Hair-raising Autographs

On the night of Hollywood’s star-studded (whatever that means) Oscars ceremony, it seems an apt time to look into the mad world of the Romantic poets, their literary legacies, and their hair-raising (you’ll see) concepts of autographs.

The pictures above are taken from a collection in Oxford’s Bodleian Library – and yes they’re just your standard real locks of human hair. But these are not just any locks – oh no – these luscious strands belong to those wise scalps of the great Romantic writers –  Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.

But why would anyone want this? – I hear you ask.

This creepy gifting began with the Romantics themselves, and most notably with Lord Byron – an infamous womaniser – who would cut off small parts of his hair and send it to his various love interests and obsessed fans. Even more strangely, this became a reciprocal process with which ladies would respond with their own contributions. Yet this practice reached its unnerving zenith when a Spanish lady gifted THREE FEET of her hair to her beau…let’s hope he appreciated that wonderful ‘gift’.

Following this it all came down to the demands of Shelley and Byron’s descendants. The Victorians were renowned for memorialising their loved ones, often preserving the short locks of hair of deceased family members or lovers. These snippets of hair were carefully cultivated and sometimes even made into jewellery – lockets, bracelets etc. – for day-to-day wear…erm romantic.

With high infant mortality rates, taxidermy thriving, death photography in popular demand, exciting in-home séances used to communicate ‘beyond the veil’, and literature teaming with grief and grievers (see Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H) – the Victorian commercialisation of death was a business that was booming.

This contextual demand for memorial culture makes it easy to see why, for the Victorians, the physical preservation of the previous era’s literary giants would far surpass a written autograph. The lock of hair of Byron or Shelley would be the collector’s ultimate dream.

In fact, such a fetishistic fantasy was the impulse which drove a similar autograph process, one also wrapped up in status and competition – particularly amongst women – and this was of the refinement of commonplace books. Aesthetically, these books appeared most closely related to modern day scrapbooks. The most sought after commonplace books contained autographed verses from favourite poets, tiny portraits, pressed flowers and, of course, locks of lovely hair. These books functioned much like (*and cue a very un-highbrow comparison*) the Pokémon Cards of the Noughties, as content was traded amongst friends, some items were much more valuable than others in terms of their ‘celebrity’ status, and intense envy of friends was never far behind.

One example, from a letter of Miss Emily Eden to Lady Buckinghamshire in 1814, demonstrates this autograph angst perfectly:

“She brought down a great book full of verses and epigrams, that she is collecting all over the world and gathered chiefly at Middleton; she let few of them be read, and screamed and pulled away the book every three minutes in case we should see more than we ought…‘May I copy this? – ‘No; not unless you let me copy that.’ – ‘Very well, but you won’t turn over the page?’ – ‘No’ – ‘Then you must not go further than that line.’ And then the books are all locked up again, for they each have keys and Lady Elizabeth says everybody wore the key of her manuscript book at her side, in case the others should get it by fair means or foul.”

And with all that slightly strange, slightly queasy, glimpse into 19th century concepts of celebrity and autographs, let’s hope Leo will be on the lookout for freaky fans with barbers clippers tonight.

 

Hangovers and Hemingway

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were writers of what Gertrude Stein termed, ‘The Lost Generation’. Theirs was an era of post-war survivors struggling to ascribe value to a world of broken hopes and dreams; a turbulent period of transition and loss in which intoxication came to represent the instability and restlessness of their new existence…

…and if we thought multiple Sambuca shots just to ring in the New Year were enough justification, imagine how smashed these two were getting!

Both authors were notoriously fond of liquor, defying the 1919 Prohibition of alcohol, and partying through the ‘Roaring Twenties’ – so called because of its roaring cars, roaring parties, and even more roaring hangovers. Two of their most well-known works, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s Fiesta:The Sun Also Rises, are grounded on depictions of recklessly hedonistic parties centred around excessive drinking. These are parties which whirl into Gatsby’s early mornings, and blur European borders into Hemingway’s ultimate Spanish Fiesta.

Jazz and drinking are synonymous in Gatsby, with the bar constantly “in full swing” and the excess of music and dancing enhancing the dizzying effect of the party narratives. Just like the novel’s socially inept narrator, Nick Carraway, readers are invited into these parties as outsiders unfamiliar with the multitude of guests who are never invited, but always turn up – and turn up very drunk.

