Shelley's Poetics, Wave Dynamics, and the Telling Rhythm of Complementarity

Abstract

With discovery of superstring theory, musical metaphors take on startling reality, for theory suggests that microscopic landscape is suffused with tiny strings whose pattern orchestrate evolution of cosmos. The winds of change, according superstring theory, gust through aeolian universe. Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and Quest for Ultimate Theory (1999) 19. It is well known that brain has periodic of activity.. entire [neural network] can operate only by large amount of cooperative, back-and-forth matching of activity at all levels ... neurons in central nervous system have rich diversity of electrical properties based on ionic conductances that endow with oscillatory Francisco Varela, et.al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science & Human Experience (1993)75 Drawn from quantum cosmology and cognitive neuroscience, epigraphs capture my recollection of critical coincidence in which my thinking about Percy Shelley's theoretical poetics began. too, theorized that cosmological structure expressed itself in vibrational and that mental events manifest autorhythmic oscillatory properties. In fact, he positioned their rhythmic interactions at foundation of his poetics, which proposed a certain order or rhythm at core of all imaginative expressivity (i.e. wide range of 'texts' falling within definitions of poetry in Defense). (1) Early in A Defense of Poetry, states that rhythmic principle within human beings corresponds to impressions which excite them (481). Mind and matter, as aspects of cosmos apparent in laws, express their shared dynamics in physical sensation[s] of rhythm and therein embody, in well chosen words of Amittai Aviram, an insistent manifestation of (Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry [1994]200. The world expresses itself in waves of information, yet these outer waves encounter and interact with inner waves generated in brain, placing consciousness itself at/as event horizon of Being. To employ phrase current with these interactive waves form patterns of interference, and under optimal conditions, both material vehicles of rhythmic manifestation/expression (biosphere and brain) achieve what contemporary physics and neuroscience term cohesion. For images of light and water provide symbolic tracks in wavelike properties of discussed in his poetics and embody properties thematically evoked in his best poetry. New readings of Shelley's figures and theories of light: confirm De Man's belief in Shelley Disfigured, that these tropes establish extraordinarily systematic foundation for occasionally chaotic poetic events (The Rhetoric of Romanticism [1984] 110). Critical analysis has also moved beyond this restricted rhetorical sphere of semiotic play toward more materialized and theorized views (Arkady Plotinsky, All Shapes of Light: The Quantum Mechanical Shelley, Shelley: Poet and Legislator ..., eds. Bennett and Curran [1996] 263). For example, given Shelley's probing nature, recovery of such symbolic pattern in physics and mind science of his day creates widened cultural context within which his imagistic tendencies. Light and water, two principles expressed through wave dynamics, embody wavelike aspects of mind and matter evoked in his poetry. Zajonc's term in Catching Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (1993) also fit Shelley: the lights of nature and of mind entwine ... call forth vision, and these harmonic interactions frame emergent feature calls perfect symmetry between inner and outer phenomena (2). Shelley's ability synthesize scientific and poetic insights grows from his comprehensive and synthetical view of celestial and cerebral mechanics (David Clark,ed. …