Paternity is poetical

The notion that fatherhood and creativity are at odds is plain wrong, as both poetry and neuroscience are showing us

by Daniel Swift  BIO

Arthur Miller with his daughter Rebecca in 1962 in Roxbury, Connecticut, US. Photo by Inge Morath/Magnum

is associate professor in English at Northeastern University London, UK. His books include Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age (2012) and The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound (2017).

Edited byMarina Benjamin

Here’s an old story, often told. In Book 6 of the Iliad, Hector – dressed splendidly in bronze armour and a helmet with a horsehair crest – bids farewell to his wife Andromache. She begs him not to return to battle and hands him their newborn son. Hector raises the boy into the air, says a short prayer, and hands him back. ‘Go home, attend to your own handiwork / at loom and spindle,’ he commands, in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: ‘As for the war, / that is for men.’

Hector Taking Leave of Andromache (1768) by Angelica Kauffmann. Courtesy Wikipedia

Hector is a father in the heroic mode, and his parenting style has long been irresistible to artists and writers. Few were shocked when the painter Paul Gauguin left his wife and five children in Denmark to pursue fame and art in Paris, then Tahiti. Such distance, they say, is good for a child. ‘The father, from his distance, supports, protects, nourishes his child,’ wrote D H Lawrence in 1922: ‘and it is ultimately on the remote but powerful father-love that the infant rests.’ Distance is equally necessary for the father who seeks to make art. ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,’ wrote Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise (1938).

This is a deeply self-serving story, of course. It’s nice for the male poet not to have to change diapers. But the argument that unsullied privacy is essential to creativity is tenacious. It surfaces when Virginia Woolf writes that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ Contemporary feminists have continued to respond to this archetype of generativity. In Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation (2014), for example, the narrator vows never to marry but to become ‘an art monster instead’.

But what if domesticity – and specifically parenthood – is in fact generative for artists? What if the cliché of solitary male creativity got it wrong? We may begin with one nursing poet. In his poem ‘Frost at Midnight’, written in the winter of 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge pictures himself at home in his cottage on a frosty night. The owls cry outside and the frost rings the trees and he is alone, ‘save that at my side / My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.’ He addresses his infant son:

         Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,Fill up the intersperséd vacanciesAnd momentary pauses of the thought!

He is transported to memories of his own childhood, and then his hopes for his son’s future.

‘Frost at Midnight’ is a poem about caring, in both senses of the word: caring for and caring about. As such, it is a surprising poem about domestic labour, which has invited comment from scholars. ‘What is truly radical about “Frost at Midnight” is Coleridge’s self-representation as a father in the traditional maternal posture of watching over a sleeping baby,’ notes Jonathan Bate. What Bate calls ‘the traditional maternal posture’ is what Hector calls ‘your own handiwork / at loom and spindle’. But perhaps it is not so radical to picture a poet who is equally involved in the work of parenting. Perhaps it is precisely fatherhood that made Coleridge a poet.

Detail from the portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1814) by Washington Allston. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

What makes ‘Frost at Midnight’ significant in Coleridge’s career is that it represents the crest of the much longer wave of his stylistic development. It is not just a great poem – it is the poem within which he becomes a great poet, and his growth as a poet can be tracked neatly against his experience of becoming a father.

Coleridge was far from home when his son was born. A lost revolutionary, he was always trying to save or at least improve the world, and he was preaching in Birmingham when word came by letter: Hartley, born to his wife Sara, on 19 September 1796. He met the news with shock and a trio of sonnets. ‘My o’erwhelmed Heart / Trembled, & vacant tears stream’d down my face,’ he wrote in the first of these. He sent this to a friend, and it was published only in 1847, after his death. He wrote another on the journey home, and here imagines that he might arrive to terrible news: ‘when I reach my door, / If heavy looks should tell me thou art dead …’ They are not charming poems, but repressed; so guarded even when apparently tender, as if he is trying out how he feels in the set form of an Italian sonnet. ‘When I saw it on its mother’s arm, / And hanging at her bosom,’ he confesses in the last of these sonnets: ‘Then I was thrill’d and melted.’ This is a cautious, half-convincing expression of fatherly love. A few days later, he wrote to a friend: ‘in truth, I have seen handsomer babies in my lifetime.’

‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Christabel’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ were all begun or completed within 18 months of his son’s birth

Because Coleridge narrated his moods, and wrote letters that turned into poems, he permits us to reconstruct a detailed timeline of his changing feelings towards his son. Later, it will be an unhappy story, and Hartley will live an unhappy life, but at first it did not seem to be going that way. By December 1796, Coleridge was planning to move his family to a thatched cottage in the village of Nether Stowey in Somerset. He wrote to a friend with enthusiasm: ‘I mean to work very hard as Cook, Butler, Scullion, Shoe-cleaner, occasional Nurse.’ He turned out to love nursing. By the start of February, he was writing to another friend: ‘You would smile to see my eye rolling up to the ceiling in a Lyric fury, and on my knee a Diaper pinned, to warm.’ This moment – of writing while nursing, of diapers and poetic inspiration........

© Aeon