Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the EditorPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMeeting during the 2019 MLA convention in Chicago, the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association considered the topic, “Romantic Elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water.” The Wordsworth Circle vol. 50, no. 2 (spring 2019) includes the papers presented by Paul Cheshire, Gillen D’Arcy Wood, and Jacob Risinger, with new essays by Ralph Pite, Bysshe Inigo Coffey, Jeffrey Cass, and James Engell.Identified by Empedocles and Aristotle, who added “aether,” the elements were considered the basic constituents of the material world, the world of nature, to which the ancients assigned myths and gods such as Gaia, Neptune, Vulcan, and Aeolus. As Richard Holmes explained in The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Vintage, 2008), the new sciences discovered subtle, invisible, impalpable dimensions, powers and forces (245–47) in these elements, with terrestrial, secular, biological, economic, and industrial functions. For example, in 1774, among the different “airs,” Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen, and within twenty years, four scientists in three countries identified photosynthesis as the process by which plants produced from other elements—from sun, water, chlorophyll, and carbon dioxide—oxygen, the gas accounting for respiration and human life. About the same time, by simple observation, William Herschel, a German musician looking through his telescopes on the streets of Bath, turned the aether into an infinite and evolving universe. By independent observation, at the same time, James Hutton, a Scottish gentleman farmer, hearing what Wordsworth called “the ghostly language of the ancient earth,” proposed a living earth shaped by wind, water, and inner fires with “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of end,” he wrote in Theory of the Earth (1795). Joseph Banks, William Smith, Mary Anning, Humphrey Davy, Charles Darwin, Joseph Dalton (who turned the five elements into twenty, inconceivably small and numerous), and so many more, observing, exploring, collecting, mostly through natural encounters rather than texts or laboratories, challenged the boundaries of time and space and accounted for human life, for all life.Starting with the same ancient elements, inventors, industrialists, explorers, and natural philosophers revealed new secular powers and forces (magnetism, steam, electricity, from the micro- to the macroscopic), while artists and poets preserved their mythic character celebrating a world of nature to which the sciences were proving human beings are “essentially adapted,” as Wordsworth said in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Among the Romantic writers, then, the ancient elements remain the common language of art, industry, and science.The papers selected for the 2020 meeting of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association on Asian Romanticism, conducted by Peter Kitson, will appear in TWC vol. 51, no. 2. We also solicit more papers on that topic, relevant to all of Asia and other disciplines: encounters with Great Britain in art, science, linguistics, exploration, religion, and translation.— MG Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 50, Number 2Spring 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704331 © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.