Nick uses alcohol as a crutch when socialising. For him, alcohol erases judgement, awkwardness and the fact that no-one really knows him – “I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table – the only place…a single man could linger without looking purposeless or alone”…

…guess nothing’s changed there then.

Yet, as a narrator, Nick’s perceived alcoholism renders him worryingly unreliable. His drinking obscures truths about others and himself, and his ludicrous self-delusion (that he has been drunk merely ‘twice’ in his life) frames the novel’s central themes of façade and falsehood. Baz Luhrmann’s recent 2013 Gatsby film exaggerates this trait in Nick, depicting his stay in a sanatorium as triggered by his ‘morbid alcoholism’, leading him to pen his Gatsby memoirs as a therapeutic rehabilitation treatment.

But it’s when his hangover truly kicks in that he finally starts to see people for who they truly are. The hungover haze uncovers how toxic his relationships have become and he finally asserts his voice, declaring his friends ‘careless’ and leaving them to their own self-destruction.

With The Sun Also Rises’ narrator, Jake Barnes, he too is a serial drinker and serial escapist. Jake pressures his friends and acquaintances to drink in order to distract from his own drinking habits and face his bitter loneliness. He tactically hangs around with even worse drunks than himself (you know, the ones who don’t even make it past predrinks) in an attempt to appear ‘sober’ in comparison.

Just as Jay Gatsby is focused on temporal and spatial escapism – obscuring the current moment and surroundings, erasing the past (because why would you question the gracious host’s murky past when he’s handing you Highballs?) – Jake too drinks to forget his current life. He drinks to obscure the harsh truth that his love obsession with Brett Ashley will never be physically consummated (largely because of her teasing disinterest in him, but also because of the allusion to a bizarre military accident which left him castrated).

Jake’s hard drinking fuels the perpetual bar crawls that make up The Sun Also Rises (and you can bet that Hemingway did some serious first-hand research for those). As with Nick, Jake uses liquor as a social veil, as a way of concealing his repulsion at the moral degeneracy of his friends: “Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people”. The alcohol successfully constructs illusions of amiability, which only sober eyes can decode. And so when his hangover finally hits, the truth he has been desperately running from will become all the more septic.

(And on that happy note)

now to finish – and to help ease the constant hangover that is January – some wise wise words from Mr Hemingway:

““Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk… That will teach you to keep your mouth shut”.

Content isn’t King!

In 1996, Bill Gates famously declared that ‘Content is King’. And so when you read and study literature you’re largely taught that this is absolutely true of a book too. The words, meanings, metaphors, themes, characters, plotlines are all of paramount importance: content is King (…and Queen).

But what about the physical book itself?

What about all those bits that cuddle the content? What about the illustrations, the binding, the cover, the font type, the publishers, even the types of paper used? (Yes even that!)

The word ‘text’ after all comes from the Latin ‘texere’ (to weave) which suggests a text, and by extension the book, is weaved together, comprised of intertwined elements. Elements which are dependant upon each other for strength and physicality. And so it makes sense to appreciate the material object in your hands.

This shift in focus from the words within, to the elements of books and their production, is known as ‘Bibliography’, and is often realised by well-intentioned but worryingly-geeky bibliophiles (book-lovers)…such as my sad sad self.

As soon as you start to think about it, you begin to realise the epic journey your little paperback has been on for its pages to be lovingly read, contemplated, and hopefully re-read, (or accompany you on holiday only to die a painful glue-drying death by the pool).

By focusing only on content, we risk de-valuing the object we hold in our hands and taking it for granted. As a wise professor recently said:

“Focusing only on the words and ignoring the book as a physical object is like an archaeologist digging up an ancient pot, noting down the writing on it, and then smashing it to the ground.”

So now to something on the history of the book. Although printed text has existed in various forms for thousands of years – from writings on Egyptian papyrus to woodblock cloth printing in East Asia – it was Johannes Gutenberg in 1454 who put his printing press to commercial use, printing the 42-lined Bible. This was the first of its kind in the West and laid the foundations, in the centuries that followed, for printing to become an industry, and not a luxury.

By the Victorian era, printing was fast becoming an accessible and efficient industry, with the rapid production of illustrated newspapers, small pamphlets, and regular periodicals which featured the tantalising instalments of great novelists like Dickens and Trollope.

Now I could go on to talk about the fascinating changing trends of paper types, binding machinery, or the introduction of hot-metal presses…but even I’m sensing no?

