A Poetic History of the Oceans

This paper analyses the rhetorical strategies of Aleksandr Veselovskii's 'Historical Poetics' — the most significant body of Russian literary theory before the Formalists. The paper focuses on the way in which Veselovskii negotiated the autonomy of literary studies as an academic discipline, both explicitly, in methodological texts, and implicitly, in his theories of literary evolution and poetic signification. It depicts Veselovskii's discourse as engaged in complex conceptual manoeuvres around five key boundaries — those of 'poetics', 'language', 'poetic form', 'metaphor', and 'tradition', which symbolically delimited the boundaries of literary scholarship itself.The paper relates Veselovskii's construction of particular 'dynamic models' of poetic evolution and signification with the problem of legitimating the autonomy of literary studies as an academic discipline. Although Veselovskii's priority seemed to be to ensure stable boundaries for literary studies, his model of autonomy is exposed as a complex of metaphorical re-descriptions and conceptual doublings that in performative fashion and through rhetorical play continuously both constructed and problematized the autonomous identity of literary studies.

This essay is an account of J.H. Prynne’s uses of and references to British romantic poetry in his poems of the 1960s and 1970s. Prynne used and thought through British romantic poetry, especially the poetry of Wordsworth, as a way of imagining alternative social relations to those of capitalism during these decades. Prynne’s relationship to romanticism changes abruptly in the late 1970s when the accumulation of capital began to stabilise and the epoch of neoliberalism began. British romanticism at this point was becoming one part of a nationalist and racist symbolic imaginary proper to Thatcherism. Inextricably linked to this wish to imagine and create alternative social relations is a preoccupation with one of the central forms of romantic poetry: the mid-length irregular (Pindaric) ode, which predominates in Prynne’s major collections of this period. In studying this aspect of Prynne’s writing in relation to the 1960s and 1970s, this essay is concerned with what I would call historical materialist poetics. Historical poetics is the study of poems at the intersection of the history of techniques, the discourses of aesthetics and evolving modes of critical mediation; a historical materialist poetics would also understand these in terms of shifting relations of production.

Poetry and Sociality in a Global Frame Walt Hunter (bio) Dowdy, Michael. 2013. Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. $30.00 sc. 296 pp. Furani, Khaled. 2012. Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press. $55.00 hc. 312 pp. A formidable hermeticism has long held sway over Anglophone poetry criticism. While criticism of other literary genres expands its grasp, most notably into new sociological approaches to literature, knowledge of the tropes and schemes of poetry serves as a border check for those interested in poetic criticism, slowing contemporary poetry’s reception, inhibiting pedagogy, and operating in general like a canon of revealed truths. Generally speaking, to read poetry means to learn the history of poetic devices and to recognize the various appearances (or absences) of this history in an individual poem: why a line break works the way it does, why a metaphor appears where it does. But these claims about poetic design do not only represent a neutral language specific to literary study or a convenient mechanism for distinguishing between traditional and avant-garde strands of poetry. By attributing a private and individual, rather than global and material, foundation to the aesthetics of poetry, such claims also prevent poetry from being recognized as a social form. As a result, canonical notions of line, verse, and enjambment are theorized as though poetry developed and continues to develop in monastic seclusion from the political economies and emergent precarities of modern global capitalism. [End Page 129] No sustained analysis exists in which the history of poetry and poetics is reread in the light of the history of globalization. Books on Anglophone poetry in particular have been cautious in adopting a postcolonial, global, or transnational critical perspective and, in general, complacent in upholding the immutable value of a small set of formal devices and traditions. Within this tradition, however, there are critics who are moving toward a global and socially attuned poetics. Jahan Ramazani’s The Hybrid Muse (2001) and A Transnational Poetics (2009) link poetic tropes of metaphor and figures of irony with theories and themes of hybridity, migration, and exile in postcolonial Anglophone poetry. After Ramazani, the Jamaican poets Claude McKay and Louise Bennett can no longer be treated as marginal, neither to postcolonial studies nor to poetry, while the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and the Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott, who are already the subjects of a voluminous critical corpus, appear newly relevant. Focusing on the late nineteenth century, Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005) calls attention to the processes by which a variety of poetic genres had been “lyricized” into a single, dominant genre, at the same time that it incites new histories of poetic subgenres, genealogies of American poetry, and compelling defenses of lyric as a collective voice (Costello 2012) or the “performance of an event” (Culler 2009, 887). Meanwhile, Stephen Burt’s many accessible reviews of contemporary poets bypass altogether the retrenched arguments for conceptual and lyric forms. The cultivation of a catholic taste for multiple, often discrepant styles in poetry, rather than buttressing a single framework of value, makes Burt a welcome voice in the wake of Language and post-Language scuffles over the politics of poetic form and political identity. Most recently, the poetics of precarious life under neoliberal conditions has been the object of attention by a scattered group of leftist poets and thinkers, including Anne Boyer (2014), Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013), Jasper Bernes (2013), Christopher Nealon (2011), Joshua Clover and Keston Sutherland (2013), Franco Berardi (2012), Judith Butler (2013), Chris Chen (2013), and Rob Halpern (2013). If we place this work alongside emergent, innovative work on post-war Anglophone, Russian, and Nigerian poetry by critics as diverse as Jennifer Ashton (2013), Marijeta Bozovic (2014), and Nathan Suhr-Sytsma (2013), it becomes immediately apparent that the entire field of poetry and poetics has taken on a new urgency and a pluralism of method. There is no reason why more work on poetry cannot wager the ambition, strength of argument, accessibility, and cross-disciplinary reach of groundbreaking books on globalization and culture such...

