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