Or I could conclude with a wonderful quote from Stephen Fry on the enduring nature of the physical book:

“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”

…oh and don’t get me started on e-books yet.

On Yer Bike

After arriving for my Masters in Oxford –  Matthew Arnold’s “city of dreaming spires” – I’ve been thinking a lot about women and bikes.

(Hold on – before you start pitying my lame new postgrad ponderings – it’s not quite as trivial as it seems).

For the Victorians, bikes became iconic symbols of freedom; they were exciting new modes of travel which innovatively expanded both geographical and social horizons. Yet for many men and women it was exactly this empowering, freeing potential that posed such a dangerous threat to public decency and propriety.

Women – once restricted to a very private, domestic sphere – now had the freedom to travel, and were enabled to cross into public domain in a swift, stealthy and stylish manner. Most crucially, the autonomous nature of the bicycle meant they could do this without a male chaperone (unless they were unlucky enough to have a tandem bike of course).

The satirical cartoon above provides us with a hyperbolised glimpse of the anxiety surrounding this new phenomenon. Published in a mid-1800s British periodical, it’s entitled “The Awful Effects of Velocipeding”. Aside from the charming use of the word ‘Velocipeding’, the cartoon is far more brilliant in its exaggerated style because it visually shows how omnipresent, yet absurd, mid-Victorian fears were surrounding the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ and her dangerous relationship with the bicycle.

The cartoon emblematises everything the conventional population feared about this emerging female archetype of empowerment and independence. If smoking a cigarette, unbalancing men and flaunting those saucy ankles weren’t bad enough – this New Woman is actually riding a bicycle.

By the turn of the century, the bicycle even had a huge impact upon fashion, with feminist organisations such as the ‘Rational Dress Society’ calling for an end to impractical skirts and corsets:

“The Rational Dress society protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure, impedes the movement of the body, or in any way tends to injure the health. It protests against the wearing of tightly fitted corsets, of high-heeled or narrow toed boots and shoes; of heavily weighted skirts, as rendering healthy exercise almost impossible”.

Women thus turned to bloomers (essentially baggy trousers) to enhance their physical freedom to move. And, to the shock of many, this dramatically changed their once hyper-feminised appearance. Many now moved towards a more androgynous look which would soon culminate in the short bobs of the 1920s.

And so today – but unfortunately not yet in all parts of the world – I think we’re lucky to be able to make such seemingly everyday, trivial decisions whether to catch the bus, rent or buy a bike, car, plane, boat, canoe – whatever – and have that incredibly empowering – yet extremely underrated – freedom to travel.

**(And yes I should go and buy a bike now).

Aliens, Vampires and Giant Beetles

Aliens, Vampires and Giant Beetles?! Before you ask, no I’m not about to discuss a strangely diverse monster nightmare, or even a surreal ‘Paranormal Activity’ sequel. I’m writing about those even stranger entities that dominated the Gothic and Sci-Fi literature of the late Victorian fin de siècle.

The fin de siècle (‘turn of the century’ for us none Frenchies) is a term used to denote the end of the nineteenth century – a fascinating period characterised by lascivity, anxiety and degeneration. The late Victorians were certainly an anxious bunch. They worried about sexuality, death, invasion and everything else in between all because their world was in a constant state of social and political turbulence. For the reading public (which was pretty much everyone), these concerns manifested themselves in the popular literature of the day through novels terrorised by aliens, vampires and (of course) giant beetles.

Now let’s start with Aliens; always a good place to start.

You’ll probably have heard of The War of the Worlds, a story of alien invasion by huge three-legged martians who decimate the suburbs with their heat rays and chemical weapons whilst the hopeless narrator watches and occasionally checks in on his wife. But I’m not referring to the US-based, Spielberg special. I’m talking about H.G.Wells’ 1898 novel, set in Woking, and so vivid in its descriptions that a 1960s radio reading of it by Orson Welles triggered terror in America as they believed the Martian invasion was being read out live.

The War of the Worlds is a piece of Invasion Literature, one which encapsulates late Victorian fears of uninvited guests – not directly ones from outer space – but ones from once-imperialised colonies, surrounding Europe, and even from the biological kingdom as Darwinism took a firm hold on the scientific community. And so Wells’ aliens became a mutant hybrid of these ever-present anxieties.

Now to those pesky Vampires.