LITTLE HAS BEEN WRITTEN, especially in English, about the history of Malaysian cinema. Rather than a fully-developed study of Malaysian film, this article is really more of an introduction to the project I am undertaking, which is a study of Malaysian cinema from the "Golden Age" (the 1950s and 1960s), including especially the films of P. Ramlee, but also such genres as the crime film, fantasy film, and pontianak (vampire) film, to today's Malaysian cinema, with its own genres, outstanding filmmakers (Aziz Osman and U-Wei Haji Shaari, for example), and performers (most obviously, Sofia Jane). And this article is as much an introduction to my methodology -- historical poetics -- as it is to my subject. Therefore, this article is divided into three sections: the first deals with the need for a new way of looking at Third World cinema; the second with a general discussion of what historical...

This essay suggests that with the increasing prominence of “historical poetics” as a set of social collectives, methodologies, and debates (especially about literary analysis), now seems to be an ideal time to assess its history and consider its future. The first part of the essay offers a genealogy of historical poetics, accounting for some of the central tenets of the group and considering detractors of these assertions, especially about the idea of “lyric reading” and the “lyricization” of poetry. The second part explains how the institutional history of historical poetics affects what it might become in the future, particularly if scholars expand its scope to include poetries not aligned with the 19th century Anglo‐Atlantic world. It suggests how postcolonial literary studies and the history of empire might alter some of the original insights of the Historical Poetics group. Examples draw from poetry printed in India's earliest anglophone newspapers between the 1780 and 1800, part of the “unread poetry of colonialism.” Recovering an historical understanding of this poetry demonstrates that Anglo‐Indian newspapers, while poignantly aware of their debts to Britain, perceived their verse as adapting borrowed British literary institutions. Insights devised from historical poetics provide another way to analyze seriously the conventional and common poetry of 18th century Anglo‐Indian newspapers, to assess how its authors perceived the institutional contexts of their writing, and to describe how it differed from Europe's norms. The final section concludes with some thoughts on what historical poetics might reveal about intellectual labor in the professional literary academy. Ultimately, historical poetics is not only about how we study poetry, but is an extended conversation about the value of history in literary study and how historical change is valued (or not) by academic scholars. Scholars can use historical poetics to consider larger questions about how to distribute their attention and how it might be rewarded by their colleagues and professional organizations. Over the next 10 years, it will prove crucial for scholars of historical poetics to reengage with questions about what archives are valuable for an historical reading of poetry and what those archives mean for the analysis of poetry in the academy.

