This is a review of Thomas A. Prendergast's book Poetical Dust: Poets\u2019 Corner and the Making of Britai

Petrina, Alessandra

English

This is a review of Thomas A. Prendergast's book Poetical Dust: Poets’ Corner and the Making of Britai

PETRINA, ALESSANDRA

Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Università di Padova

Original Citation:Thomas A. Prendergast, Poetical Dust: Poets’ Corner and the Making of BritainPublisher:Published version:DOI:Terms of use:Open Access(Article begins on next page)This article is made available under terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Guidelines, as described athttp://www.unipd.it/download/file/fid/55401 (Italian only)Availability:This version is available at: 11577/3235868 since: 2017-06-22T18:38:18ZUniversità degli Studi di PadovaPadua Research Archive - Institutional RepositoryThe Medieval Review 17.06.16Prendergast, Thomas A. Poetical Dust: Poets' Corner and the Making ofBritain. Haney Foundation Series . Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2015. pp. xiv, 238. $59.95 (hardback). ISBN:978-0-8122-4750-3 (hardback) 978-0-8122-9190-2 (ebook).Reviewed by:Alessandra PetrinaUniversità degli Studi di Padovaalessandra.petrina@unipd.itThe Medieval Review, 2017 ReviewsAlthough T.S. Eliot, as Prendergast notes, never explicitly mentioned Poets' Corner in hisworks, his desire for "an orderly narrative of literary history" (10), made explicit in his essay"Tradition and the Individual Talent," points at an orderly form of literature, pre-canonizedand pre-digested. It is possible that this same desire was at the back, if not of the earlyinterments of poets in Westminster, of the subsequent re-organizations of the Abbey space toaccommodate this literary pantheon. Oscar Wilde, who for some years was the anonymousauthor of "The Poets' Corner," an anonymous column in The Pall Mall Gazette, suggested thatone should divide the literary canon in two groups, the books one should already have read,and the books one should re-read (the third group included books one should not read at all):in a way he strikes at the very heart of the concept of national canon, indicating that the coreauthors are those that, whether read or not by the individual reader, form the collectiveconsciousness of the nation. Thus late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers andintellectuals superimposed a modern ideology on a medieval artifact, and two separate burials(that of Edward the Confessor, who had been responsible for the construction of the church,in 1066, and that of Geoffrey Chaucer over three centuries later) became the founding stonesof a cultural construction in which literature, politics and religion have a sometimes uneasyshare. Since Westminster Abbey hosts the body of Edward the Confessor, a saint but aboveall a king, it becomes a site of national identity--something analogous to what is described inSt Erkenwald. Of course, a medieval believer would inevitably associate the sacredness of theburied body with the sacredness of the space; it remains to be seen whether this may workalso in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, since the "cult" of Poets' Corner reachedits apogee over the past two centuries. Prendergast is conscious of the fact that"the...attempt to make the Abbey of Westminster a special space that could at once producereverence and money was a bit different from the larger medieval production of sacredspace" (20), yet the clearer demarcation of this difference would be impossible, as shown inthe Coda of the volume by the brief comparison with a space that is less religiously connoted,American Poets' Corner.Edward the Confessor's canonization was, according to Prendergast, manufactured by theEnglish community. The analysis of the canonization, set within the larger context of the cultof relics and (national) saints' bodies in medieval England, is fascinating, as is the wealth ofhistorical details brought to the history of the Abbey in the late fourteenth century, andleading to a hypothesis concerning Chaucer's choice of his burial place. Prendergast makesclear the transition from saint's to king's body, from holiness to a kind of ideologicalsacredness. As Westminster moves more and more from the religious to the secular, itsenshrining a king's (rather than a saint's) body becomes a sort of guarantee of the place as ashrine of the nation. But as the author correctly notes, only in the seventeenth century--afterthe burial of Edmund Spenser and the non-burial of William Shakespeare--did Poet's CornerPetrina https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/rt/printerFriend...1 di 3 21/06/17 08:33acquire the recognizable uniqueness for which it is famous today. In analyzing Spenser's role,Prendergast has some very shrewd intuitions--Spenser's own nostalgia authorizes andjustifies the concept of a Poet's corner, but at the same time hits on the controversial centerof the book: "The South Transept becomes a space that (like any cemetery) is driven by loss,but it is also a space that is different insofar as it necromantically repairs this loss with poeticphantasy" (43). Arguably any cemeterial space repairs the loss, though with a symbolic andemotional rather than a poetic phantasy; at the same time, the very idea of a physicalmonument to poetic fame clashes against the oft-repeated Horatian dictum that poetry is itsown monument.The paradox inherent in the construction is expressed, Prendergast argues, in the verystructure of Poets' Corner, what he calls its "rational illegibility" (11), and in the incorporationof Poets' Corner in a medieval space like Westminster Abbey. The author seems lessinterested in another paradox, created by the Protestant reaction to a sacred space hostingthe relics of saints and writers. Rather, the