Skating among the Romantics

Julius Caesar Ibbetson, Skaters on the Serpentine in Hyde Park (1786)

Jeremy Adler reaches for the sky in a recent essay in the Times Literary Supplement (12/7/18) in portraying the “poetics of skating” and the evolution of this poetics in the 18th and early 19th century. The subject is the "lyric fervor" produced by the sport, as portrayed in an episode in The Prelude (see lines 426–464 of Book 1) by Wordsworth: “The track across the surface evokes the course of the planets. The speed with which the poet flies over the frozen lake recalls the distant orbs circling through the sky, and the reflection on the surface, when the skater cuts across ‘the reflex of a star,’ evokes the universal analogy — the poet takes his place in the heavens like one of the Pleiades.” It was “the sport par excellence for the nascent capitalist era … made possible by the action of technology — polished steel — on nature, but went on to be “adapted to the pre-Romantic fashion for the sublime.” Naturally, Burke, Schiller, and Kant, all of whom addressed the subject of the sublime, make an appearance.

Only a few aspects of this wide-ranging essay can be touched on here, which concerns the development of European Romanticism, with the focus being the configuration of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the German poet Friedrich Klopstock (1724–1803). Wordsworth’s imagery in the episode of The Prelude, writes Adler, constitutes “a homage to a brother poet, one of Germany’s finest, … who first made skating a metaphor for poetic composition, the thrill of an imagination set free from terrestrial care.” As Adler points out, Klopstock’s odes were greatly popular in Germany, with “Der Eislauf” (Skating) of 1764 being “among the most celebrated.” Consisting of 15 unrhymed quatrains, it is “remarkable for condensing a systematic appraisal of the sport into a perfectly judged lyric, including images of great natural beauty.”

Peter Brueghel, Hunters in the Snow (1565, detail)

As Adler notes, it was these unrhymed quatrains, along with Klopstock's evocation of nature and the poetic subjectivity, that liberated the Sturm und Drang generation of German poets. The free verse in particular was felt to be quite radical, to which Goethe (1749–1832) offers testimony in his autobiography. His father, Goethe writes, was a man for whom poetry had to be rhymed and was thus quite disturbed at the fashion for Klopstock’s Messias, especially when “verses that seemed to be no verses became the object of public veneration.” The paternal library held fine calfskin editions of Hagedorn, Gellert, Haller, and so forth, but no Klopstock. A volume of the Messias having been smuggled into the house by a friend, Goethe and his sister read it in secret. One Saturday evening, however, as their father was being shaved in preparation for church the next morning, Goethe and his sister got so carried away in their recitation of the scene between Adramelech and Satan that their voices startled the barber. The upshot was that Goethe’s father’s chest was drenched by water from the shaving basin. This image might be said to encapsulate the effect that Klopstock had on the generation of writers represented by Goethe .

Ice Skating in Nurenberg

So it was that, in 1798, even though Goethe was at the height of his renown in that year, it was the aged Klopstock whom “the youthful tyros” — Wordsworth and Coleridge —  visited on their tour of Germany.  Adler calls it “the seminal occurrence in the birth of European Romanticism.” Indeed, “the whole episode bears Klopstock’s hallmark,” provoking the emergence of Wordsworth’s genius. Noting that Wordsworth soon wrote the first “Lucy" poems that were so central to his work, Adler speculates that Lucy likely recalls  Klopstock’s “girl” Fanny or even his first wife Cidli.

Henry Raeburn, "The Skating Minister" (ca. 1790)

Although Coleridge in particular came away disappointed by the visit with Klopstock, and although skating appears not to have been on the agenda of the meeting,  Adler notes that “the first draft of the skating episode in The Prelude is recorded just three months after the visit to Germany. Even though Wordsworth had seen skating in the Harz town of Ratzeburg, it was probably the “literary fashion initiated by his idol that provided the context. His early draft for The Prelude includes Klopstock’s every mark: landscape, rocky surrounds, moonlight, exercise, the contrast of sociability and solitude, the sounds of the skates, the resounding gorge, and the sublime, culminating in the mirroring of the Heavens on earth — ‘to cut across the shadow [later, reflex] of a star.'” Adler believes the “first hint” of the idea is to be found in Klopstock’s “Skating” with its “shining frost, like the stars.”

The essay is packed with a lot of back story, including some history of poetic representation of skating. The first lyrical evocation of skating appears in Gerusalemme liberata (1581) by Tasso, where village girls are depicted gliding on the frozen Rhine, but, as Adler writes, the true fashion for skating among poets emerged only in the 18th century, with James Thompson (he of The Seasons, 1726) producing “the first really glamorous account.” The earliest manual devoted to the sport was published in 1772 by Robert Jones: A Treatise on Skating, founded on Certain Principles …

Naturally, Goethe’s meeting with Klopstock in 1774 is recalled, another “epochal” get-together. Adler quotes from the passage in Goethe’s autobiography in which Klopstock gave the younger poet instruction in varieties of skates, recommending “the flat-ground variety of Frisian steel, as these were the most serviceable for fast skating.” I was interested to learn that even Schiller devoted a poem to to skating, infused with Schiller’s own sense of the sublimity of terror. The evidence of the elegy “Winter Pleasures,” written by Klopstock at the age of 73, indicates that skating, either the sport or its poetical suggestiveness, was a life-long passion.  Skating as poetic subject, as we learn, is an enduring one, including, for instance, John Ashberry’s well-known poem “The Skaters.”

I was interested to see Adler's reference to another meeting among poets that took place a year after that  of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Klopstock. Adler terms it “the foundational moment of German Romanticism.” This was in November 1799, when a younger generation of German poets — Tieck, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, and Novalis — spent a few days together in Jena, along with Dorothea Veit and Caroline Schlegel (later to become Caroline Schelling). It so happened that both Schiller and Goethe were also in Jena at the same time. According to Nicholas Boyle in his Goethe biography, on a day after one of the dinners of the Schlegel group, the party went for a walk along the banks of the Saale — even though it was November, it was a warm day — and encountered Goethe, “who conversed amiably with them all, particularly Dorothea, whom he had not previously known.” It was at one of these dinners, again according to Boyle, that Novalis read aloud his controversial essay Christendom or Europe. All of these younger poets also wrote poems on the subject of skating. On this note, the essay concludes, with Adler suggesting that “skating was a foundational theme in the Romantic project,” linking a series of local efforts into what was in truth “a single, joint, and international enterprise.”
Image credit: Artsy.Net; Skate-Guard; National Gallery of Scotland;