Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation 9781503631755

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POETIC FORM AND R O M A N T I C P R O V O C AT I O N

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Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation C A R M E N F AY E M AT H E S

STA N FOR D U N I V E R SI T Y PR E SS

Stanford, California

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Sta n for d U n i v er sit y Pr e ss Stanford, California © 2022 by Carmen Faye Mathes. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mathes, Carmen Faye, author. Title: Poetic form and Romantic provocation / Carmen Faye Mathes. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022004417 (print) | LCCN 2022004418 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503630246 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503631755 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: English poetry—18th century—History and criticism. | English poetry— 19th century—History and criticism. | Aesthetics, British—18th century. | Aesthetics, British—19th century. | Romanticism—England. Classification: LCC PR571 .M38 2022 (print) | LCC PR571 (ebook) | DDC 821/.709—dc23/ eng/20220314 LC record available at htt ps://lccn.loc.gov/2022004417 LC ebook record available at htt ps://lccn.loc.gov/2022004418 Cover design: Kevin Barrett Kane Cover art: Xenharmonic, by Fiona Ackerman Typeset by Motto Publishing Services in 11/15 Arno Pro

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For Collin

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix I n t r oduc t ion Provocation’s Means 1 Chapter 1 Hope Against Hope in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets 27 Chapter 2 The Disappointment Aesthetic 58 Chapter 3 Coleridge Tripping 91 Chapter 4 Reciprocal Keats 119 Chapter 5 The Politics of Provocation 147 C oda Provocation’s Ends 175 Notes 187 Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments

If it seemed like testing fate to write a book about disappointment when this project began, embracing its conclusion while still feeling hopeful— buoyant, even—seems even more so. What buoys me is an ever-expanding convergence of communities: teachers and mentors, colleagues and collaborators, students and mentees, families and friends. From our fi rst meeting, Miranda Burgess held open a space for me to stretch into, a space in which to experiment and explore. Her faith in me remains one of the most precious gifts I’ve ever received. My other mentors in Romanticism at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Alex Dick and Bo Earle, taught me to embrace being in the through part of thinking through a problem, and to be unafraid to show that work in my research and teaching. In his generous response to the project’s “fi nished” fi rst draft, Orrin Wang held my ideas up to the larger field of Romanticism and showed me facets of my arguments I’d never considered. Patricia Badir, Geoff rey Winthrop-Young and Jeff rey Severs asked smart questions at key moments that transformed the manuscript; the impress of Kevin McNeilly’s graduate seminar “The Poetics of Listening” is all over this work. Laila Ferreira let me talk her ear off about all the ideas I’d just been having (!) as I cycled up the hill to UBC and she let me keep my bicycle in our shared office; I’m grateful on both counts. Laurel Brinton, Rose Casey, Mary Chapman, Siân Echard, Adam Frank, ix

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Deanna Kreisel, Mo Pareles, Sandra Tomc, and Louise Soga swept in with wise counsel when it was most needed. The international community of Romanticists, congregating at the gatherings of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), the International Conference on Romanticism (ICR), and during the 2020–21 pandemic year, Romanticism in the Meantime, has been a galvanizing force. Chuck Rzepka and Jonathan Mulrooney saw in an early essay on Keats’s passivity ideas worth sharing in the European Romantic Review. To Jonathan, who (now that Chuck is retiring) has taken up Chuck’s mantle as champion of junior scholars and instigator of collegial intellectual networks, I owe opportunities to develop my ideas too numerous to list. In that crucial space between graduate and postgraduate life, Emily Rohrbach’s encouragements and invitations to work alongside her were much-needed injections of momentum; I am lucky to count her as both mentor and friend. Celeste Langan models the kind of brilliantly lateral, activist scholarship to which I aspire. Marjorie Levinson’s work is forever that which I put in front of myself as an incentive to think deeper and wider. The interlocutors whose ways of doing scholarship, no less than their ideas, have provided inspiration and sustenance over the years include Ian Balfour, Suzanne Barnett , Claire Battershill, Alan Bewell, Thora Brylowe, Chris Bundock, Timothy Campbell, Mark Canuel, Siobhan Carroll, David Clark, Jeff rey Cox, Marlene Daut, Clara Dawson, Lindsey Eckert, Mary Favret, Anne-Lise François, Emily Friedman, Lise Gaston, Amanda Jo Goldstein, Kevis Goodman, Lily Gurton-Wachter, Lisa Hager, Lenora Hanson, Arden Hegele, Nikki Hessell, Sonia Hofkosh, Yohei Igarashi, Heather Jessup, Jennifer Jones, Jeff rey Kahan, Jacques Khalip, Anita Law, Yoon Sun Lee, Michelle Levy, Devoney Looser, Deidre Lynch, Charles Mahoney, Peter Manning, Tricia Matt hew, Brian McGrath, Maureen McLane, Jon Mee, Lauren Neefe, Anahid Nersessian, Sianne Ngai, Thomas Pfau, Brittany Pladek, Brian Rejack, David Ruderman, Mari Ruti, Jonathan Sachs, Lauren Schachter, Rebecca Schneider, Kandice Sharren, Kate Singer, Diana Solomon, Michele Speitz, Andrew Stauffer, Emily Sun, Rei Terada, Michael Theune, Daniel White and Eugenia Zuroski. I appreciate my wonderful colleagues at the University of Central Florida (UCF), in particular our Brit Lit Working Group: James Campbell,

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Stephen Hopkins, Anna Maria Jones, Tison Pugh, Anastasia Salter, Mel Stanfi ll and, with special thanks, William Fogarty, who is an ingeniously sensitive reader of the kind that one can only dream of. I am grateful to have known Patricia Angley, a true beacon of light. For their many kindnesses, my thanks to Haley Baker, Christian Beck, Farrah Cato, Meghan Crowther, Fayeza Hasanat, Micah Dean Hicks, Kathleen Hohenleitner, Rochelle Hurt, Louise Kane, Chrissy Kolaya, Lisa Logan, Kevin Meehan, Sara Monroe, Brenda Peynado, Trey Philpotts, Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés and Sonia Stephens. Thanks to Mark Kamrath for his mentorship and to Beth Rapp Young for demonstrating what inclusive, egalitarian leadership looks like. Week in and week out, the Johnson’s Dictionary Online project’s technical team—William Dorner, Amy Larner Giroux, Connie Harper and Abigail Moreshead—initiated me into the digital humanities and showed me new ways to relate to poetry and language. To my dazzling Honors in the Major supervisees, Julianna Cherinka and Taylor Pryor: it was a great joy to learn from both of you. At UCF, I took to my role as a Romanticist who teaches the Long Eighteenth Century with gusto, and my scholarship is the better for it. At the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) conference in Orlando, Tiffany Potter gave me her ticket to the Women’s Caucus lunch, and the following year I presented a section of Chapter 1, “Reading Around Charlotte Smith,” on the caucus-sponsored panel “Women’s Precarity in the Eighteenth Century.” Courtney Weiss Smith generously read a draft of the chapter-length version, and it is she who got me thinking about hope against hope. My thanks to Stephen Ahern for picking my work out from the crowd and giving me a chance to think more about Jane Austen’s disappointments—some of which overlap with William Wordsworth’s—in Chapter 2. Th is book would not exist without institutional support from UBC’s Faculty of Arts and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as a UCF Vice President for Research Advancement of Early Career Researchers Grant and a University of Regina Arts Publication Fund award. The John Rylands Library in Manchester and the Houghton Library at Harvard welcomed me along the way. I would also like to

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thank my new colleagues at the University of Regina, especially Marcel DeCoste, Susan Johnston, Medrie Purdham and Michael Trussler, for welcoming me into the department during the unprecedented circumstances of a pandemic year. Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation would not be the book it is today without the patient, expert shepherding of Faith Wilson Stein. To the two anonymous peer reviewers, your constructive, insightful engagements reflect an investment of intellectual energy that I feel privileged to have received. Thank you to the entire editorial team at Stanford University Press, including Cindy Lim, Elspeth MacHatt ie, Gigi Mark and David Zielonka, and an extra-special thanks to Erica Wetter. Thank you to Elise Hess for the index. Thank you to Fiona Ackerman for the gorgeous cover art. To friends near and far, your encouragement and much-needed distractions made this book possible too: Kristin Anderson, Myra Bloom, Lisa and Matt y Jeronimo, Sheila Giffen, Rebecca Graham, Marisa Grizenko, Timothy Helmuth, Erin Howell, Jonathan Brandon Lee, Niusha Mahmoodi, Emma Nally, Lauren Neefe, Philip Provencher, Madeleine Reddon, Lauren Schachter, Amanda Schiaroli, Eva Seebacher and Brittany Wickerson. The Vancouver Babes Book Club, especially Claire Aiken, Michelle Cyca and Amanda Lee Smith, kept me reading as far outside my field as possible. A special thank you to my parents, Sherry and Joe Mathes, and siblings, Lawrence and Elyse, for your unwavering support and love beyond measure. To Jill and Chris Ankerson, the shelter you give is a space of unconditional love and acceptance. Our pup, Safie, has been a lifeline of walks and snuggles. Thanks to David Lake for believing in me. I also want to pause here in loving remembrance of those who have lately passed, Armand Abrams and Pat Ankerson. Hope Love-Scott, you are missed. Collin Ankerson: these ten years have been the best portion of a life, fi lled with “litt le, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love.” Th is book is for you.

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INTRODUCTION

Provocation’s Means

L o ok i ng b ac k on R om a n t ic i s m ’s poetic experiments, it is easy enough to discover results: elegiac sonnets, lyrical ballads and lyrical tales; gothic “mother Radcliff ” poems and spring odes; political sonnets and “songs wholly political.”1 Romantic poets do not want for taxonomic ingenuity, and these categories foreground hybridity and novelty; influences from genres historical and contemporary: forms of expressiveness adapted from speech and prose and song. Revolutionary poetry ends up looking less like the radically new and more like a complex negotiation with deeply held expectations of and attachments to particular literary experiences. Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation explores the aesthetic and affective dynamics that characterize these relations of expectation and experience by tracing the anticipatory arcs along which poets, readers and critics engaged with experimental genres and forms. Such anticipations, their disruption and oftentimes their loss, index the critical refusal of Romantic poets to elicit or reflect back to readers what Raymond Williams called dominant “structures of feeling,” including and especially sympathy.2 Provocation names the means of this refusal, because that term encapsulates the unconventional goads poets use to create aesthetic experiences that are both socially oriented and radically negative—where to be prodded or drawn out

1

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INTRODUCTION

or otherwise provoked by poetry is to feel one’s interrelationship with, and exposure to, a world of impersonal affections. Awareness of this type of provocation has hovered at the margins of more usual types for centuries. Even Samuel Johnson, from whom we have cause to expect defi nitiveness, is not sure how to defi ne it. In his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Johnson admits, “I know not whether, in the following passage” from Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594), “[provocation] be appeal or incitement”: The like effects may grow in all towards their pastor, and in their pastor towards each of them, between whom there daily and interchangeably pass in the hearing of God himself, and in the presence of his holy angels, so many heavenly acclamations, exultations, provocations, and petitions.3

Given the other two defi nitions that Johnson notes—“An act or cause by which anger is raised,” and “An appeal to a judge”—Hooker’s use of provocation seems to have confounded Johnson by its association with a feeling of agreement so profound that it is called “love.”4 The “inviolable amity” that Hooker says develops between pastor and congregation contrasts with the overt violence and needling insistence that the illustrative quotations for Johnson’s other defi nitions demonstrate. While incitement (to anger) and appeal (to authority) fit those confl ict-laden usages, neither alternative perfectly captures how provocations might contribute to such a passionate concord as Hooker’s example describes. Provocation’s more congenial sense seems instead to have more in common with what Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in “The Nightingale, A Conversational Poem” (1798), represents as stimulation or social encouragement. In a scene where nocturnal birds “provoke” one another into sharing their songs, the poet fi nds himself half convinced by their vociferousness that night has turned into day: But never elsewhere in one place I knew So many Nightingales: and far and near In wood and thicket over the wide grove They answer and provoke each other’s songs—

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With skirmish and capricious passagings, And murmurs musical and swift jug jug And one low piping sound more sweet than all— Stirring the air with such an harmony, That should you close your eyes, you might almost Forget it was not day! (lines 55– 64)5

Coleridge’s avian community is a “choral minstrelsy” that eases the speaker’s melancholy soul, and its inward-turning effects (“close your eyes [and imagine!]”) cannot help but recall that long-suffering view of Romanticism as a literature of nature poetry in which man fi nds himself (line 75). Rather than discover kinship authorized by a God who overhears each devoted utterance, the Romantic poet locates in nature the conviviality that transforms the gloomy night into boisterous day. But if the example from Hooker would throw into relief Coleridge’s poet-speaker as one who eavesdrops, Godlike, on the calls and responses of a flock that sounds concordant for his benefit, then it also highlights the strange att itude of deliberate omission that allows for this pleasing result. The counterintuitive belief that provoking others generates “harmony” no doubt contradicts many an experience of provocations unwanted or unanswered, and in Coleridge’s poem requires a listener willing to balance the desire for aesthetic coherence against the pett y fights (“skirmish[es]”), goading swoops and unmusical sounds (“jug jug”) that also fi ll the night air. These details, which seem most clearly to express what it is to provoke, are themselves provoking in their apparent unevenness and difference from the songs that they nevertheless encourage. By including them alongside “murmurs musical” and a “low piping sound more sweet,” Coleridge implies that the means of a provocation, if not the ends, retain something of the prodding aggravation that a sound like “jug jug” also introduces to the rhythms of a poem. Provocation’s inbuilt relationality, its drive to elicit a response, impels the sociality that is at the core of this type of poetic experience, even as it opens up the possibility of disappointment—for poets cannot be sure what will resonate with audiences, about the likelihood of prompts missed or figures misinterpreted. The impulse to provoke shares

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INTRODUCTION

something with the impulse to make art, Coleridge suggests, because both aim to turn elements as “capricious” as birdsong and the force of air under a bird’s wings (what “jug jug” sounds like to me) into something “stirring.” And ultimately, it is this formal decision—to include onomatopoeia that is cheekily tautological, a flat note, and to call the scene “harmony”—which brings into view Romanticism as a literature not of self-confi rmation but of material capture, where the synesthetic potential of sound becoming light is as much the matter of the poem as its dream of an impossible harmony. Deceptive Cadence

Th is book explores Romantic poetic experiments that deliberately and strategically stir up anticipatory affects that the poems, by playing with readers’ expectations of form and genre, soon disrupt, delay or refuse. These are poems that initiate the beats they resist hitt ing—beats that, whether grounded in traditional versification or narrative convention, produce resolution, closure, or even, to maintain the musical metaphor, progression. Their innovations often turn that metrically regulated sense of going somewhere into negotiations with interruption and suspension along the lines of a deceptive cadence, where tension builds in the space beyond unmet anticipation and what feels never-ending is precisely the feeling of readiness for an end. In music, deceptive cadence is the composer’s formal tactic for developing intensity through suspense: an unresolved conclusion to a musical movement or phrase that compels the listener to hang on, expectant, straining her ears. It is a form of negative intensity that prompts a further compulsion to endure, strive, or as William Wordsworth writes, “struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness [sic].”6 Rather than ignore or turn away from off-putt ing affects, the provocations of form, in this sense, encourage exertion—asking readers to struggle with, not merely undergo, challenging feelings. Deceptive cadence is therefore a good heuristic for the provocative forms examined here, which are purposeful and calculated artistic elements of poems that prioritize discomfort. Unlike threats (whose advent we may genuinely fear) or solicitations (which we may choose to accept or reject), provocations of this sort reveal to us our lack of perfect agency

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without denying that what we are experiencing is art. Indeed, the dynamics of being so moved depend on audiences’ having expected a return to the tonic or, as an example, fourteen lines in iambic pentameter. Formal provocations are different too from admonitions (to tread carefully) or rebukes (for some error) since they do not carry the weight of a moral authority whose advice or displeasure reflects our culpability, when that culpability is tied to notions of personal salvation or sin. I said at the outset that to be provoked by poetic form is to feel one’s imbrication in a world of impersonal affections, and by “impersonal” I meant not that these affections circulate unthinkingly, “like viruses,” or that they inhere in matter’s “vibrancy,” but rather that they reflect divine determinations that are, simply, not personal: not based on the will of a God who is invested in your particular path towards salvation or sin.7 Th is is external affective force understood to act upon all things (from rocks and birds to people), and therefore significantly different from Jane Bennett’s use of “impersonal” to differentiate “human affect” from “an affect intrinsic to forms that cannot be imagined (even ideally) as persons.”8 Although closer to what Adela Pinch figures as viral— Pinch is thinking about David Hume’s contagious feeling—the impersonal affections this book traces are more deterministic in their philosophical origins, as we shall see. Like unresolved chord progressions, formal provocations in poetry do not exist to judge our virtue or our wickedness, though their effects may be to reveal to us the limits of our habitual ways of expecting things to resolve. The combination of negative pressure and insistent sociality through which provocative forms draw attention to themselves can have survived in the longue durée of poetry’s invention only by disrupting without letting go of pleasure. From Horace’s admission in Ars Poetica (~10 BCE) that even Homer makes mistakes to John Milton’s decision to compose Paradise Lost (1667) in blank verse at a time when rhyming couplets were de rigueur, engendering not-quite-disappointment is a poetic art that turns out to be the crucial means by which formal provocation does not end in bad taste or satire—or a satire of bad taste, which approach Alexander Pope’s Peri Bathos; or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727) happily exploits.9 Provocative forms are neither separable from a poem’s content nor themselves meta-commentaries

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INTRODUCTION

on it; rather than cultivate wit or ironic distance, they operate within the immediacy of the experiences they disrupt, riding a wave of anticipatory affects that can keep readers engaged even after a letdown. The difference from Romantic irony makes itself felt in the embodiment of rhythms and cadences that can register below the level of conscious awareness, making encountering an imperfect rhyme or an extra foot suddenly ataxic. Ataxia, or loss of balance and coordination, describes an involuntary condition at once physical and mental, akin to the affective experience of formal provocation at the very moment of its disruption, refusal or delay. The affections to which such a loss of composure alerts us are, in addition to being impersonal, in this way also pre-personal: that is, the affections move us prior to apperception, and may thereby vex our belief that our feelings are our own. Here is where my conception of “extravagant feeling,” to borrow Pinch’s phrase, most overlaps with that of Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) casts the passions as physical forces acting upon a mind that “resembles a string-instrument, where after each stroke the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays.”10 Just as impassioned mental quivering slowly peters out, so the encounters with negative intensities that formal provocations initiate are neither permanent nor static; while they might feel vertiginous, they also can, and often do, allow time enough for readers to reorient or adjust, or even to discover pleasure anew. As Andrew Marvell, who wrote an entire poem, “On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost” (1674), to rationalize his response to Milton’s rejection of couplets, fi nally concludes, “The verse created like thy theme sublime, / In number, weight, and measure, needs not rhyme” (lines 53–54).11 In his willingness to endure discomfort enough to fi nd enjoyment, Marvell might be provocative form’s perfect audience. Indeed, when Wordsworth complains that we are easily disappointed by poems that fail to please us “in that particular way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased,” he does so to protect the integrity of his lyrical ballads’ formal and generic innovations from the routine desires of readers who might otherwise stop reading entirely.12 The sociality of the impulse to provoke, in this instance, works against inclusivity and concord, and this puts it at odds with both Coleridge’s synthesizing imagination and

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models of interpersonal affections that see agreement as the natural end of sympathy. In Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), for example, the “imaginary change of situations” by which spectators place themselves in the position of a person who suffers is answered by the sufferer’s own modifications of his expressed feelings in order to invite more perfect sympathy.13 Th is negotiation, between the sufferer’s performance of feeling (based in part on projections about spectator expectations) and spectators’ imperfect sympathies (imperfect because an intrusive sense of the spectators’ own safety prevents them from entering completely into the vicarious experience), nevertheless works towards a form of agreement that Smith calls “harmony”: “Though they will never be unisons, they may be concords, and that is all that is wanted or required.”14 Rather than asking that sufferer and spectator spontaneously share passions, losing themselves in fellow-feeling, Smith’s theory allows for the preservation of the self-sufficiency of both, whose imaginations help them manage their responses, including their judgments about the “propriety or impropriety” of their own expressed feelings and those of other people.15 By contrast, and especially in the lyrical ballads, provocative forms often educe the limits of sympathetic identification through a sense of dissonance or rupture, upon which it is possible neither to build collective understandings nor even to ground an individual’s moral responsibility. In Smith’s Moral Sentiments, the degree to which the sufferer and the sympathizing spectator remain autonomous, even estranged from one another, implies a model of bounded subjectivity that prior notions of the contagious affections trouble. In both Hume’s Treatise and the Th ird Earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Matters, Opinions, Times (1711), “a distinctly unimaginative and unreflective form of sympathy” emerges through figures of communicable affections in which experiencing others’ feelings is instantaneous, forceful and embodied.16 When panic spreads in a crowd, Shaftesbury explains, “by contact or sympathy . . . looks are infectious”: “fury fl ies from face to face, [and] the disease is no sooner seen than caught.”17 Here sympathy is not the aim (e.g., the sufferer’s goal of eliciting fellow-feeling) but rather the means by which panic is caught.18 Agreement, as a self-consciously consensus-building process, is not the natural end of

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INTRODUCTION

sympathy because negotiations aren’t necessary or, indeed, possible. As Miranda Burgess shows, Smith was not alone in proffering an alternative to such a disconcertingly permeable subject; Immanuel Kant also mobilizes the mediating powers of judgment and imagination in order to “reassuringly” prioritize the self ’s autonomy.19 In the Third Critique (1790), Kant’s aesthetic subject presumes that because her judgment—“that is beautiful”—is disinterested, it will meet with universal accord.20 Projecting this presumption of agreement outward, onto a community of others who feel as she feels, the aesthetic subject recalls Smith’s spectator, who can sympathize even with those who do not reciprocate, like the dead.21 Yet, even as “the book or work of art itself becomes a figure for sympathetic feeling” in Kant’s account, the “prospect of a community and sympathy beyond the subject’s aesthetic imagination fades into the background, displaced beyond the borders of the aesthetic scene.”22 Agreement does not mean integration or unison, for either Smith or Kant, and sympathy is not automatically a medium for sharing others’ passions; rather, sympathy aids us in staging judgments that reinforce our sense of agency and autonomy, which are also positions of power.23 Offering an alternative to the familiar story of Romanticism as an intellectual and literary movement defi ned by such powers of judgment, the analysis here discovers in the dynamics of anticipation and disappointment, provoked by poetic form, Romantic thinkers who were grappling too with philosophies of vulnerability and powerlessness. That this line of argument also skips past another familiar story, in which Romanticism emerges as and through disappointed responses to the French Revolution and its aftermaths, sets the specifically formal dynamics of disappointment apart and, by that same token, allows me to bring these dynamics to bear on more current understandings of Romanticism’s complexly global and varied relationship to history.24 Here, disappointment is not a topic or theme but rather a ligature between poetry and feeling—one that serves as an endlessly renewable indicator of art that disrupts predictable trajectories, particularly when those trajectories reinforce majority perspectives by anticipating adherence to normative standards of behavior. Whereas, for Smith,

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propriety helps produce social harmony by urging the impassioned man to fit his feelings into shapes designed to ensure the sympathetic responsiveness of those around him, provocative forms establish, in order to disrupt, expected structures (of meter, line, rhyme, diction, etc.) and the norms of relatability and appropriateness upon which such conventions allow us to agree. That is, the Romantic provocation that I ultimately term aesthetic disappointment asks readers to feel their susceptibility to outside impressions as a kind of dissonance or refusal to resolve. Th is in turn raises questions about the limits of agency and autonomy, questions for which these chapters uncover, if not answers, then new approaches grounded in the radical materialism that also distinguished the age. Situating Affect as Method

The central problem of Romantic aesthetics concerns how we are moved by art. In considering this problem, rather than look to Kant for a model of disinterested aesthetic judgment, I adopt the radical materialist perspective that “being moved” refers to embodied experiences not separable from their objects. The older philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza, which took on new life in Romanticism, provides insight into the ways some Romantic poets were thinking about such material entanglements. For yet other Romantic poets, it aids in contextualizing the metaphysical underpinnings of the felt experiences they claimed were produced and engaged by their poetic experiments, providing a lens through which to explore the social and political dimensions of the by then well-established relationship between form and feeling. Th roughout, I distinguish affects, as precognitive responses to stimuli, from emotions, which name socially conditioned, consciously recognized feeling states that reinforce our senses of our own private, bounded subjectivities.25 In Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), the affections that move us to feel and imagine reflect our porousness and vulnerability—the ways in which our minds and bodies are open to impressions—and they also reflect inescapable divine logics over which we have no control and about which we have limited understandings. The Spinozist affections are therefore like those of Shaftesbury and Hume in that they are pre-personal (i.e., not

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INTRODUCTION

private in the sense of belonging to us), but differ in that they are also, as already indicated, impersonal (i.e., not designed for us by God as goads towards salvation or sin).26 As an interpretive lens, Spinoza’s philosophy has the double effect of guiding my affect-theory approach to the poetry while helping to make sense of how Romantic thinkers themselves may have approached genre and form in relation to the affections and other radical materialist principles. Before elaborating this approach, I offer these defi nitions: I treat form as structure, syntax, tone, diction, figure, meter, trope and other elements that scaffold, give shape to or hold space for a literary work, not limited to the poems that are my focus.27 Some of the formal elements the following chapters take up are irregular meter; turns; personification; tautology and prosaic diction; rhythmic arrests and fragmentation; and simile, metaphor and juxtaposition. Form is inextricable from content (e.g., character, theme and plot), and it is also inextricable from Romantic understandings of affect and the embodied work of poetry. Genre, for its part, is simultaneously the taxonomic impulse to categorize literary types that I inventoried at the start, and the expectations that attend those categories’ forms, histories, occasions, authorships, and the like. Simply, genre is form plus situation— both the situation that gave rise to a work and the situation of its reception.28 Form and genre are linked to and mediated by history: specifically, by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century readers’ expectations of particular genres’ formal organization and elements. Th is is another way of triangulating the relation between form, genre and situation, in which genre is a concept that lives “as much in the scene of literary reception as in the scene of literary creation.” These words, which belong to Deidre Lynch, frame a discussion in which Lynch treats form as a quality of structure, and genre as the work of that quality on readers. Form not only affects readers as they read; form also forms habits of reading that contribute to genre. A “novel’s habit-forming function” is to shape readers’ expectations of the novel they are currently reading, and of novels in general.29 By locating these habits in historical scenes of literary creation and reception, Lynch shows genre to depend as much upon what a work does as what it is. The inverse logic, in cases of unmet anticipations, would imply that preventing literary

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experience from becoming habitual also prevents genre stabilization. The hybridity and novelty of the genre classifications Romantic poets propose (elegiac sonnets, lyrical ballads, etc.) would seem to indicate their awareness that formal innovation has repercussions for genre, and that readers’ genre expectations (an affective relation: how readers anticipate being moved) might be guided by new categories that recur to old touchstones. In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1840), such claims about form and genre would apply to poetry in a “restricted sense,” by describing the “arrangements of language, and especially metrical language” that spring from the minds of poets. Insofar as they are claims that also describe the Romantic tendency to un-restrict form and genre, to see poetry as moving off the page and into readers’ minds and bodies (as habit or rhythm or transport), they resonate too with Shelley’s assertion that poetic meter was invented due to “the recurrence of . . . harmony in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music.”30 Poets’ natural talents for orchestrating linguistic pleasure fostered identifications between the structured systems of musical composition and language; for Shelley, musical thinking allowed poetic meter fi rst to be thought. Other comparisons too, between genres (sonnets and songs; ballads recited and ballads sung) and situation or reception (inspired minds and Aeolian harps; nervous motions and acoustic vibrations), suggest that we can complicate traditional ideas of Romanticism’s inward-turning imagination by paying attention to the outward-moving, sonorous and musical tropes common to Romantic accounts of poetic affect. Continuing along the Shelleyan vein, doing so might even prompt us to reconsider poetry’s political power (i.e., that poets are “legislators”), especially if the pre-personal force of those politics operates even, or especially, when its source is “unacknowledged.”31 I’m interested in how Romantic poets understood poetic form to move Romantic readers, and in how these movements were, to varying degrees, often conceived of as metaphysical. Th is kind of baseline historical materialism warrants my engagements with Spinozist theories of the affections that were circulating in the period (rather than those espoused by the twentieth-century psychologist Silvan Tomkins32), and it also proscribes an approach to form of the sort for which Sandra Macpherson has called:

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INTRODUCTION

that is, “a genuinely formalist critical practice, a litt le formalism that would turn one way from history without shame or apology.”33 In Macpherson’s estimation, new formalism has a tendency to “ransom” form to history by turning the discoveries about history that form enables into every argument’s fi nal, revelatory conclusion.34 Treating form instead “as nothing more—and nothing less—than the shape matter (whether a poem or a tree) takes,” Macpherson regards form as the basic, fundamental stuff of every material thing, and, as she clarifies, this means that words are the “matter” of poetry “in much the same way as wood is the material of a chair.”35 In exploring how form was understood to move Romantic readers, I cannot leave history aside. But neither do I disagree that poetic form can be— and has been—thought about as a kind of matter that affects other kinds of matter. When, in his Defence, Shelley defi nes poetry “in a general sense,” he considers its origin “connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody.”36 Whereas Hume compares the mind to a stringed instrument, in which a sound retained nevertheless “insensibly decays,” Shelley fi nds that mental reverberations need not simply die away. On Shelley’s account, we might turn these impressions poetical, creating “not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them.”37 Harmonizing a melody is like poeticizing a passion, because both depend on adjustments to material phenomena, sound and feeling, that result in changes to matter like musical notes or words. Yet if form is adjustment (pace Anahid Nersessian38), what then is matter? My views are influenced by, but not strictly about, Romantic science, and although this introduction lays out some tenets of Spinoza’s philosophy in which Spinoza seems to get some of his ideas about matter from Lucretius’s description of atomic particles, my aim is not to pivot towards an investigation along those lines.39 What materialism means for the readings that follow is a confrontation with embodiment so radically imperiling to the sense of a bounded, agentive self as to expose identity as relationality—as constitutive of ideas and affections not our own, in which being is always already

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being in and as relation. Th is includes identity’s self-consciously cognitive parts, our contemplative and reflective selves, because in this philosophy ideas too have force. I say confrontation for two reasons. The fi rst is literary and historical, because the “scandal” of Spinoza’s thought—“at once deterministic, socially and ontologically leveling, de- or anti-humanizing . . . [yet also] politically open-ended and even utopian”40—bred opposition in seemingly equal proportion to its challenges, and these were challenges that Romantic thinkers met in poetry as well as in novels and criticism, private letters and notebook entries. The second is metaphysical, since what matters about matter in this context is its force—its capacity for confrontations both felt and unfelt.41 One way to bring this materialism, and the philosophical questions about vulnerability and powerlessness that it poses, to bear on Romantic provocations of form, is to hold the Kantian aesthetic subject up against those figures for the pre-personal affections we’ve already begun to trace, in which “external and internal impressions” operate in and upon us like soundwaves:42 that is, like the acoustic, physical properties of sound that led Kant to call music inaesthetic precisely because those in its proximity cannot choose not to hear. For Kant, music “extends its influence further (into the neighborhood) than is required, and so as it were imposes itself.” We can no more close our ears than we can stop feeling low frequencies—a bass line or percussion— through our feet, in our bones, perhaps all the way into the resonant chambers of our hearts. Of course, what makes a formal provocation provocative is very often such intrusiveness, which Kant thinks evacuates aesthetic pleasure by “interfering with the freedom of others, outside the musical circle,” but which I am arguing can prompt struggles with negative affective intensity of the sort that a deceptive cadence also describes. In the poems this book explores, the affective impositions which occur through the rhythms of regular verse meet provocations that disrupt or suspend those rhythms in order to interfere with precisely the sort of freedom that Kant’s subject needs preserved if she is to judge disinterestedly. Her frustrated expectation is that of sensory independence within social spaces (i.e., quiet). From the Spinozist perspective, however, she who glimpses freedom’s limits by experiencing unwanted affects will have gained an insight crucial enough

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INTRODUCTION

to make any “burdensome” musical experience worthwhile.43 For Spinoza, free will is an illusion that leads us to mistake our reactions for choices and to live lives warped by fantasies of perfect agency. The “means, or way, leading to freedom” lies instead in our capacity for reason—and, when we begin to grasp our vulnerability to the affections, Spinoza thinks us more adept at bringing our actions under reason’s guidance.44 Romanticism’s provocative forms revel in the means. Not with the teleological prudence of Kant’s categorical imperative (if you like), but with a still serious investment in the in-between feelings and in-process processes by which transitory affects and other material forces reveal that we have less control over our responses, rational or otherwise, than some Enlightenment thinkers hoped. Johnson’s non-defi nition of Hooker’s usage and Coleridge’s “The Nightingale” each suggest, for instance, that provocation’s more congenial sense includes being moved by a powerful external force, God and/or nature. The transformation of individual parishioners into a congregation and “many Nightingales” into a chorus happens “in the hearing of God himself, and in the presence of his holy angels” and “in one place . . . // In wood and thicket over the wide grove” (lines 55–57). While Coleridge’s lush environs might tempt us to fall back on that idea of “Nature,” to which I alluded above, as at once fodder for and the invention of the Romantic poet’s inward-turning imagination, the description locates nature instead in material motions and countermotions that are simultaneously impersonal and divine.45 In the imagery of birds swooping and diving, their calls and responses drawing one another out, Coleridge casts nature as movement—as dynamic exchanges of kinetic and aural force. In the onomatopoeia that animates this abundance of avian life, he enacts intrusive sounds of the sort that Kant would rather avoid, and by recommending that we close our eyes to trick our ears, Coleridge locates pleasure in being engrossed by the deception. Rather than inspiration or agape leading to individuation, such provocations enfold us so completely that even the experiences of pastor or poet “pass interchangeably” into those of his flock. Even though the aesthetic subject shaped by such a theory of provocation sidesteps Kantian disinterestedness (and transcendental morality),

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its emergence is not a negation of the Enlightenment but an extension, which includes and develops radical materialisms already long present.46 From Erasmus Darwin to Mary Shelley, Wolfgang von Goethe to Friedrich Hölderlin, Romanticism has always wrestled with how things ought to be by asking how things are. Older heterodoxies, including those of Lucretius and Spinoza, provide answers that, by doing away with the participation of God-the-creator, offer ontological bases for atheism and radicalism; theories of democratic equality; and scientific inquiries into the minute particles and unseen void, or else the dynamic fields of force, that may determine the world and our place in it. A less well-studied Romantic thinker, John “Walking” Stewart, whose populist materialism is a possible point of connection between Spinoza and some of the poets in these chapters, helps evince that these ideas were circulating beyond the usual channels.47 Jonathan Israel calls this parallel intellectual ecosystem the radical Enlightenment, and he identifies Spinoza as central to its sway.48 By recurring often to questions of freedom and agency through Spinoza’s discussions in the Ethics, I aim to draw out the ethics and politics of a number of poems that have seemed, to both Romantic era readers and recent critics, to indulge disappointment without justification. In so doing, I am convinced by Marjorie Levinson’s argument that “hearing the Spinozistic echo” even in “poems that seem to lack a polemical element” alerts us to “an active and pointed cultural engagement” nevertheless, since, in the radical long Enlightenment that includes Romanticism, “Spinoza’s thought carried a clear political valence.”49 But I should also say that Romanticists know that Spinoza’s influence on individual poets was various, mediated and often diff use, forming part of a cultural dialogue about the material force of feelings and ideas with which some poets were more familiar than others, and to which responses and interpretations differed. By prioritizing these differences, my chapters make site-specific interventions into the oeuvres of Romantic poets, which in some cases betray interpretive schisms (pertaining to aspects of Spinoza’s thought but also to the materiality of feeling and language more generally) that can expose poets’ competing ethical and political commitments in turn.

