Lyrical Ballads Research Articles

Lives of the Dead Poets: Keats, Shelley, Coleridge by Karen Swann

Reviewed by: Lives of the Dead Poets: Keats, Shelley, Coleridge by Karen Swann Tadakazu Suzuki (bio) Lives of the Dead Poets: Keats, Shelley, Coleridge Karen Swann Fordham University Press, 2019, 192 pp. ISBN 9780823284177, $30.00 paperback. In calling her book Lives of the Dead Poets, Karen Swann is making obvious reference to Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779–81), with which she hopes to evoke a sense of “the hagiographic, cultic” attachment to the figures of the poet (1). The twist she gives to Johnson’s title—together with the cover image chosen for the book—signals an interest in the afterlives of her subjects, and the book opens with the claim that “this book explores the insistence of biography in the reception [End Page 849] histories of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge” (1). However, the five main chapters of the book do not really explore the roles biography performed in the processes of the poets’ posthumous receptions. Instead, these chapters mainly engage in examining the allegorical “figures” of the enervated, other-worldly poet that are brought into relief by close readings of the selected writings of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge, and quotations from biographical accounts written by their contemporaries. Certainly, these chapters develop into the book’s introduction, which helps us to think through our fascination with these poets’ prematurely truncated lives in a constructive way, rather than simply condemning it as naïve and sentimental. Yet, as Swann clearly states, her “primary engagements are with contemporaries who work in British (and in some cases European) romantic studies and who remain caught up, however tendentiously, with the legacy of deconstruction, especially the work of Paul de Man” (26). To some readers, especially those outside the circle of “professional romanticists” on whose work Swann builds her arguments, the discussions after the introduction might seem at times arduous (11). However, Swann’s interesting case studies will be rewarding in their own ways to any reader who perseveres and familiarizes themselves with her prose. The book’s title evokes, for a Keats lover, the state of the “posthumous life”: an untimely suspension of life in an insulated space “that open[s] between the death sentence . . . and the moment of his actual death” (31). The represented “figure,” which is in this equivocal state, functions as a Benjaminian allegory of “the Poet” in the age of commodity capitalism. Swann focuses on this poet-figure, which we encounter as a character in a poem or as an image of a particular poet constructed by themselves and their contemporaries. Chapter 1 explores the accounts of Keats in his “posthumous life” and the figures of arrested, beautiful youths in Endymion and The Fall of Hyperion. Chapter 2 looks at Shelley’s controversial elegy Adonais and finds in it the narrative of melancholic fixation dramatized as Urania’s longing for Adonais whose death she fails to encounter. Chapter 3 takes up what Swann calls the “pod people” in Shelley’s poems—“hermetic figures” appearing in Canto 10 of The Revolt of Islam or the “glamorous Witch” of The Witch of Atlas—that resonate with the image of the elusive and ephemeral Shelley the Poet (76, 83), and speculates on their radical political potential in their disengagement from our social and political concerns. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with late Coleridge who, “after the heady period of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, or alternatively, after the crash of 1802 that led to his convalescence trip to Malta in 1803” (99) frittered away his intellect in ways that were “not productive in ordinary terms” (92). Chapter 4 is a kind of performative “abstruse research” that teases out the figure of Coleridge engaging in his research—his “work without hope”—that is “unrenderable into any common language and unsuited to any common use” (95–96). Here, she gives concentrated readings of Coleridge’s two notebook poems and “Constancy to an Ideal Object,” informed by André Green’s psychoanalytical study of “the work of the negative” (100). This “long detour” prepares the reader to encounter “Coleridge the Talker” [End Page 850] in Chapter 5 (114). Making a good use of biographical materials, many of which are taken from...