Reviewed by: Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us by Simon Critchley, and: Poetics of History: Rousseau and the Theater of Originary Mimesis by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe David Krasner TRAGEDY, THE GREEKS, AND US. By Simon Critchley. New York: Pantheon Books, 2019; pp. 336. POETICS OF HISTORY: ROUSSEAU AND THE THEATER OF ORIGINARY MIMESIS. By Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019; pp. 176. Tragedy and philosophy have a long history of antipathy. Plato and his later acolyte Rousseau, in particular, saw tragedy, with its supposed corrupting influence and disingenuousness, as so anathema to their visions for humanity as a whole that they banished tragedy from their morally utopian cities. They each viewed theatre, with its emphasis on mimesis, as deceptive slight-of-hand and therefore un-trustworthy; it teaches people that simulacrum is a substitute for genuine human interaction and so encourages a disregard for virtue and decorum among the populace. Plato, in particular, saw tragedy as the harbinger of imagination run amok, misdirected from idealistic pursuit and toward delusion, fakery, and untrustworthiness. In the tenth book of Plato’s Republic (c.370 bce), he inveighs against tragedy’s emphasis on appearance over reality. The performing artist is an imitator who dwells in appearances rather than truth and deceives through phantasm. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre, 1758) similarly condemns tragedy (and comedy) as frivolous amusements, promoting what he calls “the double illusion of self-love” (la double illusion de l’amour propre)—leading to egocentric narcissism at the expense of humility, restraint, and truthfulness. For Rousseau, flaunting oneself (se montrer) is as bad as portraying oneself in a role (se montrer autre que ce qu’on est), the very skill of an accomplished actor. Ultimately, theatre is antithetical from what he calls “the natural man” (l’homme sauvage), which is the basis of his promulgation of the raw (and thus sincere and natural) condition of humanity against Enlightenment rationality. Simon Critchley and the late Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe seek to turn the tables on the vexed relationship between tragedy and philosophy. They examine tragedy and its opponents, credit tragic theatre as virtuous, and raise critical questions about the usefulness of tragedy in our current lives. Critchley wants to “defend tragedy against philosophy,” positing that “tragedy articulates a philosophical view that challenges the authority of philosophy by giving voice to what is contradictory about us, what is constricted about us, what is precarious about us, and what is limited about us” (9). In other words, philosophy, emerging from Plato, seeks to bring clarity and pristine ideality to life, while tragedy, by contrast, fosters contradictions, presents incomprehensible suffering, and illuminates the uncertainty of existence. Critchley presents tragedy as a visceral, non-rational condition of life that gainsays Plato’s attempt to lift humanity toward the light of rationality. Tragedy, contra Plato’s idealization, is closer to, and more consistent with, the truth of lived experience. The significance of Lacoue-Labarthe’s study lies in demonstrating the importance of Rousseau’s thought for the advancement of theatre. His counterintuitive argument (which cuts against the grain of Rousseau’s objection to theatre) unfolds as follows: if Rousseau believes humanity is at its best when stressing the raw, honest, nascent state-of-nature, then imitation is one of the most salient and well-known features of our Ur-like (originary) behavior. Thus if imitation (mimesis) is a core feature of l’homme sauvage, theatre is the repository of imitation, leading to the subtitle of the book, “originary mimesis.” Rousseau’s “The Savage Man” is for Lacoue-Labarthe, admiringly, “a mimetic animal” who is therefore “originarily, an actor” (33–35). It follows that Rousseau actually favors theatre because imitation is natural sincerity, sincerity is exemplary [End Page 381] (being honest and virtuous), and theatre is imitation—ergo, theatre personifies humanity at its most sincere. Both authors stake their claims through labyrinthian arguments. Each painstakingly and articulately takes readers through dialectical ebb and flow, with Plato (for Critchley) and Rousseau (for Lacoue-Labarthe) as their chess-like competitors. Critchley writes passionately with a presentist emphasis on Greek drama in order...

