Stinsford Church, Dorset, burial site of Hardy's heart.
Old and new friends and colleagues gathered together last Wednesday to hear John Hughes, Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature, give his Inaugural Lecture. The poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, about whom John has published for many years, is fascinated by beginnings and transitional states. In his lecture 'Hardy and the Inaugural', John took up the notion of the 'inaugural' as a particular quality of lyric poetry. He remarks:
The lecture explores the idea of the inaugural as to do with transitions, turning points, transformations, and new beginnings. It links this discussion to an account of the effects of poetic language in general, and to some examples drawn from the poetry of Thomas Hardy, in particular.
And, he might have added, from Bob Dylan. In an unexpected departure**, John drew insights from Hardy's poetry to show how Bob Dylan represented an inaugural stage of 1960s culture, a poet who shares Hardy's awareness of creative moments of transition. Dylan is as famous for the way he appears in photos as for the way he sounds; John argued persuasively that these visual representations contained what Hardy would have called poetic 'Moments of Being'. Even politicians are keen to borrow some of Dylan's aura for themselves; one of John's lecture slides, showing David and Samantha Cameron in a photo from the Huffington Post in which their body language imitated that of Dylan and Suze Rotolo on the cover of The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, brought the house down. But John was making a serious point about how the inaugural can be recuperated, morally, politically and aesthetically, so that its representations can create the illusions of transitions.
The Vice-Chancellor, Stephen Marston, introduced John, and Professor Peter Childs proposed the traditional vote of thanks afterwards.
**but we await eagerly Professor John Hughes's book Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960s, to be published by Ashgate in August 2013.
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