Extension. Ex. 40. Express your view on the text taken from literature journal and relate it to your own experiences

Ex. 40. Express your view on the text taken from literature journal and relate it to your own experiences. Write a summery of it.

For many writers, travelling – both real and imagined – provided fertile new ground for their roaming imagination. Daniel Carey reflects on the literary results of some of these journeys.

If poetry is about making the world new, then travellers are almost by definition poets. The stimulation of travel is precisely its offer of novelty. Travel releases the imagination and stimulates it with the sheer impact of the unknown and unfamiliar. That is why, no doubt, so many works of literature have been produced in periods of transit, or emerge from fantasies of travel. Coleridge's journals during his residence in Malta are rich with scents and images that strike his acute senses and test his powers of description. He rarely misses the mark, even if a Devon-born Englishman had no previous encounter with lemon groves and orange trees to go on. At one point he noted: "I smelt the orange blossom long before I reached St Antonio. When I entered it was overpowering: the trees were indeed oversnowed with blossoms, and the ground snowed with the fallen leaves: the bees on them & the golden ripe fruit on the branches glowing".

Much of Romantic poetry is bound up with travel. Mont Blanc in Alpine Switzerland became a virtual rite of passage, as Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley all tested their powers in describing it. Each of them saw it as sublime, with Coleridge finding divine transcendence in its peaks and Shelley identifying the ravines and valleys with the workings of the mind and imagination. For the more skeptical Byron it stirred the soul in a different way, expressing the gulf between man and the infinite:

Above me are the Alps, The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, And throned Eternity in icy halls Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls The avalanche – the thunderbolt of snow! All which expands the spirit, yet appalls, Gather around these summits, as to show How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below.

Byron composed Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, in which this passage appears, after his own journey across the Continent, running from Portugal to Spain, Italy, and eventually the Levant.

For Coleridge, the pattern of engaging with travel continued elsewhere in his verse. Whatever his debt to opium, Coleridge's dream of Kubla Khan occurred, as he explains, after reading Samuel Purchas, a seventeenth-century editor of travel accounts. The Ancient Manner, by the same token, is a perpetual traveller, although his journey is tortured and guilt-ridden rather than liberating. The whole of Romantic writing is full of wanderers and walkers, traversing rustic landscapes whether in the Lake District, the Alps, or Italy. By convention, they usually make their way alone, like Rousseau's promeneur solitaire, communing with themselves as they adjust to the rhythm of the journey.

Every era of literature has its distinctive encounter with travel. For the Romantics, contact with nature remained an ideal, one that continues to influence us today. Earlier writers often preferred an urban milieu. In 1626 Francis Bacon advised young travellers to visit the great courts of Renaissance Europe, taking note of different customs and beliefs, and to adopt the best of what they saw. 'Let him carry with him some card or book describing the country where he travelleth, which will be a good key to his inquiry. Let him keep also a diary', Bacon recommended. Like Polonius instructing Laertes before he sets off for Paris, Bacon endorsed remaining circumspect and observant rather than gregarious.

Not everyone congratulated travellers for their bold excursions. In fact, an equally long tradition exists of lampooning errant individuals on their return. The problem began with voyagers intent on advertising their exotic experience, in a time before 'Hard Rock Cafe' tee-shirts, the fastest way to do it was by adopting an affected appearance, French clothes, a. noticeable accent (as if one had forgotten how to speak English), and even a peculiar walk which some described as 'frisking and bending of the hams'.

The Restoration playwright Etherege exposed their folly in the character of Sir Fopling Flutter (The Man of Mode), as did Ben Jonson in an earlier satire, Cynthia's Revels. He complained that travellers 'learn to make strange sauces, to eat anchovies, macaroni, bovoli, fagioli, and caviare'. But the most famous case is Gulliver, who becomes so enamoured of the horses in Houyhnhnmland that he can no longer tolerate human company, preferring to commune with the creatures in his stable rather than his wife and family on his return. When the Portuguese mariners first recover him, he reports with some annoyance that they 'fell a laughing at my strange tone in speaking, which resembled the Neighing of a Horse'.

Whatever their shortcomings, travellers have provided the foundation for much of English literature. Think of More's Utopia, written within touching-distance of the voyages of discovery in 1516. The sunburned traveller, Raphael, who tells of the famous island, ostensibly accompanied Amerigo Vespucci on three of his four voyages to the New World. Shakespeare's Tempest is another tale of island-life. The storm that sets the play in motion takes place after a trip to Tunis, blowing the courtiers all the way to the 'Bermoothes' (Bermuda). As they make their way across the enchanted island, the distracted characters continually remark on the difficulty they will face in communicating their adventures when they return from this place of wonder. As the honest lord Gonzalo remarks:

If in Naples.

I should report this now, would they believe me?

For his part, Samuel Johnson dreamed of seeing the Great Wall of China, but in the end he had to settle for Hadrian's. His tour of Scotland in the company of Boswell resulted in one of the great travel accounts of the eighteenth century. Elsewhere he proposed to 'survey mankind from China to Peru' in his poem 'The Vanity of Human Wishes', a teat made possible by his wide reading of travel literature if not by personal experience. In a more erotic vein, John Donne made similar plans to encompass the world poetically. In a famous passage, he imagined his lover as a 'new founde land, my America' which yielded to him as a metaphorical conqueror.

But the most famous case is surely Robinson Crusoe, the ill-fated mariner shipwrecked on a Caribbean island. After periods in North Africa and Brazil, Crusoe spends twenty-eight years on the island, three of them in the company of Friday. He does his best to replicate life in England, constructing a town-house and a country house, as he calls them, from the limited materials at his disposal. His island is a place of labour not recreation, and few things in his description evoke the idea of an island paradise, despite its proximity to Trinidad. Crusoe's captivity on the island is a kind of punishment, a spiritual ordeal above all. But despite learning the lesson, Crusoe quickly embarks on a new set of adventures when he makes his escape. In his Farther Adventures, Defoe takes his hero from England to China before revisiting the flourishing colony in the Caribbean.

Over the centuries, travel has continued to provoke great writing, and great writing travel. The connection between them means there is no such thing, for literature, as the 'final frontier'.

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