The article provides a critical analysis of imagology, revealing the link between imagological approach to the Other, on the one hand, and the traditions of the analytic philosophy, post-structuralist doctrines and the method of discourse analysis, on the other. We also consider the problem of imagology’s correlation with historical poetics and investigate the role of imagology in solving some crucial political challenges for contemporary Europe, discovering the latent ideological nature of imagology. We also call for the introduction of a new notion, “imagopoetics”. The foundational difference between imagology which studies the image of the other and comparative studies or historical poetics lies both in the aspect of image studies and its methodology. Imagology primarily concentrates on the social and ideological function of the image of the Other, its role in creating stereotypes and sociocultural and national particularity, while historical politics is interested in the structure and aesthetic operation of the image. Imagology’s method is the post-structuralist discourse analysis, while historical poetics utilizes the comparative historical method. Analytical philosophy with its characteristic linguocentrism acts as a forerunner and philosophical background for discourse analysis. Imagology and historical poetics have different visions of literature. For imagology, literature is nothing more than a source and repository of the stereotypes of the Other. Literature here is devoid of mimetic and cognitive finctions, unlike the view of historical poetics, which is focused on the “spirit of the nation”. By studying mechanisms and types of constructing sociocultural and ethnic identities, as well as the chances of recoding it by creating and spreading stereotypes, imagology has a very important poetical and cultural function for contemporary Europe – shaping the common European identity.

The article discusses the current status of historical poetics. The priority of the discovery of this discipline belongs to A. N. Veselovsky (1838–1906). He named the new scientific discipline, formulated its concept, introduced new categories of poetics, and justified the research program. Despite the unconditional authority of the scientist, Veselovsky’s discovery was not immediately recognized. In the 1910s and 1920s, academic positivism was replaced by formal and sociological schools of poetics, which not only argued with each other, but simultaneously denied and developed the concepts of historical poetics. As a result of this controversy, prerequisites arose for the transition to the historical poetics of the formalists V. M. Zhirmunsky and V. Ya. Propp, sociologists M. M. Bakhtin and P. N. Medvedev. Until now, the role of the philosopher A. F. Losev in the development of historical poetics has been underestimated. Losev consistently developed divisions of poetics in his multi-volume historical aesthetics (“The History of Ancient Aesthetics,” etc.). In the 1950s and 1980s, the legacy of A. N. Veselovsky was rehabilitated, and the renaissance of historical poetics began. Since then, the evolution of historical poetics can be rep resented as a history of discoveries in the works of D. S. Likhachev, M. M. Bakhtin, S. S. Averintsev, M. L. Gasparov, A. V. Mikhailov and many others. In the 1980s and 1990s, universal historical poetics almost became the “display” research aria of the Language and Literature Department of the Academy of Sciences. There is more studies in the field of historical poetics than one can imagine. T hanks to Veselovsky, historical poetics has not become a teaching in our country, it was not merely a set of rules and techniques, it appeared as a free field of research. Its development requires initiative and discoveries. Of course, materials on historical poetics predominate. Original ideas, concepts, and interpretations are needed. The retrospective review and the evolution of historical poetics are encouraging.

