Anahid Nersessian begins a discussion of “Wordsworth’s obscurity” in her new study The Calamity Form with a disarmingly candid admission. “I don’t like Wordsworth. I almost said I don’t care for him, but that’s not quite true,” because, after all, “a day spent writing about Wordsworth” or a class given over to exploring his poetry carries palpable rewards. But Wordsworth “leaves [her] cold,” and the only pleasure associated with him is that of reading him in the company of someone like Geoffrey Hartman, but never, it appears, on her own (58–59). By the end of a chapter given over almost entirely to the “pastoral” poem “Michael” (and to a ruined sheepfold on which so much depends), we finally learn the source of this disaffection. Wordsworth doesn’t like Nersessian and similar readers because they bring more to his texts than he can possibly give back. Terminally unhappy, willfully reticent, antisocial, Wordsworth writes poetry that Nersessian is convinced “wants [her] gone” (91), which proves crucial both to her demonstration here and the new study overall.Between the extremities of liking and remaining in the cold is the calamity form. But the affective frame is important here because it makes clear the extent to which a study of “form” is an “affect study” as well. In this instance the animus begins with Wordsworth before getting to a reader who has finally had enough. And Wordsworth makes it easy, if not always to Nersessian’s ostensible purpose. “Michael’s” “straggling heap of stones” is instantly inculpatory as something seen by the reader but “notice[d] not” and where that reader (the poem’s “you”) is accordingly banished, certainly admonished, as punishment for just being there. The animus is felt still more in the poem’s story of filial disobedience, which is also one of paternal or poetical tyranny. Here a climactic exhortation all but bypasses Michael’s son to render the sheepfold-in-progress, and the covenant it signifies, a placeholder for the poem that Michael, speaking more or less for Wordsworth, calls “a work for us.” A “work” or covenant that is then broken multiple times: by the son, who leaves, never to return; by the father, who suspends work, allowing the sheepfold to become a heap; and finally by the reader, always the reader, who is charged on every reading with not getting it.The reader has no choice in this poem: either in missing the thing that’s already reduced to nothing or in incurring blame for reading in the first place. Nersessian doesn’t do a lot with this except, again, as a general impression or feeling. She is concerned less with “Michael” as calamity form than with the stones as the particular calamity form to which the poem reduces on her analysis. This heap stands concretely for the poem’s inability to do what Wordsworth claimed for it in a letter to Charles Fox: namely, to expose and stop the “calamitous effect[s]” of capital and “manufactures” in the countryside and the “increasing disproportion [there] between the price of labour” and the cost of living (quoted on 63). Instead, the heap registers the incoherence, the enigma, where bad affect can apparently flourish, not as a motivating force for good but under pressure from something other than what Wordsworth may have set out to fix. Nersessian calls this deflection “obscurity,” and she’s right that what we have, what we feel, in “Michael” is inchoate compared to the poet’s stated aim. Still, her discussion is rightly framed by an anger somewhat extraneous to her demonstration. For while calamity form generally conveys “the reception and circulation of disaster as no one’s fault” (63), “Michael” presents a very particular and period-based circulation of fault in place of disaster and an obscurity, then, that is way too impactful to be just that.The Calamity Form concerns Romantic poetry and art as expressions of the Industrial Revolution, which began somewhat earlier and which certain poets of the period addressed only obliquely on account of the subscription to figuration/form at the heart of their enterprise, which was enabling and disabling in equal measure. But not, Nersessian shows, to the discredit or debit of either art or, as it happens, aesthetic distance or autonomy. For the strong move or reversal in this account involves a different kind of autonomy, in which forms—parataxis or catachresis—carry on engagements of their own with the bewildered consent of the writer. Cowper and Keats are Nersessian’s noncautionary examples, but even Wordsworth was scarcely in retreat from “parts of the world that contain the greatest misery for the greatest number” (18). All the same, they were disposed or compelled, and here it gets a bit tricky, to outsource their engagement to an apparatus whose performance consistently abuts and abets what Nersessian throughout this study calls “nescience”: ignorance—a felt ignorance—endemic to a poetics that actually thrives or is motivated at this impasse. Thus the calamity form consists of the event (modernity or the Industrial Revolution) and of a “responsive” poetics that cooperates with it, for better or worse. Such poetry “tell[s] you nothing,” and it “tell[s] you what it is to know nothing,” which makes it, at the very least, a backhanded discourse about something beyond reach (19).Calamity form therefore involves something “about” literature (and about reading it) in lieu of anything that literature might offer in the way of wisdom. Its figures are not like the ultimately disfiguring metonymies and allegories beloved by deconstruction. Rather, they are baggy hermeneutic envelopes in which nescience and interference are apertures instead of dead ends. “Every element” of Cowper’s rambling and associative poem The Task is deployed or incorporated according to the logic—the “form”—of parataxis, by which things are carefully arranged “yet none obviously follows from, is attendant upon, or is regulated by the other” (24). In “jumping” from the