of poems, plays, and excerpts from literary and philosophical texts that respond in some way to the Pacific voyage publications.

These texts were located by searching the ECCO and ECCO TCP databases, and we will be adding more material from these resources and the Burney Collection.  Our students have been preparing and marking these files to code specific kinds of cultural interactions so that we can study how English texts represented Pacific encounters and identify the types of interactions which seem to have caught the interest of Atlantic-bound media.  We’ve also provided an interactive clickable interface to “color-code” the poems, highlighting names of people and places as well as the cultural markup our students have applied:  See our edition of Anna Seward’s “Elegy on Captain Cook” (1780).  Please see also our edition of Gerald Fitzgerald’s “The Injured Islanders” (1779), produced just before the news of Cook’s death became known in England.  We offer Fitzgerald’s poem as a significant contrast to the cultural representations in Seward’s work.

The project began and is developing at the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg campus, but the site’s initial development joined a team of faculty and undergraduate students at the Pittsburgh and Greensburg campuses.  As the project continues to develop, it combines classroom teaching of digital humanities research methods together with new research to build a publicly accessible resource.  Our texts and markup and our data visualization experiments are very much a work in progress and are freely available to the public for reading or to download as the basis of new digital projects under a Creative Commons license.  Our site will continue to expand over the next few years as we experiment with topic modelling the Pacific voyage texts and as we develop new maps, search tools, and network graphics, working with new groups of students.

 

Poetry with a Different Purpose: Resurrecting Britain’s Bard

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In September 1792, on the day of the autumnal equinox, a Welshman named Iolo Morganwg met friends on Primrose Hill near what is now Regent’s Park in London.  There, they made a circle out of stones.  The largest stone was fashioned into an altar.  On this altar was placed an unsheathed sword.  Standing on these stones and dressed in wildly colored robes, the company recited Welsh history and poetry.

They were pretending to be ancient Welsh bards.

A meeting of bardic performers (called gorsedd) from Britanny in 1906. This Breton meeting provides a modern example of earlier Welsh models of the festival.

A meeting of bardic performers (called
gorsedd) from Britanny in 1906. This Breton meeting provides a modern example of earlier Welsh models of the festival.

The meeting might sound like a pagan ritual or a group of overzealous Lord of the Rings enthusiasts, but this performance was serious business.  The goal was to revive the customs of an almost forgotten Wales.  Morganwg, the organizer, called these performances gorsedd, which he translated as “voice convention.”  He imagined these meetings as communal poetic voices reasserting a unique Welsh culture, different from that of England or Scotland.  Morganwg kept these performances going for decades, and elements of these early meetings made their way into the Welsh National Eisteddfod, an annual poetry and folk singing festival that still goes on today.

I came across Morganwg and his merry band of guerilla poets while researching Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730-1820.  I wanted to offer an unorthodox history of English poetry that looks at the other side of the eighteenth century’s reputation for polite, dainty verse.  Instead, I sought out the century’s wild and bellicose figures, the majority of whom are now forgotten.

Many of them were like Morganwg, who fashioned himself into a national poet.  He wanted to write and perform poetry that was like heroic medieval epics.  This meant recreating ancient ceremonies, such as the one on Primrose Hill, but also composing poems that established intimate connections with readers that many worried had become distant because of mass-market publications.  For him, to be a bard meant to sing “native songs” of “Britons bold and free.”

We haven’t paid much attention to these rowdy vocal experiments because we’ve forgotten what poetry used to be like.  In the twenty-first century, we have two attitudes toward poetry, both of which come to us from the 1800s.  Those who adhere to the first attitude perceive poetry to be moody and introspective, written and read by people in touch with their emotions.  For them, poetry is revelatory; it’s something that changes your life.  Think William Wordsworth and Dead Poets Society.

The second attitude sees poetry as the domain of bad boys and rebel artists who fight against social norms and devote their life to art.  They are a version of Lord Byron, the dashing, drunken nineteenth-century poet who (may have) seduced his half-sister, fled Britain in disgrace, traveled through Europe and the Mediterranean, and was said to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

But poetry wasn’t always this way.  Sounding Imperial captures what it was like in the decades before these modern attitudes toward poetry took shape.  The 1700s were a time when no one cared about how poets felt.  Poetry was supposed to be about politics, nation, empire, and history, not something as small and mundane as personal feelings.

That’s why my book moves from England to Wales to Scotland and India, seeking out authors who were culture warriors, nationalists, radicals and revolutionaries, and avid colonialists as well.  Their enthusiasm was electric, and their sense of poetry’s possibility was enormous.  For these eighteenth-century artists, composing poems meant communing with the dead, making ancient bards speak again, and preserving cultures that were going extinct.  It required gathering in the early morning light to stand on stones and recite poems in Welsh.  No moody introspection for these performers and no self-serving, brooding rebellion.  Instead, for them, poetry makes the nation sing, fulfilling a mission driven by the grand arc of history.

[This piece was originally published by James Mulholland on the Johns Hopkins University Press Blog:  www.jhupressblog.com]

Sounding Imperial