If poetics customarily deals with generalities, history seems to insist on particulars. In the 21st century, various literary critics have sought to manage these competing imperatives by developing an “historical poetics.” These critics pursue sometimes very different projects, working with diverse methodologies and theoretical frameworks, but they share a desire to think again about the relation between poetics and history. Some critics have pursued an historical poetics by conducting quantitative studies of changes in metrical form, while others have investigated the social uses to which poetry was put in the cultures of the past. Both approaches tend to reject received notions of the aesthetic or literary, with their emphasis on the individual poet and on the poem’s organic unity. Much work in historical poetics has focused instead on problems of genre and reception, seeking the historical significance of poetry in what is common and repeated. Sometimes this work has involved extensive archival research, examining memoirs, grammar books, philological tracts, and other materials in order to discover how poetry was conceived and interpreted at a particular time. These methods allow critics to tell histories of poetry and to reveal a history in poetry. The cultural history of poetic forms thus becomes a history of social thought and practice conducted through poetry. For other critics, however, the historical significance of a poem lies instead in the way it challenges the poetics of its time. This is to emphasize the singular over the common and repeated. In this mode, historical poetics aims both to restore poems to their proper historical moment and to show how poems work across history. The history to be valued in such cases is not a ground or world beyond the poem, but the event of the poem itself.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I would like to summon historical poetics, as delineated by Alexander Veselovsky in particular, in order to shed light on the function of some oddly atavistic but crucial sections of Ivan Goncharov's last novel, The Precipice (Obryv, 1869). The sections, I will argue, have been unjustifiably dismissed by generations of critics as simply falling short of Goncharov's realist best. An approach informed by the methodology of historical poetics, however, allows us to read them as key to the formation of Goncharov's particular brand of “tragic realism,” a paradoxical but exigent and fruitful hybrid, born of the formal and thematic contradictions of the late realist novel. In the second part of this article, I reverse the direction of the inquiry to suggest some ways in which The Precipice, read through the prism of historical poetics, can reveal the symbolic‐affective stakes of Veselovsky's own project. This will involve having historical poetics interrogate itself – an undertaking Veselovsky would perhaps have been open to and one that allows us to appreciate significant historically rooted parallels between these roughly contemporary projects: the methodology and the novel.

This article considers Bakhtin's historical poetics as a particularly enthusiastic representative of the European evolutionary paradigm with a series of disquieting (post‐)colonial implications. It starts with a genealogy of several basic modernist categories like the self, the novel, history and historical poetics. In order to lay bare the underlying novelistic pattern of the modernist conception of history, it continues with a comparison between the philosophical and sociological theories of the novel of Bakhtin and Luhmann respectively. Both of them connect the advancement of the self with a devaluation of the other, which is a typically colonial pattern according to the argument in the conclusion of the paper.