Sympathie élocutoire, transparence du style et langage de la passion : la rhétorique selon Hume et Smith, prélude à la poétique du (pré)romantisme

Alors que se théorise une nouvelle rhétorique de communication, le concept de sympathie chez Hume et Smith réarticule l’équivoque entre expérience et pouvoir persuasif de la passion présente au sein du couple èthos-pathos depuis Aristote. La vis rhetorica de la sympathie humienne procède d’une esthétique réfléchissante aux effets moraux immotivés. Construisant un dispositif du moi projection du spectateur impartial, Smith objective sympathie et sentiments moraux. Il accentue le caractère linguistique de la communication et identifie le style dénué de figures à la transparence éthique de la sociabilité. La préface des Lyrical Ballads conjoint pathos et sympathie poétique. La simplicité de figures créatrices jaillit du langage idéal de la passion, à la différence de l’ enargeia performative du verbe blakien, parousie du logos où s’auto-réfléchit une sympathie absolue. Dans les odes de Gray et Collins, le poète en quête de sympathie affronte encore la personnification abstraite. Mais le pathème de l’écriture lyrique dans « The Mad Mother » et les deux « Nurse’s Song » atteste, outre la labilité de l’ èthos locutoire, une indétermination métrique et grammaticale des figures.

The Poetics of the Ordinary in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and Yeats’s Middle Poems Revolting against Tradition

The Poetics of the Ordinary in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and Yeats’s Middle Poems Revolting against Tradition

Wordsworth’s Ostentatious Neutrality

Focussing on instances from the Lyrical Ballads and The Excursion, this article tracks a peculiarity of Wordsworth’s diction whereby the moral significance of certain keywords is ostentatiously neu...

Editor’s Introduction: The Sheltering Tree

Editor’s Introduction: The Sheltering Tree

The Gothic-Romantic Hybridity in Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales

ABSTRACTMary Darby Robinson is well known for writing her final volume of poems, the Lyrical Tales (1800), as a direct answer, sometimes poem by poem, to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads. What has been less studied is how deliberately hybrid in style and allusions her response-poems are in the Tales, especially how prominently they foreground Gothic imagery, theatricality, and hyperbole in poems that also ape the emerging “romantic” mode of the Ballads themselves. Part of that “cheekiness,” I argue, stems from the condemnation of the Gothic that both Wordsworth and especially Coleridge had articulated in print, while also echoing it, albeit in highly modified ways, in their poetry. Most of what Robinson attempts with her hybrid Tales, though, develops the penchant in Gothic for symbolizing deep and unresolved ideological conflicts in Western culture. Her answers to Wordsworth and Coleridge, which I exemplify with selected Robinson Tales, therefore, bring out those very conflicts underlying, haunting, and even tormenting the speakers and the subject-matter in the original Lyrical Ballads.