The morbid Victorian obsession with vampires began at the start of the century (and coincidentally near the start of my blog: https://aliteraturelife.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/once-bitten/), and by the fin de siècle rose to a crescendo in 1897 with the publication of Dracula. Although Dracula is a name synonymous with vampirism, 1897 saw the publication of the lesser known – but far more intriguing – The Blood of the Vampire by Florence Marryat.

The Blood of the Vampire is a vampire novel of a different breed, completely unconventional, and perhaps the only vampire tale without a drop of blood in sight. Marryat’s protagonist – Harriet Brandt – has no fangs, no lust for human blood. She is one who inexplicably sucks the physical life force from others via close emotional contact…whilst inadvertently giving a whole new meaning to being clingy.

Marryat’s protagonist is a psychic vampire.

This female vampire not only emblematises archetypal Victorian anxieties associated with colonialism, racial mixing (she is the subject of prejudice for her Jamaican descent) and biological degeneracy, but I see her as a social vampire. The female on female bitchiness in this novel is constant. Women (and often men) are always watching Harriet, observing her movements, speculating on her past, talking about her whenever possible. She is envy, gossip, the unknown and is regarded as a social threat – a social vampire.

But this friendless vampire tale seems exceedingly normal when placed next to Richard Marsh’s mad book of the same year – The Beetle.

In essence, The Beetle does what it says on the tin. It is a story of a beetle…well a giant shape-shifting Egyptian scarab beetle who runs riot across England, stupefying everyone from the homeless to a top politician in a fast-paced, four narrator frenzy. The book is insane, and has a headache-inducing plot, but it clearly spoke volumes to its contemporary readers. The book actually outsold Dracula and became an outlet for readers to project their anxieties of the foreign – the oriental ‘Other’ – onto a fantastical being. A mode of escapism for their very real fears.

And so what should we take away from the fin de siècle obsessions with Aliens, Vampires and Giant Beetles?

That Victorian readers were addicted to the sensational, the social, and the strange? – Of course. That giant beetles sell books? – Oh yes (See Kafka’s The Metamorphosis). That the Victorians were incredibly anxious about, well, everything? – Most certainly!

But I think it’s important to see that each of these fantastical, monstrous, non-human symbols represent very real internal human anxieties.

The late Victorians read to soak up their fears, to transfer their worries – ultimately – they read to feel safe in a world they just could not control anymore. And I think that’s something we could all learn from today.

Rainy Day? Dickens is Always Your Man

And this is because he writes about them. A LOT.

Here’s a bit of obvious, but important, insight into the character of a Dickens novel. Are the first few pages soaked in rain? Weighed down by dreariness? Shrouded in fog?

…then you’re most probably reading a Dickens novel.

“The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest” – Bleak House.

Sounds pretty obvious there but it’s just not enough to say it’s a gloomy day;

Dickens sought to capture and vivify the absolute poverty of urbanised Victorian slums. The weather for these slum-dwellers was another dark part of life that was beyond their control and, as Dickens sensationalised poverty to meet contemporary demands for shocking fiction, he also needed to sensationalise the weather…And this is why you rarely get a sunny Dickens day.

From a literary level, this technique is known as Pathetic Fallacy and aims to ominously foreshadow the outcome of the day, or the fates of the characters. E.g. the opening to Great Expectations:

“and the sky was just a row of long, angry, red lines and dense black lines inter-mixed.” 

But I think it’s far more important than that. Rain and fog are tangible, universal experiences that every reader can empathise with. There’s no danger of alienating a reader by talking about the foreboding climate; a danger of boring them perhaps, but never of alienating them. A reader can be shocked at the extreme lengths characters are driven to by appalling poverty, but just as you forget your umbrella on the wettest day of the year, it’s that driving English rain that can push a character over the edge.

Now all of this does sound pretty pessimistic as a reading experience, but because he was a very accurate meteorologist for England, I personally think it’s effortlessly easy to empathise with his pathetic fallacy. Dickens also found a universal experience which would never alienate his reading public – both then, and now.

And, even better than that, he actually makes you feel much better about the rain outside your own window…

…because at least you’re not the standard orphan, opium addict, thief or murderer of a Dickens novel.

An Open Letter To Write Letters

To Whom It May Concern,

Why oh why don’t we write letters anymore? I have recently received one of the most life-changing books I have ever read and [pause for gasp] it’s not even a fiction book. It’s called Letters of Note and it’s an incredible collection of some of the most witty, hilarious, beautiful and moving correspondences that have ever been written.

