It’s sometimes hard to imagine a world without the writers of Cambridge. They’re everywhere we go, lurking in Libraries, scurrying the streets, skulking in to bookshops to casually move their volumes to the front of the display. They live among us, work among us—sometimes they even lecture us if we’re lucky. They’ve foddered most of us from an early age and they’re still around today. In the Review section of the Observer it is their names that are in large print to lure in readers, not their stories: ‘Zadie Smith’, ‘Ian McEwan’: Cambridge writers seem to have transformed themselves into a brand, the greatest, like other celebrities, identifiable by a single name.

As Virginia Woolf noted: ‘Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money’. In the public eye, it seems there is little point in writing, unless you’re going to be paid vast sums of money for it, so carving a literary identity in these fame-haunted streets can be tricky: I am not Plath, I am not Thompson, I am not plagued by black marauders, if anything I crave them and they shy away from me. I inhabit a concrete tower, overlooking the trees as they stoop into grey twigs outside my window, searching for inspiration. What have the Cambridge writers to offer me and the other undergraduates of today, seeking to follow in their footsteps?

Coming to a University that holds so many literary alumni has limitless advantages but also provokes expectations. Maybe there is a great writer in all of us—who doesn’t churn out an essay a week here? What people seem to forget about ‘Cambridge authors’ is that they are still being created, typing away slowly in locked rooms, scribbling furiously on napkins, worrying about getting their work in on time. The almost sanctified status of the literary big-shots today dismisses the importance of the very act of writing in the first place, makes us forget where they started from. So I persuaded some new writers to take up the robes of the old and try them for size: what would it feel like to be Milton or Coleridge; Woolf or Plath, trying on the clothes, or trying on the literary style?

Writers have had increasingly mixed views and experiences of Cambridge. Coleridge was an undergraduate at Jesus. His time as a student was trying, debt-ridden and full of heart-break (sounds familiar doesn’t it?). So dismal was the accommodation he finally ‘left the friendly cloysters and the happy grove of quiet, ever honored Jesus College’ and ran away to join the army.

Milton (enacted by Oliver Marsh) on the other hand relished his time at Christ’s. His only problem was he wasn’t challenged enough by the curriculum (something harder to relate to than student debt I fear). However Milton suffered in different ways, renowned for his ladylike looks and pallid physique he suffered horrid teasing. (Oli uses his curly locks to make people laugh instead).

Lovers met here. Ted Hughes, (Kit Holden) had a great time serenading Plath (Ana Thorpe) from Pembroke, the Fulbright, full-bright scholar who bit him one night (Yes biting was sexy back then, even before the Buffy/Twilight phase). The two poets blossomed in each other’s company, ‘We kept writing poems to each other and then it just grew out of that I guess, a feeling that – that we both were writing so – so much and having such a fine time doing it we decided that this should keep on,’ says Plath in a recently found recording, Hughes has to begrudgingly admit, ‘the marriage overtook the poems.’ Just your average student love story.

So the authors of our university shouldn’t scare or intimidate, they shouldn’t hound us and make us weep that we haven’t written Lycidas at the age of sixteen, or that we don’t have a pet bear to show off to our friends (Oh Byron). They worried about rooms, and friends, and falling in love, and being teased like the rest of us, and out of that mundane mix came some of the greatest writing in the world. Writing shouldn’t depend on opinion and statistics, or even on what the Observer says. As Plath put it, ‘The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.’ So don’t doubt, create because you want to create. Not because a pay check or an essay deadline is looming. The ordinary lives of the writers of Cambridge should remind us, in the words of Woolf, ‘No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.’ Although one can’t help thinking it never hurts to sparkle... and as you can see below, the writers of Cambridge still have the power to inspire.