The Textual Future of Wordsworth’s Classification of his Poems

The Textual Future of Wordsworth’s Classification of his Poems Michael Pickard (bio) Tables of contents have great consequences for collections of literary works, especially poetry. Far more than a mechanism for locating the individual pieces in a book, a Table of Contents gives a snapshot of how the author—or the editor—has conceptualized the material as a whole. This device makes the first move to supply the book with a general interpretive framework. Two of Wordsworth’s Tables of Contents provide striking examples. One—Lyrical Ballads—is famous, the other—the 1815 collected edition—infamous. The importance of the order of the poems in Lyrical Ballads is underscored by the difference between the first edition of 1798 and the second edition of 1800. Although Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly conceived and authored Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth insisted that the order of the poems be changed in the second edition.1He was responding to reviewers who had been stymied by Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts” which came first in the 1798 edition. The ordering of the 1815 Poems is even more interesting. “Much Ado about Nothing” was how The Monthly Review described it, and later readers—particularly readers in the twentieth century—have found Wordsworth’s categorical ordering bizarre and unhelpful.2Nonetheless, Wordsworth kept that basic framework in all the editions of his collected poems that he oversaw during his lifetime, and his posthumous editors preserved it for many years. Obscure as the classification may seem, it [End Page 285] represents Wordsworth’s own interpretation of his work. Scholars now scarcely remember Wordsworth’s 1815 Table of Contents and no longer try to fathom its significance. Chronological arrangements began to be installed in the late nineteenth century, and they are now regulative and commonplace. Understanding Wordsworth’s poetry today, I believe, should begin with a recovery of the meaning of those two radically different arrangements that governed the reception of his poetry.3In this essay, I trace the history of the now dominant chronological Table of Contents because it represents an interpretive focus that has not been critically examined. So universal is this interpretive framework that it has gained the bad eminence of self-transparency. But it is a framework that has a distinct historical shape. Exposing that history to critical reflection will help us understand some basic and unexamined preconceptions that we now bring to Wordsworth’s poetry. It will put us in a better position to conduct a needed reconsideration of Wordsworth’s own interpretive schema. ________ Wordsworth’s classification, which he expanded and revised in subsequent editions, was the only approved arrangement for his collected poems in use between its publication in 1815 and the first scholarly edition in 1882. After his death and for the next fifty years, it became as much a part of his literary estate as any of his poems. The nineteenth-century businessmen who, along with the Wordsworth family, oversaw the publication of the poet’s works during this period had little incentive to invest in a new arrangement. After all, it bore the legitimizing stamp of Wordsworth’s mind. For Edward Moxon, Wordsworth’s longtime publisher, the successive iterations of the classification had the further advantage of copyright protection. Copyright law at the time provided exclusive rights for the longer of two terms: the author’s life plus seven years or forty-two years. The first year that other publishers could compete with Moxon for a share of the market for Wordsworth, 1857, coincidentally, was both forty-two years after 1815 and seven years after the poet’s death. In other words, the 1815 Poems entered the public domain in the same year as all four editions of the Lyrical Ballads and the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes. This fact was not lost on Moxon’s enterprising competitors, chief among them George Routledge [End Page 286] and Co. Neither Routledge nor any other publisher save Moxon, however, could incorporate Wordsworth’s revisions to the 1815 classification. They had to, and did, take the arrangement as it stood in that year. To some extent, Wordsworth scholarship has understated this aspect of Wordsworth’s...

Emily Brontë's Lyrical Ballads

Emily Brontë's Lyrical Ballads Lee O'Brien (bio) George Levine wrote of Darwin that he "spent his life discovering differences."1 The discovery of differences and the subsequent wrestling with the destabilizing energies they bring into play may be said to be a defining preoccupation of Victorian thought as it manifested itself across an astonishing variety of cultural endeavors. Levine goes on to note Darwin's awe at little things: "pinhead-sized barnacles, and worms and bees and ants" (p. 245) that accompanied the sweep of his scientific imagining of the vast, inhuman process of natural selection. Emily Brontë's poetic imagination similarly changes scale, moving from cosmic visions to linnets, bees, and bluebells. Differences, the often-troubled borders between warring states of mind, of will, of desire, shape her poetry. Her language subtly blends visionary intensity with a powerful awareness of the significance of the ordinary fabric of day-to-day life. Reading the poems provokes a tantalizing sense that what they are obviously about is not what they are actually about: apparent simplicity breaks down very quickly under the pressure of the questions it raises. How do the poems generate such complex effects given the real sense of mystery that animates them? Many poems turn on the nature of a power they simultaneously invoke and question, adding an element of self-reflexivity that is augmented by the inscrutable connections they have to the Gondal saga and to Wuthering Heights, connections not explicitly addressed by Brontë herself. My essay constructs an account of the formal nature of the poems and explores the intertextual function of the ballad—particularly the Border ballad—as deployed by Brontë to extend the capacity of the post-Romantic lyric to perform a persistently enigmatic subjectivity. She draws together intensity and ambiguity, presence and abstraction, intimacy and unavailability in such a way as to prefigure many later forms of the Victorian lyric while, as Susan Stewart intimates, exploring "the eroticisation of boundary," an eroticization that is both visionary and violent: "visions rise and change which kill me with desire."2 The sense of difference from the run of the mill that the poems can generate was noted at the time of publication. A reviewer in the Athenaeum, quoted by Elizabeth Gaskell in The Life of Charlotte Bronte, observes that they "convey an impression of originality beyond what his contributions to these volumes embody."3 As the pronoun indicates, this review was written before the [End Page 511] "Ellis Bell" mask was removed by Charlotte, an "unwarranted disclosure" that enraged Emily who, Charlotte belatedly realized, "will not endure to be alluded to under any appellation than the nom de plume."4 As with most biographical details relating to Emily, this one is open to a number of interpretations: that, for example, she needed the nom de plume to allow her to write about herself under cover and felt the exposure grievously, or that it served to indicate that the identity of Emily Brontë had no part to play in the poetry of Ellis Bell. Another early reader observes, "if [her] poems are read by themselves [that is, separately from Anne's and Charlotte's] . . . it will be seen that strength is their most remarkable characteristic."5 Charlotte saw them as "not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry woman generally write"; she felt seized by something "more than surprise": "I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear they had also a peculiar music—wild, melancholy, and elevating."6 Charlotte's response has more to do with gender than genre, yet the language she uses is also obliquely grounded in genre. Her appreciation of the subtle urgency of the address combined with a peculiar music, "wild" and "melancholy," can suggest ballads as much as a lyric intensity. The remarks in the introductory note to Graham Tomson's (Rosamund Marriott Watson) collection, Ballads of the North Countrie (1888) are helpful in drawing a distinction between ballads and lyrics as they were perceived in the late nineteenth century, a perspective that looks back on the cultural impact of the ballad revival: "The Ballads in this collection are, for the most part, English and...

Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: The ‘Morning Post’ and the Road to ‘Dejection’ by Heidi Thomson

 Reviews covering a vast range of issues relating to textual variants, subtextual meanings, cultural legacies, and historical contexts. Pittock describes the Museum as a ‘monument to the musical and generic fusion culture of eighteenth-century Scotland’ (, ); this edition might equally be described as a monumental contribution to the study of Burns and Scottish music, whose influence will be felt for decades to come. U  L A B Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: e ‘Morning Post’ and the Road to ‘Dejection ’. by H T. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . xii+.£.. ISBN ––––. In the first few pages of Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper, Heidi omson poses the question ‘why, you may well ask, another book inspired by “Dejection”?’ (p. ), which one might supplement by asking whether we need another book about Coleridge and Wordsworth and, more specifically, the protracted collapse of their friendship, founded largely in mutual disillusionment and played out with the publication of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads; her answer is simple: ‘because I wanted to find out more about Coleridge’s compulsive expression of what could be considered private matters’ (p. ). Accordingly, this book focuses on just a few years of Coleridge’s life—–—during his ‘intense involvement with the Morning Post’ as a way of ‘unlocking his personal and poetic interests’ in a study that is primarily biographical, but also ‘textual and contextual’ (p. ). e results are surprising and persuasive, and throughout her book, omson provides sustained and illuminated readings of largely neglected pieces, excavates Coleridge’s complex and ever shiing state of mind (in part produced by his infatuation or limerent devotion to Sara Hutchinson and his compromised feelings towards his wife, whom he admired as a mother but struggled to adore as a lover), and also exposes and explores his friendship with Mary Robinson. Biography and creativity are seen to be interwoven to the point of co-dependency—which is, perhaps, on the face of it, an obvious point to make; but the book unpicks and unpacks the intricacies of their self-involvement in a consistently compelling way. omson examines Coleridge’s ‘reluctant, painful realization’ that ‘neither Wordsworth nor Sara Hutchinson were as obsessed with Coleridge as he was with them’ and his ‘need to publicize it’ (p. ). She further reveals that ‘his ideas about poets and poetry were to a surprising degree associated with his frustrated expectations of domestic happiness’ (p. ). In assessing how he publicized these frustrations, she presents a Coleridge who always needed to have the last word. e second chapter (aer the Introduction) sets the scene for what follows, examines Coleridge’s return from Germany in July , discusses how ‘the two most important relationships’ in his life—his marriage to Sara Fricker and his friendship with Wordsworth—‘came to a watershed’ (pp. , ), and considers his love of the North (geography being an important theme in the book: Coleridge was always MLR, .,   concerned with his proximity to those who were in—or moving out of—his life). e third discusses Coleridge’s work at the Morning Post and devotes considerable space to a prolonged assessment of the largely neglected poem ‘Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie’ (later retitled ‘Love’), considering it in relation to ‘e Eolian Harp’, ‘To William Wordsworth’, and ‘Lewti’. e fourth considers Coleridge’s ‘Ode to Georgiana’ (the Duchess of Devonshire) and his fascinating essay on Pitt, which reveals much of Coleridge’s talent for astute insight. Aer this Coleridge leaves London and heads north to Greta Hall. omson traces the origin of the depression that would be immortalized in ‘Dejection’ from this period, combining newspaper pieces with letters and notebook entries to build up a full picture of his mental and emotional state. e next two chapters focus on Coleridge’s surprisingly close relationship to Mary Robinson and how it complicated the Coleridge/Wordsworth paradigm. e penultimate chapter contextualizes ‘Dejection’ in relation to ‘lesser known poems and texts which were published at about the same time in the Morning Post’ (p. ). e conclusion concentrates on the differences between the April and October versions of ‘Dejection’, and claims that ‘the poem that Coleridge published in the Morning Post is just as much both...