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Nature, Upside Down

For Romantic thinkers, Spinoza’s Ethics helps explain the persistence with which we strive and struggle in a world of difficulty. I pause here to rehearse how and why in order to provide scaffolding for the arguments to come, as I work my way towards a brief discussion of the role that pity plays in the production and regulation of social harmony for Spinoza. Fundamental to Spinoza’s treatment of God and nature as one and the same is his observation that “nature has no end set before it, and . . . all fi nal causes are nothing but human fictions.”50 For Spinoza, divine logic inheres not in progress towards heaven or hell, salvation or sin, but through the uncountable causes and effects that proliferate powerful and often untraceable natural motions and countermotions, that is, ideas and affections. He argues that attaching meaning to an “end” reflects our anthropocentric tendency to presume, fi rst, that whatever we perceive to be a cause or an end really is one; and second, that whatever outcome we like best God has designed for us.51 But this latter assumption, warns Spinoza, is a “fiction” that “turns Nature completely upside down”: “For if God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants something which he lacks.”52 Rather than having faith in the perfection of fi rst causes, trying to deduce the meaning of last effects demands an impossible tracing backwards of dominos long tipped, which can only ever arrive at the spurious conclusion that these ends, whatever they may be, reflect the will of God. Instead, Spinoza argues that human beings possess two ways of approaching knowledge: reason and imagination. Neither way is better or more accurate and each depends on the other, since, for him, mind and matter are substantially identical even if conceptually different—“mind as an idea of the body” and not the other way around.53 In Beth Lord’s summation, “We are more rational as we understand things better, and more imaginative as we are affected by our experiences. At no point can we ever be wholly rational (for then we would feel nothing) or wholly imaginative (for then we would know nothing truly).”54 Th is oscillation between thinking and feeling is not binaristic but complexly intermeshed; it is a means for empowering ourselves by both increasing our understandings and inhabiting our lives in ways that are fulfi lling and joyful. When negative affections

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disempower us, making us weak or sick or lethargic, we can use reason to counteract those influences by, for instance, sleeping when we are tired or bringing patience to a frustrating situation. When repressive ideas suggest that we should act against our interests, we can imagine the unhappiness that adherence to those ideas will create, leading us to disagree or pursue alternatives. Thus the Ethics, as Gilles Deleuze points out, is not an ethical system in the sense that it dictates morality based on good and evil as gauges of personal salvation and sin. Rather, it is a system that provides insight into how our bodily and mental states affect and are affected by material forces in the world, which allows us to recalibrate and reassert ourselves in turn.55 Th is drive towards recalibration Spinoza calls “conatus,” or striving to persist in being. In the Ethics, in the section “On the Origin and Nature of the Affects,” he writes that every “thing,” from minerals to vegetables to animals, “so far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its own being” and this “striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.”56 A simple thing, such as a rock, persists through “inertial” properties (a kind of “stubbornness”), but a more complex thing, such as a human being, strives to maintain a specific poise, or relation of speed and rest, in the assemblage of all its parts, and to achieve this it must continually readjust its posture or att itude.57 Complex things are intermeshed in equilibrium-seeking negotiations in their composite selves and in relation with external forces and other things. Warren Montag, who points out that Spinoza’s idea of these complex, unified assemblages seems to have been inspired by Lucretius’s atomic bodies in De rerum natura (c. 55 BCE), notes that, “if Spinoza’s defi nition [of conatus], as rendered in English, would appear to confer upon the thing [that strives] a kind of precariousness, the Latin verb Spinoza has chosen here to denote the ‘unification’ of several individuals into one underscores its precariousness even more”: “Concurro . . . is . . . the most unpredictable, fragile and temporary unification that would merit the name.”58 The striving of complex things, both in themselves (to “concur in one action”) and in relation to others, expresses an essential resilience that is also the evidence of a profound vulnerability.59

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INTRODUCTION

In the Ethics, the theory of conatus follows Spinoza’s discussion of the ways that human beings delude themselves about the nature of their desires and appetites. From childhood, we assume that our choices are our own, so that most people believe themselves to be making free choices (about how to act, what to eat and what to say) most of the time.60 A person who has no experience of ever having made a wrong choice or doing something they “afterwards repent,” explains Spinoza, would assume every choice to be the pure determinations of their free will. They may presume to speak their thoughts aloud “from a free decision of the mind,” when the reality is that they “cannot contain [their] impulse to speak.”61 And yet even as we mature and amass evidence to the contrary (i.e., all our mistakes and regrets), Spinoza observes a tendency to persist in believing ourselves to be the determining agents of our own lives. Accepting that we are not requires accepting that the pre-personal, impersonal affections have more power over our actions and reactions than we might want to consider and will ever really know. Conatus is Spinoza’s explanation for why, under these pressures, things do not yield so completely as to lose themselves entirely; it is the force by which we can resist the affections, something internal to ourselves. I began this study out of my interest in form and embodiment, and over the years, it has transformed into a book that is equally as interested in how some of the most challenging aspects of Spinoza’s thought (determinism, monism), far from absolving Romantic thinkers of the responsibility to challenge oppressive ideas and social structures, actually appear to have reinforced a need to push boundaries. In an essay titled “The Force of Ideas in Spinoza” (2007), Hasana Sharp links our scholarly tendency to focus on the corporeal dimensions of Spinoza’s philosophy to efforts to redress an imbalance between privileged cognition and under-acknowledged embodiment that has long plagued the history of philosophy.62 The embodied subject, whose affectable states have names like “anger” and “pity,” has been racialized and gendered, without the philosophical armor (i.e., “reason” and “objectivity”) with which colonial and patriarchal logics prosper.63 Anti-colonial, antiracist, feminist and queer approaches to materialisms both new and historical, have emphasized, importantly and incisively, the “vibrant matter” that allows us, in the words of Kate Singer, Ashley Cross and Suzanne Barnett, to “redraw genders, bodies, things and texts outside

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cultural narratives that would insist on their static categorization as discrete bodies with reified identities,” and this work has generated significant dividends over the last decade.64 Yet, by attending more closely to the life force of things than to “the ‘life force’ of ideas,” Sharp argues, we’ve also missed opportunities to analyze thought itself as “an active power of being”: “something that nature does,” rather than something individual minds do.65 Since the mind is subject to immanent forces just as matter is, Spinoza excepts no ideas from determining nature, not even ideas of freedom or transcendence. Freedom is not an “escape from determination,” on Spinoza’s account, but “an immanent displacement and reorganization of one’s constituent relations with others, including other ideas.”66 To think through Spinoza’s monism in its most radical sense is to recognize that “the mind’s determination by other ideas parallels the body’s determination by other bodies, each in accordance with unalterable laws.”67 Such recognition does not neutralize the transgressive potential that our critical attention to the corporeality of experience, in Romantic texts and elsewhere, has pried open. Nor does it reify identities or reinforce discrete bodies. Instead, by highlighting ideas in an entanglement with the material force of other ideas, this kind of Spinozist ideology critique lets us examine pervasive Romantic era participation in and propagation of racist, colonialist, sexist, cis-normative and heteronormative, classist and the like assumptions, which do reify and reinforce, without dismissing or dehistoricizing the challenges to these assumptions (abolitionism; women’s and workers’ rights; democratic representation, etc.) that Romantic thinkers also leveled. The material force of a hateful idea can be stronger, that is, more deeply ingrained and widely influential, than an anti-hateful one, but ideas change. In the context of the radical long Enlightenment, such changes come into even sharper focus when we take into account Romantic thinkers’ own engagements with and sense of responsibility for the material force of ideas, particularly when those ideas are also provocations to feel deeply on behalf of others—whether strangers or friends, near or far, human or nonhuman. And how not to absolve one of responsibility for an idea when that idea is determined by God in/as nature? In an 1804 Notebook entry, Coleridge ponders Spinoza while contemplating the conundrum. Observing the

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INTRODUCTION

inevitable “disappointments & baffled attempts” that result from our attempts to live together in societies without taking advantage of or trying to “legislate for” one another, Coleridge asks, how can we act responsibly if we act at the behest of external forces that move us even without our knowledge or consent?68 One answer, which the Ethics provides, is that we should organize our relations with other things and other ideas in ways that best allow us to meet the dangers of affective impingement with reason and the dangers of harmful ideologies with imagination. These two ways of approaching knowledge, reason and imagination, can hold us accountable by granting us some amount of insight into the causes and effects of our own actions and opinions, and the actions and opinions of others. By lett ing us glimpse the complexity of our motivations and those of other people, reason especially encourages in us the moderation and restraint that Spinoza att ributes to wisdom.69 To these points, Spinoza’s commentary on pity, throughout the Ethics, is illustrative both because it elaborates the convolutions of cause and effect that make right action so difficult to pin down, and because what seems at fi rst purely affective—feeling pity—Spinoza considers in ways that speak to the intellectual-logistical problem that Coleridge’s query implies, which is the difficulty of accurately foretelling the effects of one’s actions and ideas so as to guarantee a fair and just society. Focusing on the materiality of ideas centralizes this difficulty, along with another, related difficulty that Spinoza helps elaborate, which is that a poetics capable of engaging Coleridge’s conundrum must develop affect as both its best and its worst measure of morality. Spinoza regards pity as a negative affect because it involves our suffering (“sadness”) on behalf of another suffering being which we believe feels like us (i.e., we would not feel pity for a smashed boulder but would feel pity for an injured rabbit).70 Since negative affects move us to states of diminished power that we naturally want to avoid, we naturally desire to alleviate the other’s suffering so as not to feel so badly ourselves.71 A negative affect can therefore motivate right action: this “appetite to do good, born of our pity for the thing on which we wish to confer a benefit, is called benevolence,” writes Spinoza.72 However, to act purely out of pity is to follow an embodied impulse (not to feel bad) towards an imagined result (that our action will alleviate the other’s

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suffering). Moreover, if we don’t believe that the suffering being feels as we do, then we would not feel pity and could avoid a negative affective experience entirely. It’s not hard to imagine how this escape hatch from bad feeling could motivate the reification of others as not capable of feeling “like us,” and therefore not worthy of our pity. Spinoza regards pity (commiserationem) and sympathy or compassion (misericordia) as essentially synonymous.73 In the Ethics, both pity and sympathy are anticipatory affects, like hope and fear, and Spinoza cautions against depending on such affects to make moral choices “both because, from an affect, we do nothing which we certainly know to be good, and because we are easily deceived by false tears.”74 Even benevolence can be misguided, so relying on pity to regulate social interactions will fail to reliably produce moral action. These precepts distinguish Spinoza’s approach from that of Adam Smith, for whom sympathy may “denote our fellowfeeling with any passion whatever,” negative or positive, while compassion and pity are confi ned to negative passions, as “words appropriated to signify our fellow-feeling with the sorrow of others.”75 Unlike Smith, who takes the propriety with which his sympathetic sufferer tempers the expression of his pain as a virtue—one that can lead to social harmony—Spinoza claims that the “things which beget harmony are those which are related to justice, fairness, and being honorable.” Spinoza admits that fear and flattery can also produce harmony, but only superficially and “without trust.” Because pity makes us susceptible to deception, whether by false tears or self-restraint born of propriety, it is likewise an untrustworthy guarantor of harmony; worse yet, indulging our pity can “present the appearance of morality” where there is in fact none.76 Th is is why, for the subject who lives by reason alone, Spinoza calls pity an “evil” that distracts from the ability to alleviate others’ pain based on logic, without the goad of pity at all.77 Of course, to live by reason alone is impossible, since “human power is very limited and infi nitely surpassed by the power of external causes . . . we are part of a whole of Nature, whose order we follow.”78 The upside-down logic of ascribing teleological significance to the impersonal affections Spinoza sees as pure ego; ends cannot justify means because outcomes and endpoints are arbitrary and inconsequential human inventions. Perhaps

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INTRODUCTION

this is why, in Spinoza’s system, pity, along with the related affect shame, turns out to have another surprising characteristic: it alerts us to a person who strives to do the right thing even if she fails. When seen as a means (towards benevolence, deserved or not) rather than an end (towards morality or justice), “pity . . . though not a virtue, is still good insofar as it indicates . . . a desire to live honorably. In the same way pain is said to be good insofar as it indicates the injured part is not yet decayed.”79 Pity indicates the health of our moral impulses, and these impulses are at the heart of social harmony for Spinoza. Thus Spinoza’s pity-benevolence dynamic differs from Smith’s sympathy-propriety dynamic because it holds open space for the virtuous failure to achieve moral ends—while reminding us that any such “ends” are illusory. So, while the affective mechanism of pity cannot guarantee social harmony, its operations do seem to indicate that a sense of responsibility for easing others’ suffering inheres in nature’s determinations, since the external forces by which we are moved to pity can also oblige us to imagine and investigate the source of another’s pain. Embracing Dissonance

The external stronger force of the affections does jeopardize our ability to make the kinds of moral decisions that ensure justice and equality, as Coleridge recognizes, but the affections can also prevent us from accepting ideas that perpetuate suffering. Although this conclusion would likely still dissatisfy Coleridge, Spinoza maintains that pity moves us to imaginatively engage with others’ experiences and, perhaps, to reasonably question the ideas that contribute to or justify those experiences. In the Romantic engagements with provocative poetic forms that this book traces, encountering sociality that is predicated on disruption, characterized by dissonance and perpetuated by disappointment becomes a means of confronting not knowing—how it will all go; how another living being feels or will feel—as itself a form of relationality. When readers’ genre expectations collide with formal innovations that they don’t see coming, they may be challenged to recognize their vulnerabilities to the sorts of external forces upon which a Spinozist conception of the affections also depends. Th is is a poetics that refuses to treat feelings, particularly those self-improving structures of

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feeling upon which many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of sympathy rest, as ends in themselves or, more prescriptively, as moral ends with which to judge the selves of others. Although Wordsworth, whose Spinozism scholars have begun to explore in earnest, is a significant touchstone in all five chapters of this book, I situate his poetic innovations in a genealogy of Romantic formal experimentation that begins with Charlotte Smith and includes Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800). The present Introduction, and its discussion of affect in light of genre and form, grounds the interpretations in subsequent chapters and especially my views of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784‒1797) in Chapter 1. In that chapter, the continually revised and expanded collection of innovative irregular sonnets that made Smith famous allows me to trace her evolving use of metrical and syntactical strenuousness, a kind of hedging laboriousness, in poems that express hope against hope only to turn (sometimes twice—by virtue of two voltas) against even that tenuous optimism. With this move towards hope against hope, I argue that Smith refuses those who would rely on sympathy, an impersonal affect, to motivate actions on behalf of those who suffer. Chapter 2, “The Disappointment Aesthetic,” centers on a sustained close reading of Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman” (1798), which links Wordsworth’s own rebuke of sympathy for its failure to produce social harmony to the untold tale that the poem’s disruptive formal and generic structures animate. Th is chapter situates the disappointment aesthetic that I see Wordsworth advancing in light of Romantic critical att itudes towards literary letdowns and Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), Wordsworth aims to transform readers’ struggles to fi nd pleasure while anticipating disappointment into the moral and ethical work of the poems, and this is an approach that Robinson’s Lyrical Tales both troubles and exploits. Th rough a comparison that demonstrates how Robinson models “The Shepherd’s Dog” on “Simon Lee,” this chapter also shows how her own critique of community building through sympathy personifies the dog in order to resist the critique of sympathy that Wordsworth, who rejects personification, promotes.

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INTRODUCTION

The next two chapters jump to the early nineteenth century to explore late-Romantic responses to provocations that seemed, by that point, suffused with philosophical and moral aggrandizement. Chapter 3, “Coleridge Tripping,” reveals Coleridge’s later frustrations with Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads to depend not only on changing tastes and opinions but also on a metaphysical dilemma: by 1817 and the publication of Biographia Literaria, he has come to disagree with the materialist morality that would justify Wordsworth’s prosaic verse. Declaring that metrical irregularity and flat diction feel like tripping down stairs in the dark, Coleridge claims that poetry should make readers feel a perfect coincidence of bodily balance and self-conscious self-control. Retracing Coleridge’s steps as he attempts to achieve such equipoise in his critique of Wordsworth’s “The Sailor’s Mother” (1807), I show how disappointed reading becomes the affective measure by which Wordsworth’s poem fails to model self-restraint as a (properly Spinozist, in Coleridge’s view) means of preserving the power and integrity of other people. What Coleridge wants from Wordsworth instead, I conclude, is akin to the transformative recitation of The Prelude that Coleridge immortalizes in “To William Wordsworth” (1807). The recitation’s sense of never-ending predictability creates for Coleridge a reverential experience, the embodiment of which seems to give him something of the proprioceptive self-possession that he seeks but does not fi nd in the lyrical ballads. Coleridge was not alone in looking back on poems that defi ned the turn of the nineteenth century and seeing ego overtaking “genuine” feeling. Although both Coleridge and Wordsworth earned acclaim, as well as notoriety, for their treatment of poetry as an “esemplastic” and authentic force capable of forging community across the socioeconomic spectrum, John Keats’s admiration for such achievements soon gives way to a desire for “something real.”80 Examining two poems that offer neither pedantry nor opportunities for conventional self-fashioning, “Th is Living Hand” (1820) and “Ode on Indolence” (1819), Chapter 4 shows how Keats refuses the drawn-out negotiations with anticipation and proximity to discomfort that typify fi rst-generation Romantic experiments in aesthetic disappointment.81 Rather than hold up the predictable pleasure of a Wordsworthian

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recitation as an alternative, however, Keats posits instead the aesthetic efficacy of instantaneity, or as he says of the actor Edmund Kean’s innovative stagecraft , the immediate and reciprocal bond with an audience that can occur when one gives oneself up to “instant feeling, without the shadow of a thought about any thing else.”82 Th rough halting arrests and abrupt endings, Keats’s poems enact att itudes of dynamic passivity that aim to compel readerly engagement and interest, and which just might (re)animate the poet in turn. Keats’s fascination with communicating reciprocal feeling in his letters and poems also indicates his familiarity with theories of dynamic materiality on a global scale, in which another’s feelings might move us at a distance or even after the death of the one who feels.83 My fi ft h chapter, “The Politics of Provocation,” considers the political and ethical implications of such a vast and enduring virtual space of affect by exploring revolutionary metaphors of the wind and weather for Wordsworth and Percy Shelley. Two very different historical situations organize this chapter: the forced extraction and imprisonment of the Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture by the French in 1802, and the public outcry following the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. My readings of Wordsworth’s sonnet “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” (1803) and Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy (1832) reveal that, although bordercrossing affects represent a condition of political possibility for both poets, an irresolvable tension remains between such optimism and the ethics of charging those who are most vulnerable with suffering insurrection and violence. In Wordsworth’s sonnet, the juxtaposition of a dying Louverture with a singing milkmaid is a formal provocation that unsett les the posthumous justice proffered by its fi nal lines, while, in the Mask, Shelley’s calls for Reformers to keep assembling in the wake of the massacre shares with the Reformers’ own rhetoric of safety in numbers a tragic calculation of loss. Gathering in order to agitate for change lessens the probability that any one person will be killed even though someone will be, and this is an ethical concession that Shelley’s figures for democratic reform, as an idea of God in/as nature, push to its limits. In light of our own riotous atmospheres, the ones that enveloped this book’s composition over the last five years at least, I include a Coda that

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INTRODUCTION

explores the unevenness of the burden of being moved by external affective force in Romantic thought that, in retrospect, has troubled these chapters all along. Claudia Rankine’s “Weather” (2020), an occasional poem for the New York Times Book Review, inherits Romantic figures for revolutionary change at a time when the Romantic history shaped by perpetual crises feels powerfully resonant once more. Learning from Rankine’s poem, this fi nal reflection returns to Wordsworth and the limits of staging aesthetic disappointment while also embracing revolutionary progress that is capable of staying the course.

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CHAPTER 1

Hope Against Hope in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets

W h e n C h a r l o t t e S m i t h w r i t e s to her publisher William Davies on 8 June 1791 to inquire after the proofs of her recently completed novel, Celestina (1791), she also requests to borrow a book. “Have you got Stewarts travels to ascertain Moral Motion?” she asks, “If you have, I wd borrow for I shall not buy them till I am sure they are worth it.”1 The volumes in question, John “Walking” Stewart’s Travels over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe, to Discover the Source of Moral Motion (1790), deserve our notice because they indicate Smith’s proximity to a particular type of radical materialist thinking—the diff usion of which into late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideas of the affections my Introduction began preliminarily to establish. Th is materialism has been called “instinctive Spinozism,” and more recent work has sought to establish its influence, in addition to that of Spinoza himself, on a number of canonical Romantic poets.2 “Walking” Stewart’s pantheism, though eccentric, aligns with Spinoza’s theory that mind and matter comprise the same substance, even though thinking beings can conceive of them as essentially different; thus Moral Motion “adopts” the “hypothesis . . . that sentience and intelligence are the results of matter’s organization.”3 Without going too far into Moral Motion’s idiosyncratic approach, for this chapter’s purposes it is enough to begin by asserting that Smith’s request, along with her documented interest in other, 27

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more studied books in the pantheistic tradition, such as Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791), reveals her attention to works that would have included elements of Spinozist materialism, as recent scholarship has also taught us to expect.4 Whether or not Davies ultimately lent Smith the book, and whether or not she read it, I take her request for Moral Motion as this chapter’s point of departure, because Smith’s curiosity opens onto an understudied avenue in Romantic era thinking about Smith and the material force of feeling, particularly when it comes to her early and sustained work on Elegiac Sonnets (1784‒1797). In her sonnets, Smith makes strategic use of strenuousness—a sense of overworkedness and effortful excess—in order to capture the anticipatory, negative affective intensities of a heart made sick by hoping in vain. I call this hope against hope, rather than hopelessness, so as to highlight how a tenacious kind of guarded optimism, manifested through the rhythms of Smith’s verse, lays the groundwork for the affective consequence of her poems. Th is proleptic att itude, which is both self-possessed and a form of labor along the lines of “keep on keeping on,” animates the poems in ways that refuse to buoy readers’ faith in their own voluntary powers of right action and those of other people, since being moved by the affections to act, even out of pity or sympathy, does not guarantee that the action is fair or good. Th is is a Spinozist argument, which emphasizes how the forms of subjectivity that Smith’s poems express—in which pre-personal, impersonal affections shape a specifically female social identity—gain cogency and power when, through the lens of the Ethics, their affectability turns out not to be owed to a woman poet’s so-called special weakness but rather to her enmeshment in a world of powerful external forces.5 Th is chapter begins by demonstrating how, in Sonnet XII, “Written on the sea shore.—October, 1784,” metrical persistence compels readers to confront a moral dilemma wrought by formal and generic expectations and animated by something like Spinoza’s big idea: the conative desire to persist in being.6 Sonnet XII is an early poem. It appears in the fi rst edition of Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and, with revisions, in the expanded editions that Smith released over the thirteen-year period during which her increasing popularity as a poet was matched only by her private life’s escalating public exposure.

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Panning sideways in order to reflect on this publication history and its role in Smith’s development, the middle section of this chapter reframes Smith’s centrality to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sonnet revival in Britain as a history of reading around Smith. Reading around describes a tendency among critics to insinuate knowledge of Smith’s personal life while simultaneously turning away from that knowledge and, casting her as a conduit for national genius and figure for the exemplary poetess, to absent Smith from this reception while making her poetic personae central to it. Here I argue that critics’ ingenious tactics for continuing to read Smith’s poems while avoiding her autobiographical claims are also rejections of any sense of responsibility for her poet-speaker’s suffering that the elegiac sonnets’ formal strenuousness prompts. The discomforts of this unasked-for responsibility emerge in close readings of two sonnets which, rather than invite readers to feel with the poet-speaker, present hope against hope as an alternative to the sympathetic identifications that we might expect them to encourage. My conclusion contends that such disruptions index Smith’s refusal to move readers into line with generic (i.e., normative and majority) structures of feeling along the lines of Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy (discussed in the Introduction). The revelation that Elegiac Sonnets makes available instead occurs in poetic rhythms that strain and struggle in order to emphasize how the affections cannot be counted on to produce moral outcomes. Put another way, Elegiac Sonnets’ intervention is both somber and quotidian for all that it might sound bathetic: it’s hard to be sympathetic when that feels like work. At the foundation of this reading of Smith stand several key insights into the history and theory of poetic form and embodiment, beginning with Lisa L. Moore’s polemical reorientation, in “A Lesbian History of the Sonnet,” of the sonnet’s position in poetry’s longue durée of masculine, heterosexual desire. Moore’s establishment of a female-centered, queer history that “has been repeatedly forgotten but also rediscovered and reenacted over and over again by poets att racted to the sonnet as a vehicle for articulating torqued, ambivalent, otherwise inadmissible affects,” reveals (and revels in) the sonnet’s form as a vehicle for expressing nonnormative genders and desires.7 The power of Moore’s argument, which she calls

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“heuristic rather than deductive,” is that its performance of queer rereading as a non-teleological act of sensuous literary pleasure also exposes the poets’ rediscoveries and reenactments as a recursive process in which Moore herself participates.8 The result, for thinking about Smith, has been to fuel my sense that despite new interest in the radical potential of Smith’s oeuvre, Elegiac Sonnets has been unduly overlooked.9 Unlike relatively recent work on “The Emigrants” (1793) and Beachy Head (1807) that reads Smith in relation to wartime, revolution and a deep, historical knowledge of and feeling for Britain’s imbrication in a global world,10 critics who approach Elegiac Sonnets with an eye to empowering Smith have tended to do so by making her a saleswoman in sentiment, so that questions of form, genre and affect ultimately come down to how the poems “capitalize on the permeable heart.”11 There remains a critical presumption that while Smith may be politically engaged in novels like Desmond (1792) and Montalbert (1795), when it comes to Elegiac Sonnets, in the words of Adela Pinch, “it would be misguided to see Smith’s poetry as even proto-feminist.”12 However, in the almost thirty years since Pinch’s landmark study, this would also imply that the other, crucial part of what Pinch said has been forgotten: “We cannot assert a simple continuity between the expression of misery in women’s sentimental literature and the expression of political grievance in late eighteenth-century feminist writing. The formal and epistemological dimensions of a literature of feelings must be taken into account.”13 Without losing the thread of this explanation in all the exemplary work that has been done since,14 the combination of Spinoza’s influence and Moore’s “inadmissible affects” may push us towards just such an accounting for Smith. Indeed, when “knowledge of Spinoza and of the political salience of his thought was not only available to but unavoidable for the writers of [the Romantic] period,” and when a book like Moral Motion promotes Spinozist political necessity to the travelogue set, an audience of readers seeking knowledge of foreign customs in exotic locales, the epistemological and ontological dimensions of a literature of feelings have already transformed.15 In Spinoza’s Ethics, conatus, or striving to persist in being, characterizes all things, from stones to trees and human beings; this striving “is nothing but the actual essence of the thing,” making it both what we

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endeavor to preserve and the very action of its perseverance.16 Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets is a body of work that enacts the impossibility of such poise even as it strives to reach it, in which the poems’ “inadmissible affects” work instead to resist the presumption that social harmony is the natural end of sympathy. The formal provocations with which the poems ask readers to feel this dissonance generate not only hope against hope for change, but also, and more radically, hope against readers’ hope for sympathetic closure, when that hope is insincere, misogynistic or naïve—and this is a literature of feeling which cannot help but contain a feminist charge. Out of Breath in Sonnet XII

Elegiac sonnets are, very often, comparisons: they make vivid the poetspeaker’s pain by figuring what that pain is like. Taken together, in their ever-expanding volumes, Smith’s sonnets both reveal the profound ongoingness of this pain and suggest the entrenched social and legal norms responsible for it. Th is is one way her poems differ from conventional elegy. Rather than mourn the loss of a particular person, “lacrimae rerum, they mediate a general condition,”17 one characterized by what Mary Wollstonecraft calls “the perversions of understanding which systematize oppression.”18 Thus the scale of Smith’s critique surpasses the purely personal. It puts me in mind of David Simpson’s insights into Wordsworth’s “social concern,” a poetic att itude or “indeterminate social identity that registers the presence of something sinister and invisible governing everyday life.”19 Like Wordsworth, Smith tells tales set in nature and the countryside about the people who live there. Her poet-speaker observes and imagines the lives of stalwart shepherds, homeless wanderers and suffering soldiers; figures whose “common forms of . . . alienation bespeak a general condition that is implicitly multitudinous,” as Simpson says of Wordsworth’s own rustic figures.20 And like Wordsworth too, Smith’s strong authorial presence inevitably comes to dominate these scenes, with her voltas very often a turn to the self-referential and philosophically reflective. Likening her poet-speaker’s plight to that of generalizable poetic figures, Smith nevertheless writes about female experience in particular as a uniquely uncathartic form of tragedy. Her poet-speaker emerges through

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dark, often jarring comparisons to the experiences of other, frequently male, characters and types. Some of the sonnets borrow tropes, as well as characters and plotlines, from well-known sentimental novels, and others draw from the traditions of graveyard poems, captivity narratives and the gothic. Sonnet XII, for instance, “Written on the sea shore,” grimly recasts what it means for the poet-speaker to be enveloped by sea spray and ocean waves: ON some rude fragment of the rocky shore, Where on the fractured cliff the billows break, Musing, my solitary seat I take, And listen to the deep and solemn roar. O’er the dark waves the winds tempestuous howl; The screaming sea-bird quits the troubled sea: But the wild gloomy scene has charms for me, And suits the mournful temper of my soul. Already shipwreck’d by the storms of Fate, Like the poor mariner, methinks, I stand, Cast on a rock; who sees the distant land From whence no succour comes—or comes too late. Faint and more faint are heard his feeble cries, ’Till in the rising tide the exhausted sufferer dies.21

The poet-speaker descends as she transforms. A “solitary” and “musing” nature poet, she sits at fi rst above and apart from the “wild gloomy scene.”22 If she feels compelled to add her melancholy reflections to a situation so suited to “the mournful temper of [her] soul,” it is only because the coincidence “has charms” for her. Yet, rather than cast her mortal sorrows against the harsh landscape (throwing into relief its sublimity, as one might expect of such a poem), Smith’s sestet introduces a new frame of reference. Comparing the poet-speaker’s plight to that of a “poor mariner,” Smith collapses the nature poet’s distanced view, retroactively transforming our understanding of the relationship between speaker and environment. “Like” the mariner, buffeted by storms and pulled under the waves, Smith’s poetspeaker knows herself to be “already shipwreck’d.”

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At once, the simile reveals the poet-speaker to have always been subject to forces that work to subsume and destroy her. She has always been the “exhausted sufferer,” whom no one hears or to whom no one listens or sends aid or for whom help comes too late. The rhyme of “sea” with “me,” couched as it is in the middle stanza’s middle lines, both encloses and foreshadows the sonnet’s argument: it is impossible to remain apart from the world. For the speaker, that which inspires poetry is not before or below her but overtop and all around. She is enveloped, and the “storms of Fate” that diminish her power read like a Spinozist reminder that any aesthetic predicated on perfect autonomy neglects a world of impersonal, inescapable affections. Written both because of and despite these forces, the poem, though it exists, determinably suggests that it has reasons not to. The mariner’s hopeless vantage conjures a scene of writing that is isolating and under threat, in a reversal that is far from unique among elegiac sonnets. In general, these are poems that lean heavily on their voltas, in which representations of pain, sadness or suffering turn on the abrupt disclosure that this is also what the poet-speaker feels, endures or suffers. At times, Smith inverts this pattern, opening with a respite from pain before revealing that respite to be illusory in the case of her subjects or of a poet-speaker that strongly resembles Smith herself. In Sonnet XXXVI, for example, a “lone Wanderer, fainting on his way” rests “for a moment” and feels his “sorrow” lift (lines 1, 2, 6).23 Th is, Smith’s poet-speaker morosely explains, is what the restfulness of reading and writing poetry used to be like for her. But owing to all her cares, “darker now grows life’s unhappy day, / Dark with new clouds of evil yet to come” (lines 9–10). By asking readers not only to reconsider their initial impressions, but to do so with a new awareness of the poetspeaker’s plight, such reversals emphasize the disjuncture between readers’ expectations of a poet’s power, and what Smith characterizes as the poetspeaker’s real vulnerability to the world she inhabits. In this way, and unlike Wordsworth, Smith’s social concern in Elegiac Sonnets often seems to reflect back upon the poet-speaker, a determinate social identity gendered specifically female. Obliquely registering the systemic oppressions—poverty, marriage, educational inequity, and so forth—that govern everyday life, Smith reveals the limits of poetry as an escape, a commodity, or even evidence of personhood. For the woman author who expects her writing to

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provide an avenue for stable income, career, self-expression, public persona, legacy, and the like, the att itude of detached and disinterested observer proves impossible. In Strange Fits of Passion, Pinch identified a paradox at the heart of long eighteenth-century discourses on feeling. Feelings that seem to circulate from origins unknown, that are impersonal or “wandering,” undermine the presumption that my personal feelings are my own. When it comes to women’s dissatisfactions with social, legal and political norms during the period, this paradox begs the question: can feelings that never really belonged to me really authorize my fight for change? Pinch’s answer at the time was to suggest that women’s lived experiences, including their experiences of feeling, could almost certainly be claimed as their own. Such a desire is articulated in Smith’s 1792 “Preface to the Sixth Edition” of her Elegiac Sonnets. Worried that readers might interpret her elegiac sonnets’ persistent melancholy as mere artifice, Smith explains that she began writing in order to privately express painful experiences, as the good friend whom she addresses in the preface would no doubt confi rm: You know that when in the Beech Woods of Hampshire, I fi rst struck the chords of the melancholy lyre, its notes were never intended for the public ear! It was unaffected sorrows drew them forth. . . . You know the circumstances under which I have now so long been labouring; and you have done me the honour to say that few Women could so long have contended with them.24

In what purports to be a recollection from a real-life conversation, Smith describes her elegiac sonnets as lyrics—products of the melancholy lyre—due to her susceptibility to sorrowful feelings, which “drew them forth.” At the same time, she is clear that the poems emerge from both these feelings and the experiences or “circumstances” that gave rise to them. The friend’s rhetorical function is to corroborate these claims—“You know” what happened to me, what I have suffered and what my original intentions were, her repeated entreaties demand, “you know” because you were there—and thus to confi rm that the reasons behind Smith’s decisions to write, and to keep on writing, were not only impersonal feelings but specific events in her personal

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life and their effects on her children.25 The dialogue implies too that Smith’s refusal to give up in the face of injustice presents a challenge to gendered expectations, since she is one of “few” women strong enough to bear it. Smith had good reason to write prefaces that insert her authorial self into the scene of writing. In the years following the fi rst edition of her sonnets, even as Smith had become a crucial figure in the sonnet’s revival in Britain—to hear many of her contemporaries tell it, the revival owes its existence almost entirely to her influence—she was also strangely absented from it in a number of critical accounts.26 In an April 1786 review of Elegiac Sonnets, for instance, the Gentleman’s Magazine expresses its wish that the “misfortunes” of Smith, the “pathetic poetess,” turn out to be “all imaginary.”27 Having “perused her very tender and exquisite eff usions,” the anonymous reviewer worries that, if “we have supposed her sorrows to be real,” then the poems “must” be read with “diminished pleasure.”28 “It would be hard indeed,” the writer reasons, “if a lady, who has so much contributed to the delight of others, should feel any want of happiness herself.”29 Making Smith an object of pity and intrigue (Is she suffering? Is she not?), the review recommends ignorance as the only morally uncompromised, selfpreserving way of relating to her poems. Yet to stop reading altogether is not an option. Complete quotations of Sonnets X, IV, and XXXVI prominently bisect the review, and are followed by the assertion that Smith’s sonnets “exceed” those of both William Shakespeare and John Milton.30 By the end of two short paragraphs, Smith’s poems have come to belong to canon and country, while her well-being rests with readers and critics for whom not really knowing becomes a hedge against the dissatisfying prospect of not enjoying pity premised on pain. Without directly challenging such evasions, Smith nevertheless revises and expands the prefaces of subsequent editions, particularly in 1792 (sixth edition) and 1797 (subscription edition), in ways that emphasize, more vividly and with more detail, her private experiences and emotions. In 1792, she describes the protracted legal batt le over her children’s inheritance—which, she explains, continues to motivate “des Chansons tristes” that made her famous even after Elegiac Sonnets’ initial success—and in the 1797 account, she explains the deleterious effects on her children of the inheritance’s

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loss.31 After nine years of writing letters and running around after lawyers (those “Honourable Men,” Smith scoffs, who offer neither reassurance nor recompense), she notes how her unhappiness has transformed into a melancholy state of perpetual deferral. Th inking of Proverbs 13:12, she sighs: “But still I am condemned to feel the ‘hope delayed that maketh the heart sick.’”32 Claiming a suspension of hope that should not escape our notice, Smith transforms impersonal feelings into private emotions: the “cause” for which sorrowful poetry must be its “effect.” That even by the time of the sixth edition Smith has “unfortunately no reason yet . . . to change my tone,” confi rms her in adding even more “sad songs” to the collection—which, she declares, readers must continue to celebrate as such. “Toujours des Chansons tristes!” is Smith’s rallying cry, and it is one that folds the affective dimension of hope against hope for change into the work of authorship, allowing Smith to stake a claim over her felt experiences even as her poems suggest the power of the affections to move us even against our wills.33 For Jerome McGann, Smith’s commitment to “absolute truth-telling” in the face of such difficulties situates her, along with Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, in a sentimentalist tradition characterized by the “sapphic myth” of poetry as a “discourse of failure.”34 Rather than perform the disinterest that signifies aesthetic mastery, these writers develop richly embellished styles that, by appearing to care too much about attracting an audience, make legible the exigencies of the marketplace. For them, “poetic failure ceases to be simply an available subject or theme to be addressed;” it is a formal and stylistic “textual event, a new foundational feature of imaginative work.” Th is McGann contrasts with the (implicitly masculine) approaches of the high Modernists, whose “myths of perdurance” erect “Th rones, principalities, powers, and dominions” against any whiff of Sapphic being-towards-failure.35 Although he is clearly on a mission to take back sentimental poetics from the disparagements of T. S. Eliot and Co., what McGann misses, I think, are Smith’s own defenses against poetic failure in the prefaces—and the ways her poems register this too in both content and form. Sonnet XII pivots on a tension between the presumed authority of poets and the lived precarity that Smith’s poet-speaker claims. The crucial shift, from nature poet to poet-in-nature, reveals the kind of

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embodied subjectivity that, as McGann says of sentimentalism as a whole, assumes that “no human action of consequence is possible—including mental action—that is not led and driven by feeling, affect, emotion.”36 And yet Sonnet XII’s revisionary volta also sets the stage for another, quite unexpected formal contest, one that resists the affective impingements implied by ocean waves, wind and tides. The poem’s irregular closing line, a labor of metrical endurance at fourteen syllables, enacts a conative desire to persist that feels like treading water. It is a poetic structure not of perdurance but of enduring and striving to endure. By withholding the satisfaction of a perfect heroic couplet, the fi nal line of Sonnet XII animates an experience of bodily reluctance and, eventually, of lett ing go, towards which the reader cannot help but lean: “Faint and more faint are heard his feeble cries, / ’Till in the rising tide the exhausted sufferer dies” (lines 13–14). Hitt ing each syllable of “suff-er-er,” past the point of the expected pentameter, draws out and on an affective experience of anticipation that is at once towards death and the very act of delaying of it. Here is a moment of acute formal dissonance that hangs on our awareness of an unsatisfactory resolution while, at the affective level, asking us to feel that resolution, suspended. Like the deceptive cadence in music, we stretch towards closure. The poem sets up an expectation for formal regularity then undercuts it, itself a formal move pitted against an equally powerful drive to preserve the life of the mariner and, by extension, the life of the poet-speaker: for the poem not to end. Four extra syllables become, in this way, a moral quandary to be worked out at the level of the body. They ask: does leaning towards resolution makes us complicit in the death of the mariner/speaker? Does desiring the line to meet its metrical match, waiting for the rhyme to land, anticipating the poem’s “wholeness” or “totality” as Samuel Taylor Coleridge would say—does all this implicate the reader in the life and death of the author? The Gentleman’s Magazine would prefer not to know, though its desire for self-insulating ignorance suggests I am not alone in fi nding such questions central to Elegiac Sonnets. Sonnet XII is not the only example of this kind of irregularity in Elegiac Sonnets, though it is the longest—the only example of heptameter—and the most long-suffering, having remained in the collection since its fi rst edition.

