“One Human Heart”: William Wordsworth, Poetry, and Place on the Border

Introduction 

For our group’s first blog post for the Mellon Foundation Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP, I thought it would be helpful to describe the context for how our project and team came together. Katelynn, Matthew, and I have been working this fall on developing a series of classroom and after-school activities for fifth-grade school children in the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez region grounded in the poetry and places of the Wordsworth circle, 1800-1850, and utilizing the resources of the Wordsworth Trust museum and archive in Grasmere, Cumbria, U.K.; this fall the student fellows have been reading primary texts and critical scholarship relating to William Wordsworth’s life and work, while also thinking about how to make the poetry and history relevant and responsive to children’s creative, emotional, and imaginative lives in our twenty-first century borderland community; in the spring, our team plans to begin introducing “Wordsworthian” activities into select classrooms in El Paso in order to address several broadly humanistic questions:

• How can the work of a poet born in 1770 in a remote mountainous region in the far north of England speak to the aspirations and inner lives of El Paso elementary school children today?
• What can Wordsworth’s poetry teach us about the importance of connections with nature and with other people—both those close to us and those who might seem “other” and remote from our own experiences—in relation to the project of self-development and larger human understanding central to the humanities?
• What can children learn about reading poetry from a distant age and culture through immersion in the history and textual records—letters, journals, manuscript revisions, etc.—of the period?
• How has the technology of writing changed from Wordsworth’s day to our own and how does that affect our understanding of his life, work, and creative process?
• How does Wordsworth’s poetry represent specific landscapes, cottages, and topographical features of his native Cumbria, especially in relation to his childhood development, and in what ways do the places of the El Paso borderland speak to children’s sense of themselves here today?

“Walking with Wordsworth” Summer Study Abroad

Our team’s Mellon project developed out of a summer study abroad class on “Walking with Wordsworth,” which I have been regularly offering to students at The University of Texas at El Paso since 2014. Last year, Professor Grace Haddox of  El Paso Community College and I created a cooperative agreement between our two institutions, signed by the respective presidents of each, and we now offer the “Walking with Wordsworth” summer travel abroad experience to both UTEP and EPCC students. The course involves over twenty hours of instruction in the poetry and history of the Wordsworth circle, Romantic-period aesthetics, and the Romantic tradition of picturesque tourism on our respective campuses before we travel to the Lake District (Cumbria) for ten days of immersion in the landscapes of Wordsworth’s greatest poetry and in archival manuscript work with Jeff Cowton, MBE, Curator of the Wordsworth Trust library in Grasmere. While in the Lake District, we stay in Greta Hall, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s home from 1800-1804, now run as a self-catering B&B. Wordsworth and Coleridge were good friends and collaborators, and the poets and their families often walked the 12 miles between Greta Hall and Dove Cottage (Wordsworth’s and his sister’s home) to visit, to saunter together among the stunning mountains, lakes, and waterfalls of the region, and to talk about poetry, nature, and philosophy. As one of the EPCC students explained in her final video project for the class in 2018, we duplicate some of that sense of amiable community in our life together in Greta Hall and our work together in the archives unraveling the clues the manuscripts give us to Wordsworth’s writing process and working out the personal stories of his close-knit circle of friends.

Jeff Cowton regaling UTEP/EPCC students with stories of William and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth’s arrival at Dove Cottage, pictured here, in December of 1799. William, Dorothy, and later William’s wife Mary and their children, lived in the tiny cottage until 1808, and it is here William Wordsworth produced nearly all of his most well-known and acclaimed poetry. Matthew Foster is center left in the grey sweatshirt; Katelynn’s back is to the camera in the bottom right foreground.

Matthew Foster from UTEP and Katelynn Hernandez from EPCC were both on the summer 2018 trip, and their excellent contributions to our explorations of the connections among the people, poetry and places of the Wordsworth circle made them natural choices for research fellows for the Mellon project. We began meeting early in the fall semester and the community outreach aspect of the project—introducing some of the immersion experience in Wordsworth’s life and work to elementary school children—was all their idea. I think Katelynn and Matthew both want to bring some of the magic of the “Walking with Wordsworth” experience to the El Paso community we call home.

UTEP/EPCC faculty and students at the Wordsworth Trust Library with Jeff Cowton (top center) in summer of 2018; the book lying on the table at bottom center is an original edition of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, co-written by Coleridge and Wordsworth; it is priceless.

Jeff Cowton at UTEP and Ongoing Collaboration

As a direct result of the yearly Walking with Wordsworth study abroad classes, UTEP and EPCC now have a close friend and collaborator in Jeff Cowton, the Wordsworth Trust’s Curator and Head of Learning for many years. In October of 2017, Jeff visited UTEP and El Paso, Texas, in order to deliver a UTEP Centennial Lecture on “‘Work That Might Live’: The Value of Literary Archives for Future Generations,” which also served as the inaugural plenary talk for the 2017 meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism, held on the UTEP campus October 26-28 of last year. Jeff enjoyed visiting with both UTEP and EPCC students, as well as spending an afternoon in Ciudad Juarez, and his evening talk gave the audience a concrete feel for the wide-ranging humanities work the Trust specializes in—from using poetry to work with MS patients, to managing immersion experiences for primary, secondary and higher education institutions, to sponsoring scholarly workshops and symposia. After his visit, Jeff wrote to me to invite UTEP/EPCC to collaborate with the Trust on a museum internship for an El Paso student in 2020, to mark the 250^th anniversary of William Wordsworth’s birth. Matthew, Katelynn, and I see our work this year partly as laying the groundwork for that 2020 project, which will use digital resources on loan from the Wordsworth Trust, along with, perhaps, some actual material objects from the Trust’s collections.

Jeff Cowton, far left back row, in West El Paso with alumni from each year of the Walking with Wordsworth study abroad class, October 2017.

Grasmere in Two Weeks!

A further benefit of our close association with the Wordsworth Trust is the recent invitation Jeff Cowton extended to our team to participate in a workshop in Grasmere over the weekend of December 1-2. The workshop will bring together an international group of Wordsworth scholars, health care professionals, educators, and, of course, curators and assistants at the Trust, to explore best practices and innovative ways to combine the study of Wordsworth with larger community service goals. Built around Wordsworth’s wish, expressed in an 1804 letter, that his work “might live and do good,” the symposium will engage its participants in open discussions of wide-ranging questions about the personal, social, and global benefits of poetry in particular—and humanistic study in general. Matthew, Katelynn, and I are tremendously excited about being a part of the workshop, which promises to furnish us with a host of new ideas and practical suggestions for our project back in El Paso.

We leave November 28 (arriving Thursday, November 29) and return on Monday, December 3. Stay tuned for our next blog post, which will report on our workshop experiences in Grasmere! We’re hoping among other things for the magic of seeing the tiny village of Grasmere and the surrounding high fells (mountains) blanketed in snow!

Written by Dr. Thomas Schmid
Faculty Fellow, The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP