Fredegond Shove

Fredegond Shove (born Maitland; * 1889 in Cambridge ; † 1949 ibid) was an English poet who is counted both to the Bloomsbury Group and to the Georgian Poets . She was already known to the broad contemporary public less for her complex poems in her rather narrow oeuvre than for her critical study of Christina Rossetti , which was reprinted in a number of different editions. Four of her poems have been remembered by a wider audience through the setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams .

Fredegond Shove, photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell , 1917

Gerald Frank Shove by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1917

Life

Fredegond Shove was the daughter of the historian and professor of legal history at the University of Cambridge Frederic William Maitland and the playwright Florence Henrietta Fisher. After private tuition by private tutors and tutors , which was quite common in the English upper class of that era , she attended Newnham College from 1910, where she took English as a subject, but did not take a bachelor's degree until she left college in 1913 .

Shortly after she published her first poetry, Dreams and Journeys , Oxford in 1918, Edward Marsh took her poems into the Georgian Poetry 1918-19 (1919) collection . Her poems Motion and Stillness , Four Nights , The New Ghost and The Water Mill were set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams as Four Poems by Fredegond Shove for baritone and piano in 1922. Virginia Woolf , her father's cousin anyway, acted to a certain extent as the editor of the probably unjustly forgotten Daybreak , Richmond Surrey 1922, through the affiliated publisher Hogarth Press. However, Shove was only part of the extended environment of the Bloomsbury Group , as they lived largely in Cambridge . In addition, Shove published only one critical study of Christina Rossetti , Cambridge in 1931, for which she was better known among the general public than for her poetry.

Fredegond Shove was married to the economist and lawyer Gerald Shove . Her aunt Adeline Fisher was the wife of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams , who was a second cousin of Fredegond's future stepfather, the botanist Francis Darwin . Thus, she was twice related to the Darwins, which led to the fact that she and the Bloomsbury Group were seen by the old elites as followers of the teachings of Charles Darwin , which in particular seemed to amuse Virginia Woolf. Such family ties were also a special feature of the English upper class before the First World War .

Her sister Ermengard Maitland published Poems posthumously in 1956 , a selection of poems that also included some early, previously unpublished works, and a brief obituary.

In 1949 Fredegond Shove died in Cambridge at the age of 60.

Reception and criticism

Some of her fellow writers classify her as being quite ambivalent. The pointed-tongued Edward Shanks , who seemed to unite two souls as editor and poet, rejected Edith Sitwell's recommendation as editor , just as he, as a poet, condemned his own selection of Fredegond Shove in retrospect. With the aim of definitely including an English poet in his collection, Marsh is said to have pushed Fredegond Shove through against the concerns of Harold Monros , Siegfried Sassoons and Shanks.

In his critical classification of Grierson's Critical History of English Poetry , 1946, René Wellek criticized , among other things, the inclusion of Fredegond's Shove in the canon of praised authors.

For example, Fredegond Shove's poem The New Ghost was later described as unsuccessful in the treatment of the setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams . In this poem Shove described the leaving of the spirit after death from the human body over into a mystical, intimate relationship with God:

Ralph Vaughan Williams

"And he cast it down, down, on the green grass,
Over the young crocuses, where the dew was--
He cast the garment of his flesh that was full of death,
And like a sword his spirit showed out of the cold sheath .

He went a pace or two, he went to meet his Lord,
And, as I said, his spirit looked like a clean sword,
And seeing him the naked trees began shivering,
And all the birds cried out aloud as it were late spring.

And the Lord came on, He came down, and saw
That a soul was waiting there for Him, one without flaw,
And they embraced in the churchyard where the robins play,
And the daffodils hang down their heads, as they burn away. "

In terms of style, Banfield felt this to be clearly both Georgian poetry and its loose application of spring-like vegetable imagery . However, this also corresponds to the Williams style: “an impressionistic piano accompaniment full of melodic arabesques and median shifts of triadic harmony expresses the other-worldly ecstasy”.

