Preview: A New Lyrical Ballads, At-Bristol

The centrepiece of the Festival of Ideas’ Romantic Poets and Bristol season is this unprecedented gathering of poets at At-Bristol on Friday, March 6.

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798) may not bear the most earth-shattering title – but its contents changed the course of English poetry. This collection is viewed as the point where the still influential English Romantic artistic and aesthetic movement began.

Romanticism was a revolutionary reaction against the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment, the prosaic, monolithic progress of the Industrial Revolution and the scientific approach to nature that accompanied both.

Perhaps the best definition of Romanticism comes from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin: “a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.”

The first edition of the Lyrical Ballads was published right here in Bristol – and Wordsworth and Coleridge, along with Coleridge’s great friend Robert Southey, were closely linked to and influenced by the city. Coleridge even launched his magazine The Watchman in the Rummer pub in St Nick’s Market in 1795. So what better place for a celebration of the lyrical ballad than the city that can be considered their birthplace?

The Festival of Ideas commissioned 23 leading British poets to write a new poem embodying the spirit of Romanticism. And this FoE event sees 21 of them reading these new and unread and unheard poems. Likely to be the largest gathering of contemporary poets reading new work in the UK to date, the event is a must-see for anyone who appreciates poetry.

The list of poets reading their work is virtually a roll call of current poets at the height of their power. In alphabetical order: Fleur Adcock, Patience Agbabi, Rachael Boast, John Burnside, Gillian Clarke, Paul Farley, Isabel Galleymore, Jen Hadfield, David Harsent, Kathleen Jamie, Nick Laird, Liz Lochhead, Jamie McKendrick, Ian MacMillan, Andrew Motion, Sean O’Brien, Alice Oswald, Ruth Padel, Don Paterson, Jean Sprackland, Greta Stoddart, Michael Symmons Roberts and Adam Thorpe. Kathleen Jamie and Jen Hadfield will be sending filmed contributions.

Poetry and its poetry are highly personal matters and picking potential highlights is a literary minefield – but Agbabi, Burnside and Padel immediately spring to mind as poets to recommend.

Patience Agbabi may seem an unusual choice for an event celebrating what is now seen as a traditional poetic style: her work is uncompromising and frequently concerned with identity, be it sexual, gender or racial. However, Agbabi often uses ‘traditional’ poetic forms, thus intensifying the subject matter when she performs as the mix of form and content is not what audiences might expect.

Scot John Burnside is a winner of the prestigious TS Eliot Prize (2012) and an acclaimed novelist as well as a poet. His poetry is lyrical, visceral and permeated by his obvious love of and respect for the natural world – yet there are frequently shadowy ghosts, lives unlived and even angels present in his work. His reading has been described as understated, forcing audiences to listen and to think about what his poems are saying.

Ruth Padel will be discussing the role of nature in art and literature the following day at the Watershed. Known for her writing and broadcasting on nature, music and books, Padel is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Poetry Fellow at King’s College London. She has published ten acclaimed collections of her poems – and her reading style has been described by Jeanette Winterson as “sexy, strong, rhythmic, passionate, fully alive.”

A New Lyrical Ballads Friday, March 6, At-Bristol, 7pm. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.ideasfestival.co.uk/events/new-lyrical-ballads-contemporary-poets-romanticism

Pictured: Patience Agbabi (credit Lyndon Douglas), John Burnside (credit Helmut Fricke) and Ruth Padel.