Philip Roth and Pleasure

Philip Roth and Pleasure Patrick Hayes (bio) William Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is in no sense an aesthete's charter, nor do we tend to think of Wordsworth himself as a hedonist. But this writer, who did perhaps more than anyone to establish modern literature as an object of serious attention and human importance, nonetheless insisted that its primary function is to give "immediate pleasure," and that pleasure itself is no less than the "grand elementary principle" of our lives. Any form of writing that forgets this fact, Wordsworth insisted, will quickly become irrelevant.1 The question of irrelevance was on everyone's mind in a seminar I attended in Boston a few years ago, the aim of which was to reflect upon the crisis in literary studies in America. Falling enrollments, cuts in funding, and a sense of becoming ever more peripheral: these were our concerns. It was led by two scholars who had both published well-received academic books on postwar literature: one was about the institutional and economic environment of contemporary writing; the other dealt with the relationship between literature and human rights discourse. Neither of these thoughtful and intelligent books was animated by the idea that pleasure is the "grand elementary principle" that should inform our attention to literature at its deepest level. And as the seminar developed, there was an absence of the word "pleasure," or any of its cognates. Instead, the discussion was very much in keeping with the broadly sociological emphasis of the "Post-45" group of scholars, who are currently setting the direction of contemporary American literary studies.2 By contrast, pleasure is very emphatically something that Philip Roth did not forget about. It might even be said that his fiction rubs our noses in it. From Alexander Portnoy's frantic pursuit of sexual gratification, to Mickey Sabbath's delirious mockery of all moral values, Roth was intent on showing us that pleasure matters. He refused, to quote another of his characters, to "deodorize life and make it palatable" (Communist 179), insisting we confront the most embarrassing aspects of our humanity. And while Roth remains a very popular writer, he has often been marginalized and treated with suspicion by academic literary studies in America—that profession which now [End Page 62] finds itself in crisis, with falling enrollments and a sense of becoming ever more peripheral. Of course Wordsworth himself would hardly have recognized Roth's conception of pleasure, let alone hailed him as the savior of literary value. In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads the experience of pleasure is understood via David Hartley's pantheistic psychology as a route to our best selves, and in some ways The Prelude affirms this view: its main narrative suggests that nature teaches us through pleasurable encounters with the beautiful and the sublime, and that poetry recaptures and intensifies those experiences, deepening that process of education.3 As I have argued elsewhere, Roth's significance lies not least in the way his writing challenges this redemptive view of life—or more precisely, the assumption that our life is in need of any sort of redemption. Instead there is a distinctively Nietzschean orientation in his work, a tendency to conceive pleasure in a more explicitly vitalistic and embodied way as a love of intensities, of those qualitatively rich forms of becoming that Nietzsche called the "will to power" (his own name for that "grand elementary principle"). But while there is much to separate Roth and Wordsworth, they are united in the view that pleasure is in the deepest sense not a form of hedonistic dissipation but a special type of intelligence, and that one of the most primary things literature can do is educate us about it. Education was one of Roth's most enduring concerns, and among the many educators portrayed in his fiction one of the most memorable is Murray Ringold, the high school English teacher featured in I Married a Communist. Zuckerman remembers feeling "in the sexual sense, the power of a male high school teacher like Murray Ringold—masculine authority uncorrected by piety" (Communist 2). Yet Mr. Ringold's interest in power resides not in crude forms of...