Fredegond Shove was considered extremely sensitive when it came to describing and treating the natural environment. Her technique stood out from most of the Georgian poetrists in a complex way, for example by writing in complete punches ( Love As He Is In the World ). Her expression often suggests the personal acceptance of serious sins ( Liturgy begins , O deliver me, deliver me from myself , Mercy and Justice ), which, however, was not reflected in her personal biography, although many of her readers and critics tried to do so.

Works

• Dreams and Journeys. Oxford 1918.
• Daybreak. Richmond Surrey 1922.
• The Water Mill. Oxford University Press, London 1925.
• Christina Rossetti. University Press, Cambridge 1931 (Reprint, Folcroft Library Editions 1969 and 1974).
• Poems. Cambridge 1956, foreword by E. Maitland.

literature

• Edward Lewis Davison: Cambridge poets 1914-1920: an anthology. W. Heffer & Sons, Cambridge 1920.
• Stanford Patrick Rosenbaum: The Bloomsbury group: a collection of memoirs and commentary. University of Toronto Press, Toronto / Buffalo 1995, ISBN 978-080200690-5 .
• Robert H. Ross: Georgian Revolt: Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal, 1910-22. Faber 1967.
• Pamela Todd: The World of Bloomsbury. In the footsteps of Virginia Woolf and her friends. Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 1999. Paperback edition: Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-15335-2 .

Web links

• Georgian Poetry 1918-19 in the Gutenberg project
• Portrait series of Fredgond Shove and her husband, photographed by Ottoline Morrell, 1917, National Portrait Gallery on npg.org.uk

Individual evidence

1. ↑ After Maitland's death in 1906, Florence Henrietta Maitland married Francis Darwin in 1913 , the son of Charles Darwin , who was already twice widowed .
2. ↑ Michael Copp: Cambridge poets of the Great War: an anthology. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, New Jersey 2001, p. 246.
3. ↑ Info on users.ox.ac.uk
4. ↑ Michael Kennedy: The works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Vol. 1, Clarendon, Oxfort 1992, p. 152.
5. ^ Holly Henry: Virginia Woolf and the discourse of science: the aesthetics of astronomy. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 2003, p. 81.
6. ^ Stanford Patrick Rosenbaum: The Bloomsbury group: a collection of memoirs and commentary. University of Toronto Press, Toronto / Buffalo 1995, p. 387.
7. ^ John H. Willis: Leonard and Virginia Woolf as publishers: the Hogarth Press, 1917-41. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville 1992, p. 141.
8. ↑ Noel Annan: Leslie Stephen. 1984, note p. 159.
9. ^ Robert H. Ross: The Georgian Revolt. P. 224.
10. ^ Annabel Robinson: The life and work of Jane Ellen Harrison. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2002, p. 298.
11. ↑ Barbara W. Tuchman : The proud tower. A portrait of the world before the First World War, 1890–1914. Droemer Knaur, Munich / Zurich 1969, pp. 16–83.
12. ^ John D. Gordan: Letters to an Editor: Georgian Poetry. Ayer Publishing 1967, p. 29f.
13. ↑ The first three anthologies did not contain a poet: Chris Baldick: The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 10: The Modern Movement (1910–1940). Vol. 10, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford / New York 2006, p. 112.
14. ^ Jean Moorcroft Wilson: Siegfried Sassoon: the journey from the trenches: a biography (1918–1967). Routledge, London 2003, p. 128.
15. ↑ Timothy Rogers: Georgian poetry 1911-22: the critical heritage. Routledge, London 1997, pp. 414f.
16. ^ René Wellek : History of literary criticism 1750–1950. Vol. 4, The 20th Century. English and American literary criticism 1900–1950. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1990, pp. 70f.
17. ↑ gutenberg.org
18. ↑ Stephen Banfield: Sensibility and English song: critical studies of the early 20th century. Part 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1988, p. 329.
19. ↑ Info on jrank.org
20. ↑ Frederick Wilse Bateson: The new Cambridge bibliography of English literature . Volume 5. CUP Archives, 1969, p. Cxci.
21. ↑ archive.org