Nicholas Roe

I should have met Nick Roe in 1989. We were both at a conference at the University of Lancaster for the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, and I did meet there two other dear friends, Greg Kucich and Paul Youngquist, at the exact same moment in a college pub. I might have met Nick then, but he had better things to do than drink with unknown American scholars. I did catch sight of him when E. P. Thompson, during a plenary lecture, cited and praised Nick, and pointed him out to us in the audience. It was the first of many such glimpses of Nick in his academic rock star mode—for example, seeing him arrive at a conference in Boulder, when his plane had come in too late for public transportation, in a stretch limo with his scarf flung jauntily around his neck, a romantic Mick Jagger; or watching him through a window at Strawberry Hill, during a dreary paper session, as he sat in a garden charming a circle of young scholars, his puckish grin at the ready; or listening to him give an incredibly moving talk about Haydon’s Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem directly before the painting itself.

Had I met Nick in 1989, I would have thought of him primarily as a scholar of the first generation of Romantics, and particularly Wordsworth. A series of strong articles on subjects ranging from Robespierre to Spy Nozy culminated in his influential Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, published by Oxford in 1988. This first book already revealed some of the signature qualities of Nick’s work: he brought to thoroughly discussed canonical authors and texts new archival material, in this case gleaned from libraries in both England and France; he placed his authors in relation to other less-studied authors and to larger groups, say, Godwin and Thelwall, the Cambridge radicals and the London Corresponding Society; and he used his contextualizing moves to make an important argument about Wordsworth and Coleridge, finding less what many of us had seen as a turn from politics than a shift from a confrontational politics to a poetry of democratizing sympathy. What Nick gives us is not isolated, great poets but men moving within a larger, more general political, intellectual, and cultural milieu, who shared many ideas and aspirations with their contemporaries and comrades, but who also had the ability to convert these common experiences into great poetry. This book continues to have a lasting impact, with literally hundreds of citations, and with these occurring not only in pieces on Wordsworth or Coleridge but also on, say, Byron or Austen or imperial culture.

I sometimes think of this work as representing Nick’s first life, to steal his subtitle from his book on Hunt, as he established himself as a key scholar working on the poetry and culture of the 1790s, but this would suggest that he stopped thinking about these subjects, when, in fact, he has continued to publish on the first generation of Romantics, including in his The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries, which was issued by Palgrave in 1992 and which in its multiple editions has contributed to our understanding of the role of nature in the larger cultural debates of the period, and, more recently, in essays and edited volumes on Coleridge, as well as Thelwall and Burns. Still, Nick was not going to remain satisfied with being known as a scholar of one portion of our period.

I finally did meet Nick in 1994, at the second NASSR conference held at Duke. He and I were on a Keats panel together, but we didn’t really connect then. By complete chance, I ended up sitting next to him at the conference banquet, where we found we were working along similar lines of inquiry. A retreat to the bar, where we were joined by Greg Kucich, cemented the creation of a kind of Cockney School of criticism, a desire to return Keats in particular to his place in the Hunt circle and more broadly in what Nick called the culture of dissent. Already into...