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As a general rule, though, Smith prefers pentameter. Of her ninety-two elegiac sonnets, almost three-quarters (sixty-seven poems) conclude in decasyllabic verse, and exactly one-quarter end in an Alexandrine. One poem, Sonnet XIII, “To Petrarch,” is written entirely in tetrameter.37 Quite a few of the poems rely on strong caesuras, by way of long dashes or commas, in order to regulate metrical divisions in their fi nal lines; and a number of these scan cumbersomely precisely because the caesura forces syllabic elision or overemphasis. When it comes to rhyme, seventy-four elegiac sonnets end in couplets, and the remainder follow the patterns ABAB, ABBA or ABCABC. Within the duly respected constraint of fourteen lines, then, the ways in which Smith’s elegiac sonnets draw to a close are formally various. While most fall into line with expectations for a modern English sonnet (heroic couplets), at least every fourth poem, on average, surprises. Sonnet XII breaks with formal expectations in order to stage an encounter with other affects—like pragmatism, anger and frustration, which Smith’s prefaces also display. Finally, Smith’s revisions of Sonnet XII further encourage this interpretation. The later editions of Elegiac Sonnets include slight variations in the poem’s fi nal line, which indicate deliberate attempts to overemphasize affective postponement and delay. Up until the 1786 third edition, an iambshift ing contraction had urged the elision of the second syllable in “sufferer,” allowing the fi nal line to be read with six feet: “Till in the rising tide, th’ exhausted sufferer dies.” By the 1792 sixth edition, however, the contraction is gone (though the obstruent comma remains until the eighth).38 Th is change makes an already elongated line more interminable, not less. The reader must pass through the Alexandrine-shaped space of comfortable irregularity (ending poems or stanzas with an extra foot was a well-worn convention) and enter the zone of the obtuse or even vulgar. Yet, rather than choose a more capacious form—like the free verse that Smith will use to tell another, similar story about mariners, social alienation and the dangers of the sea in Beachy Head (1807)—Sonnet XII’s sonnet form conveys rhythmically and linguistically the experience of feeling an attachment to that which confi nes. The poet-speaker’s death becomes inevitable at the very moment that its metrical dispensation becomes unbearable, and whatever

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self-satisfying pity readers may have been cultivating is left awash in a fi nal verdict that is also a relief: now those who are reading aloud can exhale— while the “exhausted sufferer” remains breathless as she slips below the surface. Reading Around Charlotte Smith

Put simply, Smith’s elegiac sonnets are provocations of form because they are hybrid and irregular. More complex, though, are the ways in which critical responses to Elegiac Sonnets meet these provocations, both as deeply meaningful formal innovations and as the creative outputs of a woman poet. Only a few months after the Gentleman’s Magazine’s original review of Elegiac Sonnets, that periodical published a quite remarkable follow-up. In what amounts to either an informal essay or a bloated letter to the editor, a Mr. H. White says that he has become aware of the “poetic eff usions” of a certain “M. C. S.” owing to the magazine’s coverage. Now, he “cannot help thinking that the Public ought to know” about an entirely different poet, the Rev. Mr. Stevens of Derbyshire, to whose work White devotes seven paragraphs of lavish praise and one piece of questionable advice.39 Without naming Smith, White goes on to explain the merits of Milton’s sonnets, before pointedly dismissing “litt le elegies . . . consisting of four stanzas and a couplet,” as “no more sonnets than they are epic poems.”40 In abstract terms, White then discusses how a sonnet’s style, “if the subject is familiar and domestic,” ought to be “affectionate,” “vigorous” and “energetic”— characteristics that, not coincidentally, stand in strict opposition to the melancholy of Smith’s verse. Not until White’s penultimate paragraph does the revelation fi nally come: “Mrs. Smith says she has been told that the regular sonnet suits not the nature or genius of our language,” White fairly sneers; “Surely this assertion cannot be demonstrated, and therefore was not worth attention.”41 Without appearing to notice the absurdity, White turns his back on Smith while writing an entire essay to spite her success. That Smith had been the subject of White’s censoriousness all along, readers including John Thelwall and Anna Seward recognized. Seward quotes White at length in her Preface to Original Sonnets on Various Subjects (1799), with full awareness

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of the allusions to Smith.42 Thelwall, by contrast, comes to Smith’s rescue in grand style, publishing, in December 1792, “An Essay on the English Sonnet; illustrated by a comparison between the Sonnets of Milton and those of Charlotte Smith,” in which he stages an imagined debate between himself and an unidentified caustic critic—clearly White—in order to rebuke those who “[shackle] the wings of aspiring genius” with “pedantic prejudices in favour of the models of established writers.”43 To that end, Thelwall reproduces White’s critical jabs in order to defend Smith against them. To the remark about “litt le elegies” Thelwall rejoins: “call them epic poems if you will. The time is coming when we shall estimate things, not by their titles, but by their merits.”44 For Thelwall, “titles” implies not only genre but canon and class, so that even when Smith enters “the more humble walks of poetry,” she might still, “with daring irregularity . . . surpass the celebrated writers.”45 Gallant as he is, though, Thelwall’s defense nevertheless reveals that even as the sonnet’s renewed popularity and respectability at the turn of the century offered a chance for a new generation of sonneteers to innovate rather than imitate, attempts to set rules, establish expectations and incentivize best practices often relapsed into traditional, and traditionally male, expectations. Smith’s irregular sonnets made her a target for those intent on defending the status quo—which could also mean differentiating propriety from popularity, with Smith standing for the latter. That Smith was, as I have been describing, often a missing target in these attacks makes her formal innovations no less central to them. While a perhaps quintessentially Romantic focus on originality and boundary-breaking might surprise us in its application to a form defi ned by a limit to a mere fourteen lines, such restrictiveness was often regarded as the very thing responsible for the sonnet’s innovative potential. Seward, for instance, lauds Milton’s sonnets for their “strict energetic measures” and adherence to the “Severest of [poetic] orders,” which she thinks “convey / A grandeur, grace and spirit, all their own” (lines 12, 2, 13–14).46 Seward takes pride in her own adherence to the Miltonic “rules” that make sonnets both a very difficult form and the form with the most potential for excellence.47 William Wordsworth, himself an admirer of Smith, defends not the struggle but the peace of mind encouraged by the sonnet’s limitations.48 In his “Prefatory Sonnet,”

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he calls the form’s “scanty plot of ground” not a “prison,” but a “pastime to be bound” (lines 9, 11, 10).49 Those poets “who have felt the weight of too much liberty,” Wordsworth writes, “should fi nd short solace” in the sonnet’s formal constraints, as he himself has done (lines 13–14).50 For other poets, the sonnet’s small size throws into relief a tension between artistic freedom, on the one hand, and the seemingly arbitrary limits that genre imposes on form, on the other. Mary Robinson, in her “Preface” to Sappho and Phaon (1796), argues that the modern English sonnet depends upon a concluding couplet that, unhappily, “confi nes the poet’s fancy”; she bolsters her own use of the “legitimate” or Petrarchan form, which ends in alternating rhyme, by highlighting the ease with which this allows more than one Petrarchan sonnet to “be carried on in a series of sketches . . . forming in the whole a complete and connected story.”51 For Robinson, the sonnet sequence answers the problem of the limited form by allowing for continued elaborations. It is Coleridge, however, who justifies the “totality” of a scant fourteen lines not for the sake of containing poets’ wild imaginations, but out of respect for readers’ “pre-established codes of decision.”52 Coleridge’s “Introduction” to the sonnets (1803) rationalizes formal restriction precisely because it so readily fulfi lls readers’ desires for completeness: The Sonnet then is a small poem, in which some lonely feeling is developed. It is limited to a particular number of lines, in order that the reader’s mind having expected the close at the place in which he fi nds it, may rest satisfied; and that so the poem may acquire, as it were, a Totality,—in plainer phrase, may become a Whole. It is confi ned to fourteen lines, because as some particular number is necessary, and that particular number must be a small one, it may as well be fourteen as any other number. When no reason can be adduced against a thing, Custom is a sufficient reason for it. Perhaps, if the Sonnet were comprized in less than fourteen lines, it would become a serious Epigram; if it extended to more, it would encroach on the province of the Elegy. Poems, in which no lonely feeling is developed, are not Sonnets because the Author has chosen to write them in fourteen lines: they should rather be entitled Odes, or Songs, or Inscriptions.53

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Here, the necessary preconditions for a poem to count as a sonnet are that it develops a “lonely feeling” and that it is fourteen lines long. Deviations from these two stipulations result in poems that “encroach” upon the territory of other genres, thinks Coleridge—although sonnets are free to vary in meter, and in the pattern and number of their rhymes.54 Crucially, Coleridge professes not to have invented these “laws” but to have derived them from the exemplary oeuvres of two modern poets: William Lisle Bowles, whose 1789 collection imitates the elegiac sonnet invented by Smith, and of course, Smith herself. As we have seen, Coleridge was not alone in esteeming Smith in this way. Yet, if Smith shaped the sonnet revival that influenced later poets, from Wordsworth to Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, then what role might her particular innovation—the elegiac sonnet—have played in the development of other hybrid and irregular Romantic experiments? Following Coleridge’s schema, it would seem, none at all. By his measure, Smith’s poems are sonnets, perfectly calibrated for “wholeness” at fourteen lonely lines. Basing his rationale on long-established “Custom,” Coleridge highlights the history and illustriousness of the sonnet designation—two associations that would not have been lost on his readers, as Milton’s repeated invocation shows. Indeed, even for Smith herself, laying claim to the sonnet required a degree of judicious positioning that leads her to demure, in the prefatory statement that would go on to draw White’s ire: “The litt le Poems which are here called Sonnets, have I believe no very just claim to that title; but they consist of fourteen lines, and appear to me no improper vehicle for a single Sentiment.”55 Coleridge, for his part, justifies his canonization of Smith and Bowles by likening their popularity to that of Petrarch. For Coleridge, all this would seem to render “elegiac” redundant, since the one thing that sonnets and elegies share, “lonely feeling,” is also the thing without which a sonnet ceases to be a sonnet. Yet by seeming to rewrite Smith’s “single Sentiment” in the language of negative affect, Coleridge’s “lonely feeling” implies that a particular type of feeling is the one most obviously in need of a sonnet to develop it. Not without humor, I think, Coleridge personifies poor, lonely feeling as he freights the very idea of a sonnet with melancholy. And while he does acknowledge the variety of passions

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that sonnets in general express (“those Sonnets appear to me the most exquisite, in which moral Sentiments, Affections, or Feelings, are deduced from, and associated with, the Scenery of Nature”56), what his two popular sonneteers (Smith and Bowles) are popular for nevertheless suggests a particular emotional palette. Thus Coleridge captures the elegiac sonnets’ marked lugubriousness without the rationale offered by Smith’s biography. Unique among those who venerate Smith, he does not even mention her sorrows. Instead, by making lonely feeling a necessary condition of the poems themselves, Coleridge accomplishes what the Gentleman’s Magazine only hints at: a method for reading around Smith, which is also a means of evading the moral obligation not to take aesthetic enjoyment from autobiographical pain. It is an elision that transforms the relationship between reader and poem, allowing elegiac sonnets, and all their painful pleasures, to become the intellectual and emotional property not of poet (or even of poet-speaker) but of reader: “Easily remembered from their briefness, and interesting alike to the eye and the affections, these are Poems that . . . domesticate with the heart, and become, as it were, a part of our identity.”57 Rather than ask readers to grapple with difficult moral questions about the poet’s experiences of injustice, what each sonnet should do, Coleridge says, is deliver a lone instance of moral sentiment, affection, or feeling, straight into the reader’s heart. Perhaps it is not hard to see how criticisms of this sort are a discomfort avoidance technique, which elide Smith’s public expressions of personal and professional difficulty in order to produce Smith as X: Smith as celebrity poetess, Smith as national treasure, Smith as Milton’s sometime inheritor. Allusions to her fraught biography that exist only to set it carefully aside are not, after all, recognitions of personhood. What they do accomplish is the rejection of Smith’s attempts to discomfort readers for whom easy pleasure would seem to rely instead as much on the fulfi llment of genre expectations as on eliding the material conditions of women’s experiences of authorship. Indeed, it should not go unmentioned that by 1817 Coleridge will have dropped Smith from his record of significant sonneteers, so that in the Biographia Literaria only Bowles appears influential.58 Wordsworth too, in the late-career reminiscences of the Fenwick Notes, trades Smith for Milton,

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thereby resituating his own sonnets’ genesis in a masculine tradition.59 Yet, over the course of ten editions, Smith’s increasingly revealing prefatory materials and her poems work together to provoke a sense of responsibility, even complicity, for the woman poet’s pain. Th is is not to re-cast what are really straightforward attempts at inviting a sympathetic response, nor is it to prostrate Smith to the whims of the marketplace. Rather, it is to suggest that the elegiac sonnets’ formal irregularities are sites in which such selfpreserving avoidances as Smith’s critics betray come up against her commitment to producing and reproducing a poetics of inexhaustible hope against the hope for easy pleasure that might motivate some readers to read on while looking away. Turning Against Hope

Hope against hope is the form of a sonnet in miniature: one feeling, a turn, and another feeling that lets us see the fi rst feeling anew. Because both feelings are hope, however, the form is also recursive: hope turns toward a confrontation with itself, which is also the action of not giving up on itself. Ernst Bloch has identified hope as “the most important expectant emotion, the most authentic emotion of longing and thus of self,” due to its alignment with positive futurity and its power to counteract negative “expectant emotions” like anxiety or fear.60 Hope against hope, specifically, reflects both wariness and expectancy; it is a feeling that guards against unrealizable futures even as it simultaneously commits itself to them. The biblical origin of the phrase is in Romans 4:18–19, when Abraham took in the hard facts of his earthly existence and, “being not weak in faith,” trusted in God’s seemingly impossible proclamations as he “against hope believed in hope” and the future that was promised.61 Pragmatic, self-aware and unswervingly devoted, Abraham’s hope against hope couches proof of faith in disproof of credulity—he was aware of the facts, after all. Of course, when seen through a different lens, such faith might seem like naïveté or delusion. Confronting the “complex and contradictory nature of progressive forces” in mid-1980s U.S. politics, for instance, Cornel West describes a Black radicalism that “hopes against hope if only to hold out the dream of freedom in a never-never land . . . in order to survive in

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the deplorable present.”62 For West, hope against hope prevents activist inertia even as it props open the door to a fantasyland that distracts and excuses, becoming yet another reason why “people are not Bartleby, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of att achment that they are used to,” as Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” helps explain.63 Here is a version of hope against hope in which knowing all the facts is not the same as knowing all the psychological drives or compulsions, nor is it the same as being able to give up one’s object of desire. And yet, structurally at least, hope against hope’s central break in the proceedings, its pause to examine what’s known, its momentary hesitation—its volta, in short—may also be the hinge to a different understanding of the concept’s radical potential. Hope that is really against itself confronts the hope-fi lled status quo and fi nds it wanting. As James Bliss argues, “hope against hope [is] the possibility of politics not simply as hope for a different or better world, but as the ardent refusal of this world.”64 Rather than hope against one’s better judgment or with credulous conviction, here is a hope that refuses to accept its own second coming as a consolation prize. No elegiac sonnet better captures hope against hope’s radical refusal than Sonnet VI, “To Hope.” Included in the 1784 fi rst edition of Elegiac Sonnets, the poem turns the expectation of hope’s consoling powers against hope’s fleeting and beguiling nature in order to imply that a more dependable, even rational att itude would be faith in death as a “cure” for earthly woes (line 13). Like the very form of the phrase hope against hope, the poem comprises two mirrored halves and a volta, strung together in a tensile antagonism: O HOPE! thou soother sweet of human woes! How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn? For me wilt thou renew the wither’d rose, And clear my painful path of pointed thorn? Ah, come, sweet nymph! in smiles and soft ness drest, Like the young Hours that lead the tender Year; Enchantress! come, and charm my cares to rest:— Alas! the flatterer fl ies, and will not hear!

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A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain, Must I a sad existence still deplore? Lo!—the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain, “For me the vernal garland blooms no more.” Come, then, “pale Misery’s love!” be thou my cure, And I will bless thee, who, tho’ slow, art sure.

With the exclamation, “Alas!” at the start of line eight, Hope turns away from the poet-speaker. Rather than the more usual placement of the volta in the ninth line, this turn cuts the sonnet in half, twisting on an axis not between octave and sestet, but between two perfectly equal seven-line parts. Doubled imagery reinforces these balanced halves: there are wilting flowers and thorns on either side, revealing that the “wither’d rose” and “flowers [that] fade” garnish a world fi lled with danger and decay whether you have hope or not. When the poet-speaker’s desire for hope turns out to be false optimism (for hope is an “Enchantress” and a “flatterer,” dressed “in smiles and soft ness”), it grates against the realization that hope cannot change the poet-speaker’s material reality even as it emphasizes that not much has changed from one side of the poem to the other. Importantly, this stubborn reality includes the influence of other, perhaps more established negative feelings, “fear, anxiety, and pain,” all of which “prey” upon personified Hope, driving her away. Like the “kinetic poise” for which Spinoza’s conatus aims, the balance that hope against hope strikes suggests an ideal suspension, a body hovering between two perfectly equal forces of feeling.65 Yet even as Sonnet VI’s central volta turns the poem about on its axis, producing two parallel halves, death is a certainty towards which only those who hope against hope dare to look. In Shakespeare’s King John, the play from which Smith takes the phrase “Misery’s love,” the extravagant distress of Constance, mother of the rightful heir to King John’s throne, invites death with enough gothic fervor that a male overhearer comments, “Lady, you utter madness, and not sorrow.”66 When Constance protests that she is not mad but grieving the imminent loss of her son, who is held captive and in grave danger, the counsel of powerful men dismisses her distress as an infatuation with feeling itself: “You are as fond of grief as of your child,” mocks the King of

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France.67 Just as Smith’s Enchantress, Hope herself, turns away and “will not hear!” when faced with negative feelings, so the men refuse to hear Constance’s lamentations as anything but empty grief, which they interpret as the performance of victimhood and evidence of madness. Th rough this incorporation of Shakespeare’s line, “To Hope” seems to ask what sorts of feelings a person in Constance’s position should profess to want instead? Surely those who judge must be looking for cool-headed logic, rather than reasons to blame, and yet the terrible frustration of Shakespeare’s scene is that if Constance professed to have hope, or even hope against hope, for her son’s safe return, she would be naïve to the point of delusion. While the desire for death might seem irrational, it would be more irrational to put faith in a future about which enough is already known to predict its terrible end. Constance will be right about her son’s death, just as Smith implies that her poet-speaker is right about Hope’s false consolations and weakness in the face of lived experiences of pain. As Constance’s tragic foreknowledge reveals, peering into oblivion is a kind of hope that refuses the other, naïve attachments that might lead a mother—or any female poet—to survive in the “deplorable present” only by expecting a miraculous rescue from the patriarchal authorities. When the poet-speaker fi nally invites “pale Misery’s love” to “Come, then . . . be thou my cure, / And I will bless thee, who, tho’ slow, art sure,” the staccato cadence of single-syllable words, separated by commas, generates a hesitant, almost creeping lag between what the poet-speaker professes now to want and what that desire must mean. “Slow” but “sure” death suggests that the poet-speaker is not quite wanting but waiting to die. Like Sonnet XII’s laborious fi nal line, here Smith asks readers to dwell in discomforting, “inadmissible,” or as Daniel Froid rightly observes, “ugly feelings.”68 By applying Sianne Ngai’s theory of noncathartic negative affects that mediate between the aesthetic and the political, Froid links “the perpetual drudgery of melancholy” that many elegiac sonnets express to “a kind of resistance” to the systems responsible for Smith’s real-life troubles.69 To this must be added that these poems’ formal provocations, particularly this hedging sense of metrical persistence, resist other systems rife with expectation too: the genre conventions through which readers look forward to resolution or

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Coleridgean “wholeness,” and the metrical rhythms by which they expect to be carried there. Rather than invite the kinds of evasions through which some critics read Elegiac Sonnets while reading around Smith, Sonnet VI’s metrical persistence enacts a deliberate unburdening of the imperative to chase hope that, by lett ing readers down without lett ing them off, shifts the resilience and endurance necessary for living without or beyond hope away from the poet-speaker and onto the shoulders of attentive readers. For Smith, the metrical motions of an inexorable approach to death might be a way to capture what it is like to be at the mercy of someone else’s priorities and timeline. But these rhythms also turn that feeling inside out, by asking readers to commit for a time—however brief—to Smith’s schedule. The result is a suggestion of a model of subjectivity at once more resilient, precarious and relational than the “vigorous and highly developed conception of the individual subject” upon which Jonathan Culler’s claim for the emergence of the Romantic lyric subject rests.70 Spinoza’s theory of conatus holds that we strive for equilibrium and empowerment in the face of affections that move us to experience appetites and desires over which we have litt le control, since the cause of an affect may be unknown and its effects can register even below our conscious awareness.71 Far from walking the hero’s path, author of her own story, she who strives, says Spinoza, does so because she cannot do otherwise: her actions “are modes by which [the] att ributes [of God in/as nature] are expressed in a certain and determinate way.”72 “Neither the human nor even the animate stands apart from or in any way transcends physical nature; we are subject to its determinations as is any other existing thing.”73 To the extent that we human beings are conscious of our striving, we can choose to align ourselves with what empowers us (by cultivating friendships for instance) but we would be mistaken in att ributing these choices to our own decisions, freely made. For Culler, who regards the Romantic lyric subject as one who “absorbs into himself the external world and stamps it with inner consciousness,” and who fi nds that “the unity of the poem is provided by this subjectivity,” the poet’s mind brings coherence to the world expressed in poetry.74 For Smith, however, the external world impresses itself upon the poet-speaker, and the elegiac

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sonnets reflect both the impersonal nature of these impressions and the sense of subjection and precarity that they produce. Perhaps this is why, in so many of the elegiac sonnets, the introduction of the lyric “I” brings not resolution and unity but renewed difficulty and fracture, as the world’s resistance to being absorbed (by a poet’s inner consciousness or any other mentality) meets other, formal and generic modes of resistance. Often, it is the volta that introduces both the lyric “I” and crucial revelations about the external world’s affective consequences, though it should by now come as no surprise that Smith innovates here too. Rather than deploy a single, authoritative volta—the resolution upon which readers might hang all their expectations of a sonnet’s fi nal twist—her elegiac sonnets have a tendency to turn and then turn again, so that even after all had seemed exposed, still more complications emerge. In Sonnet VIII, “To Spring,” for example, a relatively benign portrayal of Springtime turns to a discussion of its psychological benefits (“could aught be found / To sooth awhile the tortur’d bosom’s pain”), and then turns again to reveal the one mindset that Spring cannot heal: “thy prospect fair, / Thy sounds of harmony, thy balmy air, / Have power to cure all sadness—but despair” (lines 8–9, 12–14). In Sonnet XXXV, “To Fortitude,” the poet-speaker cultivates fortitude not against sadness but against the impossibility of achieving that “false fleeting meteor, Happiness,” which turns out to mean, hope against hopelessly, that fortitude “shall teach me how to die!” (lines 7, 14). Finally, to look back for an instant to Sonnet XII, “already shipwreck’d” is a turn that revises a previous turn (“But,” in line seven), which had revealed the poetspeaker’s gothic appreciation of the “gloomy” scene’s “charms.” By wringing out one fi nal twist, these revisionary turns further Smith’s elegiac sonnets’ overall sense of strenuousness and effortful excess, and, by resisting expectations, they also reinforce the insensibility of the world to the hopes and dreams of any one individual. Just as personified Hope, in Sonnet VI, is a source of self-deception, a “flatterer” who eases us into believing that providence is on our side, so the revisionary turn participates in a Smithian poetics of hope against hope by making vivid the illusoriness of a world designed for us and our pleasure.

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The Sociability of Turning Away

Revisionary turns enact hope against hope by holding space for one last refusal—whether of the poet-speaker’s “world as it is” or those worlds imagined by Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or any of the other writers whose ideas and stories Smith’s literary allusions enfold. Revisionary turns pervade the poems in Elegiac Sonnets, from fi rst edition to last, but by exploring a later instance, from the 1795 Sonnet LVI, “The captive escaped in the wilds of America, Addressed to Hon. Mrs. O’Neill,” I want to frame my fi nal close reading with the likelihood that many of Smith’s readers would have known by now what to expect—and that Smith continues to innovate based on these altered expectations. For Smith’s long-time readers, the variety and number of revisionary turns, while never programmatic, might even have fostered a certain anticipatory distrust of any volta that seemed insufficiently transformative or revealing. Across and between poems, as across and between editions, the counterintuitive result may be that these revisionary turns’ “habit-forming function,” in Deidre Lynch’s phrase, is to teach readers to expect them.75 In Sonnet LVI, Smith waits until the fourteenth line to use a revisionary turn that, by reaching out to a real-life friend, acknowledges the social character of even the loneliest poetic form. Like Jane Austen’s aside to the “body of novel readers” in Northanger Abbey (1817), Sonnet VLI counts its author among its audience in a way that builds a scene of reception into the scene of literary production. Not only forging links to the venerable traditions of Petrarch and Milton, Shakespeare and Goethe, here Smith positions her poet-speaker as a reader of captivity novels, one of those entertainments extracted from colonial contact zones that, by embellishment, elision or both, make heroes and villains out of “true life tales.” In so doing, Sonnet LVI conjures a community of readers able to meet its allusions with habits already honed by conventional forms even in a popular prose genre. When Smith’s revisionary turn disappoints these expectations—the ones readers’ presumed intimacies with captivity narratives produce—her poem suggests that a better way to survive the beguilements of a hope-fi lled present is through sororal camaraderie and care.

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The captivity novel, a “remarkably popular genre” during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was “spurred by the very real and significant resistance of Indigenous peoples to white encroachment.”76 According to Khyl Lyndgaard, “More than two thousand extant nonfictional captivity narratives” record and narrativize these antagonisms, reinforcing fears of Indigenous “Others” whilst also helping to destabilize “the heroic rhetoric . . . of ‘how the West was won.’”77 Rather than catalogue the daring deeds of the explorer-colonizer, captivity narratives tell of those held against their will. One example that was likely known to Smith is Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), which relates Rowlandson’s eleven-week detainment by the Algonquins, “an external enemy identified with satanic forces.”78 In Rowlandson’s telling, religious faith keeps her from truly giving way to despair, and, as Lisa Logan argues, this allows the very idea of captivity to take on other types of figurative meanings: “captivity operates as a metaphor to reveal the position(s) [that Rowlandson] inhabits as a woman author and a gendered and political subject” as she seeks “reassurance in an uncertain world.”79 In Sonnet LVI, the uncertainty of a world at once alien and dangerous is precisely the point. By comparing her poet-speaker to an escaped sett lercolonist, Smith multiplies the forces responsible for the perils of each: IF, by his torturing, savage foes untraced, The breathless Captive gain some trackless glade, Yet hears the war-whoop howl along the waste, And dreads the reptile-monsters of the shade; The giant reeds that murmur round the flood, Seem to conceal some hideous form beneath; And every hollow blast that shakes the wood, Speaks to his trembling heart of woe and death. With horror fraught, and desolate dismay, On such a wanderer falls the starless night; But if, far streaming, a propitious ray Leads to some amicable fort his sight,

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He hails the beam benign that guides his way, As I, my Harriet, bless thy friendship’s cheering light.

In the fi rst ten lines Smith builds a world in which the dangers the escapee has yet to encounter may exceed the dangers that he has left behind. Nature seems to him unnavigable (“trackless” and “starless”) and predatory.80 When he fi nally spies the “amicable fort,” it promises protection not only against Indigenous “foes” but also against a foreign wilderness that, like the powerful wind and waves of Sonnet XII, threatens to subsume him. Overwhelming darkness, terrifying and mysterious sounds, lurking carnivores, and a chase through a forest swamp—these gothic suggestions are cut through by the fort’s “far streaming” and “propitious ray.” What seems like divine intervention come to “guide” the “wanderer” home resonates strongly with the typological arcs common to the captivity narrative genre, in which the captive’s suffering prepares them for salvation (just as in Rowlandson’s account). Read in this way, Smith’s opening conditional “If ” might be understood to set in motion a journey through a fallen world, while “But if ” would signal a turn towards the rewards of faith. However, that the escapee’s potential rescue is like the comforts of female friendship (“As I, my Harriet, bless thy friendship’s cheering light”) is a revisionary turn generative of a number of dissonant effects. Adjusting the tone of suffering from his acute terror to her contemplative melancholy, this fi nal turn evacuates the dramatic intensity of the homecoming scene and derails any sense of catharsis or relief that may have been anticipated. Notably, the turn also secularizes the sonnet, by making friendship, not God, the source of salvation and light. What reads as a truly bathetic shout-out to Smith’s particular friend clunks too with an extra foot, in a line that brings home to British readers not only the poet-speaker’s woes, but also the everydayness of them. She is like the wanderer, sure, but hers are not the agonies of empire. Smith figures home as a foreign country, and the effects of her doing so depend on how we understand Sonnet LVI to operate between the expectations of its two generic touchstones, the captivity narrative and—by 1795—not just the sonnet, but the elegiac sonnet. For readers well versed in both, Sonnet LVI’s bathetic fall into secular salvation would

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undo a conventional sonnet’s single, authoritative volta with a second turn, but this is something that Smith’s long-time readers may well have anticipated. More off-putt ing might be Smith’s refusal of a narrative convention that the elegiac sonnet spends thirteen of its fourteen lines developing: the escapee-protagonist’s restoration. Undermining the anticipation of closure suggested by the poem’s nascent plotline, the revisionary turn comes before the escaped captive arrives at the fort, collapsing the comparison between protagonist and poetspeaker prior to his reaching safety. With fi nality and abruptness, in a line metrically arranged to reinforce the reader’s surprised dissatisfaction with an extra beat, the revisionary turn transforms Sonnet LVI into a response, not to captivity exactly, but to the feeling of reading about it. Interpreted in this way, the conditionals and fi rst turn come to express every reader’s hope for the protagonist’s success by mixing fantasies about what may happen (“If . . . But if . . .”) with what actually does—once the page turns. The fi nal turn (“As I”) would then enact a sudden shift in readerly focus, a snapping back to reality after being absorbed in a book. And ultimately, this is the message that Smith seems willing to disappoint in order to deliver: while we are reading, home becomes a foreign country—a place from which we often return, mid-chapter, to contemplate the things in our lives for which reading about other people’s lives makes us grateful. If such a catoptric conclusion from what had seemed like an interesting poem makes us shrug, it may be that Smith’s innovations have taken us too far, right into the territory of what Anahid Nersessian calls “bad taste as part of an aesthetic response to the conditions of empire.”81 The glib recognition that the colonial account is a lens through which Britons at home come to know their own good fortunes casts extreme privilege as a neutral platform upon which to exercise one’s self-improving sympathies. To be grateful is to gain the self-satisfaction of being good. By closing the book and thinking of Harriet, however, the fi nal line also suggests Smith’s awareness that, for more than a decade, her own attempts at providing a lens through which others might engage with women’s experiences have been met with the same: a sigh, a shake of the head, a chance for the reader to lay the volume to rest and reflect on her own, happier life. That Harriet Boyle O’Neill

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was Smith’s real-life friend yokes poet and poet-speaker together with an overt decisiveness that imbues sorority with the power to lessen women’s suffering—including that produced by the specific ordeals that the autobiographical prefaces to Elegiac Sonnets, in 1795, still have cause to relate. Making this argument raises questions about the alignments among Smith, her poet-speaker, and women’s experiences as writers and readers in the late eighteenth century that have been central preoccupations of Smith scholars for decades. How much should Smith’s strong autobiographical framing influence our interpretations of her work? How much of the personal can we read as political without falling off an anachronistic cliff ? What Jacqueline Labbe claims happens when we affi liate too closely Smith and her poet-speaker is criticism that disempowers and flattens, “treating [Smith’s works’] manifold themes and narratives as, fi nally, reducible to and manifested from Smith’s life.”82 That Smith’s poetics of hope against hope is a critique of hope very like that which Smith makes personal in her prefaces (i.e., the “hope delayed that maketh the heart sick”) might be, by Labbe’s estimation, an observation that renders Smith “less an interventionist than a victim, less a chronicler than an experiencer of events.”83 Yet, having revealed my view of Smith as a woman speaking from a specifically female position of need, loss and sorrow, I can think of no better way to describe the elegiac sonnets’ particular lyricism than that of an “experiencer,” a term etymologically linked to the scientific method (through an obsolete meaning: “Proof by actual trial; practical demonstration”), which implies awareness of one’s imbrication in an environmental surround (through a current meaning: “being consciously affected by an event”).84 As we have seen, Smith’s elegiac sonnets create that lyric “impression of thought happening or consciousness occurring” at multiple levels—including the level of a metrical striving to persist in being, that might reflect her interest in “moral motion” of the sort that Spinoza inspires.85 Other lyric impressions appear as distinct framing mentalities, such as Sonnet XII’s nature poet, while yet other impressions—self-reflexive, invested in claiming lived experiences outside the world of the poem, and gendered specifically female—emerge as well, in ways that closely align with Smith’s self-presentation in her prefaces. Critical recognition of these facts does not make Smith a victim. Rather, it

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allows us to investigate the epistemologies of feeling, formal logics and even politics at work in poems that ask readers to grapple with their att achments to and expectations about particular kinds of literary experience. Conclusion

By asking readers to feel hope against hope as a provocation towards responsibility for the poet’s labor and life, Smith challenges the impractical veneration of those critics for whom Elegiac Sonnets’ success would seem to depend upon the poems harmonizing with preconceived notions of form and genre. Coleridge’s claim (supposed to have been inspired by Smith) that a sonnet should “domesticate with the heart, and become, as it were, a part of [the reader’s] identity” implies that sonnets fit themselves to readers’ expectations, and not the other way around. “The reader’s mind having expected the close at the place in which he fi nds it,” says Coleridge, the reader “may rest satisfied.”86 Yet Smith’s elegiac sonnets are, depending on your taste, either worse or better than that: they appear to refuse restfulness on principle, and work at every turn, revisionary or otherwise, to reveal the unsatisfying disjuncture between hope and reality. The worlds that the poems imagine are “tumultuous” and “troubled;” the figures that people these worlds are wanderers and exiles and other lost souls.87 Even when the poems seem to reach out to communities of readers and friends, dissonance remains in irregular lines, revisionary turns, bathetic falls and unresolved figures. In Sonnet LVI, Harriet’s awkward introduction ultimately refuses the comparison of friendship and safety: by poem’s end, female friendship remains only akin to the anticipation of safety—the fort’s beacon—and not the protection represented by the fort itself. When eighteenth century theorists of sympathy or fellow feeling think about harmony, they often refer to the feelings of the majority. In Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), sympathy lets people bring the expressions of their feelings into line with other people’s expectations “as is sufficient for the harmony of society.”88 The well-known “imaginary change of situations” by which Smith’s theory operates allows an “impartial spectator” to feel (well enough and based on their own experiences) another person’s feelings. Initiated by an apparently preconscious impulse towards

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relationality, this imagined exchange produces “an analogous emotion . . . in the breast of every attentive spectator” that also depends on conscious comparisons and judgments that can involve both parties.89 If the impartial spectator imagines how she would feel in the place of a man who suffers, then she also judges the reasons for his suffering in order to determine whether that reason is a sufficient cause for his feelings. By the same token, if the suffering man feels gratified by the sympathy that he inadvertently receives, then he may tailor the expression of his feelings to elicit sympathetic responses from those around him. In one example, Smith describes how a wildly impassioned man desires to relate harmoniously to those around him, and therefore quells the evidence of his feelings by “lowering his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators are capable of going along with him.” The man “must flatten . . . the sharpness of [his feeling’s] natural tone, in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him.”90 The impassioned man still feels, but in a less alienating or forbidding way. Adam Smith figures this shift not as a turning down of the feeling’s volume but as a qualitative change in the type of feeling expressed. A lowered pitch, a flattened tone—in music, these are dynamic changes that effect the harmonic relations of a piece and its overall sound.91 The metaphor thus implies that the “tones” of different people’s feelings can sound pleasant together without being exactly the same, just as our sympathetic responses to other people’s feelings can create social cohesion without being perfect copies of the original feeling. Tonal adjustments towards the socially acceptable, which Adam Smith regards as acts of “propriety,” are therefore multitonal and dynamic, qualitative shifts that help to avoid the “dissonance” that he associates with “impropriety of the affections of other men.”92 Over time, propriety shapes how society understands different passions (as decent or indecent), but for Smith it is ultimately our sympathetic responses that work to regulate the way we express our feelings towards the social average—also known as harmony. If we leave for the moment the impossibility of disinterest for the woman writer, Charlotte Smith’s poet-speaker might seem like a good example of both the impartial spectator, whose sympathy involves acts of comparison and judgment, and the wildly impassioned sufferer, who strategically

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adjusts her feelings’ expression.93 Certainly, the poems’ revisionary turns often hinge on comparisons that justify, even as they create, a melancholy “pitch.” That Smith’s comparisons tend not to result in harmony, however, but to reveal instead the disharmony between the poet-speaker and the world that she inhabits, or between the readers’ expectations of a poet’s power and the poet-speaker’s claims to subjection, suggests that this model of feeling is not the one upon which Smith bases her poems. In Elegiac Sonnets, hope is a negative affect: a force of feeling that weakens the poetspeaker by also involving trepidation, anxiety, memories of past failures, and other bad feelings. Hope’s deferment makes “the heart sick,” Smith declares, and in Sonnet VI, “fear, anxiety, and pain” fi ll in the space after Hope abandons her poet-speaker. Such associations of hope with fear and ready exhaustion emerge too in poetic rhythms that resist going on even as they cannot help but do so. Rather than each of these troublesome feelings being managed to best suit society, the affects that contribute to Charlotte Smith’s negative anticipations appear inextricably correlated, and thus to align with Spinoza’s logic when he writes, “[t]here are no affects of hope or fear without sadness. For fear is a sadness . . . and there is no hope without fear.”94 By drawing readers into reluctant complicity with her poet-speaker’s death, or by reimagining the poet-speaker’s relation to the world of the poem the moment before its apparent resolution, Smith thwarts our desire not just to sympathize, but also to pin our hopes on a vision of sympathy that can alleviate anyone’s pain, including our own. These are poems in which people suffer and are not soothed, and for which the “propriety” of characters, poet-speakers, or even Smith’s imagined readers has no real efficacy. When Smith acknowledges her friends and allies, in prefaces and poems, she recalls the positive affective forces of kindness and friendship even as she expresses the limits of camaraderie and care in a world that cares not. Charlotte Smith is unlike Adam Smith because she fails to see how the voluntary actions of individuals moved by external affections can ensure the smooth operations of society. What Elegiac Sonnets reveals instead is that our desire for harmony—or for social cohesion that agrees with an extant majority perspective—is itself generic. And this too is a hope against hope that Charlotte Smith disappoints.

