Stewart, Dustin. Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

Abstract

In September 2021, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies hosted a discussion of Futures of Enlightenment Poetry, that year’s recipient of the Louis A. Gottschalk prize. Early on, one participant noted that this monograph was the first on poetry to earn the award since 1985. Although a single honor can hardly speak for the commitments and trends of such an interdisciplinary field, it does represent an important statement as to what that field values. Stewart’s book is erudite, engaging, and well argued; one executed so smoothly, on any topic, would surely merit recognition. But it is significant that after more than thirty-five years, ASECS has saluted a book dedicated to the study of poetry. Futures of Enlightenment Poetry should find a wide readership among scholars of the period, including but not limited to those who put poetry at the center of their teaching or research.Stewart identifies two related strains of religious thought in poetry of the long eighteenth century: notions of the afterlife, or “futurity,” as a kind of disembodiment—“a spiritualist tendency” hastening the flight of the soul—or re-embodiment—a “mortalist” one extending the reach of the material world. Moving a step further, he also proposes that the “reversible rhythm” between these two visions informed “the theory and practice of poetics in Enlightenment England.” More specifically, “disagreement about what the afterlife is like spilled over into disagreement about what poetry is like, what it is and what it can do.”This book is remarkable for how deftly and consistently it allows one idea to open out onto the next, even as it provides gentle reminders of where we’ve been and where we’re going, especially in transitions between chapters. Succinct headnotes introducing major sections, or “movements,” as well as two engaging interludes tracing alternative paths through eighteenth-century poetics, are refreshing organizational features. I can imagine that such attention to readerly experience translates to exceptional work in the classroom, and in fact while reading I was reminded of the captivating language that marked the lectures of my best teachers. This effect also derives from the book’s elegant prose and conversational tone, which manage simultaneously to indicate both intellect and inclusiveness.The introduction puts the book’s central terms into conversation not only with Paradise Lost but also with contemporary writers, and we return to Milton in the first chapter, “An Education for the Present,” which offers an extended reading of Paradise Regained. This chapter also constitutes most of “Waiting for Matter,” the book’s first movement. For Stewart, the Son is perpetually learning, and as a result his “saying ‘not yet’ to the future generates the present tense of the poem. It carves out the possibility of genuine freedom here and now, as opposed to a present that is in fact either a corollary of some past arrangement . . . or a loan against some expected future.” Here and often elsewhere, broader arguments find grounding in textual particulars. Guided by trenchant analyses of diction—the interplay between “while,” “wiles,” “wild,” and “will”—and syntax—the crucial work of caesura to emphasize stasis—this chapter makes a compelling case for the poetic and theological significance of the poem’s refusal to work proleptically. Indeed, the book is often at its strongest where Stewart brings poetic detail to the fore, guiding us through an attentive reading and then up into more sweeping implications. In some later moments, excerpted poetry will be left to speak for itself, representing an idea but not treated as minutely. Yet I was so enthralled by moments of intensive reading that I wished for every quoted passage to receive the same careful treatment.The first of two interludes arrives next; Stewart describes these as “sketching out a shadow book of sorts,” an alternative “story” that might be told about eighteenth-century poetry “if a new push toward the spiritualist perspective with its contrary pattern hadn’t intervened along the way.” I appreciated these sections primarily for their work in expanding the book’s range of poets: Thomson here, and later, Gray and Cowper.The second movement, “Rising to Spirit,” includes chapters on Elizabeth Singer Rowe (“Gender after Sex”), Edward Young (“Commerce after Money”), and Mark Akenside (“Creation after Reproduction”), whose “variations on spiritualist poetics” offer a fuller view of “the soul’s release as a break from repetition into difference, sameness into novelty.” Perhaps most striking about these chapters are their varied ways of treating one crucial point: that poetic writing itself makes possible certain forms of theological vision, or rather, that some kinds of intellectual and spiritual work rely on poetic expression to be realized. For instance, in Rowe’s case, “Poetry gives her a name for the exultation she feels and theologizes as release . . . and its conventions give her a way to represent on the printed page both the idea of rupture and the corresponding feeling.”The chapter on Young suggests original ways to link poetics and early capitalism, exploring “souls in poetry that come to resemble capital by expanding, accumulating individual spirit, in the act of circulating from one place or ground to another.” Here Stewart proposes intriguing connections between spiritual thinking and economic language, especially where both relate to the imperialist violence of mining. Finally, we encounter in Akenside a “dream of ascent,” early evolutionary thought that “places stress on the limits of actually existing physicality, both at the level of particular life forms and at that of life itself.” I especially appreciated in this chapter a discussion of the couplet form as generating movement forward, rather than proceeding as a series of closed units; like other sensitive readers of eighteenth-century poetry working today, Stewart resists tired characterizations of the period’s poetic forms.In the final movement, “Returning to Matter,” Stewart turns to Romanticism, reading Anna Letitia Barbauld in the fifth chapter, “The Place for Gloom,” and Wordsworth in the sixth, “Romantic Re-Embodiment and Beyond,” and concluding with brief examinations of Wheatley, Blake, and Dickinson. Whereas Barbauld appears ultimately to have worked in contrast to spiritualist poets, offering instead a materialist poetics unafraid of negative affect, Wordsworth develops a materialism celebrating the spiritual possibilities open to the earthbound and timebound soul.Futures of Enlightenment Poetry proposes rich new ways of exploring the period. Stewart’s work is a testament to the relevance of theology and poetry for eighteenth-century studies, and of eighteenth-century studies for humanistic understanding writ large. While reading, I was sometimes reminded of a remark in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.” In a way, Stewart helps us to see that the writing and reading of poetry might make possible some glimpses of just such an eternal life.