Wordsworth Elegizing the Lyrical Ballad in the 1830s and 1840s

Elegy has become a genre more honored in the breach than the observance: its focus on the poet-mourner’s own grief risks seeming histrionic. Or it may seem that the poet consoles herself too quickly, undermining her sincerity and disrespecting the deceased. This article explores a negotiation of the risks attendant upon elegy by examining three poems of William Wordsworth’s late career that commemorate members of his intimate circle, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These poems are significant examples of Wordsworth’s revision of the elegiac as he had inherited and practiced it because they commemorate and mourn tacitly, founding themselves on a newly dead friend’s old poetic words rather than voicing grief directly. What is memorialized is as much the old poetry as the friend himself.

Баллада в современной отечественной поэзии: пути и характер трансформации жанровой формы

The article analyzes the features of transformation of ballad genre form in modern Russian poetry. Relying on theoretical propositions about the specifics of the genre, developed in the works of Yu. N. Tynianov and M. M. Bakhtin, the nature of changes in the features of the genre of ballad are explored in the creative practice of poets of the turn of 20 th -21 st centuries. The study found that the genre “image” of ballad is directly related to the feature of the modern poetic process, in which there are “traditional” and “avant-garde” paradigms. It is noted that in the works of poets-traditionalists (E. Rein, O. Khlebnikov, O. Nikolaeva, S. Kekova, D. Bykov, etc.) is dominated by a variant of the lyrical ballad, which has a philosophical, elegiac nature, and a special drama and tension are associated here with nostalgic sadness about the past, the loss of ties to the past, discomfort in the present. It is shown that the works of avant-garde poets (T. Kibirov, E. Schvarts, F. Svarovsky, A. Rovinsky, D. Vodennikov etc.) often decanonize genre characteristics of romantic ballads. It is emphasized that through the genre synthesis of ballad, lyrical cycle, parable, and fable the avant-garde poets demonstrate the instability of the era of the late 20 th century, the confusion of a man caught in the maelstrom of socio-political events. Analyzing the work of poets, the authors prove that, unlike the poets-traditionalists, the representatives of the avant-garde trend abandon traditional lyricism and actively use all the variety of postmodern techniques.

