The Poetry of Motoring: Romanticism on the Road

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  • 自動車の詩学―道をゆくロマン主義
  • ジドウシャ ノ シガク : ミチ オ ユク ロマン シュギ

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Abstract

<p>Wordsworth is well known to have opposed railways coming into the English Lake District. If he had lived a little longer, would he have opposed the motor car, too? Would Shelley have enjoyed new sensations of motoring speed? How about De Quincey, connoisseur of rapid motion? My paper explores how Romantic ideas, imagery, and language were adopted and adapted by early motorists when they described their new mode of travelling and new perceptions of the world gained through it. </p><p>  The travel writer James John Hissey, for instance, delighted in a “bracing, breezy, inspiring drive” across the romantic landscape of Quantock’s “airy ridge”, in the footsteps of Coleridge and Wordsworth. When driving down a Cotswold hill, his wind-riding “spirit of speed” is thoroughly Shelleyan, recalling “Ode to the West Wind” (An English Holiday with Car and Camera, 1908). Like the Romantic poets, early motorists relished the bodily sensations of moving through the world, feeling the wind, rain, sunshine, and the undulation of the ground; like the Romantic poets they perceived a sensation of oneness with landscape through which they moved.</p><p>  On the other hand, in Road Touring in Northern England (1914), Reginald Wellbye, a guidebook writer, compared rail and road travel in favour of the latter, praising the liberty, mobility and independence of automotive travel. As De Quincey had lamented, for Wellbye, the railway had “disconnected man’s heart from the ministers of his locomotion” and restricted travellers to the route of the iron road, thus making them passive and dependent; by comparison, freedom and independence seemed more available to pedestrians and motorists. Ironically, the new motor age had rediscovered an ideal way of travelling—the Romantic freedom of wayfaring—that Wordsworth had also celebrated in many of his poems before the arrival of the railways.</p><p>  Exploring some accounts by motor tourists in the early twentieth century, I will consider how they re-created the Romantic lyricism for the motor age, into a “motor-lyricism” that celebrated freedom, independence, bodily sensations, and oneness with nature.</p>

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