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The Disappointment Aesthetic

P l ac i ng C h a r l o t t e S m i t h ’s provocative forms before William Wordsworth’s is one act of critical reemphasis, my own refusal to write a book that makes it easy to read around Smith, and it’s also the sett ing of a historical scene. Smith’s poetics of hope against hope helps shape Romanticism as a literature in which being moved by art challenges theories of the mind and body that see subjects as autonomous agents for whom aesthetic experience provides merely supplemental benefits. By plying the tension between custom and innovation, her irregular sonnets keep taut the line between readerly anticipations and dissatisfactions in ways that emphasize subjects’ embodied vulnerabilities to outside impressions. The poems don’t simply disappoint expectations, they ask readers to confront their attachments to certain hopeful trajectories that, built on sympathy, are animated by and depend on suffering. That Wordsworth, himself a great admirer of Smith, explores the limits of sympathy in lyrical ballads defi ned by generic hybridity and animated by formal dissonance suggests generative correspondences between his innovations and those of Smith, and, as this chapter demonstrates, those of Mary Robinson as well. Examining Wordsworth’s poetic provocations without excepting him either from this turn of the nineteenth-century milieu or, in Chapter 3, from the pushback he receives from Samuel Taylor

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Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria, this chapter and the next will argue that an aesthetics of disappointment—that is, a set of formal practices designed to move readers contrary to their inclination or will—was essential to the development of Romantic poetry and criticism in Britain. With the term aesthetic disappointment, I want to capture poets’ deliberate attempts to move readers past anticipation and into experiences where unfulfi lled formal and generic expectations defi ne their relationships to a work of art. Laura Quinney has argued for a poetics of disappointment that hangs on psychological distress, a mental state in which “esteem for the self is . . . seriously compromised, while Alexander Freer has mapped similarities between poetic and erotic disappointments through the salutary rhythms of each.”1 Anahid Nersessian, in her own exploration of disappointment as “a structure of blocked feeling . . . an impasse,” adopts some of Quinney’s principles, although she “shifts the emphasis from disappointment’s psychological difficulties to its historical goads.”2 My purpose is to shift the emphasis once more, to land on disappointment’s affective dynamics and aesthetic results, and to ask how these relate to the moral and ethical work of poetry. If readers’ disappointments, or near disappointments, as we shall see, offer affective verification for provocative forms that push readers beyond their own parochial points of view, then might the Wordsworthian “struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness” involve grappling too with the limits of our presuming sympathetic knowledge of one another’s pain?3 During the resurgence of interest in the importance of Spinoza’s Ethics for Wordsworth’s philosophical worldview, litt le attention has been paid to the stark renovations that Spinozist view of sympathy, as a negative affect, would impose; indeed, one critical tendency has been to focus on the empowering affects that the poet gains from his engagements with the natural world and to connect that with sympathy. Take, for instance, Marjorie Levinson’s assertion that, in analogizing the budding of a twig with the thinking of a mind in “Lines Written in Early Spring” (1798), Wordsworth reflects Spinoza’s radical nondistinction between matter and mind, as well as the “power . . . experienced as joy or pleasure” that comes from “becoming joined to another body harmonious with one’s own.”4 Similarly, for

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Adam Potkay, that “every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes” evinces Spinoza’s happy impress on the poet: “Wordsworth generally echoes Spinoza’s joy in the underlying oneness of things” (lines 11–12).5 Quoting at length from the 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Levinson goes on to assert that we “can easily imagine Spinoza as the author of this famous statement” by Wordsworth: “We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure.”6 But can we? When sympathy—or pity, since “[t]here seems to be no difference between pity [commiserationem] and compassion [sympathy or misericordia]” for Spinoza—is understood as a negative affect, a kind of pain felt on behalf of another, its relationship to pleasure is less clear.7 Considering pity’s inverse, Spinoza muses: “By what name we should call the joy which arises from another’s good I do not know.”8 Th is book’s Introduction has already elaborated how, when it comes to pity (commiserationem is the term Spinoza most often employs), we naturally seek to alleviate its cause, not due to our own pure benevolence, but because pitying others makes us feel bad. Th is dynamic obliges us to consider the reason for their suffering (so as to relieve it and let ourselves off the hook), and thus pity’s social mechanisms are complexly motivated by both disempowering affects and the anticipation of our own return to conative equilibrium. And yet the very fact of pity’s existence seems to indicate that a sense of responsibility to ease others’ pain inheres in the determinations of God in/as nature, making our ability to feel pity indicative of the still-living sensitivity of our moral impulses in the same way that cringing over a skinned knee reveals our bodies’ still-living vulnerability to asphalt. Both hurt, but even at the point of injury they turn our awareness to healing. Given this alternate emphasis, Levinson’s comment excises that which seems closer to something Spinoza might have said about sympathy: “wherever we sympathize with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure . . . [The poet] considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an infi nite complexity of pain and pleasure.”9 The pleasure to which Wordsworth here refers emerges from “the poet’s art,” including the rhythms and rhymes by which sympathy is “propagated”— helping it grow even when readers are being asked to sympathize with

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painful situations.10 Had Spinoza himself really authored these statements, perhaps it would be “hope,” that “inconstant joy, born of the idea of a future or past things whose outcome we to some extent doubt,” that would subtly combine with pity in order to motivate benevolence.11 Hope, after all, mixes easily with another negative affect, fear, which reinforces the complexities of pain and pleasure involved in affective projections.12 In any case, the pleasure that Wordsworth describes is like hope in that it is forward moving and forward thinking. Propulsive poetic cadences support, through an “overbalance of pleasure,” readers’ sympathies with even the most destitute of Wordsworth’s humble figures.13 However, in those poems in which sympathetic identifications seem designed to falter or recede, in which the Wordsworthian poet-speaker comes up against what James Noggle theorizes as “insensibility,” or in Mary Jacobus’s words, against “indifference to life,” the relation between formal and affective anticipations might seem to have more to do with the realization of doubt—that is, with the realization of that which grounds all hope in fear, according to Spinoza—than with the attainment of sympathy understood as happy fellow feeling.14 And, as the affect that names the unwished-for materialization of that doubt, disappointment (or remorse, in Edwin Curley’s translation of conscientiæ morsus) becomes in some ways continuous with a poetic art that asks readers to leave unfulfi lled their expectations of what makes good poetry so as to be brought into closer proximity to the “sympathies of men.”15 Thus Wordsworth, thinking of this refusal to deliver easy pleasures in the Lyrical Ballads, calls literary conventions a “promise” between reader and poet that, he admits, his innovative poems must surely disappoint;16 almost two decades later, Coleridge devotes much of the Biographia Literaria to examining his own disappointed reading of Wordsworth’s verse. I call this aesthetic disappointment, then, because both Wordsworth and Coleridge do, but I also want to insist that the affective valences of such a mode—which begins in anticipation or hope, activates due to the disruption of that anticipation or hope, and persists even after the disruption as a noncathartic sense of irresolution or descent—are already present in Romantic poetic experiments from, not least, Charlotte Smith, and that they remain as preoccupations with the play of interruption and inharmoniousness in

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the poetry of second-generation Romantics and beyond. Th is chapter’s case study is Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman, with an Incident in Which He Was Concerned” (1798), with further explorations of Mary Robinson’s “The Shepherd’s Dog” (1800) and Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well” (1800). All three are works in which formal and generic fault lines open up between expectations of regularity and closure, on the one hand, and experiences of dissonance, on the other, in order to reveal the poems’ hyperawareness of their own relationship to conventionality. Such conventionality these poems both indulge, dangling it in front of the reader, and undermine, through innovative modifications, disappointing the reader but also encouraging her to stay the course: to remain attentive and att uned to the work even after the expected pleasure has failed to materialize. Indeed, as these examples will show, there can be a defi nite melodrama to aesthetic disappointment, since the letdowns that result from a poem’s being “out of tune on purpose” often depend on overplaying generic characteristics that, because they are conventional, would otherwise go unnoticed. As Alexander Pope, in Peri Bathos; or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727), gleefully enquires, “Is there not an Architecture of Vaults and Cellars, as well as of loft y Domes and Pyramids? . . . Is there not an Art of Diving as well as of Flying?”17 Yet while Pope satirically skewers the pretentions of mediocre poets, Wordsworth wants to take seriously his audience’s ability to separate the bathetic from the new. “It will perhaps appear to them,” Wordsworth worries, “that . . . the author has sometimes descended too low, and that many of his expressions are too familiar, and not of sufficient dignity.”18 When he employs the language of “low and rustic life,” Wordsworth does so not to render his diction “proportionably low to the Profundity of the Thought,” as Pope exclaims, but to ask readers to fi nd “in a state of greater simplicity” opportunities for contemplating “the essential passions of the heart.”19 These are the claims made for Lyrical Ballads in the 1798 Advertisement and 1800 Preface, and to the extent that Wordsworth succeeds in engaging his readers while surely disappointing them, he does so by transforming readers’ struggles to be pleased in spite of themselves into the moral and ethical work of the poems.20 For Robinson, by contrast, a lyrical tale of humble

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life can only depend so much on readers’ sympathies if it intends to arrive at resolutions that are just. Robinson’s embrace of personification resists the Wordsworthian disappointment aesthetic by providing insight into characters’ motivations, so that we may judge them not by sympathy alone. In what follows, the social reflections that all three poems encourage ask how, or if, it is possible to know the inner lives of other beings, their drives and intentions, loves and hates and sorrows. Whether or not these beings appear worthy of our sympathy, or even recognizable as persons, can we divorce our immediate responses to them from what we already expect and judge, based on what we’ve gleaned from the stories, hearsay and gossip that animate these poems? Affect operates precognitively, but in the conclusion of “Simon Lee” self-consciousness about readers’ formal and generic expectations might seem to produce a slip from affect to affectation, where the poet-speaker’s compensatory fi nal act is to perform the social dominance that has suddenly ceased to feel spontaneous or natural. In this way, Wordsworth’s refusal to resolve the “tale” for the satisfaction of Lee, the poetspeaker, or the reader, draws into awkward equivalence the predictability of the attachments of each. While the reader has been “patiently . . . wait[ing]” for plot, Lee has been expecting strength, and the poet-speaker has been counting on an uncomplicated expression of gratitude—in addition to relief from pity not unlike that which Spinoza describes. What occurs instead, by meeting none of these expectations, recalls the critique of social harmony that Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets has already suggested, as well as the suggestion that, in keeping open possibilities for other types of unanticipated experience, aesthetic disappointment exposes readers to breaks in the status quo and activates other kinds of affects in its wake. Mythmaking, Gossip and the Gratifications Expected of Verse: “Simon Lee”

Harmonious social relations are easier to imagine than to discover, Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads often suggest. While a tall tale about a chilling curse can draw two very different people into an equivalence of frigid feeling (in “Goody Blake and Harry Gill”), those poems that claim fi rst-hand experience tend not to resolve, and to reveal instead, for example, that kindness

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can be cruel, or that war naturalizes unnatural forms of grief. These ambivalent outcomes, from “Simon Lee” and “Old Man Travelling: Animal Tranquility and Decay, A Sketch” (1798), respectively, turn ostensibly real-life encounters into refusals to narrativize and, thus, into refusals to participate in what Adam Smith calls “bringing the case home” to oneself, in order to “imagine [what] should be the sentiments of the sufferer.”21 In “Simon Lee,” especially, the abrupt termination of the narrative is self-reflexive about Wordsworth’s intent to thwart readers’ desires for resolution and sympathy. In its own time, the poem exemplifies that for which Lyrical Ballads was frequently indicted: “An obscurity too often arises, from a romantic search after simplicity,” warns the Monthly Mirror in 1801, “and there is a studied abruptness in the commencement and termination of several pieces, which make them assume an appearance of mere fragments.”22 Worse yet, “the volumes are marked by a querulous monotony of woe . . . and this sorrow takes its root in the hollow-heartedness of human beings, or the calamities incident to human life.”23 More recently, the poem’s direct address to “My gentle reader” has been recognized for breaking the fourth wall in order to upset expectations, while the poet-speaker’s attempt to aid Simon Lee, followed by his odd reaction to the Old Huntsman’s gratitude (which leaves the poet-speaker “mourning”), suggests a belated realization that to help the weak is to confi rm them in their weakness.24 The unkindness of a kindness, in this sense, is the breaking off not of the tale that readers expect, but of the tale that Lee has been telling himself all along about his own fortitude. Rather than represent the production of social harmony, “Simon Lee” is a poem that enacts, by way of formal provocations, an interpersonal tension that even the poet-speaker’s best intentions cannot reconcile. The tension between conversation and hearsay that organizes many of Wordsworth’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads appears early in “Simon Lee,” presaging the poem’s unresolved conclusion by emphasizing other dissonances that seem endemic to the tales people tell about one another’s pain. In the poem’s balladic fi rst part, Wordsworth begins by describing Lee as “An old man . . . a litt le man, / I’ve heard he once was tall”; “He says he is three score and ten / But others say he’s eighty” (lines 3–4, 7– 8). Here word of mouth competes with the fi rst-hand observations of the

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poet-speaker, including his report that Lee claims to be only seventy. More descriptions follow, some of which are unremarkable (Lee owns a blue cloak), while others are outlandish. Of Lee’s once-remarkable proficiencies as a hunter, the poet-speaker notes, “No man like him the horn could sound / And no man was so full of glee”; “He all the country could outrun, / Could leave both man and horse behind” (lines 17–18, 41–42). Such declarations we are told reflect the opinions of “To say the least, four counties round” among those who “Had heard of Simon Lee” (lines 19–20). These sources of knowledge, from hearsay to personal anecdotes and Lee’s ineffectual counterclaim, might seem to evince the Old Huntsman’s renown as the stuff of local legend—that is, were it not for what the poet-speaker casts as the very real chance that “You [will] meet him where you will” and “see” for yourself what changes time has wrought upon Lee (line 11). Nowadays you would fi nd him “bereft / Of his right eye,” “lean and . . . sick,” with “His litt le body half-awry, / His ancles . . . swoln and thick” and “His legs . . . thin and dry” (lines 25–26, 33–36). Much has changed from Lee’s glory days, and he embodies this history as a kind of living ruin. That we cannot, in fact, “meet [Lee] where [we] will,” but must depend on Wordsworth’s poet-speaker for this vivid litany of ailments, reinforces our initial sense of the poem as a “tale” in the ballad tradition from which Wordsworth draws. The poem’s single-syllable exact rhymes and simple diction (“he,” “see,” “glee,” “Lee,”) are almost too emphatic in their singsong evocation of vocal performance. Maureen McLane, who theorizes balladeering as “a complex, multiply-mediated feedback loop,” has shown how the ballad’s proliferation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries depended on writerly remediations that preserved or invented “orality-effects” as evocations of the ballad’s preliterate history.25 When Wordsworth claims the language of “low and rustic life” as his lyrical ballads’ lingua franca, he signals his participation in a culture of “literary orality” that, says McLane, inherits from antiquarians and ballad collectors their deep concerns with issues of provenance and translation, and of circulation, transmission and performance.26 That the many sources offering potential verification for Lee’s story are also many voices thereby reinforces the poem’s ties to a genre not only rooted in song, but also famously tied to questions of authenticity.27 Lee’s

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fame “four counties round” shores up the legitimacy of the poet-speaker’s claims even as they increasingly become the sorts of overstatements from which tall tales are spun, in which a phrase like “to say the least” generalizes just enough to make any exaggeration appear defensible. As the descriptions of Lee become more recent, however, the clash between the Old Huntsman’s past greatness and current decrepitude complicates the alignment with balladic mythmaking, in part by activating that frisson of delicious superiority that is gossip’s galvanizing force. Valorization transforms into an att itude towards Lee that is overfamiliar, even parental, and this is reflected in the poem’s doting cadences. Th roughout, “Simon Lee” employs a slightly irregular ballad form, with eight-line stanzas rhyming ABABCDED rather than ABABCDCD. The fi rst two lines of each stanza are iambic tetrameter, and the remainder alternate iambic lines of four and three feet. Such “small disruptions to the typical ballad stanza,” writes Kandice Sharren, are “another way in which Wordsworth thwarts his readers’ expectations.”28 By sliding through each stanza’s penultimate rhyme, Wordsworth frustrates ballad purists, but he also, and more palpably for many early nineteenth-century readers and critics, allows sentencelike phrases to cohere. For instance, in describing the extra-domestic help that Lee’s wife, Ruth, provides, Wordsworth runs together what might have been four end-stopped beats: And though you with your utmost skill From labour could not wean them, Alas! ’tis very litt le all Which they can do between them. (lines 53–56)

On the level for which Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface has already prepared us, here is rustic language offered up in what amounts to, if not a sentence, then what Coleridge would disparagingly call a “prosaism.”29 While still metrical, the unrhymed, enjambed lines work from within to generate not just poetry in the language of prose but lines, “naturally arranged,” with a prose-like syntax and character.30 That the fi nal paired lines of the stanza use identical rhyme that feels repetitious both in diction and sound (“wean them, / . . . / between them”) reinforces this sense, and it also recalls another of Wordsworth’s defenses of prosaic forms, in “Note to The Thorn”

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(1800). In this note, Wordsworth endorses repetition and tautology for the more efficient communication of impassioned feeling, especially when “the inadequateness of our own powers” of language or description requires it.31 By inadequate powers Wordsworth does not mean the poet’s, but rather the vocabulary and speech patterns of the figures peopling his poems, those utterers of humble speech who would be unlikely to use inspired synonyms. “During such efforts” to express themselves, says Wordsworth, “there will be a craving in the mind, and as long as it is unsatisfied the Speaker will cling to the same words, or words of the same character.”32 Even though “them” and “them” do not seem like ideas in need of double reinforcement, the overall effect is a remark that may as well have been whispered to us by the neighbor across the fence. Bolstered by second-person pronouns “you” and “your,” these lines’ conversational, gossipy tone makes light of a sad subject, while their good-hearted ubiquity (haven’t we all tried to get our grandparents to stop driving?) shows there is levity too in sharing in the mundane. Brisk, practical, and delivered with the Lees’ best interests in mind, the advice on offer (shared with the reader rather than with Lee) is what Patricia Spacks calls the gossip of “moral avoidance,” which, though not malicious in intent, “often sounds competitive, measuring who’s up, who’s down.” Its value, for Wordsworth’s larger point, might inhere in the fact that such gossip “reveals complacencies of groups in power, groups whose members, when they gather, feel no need to question themselves or their assumptions.”33 Like the poet-speaker’s presumptive act of kindness, the belief that the Lees should stop working assumes the special superiority of “knowing how it will all go,” which is precisely the att itude that Wordsworth ascribes to his readers in the poem’s next part: Few months of life has he in store, As he to you will tell, For still, the more he works, the more His poor old ancles swell. My gentle reader, I perceive How patiently you’ve waited, And I’m afraid that you expect Some tale will be related.

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O reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, Oh gentle reader! you would fi nd A tale in every thing. What more I have to say is short, I hope you’ll kindly take it; It is no tale; but should you think, Perhaps a tale you’ll make it. (lines 65–80)

Over the course of two stanzas, every hint of instability—from unreliable informants to formal, tonal and generic disruptions, and even including the rhyming of repeated words (“take it / . . . / make it”)—conspicuously collapses into an aesthetic disappointment for which we may now be well prepared. Midway through the stanza, the poet-speaker pivots towards “My gentle reader,” breaking the fourth wall and halting the progress of the narrative set-up. The reader, chided for presuming that storytelling is inevitable, suddenly fi nds herself asked to “think” a tale into being out of a chance encounter with Lee that the poet-speaker promises to relate. Such an abrupt shift into self-reflexiveness about the generic conventions and associated readerly expectations that the poem now rejects might seem, retroactively, to render its balladic fi rst part agreeably consistent. In reality, though, not even a casual reader of “Simon Lee” would be likely to claim that its opening possesses any kind of organic unity that the second part simply betrays. Even by the fi rst stanza, the instability of past and present versions of Lee introduces fissures in the fabric of his world. Wordsworth lets go without comment, for instance, that Lee’s status as a living record of his own life is not enough to verify such basic details as his adult height or age. Lee’s physical decay, the poem’s jaunty tempo and a hyperbolic nostalgia for the romance of former times distract from this elision along with its more troubling implication: that Lee cannot be trusted to know himself. What might seem like pandering or parody contributes to an evacuation of interiority that makes Lee mysterious but also a strangely unsympathetic character.34 It is for this reason, argue critics, that “Simon Lee” can be understood to disappoint the genre expectations of not only the ballad but also the humanitarian protest poem—a point to which I will

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return.35 My own view is that Wordsworth embeds fault lines such as these in order to push readers to fi nd footing on unsteady ground, priming readers not to give way by asking them to feel what it is like to “stumble upon prosaisms” and other minor infelicities.36 Having already felt their proximity to disappointment in the poem’s fi rst part, ideal readers may even be able to temper their expectations and use their own judgment—might be able to “think,” in fact—well before the poet-speaker calls on them to do so. That the apostrophe is not the poem’s fi nale but another opportunity to prepare reinforces this sense that, given a bit of distance and time to adjust, disappointment can encourage reorientation rather than surrender. In Wordsworth’s own words, we may be able to “struggle” with discomfort rather than declare ourselves only able “to be pleased in that particular way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased.”37 The “incident” that follows leans precipitously towards prose, challenging readers to keep time in a scene that is quite literally in a new day and season: “One summer-day I chanced to see / Th is old man doing all he could / About the root of an old tree” (lines 81–83). The poet-speaker happens upon Lee struggling to persevere, if not through his labor (the hunting skills for which the current world has litt le use) then through the laboriousness that has always defi ned him. Lee’s failing health, once ballast against gossipmongers’ hot air, becomes pitiable, even pathetic in the eyes of the poetspeaker, and Lee’s efforts seem ineffectual enough to warrant intervention. By easily cutt ing through the root and relieving Lee of the task, the poetspeaker might seem to have done a good and helpful deed. Yet Lee’s gratitude so overwhelms them both that the poet-speaker, upon reflection, cannot seem to sett le on the significance of the interaction: The tears into his eyes were brought, And thanks and praises seemed to run So fast out of his heart, I thought They never would have done. —I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning. Alas! the gratitude of men Has oft ner left me mourning. (lines 97–104)

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The force of gratitude moves Lee so profoundly that the poet-speaker, surprised and dismayed, is moved in turn, but to a much less charitable attitude than that which seemingly inspired his initial kindness. Having anticipated bringing an end to Lee’s piteousness, and thus also an end to the negative effects of pity on the poet-speaker, he appears impatient with Lee’s crying and carrying on, and wonders when it will “have done.” Following the long dash—a disruption which Brian McGrath reads as a typographical indication of time having passed, along the lines of Wordsworth’s claim for poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility”—the poem’s fi nal four lines establish the poet-speaker’s knowledge (via hearsay, once again) of the prevalence of heartlessness and ingratitude in society.38 The interjection “Alas!”—yet another disruption—punctuates the poet-speaker’s closing observation that “the gratitude of men” tends to affect him more profoundly than other, far colder att itudes. Rather than helping to resolve the tension between himself and Lee, however, these reflections invite only further questions: if the incident with which Lee is concerned neither forms a plot nor reveals a moral lesson, then what? Whatever loss Lee’s gratitude compels the poet-speaker to mourn—whether some idea of stoic masculinity or time of heroism, myth of self-sufficiency, aging with perfect dignity or ideal sympathy—remains a mystery. Deliberating Disappointment

“Being disappointed” depends on, and can be changed by, our personal expectations. Th is is an understanding that, in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century critical and aesthetic discourses, helps to clarify why the concept diverges from major aesthetic categories such as the sublime and the beautiful, even as its aesthetic expression shares with them some characteristics of virtual affect and, perhaps, of sociability as well. Unlike the a priori truth claims that undergird the presumption of agreement in a Kantian aesthetic judgment, disappointment can be as unique as a single person’s hopes or predilections. Jane Austen, for instance, notes in a letter how her father and herself, both of them having begun to read Samuel Egerton Brydges’s Arthur Fitz-Albini (1798), responded differently: “My father is disappointed—I am not, for I expected nothing better.” Austen’s

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ability to foresee the relative letdowns of Arthur Fitz-Albini she credits to her personal knowledge of the author’s poor taste.39 She avoids disappointed reading because she is prepared, and her pleasure in being so comes through in the letter as a sense of pride in both her tasteful discernment and her capacity for emotional disinvestment. Those closer to the work, especially Egerton Brydges’s immediate family, are not so lucky; for them, the novel’s faults make it “the only one of Egerton’s works of which his family are ashamed.”40 In its critical confidence, Austen’s letter reveals how a claim to disappointment can bring a private assessment to bear on public opinion in negative or unenthusiastic ways, but insofar as differing opinions might lead to disputes, they might also lead to justifications for the continued reading of something unrefi ned or experimental. As she also makes clear, Austen keeps reading Arthur Fitz-Albini despite its weaknesses because its idiosyncrasies provide insight into the mind of its author. In this way, disappointment can name the tension between what is expected of the work and what it delivers, and such a judgment need not be antithetical to the work’s other pleasing or compelling qualities. When Elizabeth Barrett (later Browning) notes in her diary: “I fi nished Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, Evening of St. Agnes & Hyperion, before breakfast. . . . The fi rst three disappointed me. The extracts I had seen of them, were undeniably the fi nest things in them,” she holds Keats’s publisher accountable for her letdown by suggesting he had already circulated all the best bits.41 John Wilson Croker, in an 18 July 1819 letter to John Murray, measures his opinion of Lord Byron’s Don Juan against the infamous poet’s previous works: “I am agreeably disappointed by fi nding ‘Don Juan’ very litt le offensive,” he writes, “It is by no means worse than “Childe Harold,” which it resembles as comedy does tragedy.”42 Croker’s agreeable disappointment denotes the surprised enjoyment of a work that fails to entirely meet negative expectations, and his jocular att itude (“I had rather a son of mine were Don Juan than, I think, any other of Lord Byron’s heroes. Heaven grant he may never resemble any of them”!) implies that there is pleasure too in the comparison.43 Indeed, the fact that Croker communicates his critique as a point of interest and connection with Murray, the publisher of Don Juan in 1818, suggests that some kinds of light, critical disappointments could be

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shared even with those invested in the work’s success. For Austen and Croker, measuring one’s own taste against the tastes of others is itself a source of pleasure—an effect that helps explain why claims about critical disappointment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tend not be psychically defeating or even private, circulating as they do evidence of readers’ own critical acumen alongside the disappointing works themselves. Despite the preponderance of tasteful discernment in these anecdotes, it is the affects provoked by form, more than the standards att ributed to taste, that govern the judgments about aesthetic disappointment that motivate this chapter’s investigations of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads.44 Indeed, following his defense of taste as an “acquired talent” in the 1800 Preface, Wordsworth quickly subordinates it to two more important requirements: for even “the most inexperienced Reader” to judge Lyrical Ballads “for himself,” and for those who begin to feel themselves responding negatively to an unfamiliar poem to “temper the rashness of decision.”45 Ideal readers, for Wordsworth, sense their proximity to disappointment in order to rein in false impressions (especially those based on others’ opinions) and suspend harsh judgments. As Austen’s and Croker’s comments illustrate, the value of a disappointment can lie in the pleasure of having just avoided it— and this depends on an anticipatory att itude that holds space enough to be nonreactive. One overlap in disappointment’s critical and aesthetic postures, then, may be the possibility for pleasure afforded by the temporal lag between spontaneous affects and their conceptualization as a disappointment, once we come to think of the experience as such. Negative surprise, dashed hopes or a sense of discomfort, frustration, irresolution, disruption or descent—all these may influence an eventual, retroactive judgment of aesthetic disappointment. To eke out pleasure in being so moved, Wordsworth calls on readers not to feel those awkward feelings any less, but to prepare themselves for alternative kinds of poetic gratification. Not coincidentally, one of “the chief reasons” Wordsworth gives for expanding the 1798 Advertisement into the 1800 and 1802 Prefaces is that of preparing readers for the unconventional poems to come, so “that at least [they] may be spared any unpleasant feeling of disappointment.”46 Rather than simply taking him at his word, however, we may now be able to see how Wordsworth’s attempts to manage readers’ expectations are not

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about erasing disappointment entirely, but about using it in order to produce, by way of disappointment’s close avoidance, other sorts of affects. If the logic sounds familiar, that is because it adheres closely to the rationale that Edmund Burke gives, in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), for the appeal of the sublime. Burke explains that when “ideas of pain and danger” work “in a manner analogous to terror,” they are “a source of the sublime.” Not actual terror, but its aesthetic or virtual cousin, the sublime occurs when, “at certain distances and with certain modifications,” pain and danger cease to “press too closely” and become instead “delightful.”47 By “delight” Burke means a sense of relief or release from pain and danger rather than the “positive pleasure” that he associates with the beautiful. The sublime results from fi nding ourselves in proximity to pain and danger while just avoiding them; its payoff depends on our being at enough of a remove so as not to feel truly threatened. Yet unlike the overawed feeling of the sublime (“the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling”48), aesthetic disappointment involves a different kind of mental load and delivers a different kind of kick. Being moved by a work of art that disappoints expectations for literary or artistic effect—to give another brief defi nition of aesthetic disappointment—foregrounds subjection. In the words of Sianne Ngai, it “point[s] to a deficit of power, which is significantly not the same thing as the suspension of power that plays a role in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theories of aesthetic freedom,” particularly the sublime.49 In “Simon Lee,” aesthetic disappointment plays with the disjuncture between hope and reality in ways that reveal not just the failure of anticipation (in the moment) but also the loss of expectations upon which other, more deep-seated assumptions—about self-sufficiency, free will and personal autonomy—might also rest. Even if the reader’s ability to swerve away from the poem’s letdown works as Wordsworth hopes, and relief swoops in to offer something like Burkean delight, to be truly sideswiped by disappointment must also be to confront forms of powerlessness that include the limits of any optimistic attachment. The disappointment aesthetic is for this reason noncathartic. Rather than offer intensity that crests, climaxes, peaks and then also cleanses, disappointment fi lls in the space after hope and, quite possibly, it remains there. Burke calls disappointment “an uneasy sense” that results from “the

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cessation of pleasure” when that pleasure is “abruptly broken off,” which is a usage proper to the period.50 Along with its current meaning, which is to “frustrate . . . expectation or desire,” “to disappoint” comes from “to undo the appointment of . . . to dispossess” or else to “break off (what has been appointed or fi xed).”51 Samuel Johnson defi nes the verb in 1755 as “to defeat of expectation” and also “to balk”—a word that, today, can refer to stopping short, and interestingly, that Johnson defi nes in its nominal senses as “a great beam . . . [or] rafter,” “a ridge of land left unploughed.”52 By these records, disappointment hinges on disruption: it can characterize a demotion from joy to indifference, perhaps, or from approbation to disapproval, but it can also refer to the introduction of irregularities into a regular structure, such as plowed fields or, Wordsworth warns readers, poetry. Moreover, in Burke’s schema, disappointment is a negative pleasure, rather than a positive pain, which might render it more closely related to the aesthetic category of the beautiful (a positive pleasure) than to that of the sublime. And because Burke aligns the passions related to pleasure with society and the social affections, disappointment can make us think of other people rather than ourselves: “if you listen to the complaints of a forsaken lover,” writes Burke, “you observe, that he insists largely on the pleasures which he enjoyed, or hoped to enjoy, and on the perfection of the object of his desires.”53 Whether or not the example is naïve, Burke alerts us to the possibility that the powerlessness that aesthetic disappointment reveals may also invite social reflection. In other words, aesthetic disappointment is noncathartic but may share with the classical defi nition of catharsis a concern with the social dynamics that aesthetic experiences both produce and enforce. In “Simon Lee,” the moment of aesthetic disappointment is not limited to the breaking of the fourth wall. It emerges, rather, through a procession of provoking forms that, by repeatedly teasing the failure of readerly anticipations, cultivates readers who might meet such a major disruption without a total loss of enjoyment. In the “Note to The Thorn,” Wordsworth explains how formal provocations can draw readers in by creating a kind of momentum, and he does so by imagining himself writing a poem about an older man of “slow faculties and deep feelings,” like “a Captain of a small trading vessel for example.” In order to “convey passion to Readers who are not accustomed to sympathize with [such a man],” Wordsworth plans to

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engage “the assistance of Lyrical and rapid Metre.” As he explains, it would be “necessary that the Poem, to be natural, should in reality move slowly; yet I hoped, that, by the aid of the metre, to those who should at all enter into the spirit of the Poem, it would appear to move quickly.”54 “Simon Lee,” which seems to move quickly even when it describes events that move slowly, shares with Wordsworth’s thought experiment the use of rapid meter, among other formal goads, to lend interest to a protagonist whose inner life is opaque. As we have seen, when such accelerations meet with formal disruptions—from Wordsworth’s changes to the typical ballad stanza to his use of interjections, flat rhyme and prosaic diction—the poem seems to seize without stopping, asking the reader to fall forward into awkward feelings. The disappointment aesthetic that “Simon Lee” exemplifies emerges, then, through a process of att unement to the ever-present sense of disharmony and irresolution that the poem’s major disruption fi nally throws into relief. Yet in the poem’s lyric second part, the challenge to readers’ sympathies that Lee poses seems less a question of unfamiliarity, as Wordsworth claims of the imagined sea captain, than of the potentially dehumanizing overfamiliarity with Lee as a rustic “type.” That is, Lee may be too recognizably pitiable to readers reared in the age of sensibility. The humanitarian protest poem to which I alluded before is a genre that “may challenge readers to rethink the prevailing assumptions that govern responses to the poor, but [may] also risk substituting sympathetic identification with the representation of suffering for sympathetic identification with what one might call actual suffering.”55 The tendency to regard Lee as a figure rather than a human being, which is a tendency we have already seen from the poem’s gossips and mythmakers, may well be a form of tale-telling. That such an approach generates neither un-self-interested sympathy with Lee nor tales formed by “thinking,” the poem’s self-conscious interruptions everywhere imply. “Mediocrity Squared”: Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales

In the essay that introduces Part 1, “Provocation,” in his book The Conspiracy of Art (2005), Jean Baudrillard fi nds nothing at all provocative in an art world that, post‒Andy Warhol, values provocation above all else. For

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Baudrillard, art which raises “banality and nullity to the level of values or even to perverse aesthetic pleasure . . . salvages nothing; on the contrary, it is mediocrity squared. It claims to be null—‘I am null! I am null!’—and it truly is null.”56 In the wake of what Baudrillard sees as Warhol’s authentic subversion, no ironic self-fashioning or sophisticated airs can reinvest contemporary art with the essentially “poetic operation” of making “Nothingness rise from the power of signs.”57 Yet the artist’s identity (Warhol is described as “cool, and even more than cool, totally insouciant”) proves essential to Baudrillard’s admiration of a body of work that is supposed to be all means and no ends, in which “I am operationality itself!” is radical rather than pretentious when Warhol says it.58 The artist, as the one whose coolness is spontaneous, unaffected, rule defying, and—since performance is part of the artist’s nature—at the same time highly produced, can transgress authentically whilst participating wholly in the constructedness of art. In Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth does not aim for nullity. But to the extent that “Simon Lee” provokes by staging aesthetic disappointment as a lapse into ‘authentic’ experience, its apostrophe reveals a similar tension between authorial prominence and a desire, in the words of Celeste Langan and Maureen McLane, to disappear into “the medium of poetry” or to become “operationality itself!”59 Whether or not Wordsworth would meet the standard of a Warholesque insouciant genius according to Baudrillard, the hypermediacy of “Simon Lee,” its “conspicuous marking of mediation, a kind of ‘busyness,’” lays the groundwork for a break in the fourth wall that, by suddenly centralizing the poet-speaker, must also erase him.60 The poem enacts stories told and retold; it casts forth the seed of its own retelling and “imagines its other lives.”61 Despite the poet-speaker’s att itude of chiding nonchalance, a phrase like “Perhaps a tale you’ll make it” indicates an awareness that his own moment in the spotlight must also lead to his being subsumed into the poem’s larger logic of tale-making, which is that no one who has once taken center stage can escape being repurposed by the gossips, poets and, now, readers responsible for the perpetuation of such tales. Himself playing the role of provocateur, Baudrillard, with his cross exclamation of “mediocrity squared,” characterizes the ecosystem of contemporary art as the proliferation of similar forms, which, though they point

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to their own derivativeness (“I am null! I am null!”) cannot intensify any quality but their ordinariness. Like Coleridge’s denunciation, in 1817, of “a school of imitators” who recreated the lyrical ballads’ “prosaic words in feeble metre . . . for nearly twenty years,” 62 Baudrillard has no patience for the purveyors of ripple effects. Yet because aesthetic disappointment depends so critically on readers’ expectations, on shared knowledge about what a poem should be, emulation not only amplifies trends but also provides necessary stabilization to the literary field and its readers, from which more disappointment may emerge.63 The norm against which so-called genius pushes actually coalesces out of that which it had previously destabilized. Indeed, what Coleridge does not say in 1817 is that even before Lyrical Ballads went into its second edition, a well-connected figure in the publishing world and a poet with whom Coleridge had already traded poems by letter had taken up writing rustic tales in simple language, and was near to releasing a collection so obviously modeled after Lyrical Ballads that, Dorothy Wordsworth reports, her brother considered retitling the project.64 Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales was published in 1800, at a time when “Robinson, at the peak of her career, was far more famous than Wordsworth or Coleridge.”65 More than a straightforward imitation, Lyrical Tales engages in a complex web of dialogues and borrowings that, Ashley Cross demonstrates, implicate Wordsworth and Coleridge too in a literary culture at once sociable and territorial, striated by gender in ways that appear to have motivated Robinson to align herself with the younger poets.66 Robinson’s self-positioning in this respect is complex but indexical: in a letter to a publisher she writes, “[my] volume will consist of Tales, serious and gay, on a variety of subjects in the manner of Wordsworth’s Lyrical ballads.”67 Robinson’s Lyrical Tales collects a number of poems previously published under the nom de plume Tabitha Bramble in the Morning Herald, as well as four new poems: “The Trumpeter,” “The Widow’s Home,” “The Shepherd’s Dog,” and “Golfre.”68 Scholars have drawn parallels between many of the tales and their apparent counterparts in Lyrical Ballads, including Robinson’s “The Deserted Cottage” and Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage,” her “All Alone” and his “We Are Seven,” Robinson’s “Golfre” and Coleridge’s Christabel, and her “The Haunted Beach” and his Rime of the Ancient

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Mariner.69 No one seems as yet to have connected “The Shepherd’s Dog” to “Simon Lee,” though they make a good pairing for their irregular balladic forms and tales of aged rustics of high repute. Each of the three stages of Robinson’s poem corresponds to and revises those of Wordsworth’s—it follows so closely, in fact, that “an incident with which [the protagonist] was concerned” occurs in the exact same line of both poems. Yet even as “The Shepherd’s Dog” makes many of the same moves, formally and conceptually, as “Simon Lee,” Robinson’s poem embraces a positive narrative logic that works against the disruptive potential suggested by her “low and rustic” formal innovations. As a result, her homage fails to produce the pleasurable proximity to disappointed expectations upon which the aesthetic dimension of disappointment in “Simon Lee” depends. What “The Shepherd’s Dog” does instead is to reveal both the influence of aesthetic disappointment and a specifically formal, poetic resistance to it. Personification works in Robinson’s poem to allay concerns over the justice or injustice of social feelings such as pity, and to suggest that even the decisions of nonhuman animals owe to moral impulses strengthened by sustained social intercourse. As a response to Wordsworth’s poem, then, “The Shepherd’s Dog” offers a more inclusive vision of agency and its relationship to feeling. By staking his life for his dog, the shepherd displays a selflessness seemingly driven by sentiment alone. But when the dog stakes his life for his master in turn, and does so with every indication of rational understanding, Robinson suggests that readers’ limited capacities for seeing into the heart of things may mean they are not quite up to the task of tale-making themselves. In “The Shepherd’s Dog,” Robinson reimagines the Old Huntsman’s story in a poem where the power of simple, unadorned language incites pity and sways authority. The fi rst ten stanzas of her poem relate the life of a loyal dog named Trim, who is now “very old, and grey” (line 24): A Shepherd’s Dog there was; and he Was faithful to his master’s will, For well he lov’d his company, Along the plain or up the hill; All Seasons were, to him, the same Beneath the Sun’s meridian flame;

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Or, when wintry wind blew shrill and keen, Still the Old Shepherd’s Dog, was with his master seen (lines 1–8).

