The Infrastructural Sublime and Imperial Landscape Aesthetics: Robert Southey, Poet Laureate, and Thomas Telford, Father of Civil Engineering

Abstract

ABSTRACT The following essay turns to Britain’s imperial past to unravel a knotty link between celebrations of Britain’s civil infrastructure and Romantic authors’ accounts of poetic prowess. Although the relationship between poetics, landscape, and architecture remains a core concern within Romantic literary criticism, little work studies the widely celebrated innovations of this period’s civil engineers. But when we recognize how bridges, roadways, and canals from this era were rendered sublime both by influential poets such as Robert Southey and Britain’s popular presses, we discover a troubling link between British infrastructural aesthetics, poetics, and empire. Studies on Romantic literature and architectural form tend to foreground ruins, and they typically theorize the decay of structures both actual and figurative. Left virtually unconsidered in these accounts is the technology of the bridge, not to mention grand undertakings like Thomas Telford’s work on the expansive Holyhead Road project, its relation to colonial ideology, or to Southey, Telford’s close acquaintance and Britain’s Poet Laureate. Yet to bring these massive and widely celebrated infrastructural developments into conversation with historical and literary inquiry compels us to reconsider key intersections between national politics, sublime aesthetics, and architectural and poetic art born of the British Romantic movement.