In this book, Jack the Ripper’s kidney-eating confession will make your skin crawl. Virginia Woolf’s suicide note will move you to tears. John Steinbeck’s love advice to his 14 year old son will melt your heart. Roald Dahl’s reply to the 7 year old fan who sent him a glittering dream in a bottle will mesmerise.

Historically, letters even became ingratiated into the fabric of some of the most iconic fiction ever published. Initially popularised by Samuel Richardson’s 1840 work Pamela, the epistolary form emerged as a way of enhancing a novel’s realism by adding letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings to create a pseudo-reality. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was one such novel which popularised this epistolary form and allowed readers to get to know the inner workings of multiple characters, as well as trace their relationships to one another.

So if for centuries letters have been the most powerful modes of communication – be it political, romantic, or simply just to beg President Eisenhower not to shave Elvis’ sideburns in the army (a genuine letter from three female Elvis fans) – then why don’t we write them anymore? Of course they are written/typed/emailed but having the word ‘Cover’ in front of it seems to immediately deflate the romance and power of the letter. We should write something meaningful. Not something that will be inboxed/sentboxed/sent to drafts, but something crumpled and stained, something barely legible and messy, something you wait anxiously to receive and then scribble furiously to reply.

So reader, here is my written guarantee, my absolute promise that I will never stop reading Letters of Note. Never paint my nails near it, never make stir fry in its proximity, never bend its pages in carelessness.

And I will also never stop writing letters.

Forever yours,

A Letter Romantic.

A heartwarming response from John Steinbeck to his 14yr old son who on the same day asked for advice on falling for a girl at boarding school.

A Victorian Bridget Jones

Now you’ve probably heard of Bridget Jones. The diary series of the ever-so endearing thirty-something whose dizzying spells in and out of love with the Austen-esque Mark Darcy (and the E.L.James-esque Daniel Cleaver) literally leave you laughing out loud.

…and now I’m sure you’ve always wondered if there was ever an equally hilarious Victorian precursor to it (well you’ve probably never wondered that but keep reading anyway!)

Originally appearing in Punch magazine in the 1880s, George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody narrates the life of the clumsy – and self-professed comedian – Charles Pooter as he argues that his life should still be documented, even if he’s not considered a “Somebody”.

Yet just like Bridget, Charles Pooter is the definition of the word cringe. 

With awful puns that make you laugh out of politeness, a clumsy streak that never goes unnoticed, and a social awkwardness which makes you wish he’d stayed at home alone, it’s hard not to compare him to Bridget – Queen of Cringe.

However their characters differ significantly when you begin to compare their self-perceptions. Where Bridget is genuinely self-deprecating, lacking in self-esteem and frequently quite depressive,

“2 a.m. Oh, why am I so unattractive? Why? Even a man who wears bumblebee socks thinks I am horrible.” 

and often struggles with her responses to social situations,

“I paused to think up something very witty and cutting to say”

Charles Pooter is excessively (and quite naively) self-assured, especially in the apparent hilarity of his jokes,

“I make one of the best jokes of my life”,

“[about his own joke] I never was so immensely tickled by anything I had ever said before. I actually woke up twice during the night, and laughed until the bed shook.”

In fact Charles’ egotism goes so far that he places himself in the ranks of the great 17th century diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, envisioning the impressive remuneration he would accrue from being published…to which his wife and son “burst out laughing”.

Yet despite what seems a disavowal of Charles’ misplaced arrogance and humour, I personally laughed a lot at his cringey jokes and found the book just as funny (and if not funnier!) than Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary.

So with the recent release of the third Jones book, it’s definitely the time to give this super short book a read (even if it’s just to see how embarrassing my sense of humour probably is) or subscribe online to the Diary’s daily alerts which lets you receive entries in a similar fashion to the Victorian periodicals  http://www.diaryofanobody.net/

…and I would leave you with a Charles Pooter-style ‘hilarious’ joke, but I’ll save that until I’m closer to a thirty-something Bridget.

 

Distressed Damsels and Disney

Throughout history, the damsel in distress has been an ideological construction reinforced by popular literary culture, yet nothing epitomises it more than the Walt Disney princess.