Swinburne Adam Mazel (bio) This essay reviews the prominent scholarship on Swinburne produced between 2018 and 2019. The most discussed texts continue to be the quintessential Swinburne volume, Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866), and its principal poems, such as “Anactoria,” though also frequently examined last year was his long medieval poem on love, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882). The preeminent approach remains historicizing Swinburne’s poetic form, whether treated as style, prosody, or genre; also substantial was the related topic of Swinburne and music: his poetic songs and late-Victorian musical settings of his verse. Swinburne’s interest in poetic songs of the past points to another long-standing issue that generated discussion in 2018: Swinburne’s medievalism. The final subject prominent in last year’s scholarship is Swinburne’s poetics of antinormative sexuality. Historicizing Swinburne’s Form The three studies that follow share a focus on examining Swinburne’s poetic form historically but differ in their methods, which are occasionally antagonistic. Laura McCormick Kilbride’s Swinburne’s Style: An Experiment in Verse History (Cambridge: Legenda, 2018) closely analyzes Swinburne’s prosody via her method of “verse history” to capture what is unique about Swinburne’s poetic style and to show his significance to the development of English poetry. Verse history emerges from the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno and the “verse thinking” of Simon Jarvis, and it analyzes poetic form experientially, tracing [End Page 433] how prosody, in its unfolding, makes meaning by manipulating the reader’s attention and her or his memory and expectations of formal patterns and their associations. Kilbride presents verse history as an alternative to the influential method of historical poetics, exemplified by the scholarship of Yopie Prins and others. For Kilbride, historical poetics underreads the poetry and overrelies on historical discourses about poetry to historicize poetic form. Verse history, on the other hand, while it does consider period poetics, strongly emphasizes the critic’s analysis of the poetry itself; the critic scours its form to capture how it comments on historical context. Moreover, historical poetics often assumes historical difference, for example, that our suppositions of what counts as poetry differ from those of Victorian readerships. Verse history, however, often presupposes historical continuities to enable the critic’s reading to have historical validity: what remains the same between 1865 and now, for Kilbride, is English’s “linguistic-prosodic capacities” and “our ability to [both] reflect on how a poem works in us [and] discern similarities and differences in technique . . . across periods” (p. 22). Historical poetics likewise often recovers past practices of reading, whereas verse history describes the “communal aspects” of the critic’s “encounter” with the poem’s form (pp. 22, 21). In practice, Kilbride shows an impressive knowledge of prosody, a meticulous and exhaustive attention to the nuances of poetic form, and conclusions that are at times illuminating. But her deep formalism in turn risks overreading the poetry, causing her broader arguments to occasionally get lost in the wealth of formal detail that she scrutinizes. Kilbride’s first chapter, whose article version was reviewed last year, is the strongest of the four. It examines how Swinburne manipulates the affective and semantic capacities of rhythm in his seeming Greek tragedy Atalanta in Calydon (1865) to produce its prosodic power. Kilbride follows George Saintsbury’s claim that the prosody of Atalanta should be understood not via classical metrics but via English ones. But since traditional English scansion trips on Swinburne’s syllabic variability, she argues that the prosodic patterns of Atalanta are best captured through the beat scansion of Derek Attridge. Doing so leads Kilbride to argue that Atalanta alternates two beat patterns— the five-beat dialog and the four-beat chorus—which associate with the drama’s themes and tones. Swinburne masterfully interweaves these metrical sets to create a “native English tension” (p. 47), which plays with his readers’ associations and produces his verse’s power. Chapter 2 seeks to answer what makes Swinburne’s frequent repetition unique by analyzing recurrence in Poems and Ballads, First Series, particularly “The Triumph of Time,” which Kilbride considers Swinburne’s most repetitious poem. While scholars often read Swinburne’s repetition symbolically for [End Page 434] its thematic meaning, Kilbride...

T his special issue of Modern Language Quarterly originated in a 2014 conference we organized at the University of Chicago, “Poetic Genre and Social Imagination: Pope to Swinburne.” The conference was intended to highlight compelling new approaches to an old question: the relation between culture and poetic form. The focus on British poetry from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century was partly motivated by our own scholarly interests and partly meant to expand the concentration on the latter half of the nineteenth century that has typified British historical poetics in American English departments. Listening to the lively presentations and conversations at the conference, however, we realized that there was not much consensus about what historical poetics is (or should be). In fact, the label historical poetics is associated with two quite different contemporary critical movements. It is also true that “historical” and “poetics” are contested concepts, as Yopie Prins notes in this issue. And before they are contested, they are ambiguous: althoughAnglo-American specialists in poetry often describe what they do as “poetics,” for example, this word has long beenused (and is still used by scholars like Tzvetan Todorov and Gerard Genette) to refer to the theory of literature as such—a usage more recently extended, on both sides of the Atlantic, to the theory of anything at all (the poetics of speech, of prose, of space, of identity, etc.). At the theoretical

Historical Poetics, while in many ways an ally of Russian Formalism, finds itself in an uneasy relationship with the empiricist mode of formalist enquiry inasmuch as the latter is seen as generally inimical to historical contextualization. On the other hand, representatives of both Historical Poetics and the morphological method have at different points been accused of favoring atomizing analysis over aesthetic appreciation. This putative inability to grasp the work of art as a totality is a taint that literary theory inherited from nineteenth-century philology, whose mission was precisely to combine historicization with minute attention to details of verbal texture. By emphasizing their shared philological patrimony, the article argues for a reconciliation between the morphological method and Historical Poetics. The approach to literary forms it puts forward, which detects historical vitality in distinct elements revealed by morphological analysis, takes its inspiration from Alexander Veselovsky's theory of motif and Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of architectonics and the chronotope.

