Being Several: Reading Blake with Ed Roberson

Abstract

This essay takes the issue’s temporal prompt—“Romanticism, Now and Then”—as a chance to think about forms of rhythmic and rhetorical self-difference in the poetry of William Blake, read by way of the poetry of Ed Roberson. Both are poets who present the reader with overlapping forms of time in human and natural worlds. I draw on social theories (Du Bois, Mead, Fabian, Silva) and critical reading practices (Reed, Terada) that train the reader’s attention on the kinds of sociality and duration palpable through poetry’s formal resources. Borrowing cues from Roberson’s poetry, and taking up recent poetic orientations in critical race theory, I attempt a new look at Blake’s “The Tyger,” particularly its receptivity or vulnerability to the mixed durations of other parts or inhabitants of the world. For Blake, as for Roberson, attention to endangerment is also a way of exploring coevalness. However, I am also arguing here that familiar accounts of Romanticism’s feel for material natures and environmental consciousness require more attention to sociospatial and chronopolitical orientations, as constitutive of any politics of nature.