The damsel or demoiselle is typically a beautiful female, rendered helpless by an extreme villain or monster (dragons are often a favourite) who must be rescued by a heroic male. This archetype evolved from Medieval courtly romance tales in which chivalric knights must save their maidens from certain peril (and inevitably seduce them along the way) to complete their heroic tasks.

But as knights in shining armour grew sparser and feminism evolved, the damsel made it easier to stereotype the disempowered female and enhanced the Victorian desire for separate spheres: men in public and women in domestic privacy.

Fast forward some decades and feminists asked:

Why was the damsel always expected to end up with her hero? Maybe she wasn’t into the helmet-hair look and wanted the freedom to choose her own husband

Why couldn’t the damsel be given the opportunity to save herself? Perhaps she was just about to save herself from the dragon until this show-off knight turned up.

And then there’s the emergence of Disney…

Early Disney princess films like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Ariel began to Disnify the damsel and, although disguised beneath flowing princess locks, a pretty dress and sparkling tiara, she was still helplessly distressed without her heroic prince charming.

Like the classic Pygmalion story (where the sculptor Pygmalion carves his perfect woman from marble and awakens her with a kiss), Snow and Aurora can only be vivified by their prince’s kiss. By ensuring that female agency can only be given by the male’s kiss, the princesses became just as helpless as their medieval damsel forerunners.

But recently this has all started to change.

Although far from creating an entirely autonomous princess, Disney’s more recent films have responded to feminist outcries against the archetypal damsel:

‘Tangled’‘s (2010) Rapunzel-based protagonist is a much more independent character who (with the help of a frying pan) experiences the dangers of the world alongside a less brave and more humorous type of prince, Flynn.

 

‘Brave’ (2012) saw Scottish redhead Merida as an empowered and feisty female warrior whose courage and headstrong attitude would leave Snow White blushing. Not unlike Nora in Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’, Merida shakes up the kingdom by refusing to be betrothed and takes her future into her own hands.

 

In ‘Frozen’ (2013), Elsa and Anna are two more self-rescuing princesses who seize the opportunities to pursue their own freedom, independent of their parents and male counterparts. The double dose of princess-power (excuse the cheesiness) enhances the bravery and strength which made archaic damsels so distressed in the first place.

So although Disney have far from started a feminist revolution, they’re on the right track to help to fade out the disheartening, disempowered and distressed damsel.

 

 

Busta Rhymes and William Wordsworth

“For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”  – William Wordsworth ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’

Although ironically – and coincidentally for Wordsworth – their names contain allusions to their favoured linguistic modes of ‘Rhymes’ and ‘Words’, the two are rarely popular figures for comparison. Wordsworth, as a visionary early Romantic poet concerned with the power of the Romantic imagination and the awe-inspiring sublimity of nature, and Rhymes, as a modern-day rapper renowned for his unique musical talents of rapping at an abnormally fast rate utilising internal rhyme and para-rhyme (half-rhyme), appear at first glance to have very little in common.

Oh but wait.

First watch this and I’ll reveal how these two can in fact be compared.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhIrzbhEGvs

When first hearing this song – especially if unfamiliar with Busta Rhymes’ unique rap style – the reaction is probably one of bewilderment and eyebrow raising, as it first was for me. But then I started to listen again and compared it with Wordworth’s definition of poetry as a “spontaneous overflow of feeling” and found that Rhymes’ rapid lyrical outpour certainly felt spontaneous and was definitely a powerful overflow of his feeling.

Like much of Wordsworth’s poetry, Rhymes’ song ‘Thank You’ explores thematic ideals , including the place of a deity in society, the power and force of nature and the venerated position of the poet or artist, as exemplified by Rhymes’ fantastically arrogant “The microphone is bleedin you should take it from me!”. 

As shown below, Rhymes even adopts, although probably without knowing it, the Romantic appreciation of the power of nature along with its transformative, organic and meditative forces:

“We comin to give ’em the shivers watery flows spillin like rivers/ Floodin the street” – ‘Thank You’ – Busta Rhymes

“As now, fair river! come to me.
…’Till all our minds for ever flow,
As thy deep waters now are flowing.” – ‘Lines Written Near Richmond, Upon the Thames, at Midnight’ – William Wordsworth (although you probably guessed it wasn’t Busta)

Although I’m not totally certain if Rhymes is a huge Wordsworth fan, I think it’s really important to see how two figures who initially seem to be almost laughably unrelated to one another can in fact be so effortlessly intertwined.