poet’s immediate environment to landings both near and far (war, the slave trade), Cowper’s parataxis, like that of the filmmaker Derek Jarman in his wake, is a dialectic that goes nowhere at a moment when things demand otherwise. The calamity form is thus a figure of “dim concurrence” (46) through which “the intimate entanglement of ordinariness—of hobbies, letters, books, and walks—in vast economic networks” is on view as both the “only subject for modern poetry and the one subject that modern poetry cannot rationalize or redeem” (56).Nersessian’s is not necessarily an interpretation of Cowper, or even of a specific form, in this case parataxis. It is more the takeaway, the peculiar affect, of their meeting in this way, a reactive and prolific accompaniment to certain events that proves a road to nowhere and to everywhere at once. In Keats the reaction form is catachresis, defined here as the “figure of matter out of place” (106), an unsettling “mismatch” (110), such as a head secreted in a pot of basil. In focusing on the body in states of “degradation” and in the posthumous existence that has more to do with “the lives of others” than with its immediate, dying referent, catachresis “aspires to emancipate the senses” (114), if only by default. Where parataxis in Cowper or obscurity in Wordsworth is largely an impasse (albeit with a backstory that is never ending), Keatsian catachresis bears testimony to “the fissuring of life as something that can be bought and sold” and only then becomes a “device Keats uses to begin to imagine how life might be mended, or what it might feel like if it were” (114).It’s hard to overemphasize the role of “feeling” in this analysis, precisely because it is feeling in a more concentrated sense than we typically mean when we invoke the term. It is feeling-as-reading, both in place of and as a kind of referentiality. How else could the “intense corporeality” of Cupid and Psyche in “Ode to Psyche” figure communal relation (à la Marx) that is not necessarily in the present but out of time or “at the end of culture,” where humanity is reclaimed “as a locus of passionate existence” (120–21)? The barely referential stakes of Keats’s “creatures, couched side by side” are a feeling that reads almost like a message in a bottle, because, unlike the heap of stones in “Michael,” the transformation that catachresis enfolds is a joint labor, a work in waiting really, rather than the ruin that results immediately from nonaction. And this is just as true of the Hyperion poems, which portray posthumous existence not as a paradox but as a catachrestic figure with legs—with a story to tell—which is not only that we are already dead (like Keats’s Titans) but also that there is a form of death-in-life that, as Nersessian puts it, might ultimately “be perished out of” (127).The last of the forms that Nersessian explores—now with her focus mostly on painting—is apostrophe. Here, in calling to an entity that cannot respond, apostrophe is evidently past its utility, as it is in the case of Constable’s “emotionally illegible” cloud studies (150). Nersessian attributes to these “skyings” (the artist’s term) a “vested interest” in the “delay or denial” of “affective response” (150). But here, as before, the delay is itself an affect, albeit a rather flat one, that also stands for intention: an “experience[e] of impersonality” that “seem[s] absolutely one’s own” (151) precisely because it “seems” that rather than “is” that. There is a good deal of weight that seems bears here, chiefly a “burden of personality,” certainly of feeling, that, far from being lifted so as to animate “states of ecstatic blankness” (or according to some ethical project or extension, as she also notes), is pretty much everywhere (152). And I don’t think that Nersessian ultimately disagrees. Constable’s studies stage what it means “to feel near to a thing that is always far away” and are ultimately about the “unresponsiveness of the natural world to the questions we pose to it, and our irresistible urge to keep asking them anyway” (163, 164). Nersessian found herself in a similar situation when reading Wordsworth. But with Constable unresponsiveness is not a problem so much as a validation of method as well as of art, in which the impasse of form or the nescience to which form leads is generative rather than a headache. The Calamity Form is about the experience, all told, of being “near to” these Romantic works and about the projective identification that this proximity requires, not always for the best. In Wordsworth it aggregates to a heap of disaffection. But with the others it involves a competence equal to the incompetence—and I mean this heuristically, not pejoratively—that art performs in feeling what it doesn’t know.Nersessian’s first book, Utopia, Limited, explored a distinctly moderated or contracted Romanticism that, by attaching limits to our “imaginative and appetitive powers,” was broadly reparative, both in recognizing harm and in postulating or projecting what Northrop Frye termed a “low adjustment utopia” better fitted to our environment (21). The Calamity Form represents a further refinement in which utopia or what stands for it has been adjusted downward to the point that it no longer matters. But not because it doesn’t matter. Calamity form is simply “a caution against taking the heroic possibilities of literature too seriously” (4). That leaves plenty more to take seriously, chiefly the experience of these texts, which Nersessian both plumbs and re-creates with erudition, verve, extraordinary intelligence, and a literary mind par excellence. If Romantic writing and art feel caught at times in a welter of materialism, that was earlier theory, and before that special pleading, they transform, on this analysis, into something freer and more enduring, because they have found a place or have come to one that, as Nersessian shows over and over, is unbearable and somehow necessary.