Georgia Wagstaff responds to Virginia Woolf:

I could stay in bed another fortnight, and watch as snow-laden boughs exhale into new-budding leaf, and twigged bundles of bird-nest appear in high tree-spires. That is to see life, to observe the spherical whole, when the frost melts from the flawless geometric green of the Cambridge courts, and crocuses spill into life over the walkways. The cyclists pulsate and disappear as they fly along the roadside, trying to retain a grip on their handlebars and reality. The tide of scholars that flow in October and ebb in June erode the stone with sighs, encased in a bubble and engaged in this continuum of learning.

Oliver Marsh responds to John Milton:

Now where did I put my Paradise? I know I had it somewhere. Maybe I left it on the northbound Citi 9 bus. Maybe I left it under that nice mulberry tree. Maybe I dropped it in excitement when I discovered that formals end with everyone kissing my bust (turns out I'd misunderstood). Or most likely all those rugby lads have stolen it again. I don't understand why I'm such a target for them; and using my flowing blond locks to hide my face when they come past never works. Effeminate? Whatever happened to metrosexual? And whatever happened to my Paradise?

Kit Holden responds to Ted Hughes:

A Hughes Unconscious

Poet and nation circle each other;
Legacies nudge a tragedy that was without doubt
A Freudian slip to the mother,
Does not a metaphor make.

That the past is no calamitous change;
But a lesson which must be learned.
The soldier must remember what he has lived.
If he is to live on - no malice must derange.

And though death be matched against death,
Though verse be his only escape from self harm,
He must always remember
That there never was a lesser death.

I, though, do not speak for the soldier.
I speak for all mankind (winced out).
A claim far beyond my station.
One which has seen better men fall.

From here, there is no parody.
But rather a reminder.
That the poet voices himself.
He cannot do much else.

So, dear student, if you wish.
To converse with a good man’s verse.
You would do better,
To find some Auden.

Ana Thorpe responds to Sylvia Plath:

The doors slid open to a crowded train. People poured out, stepping on each other’s toes, half-apologizing. He found himself a seat between two city men, who seemed to be dressed the same way and looking at their watches at the same time, even on a Sunday. The woman made her way into the train, the doors snapping at her heels. She stopped in the entrance, looking intently at a baby gurgling in a pram, the mother clutching at the handle.

Greg took out a book from his bag: Civil Disobedience by Thoreau; an old copy with a spine hollow as a celery stick. The train rocked away, and he looked at the landscape, the marshes and houses and blue sky, the black faces around him. There was the ring of a mobile and a tall man with a crutch fumbled in his pocket, picking out a vintage mobile the size of a walkie-talkie. ‘What? You’re telling me he ain’t gonna pick me up?’ He swore and shouted and called off and slid his mobile back into his trousers; he had a koala imprint on his tee-shirt.

Conrad Landin responds to Adam Gray:

(untitled)

Once I’d finished my reading,
my washing, documentary eavesdropping
I’d thrash out the persona of Cynthia Iso.
Cynthia, forever waiting there on the sheet
where I wrote her name.

BlackBerrys rattle desks like academic
jackhammers in the heart of Cambridge.
On Panorama fourth-rate apologists
talk cross-purposes and frown.

Reading’s off, I don my black beret,
scan the room but no unwanted 2-pound coins
emerge. The laundry-room’s off bounds it seems,

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

and still Panorama thinks it’s You and Yours.
Cynthia Iso shouts at me
from where I wrote her name.
A mental note takes shape around the paper.
And she’s off again; you develop me later;
for now I’ll stay as I am; 2D; amazed.

Robert Hawkins responds to Rupert Brooke:

Chione

Still-born morning is silently delivered,
snow borne grudingly by the kept-o grass.
Back lawn, creaking, under foot-fall slidings -
Atlas, complaining, shoulders extra load.
Two days I wait, face down, left
for dead. Gristly-gritting porters operate,
opening arteries, swabbing ags.
Boreas, bereft, howls along the backs.
Scooped up, rolled and trampled, thrown
and shaped, I am used. Helios,
sleeping thus far, rises cloudy-eyed:
my undertaker.