The fi nal four lines of Robinson’s balladic stanzas rhyme CCDD, rather than the conventional CDCD or Wordsworth’s CDED. Whereas Wordsworth’s decision not to rhyme the penultimate line of each stanza gives him flexibility with respect to the prosaic qualities of his verse (since he can choose to create more space between end-stopped beats), Robinson takes other formal liberties in pursuit of humble decorum. Enjambments allow for sentence-like statements across line breaks, and in this poem they also enact persistence across other kinds of boundaries—barriers of species and language. There’s an earnestness to lines like “and he / Was faithful,” which takes seriously the connection between man and dog; Trim’s commitment to shepherding is not pure instinct but the result of a deep attachment to the one who “will[s]” the work to be done. Each of Robinson’s fi nal couplets comprises one line of pentameter and an Alexandrine, or a line of hexameter with a central caesura. The extra beat of the Alexandrine draws the stanza out in a way that also underscores the faithfulness of the dog, who, like the line, does not want to give up: “Still the Old Shepherd’s Dog, was with his master seen.” That the Alexandrine’s major stress (on the sixth syllable) very often lands on the word “Dog,” after which follow six more beats in which to describe Trim’s dutiful actions, bolsters this effect. The resulting cadence feels like the regular life of dog and shepherd, day in and day out, which the poem’s repetitive time-stamps also reinforce: “In smiling days, and days of need”; “so pass’d on the chearful night and day”; “Full many a year, the same was he” (lines 12, 23, 73). There is even a stanza devoted to what they do on Sundays: “The faithful Trim would mope awhile; / For then his master’s only care / Was the loud Psalm, or fervent Pray’r” (lines 52–54). Unlike Charlotte Smith’s laborious lines, Robinson’s formal innovations capture the ongoingness of work and life as natural (cyclical and seasonal) and inherently fulfi lling. In the fi rst, expository stage of “The Shepherd’s Dog,” the swirl of hearsay and gossip by which Lee takes on mythic status in Wordsworth’s poem is notably absent. Trim’s stature and actions are not hyperbolic or nostalgic but those of a regular sheepherding dog, “a bold and faithful breed”

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(line 10). Like Lee, Trim is well-known about town (“Among the villagers was he / Belov’d by all the young and old” [lines 25–26]), but unlike Lee, Trim seems to have earned this distinction for doing nothing very special (i.e., for doing exactly what a dog like him is bred to do). There is no polyphony of voices and therefore no uncertainty: in Robinson’s tale, the narrator’s omniscient perspective lends gravitas to a simple story, which is also the only story. The use of personification, at fi rst subtle and seemingly innocuous (Trim “would mope”) heightens the effect, ultimately generating an explanatory framework that readers may belatedly discover themselves to have internalized: that dog and master each consider the other a “friend”; that Trim weighs the value of his labor against the approbation he receives (“well . . . he knew” that “his master’s company / Would recompense his toil”); that Trim feels “love” for both master and work (lines 145, 67–68, 74). Trim’s inner life is as accessible to the narrator as his outer one, and his ability to weigh decisions in particular will be crucial for the tale’s fi nal moral reckoning. In “Simon Lee,” by contrast, other people’s opinions overwhelm those of the Old Huntsman, producing a kind of receding subjectivity that suspends and destabilizes, inviting questions about what intimacies are possible between neighbors. The difference cannot help but recall Wordsworth’s rejection of personification, among other purportedly ossifying elements of style, in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. As part of Wordsworth’s campaign for reader preparedness (so “that I may not be censured for not having performed what I never attempted”), the poet warns that the collection contains only a very few “personifications of abstract ideas.”70 Wordsworth’s aim is to “keep” his readers instead “in the company of flesh and blood,” which I take to mean grounded from the airy heights of intangible concepts and open to feelings that may be unexpected or alienating.71 Personification’s difficulty, for Wordsworth, is twofold. In the fi rst case, its use proliferates an anthropocentric coherence that pushes everything that is not either human or humanized to the margins; in the second case, the very form of that coherence is suspect. In the words of Francis Ferguson, personification “fails to recognize the difficulty of comprehending humanness” by taking for granted “that there is a stable form to be projected.”72 In the fi nal part of “Simon Lee,” even though the Old Huntsman is, or once

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was, a human being, his inaccessibility might seem to us incoherent—in need of a tale to lend it meaning. Wordsworth’s refusal to tell that story is, by this logic, also a refusal to project onto Lee the personifying att ributes that would help readers make sense of him. The passive construction which begins the concluding stanza, for instance, “The tears into his eyes were brought,” disassociates Lee from the feeling, “gratitude,” that explains his crying (lines 97, 103). When, in the following lines, “thanks and praises seemed to run / So fast out of his heart,” the grateful words run like liquid tears but they also, in another sense, transport themselves out of Lee’s heart or mouth (lines 98–99). Moved by a force of feeling, Lee’s gratitude is not, fi nally, his own but that “of men” in general (line 103). Rather than presume to understand what Lee, or any person, is, Wordsworth’s retreat from personification might encourage us to interpret this scene not as a flattening out of Lee’s humanity, but a return to it.73 Counterintuitively, the more Lee seems like an automaton or cypher, the less intelligible and therefore more human he would be. By contrast, in “The Shepherd’s Dog,” what a person is inheres in a dramatic, selfless version of agency available to human and animals alike: the staking of one’s life for the preservation of another. Robinson’s embrace of personification, like her embrace of omniscient narration, unifies the tale around this crucial idea, the staging of which begins when Trim must protect his master’s flock from the hounds of a “gay and lordly company,” in an encounter that frames the old dog as exceptional for the fi rst time. “With angry snarl [Trim] attack’d the hounds!” declares Robinson, “For still his ire was fierce and bold, / And ne’er did valiant chieftan feel more strong / Than the old Shepherd’s dog, when daring foes among” (lines 83, 92, 94– 96). Trim holds them off, but when the company shows up on the shepherd’s doorstep, it is to demand the death penalty for the “MAD” dog that has wounded their hounds (line 104). Th is pivotal injustice would seem sure to wrench the poem into the territory of a more serious heartbreak, but the repeated description of the lordly company’s gay demeanor turns out to be the more prescient indication of where the tale is headed. In what is perhaps the most significant difference between the poems, rather than have the poetnarrator comment on the scene, Robinson allows the “kind old Shepherd” himself to plead Trim’s case:

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“For many a year my Dog has been The only friend these eyes have seen; We both are old and feeble, he and I— Together we have liv’d, together let us die! Behold his dim, yet speaking eye! Which ill befits his visage grim He cannot from your anger fly, For slow and feeble is old TRIM! He looks, as though he fain would speak, His beard is white—his voice is weak— He is NOT MAD! O! then, in pity spare The only watchful friend, of my small fleecy care!” (lines 109–20)

Against all odds, the shepherd’s request is granted; “pity touch’d the company,” and the lords agree to spare Trim’s life, punishing the dog instead by imprisoning him on an island for nine days (line 123). Th is shift from expository set-up to specific incident begins on the same line and with similar phrasing in both poems: Wordsworth’s “One summerday, I chanced to see” (line 81) becomes Robinson’s “One morn, to the low mead went he” (line 81). The story of Trim’s protecting the sheep shares with the poet-narrator’s happening upon Lee a concern with aiding the weak and the duty to do right by one’s fellows. Both poems suggest that we come to know ourselves through work. Yet Robinson’s third act, which we might expect to correspond to the fi nal ambiguity over the poet-narrator’s unkind kindness in “Simon Lee,” diverges markedly. Over the course of seven stanzas (compared to Wordsworth’s one), we learn that the shepherd, unable to remain parted from “his old friend,” sets out each morning in a “litt le boat” to visit Trim “across the stream” (lines 131, 133). All is fi ne until the sixth day, when the boat suddenly “dash’d impetuous, ‘gainst” “a wither’d tree,” plunging the shepherd into the water to be swept away by the current (lines 143, 139). Witnessing this from shore, Trim makes a critical decision: Old TRIM, now doom’d his friend to see Beating the foam with wasted breath,

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Resolv’d to bear him company, E’en in the icy arms of death; Soon with exulting cries he bore His feeble master to the shore, And, standing o’er him, howl’d in cadence sad, For, fear and fondness, now, had nearly made him MAD (lines 145–152)

Unwilling to leave the conclusion of her tale up to readers, Robinson presses on, delivering a parallel action which equates man and dog in love, courage and most critically, rational agency. While the shepherd’s willingness to sacrifice himself may have seemed excessively sentimental or overblown— pandering to readers’ own sentimental attachments—Trim’s decision to risk his life Robinson presents as situationally urgent but psychologically both rational and deeply felt. Having judged (i.e., “doom’d”) that the shepherd will surely drown without help, Trim resolves to try to save his master or perish in the attempt—to meet him, “E’en in the icy arms of death.” Heather Keenleyside reminds us that, prior to Wordsworth’s dismissal, personification in the eighteenth century indexed a more extensive “ontological uncertainty” about “what a person is . . . or is not.”74 Examining James Thomson’s The Seasons (1746), Keenleyside fi nds that personification “confers agency” onto nonhuman animals and things but it also “runs agency and sentiment together, defi ning persons by a capacity to be moved” rather than by an ability to move or act independently. Th is works because the passions or affections are forces that make action meaningful: when we are moved to act out of anger or pity, we are moved to a state of personhood. And, because this capacity to be moved in Thomson’s poem is “proper not to human beings” but to persons, Keenleyside explains, “agency and sentiment do not precede but proceed from personification.”75 In “The Shepherd’s Dog” a similar set of contingencies appears to motivate Trim’s heroic deed; through personification he not only judges and resolves, but does so out of “fear and fondness.” Likewise, when he howls in “cadence sad” he is moved by feeling to express himself. While Wordsworth might preserve nuance by refusing to say what a person is, Robinson’s personifications suggest that our judgments about the

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humanity or inhumanity of others are often insufficiently considered. The question of madness emerges in “The Shepherd’s Dog” at decisive moments in which Trim’s personhood—not only his reason, capacity for love, and moral sense, but also his membership in the community and right to a fair trial—is also in question. Paired repetitions of the words “MAD” (emphasized in small capitals) and “doom’d” suggest that the impulse to call that which escapes understanding “madness” is at once de-personifying and litigious—that is, designed to undermine basic rights and privileges. When the lordly company calls for Trim’s execution, it is because they “deem’d [him] MAD”; when the shepherd pleads Trim’s case he cries, “He is NOT MAD! O!”; when Trim fi nds himself “doom’d” to solitary confi nement, it is “Enough to make him MAD—were he not so before!” (lines 104, 119, 128). At the same time, Robinson also links madness to a kind of overflowing, unconditional love, teasingly canine in its expression. In one scene, “TRIM stood yelping loud, and ALMOST MAD with joy!”; in the wake of the shepherd’s successful rescue, “fear and fondness, now, had nearly made [Trim] MAD” (lines 136, 152). In none of these examples does Trim enter a state of actual madness, but he does almost or nearly do so through the intensity of his feelings. In one sense, then, Robinson recognizes that madness names a loss of control over one’s actions that can be used to justify imprisonment or death; in another sense, however, madness sits at the far end of a spectrum of responsiveness to the passions, so that one approaches it in lockstep with the intensification of feelings that can also lead to extreme acts of bravery. When the lords ascribe to Trim madness in the former sense, they fail to consider any complicating factors, including that they are strangers who know litt le of Trim as a person. Their snap decision results from viewing Trim all at once and in isolation, outside the dynamic milieu of other persons with and for whom his actions make sense. The poem, by dramatizing the injustice of the lords’ judgment, suggests that personification, far from projecting onto Trim a spurious stability, grants readers insight into his motives instead. From long-standing social and vocational obligations to passional forces and Trim’s own nature and instincts, the reasons for Trim’s actions are interpretable as meaningful (i.e., heroic) only to those able to

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consider his person long and deeply, as Robinson implies that strangers cannot. Whatever else Robinson achieves in her Lyrical Tales, “The Shepherd’s Dog” presents a challenge to critics for whom the key to the collection is “an understanding of Robinson’s manipulations of . . . genre expectations” when the expectation in question “is the familiarity of ‘happily ever after.’”76 In the end, “The Shepherd’s Dog” satisfyingly resolves, and in so doing rejects both the central provocation of “Simon Lee” and the more “familiar kind of disappointment,” that Judith Pascoe fi nds elsewhere in Robinson’s oeuvre, where “a moment of poetic escape” gives way to “the failure of poetry to sustain a transcendent gesture.”77 Rather than leave readers wondering, Robinson concludes that Trim and the shepherd live the rest of their lives in “chearful company” (line 160). Not only are they “[m]ore happy than the proudly great,” they experience this rustic contentment together: “on a pallet, clean and low, / They hear, unmov’d, the wild winds blow” (lines 157‒58). Still writing in the language of low and rustic life, still invested in metrical innovation, Robinson nevertheless refuses the open gesture—“perhaps a tale you’ll make it”—through which Wordsworth might be understood to fail to protect the Old Huntsman from the judgments of readers who are also strangers. In so doing, Robinson lets us see the degree to which the disappointment aesthetic must rely not just on nonreactivity but also on fairmindedness—qualities that, she implies, cannot be guaranteed. In a world where quick decisions can mean the difference between life and death, freedom or imprisonment, Robinson suggests that for those without a voice, like Trim, putt ing one’s story into the hands of strangers cannot be a safe way to proceed. Conclusion: “Hart-Leap Well”

As a response to “Simon Lee,” “The Shepherd’s Dog” may be no less provocative for all that it disappoints the disappointment aesthetic. Rather than the passions or affections being treated as material forces that affect us spontaneously before becoming meaningful through reflection, in “The Shepherd’s Dog,” the affections of “fear and fondness,” love and “joy,” are displayed as the fully characterized, meaningful passions by which Trim is moved to act;

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they seem to indicate an earlier eighteenth-century view in which, in the words of Keenleyside, “People do not move with meaning but are moved by it.”78 The poem conditions personhood on responsiveness to these passions, suggesting that what looks like madness may in fact be valor. When rash judgments lead to injustice, pity soon emerges as a powerful corrective; the shepherd’s successful appeal on Trim’s behalf shows that even the lordly company can be moved by pity to a reasonable concession. At the same time, near constant personifications establish an explanatory backdrop—a set of known facts about Trim’s life and preferences—through which his reversals of fortune might appear to readers not only just but deserved. The poem’s march towards narrative resolution prepares readers not for instability but vindication, and it also returns us to the discussion of Romantic aesthetics with which this chapter began. How to square “being moved” by forces beyond one’s control with the sense of individual freedom and autonomy that, for Kant and others, aesthetic experience should reinforce? Many of the explanations that this book presents begin from the claim with which this chapter wraps up: that Romantic views of the affections complicate the earlier eighteenth-century views that Robinson’s poem animates. For Wordsworth, in “Simon Lee” and elsewhere, subjects are moved not by passions that are immediately transparent to our understanding as love or joy or melancholy; for poets, as for persons, the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” must be “recollected in tranquility” before becoming meaningful.79 By extension, other people’s passions are doubly inexplicable, since we cannot know how they feel, and they may not know themselves. To “think,” for Wordsworth, is an invitation to use one’s proximity to an “unpleasant feeling of disappointment” as a chance to reconsider the assumption that, in poetry, making sense of the world should come easily. What follows in Chapter 3 will further explore how, for Wordsworth and Coleridge, a Spinozist conception of the affections might come to be interpreted differently over time. For now, however, I want to conclude by offering one last poetic experiment in aesthetic disappointment, Wordsworth’s lyrical ballad “Hart-Leap Well.” Th is poem I treat as a further development of the formal structures that lead to aesthetic disappointment begun in “Simon Lee,” and also as a complication of the role that personification plays

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in alerting us to Wordsworth’s concerns with the precognitive status of the affections. In this poem—which fi rst appeared in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads and was probably not known to Robinson as she composed Lyrical Tales—being moved to spontaneous feeling does not separate humans from nonhuman animals but thinking does. Ascribing feeling-states like unhappiness to a suffering animal recognizes the affections as not only prepersonal but also pre-personhood, and thus not a contravention of Wordsworth’s position on personification; purporting to know what an animal thinks, however, oversteps and overdetermines, taking us out of “the company of flesh and blood” and into the realm of ego and pride.80 “Hart-Leap Well” tells a tale in two parts, the fi rst medieval and balladic and the second contemporary and lyric. It begins with a knight, Sir Walter, who, in the course of hunting a stag, the Hart, gallops three horses to exhaustion and commands hounds whose “breath and eye-sight fail, and, one by one / The dogs are stretch’d among the mountain fern” (lines 23–24).81 The fleeing Hart leads Sir Walter to a beautiful vale, which becomes the deer’s final resting place; the knight erects a commemorative “Pleasure-house upon this spot,” and duly names it “Hart-Leap Well” (line 57). Th is fi rst part of the poem ends self-reflexively, with the poet-narrator interjecting to forewarn, “But there is matter for a second rhyme, / And I to this would add a second tale” (lines 95–96). The second tale, like the post-apostrophe portion of “Simon Lee,” centers on the poet-narrator wandering through a forest and happening upon a puzzle. Rather than meet the cipher-like Lee, whose bodily ruin may seem to preserve a secret history in much the same way as does a faded manuscript, in this poem, “It chanc’d that I saw standing in a dell / Th ree aspins at three corners of a square” (lines 102–103). The diction and phrasing recall the meeting with Lee (“One summer-day I chanced to see”) but here really is a ruin—the remains of the pleasure house—and this relic is capable of neither telling its story nor expressing its feelings. Rather than charge readers with solving this puzzle or fi nding meaning in it, in “HartLeap Well” a helpful Shepherd appears, and it is from him that the poetnarrator learns the story of the hunt. The Shepherd’s efforts at making a sympathetic tale out of the hearsay and speculation surrounding the vale “in times of old” reflect not only the

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poet-speaker’s curiosity and the Shepherd’s longstanding, personal interest in the puzzle, but perhaps also the charge to “think” from “Simon Lee” (line 123). Like a Wordsworthian ideal reader, the Shepherd has clearly spent time pondering the stag’s life and death, and he has much pity for the Hart, who, “For thirteen hours . . . ran a desperate race” (line 145). The Shepherd posits that those who say a “murder” cursed the vale are really talking about “that unhappy Hart,” and he wonders if it was nostalgia that drove the stag to choose that particular place to die (“Th is water was perhaps the fi rst he drank / When he had wander’d from his mother’s side”) (lines 140, 151–52). Yet the Shepherd is quick to admit that “in my simple mind we cannot tell / What cause the Hart might have to love this place” (lines 146–47). While he cannot help but att ribute unhappiness and love to the stag, he also recognizes and struggles with the limits of his own insight. Trying unsuccessfully to imagine what the Hart must have experienced during a last, valiant attempt at self-preservation, the Shepherd exclaims, “What thoughts must through the creature’s brain have pass’d!” (line 141). No matter how “simple” the Shepherd’s understanding, his awareness that he can never know the Hart’s thoughts is a sophistication that, as Wordsworth elsewhere implies, many more authoritative tale-tellers sorely lack. In “Hart-Leap Well,” ascribing feeling states to nonhuman animals is not limited to seeing them in the Hart. In its opening scene, even Sir Walter’s third horse feels “Joy” as he leaps into a gallop (line 9). On Spinoza’s account, to be galvanized to act in accordance with one’s nature—to run if one is a horse—empowers and strengthens, sparking a positive response that Wordsworth calls happiness or joy. From the perspective of the poetspeaker, man and horse perfectly align in their capacity for feeling: “The horse and horseman are a happy pair” (line 10). The Hart, by contrast, meets the hunter under circumstances that are contrary to a deer’s nature. Though the stag must be a trophy—strong enough to bear a rack of antlers that attests to many seasons of good health—by the time Sir Walter catches him, he “toils along the mountainside,” “Weak as a lamb” and “foaming” with sweat (lines 29, 39, 40). When the Shepherd calls this state unhappiness and the poet-speaker calls it “sorrow,” each gives a name to disempowerment (line 180). Rather than personify the Hart, however, these feeling states

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seem to characterize instead degrees of animation: experiences of embodied dynamism best expressed by movement (galloping, running, toiling). What kindles the Shepherd’s pity is not the plight of the Hart as a person, a community member or friend (as Trim is depicted), but the exhaustion that the stag suffers; the question is not whether the deer feels but how deeply and for what purpose. The poem’s two human commentators, by describing animal feelings but not animal thoughts, attach positive and negative affects to creatures other than human beings, but nevertheless toe a moral line before the sorts of egocentric impositions that might lead one to mistake domination for care or, still worse, cruelty for a compliment. Sir Walter’s naming of the vale exemplifies the latter, while his drive to pursue the Hart at the cost of dogs’ and horses’ lives is a version of the former, which also betrays a singlemindedness in stark contrast with the Shepherd’s humble, multifaceted perspective. And perhaps it is this respect for amphibology that explains why, in the end, the poet-speaker seems to want only partial credit for the poem’s moral takeaway: One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide, Taught both by what [Nature] shews, and what conceals, Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels (lines 177–80)

In a resolution that leaves the significance of the Hart’s life and death, fittingly, unresolved, the poet-speaker indicates that the human tendency to privilege human feelings—“our pleasure or our pride”—has moral consequences. When we have respect for what we cannot know about the natural world, we exercise our humility and we also allow animal feeling to exist in and for itself, unencumbered by or unblended with our own. Here is an invitation to suspend judgment and practice restraint that seems to rest on the assumption that all feeling is pre-personal, whether it is felt by a person or not. One moral lesson, divided, echoes the formal architecture of aesthetic disappointment in “Hart-Leap Well” overall (its distinct balladic and lyric parts), and the self-reflexiveness of this last stanza also throws into relief

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how Wordsworth’s desire for readers’ restraint benefits from a more rigorous foregrounding of potential disappointments in this poem compared to “Simon Lee.” Rather than create a negative surprise that rocks readers back on their heels, “Hart-Leap Well” introduces the puzzling ruin only after explicit cautions; a prose “Argument” at the outset refers to “monuments spoken of in the second Part,” and the poet-speaker interjects before the fi rst part closes in order to remind readers of the “second rhyme.” That “HartLeap Well” comes after “Simon Lee” in the 1800 collection may also position the more startling poem as a kind of early warning. As an exercise in reader preparedness, then, such rigorous framings might seem to cast “Hart-Leap Well” as a more rudimentary drill, one designed to make fi nding pleasure in a poem suff used with disappointment and its associated affects—anticipation, irresolution, loss—entirely more likely. The experience of aesthetic disappointment, retroactively understood as such, arises through repeated swerves away from story and towards the unknowability of everything from the glorified past to a deer’s thoughts and nature’s design and intentions. The poet-speaker’s entreaty to interrogate “our pleasure and our pride” adds to the charge to “think” an invitation to also think about how to feel. And, if such an invitation too applies retroactively, then perhaps we are fi nally left with a chance to revisit any expectation of sympathy as inherently or reliably capable of resolving our doubts.

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CHAPTER 3

Coleridge Tripping

A s p r e v iou s c h a p t e r s have begun to elaborate, reading’s galvanizing motions—the rhythm and pace with which readers feel themselves moving through a text—enact a peculiar tension between freedom and transport. Reading liberates, but it also carries us away, and not just imaginatively. By “motions” I mean those bodily, and specifically nervous, vibrations that Romantic science regarded as fundamental to health and the shape of lived experience.1 Th is is embodiment cast as vitally susceptible to outside impressions, so that environments, atmospheres and the forceful feelings of other people have as much to do with well-being as the state of the body itself.2 Motions of this sort produce a reader who is moved by, as much as moves in and through, a text. For this reason, sympathetic readerly motions generate pleasures that are also vulnerabilities, the (loving, satiric) representation of which Romantic literature makes it easy to fi nd—just ask Catherine Morland.3 Yet for two important theorists of reading in the period, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, such motions are also metaphysical, to the extent that they owe their forcefulness to philosophies of immanence predicated on the limits of human agency. Th is argument, which is also the identification of a specifically Spinozist dimension in the debate over poetry’s power, builds on scholarship long att uned to the influence of 91

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Coleridge’s metaphysical speculations on Wordsworth. Geoff rey Hartman, prototypically, fi nds in The Prelude “a secondhand Spinozism ([adopted] . . . surely, from the enthusiastic Coleridge),” and Adam Potkay observes “Spinoza’s impress” upon “Wordsworth’s (and Coleridge’s)” views of nature.4 Like Hartman’s, Potkay’s bracketed suggestion presumes that these poets’ understandings of the philosopher were largely shared—a presumption that Nicholas Halmi’s careful delineation of Coleridge’s ever-changing and often idiosyncratic responses to Spinoza would seem to unsett le.5 Pursuing the related suggestion that Wordsworth’s position on Spinoza was also in many ways his own, this chapter adds to the medical-aesthetical-historical dilemma that Kevis Goodman fi nds in the Biographia Literaria (1817) another crucial reason for Coleridge’s disappointed reading. For Coleridge, Wordsworth’s willingness to subject readers to poems that diminish their senses of agency and power disrupts a theory of ideal reading that Coleridge grounds, as demonstrated here, in a radical materialism quite different from that which Wordsworth’s poems mobilize. In the Biographia, Coleridge grapples with lyrical ballads that refuse to sustain the momentum of his readerly anticipations, in which “the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims [to pleasure] in order to disappoint them.”6 As Chapter 2 has elaborated, Wordsworth’s disappointment aesthetic in the Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) makes proximity to formal letdowns into a measure of readerly resilience, and does so without entirely lett ing go of pleasure. When it comes to Coleridge’s later dissatisfactions in the Biographia, recent criticism has examined many of the reasons, medical, aesthetic, intellectual, and psychological, for Coleridge’s expressions of literary critical dismay.7 To this I add that Coleridge’s tactics for avoiding disappointed reading—tactics that are both embodied and agonizingly self-aware—are also responses to the materialist logic that Marjorie Levinson’s work on Wordsworth’s Spinozist influence has made vital to Wordsworth’s poetics.8 For this reason, Coleridge’s desire to be moved by, but not to lose his bearings in, the transports of reading Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads hangs on the need for an impossible sixth sense, one that resonates with even as it resists the Spinozist influence. I call this sense “proprioceptive self-possession,” after three figures for embodied cognition

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upon which Coleridge’s theories of reading and thinking depend: collecting force, gathering strength and preparing muscles.9 Th is sense is impossible because proprioception, the body’s ability to sense its position relative to itself and its environment, operates in precognitive and interoceptive ways, while self-possession names a highly self-conscious regard for the assurance and ease with which one acts.10 To have proprioceptive acuity is to act without thinking; to be self-possessed is to know that one meets challenges with grace. For Coleridge, having both means achieving a readerly equilibrium that is perfectly att uned to the poetic coincidence of thought and feeling, but also perfectly distanced from it. Unfortunately for Coleridge, many of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads make him feel the limits of his proprioceptive capabilities and a mortifying loss of self-possession. Coleridge’s disappointment feels like tripping on the landing—like “leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.”11 It is a breach of the compact, Wordsworth himself admits in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, that readers expect to enter into when they pick up a book of poetry.12 In what follows, I begin by considering Coleridge’s disappointments as affective negotiations with forms of proprioceptive adjustment like balance and spatial awareness, which resonate with Spinoza in their privileging of readerly “motions” and “force.” These negotiations depend critically on form, but through them Coleridge wrestles too with the expressions of human difference that the poems’ “low and rustic” language conveys. In his critique of Wordsworth’s “The Sailor’s Mother” (1807), I show how Coleridge seeks proactively to transform these difficulties by intervening in the poem’s meter and rhyme: pausing, rereading, and “disproportioning the emphasis.”13 As a tactic for simulating equilibrium, this intervention is embodied insofar as the feeling of equilibrium is also, on Coleridge’s account, a dynamic proprioceptive adjustment—a “retrogressive movement [that] collects the force which carries him onward.”14 Yet, when lasting balance proves impossible, Coleridge swaps ideal reading for rhetorical emphasis, producing rather than overcoming his own disappointment. In this surprising reversal, I show how two competing interpretations of materialist morality emerge. When “The Sailor’s Mother” presents bearing to be moved as an act

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of strength, it suggests (along with Spinoza) that goodness means steadfastness and self-restraint; yet by disappointing his readers, Wordsworth’s verse is itself unrestrained and imposing in a way that undermines, for Coleridge, the poet’s moral responsibility to preserve the integrity and forcefulness of other people. The chapter concludes with a counterexample that elaborates further the dependable reading experience that Coleridge would seem to prefer, by exploring how, in his 1807 poem “To William Wordsworth,” proprioceptive self-possession characterizes the transport that Coleridge experiences while hearing The Prelude (1805) read aloud. The Biographia Literaria and Proprioceptive Self-Possession

Reading generates dynamic mental undulations, which comprise waves of pleasure that, at each crest and dip, become momentary pauses for reflection. Th is is Coleridge’s version of ideal reading, as he describes it in Chapter 14 of the Biographia: The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the fi nal solution; but by the pleasureable activity of mind excited by the att ractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward.15

Ideal readerly engagement is neither pure reaction to stimuli nor a teleological drive to discover the conclusion, but a continuous and pleasurable process of regrouping and adjustment. While the reader may seem passive (“carried forward”), his motion depends on active instances of “collecting,” in which he “pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward.”16 To move retrogressively is to return to a simpler state, which Coleridge here seems to imagine resists reading’s forward momentum. Like the water-insect that figures thinking in another well-known Coleridgean example, collecting force acts as “a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion”—a minor, but not insignificant, means of mobilizing towards action.17

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Sometimes carried forward, sometimes holding back, the reader’s “motion” is like that of a “serpent” or the “the path of sound through the air.”18 As Goodman has shown, this is an image gleaned from aesthetics and medicine. “Coleridge is here drawing on [Henry Home, Lord] Kames’s account of the ‘beauty of a serpentine river,’” in Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762), which is a figure “not separable from its genesis: that is, the origin and context it shared with the concurrent medical concern for the delicate relationship between the body and its environment.”19 Indeed, in the Biographia, this relationship is nowhere more delicate (or more medicated) than in Coleridge’s account of meter’s intoxicating effects: I argue from the EFFECTS of metre. . . . As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation; [these effects] act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. Where, therefore, correspondent food and appropriate matter are not provided for the attention and feelings thus roused, there must needs be a disappointment felt; like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.20

Although “leaping” might seem a peculiar way to describe how one regularly negotiates stairs, the word again recalls the discussion of the waterinsect, where to “leap” describes both the active and passive elements of thinking.21 “Let us consider what we do when we leap,” begins Coleridge in the lead-up to that discussion: “We fi rst resist the gravitating power . . . [and then] we yield to it in order to light on the spot which we had previously proposed to ourselves.”22 Such is a “process completely analogous” to mental activities like “trying to recollect a name” or “composing,” which the motions of the water-insect also illustrate: Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the litt le animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. Th is is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking.23

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Not incidentally, then, Coleridge’s use of “leaping” down stairs in the dark implies that thinking under the influence (of meter) makes one liable to misjudge how best to anticipate and yield to thought’s gravitational pull. Tripping, in this sense, occurs when our preconceived expectations about landing meet the limits of our own propulsion or balance. Mary Favret has made it impossible to forget that reading involves seeing words on a page “in a historically given world,” where everything from dim candlelight to faded ink may conspire to disrupt comprehension and enjoyment.24 Her work on the “pathos of reading” reveals the physiology of vision as always already part of the struggle for meaning-making. Coleridge, who self-experimented with the effects of induced visual difficulties in reading (brought about by squinting in candlelight or reading through smoke), is hardly an exception.25 Yet “leaping in the dark” eliminates sight. Darkness exacerbates the issues of calibrating and maintaining power and poise that “leaping” educes, but it does so in order to figure as interoceptive and haptic what is already beyond seeing: those “unconscious and automatic neural processes that account for much of what we call reading comprehension.”26 In this way, Coleridge implies that poetic meter mediates “the delicate relationship between the body and its environment” by affecting the “fibrous ‘motions’” that Romantic medicine thought to “course in both directions . . . from the sentient extremities to the brain and from the brain back to the extremities.”27 Among reading’s unconscious operations, those triggered by meter are like the body’s proprioceptive capabilities, Coleridge implies, because the motions of the brain and body vibrate together. Recent criticism that focuses on Romantic medical and protopsychological discourses has emphasized that, for Coleridge, a dependable poetic cadence acts as a “stimulant,” which simultaneously soothes and animates through the thrill of expectations repeatedly met.28 Social and communicable, this pleasure is at once visceral and virtual, since it is liable to be contracted in a “medicated atmosphere,” to loosen the tongue and generate conversation, but also to “rouse” feelings of engagement and interest. Coleridge worries that, like alcohol—which at fi rst helps to lubricate a social interaction and, later on, blurs it—this kind of metrical regulation can become, over time, a dulling and dangerous background rhythm. Meter

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“produces” its double effects, he attests, “by the continued excitement of surprize, and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence.”29 Thus, meter can work against ideal reading by granting too much power to a “mechanical impulse” like curiosity.30 Caught in a pattern of “reciprocations,” the intoxicated reader trades interest and attention for a kind of hyperstimulated, dull expectancy—a mental and physical state requiring reliable poetic sustenance (regular meter, but also language and content fit for poetic expression), in order to continue.31 As Thomas Pfau has demonstrated, the challenge that “alien Stimulants” pose to Coleridge’s ontological investment in the human mind as “an imperfect echo of the divine” (a mind that is therefore unique, self-legitimating, and responsible), requires critical engagements capable of moving between Coleridge’s figures for human action (choice, self-determination) and reaction (impulsivity, unselfconsciousness).32 In Coleridge’s late religious and philosophical writings especially, his Kantian preoccupation hangs on the pursuit of a “specifically human type of agency,” ontologically distinct and capable of ethical decision making.33 When it comes to his own embodiment, however, Coleridge is constantly, even obsessively aware of the impingements wrought by haptic, auditory, and especially visual stimuli, as Rei Terada’s work on the Notebooks has shown.34 In light of this tension, Terada’s evocative juxtaposition of Coleridge’s self-experiments in reading and his unifying theory of the “esemplastic imagination” is as concise as it is exemplary. For Coleridge, she writes, “imagining is as easy as squinting.”35 Reembodying the creative act in a minor, physical movement, Terada emphasizes that even the most abstract aims of art and philosophy are for Coleridge as minutely as they are astonishingly embodied.36 Moreover, that Coleridge’s disappointed reading is neither pure philosophy nor generalized literary theory, but a pointed critique of Wordsworth’s poetics productively complicates meter’s embodiment by a subject who must contain, in Coleridge’s words, a “Spark . . . of the Divinity.”37 While Coleridge projects tripping over irregular meter in a figure suggestive of missed feet, he also, and more precisely, compares it to muscles primed for

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an activation that never arrives. Like an ideal reader, whose pauses actuate the “pleasurable activity of the mind,” or the water-insect, whose struggle upstream figures the action of thinking, the metrically intoxicated reader “collects” or “gathers” “force” (“prepare[s] . . . muscles”) in order to leap. The difference is that, in its very form, Wordsworth’s poetry forestalls him. A rock in the current, prosaic verse disrupts not only proprioceptive ease, but also the motions of thinking—no matter how soothed or animated. Th is inextricability suggests a further cause for Coleridge’s dismay. Meter, by blurring the distinction between mind and matter, compels him to confront the limits of his power over his own readerly experience. An intoxicated reader’s loss of “kinetic poise,” to borrow a phrase from Levinson, would therefore indicate not only the failed potential of a reader’s “force,” but also the success of negative affective forces (currents, rocks) outside her control.38 For Levinson, “kinetic poise” refers specifically to a central tenet of Benedict de Spinoza’s radical materialism: the conative “striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being,” with which Coleridge was certainly familiar.39 In Spinoza’s Ethics, “conatus” is the impulse to maintain equilibrium in the face of affective forces that move in and through us, a concept that has been integral to the, by now well-established, “turn to affect” in a range of academic disciplines.40 As this book’s Introduction describes, Spinoza’s is a world in which God is immanent in/as nature (“the creator in its creation”) and whose laws can operate directly or indirectly—and for this reason, often unaccountably.41 His Ethics lays out “human actions and appetites” in geometric style, “just as if it were a question of lines, planes and bodies.”42 The result, as Gilles Deleuze puts it, is that “Spinoza’s ethics has nothing to do with morality; he conceives it as an ethology, that is, as a composition of fast and slow speeds, of capacities for affecting and being affected on the plane of immanence.”43 These eternal laws express God’s essential nature in the world and, by extension, for humanity, but they also challenge the scope of human agency. Recognizing that we have litt le power over what we “undergo” in this world, Spinoza sees individuals as conative, striving, but ultimately “subject to” material forces outside their control, and even outside their awareness.44

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Given the importance of “responsible” or self-aware human agency for Coleridge, Spinoza is both problem and solution. Solution, because Spinoza’s system accounts for Coleridge’s metrical-loss-of-power by way of affective forces acting upon an embodied subject. Problem, because even if the subject knows they are being acted upon, and strives to change their course, Spinoza does not make self-awareness proof positive of responsible action. In Spinoza’s system, the minds of humans, nonhuman animals and inanimate objects differ in degree, not kind. A uniquely human moral agency is impossible because “good” and “evil” are terms denoting the positive and negative effects of material forces on bodies, where neither forces nor effects are att ributable to transcendent judgments. Even more troubling, for a reader like Coleridge, is that Spinoza’s conception of “mind and matter [as] cognitively but not actually distinct” makes it possible to think that one has chosen freely the good or right course of action without actually having done so.45 “Men believe themselves free,” Spinoza writes, “because they are conscious of their own actions, and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.”46 As Levinson has shown, much of Wordsworth’s corpus “come[s] alive and  .  .  . cohere[s] conceptually when read against ‘le spinozism.’”47 That Coleridge’s disappointed reading is likewise enlivened hangs on the observation that, if Spinoza is both problem and solution for Coleridge, then so too is Wordsworth’s Spinozist influence. Tactics for Readerly Self-Possession: “The Sailor’s Mother”

Were there a poet whose stated intention was to disrupt readers’ “kinetic poise,” it would be one who makes the “struggle with feelings of strangeness and auwkwardness” central to his poetics.48 In the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s use of prosaic language in verse fits the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” to a form that challenged late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century readers’ assumptions about what counts as good poetry.49 A decade and a half later, Coleridge’s critique in the Biographia hangs not on intoxicating meter alone but also on Wordsworth’s refusal to offer “correspondent food and appropriate matter” for the “feelings thus roused” by meter.50 A poem’s language and content, Coleridge declares,

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must meet the embodied expectations that a poet initiates by writing in verse. Otherwise, “for any poetic purposes, metre resembles, (if the aptness of the simile may excuse its meanness), yeast, worthless or disagreeable by itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is proportionally combined.”51 Th rough the figures of disruption and downturn with which Coleridge characterizes his disappointments, he censures Wordsworth not just for causing displeasure but for doing so purposefully. Intent crucially distinguishes Wordsworthian disappointments from those of poets in previous ages. For example, “[s]udden and unpleasant sinkings,” as Coleridge complains of “The Thorn” (a poem whose flat formal device—tautology— Wordsworth stridently defended), resonates with an 1805 Notebook entry in which Coleridge again aligns proprioceptive loss with poetic failure. In a sonnet by the seventeenth-century Italian poet Giambatt ista Marino, Coleridge calls the word “asconde” (hides), “flat with a vengeance—nay, it is not a flat—it is a sink; one steps into a hole when one was expecting to place the foot on a stair higher.”52 To “sink” is to step onto a flat surface but to perceive it as an embodied misjudgment. For Coleridge, the interrupted anticipation of elevated language (or in the case of tautology, different language) creates the illusion of a “hole,” when what is really lacking is the next step, higher up. By Coleridge’s estimation, for a poet from an age in which poetry’s “prime object [was] . . . the avoidance of every word, which a gentleman would not use in dignified conversation,” to have made such an error, Marino must have been truly mistaken. In contrast, Coleridge judges many of Wordsworth’s poems to be worse traps, even, than Marino’s bathetic “sink” because they are defended as intentional. By mobilizing his disappointment aesthetic as an opportunity for ethical reorientation in poems like “Simon Lee” and “Hart-Leap Well,” as we have seen, Wordsworth centralizes those disruptions that, critically for Coleridge, deliberately set readers up to stumble. In the Biographia, Coleridge responds by hypothesizing that overemphasizing any lyrical ballad’s poetic qualities (trying out “even tri-syllable rhymes”) will reveal, if not untold greatness, then at the very least something novel about the relation of the reader to the poem.53 “Double and