structure of the space thus adapted to Poets'Corner appears to fascinate him, so that at the end of the volume he provides not only a fullalphabetical list of burials and monuments, but also a chronology of Poets' Corner, and ahighly useful map of the space. This choice mirrors the highly systematic structure of thebook, a structure on which he can build an articulate reading of the development of thisconsecrated space, and of the uses to which it was put, inserting also an analysis of the usesto which poets, critics and playwrights put the trope of funerary monuments and immortalityin order to suit different agendas, as in the case of Ben Jonson (62) and Drayton (63-64), aswell as their Victorian counterparts.Prendergast harks back to his earlier Chaucer's Dead Body. From Corpse to Corpus (2004) bynoting that, when eighteenth century viewers expressed concern at the absence of bodies incorrespondence with some monuments, and vice versa, they were indicating "a discomfortwith the absence of the body that can be traced to a kind of early modern version of themedieval obsession with the relic" (78). In fact it might be argued that the present book is acontinuation of the previous study, only here the clear thesis set out in the 2004 work--themonumentalized poet as a lay version of the monumentalized medieval saint--has to takeinto account also the centuries following the fifteenth. This allows Prendergast to considerindividual striking cases, from Edmund Spenser to John Dryden to Alexander Pope, thusretracing a tentative history of the construction of a literary canon in England. Incidentally,this also allows him to touch on a number of points more or less directly related to themonumentalization of poetry, such as the question of patronage, or the emergence of theconcept of author's copyright.Of course, the risk of this kind of book is to superimpose some kind of order on what is,Prendergast himself admits, "the anecdotally irresistible history of the Abbey" (105). Just asPoet's Corner cannot function as a systematic catalogue of canonical writers, so this bookcannot attempt a unified reading of its cultural significance. It goes to Prendergast's creditthat he is aware throughout of the dangers of his enterprise. By choosing a chronologicalpath, he can point out absences and lapses (notably in the nineteenth century) that mark theencounters and clashes of literature and politics, as in the case of Byron, buried at Newsteadgiven the unspoken assumption that his body would not have been received at the Abbey.Thanks to his historically-based approach Prendergast can engage in a dialogue with hissources (of which there are many) and thus highlight the contradictions inherent in a processof monumentalization of the nation's literary heritage, from the quasi-absence of womenwriters to the contrast between the desire to memorialize each English poet and the paradoxinherent in the absence of some of these poets' bodies, which contradicted the "seeminglyorganic or naturalistic idea of Poets' Corner" (116) evoking instead, in the words of itsPetrina https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/rt/printerFriend...2 di 3 21/06/17 08:33nineteenth-century critics, "a kind of registration office," as William Morris noted (117). Asurprisingly apt conclusion to the story of Poets' Corner, and to Prendergast's book, isprovided by the last burial: the funeral service (and subsequent interment of the ashes) ofLaurence Olivier provides, as Prendergast notes, a satisfactory avatar for the absentShakespeare, but at the same time reinforces the ambiguity in the perception of thepossibility of a physical embodiment of poetry.It would perhaps have been useful to set this analysis in a more wide-ranging comparativecontext: apart from a brief allusion to Ludwig's Walhalla (sometimes spelt Valhalla here, witha conscious allusion to the sacred space of Norse mythology) and from a flitting allusion tothe Italian Campo Santo (presumably a reference to the Camposanto Vecchio in Pisa), thedevising and development of Poet's corner is seen in isolation, which does not help us tounderstand its meaning or import; a comparison, for instance, with the Pantheons in Romeand Paris (or the planned Pantheon in Moscow) might have given a clearer sense of thechange of perspective between the late Middle Ages and the late modernity in the Europeanconsciousness of its cultural past, while a reference to Ugo Foscolo's poem Dei Sepolcri(1806), which devotes a long section to the burial of writers in the Florentinian church ofSanta Croce, would have shown that the emergence of a conscience of its literary past appearto accompany the birth of the idea of nation. Rather, by dedicating the Coda of the volume tothe American Poets' Corner Prendergast reinforces an Anglo-centric perspective that obscuressome of the meaning of the early modern and Victorian reflections on Poets' Corner. Thissensation is reinforced by an obvious unease with Scottish writers, in spite of the "Britain" ofthe title. The effort to read in the detail of such an articulate and time-constructed culturalartifact may also lead the analysis to find meaning in what may be only incidental details.However, these are secondary considerations; this book teases out the finely interwovenstrands of literature, politics and religion with rare ability, offering us a convincing alternativehistory of English poetry and its reception.Petrina https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/rt/printerFriend...3 di 3 21/06/17 08:33

Thomas A. Prendergast, Poetical Dust: Poets’ Corner and the Making of Britain

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Thomas A. Prendergast, Poetical Dust: Poets\u2019 Corner and the Making of Britain

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