James Montgomery’s Waterloo: War and the Poetics of History

Abstract

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...