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tri-syllable rhymes,” Coleridge declares, “form a lower species of wit, and attended to exclusively for their own sake may become a source of momentary amusement.”54 While momentariness is not the same as the continuous undulations of ideal reading, Coleridge nevertheless offers transitory pleasure as a suitably self-conscious alternative. “Wit” and “amusement” would seem to indicate that what one loses in unselfconscious enjoyment, one gains in ironic distance. However, by also intervening formally—adding pauses and reversals as he reads, to emphasize and deemphasize the poem’s meter and rhyme—Coleridge still aims for more than just self-conscious distance. While he means to allow the poetry to be disappointing in order to read it ironically, he also wants to avoid feeling the thump of formal disruptions. In other words, even while recognizing its impossibility, Coleridge persists in holding up the reader’s proprioceptive self-possession as an ideal against which all poetry, including lyrical ballads, should be felt and judged. Th is persistence is on display in the sustained attempt to achieve embodied equilibrium and self-consciousness about one’s own ability to read strategically that is Coleridge’s meticulous critique of Wordsworth’s “The Sailor’s Mother.” A lyrical ballad, but one not published until 1807, in Poems, in Two Volumes, “The Sailor’s Mother” is a poem about meeting an itinerant stranger whom Wordsworth reveals to be both impecunious and venerable; she is the mother of a dead sailor who carries with her his last possession, a caged bird. Each of the poem’s six stanzas comprises a quatrain in tetrameter and a couplet in irregular hexameter, a form that nineteenth-century readers may have found more reminiscent of odes than of narrative verse.55 For Coleridge, this structure contrasts with much of the poem’s pedestrian content, simple language and narrative diction, producing a conundrum of taste, convention and, by now unsurprisingly, readerly embodiment. Working through the poem in nonsequential stages, Coleridge begins, in stanzas four through six, with an attempt at “disproportioning the emphasis” in order to make the poem’s awkward rhymes “perceptible.”56 Perceptibility would seem to circumvent the issue of poetry’s drug-like metrical effects preventing readers from seeing (in the dark) or sensing (through proprioception’s haptic dimension) that the staircase or the line of poetry is only one, not three or four, steps down.57 Coleridge imagines a reader who

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avoids these missteps by actively projecting her position relative to the poem’s rhyme scheme and, anticipating the interventions necessary for balanced reading, determines each rhyming word’s emphasis in advance of its counterpart to come. In this way, perceptibility turns out to mean foresight about the need for change. However, and as Coleridge’s snake-like figures for ideal reading imply, moments for readerly adjustment (crests and dips) support pleasurable equilibrium only through the continuity of their returns. The sinusoidal motion of collecting force is like the path of sound through the air: the very form of frequency. Coleridge’s discovery that “The Sailor’s Mother” needs artificial emphases only inconsistently poses a problem for such an ideal, which is based on endurance as much as foresight and balance. Thus Coleridge concludes that the real problem with “The Sailor’s Mother” is not with its imperfect rhymes, but with the “equal sense of oddity and strangeness . . . in fi nding rhymes at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial.” He resolves it better to overlook the rhymes entirely.58 Not having achieved proprioceptive self-possession by intervening rhythmically, Coleridge, in the next stage of his critique, retrenches. He singles out the poem’s second stanza, which, like all the others, has an extra metrical foot in the last line, in order to pose a rhetorical question that includes another figure for disappointment, an “abrupt down-fall.”59 Here is the excerpted second stanza as it appears in the Biographia, along with a portion of Coleridge’s discussion: I would further ask whether, but for that visionary state, into which the figure of the woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet’s imagination (a state, which spreads its influence and coloring over all, that coexists with the exciting cause, and in which The simplest, and the most familiar things Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them) I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt down-fall in these verses from the preceding stanza? The ancient spirit is not dead; Old times, thought I, are breathing there;

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Proud was I that my country bred Such strength, a dignity so fair: She begged an alms, like one in poor estate; I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate. It must not be omitted, and is besides worthy of notice, that those stanzas furnish the only fair instance that I have been able to discover in all Mr. Wordsworth’s writings, of an actual adoption, or true imitation, of the real and very language of low and rustic life, freed from provincialisms.60

In a run-on sentence that interrupts itself twice, once to digress parenthetically and then again to quote his own play, Remorse (1813), Coleridge accuses Wordsworth of failing to represent the sailor’s mother accurately. On Coleridge’s account, the additional “color” or ornamental language added by the poet in a “visionary state” expresses Wordsworth’s state of mind, not the reality of the mother’s character and appearance. Yet if Wordsworth here uses overly elevated language to describe the sailor’s mother, then where and how does the “abrupt down-fall” occur? While common sense might lead us to assign the “preceding stanza” to stanza one, the stanza that precedes stanza two in the poem,61 a comparison of the “visionary” language of stanza two reveals it to be no less “awe”-fi lled than stanza one: One morning (raw it was and wet, A foggy day in winter time) A Woman on the road I met, Not old, though somewhat past her prime: Majestic in her person, tall and straight; And like a Roman matron’s was her mien and gait. (lines 1– 6)62

The language of “Majestic” “Roman matron” Coleridge must read as elevated, even in the too-long Alexandrine; the rhyme of “straight” and “gait” neatly resolves; the mother’s mythic proportions exemplify, once again, the “susceptibility” of the poet to “his own genius.” Although it is possible to read the “down-fall” as sloping downward throughout the second stanza, from “ancient spirit” to “country bred” and “she begged an alms,” to a fi nal

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line comprised of short, uncomplicated words: “I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate,” this does not account for its “abrupt” character. Nor does it help to make sense of Coleridge’s last critical admission: “that those stanzas furnish the only fair instance . . . of the real and very language of low and rustic life, freed from provincialisms.” Just as “majestic” and “Roman” adorn the mother in stanza one, “pride” and “abate” are the ornamental language of the Wordsworthian poet-speaker in stanza two; the stanzas are comparably, even equally, suff used with poetic elevation. Instead, in the indexical confusion of “the preceding stanza,” “these verses” and “those stanzas,” an unexpected reorganization takes place in the Biographia because “preceding stanza” refers not to that which precedes stanza two in Wordsworth’s poem, but that which proceeds next in Coleridge’s discussion, stanza two itself. “These verses” and “those stanzas” must, in this case, refer to stanzas four, five and six, which Coleridge has already excerpted on the previous page for his discussion of rhyme. In order to make the comparison (to feel the “down-fall”), the reader must read stanza two and then reread or imagine reading stanzas four, five and six again—as if for the fi rst time?—whilst also, somehow, locating the abrupt character of the downfall in the missing stanza between them. For it is stanza three, which Coleridge neither describes nor includes, that seems most likely to contain the “abrupt down-fall” in question. How and where the descent occurs (in the third stanza’s fi rst line? Its last?) returns us once more to the poem: “When from these loft y thoughts I woke,” begins stanza three, “I said to her, ‘Beneath your Cloak / What’s that which on your arm you bear?” (lines 13, 15–16). Wordsworth’s self-consciousness about the loft iness of his poet-speaker’s thoughts implies an intentional contrast with the pragmatism of the mother’s reply: “‘A simple burthen, Sir, a litt le Singing-bird’” (line 18).63 In addition to descending from loft y to earthly, then, stanza three would seem to commit the even greater offense, in Coleridge’s opinion, of that descent being deliberately included. Leaving out stanza three, Coleridge elides Wordsworth’s self-conscious framing of the transition from poetic to prosaic language, all the while posing questions (“I would further ask . . . I would ask the poet . . .”) that seem to willfully ignore the response suggested by those very same absent lines.

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Moreover, for the reader of the Biographia without a copy of Poems, in Two Volumes at her fi ngertips, the third stanza’s absence encourages yet another kind of reorientation. For her, “abrupt” may meet “down-fall” in the sudden recognition that Coleridge’s reader (not Wordsworth’s) has been tasked with judging the poem backwards. What precedes stanza two in Coleridge’s account is stanza six, the last of the three stanzas that he cites in his discussion of rhyme. Yoked together in this way—the prosaic, literally un-rhyme-able fi nal stanza of Wordsworth’s poem against the elevated language of the poet-speaker’s laudatory fi rst impressions in stanza two—the difference really is “abrupt.” By juxtaposing the closing lines of the mother’s rustic speech with the more elaborate vocabulary of Wordsworthian egopoetics, Coleridge “makes perceptible” his literary-critical disappointment. That he does so incompletely and out-of-order suggests, for readers of the Biographia, that a different kind of readerly adjustment is necessary: the mapping of a “down-fall” onto that which is really (from stanza six to stanza two) a sudden falling up. In this vertiginous critique, proprioceptive selfpossession might seem to depend upon, rather than fall prey to, the swift descent of disappointed reading by plying the dynamics of a cat twist. It takes ready reflexes, in Coleridge’s case, to land on one’s feet. No longer moved by the poem, but by his own self-reflexive tactics for reading it, Coleridge’s orchestrated downfall lets him judge “The Sailor’s Mother” and fi nd it, by the measure of a “true imitation” at least, partially successful. Yet it cannot escape our notice that, unable to achieve the enduring, proprioceptive ease that distinguishes ideal reading, his readerly acrobatics nevertheless leave him exactly where Wordsworth means him to be: thinking about the “real language of men” and grappling with “feelings of strangeness and auwkwardness.”64 Even Coleridge’s stated focus on pure form (meter’s “powers considered abstractly and separately”65) fails to prevent the need for a downfall, and moreover elides the more interesting connection between a reader who feels diminished by form and the fact of the poem’s focus on human grief and fortitude. As the next section will demonstrate, it seems no coincidence that the sailor’s mother is also a figure who strives to maintain equilibrium against negative forces beyond her control.

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On Bearing to Be Moved

“I met this woman near the Wishing-Gate, near the high-road that then led from Grasmere to Ambleside. Her appearance was exactly as here described, & such was her account, nearly to the letter.”66 Th is is what Wordsworth says, according to the Fenwick Notes, about the real encounter that inspired the composition of “The Sailor’s Mother” during 11–12 March 1801. In the Biographia, Coleridge indicates that he knew this, and that this “nearly” verbatim representation is exactly his point. Why, complains Coleridge, when the encounter with the mother “would have been more delightful . . . in prose . . . in a moral essay, or pedestrian tour,” would Wordsworth arrange her words metrically? It seems obvious to him that “I write in meter because I am about to use language different from that of prose”; a poem transcribed “nearly to the letter” cannot help but fail to intensify readerly pleasure.67 Yet the sailor’s mother is also one of those almost spectral Wordsworthian figures who, in David Simpson’s words, “embody a metaphysical intuition about the death-directedness of all life.”68 Although we understand her to be speaking the language of “low and rustic life,” she nevertheless exudes the flat affect of traumatized fortitude that characterizes other wellknown figures of dispossession, like Margaret in “The Ruined Cottage” and Simon Lee. Arranged metrically, her statements take on a fragmented directness that does not, as Coleridge assumes, imply that Wordsworth’s goal ever was to maximize “delight”: “I had a Son, who many a day Sailed on the seas; but he is dead; In Denmark he was cast away; I have been as far as Hull, to see What clothes he might have left , or other property. The Bird and Cage they both were his; ’Twas my Son’s Bird; and neat and trim He kept it: many voyages Th is Singing-bird hath gone with him; When last he sailed he left the Bird behind; As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind.

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He to a Fellow-lodger’s care Had left it, to be watched and fed, Till he came back again; and there I found it when my Son was dead; And now, God help me for my litt le wit! I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it.” (lines 20–36)69

The Sailor, son to the grieving mother, was likely a British navy recruit who, given the poem’s 1802 composition, died at the 1801 batt le of Copenhagen. A successful bid by the British to secure control of Danish ports in advance of the French, this is a batt le “at a distance,” to invoke Favret, that Wordsworth brings no closer for all his having written a poem about its human cost.70 Instead, Wordsworth’s commitment to the present moment makes spare and unembellished the cause of tragedy. Staying with the grieving mother (and leaving undescribed the theater of war), Wordsworth’s speaker falls into step with her, and with the rhythms of her story. In the poem’s opening stanzas, the att raction that the speaker says he feels towards her occurs before he knows its cause. Her stately “mien and gait” triggers his national pride (“Proud was I that my country bred / Such strength, a dignity so fair”), and even when she “beg[s] an alms,” she neither undermines her own noble stature, nor ceases to reflect idealized British national character (“I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate”) (lines 9–10, 11–12).71 In this way, the sailor’s mother is also like the widowed Margaret, or the deteriorating Simon Lee, or indeed a host of Wordsworthian figures, in that she “stands for many others, and the common forms of their alienation bespeak a general condition that is implicitly multitudinous.”72 That her stalwart account is not a valorous elaboration on her son’s death, or even a meditation on fallen heroes in general, but predominantly the story of her actions in light of wartime forces beyond her control, makes this is a poem about what war at a distance brings home, and what it leaves behind. And if the argument scales up, then Wordsworth is claiming too—rather hopelessly, it seems—that the best a nation can do is to meet the loss of her young soldiers with dignity. Bearing news of evil, of wartime death and suffering, without giving cause for why what is lost is lost and what is gained is gained, “The Sailor’s

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Mother” expresses trauma without resolution or recompense. It offers no moral lesson other than what might be learned by a reader who endures being moved by a poem in which losing one’s bearings might mean losing one’s self. By anatomizing each beat and line, Coleridge claws back control at the expense of a formal logic inextricable from the poem’s larger claim for resilience as a form of heroism. His “abrupt down-fall” emphasizes instead Wordsworth’s unrestrained genius as the “visionary incoherence” responsible for overstating the case in one stanza and understating it in the next. By generating his own “abrupt down-fall” in the Biographia, Coleridge reclaims being moved as an act of literary critical strength, yet fails to distinguish disappointed reading as a loss of agency or power from the poem’s implicit—and, as I am arguing, implicitly Spinozist—moral lesson. When Deleuze claims that Spinoza’s “ethics has nothing to do with morality,” he really means that Spinoza “replaces” the good-evil binary, which reflects transcendent values, with a good-bad binary, which reflects qualitative differences in lived experience.73 Rather than morality referring to God-given judgments, Spinoza att ributes evils like pain and death to diminishments of bodily power: “bad encounters, poisoning, intoxication, relational decomposition.”74 By this same logic, Spinoza regards “goodness” as vitally active and self-preserving; an “individual will be called good (or free, or rational, or strong),” he writes, “who strives, insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and thereby increase his power.”75 As Edwin Curley puts it, in Spinoza’s philosophy, “reason cannot move to action without the motive force of passion, but we can become passionately reasonable . . . and reasonably passionate in pursuit of our freedom and self-governance.”76 Within these parameters, then, the language of “morality” is not absent from the Ethics, although certainly it is defi ned otherwise. According to Spinoza, morality is the reasoned resistance to being moved by one’s own affects to influence other people. Spinoza explains that “he who strives, only because of an affect, that others should love what he loves, and live according to his temperament, acts only from impulse and is hateful,” while he is loving “who strives from reason to guide others acts not by impulse, but kindly,

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generously, and with the greatest steadfastness of mind.”77 In the absence of moral judgments that reflect transcendent values, Spinoza does regard moral action as possible. The critical difference is that the Ethics does not grant human beings the freedom that comes from being their own source of (virtuous) motivation. In the evocative 1804 entry in the Notebooks to which this book’s Introduction has already pointed us, Coleridge proposes that to “reconcile” the divine permanence of Spinoza’s “Jus extrinsecum fortioris” (law of an external stronger force) with “the struggles of the infi nitely various Finite”—the endless variety of human desires—is the “work” of living a life worth living.78 Th is work is “Inspired,” Coleridge claims, because it might help answer why, when individuals try to live together without overpowering or “legislating for” one another, “disappointments & baffled attempts” so inevitably result.79 Disappointment is the loss of a hoped-for thing. As the previous chapter has shown, it describes both the event and the felt experience of interrupted expectations, and, for Coleridge, its poetic manifestation feels like tripping down stairs in the dark. That disappointment may also signal the need for (and perhaps too the impossibility of) a reconciliation between external affections and individual desires names the psychological cost of the impasse between what divine logic wants for us and what we want for ourselves. On Spinoza’s account, disappointment betrays a want of mental power and arises from the attachment to hope, which is also the unreasonable assumption that humans can “conquer fortune.”80 Disappointment catches us hoping too much and reasoning too litt le, forgetful of fortune’s unconquerable nature. Moreover, and as Wordsworth himself acknowledges, disappointment is no unfit description of the risk that Lyrical Ballads takes.81 By asking readers to feel the limits of their freedom, even as he depicts the diversity of human life, Wordsworth would seem to pursue the inspired work that Coleridge envisions. Lyrical Ballads reconciles in poetry an external stronger force (meter) with humanity’s endless variety (“a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents”).82 In so doing, it challenges readers to feel the impasse between what they expect of poetry (call it taste or convention) and what poetry asks of them (call it fortune).

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From one Spinozist perspective, then, “The Sailor’s Mother” tells a story in which being moved by outside forces—but also guided by reason, and att uned to what one’s “own nature, considered in itself, demands”—meets the Ethics’s harsh requirements for morality.83 The sailor’s mother bears being moved—to grief, to Hull, to speak—without impressing her way of being in the world upon others. She is self-reflective even if she is not selfconfident. Th roughout the poem, she endures her grief in a manner that equates “goodness” with steadfastness and strength, an ability to “organize” her “encounter” with a stranger in ways “compatible” with her nature, and a capacity to join with that which increases her power: the litt le bird, in which her son took so much pleasure.84 What the poet-speaker fi nds so admirable in the sailor’s mother is, fi nally, that she goes on living on in accordance “with [her] own nature, considered in itself ”; her most powerful action is that, through something like reasonable passion, she bears being moved while staying her course.85 From another Spinozist perspective, however, Wordsworth’s affections lead him to impose upon the sailor’s mother as well as his readers. By sett ing readers up to stumble, Wordsworth knowingly commits himself to a form of immorality—legislating for other people—not in keeping with the supposed intent of Lyrical Ballads. Acting from the “impulse” by which “others should love what he loves, and live according to his temperament,” Wordsworth does not, thinks Coleridge, treat his readers “kindly” or “generously.” Understood in this way, Coleridge’s “abrupt down-fall” throws into relief not just the stylistic problem of prosaic language in verse, but a fundamental interpretive difference between Wordsworth’s materialist morality and his own. A Wordsworthian Spinozism reveals our susceptibility to forces outside our control, by which we are moved to “feel . . . / Against or with our will,” and charges us with striving to stay on track. Coleridge’s Spinoza, by contrast, teaches self-restraint as an exercise in preserving the force and integrity—that is, the proprioceptive self-possession—of other people. Consolation and Counterpoint

Th roughout their long friendship, Coleridge frequently encouraged Wordsworth in his work on the sustained philosophical poem then known as “the

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poem to Coleridge.”86 In the winter of 1806, a litt le more than eight years after fi rst reading some of its early lines in 1798, Coleridge fi nally spent “nearly two weeks” listening to Wordsworth read aloud the entire thirteenbook series of what we now know as The Prelude (1805).87 Coleridge’s deeply felt response impelled a poetic reply, and the poem he sent to Wordsworth in January 1807 is titled “To William Wordsworth: Lines composed, for the greater part on the Night, on which he fi nished the recitation of his Poem (in thirteen Books) concerning the growth and history of his own Mind.”88 Coleridge’s high praise for both poem and poet provides an illustrative counterpoint to the previous discussion by describing, if not an ideal reading experience, then an ideal experience of listening to someone else read. The continuity and regularity of sustained blank verse and the cadence and timbre of the poet’s vocal expressions coalesced into a rhythmic force that Coleridge describes as carrying the listener onwards in “Comfort” and “Peace” (lines 56, 93).89 Trusting in poem and poet to sustain him, Coleridge does not fear losing his bearings even when he feels roused and shaken by particular lines or images. Ultimately, the experience transports him to such wonder that, when the recitation is fi nished, Coleridge moves to rise only to fi nd himself “in Prayer!” (line 119).90 Something of the proprioceptive self-possession that Coleridge seeks he appears to fi nd in Wordsworth’s recitation. The alternations between, initially, intense mental and physical activations (“The Tumult rose”; “the mind / May rise enkindled”) followed by releases (“The Tumult . . . ceas’d”; “My soul lay passive”) that Coleridge reports together suggest a dynamic equilibrium which, he declares, allows him to receive the “prophetic Lay” of The Prelude “into [his] heart” (lines 93, 9, 93, 102, 3, 2).91 Being moved by the rhythms of the reading, in excess of and in concert with its expressed content, generates a state of readerly receptivity that allows him to incorporate fully the experience, to internalize it. As we have seen, such receptivity is a delicate balance that depends critically on reading’s sinusoidal motions—and as we have also seen, this requires reading materials with a high degree of dependability to maintain. In Chapter 1, Coleridge epitomized “Reading Around Charlotte Smith” by calling upon “custom” to defend the sonnet’s seemingly arbitrary fourteen lines. Because that number

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is well-established, the sonnet meets us where we are, takes us where we expect to go, and can thus “domesticate with the heart, and become, as it were, a part of our identity.”92 Just as with The Prelude’s receptive listener, the sonnet reader’s “heart” accommodates poetic insights delivered in a form precisely as anticipated; in both cases, gett ing what one expects from poetry cracks open a conduit of feeling to the listener’s or reader’s very core. Yet, while Coleridge slips past Smith’s autobiographical claims by seeming to substitute the elegiac sonnets’ “lonely feeling” for Smith’s own, when it comes to The Prelude, he delights in discovering anew how its biographical elements bring to life personal (Wordsworth’s childhood) and worldhistorical (the French Revolution) events, some of whose experience he and Wordsworth share: O FRIEND! O Teacher! God’s great Gift to me! Into my heart have I receiv’d that Lay More than historic, that prophetic Lay, Wherein (high theme by Thee fi rst sung aright) Of the Foundations and the Building-up Of thy own Spirit, thou hast lov’d to tell What may be told to th’ understanding mind Revealable; and what within the mind May rise enkindled. Theme hard as high! (lines 1– 9)93

The gift of knowing Wordsworth is a “Gift to me!” Unlike other provocations of form that this book traces, in which to be provoked by poetry is to feel one’s vulnerability to the impersonal affections, here Coleridge feels fi rst and foremost that The Prelude moves him in ways that are personal and divine. Whether or not self-possession requires dispassion, Coleridge casts himself as wholly confident in his status as insider—secure in knowing that he is already part of the story he so readily internalizes. His is “th’ understanding mind” to which the poem’s “high themes” are “Revealable.” Deep, personal understanding becomes dependability of a different sort, since Coleridge has long been the other half in the conversations that shaped “the Foundations and the Building-up” of Wordsworth’s “own Spirit,” and therefore he already knows what “thou hast lov’d to tell.” The silent suggestion,

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what thou hast loved to tell me, resonates through from the opening exclamation. More than simple camaraderie, the poets’ intimacy is that of intellectual challenge and hard-won respect, as the reference to Wordsworth as teacher and the reverential “Thee” and “thou” of Coleridge’s direct addresses emphasize. Rather than generalizable custom giving rise to a sonnet’s fourteen lonely lines, for Coleridge, The Prelude operates both familiarly and on an epic scale, fitt ing elevated language to elevated thoughts in a cascade of powerfully dependable gratification. Or so Coleridge describes. Certainly, The Prelude is not without its irregularities of meter and rhythm, its moments of syntactic awkwardness and flat diction, and neither are its scenes devoid of disenchantment. Yet in Coleridge’s telling, hearing The Prelude read aloud encourages him again and again in a kind of trust fall, a lett ing go that is only possible because poem and poet are there to catch him every time. “Eve following eve,” Coleridge feels fi rst comforted, then galvanized, then comforted again by the recitation. “In silence list’ning, like a devout Child,” he writes, “My soul lay passive, by thy various strain / Driven as in surges now, beneath the stars,” before becoming again “a tranquil Sea / Outspread and bright, yet [once more!] swelling to the Moon!” (lines 97, 101–103, 106–107).94 The surges and swells of The Prelude are unlike the “disharmony in style” found in the lyrical ballads because they create “heights and depths” that are regular and wavelike, controlled by the gravitational force of a celestial body that is also, presumably, a poet.95 Even when these forces strike Coleridge, there remains a causal relationship between his ability to give way to whirlwind apperceptions and the security of their friendship. Indeed, in “To William Wordsworth” part of the pleasure that comes from the loss of selfcontrol in the face of powerful poetic forces hangs on Coleridge’s willing submission to those forces. To be “Scatter’d and whirl’d” is also to give oneself over to being loved, in an intriguing version of what Samuel Rowe has termed the “metrical masochism” of Coleridge’s experimental poetics.96 In Coleridge’s account of The Prelude, “uplift ing” is a “sense” that opens one to valuable, affi rming kinds of disarray, in which embodied cognition (when “Thoughts” become “A bodily Tumult!”) can be both off-kilter and generative (lines 55–60).97

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Thus Coleridge allows himself to be carried by the knowledge that The Prelude’s elevated language fits its elevated philosophical enquiries; that its deviant forms, such as they are, must always return to regularity; and that Wordsworth reads surely and eloquently. For Coleridge, the recitation goes on and on as a “sweet continuous song” that—even when it ends, does not seem to: And when O Friend! my Comforter! my Guide! Strong in thyself and powerful to give strength! Thy long sustained Lay fi nally clos’d And thy deep Voice had ceas’d— .

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Scarce conscious and yet conscious of its Close I sate, my Being blended in one Thought, (Thought it was? or aspiration? Or Resolve?) Absorb’d, yet hanging still upon the sound: And when I rose, I found myself in Prayer! (lines 52, 108–119)98

These lines, by seeming to rewrite the scene in Book VIII of Paradise Lost in which Adam, after conversing with the angel Raphael, still hears the angel’s voice in his ear, reinforces the divine nature of both intellectual conversation and the poets’ friendship.99 The scene turns an auditory afterimpression into an affective cushion, softening the listener’s reentry into reality while also propelling him towards new kinds of thinking—“or aspiration? Or Resolve?” In these lines Coleridge situates himself for the fi rst time among other listeners, widening the scene of reception to include a rapt audience of “beloved Faces” gathered “round us both” (lines 113, 112). Once again, the experience is one of trusting familiarity, now that he sees “All, whom I deepliest love, in one room all!” (line 114).100 Yet, whereas the angel cautions Adam against becoming too curious about the nature of God and the universe, Coleridge has been lauding Wordsworth’s philosophical investigations all along as “a linked Song of Truth” made “audible” (line 51).101 The Prelude begins by telling “Of Tides obedient to external Force, / And Currents self-determin’d, as might

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seem, / Or by interior Power: of Moments aweful”; it concludes by exploring “Duty, chosen Laws controlling choice, / Virtue and Love!” (lines 12– 14, 37–38).102 In exposing the paradox of duty (can chosen laws enforce their own choosing?), Coleridge refers to Book 13 of The Prelude, which celebrates what Wordsworth has learned from their friendship, in which Coleridge’s “presence shed[s] the light of love” and his “reason” is the very reason that the two poets challenge themselves to profounder contemplation: . . . the deep enthusiastic joy, The rapture of the hallelujah sent From all that breathes and is, was chastened, stemmed, And balanced by a reason which indeed, Is reason, duty, and pathetic truth— And God and man divided, as they ought, Between them the great system of the world, Where man is sphered, and which God animates (lines 251, 262– 69).103

Wordsworth’s deft tautology—“a reason which indeed, / Is reason”—plays on the term’s double meaning as at once cause or motivation (the reason for something) and rationality (thinking and reasoning). It builds from his claim that Coleridge’s philosophical interests “balanced” both poets’ tendency to give way to agape, to sing “hallelujah” and rejoice. That reason also puts limits on (chastens and stems) such enthusiasms may seem to imply that rationality is antithetical to God’s will. Reason becomes ballast against the buoyancy of “rapture” that rises, like the warmer air, “From all that breathes and is.” Yet the poets’ contrasting discovery, which Coleridge mimics in his own tautological paradox, is that even the rational capacity of human beings to question the divine must be divinely ordained, that is, it must be the reason we have reason. Just as Spinoza sees God’s will as immanent rather than imposed, so Wordsworth describes how God “animates” a “system” from which He is “divided.” Thus our ability to reason is both a “duty, and pathetic truth” because it tells us we ought to choose rationally that which we are already determined to choose. In “To William Wordsworth,” the recurring imagery of tides, currents and associated gravitational effects likewise centralizes speculations

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about how our actions are determined by “external Force.” Coleridge, by characterizing celestial bodies like moons and poets as powerful att ractants, renders them capable of organizing the kinds of wavelike motions that keep oceans and readers in a state of flow. At the same time, framing Wordsworth’s friendship as “God’s gift” and the poem as “A Tale divine,” Coleridge suggests that behind the poet’s sway exists another, more powerful originator (lines 1, 38). And, building on the comparison of Wordsworth to the moon and his listener’s soul to swelling waves, Coleridge’s logic might seem to extend to the physical universe as well. While gravity may appear like a cause in and of itself, the laws of physics are also subject to more fundamental fi rst causes, whose unfathomability we attempt to reconcile with speculations and scientific inquires that soon become ends in themselves. From the Spinozist perspective, because “nature has no end set before it . . . all fi nal causes”—that is, all the effects we think ourselves able to isolate and explain—“are nothing but human fictions.”104 Gravity, like poetic genius, is a story we tell ourselves to make sense of why things are the way they are; if neither moon nor poet is wholly responsible for originating the motions they nevertheless generate, then even those influences that we accept as given do not fully account for the ways our lives are subject to “Jus extrinsecum fortioris.”105 Knowing all this, we might wonder why Coleridge’s view of The Prelude differs so starkly from his view of the poems in Lyrical Ballads, if both reveal the limits of human agency and power. The limited freedom suggested by the line “Duty, chosen Laws controlling choice,” perches on the precipice of enjambment with “Virtue and Love!” (lines 37, 38). On Coleridge’s account, duty becomes part and parcel with living well and virtuously, rendering limitation not threatening but natural, necessary and also inspiring. Coleridge takes pleasure in imagery and ideas in The Prelude that would elsewhere seem sure to frustrate him. “Currents self-determin’d, as might seem, / Or by interior Power” is an anthropomorphism that, through the Spinozist lens, masks the impossibility of perfect agency by granting nature the self-determination we only wish we had. Yet, rather than make him feel defeated or powerless, Coleridge remains impassioned by his deep familiarity with the themes’ complexities and genesis, and writes that he feels

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his mind once more “enkindled” by them (lines 103, 108).106 So, while Lyrical Ballads also approaches difficult themes, the difference that “To William Wordsworth” evinces combines the poets’ longstanding friendship with the dependable formal characteristics of the verse itself, allowing The Prelude’s formal provocations to operate along the lines of a passionate concord. For Coleridge, the limits imposed by self-restraint represent a virtue that is also an act of love. Conclusion

Given what Coleridge takes to be an ideal coincidence of form and content in The Prelude, perhaps it is unsurprising that he represents himself as moved by a poem that explores what it means to be moved. Th is is, after all, what preserves him from disappointment: Wordsworth’s poem delivers “correspondent food and appropriate matter . . . for the attention and feelings thus roused.”107 Even though The Prelude’s themes also include missed opportunities, letdowns (notably at Simplon Pass), and, most searingly, collapsed optimism for revolutionary France, these hopes rise and fall just like the poem’s undulating rhythms: “Hope aloft / Now flutter’d, and now toss’d upon the Storm / Floating! Of Hope affl icted, and struck down” (lines 29–31).108 There is no lack of deflationary feeling in The Prelude, but the difference for Coleridge lies in the rhythmic and conceptual preservation of dignity for the readers (and listeners) who appreciate its art. Here Wordsworth does not undermine or thwart—and this would seem to fulfi ll a Coleridgean materialist morality, based on the principle that one should restrain one’s own appetites and impulses out of respect for the bodily and mental poise of other people. The effect on Coleridge is a sense of trusting kinship that the immediacy of Wordsworth’s recitation throws into even sharper relief. As the following chapter on John Keats’s “affective reciprocity” explores, the “instant feeling” that Keats too discovers in poetry’s live performance has the power to turn crowds into communities and cement the bonds of friendship. For Coleridge in 1807, however, as for Coleridge in 1817, the opposite is also true: the social dimension of a formal provocation can just as easily take the form of alienation and exclusion. As Simpson says of the position

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into which Wordsworth so often puts his readers: “No one takes kindly to be deemed a helpless onlooker”: “such a condition seems to diminish or deny the power of human agency, denying us options for intervention or even rational theorization because the forces that move the world are not visible and cannot thus be formulated as politics.”109 Th is chapter, staking its claim on the legibility of a materialist morality in Coleridge’s criticism and Wordsworth’s poetics, has reconsidered the conceptual ground of such a condition. Th rough a Spinozist conception of the affections, Coleridge’s tactics for avoiding disappointed reading can be understood as negotiations not just with material forces outside his control, but with a competing, Wordsworthian understanding of how those forces should be enacted by and represented in poetry. For literary historians, this distinction grants us new purchase on the aesthetic innovations of two hugely influential Romantic poets, allowing us to see past changing fashions of taste and convention to the competing interpretations of material agency and morality that Coleridge codes in terms of reading’s embodied effects. For the literarycritical afterlife of Romanticism and Romantic aesthetics, then, this interpretive divergence has much to teach us still about the role of poetry in the development of theories of resilience and fortitude, hope and disappointment, and fi nally, what it means to bear to be moved.

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Reciprocal Keats

I n t h i s c h a p t e r I turn to exploring the expectations of affective reciprocity that characterize John Keats’s poetics—expectations that I see motivating the complex negotiations between pursuit and retreat underlying his expressions. Affective reciprocity names an artist’s expectation that his work will generate a felt response in an audience and that this audience will relay that feeling onward in such a way as to move the artist in turn. Th is is the model of “instant feeling” that Keats describes in his review of the actor Edmund Kean, whose dynamic poses and active use of voice drew his audience to him, Keats admiringly writes, like “moths about a candle,” and whose performances were further energized by that attention.1 That the poet himself would have been energized by positive reviews underpins many late-Romantic reactions to Keats’s oeuvre, with critics suggesting that in the absence of such feeling Keats wilts and expires.2 Yet what strength Keats might have gained from a more receptive readership he forfeits, by many accounts, for a style so overwrought as to almost certainly have been intentional. His revisions to The Eve of St. Agnes (1820), for instance, Richard Woodhouse took to be a deliberate attempt to “fl ing . . . readers off at last” by provoking their “pett ish disgust.”3 Alternatively seductive and off-putt ing, Keats’s provocations of form are typified by interruptions and arrests that do not “pass into nothingness,” 119

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yet leave behind something else—“a twinge of distaste”; a “wearisome” aggravation—and thus the variety of Keatsian epithets, starting with “vulgar,” is well-known by now.4 How to square such a style with a poet so public about his desire to please his audience and receive their recognition in turn; so certain that the scene of reading is one of embodied intensity; and “so sensitive” (to rehabilitate Lord Byron’s phrase) to others’ opinions?5 One answer, also by now well rehearsed, is that Keats’s class position exposed him to embarrassments pecuniary and social (as Christopher Ricks argues), making his “allegorical style” (in Marjorie Levinson’s phrase) the formal overcompensation for his lack of class privilege.6 In James Chandler’s reading of the “smokeability” of Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil (1820), the combination of personal insecurity and Cockney slang (being “smokeable” meant liable to be roasted by the public) links Keats’s style to a subtle mode of social positioning: “an act of comprehension that implies an act of condescension, toward ‘weakness’ or ‘inadequacy.’”7 The “capacity to smoke” involves a chain of literary-critical judgments among a particular milieu, in which members “cannot help both smoking and being smoked”; Keats becomes not a victim of his class but rather a willing participant in a culture of predatory discernment based on identifying with another poet’s “instincts.”8 Chandler’s interpretation of Keats as both actively manipulating his literary standing and exemplifying Romantic literature’s self-conscious historicity constructs a poet both capable and historical. Yet, while Chandler is right to regard Keats as engaged in and by relational dynamics (the “chain” of smokeability from Keats to Mary Tighe), he remains focused on Keats’s “relative transcendence” of these influences, rather than on more reciprocal engagements.9 As Jonathan Mulrooney shows, when, in the famous “Negative Capability” letter, Keats aligns himself with “Kean and his low company” and against the pretensions of his middle-class dining companions, he enacts “a socially symbolic reversal” that is also “an identification with the new modes of theatrical experience Kean embodied on the early nineteenth-century London stage.”10 Suitably, the poetry that this identification informs is social without being sociable; Mulrooney terms it a “poetics of interruption.”11 My own view, which is complementary, sees Keats’s

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relational att unements extending beyond “symbolic” reversals, however, to the pursuit of reciprocal feeling. In two parts, this chapter explores how, in his letters and the poem “Th is Living Hand,” Keats considers the limits of feeling across vast distances and even past death, speculating more or less light-heartedly about what I’ll call, after Richard Sha, “some versions of materiality.”12 Not wholly satisfied with theoretical abstractions, however, Keats desired “something real,” something that can be “proved upon our pulses,” and this suggests why Kean’s acting inspires him and raises questions for him about achieving such intensity in his own work. One answer, elaborated in this chapter’s latter part, can be found in Keats’s att itude of dynamic passivity, where strategic retreats aim for reciprocal interest and attention from readers and friends. No less provoking than Keats’s desire to outmatch, refuse, or as Woodhouse thinks, disgust, this is an att itude that is entirely more hospitable, even magnetic, and which works by alternating expressive registers akin to Kean’s ability on stage to toggle between “fiery decision” and “still deeper charm.”13 From his London debut at Drury Lane in 1814 and onward, Kean astonished audiences and critics with his powerful interpretations of Shakespeare and modern playwrights, going on to become “the most popular actor on the English stage during Keats’s poetic maturity.”14 Keats saw Kean performing in all of his principal Shakespearean roles as well as many of his modern ones, and in his letters Keats refers to the actor nearly twenty times.15 In fact, Kean so captivated Keats that the poet co-wrote, with Charles Brown, an entire play for Kean, which follows “standard Keanian conventions.”16 The 21 December 1817 review in The Champion in which Keats lauds Kean is a touchstone for this chapter because it reveals Keats’s thinking about the ways in which energetic advances and retreats contribute to aesthetic experience: Amid [Kean’s] numerous excellencies, the one which at this moment most weighs upon us, is the elegance, gracefulness and music of elocution. A melodious passage in poetry is full of pleasures both sensual and spiritual. The spiritual is felt when the very letters and points of charactered language show like the hieroglyphics of beauty:—the mysterious signs of an

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immortal freemasonry! “A thing to dream of, not to tell!” The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of Kean, and to one learned in Shakespearean hieroglyphics,—learned in the spiritual portion of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual grandeur: his tongue must seem to have robbed “The Hybla bees, and left them honeyless.” There is an indescribable gusto in his voice, by which we feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future, while speaking of the instant. When he says in Othello, “put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them,” we feel that his throat had commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk, he speaks as though his body were unassailable. Again, his exclamation of “blood, blood, blood!” is direful and slaughterous to the deepest degree, the very words appear stained and gory. . . . We could cite a volume of such immortal scraps, and dote upon them with our remarks; but as an end must come, we will content ourselves with a single syllable. It is in those lines of impatience to the night who “like a foul and ugly witch, doth limp so tediously away.” Surely this intense power of anatomizing the passion of every syllable—of taking to himself the wings of verse, is the means by which he becomes a storm with such fiery decision; and by which, with a still deeper charm, he “does his spiriting gently.” Other actors are continually thinking of their sum-total effect throughout a play. Kean delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without the shadow of a thought about any thing else. He feels his being as deeply as Wordsworth, or any of our intellectual monopolists.17