NEIL RAMSEY James Montgomery’s Waterloo: War and the Poetics ofHistory T he battle of Waterloo has long represented a historical watershed for nineteenth-century Britain, the victory over Napoleon mark­ ing a foundational moment in the nation’s rise to global imperial power. It is hardly surprising, then, that studies of Romantic literature have reflected at some length on the cultural and symbolic meanings attached to the bat­ tle. These studies have, however, taken two quite distinct approaches. On the one hand, as Philip Shaw has argued, Waterloo was viewed as an event of unparalleled sublimity that, nonetheless, resisted representation and failed to achieve its promise of consolidating national unity after twentytwo years of conflict.1 On the other hand, the battle has also been seen to have marked the termination of what Jerome Christensen defines as the condition of eventfulness characterizing Romantic wartime and its poetry.2 A product ofmodern mass media and daily news, wartime eventfulness de­ scribes not only the affective state of watching a war, but equally a time that is unable to secure a coherent narrative of how history will unfold. However, Waterloo allowed history to resume, the battle giving rise to a post-Waterloo Romantic historicism in which historical change came to be seen as determined by the slow progress of socio-cultural forces and a determining spirit of the age rather than the result of random contin­ gencies of violent conflict.3 In effect, the sublime event of Waterloo gave rise to a view of history that has no room for sublime events, the battle si­ multaneously defining and yet failing to define the course of the nation’s history.4 i. Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 2. Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 3. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics ofLiterary Culture and the Case ofRomantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 4. On Waterloo’s doubled existence as historical event and emblem of historical process, see alsoJan Mieszkowski, Watching War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 43-44. SiR, 56 (Fall 2017) 361 362 NEIL RAMSEY For the Romantic poet James Montgomery, the mediatized eventfulness ofwartime was the very reason that the Romantic era could be understood as an “age ofpoetry.”5 In order to consider Waterloo’s relation to Roman­ tic poetry and history, this article turns to a series oflectures on poetiy that Montgomery published in the 1830s. While almost wholly forgotten today, the lectures not only provide an early effort to construct a periodized liter­ ary history ofthe era, but they also establish a relation between war and po­ etry in ways that have striking echoes in recent scholarship on Romanti­ cism and war. Montgomery proposes that war formed the historical grounds for Romantic poetry because, as he argues, war rendered ordinary life visionary. In making such a claim, however, he also poeticizes war in ways that call into question quite how war relates to its historical moment. Appearing as a markedly textual phenomenon, war in Montgomery’s ac­ count works both to shape the history of an era and to lift an era out of its historical chronology. Montgomery finds this tension embodied in Water­ loo, a sublime event that simultaneously completes and yet redirects his­ tory. Relating his views to similar reflections on war and history in the sub­ sequent thought of Michel Foucault and Reinhart Koselleck, this article argues that Montgomery’s reflections draw attention to an underlying ten­ sion in Romantic historicist understanding of the battle (or what Koselleck calls an “epistemological aporia”) between the aleatory event and the struc­ tural determination of historical necessity.6 Remembered today primarily as an author of devotional hymns and an apostate from his youthful radicalism in Sheffield at the start of the 1790s, Montgomery has been almost entirely forgotten in histories of British Ro­ manticism. It is an omission that ignores his quite remarkable prominence at the time. William St. Clair shows that Montgomery’s sales figures during the first decades of the nineteenth century approximated those of other leading poets, such as Samuel Rogers, Thomas Campbell and Robert Southey.7...