The Poetics of Susceptibility: Wordsworth and Ecological Thought

The Poetics of Susceptibility: Wordsworth and Ecological Thought Amelia Klein (bio) Although wordsworth was heralded early on as a poet of nature, there is a long tradition of looking askance at his engagement with the natural world, indeed of questioning whether his poetry actually says anything about nature at all. Reviewing The Excursion in 1814, William Hazlitt implies that, whatever its purported subject may be, Wordsworth’s poetry is always in truth about Wordsworth himself. “There is, in fact, in Mr. Wordsworth’s mind,” writes Hazlitt, a repugnance to admit any thing that tells for itself, without the interpretation of the poet,—a fastidious antipathy to immediate effect,—a systematic unwillingness to share the palm with his subject.1 Despite Wordsworth’s own affirmation, in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, that “I have tried always to look steadily at my subject,”2 he is, according to Hazlitt, constantly getting in his subject’s way, constantly displacing “immediate effect” into “interpretation”—as if it were always quite clear where one ends and the other begins. He gives us not the thing itself, but only his ideas about it. This image of a narcissistic Wordsworth, unwilling “to share the palm with his subject” and interested in nothing so much as his own mind, has proven extraordinarily tenacious. An entire critical heritage has taken Hazlitt’s position, a position reinforced by Keats when he spoke in a letter of “the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,”3 a characterization that would come to be, as Paul Fry observes, “the singlemost tyrannical [End Page 105] notion governing preconceptions about Wordsworth to this day.”4 The result has been a persistent and exaggerated emphasis on self, and mind, and consciousness in Wordsworth’s poetry, while his real sensitivity to nature has been obscured. Throughout this critical history, the charge of egotism or subjectivism has been closely allied with the idea that Wordsworth is preeminently a poet guilty of what John Ruskin termed the pathetic fallacy. Not only does he impose his interpretation on things that would otherwise tell for themselves, as Hazlitt gripes; he habitually misperceives things to begin with by projecting his own thoughts and feelings onto them. Ruskin defined the pathetic fallacy as that “state of mind” which produces “a falseness in all our impressions of external things.”5 The pathetic fallacy projects inner, subjective experience where it doesn’t belong, onto what Ruskin calls “pure physical nature”—which he describes as “mere cold corporealness” and as “dead enough in itself.”6 The implication is that we know with certainty what nature is (purely physical, inert) and isn’t (animated, expressive). Wherever we find a description of nature as charged with emotion, as somehow moving or even speaking to the perceiver, what is being described is not really nature at all, but only the person looking at it—not “immediate effect,” in Hazlitt’s terms, not a “thing that tells for itself,” but “interpretation.” According to Ruskin, poets who fall prey to the pathetic fallacy—chief among them Wordsworth—are “in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them.”7 They can’t see straight, can’t see what is really there, and therefore can’t describe it accurately. Drawing a parallel between a poetics that saturates the natural world with private feelings and an idealist philosophy that holds “it does not much matter what things are in themselves, but only what they are to us,”8 Ruskin like Hazlitt casts Wordsworth as a poet who makes the outer world a reflex of personal affect, an emblem of the self, rather than offering materially accurate images of things themselves. Critics of quite different stripes have agreed that Wordsworth’s descriptions of nature are not to be trusted. They disagree as to whether, or to what degree, his disingenuous engagement with nature—and his body of work as a whole—is to be censured or applauded. Among the positive readings are Geoffrey Hartman’s classic analysis of Wordsworth as a poet of [End Page 106] transcendent, “essentially apocalyptic” imagination,9 who repeatedly turns and returns to nature to shield himself from his own visionary power and...

Coleridge and Cosmopolitan Intellectualism, 1794–1804: The Legacy of Göttingen University. Maximiliaan van Woudenberg. New York: Routledge, 2018. Pp. x+340.

Coleridge and Cosmopolitan Intellectualism, 1794–1804: The Legacy of Göttingen University. Maximiliaan van Woudenberg. New York: Routledge, 2018. Pp. x+340.

Wordsworth’s Sibling Logic: “We Are Seven” and “Tintern Abbey”

ABSTRACTThis essay proposes that the logic of sibling kinship—in particular, siblinghood’s inter-subjective, networked, and horizontal forms of relationality—enhances our understanding of William Wordsworth’s poetic subject. Focusing on sibling-oriented works across Lyrical Ballads, including “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” and “We are Seven,” I consider how the poet’s vision of selfhood extends beyond an inclusive, solitary “egotistical sublime” to incorporate, instead, a multi-dimensional sense of interconnectedness with others. Such sibling inter-subjectivity, this piece argues, proves to be far more integral to Wordsworth’s poetic identity than occasional references to his sister Dorothy have otherwise implied. While Wordsworth’s sibling speakers reflect historical realities of family systems during the late eighteenth century, I demonstrate how these poeticized siblings also reverberate with contemporary notions of queer temporality, as they embody Wordsworth’s consciousness of an interdependent past, present, and future.