The review makes vivid the affective intensity that Kean’s acting brings to Shakespeare’s poetry. The actor’s physical expressiveness, which alternates strength and soft ness, storminess followed by gentleness, takes advantage of poetry’s aural and bodily registers (the “sensual life of verse”) by adding Kean’s own “sensual grandeur” with tongue and lips. For Keats, the synesthetic result is poetic sound that is a sight to behold. And while there is certainly no dearth in Keats’s own poetry of literary synesthesia—“the phenomenon wherein one sense modality is felt, perceived or described in terms of another”—the cross-sensory effects that he att ributes to Kean are complete and arresting, unlike the blended imagery of a line like, “And taste the music of that vision pale,” from Isabella (line 392).18 For Keats, the

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“indescribable gusto” of Kean’s voice combines elocution and physicality in order to inhabit Othello’s psychic complexity, and this immediacy—the way the actor “delivers himself up” to the Moor’s reactivity to injustices, real and imagined—transforms sound into sight. When Kean exclaims “‘blood, blood, blood!’ . . . the very words appear stained and gory.” “Blood! blood! blood!” Kean’s embodiment of the repetition reinforces its excess; there is too much blood and the blood is more than blood, staining Othello’s words with “gory” evidence of murder. In Keats’s view, the actor animates the line’s violence by uniting Kean’s expertise (as “one learned in Shakespearean hieroglyphics”) with sublime elocution, rendering his delivery both dramatic and incisive—an interpretation of Othello that is also an identification with the mindset of Shakespeare himself. Kean breathes life into Shakespeare’s lithic verses (“an immortal freemasonry!”), and he does so from a place so deep within that mindset, and within the world of the play, that when he delivers his lines, audience members “feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future, while speaking of the instant.” No longer identifiable as Kean, “the utterer” is unselfconscious and spontaneous—an electric conduit of feeling through whom the play becomes reality: the only possible past and future and present. Simultaneously, Keats’s account of seeing those same “Shakespearean hieroglyphics” in his own mind’s eye (“the very words” dripping blood) is neither a new revelation nor a cathartic release. It is but one of many “immortal scraps,” which Keats cites in order to locate Kean in a relay of aesthetic “instants” along with those the actor creates on stage. For Keats, poetic language is akin to hieroglyphics from the start: “the very letters and points of charactered language show like the hieroglyphics of beauty.” Even before or without Kean’s interpretation, these word-pictures figure a kind of instant reading, where the reader grasps the meaning of a hieroglyph all at once rather than parsing letter by letter or word by word. Poetry is “A thing to dream of not to tell.”19 Quoting Christabel (1816), here Keats privileges the immediacy of the immersive dream state over the narrative time that telling takes, even as he alters the critical word—Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls Geraldine’s half-clothed figure “A sight to dream of, not to tell!” (line 253)— that would have underscored his point.20 Or perhaps a “thing” is more like

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an actor, who breathes and sweats as well as signifies? In any case, Kean transforms instant reading—the “charactered language” through which he plays characters—into “instant feeling,” which again transforms into instant reading when the “slaughterous” line to Keats “appears.” Crossing into and out of different senses as well as different registers of the sensory imagination, the transformations occur in cooperation and in tandem, while also embedding momentary freeze-frames. Each expressive beat—instant reading, instant feeling, instant reading—is an arrest that casts instantaneousness as aesthetic consequence. Keats’s Conduits of Feeling

I am not alone in observing that Keats imagined affective reciprocity with readers who, in being moved by what they read, would move Keats in turn. While reception-focused studies have elaborated the poet’s “anxiety of audience” and fraught relationship with his critics, I turn here to the specifically material properties of feeling and its rebounding effects for Keats.21 Two limit cases—feeling over vast distances and feeling past death—help contextualize Keats’s excitement about “instant feeling” as born of his admiration for a particularly efficient conversion of what I will provisionally call energy. Specifically, Keats sees Kean’s transformation of intellectualpoetic energy (Shakespeare) into kinetic-affective energy (performance) as an aesthetic achievement where nothing, neither feeling nor meaning, is lost. Instantaneousness thus becomes for Keats the capacity to short-circuit a problem, which these limit cases expose, of feeling that seems to leak or lessen as it travels—whether crossing the Atlantic or carrying on the poet’s “posthumous existence.”22 The relation between poet and reader is less immediate than that of actor and audience, delayed as it must be by publishers and printing presses; copies advertised, circulated and sold. Yet in his letters and poems, Keats nevertheless describes the scene of reading as rich in affective potential. Just as the poet fi nds himself inspired to write “Sitt ing Down to Read King Lear Once Again” after doing just that, so Keats constructs readers who are moved by his writing, and furthermore, he imagines that their responses move him. As Brendan Corcoran observes, Keats’s “desire for [literary]

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recognition as a physical presence” depends on a “virtual reality” that aims to collapse the distance between the poet and his reader.23 More than mimetic, the simulation of closeness between poet and reader that verse generates is itself felt and experienced—a virtual intimacy made all the more palpable by the embodiment of poetic rhythms and rhymes. At the same time, for such intimacy to be truly reciprocal would require not just the activation of the poet’s imagination and of the reader’s in turn, but also the poet’s continued openness to receiving the reader’s reactions. And if instant feeling is Keats’s aim, then the poet’s receptivity would ideally coincide with the very moment that his poem elicits a response—a difficult condition to fulfi ll when the times and places of readers’ reading is unknown. While, from the reader’s perspective, metered verse might seem to ameliorate this lack of immediacy by bringing time (rhythm, tempo) to reading, for the poet, how to sense or share in readers’ responses remains a confounding fascination. In a 16 December 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats in Kentucky, Keats proposes a weekly routine for achieving virtual connectivity between two sets of readers (rather than between reader and poet) and still comes up short. In the letter, Keats envisions opening a conduit of feeling between himself in England and his brother and sister-in-law in America, despite the distance, by both households reading “a passage of Shakespeare every Sunday at ten o Clock.”24 Even notwithstanding the time change, however, what Yohei Igarashi calls Keats’s dream of “Shakespearean Skype” goes only so far as to imagine the affective contact between the three of them as partial; they would be “as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room,” describes Keats.25 Thus, while the feeling of closeness can travel, its evocation in the letter—a technology that also travels—nevertheless hangs on a figure of sensory deprivation, the loss of sight. According to Igarashi, this description of the inability to see body language or facial expressions indicates that even in Keats’s most speculative accounts of suprapersonal feeling he preserves the essential unknowability of other people; for Keats, “space might be surmountable with sympathy or technology, but subjectivity is not.”26 For the purposes of this chapter’s argument, I will observe that whatever feeling-at-a-distance Keats thinks it possible to share across an ocean loses something of its perceptibility along the way, even as the very

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idea of synchronized reading reinforces the poet’s desire for affective immediacy as the feeling of an instant: ten o’clock on Sunday. For feeling to be virtual and physical in the way that Keats supposes conjures the material force of the affections, which can move us even without our awareness, and might prompt us to consider his transatlantic thought experiment in light of some of the other ways Keats imagined feelings and ideas to travel. If thoughts are things that, like “Atoms,” were “at the Creation . . . very likely . . . spun forth into the thin Air for the Brains of Man to prey upon,” then thoughts might traverse the globe as other atoms do, and might move us to feel, wherever we may be.27 In the 24 March 1818 letter to James Rice from which these sentiments are taken, Keats cheekily implies that the laws of conservation of energy and mass apply to “Intellect” just as they do to the water cycle. He jokes about John Milton’s brain, that it “like a Moon att racted Intellect to its flow,” so that, had Milton not been “gormandizing” more than his fair share of the world’s intelligence, King Charles II and some lesser poets and playwrights, “might have been all wise Men.” Milton’s gravitational force draws thoughts towards him, and the materiality of the metaphor rests on an analogy between the distribution of atoms comprising the world’s intellect with those comprising its water supply: “That which is contained in the Pacific and [could not] lie in the hollow of the Caspian—that which was in Miltons head could not fi nd Room in Charles the seconds.”28 Recalling to his reader that “there is ever the same quantity of matter constituting this habitable globe,” Keats’s hydraulic model for the “enormous changes and revolutions” that galvanize thoughts as well as things, genius as well as H2O, operates globally.29 It envisions the virtual space of affect as global and distributed, whose politicalecological figures are the moon and tides, the wind and weather. That these are also figures which return us to Coleridge’s comparison, noted in Chapter 3, of Wordsworth’s genius to the gravitational pull of the moon, and which forecast the climatological figures for border-crossing political affects that Chapter 5 explores, should come as no surprise. As Sha demonstrates, Keats was surrounded by Romantic theories of “dynamic materiality” that, in interpreting the laws of conservation, cast that which is neither created nor destroyed, mass or energy, not in terms of Newtonian

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physics, but as an essential property of one universal substance defi ned by motion and change.30 Whereas Newtonian “atomism relied on direct material contact between particles,” Sha explains, for Humphrey Davy, Joseph Priestley, Mary Somerville and others, “dynamism presumed that space was fi lled with fields of force.”31 By the time Keats was receiving his training in chemistry and medicine, notions of dynamic materiality had already fundamentally altered how Romantic thinkers related to their environments, “demanding an ecological understanding of one’s actions” because “everything interacted with everything else . . . [and] there were now necessarily multiple centers of activity and influence.”32 And, as Alan Bewell reminds us, whether in the British scientific imagination or more generally, the proliferation of such centers of influence and activity is inextricable from empire.33 Even so, when it comes to Keats’s reverence for the gravitational force of great poets—Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth—Keats locates the tidal pull of their intellectual currents not in transnational tension with foreign influences but in a local, specifically English literary tradition. Whether there existed other Miltonic satellites outside Keats’s purview or whether he imagined Milton to have magnetized enough intellect to impoverish every other nation, Keats’s fidelity to his few homegrown exemplars suggests the gravity (in his mind, quite literally) that would be involved in introducing new geniuses among them. When, in the review of Kean, Keats says that Kean “feels his being as deeply as Wordsworth, or any of our intellectual monopolists,” Keats means that poet and actor are national preoccupations, two of England’s living greats. And yet peering through the lens of Keats’s jokey engagement with what we might call his “law of conservation of intellect” offers further grounds for interpretation. In monopolizing not just the mental space of British readers and audiences, but also the very particles of the world’s available intelligence, the atomic weight of Kean’s genius would itself exert a universally att ractive as well as propulsive force. In such a Keatsian law of conservation of intellect, thought must be that which is not created or destroyed—merely passed around and passed on. For Keats, questions about his own poetic development in relation to the genius of other poets, and especially about how to create for himself such

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a posthumous life of feeling as that linking Milton to Wordsworth, and Shakespeare to Kean, were persistent and pressing concerns.34 In a wellstudied letter composed less than two months after the one to Rice, on 3 May 1818, Keats attempts to situate himself among this milieu. Comparing “human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments,” Keats describes a “Mist” through which he passes, along with his correspondent, J. H. Reynolds: We are in a Mist—We are now in that state—We feel the “burden of the Mystery,” To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive when he wrote “Tintern Abbey” and it seems to me that his Genius is explorative of those dark Passages. Now if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them. he is a Genius and superior [to] us, in so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries, and shed a light in them—Here I must think Wordsworth is deeper than Milton—though I think it has depended more upon the general and gregarious advance of intellect.35

Emily Rohrbach has shown this “Mist” to express the poet’s relationship to intellectual history as affective and contingent, “a sensory, material figure for the difficulty of knowing the present and for the provisional, fleeting quality of that knowledge when it verges on an unknown futurity.”36 Keats implies that to be fully present in one’s art—as Kean is with his special talent for “thinking of the past and future, while speaking of the instant”—is to hold oneself in a felt relation to history and, as Rohrbach would point out, to the future’s history as well. The figure of “Mist” materializes the difficulty of accessing this capacity for Keats, who considers himself and Reynolds as yet to be journeymen travelers along that road, without the kinds of natural aptitudes that would have sped their entry into the darker places. As Keats remarks, Wordsworth “is a Genius and superior [to] us.” To this we must add that “Mist” is a densification of the air—perhaps of the “thin Air” upon which Keats, in the earlier letter to Rice, fancies “the Brains of Man to prey.”37 Filling up the passages traversed by genius, suspended water vapor suggests the condensation of aerosolized thought around those who draw intellect so gluttonously towards them. As Sha might frame it, “what Romantic matter does for Keats” is “unite thoughts and things” through the language of “force.”38 Akin to the “Waterspouts

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whirlpools and mighty Rivers” that express the water cycle’s physical power and never-ending transformations, “Mist” evinces water’s chemical properties and suggests a line of dynamic materialist thinking in which the forces that shape the world are at once untraceable and powerfully obvious—a paradox that Keats’s inclusion of the “burden of the Mystery,” from “Tintern Abbey,” goes some way to expressing.39 Wordsworth’s line, quoted twice in the letter to Reynolds, Keats uses like a shorthand for the responsibility that comes with knowing enough to know that one doesn’t know enough. We can recognize poetic genius, just as we can see the tides rushing in, and yet we know that we don’t really know the forces responsible for either. Keats’s fi rst use of the phrase is in a comparison of aerial navigation with the interdisciplinary expertise that his medical studies have afforded him: possessing wide-ranging knowledge is like being “fledge[d]” and able to “go thro’ the . . . air and space without fear.”40 By the second instance of the line’s use, quoted above, “Mystery” and “Mist,” thought and thing, seem to suggest one another, along with the opposite and equal suggestion that those who have less knowledge fi nd navigating more difficult through the air made heavy by the caliginous wakes of brilliant minds. Finally, that “Mist” is also another figure for sensory deprivation, which darkens passages and obscures sight while creating a new, tactile and haptic environment (breathing humid air; moisture on the skin), returns us to the realm of feeling, reading and their limit cases for Keats. Being in a “Mist” is similar to Keats’s “blind bodies . . . in the same room,” who register closeness without seeing one another’s expressions.41 Both metaphors choreograph relationality through the virtual staging of proximate bodies, and both suggest that even when connections between people are imperfect there remains supra-visual ways of sensing propinquity—embodied insights that, like proprioception or spatial awareness, orient us even though our knowledge may be indirect or partial. In the later letter, this spatial sense places Keats and Reynolds in a number of significant orientations: in relation to other living poets and thinkers (“We are in a Mist”); in relation to each other (“We are now in that state”); in relation to famous poets and thinkers from history; and with Rohrbach, in relation to future famous historical poets and thinkers as well.42 Thus “Mist” becomes a figure for

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sensory deprivation but also for sensing mysteries—as a “burden,” a kind of weight—which our dominant or habitual sense perceptions might lead us to ignore. For Keats, what it feels like to engage with another poet’s legacy, or to hope for a legacy of one’s own, is akin to sensing one’s relative position in an environment of obscurity. Reading between the three letters, written within nine months of one another, reveals that Keats’s ‘law of conservation of intellect,’ or fantastic vision of a fi nite quantity of thought that is neither created nor destroyed, appears more and more like a speculative map of the posthumous life of genius. Even though Milton’s and Shakespeare’s legacies remain powerful in 1818, Keats knows that Wordsworth and Kean, whose living intensities organize the current ecosystem of intellectual achievement, benefit from and help to keep those legacies alive—and yet this still leaves open the question of to whom their legacies will be entrusted, and what those legacies could have to do with his own. Posthumousness becomes an att itude of peering into darkness, trying to intuit what is to come, all the while hoping that one’s nondominant senses might just grasp such an intuition. The specter of death, that of Keats’s brother Tom as well as his own, haunts these letters with the unanswerable question: where do the atoms that make up our intellects go when we die? According to Kelly Grovier, the letter to Rice provides an answer through its resonances with the “‘homespun’ Spinozist speculation” of John “Walking” Stewart, the peripatetic polemicist and author of Travels over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe, to Discover the Source of Moral Motion (1790), whose ideas interested Charlotte Smith (as described in Chapter 1).43 What Keats gets from Stewart, claims Grovier, is a rather grim version of the “molecular law of material conservation” that Keats, in a later poem “Th is Living Hand,” uses to conceptualize death as a state-change in which bodily decomposition lets loose atoms that continue to influence (i.e., haunt) the poet’s addressee.44 Of course, Keats’s introduction of a ghost poet-speaker characterized by such purpose-driven tenacity suggests a metaphysical approach that, if idiosyncratically Spinozist as Grovier thinks, has also gone through something of a gothic adjustment. Immortal personhood would be less than classically Spinozist, since, in the Ethics, the eternal part of the mind retains nothing of

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an individual’s attachments, not their “imagination, or memory.”45 Nevertheless, by blurring the distinction between physical touch and other, indirect and postmortem affective pressures, “Th is Living Hand” is a poetic fragment that, as we shall see, develops posthumous feeling as material force, and does so at the very limits of virtual and haptic connectivity. Feeling Past Death: “This Living Hand”

“Th is Living Hand” explores how a desire for affective reciprocity in life transforms into a still-animating craving for responsiveness in death, in a poetic fragment that begins and ends with unrequited gestures: Th is living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is I hold it towards you—46

The fi rst unrequited gesture occurs across the poem’s two opening lines, where enjambment transitions the “living hand” from “capable” to capable merely “Of earnest grasping.” Here the poet-speaker’s words, immortalized with pen and paper by that very hand, seem not up to the task of engendering the recognition he craves, of being grasped in turn. The second, more dislocated and determined gesture, “—see here it is / I hold it towards you—” which also extends across two lines, concludes the poem with a dreadful ambiguity. Is the hand that reaches “towards you” still a living hand, and whether or not it is, do you take it? The fragment’s provocation, of form as well as substance, is its insistence that we love something so unfi nished and unsett ling. In this way, Keats might seem to trade the preparatory fault lines of the Wordsworthian disappointment aesthetic, which help readers learn not to stumble, for the cliff-hanger of a sudden revulsion. In between, the poet-speaker describes draining the life and warmth from his addressee, “haunt[ing]” and “chill[ing]” her, and fi nally convincing

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her to empty her own heart of blood. These images of etiolated embodiment recall Keats’s account of immature or unfi nished poetry in his Preface to Endymion (1818), in which he figures poem, rather than poet, as a dying youth. “It is just,” Keats writes, “that this youngster should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that while it is dwindling I may be plott ing, and fitt ing myself for verses fit to live.”47 For Keats, youth is another name for unsophisticated poetry, for the “mawkishness” that leads to negative reviews, and it is also a way of talking about a naïve, arbitrary belief in a surfeit of time (a belief that Endymion both critiques and fetishizes).48 Planning to live on, the poet that Endymion’s Preface constructs in 1818 shoulders the burden of making himself ready to produce more resilient future poems. “Th is Living Hand,” likely composed closer to 1820, is more desperate and more threatening.49 Time has run out, and death has become “a troubling point of origin for the poet, the poem, and even the reader.”50 In the fragment, the poet-speaker’s insistence that his addressee want to trade the blood in her veins for his posthumous existence reverses the logic of the Preface by making addressee, not poet, responsible for accommodating the poet-speaker’s “earnest grasping”—for “fitt ing” herself in such a way that the poet will “live.” Even under the duress of being haunted, this small nod towards reciprocation—“thou would wish thine own heart dry”—is a recognition that the poet-speaker appears willing to die in order to receive. Enlightenment is one thing—to Reynolds, Keats describes Wordsworth’s superiority as being able, “more than we, [to] make discoveries, and shed a light in [the dark Passages]”—but intimacy is another.51 In “Th is Living Hand,” the yearning to touch and be touched begins with a juvenile earnestness that quickly transforms into a desire for penetration, a yearning to enter the addressee’s body and psyche and to be entered by her through a transfusion of blood. Intimate contact becomes difficult to separate from violation, and my decision to refer to the addressee with she/her pronouns amplifies the misogynist undertones of a poem in which the addressee would “be conscience-calm’d” by her own sacrifice.52 As if she who did not take his proffered hand knows that she deserves to be terrorized. The addressee’s capitulation will be the death of her, but more than having exhausted her of the will to live, it will also be a sign that unremitt ing torture

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has sufficiently convinced her of her mistakes, of her own responsibility for what she now suffers. If we can observe this abuse while also taking seriously Keats’s dynamic materialist imagination, then we might recognize too in his penetrative imagery an approach to sharing feeling in which the affections move embodied subjects to similar states of being. By this logic, for a poet-speaker who is already “leading a posthumous existence” to share his experience, he would need to make his addressee feel “the icy silence of the tomb” along with him.53 Indeed, when Keats, still ruminating on Wordsworth’s genius in the letter to Reynolds, notes that “axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses,” he couches the observation in an idea of “experience” as shared feeling. “We read fi ne—things,” says Keats, “but never feel them to thee full until we have gone the same steps as the Author.—I know this is not plain; you will know exactly my meaning when I say, that now I shall relish Hamlet more ever than I have done—.”54 While “exactly [Keats’s] meaning” is fated to remain exact only to Reynolds, the notion that poetry such as Wordsworth’s can help clarify philosophy by inviting readers to feel it in their veins (at a heartbeat’s metrical tempo—through their blood!) makes poetry a vehicle for enlightenment through intimacy. In the transition from reading “fi ne—things” to feeling them through an identification with their author, we fi nd a vacillation between reading and feeling very much like that which galvanizes Kean’s acting, as he translates instant reading into instant feeling and back again. That Keats’s line of thinking lands him on Hamlet is at once compelling and suggestive. Yet in “Th is Living Hand,” the addressee’s “wish” to prove herself upon the ghost-poet’s pulses is ultimately not enough. The conditionals upon which the fragment’s entire exercise in postmortem requiting is premised (“would, if ”) here reemerge as an echo (“would wish”) that, with repetition and near rhyme, seems to haunt the poem as a distorted version of itself. Perhaps this warped repetition reflects back to the poet-speaker what corruption his menace has wrought, now that uncoerced consent is impossible. Or perhaps it brings into focus for the poet-speaker that, no matter how enthusiastically the addressee offers him “red life,” hers is a response framed

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by fantasy, terror and contingency. Either way, that “thou would wish” is a reciprocation neither satisfactory nor complete Keats implies by his poetspeaker turning “towards you” in the poem’s last line and grasping once again for connection. In its apostrophic entry into the present moment, away from antique “thou” and towards modern “you,” the gesture signals a desire to trade gothic intrigue for an immediate, contemporary response: for just one exchange of instant feeling. When Levinson, quoting John Jones, remarks, “‘End-stopped feel’ is as good a phrase as any to describe the alienating closure of Keats’s poetry,” she suggests that there is more of feeling and of psychic intensity to a Keatsian clunk than is captured by the usual critical vocabulary.55 To be alienated by closure—and not, as in Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee, or the Old Huntsman”, to have closure withheld from you—leaves space to neither struggle with disappointment nor strive while bearing being moved. Challenging the active exertions of the Wordsworthian paradigm by, simply, stopping, Keats’s arrests can feel instead like a shutt ing off or shutt ing down with no recourse, no second chances to struggle or strive, and can demonstrate by doing so that resolution and closure are not synonymous. “Th is Living Hand” does not resolve. “I hold it towards you” is a declaration that implies the unanswerable question—will you take it?—and thus the poem ends in uncertainty. Yet, through its conditional framing and the two bookending gestures, the poem also, formally and with certainty, closes. After seven lines of pentameter, the eighth and fi nal line stops short at six syllables. Here is an unresolved fragment defi ned by closure, a broken-off thing whose life is complete. What is alienating about such a closure, and not simply surprising or dissatisfying, is that reifying the poet-speaker (as a disembodied hand— another broken-off thing) also reifies the reader, though not in the way we may expect. While the image of the “living hand” initially operates as a synecdoche for the poet through its association with the physical action of writing, in the fragment’s last line the poet ceases writing; he stops before completing the ten syllables that would match the previous lines of pentameter. In the four ghost syllables that remain, a reader might feel compelled to fi ll in the blanks: “I hold it towards you—Will you take it?” At once, the

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line feels whole, the process of reading complete. But perhaps too the reader experiences this impulse to conclude as involuntary, a kind of automatic writing that reveals her vulnerability to affective impressions while emphasizing, through the mechanical nature of the impulse, the parts of herself that are thing-like even before her heart is drained of blood. Completing the line becomes possession by the ghost of a poetic cadence, to which nonagential or post-agential parts of herself cannot help but respond. That completing the line would also constitute taking up the poet’s mantle—walking “the same steps as the Author” in order to feel the poem “to thee full”—also suggests that making manifest a poem’s missing beats replaces abstraction (i.e., metaphysical speculations about death) with immediacy (i.e., audience participation). Rather than foreshadow the reader’s own dead hands as cold and unresponsive, then, there emerges a kind of readerly “thingness,” past death, characterized by volition even without perfect agency.56 The unwritten words return as affective reciprocation, even if responses extracted through guile or menace leave something to be desired. For Keats, the problems of feeling over great distances and past death lie in a distortion or lessening of intensity, which he figures as sensory deprivations that nevertheless prepare us to hone other, haptic and spatial, ways of knowing. Keats’s dynamic materialist imagination codes these figures with both levity and gravity, envisioning scenarios in which whatever mass or energy of intimacy we fear losing isn’t truly lost, but, neither created nor destroyed, need only be sought in the right places and in the right ways. To George and Georgiana, Keats muses, “sometimes I fancy an immense separation, and sometimes, as at present, a direct communication of spirit with you. That will be one of the grandeurs of immortality—there will be no space and consequently the only commerce between spirits will be by their intelligence of each other.”57 Even so, in the letters and “Th is Living Hand,” there nevertheless remains an impression of dissatisfaction with intangibility and concealment, metaphysics and abstraction. Turning from his discussion of the dark passages, Keats observes, “there is certainly something real in the World . . . Tom has spit a leetle blood this afternoon, and that is rather a damper—but I know—the truth is there is something real in the

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World Your third Chamber of Life shall be a lucky and a gentle one—stored with the wine of love—and the Bread of Friendship.”58 Keats’s brother Tom, who would die of tuberculosis on 1 December 1818, recalls to him the visceral tragedy of the present, and this prompts him to reassure Reynolds of the sustenance that will help them through it: love and friendship figured as wine and bread. “Something real” shares with Keats’s desire to have philosophy “proved upon our pulses” a need to embody, literally to ingest, the feeling of a moment. It is immediate gratification akin to what Keats sees translated into aesthetic experience by Kean’s acting, and its positive association with love and friendship evokes in particular that facet of Kean’s performance which Keats calls, after The Tempest’s Ariel, “spiriting gently,” wherein the actor lowers his voice, contracts his body and seems to retreat upon the stage. By suspending action so as to generate the affective force of pulling away, Kean models for Keats how strategic diminutions and arrests engender interest and attention. And, while “Th is Living Hand” takes such attenuation to the extreme, compelling the reader to respond to four fi nal beats that are felt precisely because they are suddenly absent, the impulse to lean into that which leans away has always been behind our dramas of coy passivity, from shrinking violets to the enticements of “playing hard to get.” Against the long-established view that Keats’s view of passivity is modeled on Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness,” what follows traces the att ractions of reservation and retreat in Keats’s letters and the “Ode on Indolence” in order to show that the poet saw passivity as an embodied and even physically demanding att itude for cementing reciprocal social bonds. In “Ode on Indolence,” to deliberately adopt a passive att itude is to add artistry or craft— the aesthetic, in other words—which both distances and compels affected subjects to seek the source of their affections. Towards an Aesthetics of Passivity

In a letter to J. H. Reynolds on 19 February 1818, Keats describes “the beauty of the morning operating on a sense of Idleness,” and comparing busy bees to feminine flowers, the poet exclaims, “let us not therefore go hurrying about . . . [but] be passive and receptive.”59 Presupposing a binary between

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“hurrying” actively and receiving passively, such a statement might seem to reinforce that Keats saw a connection between psychological openness and bodily inactivity, an assumption that locates Keats’s view of passivity easily within a Wordsworthian lexicon, right under the entry for “wise passiveness.” Yet attending to Keats’s own, active use of passiveness illuminates other ways of striving. Flowers call to bees without effort, through colors indiscernible to the human eye, and for all his idleness, Keats judges his morning to be both beautiful and operational. Passivity, Keats implies, is both a choice and an att itude, which may be struck even, or especially, in writing—“I am sensible,” Keats teases, that “all this is a mere sophistication . . . [designed to] lift a litt le time from your Shoulders.”60 By inviting Reynolds, the receptive reader, to participate in an epistolary exchange activated by indolence, Keats turns from his own repose to his reader’s equally embodied response, shoulders and all. Reoriented by the “mere sophistication” that directs Keats’s posturing self-consciously towards his addressee, the poet’s passive att itude encourages a lighthearted sociability that is at once reciprocal and, indeed, flowerlike. Th is well-known letter captures the dynamic passivity that animates many of Keats’s poems, but it also employs a vocabulary so Wordsworthian (or so it has seemed) that scholars have consistently presumed confluences of defi nition between the two. Walter Jackson Bate, for instance, has noted that Keats’s sustained work on Endymion caused the poet to seek out “mere passivity,” a “natural reaction,” which explains why “the image of the receptive flower, visited and fertilized by the bee, caught his fancy.” By the end of the paragraph, Bate is ready to claim that Keats was interested in “slow development, maturity, rooted strength, leisure for growth . . . something close to Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness.’”61 Th is pervasive assertion— that, for Keats, poetic production benefits from, and may even depend upon, an unassertive sort of passiveness—gathers strength from the established relationship between Keats’s negative capability and Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness,” a link inaugurated by H. W. Garrod and Jacob D. Wigod in 1952.62 Canonical Romantic criticism, from Bate to Geoff rey Hartman and Jack Stillinger, has reinforced this link, and the comparison remains even in more recent critical reconsiderations.63 Even though many scholars

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(Bate foremost among them), have shown that negative capability arose quite immediately out of Keats’s admiration of Shakespeare, modern theater, Kean’s acting and Hazlitt’s critical reviews, important contributions to the field have also maintained or overlooked the original comparison to Wordsworth, and the unintended consequence has been that presumptions about a Wordsworthian inheritance continue to overshadow Keats’s dynamic engagements with passivity.64 Scholars may differ over the degree to which negative capability was influenced by, or is similar to, “wise passiveness,” but they still generally agree on what passiveness means for Wordsworth, and by the same logic, for Keats—a diff use or open mind, and a stationary body.65 In recovering passiveness as a dynamic att itude for Keats, I want to explore the ways in which Keatsian passivity invites sociability, creating lines of influence that strengthen friendships and shape social dynamics. Th is assertion summarizes what Keats says in his letters, particularly one to Benjamin Bailey of 23 January 1818, in which the poet explains that adopting a passive att itude helps fortify male friendships. “The sure way Bailey,” he writes, “is fi rst to know a Man’s faults and then be passive, if after that he insensibly draws you towards him, then you have no Power to break the link. Before I felt interested in either Reynolds or Haydon—I was well read in their faults yet knowing them I have been cementing gradually with both.”66 For Keats, passivity helps gauge whether, despite knowing a potential friend’s flaws, that friend’s att ractions are enough to compel the poet to pursue the relationship. By this account, passivity prompts intimacy without agency, since Keats’s passive att itude invites Reynolds and Haydon to “insensibly draw” him towards them, with an almost gravitational force reminiscent of the letter to Rice, and it also establishes a social dynamic in which the bond of friendship is more powerful, even, than the men it binds. “Cementing gradually” implies a slow, yet irreversible change of state, as though the friends themselves are transformed in order to accommodate the connection. In the lyrical ballad “Expostulation and Reply,” which contains Wordsworth’s best-known use of “wise passiveness,” William, the poem’s eponymous speaker, also invites, by way of passiveness, a friend’s engagement (line 24).67 William’s indolence piques Matt hew’s interest, which creates

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the conditions for the composition of the poem. Couched alongside the impulsive geniality of “The Tables Turned,” a poem “on the same subject” as “Expostulation and Reply,” and leaning towards the familial confidence of “Tintern Abbey,” in Lyrical Ballads, “wise passiveness” is positioned among themes of sociability; “Expostulation and Reply” is a poem in the form of a conversation, after all. But it is also a poem about pedagogy, in which “wise passiveness” signifies a radical openness to the teachings of the natural world. Wordsworth idealizes the lesson made possible by Matt hew’s appearance—casting William as “wise” instructor and Matt hew as pupil— and William’s “reply” to Matt hew’s admonishments neatly justifies William’s idleness with the suggestion that “wise passiveness” leads to inspiration and, eventually, to poetry. Just as “wise passiveness” grants the poet access to powerful natural impressions without any clear recompense for nature, however, the society engendered by William’s idleness is a one-way street. William’s response dismisses the concerns of his student (“Then ask not wherefore, here, alone, / Conversing as I may, / I sit . . .”), whose voice is not heard again, and this closes the poem with an abrupt repudiation of any further discussion (lines 16, 29–31). Keats, by contrast, represents a passive att itude as part of a negotiation between clever social positioning and receptivity to the attractions of friendship that is necessarily reciprocal. Following Keats’s passive retreat, the felt immediacy of the friends’ influences—those “insensible” movements by which they draw him back towards them—suggests a relational subjectivity by which each friend moves in response to the other.68 Th is process begins with a deliberate, and perhaps one-sided aim— passivity as the “sure way” to gauge a friendship—but it produces a bond that Keats’s metaphor, “cementing,” indicates is shared between them.69 Although both Keats and Wordsworth relate encounters in which passivity invites society, and this does suggest that the poets had similar understandings of the attention-grabbing quality of retreat, Keats’s performance of passivity differs in that it is more critically an att unement to the reciprocal influences that his passive att itude initiates. In late 1817 and early 1818 Keats had myriad reasons for conceiving of passivity as a dynamic att itude capable of engaging forms of relational

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subjectivity. Attending theatrical performances and participating in the lively aesthetic debates of Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt and other Cockney School contemporaries, Keats sought to express the aesthetic power of affect—or something very like it, “gusto” (an idea introduced to him by Hazlitt) or “intensity”—in his letters, poems and the review of Kean.70 Emphasizing the affective immediacy of the actor’s voice and presence, the review pays close attention to the ways in which Kean’s passive achievements both move audiences and reveal the actor’s responsiveness to the roles he plays.71 Keats begins by admiring Kean’s ability to inhabit characters of both “the utmost of quiet and turbulence” but ends by choosing, from an entire “volume” of timeless examples, to commend especially Kean’s dramatic demotions, “those lines of impatience to the night who ‘like a foul and ugly witch, doth limp so tediously away.’”72 Such an assessment differentiates Kean from his forebears and contemporaries, particularly when it comes to the Romantic theatrical practice of striking attention-grabbing poses, or “att itudes,” on stage. For, even though the dramatic att itude—the “strategic use of sustained pause,” as Judith Pascoe describes it—was already an established part of the repertoires of Sarah Siddons and other Kemble School actors, Kean’s dynamism radically refashioned the practice.73 Rather than holding static postures for extended periods, Kean’s pauses, advances and retreats created an effect, according to Coleridge, very like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightening.74 As Tracy Davis makes clear, Coleridge’s remark is far from complimentary, as it alludes to the swagger and unevenness of Kean’s style.75 Keats’s review of Kean, by refusing to censure the bathos (as Coleridge describes it) of Kean’s abrupt shifts and descending actions, reinforces what we have already seen of the poet’s interest in the affective power of such retreats—Kean’s laudable ability to do “his spiriting gently.”76 Kean attracts an audience, writes Keats, like “moths about a candle”; by opening himself to the felt immediacy of each moment on stage, “Kean delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without the shadow of a thought about any thing else.”77 For Keats, Kean’s att itudes of dramatic passivity become part of a reciprocal relation between actor and audience, mediated by Shakespeare’s language, in which Kean gives himself over to these influences and

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his audience, in turn, fi nds him utterly compelling. That Keats later claimed to want “to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting” further establishes Kean’s influence, and it also suggests that Keats saw enough similarity between the roles of poet and actor, writer and translator, to hope that his poetic works might garner comparable responses.78 “Ode on Indolence” is one such work, which, in mobilizing the affective possibilities of passivity, casts the ode’s speaker as the viewer and receiver of “instant feeling.” “Ode on Indolence” is a poem in pursuit of itself, which is to say it is a poem about indolence in which indolence measures the desirability of poetic composition. While it has often been taken as a work about the burden of poetic creation, in which the luxury of idleness competes with the pressure to produce, such critiques too often read the speaker as helplessly enervated—motivated, as Jacques Khalip avers, by “a consciousness forever craving to disappear into the art it imagines and wants.”79 Such utter self-negation, psychological and physical, fails to appreciate the active negotiations between poet and audience that the speaker’s passive encounters animate. Rather than treat the ode as sumptuous and self-interested, I see Keats’s admiration for Kean as opening “Ode on Indolence” to critical engagement with theatrical innovations and, in particular, with the evolving art of the dramatic att itude that Kean brought to the Romantic stage. Propelled by these contexts, “Ode on Indolence” puts on display the aesthetic as well as social dimensions of Keatsian passivity: by figuring movements into and out of passive att itudes, Keats creates a dynamic between retreat and pursuit that activates the relational subjectivity that drives the poem. Passivity’s subtly compelling force in “Ode on Indolence” emerges most clearly in the speaker’s initial perceptions of the urn, which quickly transform from relaxed to fi xated. In the ode’s opening stanza, the speaker perceives three muses, as if frozen on a vase, in att itudes as stolid as those of Kemble School actors. The speaker describes these figures advancing and retreating, coming into and out of view: They pass’d, like figures on a marble Urn, When shifted round to see the other side; They came again; as when the Urn once more

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Is shifted round, the fi rst seen Shades return; And they were strange to me . . . How is it, Shadows, that I knew ye not? (lines 1– 9, 11)

Whereas in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the “Att ic shape! Fair att itude!” that is “For ever panting” gasps with passionate potential (lines 41, 27), the passive att itudes of “Ode on Indolence” wear “placid sandals” and “stepp’d serene” (lines 3, 4).80 The speaker, caught in a “blissful cloud of summer indolence,” may merely gaze at the puzzling urn, or may hold it aloft and turn it; Keats’s passive constructions (“When shifted round,” “Is shifted round”) conceal the source of the urn’s revolutions, and emphasize instead the dreamy quality of both speaker and muses (lines 16, 6, 8). Yet as the figures revolve into view a second time, they are even less present: “faded,” as the speaker says later on, or else more shadowy or shade-like (lines 23, 11). Beginning as a tableau vivant, the figures on the urn become a moving (fading) picture, before which Keats’s speaker is both captivated audience and keen pursuer. Fading and revolving collapse into the speaker’s singular experience of the muses’ retreat, and he “burn’d” to follow (line 23). Th is is more than a depiction of indolence as receptivity to inspiration: it is the deployment of passivity itself as a force of affective engagement. Keatsian passivity here becomes a means to express the speaker’s changing relationship to poetic perception—figured by the three muses who turn out to be Love, Ambition and Poesy—from the speaker’s beginning state of unsuspecting indolence, to his pursuit of the muses’ passive retreats, to the dramatically passive att itude by which the speaker fi nally claims to throw off the muses’ influence. Th is dynamic exchange between pursuit and retreat galvanizes the ode’s narrative and, more critically, casts poetic perception as an affect—as the immediate and embodied response of poet to muse. If indolence leaves the speaker’s senses “Benumb’d” and “Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness,” then in the muses’ presence he “burn’d / And ached for wings” (lines 17, 20, 23-24).81 When they appeared to be retreating from him, the speaker “wanted wings” to follow, even though, only a few lines later, he admits that his “demon Poesy” has “no joy for him” (lines 31, 30, 35). Since, for much of the poem, the speaker cannot identify the figures,

