Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment by Mark Sandy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment by Mark Sandy David J. Langston Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment. By Mark Sandy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. In Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism, Mark Sandy explores how romantic writers galvanized a succession of rich, multilayered responses among chiefly American writers extending past F. Scott Fitzgerald to Wallace Stevens and Toni Morrison. Each chapter inspects allusions, textual parallels, and “hauntings”—one of Sandy’s guiding concepts for explaining transformation—as these writers conduct a vigorous textual give-and-take focused on his subtitle’s three terms: the epistemic status of the self, changing aesthetic standards for authentic representation, and, finally, the shifting interplay between self and natural world. While Sandy’s fresh insights add resonance to the past century’s cultural dialogue, he also risks making this dialogue sound more harmonious than it sometimes was. The difficulty is partly the consequence of an interpretive method that proceeds with two interlocking analytical modes: close examination of specific texts that abruptly pivots into juxtaposing texts by different writers who share, he says, concurrent poetic objectives. The explications are nuanced and useful; the comparisons can be illuminating but they sometimes raise questions about the level of agreement that Sandy attributes to these writers. The advantages and limitations of an interpretive method that Sandy calls a “chamber of echoes” (8) can be illustrated by the echoes he identifies between Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” theme in Nature and John Keats’s watchword for poetic method, “negative capability.” On one level, we can readily agree when Sandy finds the two poets sharing a “central idea,” relatedness, that elevates “intuitive disclosure” over consecutive reasoning as the poet’s special gift (23). But if relatedness could identify connections between Keats and Emerson, the term loses several degrees of credibility when we examine its precise consequences in the context of Sandy’s additional claim that Keats and Emerson both grant the poet’s subjectivity a central role to the poet’s project: Emerson’s formulation echoes Keats’s empathetic ability to enter, unobtrusively, into other states of being and feel those inner psychic and physical spaces beyond ourselves. . . . Keats’s negatively capable imagination permits the mind to “take part” in [the] existence of another being’s inner spaces, solidity and life. (22; emphasis added) Sandy’s commentary overlooks how Emerson’s poetic strategy concentrates on landscape, not on adopting another perspective such as Keats’s often-cited sparrow pecking about the gravel. In Nature, Emerson describes himself as a lone observer whose obtrusive visionary transcendence is threatened by “laborers . . . digging in the field hard by” because other competing perspectives [End Page 124] spoil his transcendent solitary vision (Emerson: Essays and Lectures, edited by Joel Porte, Library of America, 1983, p. 42. Hereafter EL). Emerson’s poetics have no Porphyro-and-Madeline intersubjective moments of shared, if transitory, sublimity, and my puzzlement over Sandy’s reading of Emerson is compounded when, in his skillful rendering of a “chamber of echoes” activated between Fitzgerald and Keats, Sandy expressly cites Keats’s distinction between the “chameleon poet” and William Wordsworth, the poet of the “egotistical sublime” (41). Moreover, in his concluding “Coda,” Sandy even observes that Wordsworth courts a “dangerous solipsism,” a judgment that applies equally to Emerson (149). But there is a further ramification. For Emerson, not only do moments of visionary intensity occur in isolation, but the second step—achieving “earnest vision”—erases the sensuous immediacy that figures so crucially in Keats’s imagination: When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added, grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. (EL 33) Reason, Emerson’s term for the supreme power of consciousness, renders all surfaces as transparent, and Emerson’s transparent self—the element that Sandy stipulates to be the one reliable fixity in Emerson’s flux of experience (24)—expands beyond the bounds of any specific identity. The poet’s...