Reaction: Exploring the Chemistry Frontier in Water-Borne Vessels

In 2007, John Warner and Jim Babcock founded the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry and, with Amy Cannon, founded the green chemistry education nonprofit organization Beyond Benign. John is the recipient of the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Mentoring and the 2014 Perkin Medal. In addition, John is one of the founders of the field of green chemistry and is co-author of the defining textbook Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice. In 2017, the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Technische Universitat Berlin announced the naming of the John Warner Center for Green Chemistry Start-Ups in his honor.

Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry. Michael Gamer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+307.

<i>Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry</i>. Michael Gamer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+307.

Preface to Lyrical Ballads re–examined

Preface to Lyrical Ballads re–examined

Wordsworth's Dropsy: Flux and Figure in The Excursion

This essay traces how William Wordsworth engages with both Romantic medical discourse and aesthetic theory by insisting that the mind is physically embodied, and finds his most complex and compelling treatment of this subject in his long poem of 1814, The Excursion. Adapting the formal model of poesis as a hydraulic process that he had theorized in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, the Wordsworth of 1814 considers minds as embodied brains governed by the influx of both liquid and language: the discovery of a waterlogged Voltaire corresponds to the shape of the Solitary's psychology through the formal mechanisms of intake, excess, and outflow. In this poem, however, Wordsworth's well-established hydraulics take on a newly pathological function, as his characters employ the imagery of the dropsy of the brain, or hydrocephalus, as they investigate and attempt to treat the Solitary's morbid state of being. What emerges throughout The Excursion – and, in turn, in ‘Simon Lee’ – is that the physical register of disease stands in for the characters' emotional states as a sylleptic structure of feeling. Ultimately, Wordsworth's dropsical brains bring into focus the Romantic idea of poetry as organic form, to ask how mechanistic and organic models might be reconciled in his notion of the hydraulic mind.

Modernism and T. S. Eliot

The appearance in 2015 of a new edition of Eliot’s complete poems, with its staggeringly detailed commentary, was an invitation to ponder once more the major contribution he made to what became known in academic circles as modernism. It was the Nobel laureate Peter Medawar who once wondered whether ‘doctrinaire psychoanalysis’ was not perhaps ‘the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century’.1 Anyone who proposed modernism as a strong candidate for second place would need to remember that having ideas that turn out to be false does not in itself make someone a confidence trickster. Only if the manner in which they are set out, and urged on the public, involves some degree of self-interest and deception might such a harsh term begin to seem justified. Modernism in Britain was crucially dependent of a number of ideas Eliot put forward in the years immediately following the First World War. The most well-known of these is the notion that ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates’.2 The impersonality of great art appears to have been very much in the air as Eliot was making his mark. In one of the essays in the collection he called The Sacred Wood, published in 1920, he quotes with approval an obscure French critic who had written that ‘there is a literary beauty which is in some ways impersonal and perfectly distinct from the make-up of the author himself’.3 As far as the specifically English context is concerned, Eliot’s attitude could be seen as a response to a way of thinking that can be traced back to the preface to Lyrical Ballads, in which it is assumed that poets are people of powerful and interesting feelings, so that the more powerful and interesting those feelings are, the better poets they will be. This deflection away from the problems of composition no doubt gave rise to much artless self-expression, but if this is the tendency against which Eliot is protesting, his response to it is peculiar and extreme. ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion’, he writes in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, the essay where most of his most frequently quoted formulations about impersonality appear, and that is no doubt quite true; yet it is a surprise to find him continuing immediately with ‘but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’ (the repetition of ‘escape’ saves any commentator who finds the eyebrows lifting from having to put that word in italics). The impression here of inadvertent self-revelation is not lessened by Eliot ending this section of his essay with the foppish: ‘But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things’ (SE, p. 21).