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perceiving Poesy (and the other muses) becomes an affective negotiation with unknown influences, very much like Spinoza’s “passions,” which are affections that cannot be easily traced to their source.82 Indolence, in this way, leads to poetic production, wanted or unwanted, but only because it opens poets to affections that influence and even compel them unawares. Keats’s speaker is not completely oblivious, however. His recognition of the figures in the third stanza produces a sense of guardedness and restraint that, although not quite enough to extricate him from the vortex of the muses’ att ractions, subtly shifts the terms of their relationship. For the speaker, the muses are a paradox of desire and refutation, as he admonishes them for possibly plott ing to “steal away, and leave without a task / My idle days,” on the one hand, and asks, “O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense / Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness?” on the other (lines 14– 15, 19–20). The senses by which the speaker perceives these goading affections are similarly paradoxical. The ode opens with a sighting—“One morn before me were three figures seen”—that does not provide the speaker sufficient information to identify the muses, and it closes with a command for the figures to “fade soft ly from mine eyes,” and “Vanish” (lines 1, 55, 60). Yet the speaker’s affections compel him as “a fever fit” even after he recognizes the figures for who and what they are (line 34). The felt immediacy of the muses’ influence—those aches and wants (line 24, 31)—do not shift in tandem with the speaker’s visual cues, but seem, rather, to layer on top of one another, suspending the revelation of the muses’ identities and obscuring their purpose. A “visual touch,” as Brian Massumi conceives it, affi rms the fundamentally synesthetic nature of affect, and highlights the particularly close interpolation of touch and vision in Gilles Deleuze’s Spinozist theory of the haptic. “What,” Massumi asks, “besides sight can feel texture at a glance?”83 The answer, for Keats’s speaker, is the dream or memory of a haptic experience, a persistent and embodied reencounter that blurs distinctions between modes of perception. By giving way to the muses as in a “dim dream,” the speaker fi nally locates himself in relation to them and, at the same time, accepts the visions they have to offer (line 42). Tilottama Rajan has argued that the “discourse” of indolence in Keats’s early poems has prevented critics from exploring the Keatsian ideal of

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“poetry as a mode of attentiveness” in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, and Rajan adopts the wise passiveness to negative capability comparison as a synonymous evocation of this “mode.”84 Rajan highlights Keats’s concerns about poetry as an unattainable leisure-class pursuit, and her important discussion of worklessness, the “darker side” of indolence, in the early poems reveals Keats’s awareness of history’s ambivalence and “negativity.”85 But to this I would add that “Ode on Indolence,” both a “mature” poem and one that unapologetically exploits the language of indolence, dissembles indolence by way of an altogether different “mode of attentiveness,” which is not illuminable by that borrowed comparison. Neither the cessation of striving nor its nihilistic absence, the speaker’s fi nal repose reverses the muses’ passive retreats from the opening stanzas, and in so doing reveals both a reciprocal relation between speaker and muses and the speaker’s penchant for the dramatic. In a fi nal refusal that thrums with passionate commands, the speaker casts himself upon the earth and declares, “Ye cannot raise” me (line 51). Delivered in an att itude of dramatic and forceful passivity, the speaker’s exaggerated admonishments to the muses—“fade soft ly from mine eyes,” “Vanish,” “and never more return!”—emphasize the scene’s theatricality (lines 55, 59, 60). His sudden worry that he has become “a pet-lamb in a sentimental farce” indicates his awareness of his actions’ artifice but makes him no less a performer (line 54). In this gymnastic model of passivity, retreat is a suspended pose that teeters, Kean-like, on the edge of excess, but it is also a site of affective energies built up throughout the rest of the poem. Like “instant feeling,” the mode of attentiveness that “Ode on Indolence” constructs responds to the affections of speaker, muses and reader in order to capture the immediacy of a shared aesthetic experience. Conclusion

In a 23 January 1818 letter to his brothers, George and Tom, Keats frames the composition of his King Lear sonnet—a poem occasioned by a play—as an act of dramatic and discursive intensity prompted by passivity. The letter describes Keats’s changing mindset, which moves from a passive addiction, to interest and employment, and fi nally to a sense of motivation so insistent

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that it appears located elsewhere, in the “demand” of Shakespeare’s play for a prefatory poem: I think a litt le change has taken place in my intellect lately—I cannot bear to be uninterested or unemployed, I, who for so long a time, have been addicted to passiveness—Nothing is fi ner for the purposes of great productions, than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers—As an instance of this—observe—I sat down yesterday to read King Lear once again and the thing appeared to demand the prologue of a Sonnet, I wrote it.86

In a way that echoes the slow cementing of friendships, Keats’s chronic passivity opens him to the att ractions of poetry by the “very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.”87 Here again, passivity allows the poet to gauge whether, despite his knowing the play well, its inspirational effect is enough to compel him to write. Some of the themes and vocabulary that we have traced in letters from later in the year seem, with the benefit of hindsight, to foretell the development of Keats’s “law of the conservation of intellect.” Yet none of these considerations leads directly to the play’s “demand.” Rather, Keats’s fi rst passive addiction frames another retreat—momentarily suspended by the command to watch it—into a pose of readerly receptivity. Sitt ing down, Keats embodies an att itude att uned to inspiration and, at the same time, positions himself in relation to his reader-as-audience. To return to where we began, the arrests and retreats that characterize Keats’s poetics can feel like a closing off of the connective tissues between subjects, which estrange even as they court audiences’ renewed interest and attention. Th is is a paradox that, as “Th is Living Hand” and Keats’s letters reveal, reflects a fierce desire for connection even as the poet recognizes that feelings can lose something of their intensity with distance and time. Projecting these changes as forms of sensory deprivation, Keats never theless indicates that other ways of sensing and knowing might flood into the space opened up by the transformation. How Keats imagined such a tidal system of feeling to flow we’ve explored, in this chapter’s fi rst part, in terms of some versions of dynamic materialism with which he was familiar. In one light-hearted version of his dynamic materialist imagination, the law

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of conservation of mass applies to poetic genius in ways that add to some thinkers’ atomic bulk at the expense of others. On this account, the power of Milton or Shakespeare is gravitational: an impersonal and indifferent force that, like negative capability, needs no “irritable reaching” to draw thought towards it.88 Yet in the other, darker version of Keats’s materialist imagination that “Th is Living Hand” animates, affective reciprocity takes on a more personal, even vindictive quality. By the time of the poet-speaker’s fi nal gesture it is too late for his addressee’s response to be anything but retroactive and coerced, and yet the poem still opens space, in the form of four missing beats, for the reader to continue to be moved by the ghost-poet’s power. Considering Keats’s arrests in this light helps put in perspective some of the contrariness that Woodhouse ascribes him with respect to readership, and it also offers an alternative to more recent interpretations that view Keats’s disaffected poetics through the lens of his social anxiety. Keats’s deployments of passivity as a dynamic att itude, here and in the other letters and the ode, challenges the assumption in much recent scholarship that passiveness, for Keats, was an essentially disembodied and unassertive state, a conclusion that has hinged upon the established relationship between negative capability and wise passiveness. Keats’s review of Kean suggests ways in which dynamic passiveness gained an aesthetic dimension for the poet, and drawing attention to the affective intensity of such movements, “Ode on Indolence” reveals that, for Keats, a passive retreat could be not only a receptive state but also a powerfully persuasive mechanism for inviting response. What Keats saw as Kean’s exemplarity on stage is feeling where nothing—no modicum of nuance or intensity—is lost, and which may even intensify through a synesthetic relay between instant reading and instant feeling. Building on these observations, the theatrical contexts that permeate discussions of passivity in Keats’s letters and “Ode on Indolence” invite a new approach to the familiar tension between indolence and poetic production. Gesturing towards what such an aesthetics of passivity feels like for Keats, this chapter has argued for rethinking Keats’s relationship to readerships, indolence and poetic production.

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The Politics of Provocation

T h i s f i n a l c h a p t e r traces the relation between political optimism and formal provocation in two very different poems about two very different political uprisings, the events leading to the Haitian Revolution and those following the Peterloo Massacre, uncovering affective boundarycrossing as a condition of political possibility for William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The phrase affective boundary-crossing emerges from a conception of the affections as diff use and contagious on a global scale, where forceful feelings might just as soon move a crowd pressed together in a London square as they would pockets of insurrection across Caribbean ports. Such a view draws on the work of Mary Fairclough and Jon Mee, on the one hand,1 and especially Julius S. Scott, on the other. Scott’s The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, documents the “networks of black rebellion” that swept “across linguistic, geographic, and imperial boundaries,” which he characterizes as a “tempest created by the black revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue and communicated by mobile people in other slave societies.”2 By the second half of the eighteenth century, even as a relatively small number of Caribbean plantation authorities had succeeded to some degree in controlling the proportionably much larger populations of enslaved workers, gett ing sugar to market required transportation systems that were also avenues of communication 147

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and routes of escape.3 The “complex (and largely invisible) underground which the ‘mariners, renegades, and castaways’ of the Caribbean created to protect themselves in the face of planter consolidation” allowed “news, ideas, and social excitement [to travel] in the electric political environment of the late eighteenth century,” all of which were crucial to the uprisings that led to Haiti’s independence in 1804.4 The source of Scott’s title, Wordsworth’s sonnet “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” (1803), imagines that an inspiring wind activates the revolutionaries’ irrepressible political will, and is the fi rst poem that this chapter explores. The second, Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy (1819), also figures the desire for social and political change as atmospheric forces by comparing the response of British Reformers to the violence on St. Peter’s Field to “steam,” “inspiration” and a “volcano heard afar” (lines 361, 363).5 Th roughout this chapter, wind and its complementary elements, sound and kinetic force, guide my discussion of the metaphysics of the collective actions that the two poets envision. In Romanticism’s colonial imagination, meteorological phenomena—fluctuations in climate and atmosphere, weather events and especially trade winds—were linked to the activities of global commerce writ large. Wind, or its absence, was crucial in the seafaring era of British imperial and colonial expansion. More than fi ll sails, wind could herald the arrival of weather (rain, storms—or the dissipation of each) and contribute to the atmospheres that many people in the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries associated with public health. What Alan Bewell calls “medical geography” names the mapping of atmospheres’ salubrious or deleterious effects onto spaces domestic (the bracing country air), regional (the Italian climate as conducive to recovery from chronic illnesses), and colonial (more often than not, a “pathogenic space” rife with deadly miasma and disease).6 Romantic ideas of our vulnerabilities to these atmospheres could be striated by race and ethnicity, so that white sett lercolonialists saw themselves as constitutionally unsuited to the tropics and thus more susceptible to diseases carried by the hot and humid air. To the extent that this helps explain the reality of populations newly exposed to pathogens for which they have no immunity, it is also a persistent racist fiction that, as Denise Ferreira da Silva has shown, endured well into the

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twentieth century.7 That such vulnerabilities are also suggestive of negative and positive affects, which move subjects to greater or lesser power, returns us to the radical materialist idiom, as Miranda Burgess makes explicit when she identifies “the intersections between the virtual space of affect and Bewell’s globally pathologized space” as a site in need of more critical attention.8 Sound, which is part of wind and weather, also shares with affect and disease the capacity to move embodied subjects. Sound “spreads in space,” writes Jean-Luc Nancy, “where it resounds while still resounding ‘in me.’”9 Th is resonance is why Nancy calls sound “methexic,” by which he means “having to do with participation, sharing, or contagion.”10 And as we saw in this book’s Introduction, it is also why Immanuel Kant ranks music among the lowest order of aesthetic pleasures—since we cannot claim disinterestedness if distance from the aesthetic object is impossible.11 Sound inhabits and comprises atmosphere, and by revealing our susceptibility to forces outside our control, it also illustrates the affective force of feeling for Wordsworth and Shelley. As a figure for affective border-crossing, wind has the advantage over sound, which loses intensity as it gets further from its source, of being globally scalable. Wind can cross continents and oceans, and may even increase its force as it moves, by joining with other gusts and breezes that agree with its direction; in this way, wind might seem to operate as Spinoza claims all “things” set in motion do, being aided by forces that agree with their natures and hindered by forces that do not.12 In “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley envisions the wind’s transatlantic “path,” causing “the Atlantic’s level powers” to “cleave” into waves and “chasms,” announcing itself to the “seablooms” “far below” with a “Voice” so terrible that even in the depths of the ocean they “tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!” (lines 37–42).13 And because wind creates sound, it announces itself while seeming to speak in whistling tongues, or even to carry messages across vast distances. Wordsworth’s “correspondent breeze” resonates with the poet’s frame of mind but is also the bearer of nature’s messages, an airy correspondent to whom, with The Prelude, perhaps, the poet writes back (line 35).14 In his ode, Shelley too makes the “unseen presence” of the West Wind a medium for disseminating ideas, including those ideas expressed in writing; in the opening and closing

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stanzas, the wind is exhorted to drive the dead leaves—of books, of trees— “over the universe,” and even “scatter” the poet’s own “dead thoughts” as “words among mankind!” (lines 2, 63–5).15 Like Scott’s “tempest” of insurrectionary information, Shelley’s “wild West Wind” bears news of reform, sounding the “trumpet of a prophecy” (line 69) that, James Chandler notes, presages imagery soon to appear in A Philosophical View of Reform (1820) and A Defence of Poetry (1840), both of which Shelley composed shortly after the ode in the period 1819 to 1821.16 The West Wind foretells seasonal change (winter into spring) just as it fi lls the atmosphere with clarion calls and other breathy metaphors—inspiration, spirit—for rousing populations to moral and political revolution. Before gett ing blown off course by Shelley’s revolutionary atmospheres, however, I want to turn to Wordsworth’s sonnet, because it expresses border-crossing political optimism after the Reign of Terror but prior to the renewed unrest in Britain, during the years from 1816 to 1819, to which Shelley responds. “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” was occasioned by the forced extraction and imprisonment of the Haitian political and military leader Toussaint Louverture by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802.17 In my view, the poem confronts readers with the difficulties of listening in places of trauma through a clashing juxtaposition—one that, in its disappointing impropriety, suggests what might seem like magical thinking: that even those who do not care to hear about the events in Saint-Domingue cannot help but be moved by Louverture’s material legacy, which comprises affects circulating revolutionary fervor on the “common wind” (line 11). Wordsworth’s approach to the affections, as previous chapters have shown, embraces provocative poetic forms that foreground our susceptibility to outside forces while charging us with striving to stay on track. In what follows, Wordsworth’s representation of Louverture’s legacy as an enduring and affective power resonates with similar Spinozist imagery and ideas by abstracting and subsuming Louverture, even past death, into the dynamics of an all-encompassing natural world. Focusing on sound as a material force, I take inspiration from Canadian poet Jordan Scott’s Guantánamo project in order to frame my opening exploration in terms of the question, “How is it possible to listen in places of trauma?” I do so in order to argue that, if the sonnet to Louverture

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registers, however imperfectly, faith in the revolutionary power of material forces beyond the terrible immediacy of a man who suffers, then it also admits the melancholy possibility that political reinvention’s best hope depends upon even those who fail to listen nevertheless being moved. Ambient Sound, Applied Poetry

In April 2015, Jordan Scott was permitted to spend five days in the U.S. Guantánamo Bay Detention Center.18 During a public lecture that May, in Vancouver, British Columbia, he described how the permission to do so felt to him inexplicable: “I applied as a poet,” he said, because “I wanted to know if it is possible to listen in places of trauma.” While there, Scott was allowed to take notes, field recordings and photographs without recognizable persons in them. At the end of each day, guards would erase from his phone any content deemed questionable. Yet Scott’s primary interest—in collecting ambient sound—soon exasperated them, and the guards, it seemed to him, ceased listening to the recordings closely. According to Scott, while language poses a threat to the isolating imperative of the Guantánamo program, and poetry is confiscated from detainees because it may contain secret messages, “sound, [which] is poetry’s material nature . . . I was allowed to collect . . . it was of no threat to them.” Scott presented his field recordings to the Vancouver audience in a form resistant to form. Although the recordings were edited and reduced in length, they were played in chronological order and were pointedly not musical. When asked, Scott was adamant that his desire to think through an ethics of listening prevented him from imposing any structure on the recordings that might be construed as trivializing, reductive or entertainment-making. He was also adamant that there are poets who are and have been detained at Guantánamo, and who have and will speak to their own experiences. Central to Scott’s listening project is the idea that attentiveness to the suffering of others is both ethical and material: a sonorous experience captured, played and replayed in order to move listeners to physical and conceptual resonances with spaces of restraint, hostility and torture. To hear echoes in empty chambers might also be to imagine them: concrete boxes under harsh light. But what is beyond imagining may too become available

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through listening, in the audience’s sense of discomfort, revulsion or fear; of not wanting to hear; or of wanting to hear too much. In this way, Scott’s project suggests that listening to sound without form, or what Nancy calls “abstract sonority,” might generate insight at the affective, precognitive level.19 That neither Scott nor his audience could anticipate or control these effects also suggests that one of the related insights might be the sudden awareness of our vulnerability to them. In other words—those of Wordsworth—that it is impossible to “bid the ear be still” allows for the realization that we cannot help but feel “Against, or with our will” (“Expostulation and Reply,” lines 18, 20).20 How is it possible to listen in places of trauma? Scott, with the aid of sound recording technology, digital archives and an audiovisual system, provides one answer, and Wordsworth, I am warming up to suggest, provides another. The Romantics, who were “the last generation to go unrecorded,” as Judith Pascoe reminds us, found other ways to fi x voice and sound.21 For Wordsworth, in poems such as “The Solitary Reaper” and “The Power of Music,” preserving voice often means preserving a figure of “low and rustic life” for the Wordsworthian gallery of such figures: adding a Highland laborer and a busker, for example, to his catalogue of the poor, itinerant, mad and destitute.22 Indeed, the “power of music” in the poem of the same name is its ability to bring together a whole crowd of such figures, and to coax pennies out of their pockets and into the busker’s hat. To these I would add the 1803 sonnet “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” as an imperfect fit. Here, a “rural Milk-maid” tending her cow sings near (unbeknownst to her) the underground cell of the imprisoned Haitian leader (line 2).23 Like the song of the solitary reaper, the milkmaid’s song is unknown: she is a figure both pastoral and foreign.24 Unlike the solitary reaper, the milkmaid’s presence is limited to a single line. She serves as a counterpoint to the poem’s focus, which is Louverture, or more precisely, how Louverture listens in a space of trauma, and how it is possible to listen to him. The milkmaid’s oblivious presence throws into relief Louverture as emphatically not a figure for the Wordsworthian gallery. He is represented, rather, in two modes: as a mortal man suffering in solitary confi nement, fearing death and therefore worthy of the reader’s sympathy, and as the source of an uncontainable revolutionary energy, a “Power” that persists in Saint-Domingue and

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elsewhere. It is in this second mode that listening in spaces of trauma turns outward, becoming an att unement to the reverberations of Louverture’s legacy. These reverberations are like sound but are not necessarily sound: on Wordsworth’s account, they are material forces capable of impelling the radical political change by which others will also, surely, be moved. “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” takes as its subject “a figure of intrigue in the British public imagination” at the turn of the nineteenth century.25 Louverture was an enslaved laborer who became Governor-General of SaintDomingue, France’s largest and richest colony. Although civil unrest began as early as 1789, what we now call the Haitian Revolution started in earnest with the 22–23 August 1791 revolt in which Louverture seems almost certainly to have played a part.26 It was not until 1793, however, after England and Spain declared war on France following the violence of the Reign of Terror, that his “meteoric rise” to power truly began.27 Louverture initially took up arms alongside the Spanish forces that had come to take Port-auPrince from the French colonists; however, France, in a bid to regain control, abolished slavery on 20 June 1793 and appealed to this newly freed labor force to enlist in the French army. Defecting to the French, Louverture rose through its military ranks; he eventually helped wage a civil war that united the island under his leadership; and over the next decade, he laid the groundwork for Haiti’s independence in 1804.28 Although Louverture officially declared his allegiance to France while in office, his autonomy and authority seemed, from the French government’s perspective, to pose a threat to French interests, and in 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte brought Louverture to France to be exiled to Fort de Joux, in the Jura Mountains, where he would die of exposure in April of 1803.29 Fort de Joux is approximately 50 kilometers from Neuchâtel, the Swiss lake town that Wordsworth visits near the end of Descriptive Sketches (1793). That Wordsworth knew the area, and that he was actually in France during the Peace of Amiens, at a time when Louverture’s imprisonment was news,30 seems to have suggested to the poet that he write a sonnet about it: TOUSSAINT! the most unhappy Man of Men, Whether the rural Milk-maid by her Cow Sing in thy hearing, or thou liest now

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Alone in some deep dungeon’s earless den, O miserable Chieftain! where and when Wilt thou fi nd patience? Yet die not, be thou Life to thyself in death; with chearful brow Live, loving death, nor let one thought in ten Be painful to thee. Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee, air, earth, and skies! There’s not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee: thou hast great allies: Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man’s unconquerable mind. (1803)31

How does Louverture listen? In the unreality of solitary confi nement, where “dens” have “ears” cut off by injustice, Louverture listens uselessly but not hopelessly, or so the poet-speaker’s urgings seem to suggest. Th rough its strident repetitions of dejection (“most unhappy,” “miserable Chieftain!”), the sonnet establishes that Louverture’s discontent must persist, whether or not he can hear the milkmaid’s song. Yet, while his ability to hear her is contingent (“whether [she] / Sing in [his] hearing . . . [or not]”), her existence is incontrovertible: she remains, like happiness, at a great remove from the prisoner and in ideal form. Recognizing this misery, Wordsworth nevertheless urges Louverture not to give up: to “fi nd patience,” to enjoy his fi nal thoughts and even to meet death cheerfully. By continuing to listen for what he cannot hear (the milkmaid; the pedantic poet-speaker), Louverture would seem to do the only thing left to him—to strain his ears, to struggle, and thus to continue living on. In this context, listening uselessly might be seen to resist the desolation of lost human connections (embodied by the milkmaid) and to shore up Louverture’s belief in the importance of his own life and life’s work (a position reinforced by the poet-speaker). Forcibly injecting optimism into a scene of unknowable suffering, the sonnet is emphatic, even “jarring,” as Kristin Mahlis argues, in its framing of Louverture’s fi nal days and death as somehow generative. Mahlis, who is highly critical of Wordsworth’s juxtaposition of solemn reality with this strange optimism, argues that by “equating” the milkmaid, a “stock pastoral figure,” with Louverture,

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“Wordsworth  .  .  . turns to the irrelevant or the euphemistic in supposed tribute.” Such a contrast, she writes, neither does justice to Louverture nor follows the expected protocol for a legacy sonnet: “Cast in a tragic mode before his virtues are extolled, Toussaint seems more an object of pity than of praise.”32 Th is complaint, which hinges on an idea of tribute as the enunciation of recognizable achievements, nevertheless offers a fitt ing assessment of the poem’s tone and a good summary, I think, of the poet’s likely reaction to Louverture’s imprisonment. The loss of liberty for a man so fiercely committed to preserving it must have seemed, for Wordsworth, a pitiful fate. Yet Mahlis would rather that Wordsworth credit “the leader of a powerful slave revolt in Saint Domingue” with Haitian independence: she wants Wordsworth to name Louverture’s “cause.”33 Instead, Wordsworth offers an account at once more ambivalent and more astute: the feeling of a conceptual disjuncture. Such a disjuncture as arises, perhaps, from the jailing of one military dictator by another; or from the fact that Louverture, a free man in Saint-Domingue, must be summoned to France to be jailed, at a time when, famously, “there [were] no slaves in France.”34 Rather than enumerate his present victories, which, in 1803 did not yet include an independent Haiti, the sonnet asks how victories unmet will become the achievements of a legacy, and it seems to ask, how is it possible, now that Louverture is very probably fated to die, to continue to listen to him? The milkmaid, who stands as geographically proximate to Louverture as it is possible to be, appears not to listen: she remains oblivious to his suffering. The distance between them is physically slight but conceptually vast, and the tentative thread of her singing is only ambivalently capable of traversing it. Rather than “equating this stock pastoral figure” with Louverture, the milkmaid, I would argue, is a synecdoche who stands bathetically for the European population in general.35 She is a figure for those who live on without realizing their proximity to suffering. Leaning heavily on enumeration as a form of paying tribute, Mahlis underestimates the power of the alternative relational dynamic enacted by this juxtaposition. While she is right to align the privileged white male poet with a colonial perspective, Mahlis is too quick to dismiss Wordsworth’s investment in radical political change. In the sonnet’s second part,

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Louverture’s isolation and discontent coalesce into a radical inversion of interiority and exteriority that is anything but apolitical. The “unhapp[iness],” “misery” and “pain,” with which Wordsworth imagines Louverture struggling are replaced with forces more enduring, powerful and externalizable: “Thou hast left behind / Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies.” These lines, by seeming to rewrite Louverture’s famous declaration as he was forced on board the ship Le Héros on 7 June 1802, bound for exile in France—“By overthrowing me you have only cut down the trunk of the tree of liberty of the blacks; it will grow back by the roots, which are deep and numerous”—turn man to cause.36 While Wordsworth continues to address Louverture throughout this part of the sonnet (“thou hast great allies; / Thy friends are exultations”), there emerges a parallel sense of the Haitian leader’s diminishing personhood, as his life and liberty are subsumed by natural forces that will continue the work that he has begun. The sonnet turns outward, directing these forces towards that unseen, unheard and previously unreachable general population. While receiving inspiration on “the common wind” is a familiar enough Wordsworthian trope, the strength of these particular passions—“exultations, agonies, / And love”— speak of a more commanding forcefulness, one that Wordsworth treats as befitt ing the immortality of such a powerful figure as Louverture. Continuing to move populations as his “great allies,” the radical politics of forceful feeling that Wordsworth here imagines changes minds by moving bodies. Although Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson have critiqued a Wordsworthian imagination that “displaces,” for McGann, and “escapes,” for Levinson, painful social realities, more recent criticism, including from Levinson herself, has reclaimed the ethical dimensions of the poet’s specters and silences.37 The ghost-like figures in many of Wordsworth’s poems David Simpson sees as reflections of a poet grappling with alienating modernity and as indications of an ethical att itude that Simpson calls “social concern.”38 Levinson’s radical materialist rereadings, particularly of “A slumber did my spirit seal,” have expanded Wordsworth’s philosophical ambitions to include the Spinozist premise that “mind and matter are cognitively but not actually distinct” in order to explore, in that poem, the strange fact of Lucy’s continued feeling even after death, as she continues to

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be moved as part of the earth’s diurnal motions.39 Indeed, it should not escape our notice that the imagery and cadences of “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” are reminiscent of the Lucy poem: the diurnal forces of “air, earth, and skies” mirroring those of “rocks and stones and trees!” (line 8).40 In these lines, the category confusion that comes from cataloguing similarity among difference is also present: “air . . . and skies” echoing “rocks, and stones.” Such doublings, according to Levinson, “signpost” Spinoza by reinforcing the radical nondistinction between conventionally separable things (mind and matter, for instance) upon which the philosopher’s system depends.41 What’s left, in “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” is not the fi xed memory of a great man’s mind, but “Man’s unconquerable mind”: an idea of mind as matter that does not end at death, but perseveres, as in Spinoza’s philosophy, as affections that move us without knowledge of their cause.42 “There’s not a breathing of the common wind / That will forget thee” presumes that whoever is doing the breathing is also doing the remembering, in an equation of matter with mind that seems to transform the common wind into the collective breath of the common people, who are, like the wind, everywhere and all around. Read in this tautological way, the lines might seem to forecast the insurrectionary activity that Julius Scott documents among enslaved and colonized peoples throughout the Caribbean. They might refer to the circulation of revolutionary ideas by Black and Brown people striving for emancipation and independence, and given the poem’s English-speaking readership, the lines might conjure too the abolitionist potential of those in Britain and elsewhere who have yet to take up the cause. Yet at the same time, speculations such as these cannot, indeed should not, absolve Wordsworth of his privileged position—what Ian Baucom identifies as an att itude of moral “witness” or “modern historical observer”—nor can they dispense with the objectifying gaze central to that att itude.43 Wordsworth’s confident mapping of emancipatory progress onto a situation of imprisonment and torture turns suffering into sacrifice, all the while insisting that Louverture, with just a litt le reminding, will come to value the political significance of his death over the preservation of his actual life. By turning man to cause, “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” dehumanizes and objectifies, and it likewise elaborates deep corporeal concerns with

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the inextricability of subjects from the worlds they inhabit, eagerly foretelling the global affects (“exultations, agonies, / And love”) animated by this legacy. That experiencing these border-crossing political affects requires their reembodiment by those whom Louverture will leave behind suggests that, for Wordsworth, to be a revolutionary is to be revolved—spun by vaster motions, like Lucy, who is “Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course,” or like Louverture, who, in his soon-to-be posthumous state, is whirled round in the course of making history. Unity and Safety

It’s not enough to link provocative poetic forms to border-crossing political affects: we must examine who is charged with being moved by these forces, particularly during times of crisis. Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester, calls upon Britain’s northern textile workers—whose industry depends on enslaved cotton producers in American and West Indian plantations—to “Stand,” “calm and resolute” in the face of mass panic and violence (line 319).44 Like Wordsworth, Shelley figures political feeling that persists, even past death, as a force at once physical and inspirational; Shelley is like Wordsworth too in that he encourages change-makers to meet state-sanctioned violence with equanimity—to calmly trade personal safety for transpersonal unity. While blanket statements about the inevitability of universal liberty envisioned by either poem would smother differences of race and class in the idealized folds of Enlightenment progress, and clearly what Shelley calls wage-slavery is not the same as enslavement, reading these poems in opposition and succession nevertheless reveals Romantic thinking about revolutionary ideas and affects that transform personal trauma into impersonal potential on a global scale. Put another way, like Wordsworth’s contrast between Louverture and the milkmaid, there is friction too in this chapter’s central juxtaposition, which rubs presumptions about the human condition up against speculations about a posthuman one. I will have more to say about this in this book’s Coda, which explores the ambiguous status of the milkmaid’s own naïve (un)affectability in light of intergenerational trauma and the systemic mass murder of Black people that continues to this day, but for now, one

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answer to the question of who takes on the burden of being moved by political affects to suffer and strive in Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s poems is, simply, those who are already vulnerable to dominant structures of power. Shelley’s Mask is a poetic response to the bloodshed that took place during a 16 August 1819 rally at which workers and their families gathered in support of parliamentary reforms that would have helped to alleviate their poverty. When the local yeomanry’s attempt to disperse the crowd turned into a deadly attack, between ten and twenty people were killed and many dozens more wounded.45 The Mask likely formed part of a planned collection that Shelley envisioned to “awaken & direct the imagination of the reformers” towards continued organizing and agitating for change, and it has been taken by critics as an exemplary instance of political poetry.46 In the poem, political fervor circulates. It arrives at the Shelleys’ residence in Italy on “a voice from over the Sea” (often interpreted as an English newspaper) and returns to the English “Nation” as a poetic refrain “Heard again— again—again—” (lines 2, 360, 367).47 Like the gusts that stir the leaves (of books and trees) in “Ode to the West Wind,” these border-crossing messages are at once suggestive of the circulation of ideas in print and powerfully audible and affective (a “voice” of “great power”; “Eloquent, oracular; / A volcano heard afar” [lines 2‒3, 362–63]). They remind us that other kinds of provocative texts, from newspaper reports and published letters to perhaps some of the most directly provoking of political formats, the pamphlet and broadside poster, strove to inspire and direct action during this period in immediate, pragmatic ways.48 Shelley, infamous scribe of The Necessity of Atheism (1811) and, during his Irish sojourn in 1812, writer and distributor of radical pamphlets strewn from balconies, was no stranger to such texts. Although Leigh Hunt would self-censor The Mask until 1832 for fear of “prosecution for libel, sedition, or treason” if he published it in the Examiner in Autumn 1819 as Shelley had hoped, the poem nevertheless raises concerns about the political necessity of personal risk that were also playing out in the public discourses surrounding the event that would come to be called the Peterloo Massacre.49 In the immediate aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre, then generally presented as the shocking events of 16 August 1819, urgent responses shaped

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something of a public relations batt le between industry and gentry in the local and national press. Urgent was the need to defi ne and categorize, since whatever words named the events—whether military exercise or meeting, peace-keeping action or murderous rampage—would determine the day’s historical significance and political clout. In newspapers and letters, the conservative response was deft . While we respect the right of peaceable assembly to discuss issues, they claimed, on St. Peter’s Field there was an abuse of this right: the number of attendees made true discussion impossible; the crowd was too riled up to constitute a peaceable assembly; the event seemed more like a military exercise than a meeting.50 “Surely it is absurd,” opined one commentator in a letter to the editor of the New Times, “as well as useless, to convene meetings to establish, strengthen, or confi rm a purpose or principal [sic] assented to by all, high & low, rich & poor, Whig & Tory, Reformist, Non Reformist, Anarchist & AntiAnarchist. But this concession does not convey another—namely that the people may meet for a different, and, as I contend, illegal purpose, to alarm, to intimidate, to overawe.”51 As a justification for the state-sanctioned violence that ensued, this was the bottom line: the Reformers’ so-called meeting could not possibly have been productive as a meeting. It was instead a deliberate threat to civil society, since its real goal was to force change through other means. The vocabulary that existed in 1819 for describing those means did not yet include the word protest, but other terms—petition, assembly and, most often, meeting—were used by the Reformers to frame their actions and agenda.52 Their purpose was to petition for better wages and lower taxes by assembling in order to make visible their suffering. Henry “Orator” Hunt was slated to speak to these goals and to argue that greater parliamentary representation on behalf of the working classes would achieve them. In the massacre’s aftermath, the Reformers responded to the Tory rebukes not by defending the legitimacy of their meeting as a meeting (one capable of productive discussion, as per the newspapers’ semantic quarrel), but rather by proposing to increase future meetings’ size and scope. A broadside dated 29 October 1819 argues that a network of coordinated meetings in England, Scotland and Ireland is a “safe way” to proceed; the broadside implores every Reform society “to call their Meetings in Future all on one and the

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same Day, then it would be impossible to MURDER ALL, as the Murderers could not be at all places at once.”53 We should pause to consider what this statement concedes on the part of the Reformers. The difference between “it would be impossible to murder any” and “and it would be impossible to murder all” hitches political efficacy to human sacrifice. It accepts that violence will continue, and in a hyperbolic tone keyed to the terror of recent bloodshed, it assumes that safety in numbers means lessening the probability that any one person will be hurt even if someone will be. In order to make this claim, the broadside presumes a limited number of murderers and a much greater number of Reformers. Human lives become chances to live, in an equivocal promise that reads as alternatively optimistic and deadly. Here is a cynical injunction that aims to rouse and inspire nevertheless, and which seems to predict another rousing declaration: The Mask’s repeated call for the English working poor and their allies to “Rise like lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number”: for “Ye are many—they are few” (lines 151–52, 155; repeated at 368–69, 372). By seeming to align with the Reformers’ cold logic of probable safety and assured violence, Shelley’s Mask also seems to register the abysmal concession that is at the core of such arguments for the political necessity of collective action: people will die in the attempt. No matter if part of what rationalizes such arguments is that people are dying already—of hunger and disease, of the inhumane conditions in factories, workhouses and even the cottages in which they live. The decision to act together, and to act now, invites death more swift ly and with more violence. In The Mask’s fi nal stanzas, it calls upon the Reformers to let the “tyrants” “Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew,— / What they like, that let them do,” for only then “the blood thus shed will speak” (lines 340–44, 350). The difference that collective action makes, and that Shelley’s poem, like the broadside, reinforces, is the chance for empowerment that unity affords. For the Reformers, unity is stability and strength, a position for drawing yet more Reform societies to assemble. The broadside therefore braces its call for coordinated meetings by dismissing a rumor that “the Union is divided and broken up” as a “notorious . . . falsehood” spread by the Reformers’ enemies to weaken their

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image.54 (Indeed, even the writer of the letter to the editor of the New Times recognizes unity’s importance when he archly “concedes” the “absurdity” of meeting to rally opposing groups, from high and low, etc.55) Whether understood as uncountable drops of blood all speaking as one voice, or as the consolidation of local Reform societies into a coordinated movement, unity— that increasingly empty watchword in today’s rhetoric of renewal following acts of violence—here names the empowerment that, as in Spinoza’s philosophy, comes from joining with those who agree with one’s cause. Shelley’s interest in Spinoza is well established. Donald Reiman asserts that it “dated from at least January 1811 and flourished until the end of his life,” constituting an influence on Shelley “as profound” as that of Spinoza on Coleridge.56 In Timothy Morton’s identification of a Spinozist scaffolding in the notes to Queen Mab (1813), he discovers “everything in [Shelley’s] later work is here, from carefully worked-out literary topics to sequences of philosophical thinking on a variety of themes that would preoccupy Shelley for the rest of his life.”57 One such theme, “the delusions of free-will” (Shelley’s own phrase), Morton links to conatus, and to Shelley’s suggestion, in Note 12, that all beings, from “vipers” to “tygers,” are constrained by their natures to strive in certain ways: “from a wide enough perspective, there are not free agents acting on unfree ones, but instead a push-pull of forces in a vast system,” summarizes Morton.58 Such an ecology of conative drives is easy enough to imagine in the predatory animal kingdom; yet as Hasana Sharp reminds us, affections such as bodily hunger are not the only “push-pull of forces” at work. For Spinoza, even thinking is “an active power of being”: “something that nature does” rather than something that individual minds freely do.59 Sharp’s argument, which is that through the lens of the Ethics, “Ideology critique . . . becomes a project of ascertaining particular disabling assemblages of thought, which must be countered through the mobilization of alternative constellations of thinking force,” helps illuminate Shelley’s view of unity in The Mask as logically similar to, but metaphysically distinct from, that of the Reformers in their broadside.60 Although poem’s and poster’s shared concern with unity strengthens The Mask’s resonance with what Joshua Clover, referencing Shelley’s “Ye are many,” regards as the emergence “of the many” in the development of a class

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consciousness proper to the labor strike—the radically transpersonal solidarity of coordinated “thinking force” that Shelley’s poem envisions transforms more than just the Reformers’ self-understandings.61 Indeed, one reason to dwell on the context offered by the broadside is that it challenges a basic assumption that critics have tended to share about The Mask’s political provocations: that its appeals to the “many” rest on ideals of nonviolence or violence reduction (“passive resistance,” or as Matthew Borushko puts it, “the ethical position of least violence”).62 It therefore follows that, when blood and slaughter aerosolize into revolutionary affects, when they “steam up like inspiration” (line 361), the poem’s “ambivalence” about the need for violence turns “potentially dangerous,” as Stephen C. Behrendt writes.63 Instead, by lett ing us recognize that the logic of probable safety and assured violence does not aim to lessen violence but merely to reduce the risk to any one person (leaving the overall amount of violence unchanged), the broadside helps us see that the ethical concession Shelley’s poem makes is, rather, that it calls for more immediate and more public violence in pursuit of greater unity. By reframing the “collective dimensions” of political assembly in terms of Spinoza’s “transpersonal accumulation of ideal power that includes human as well as nonhuman beings,” we can reinterpret Shelleyan unity in The Mask as a conative assemblage of ideas that are propulsive and transformative because they are accumulative.64 Doing so suggests an answer to Amanda Jo Goldstein, who, in observing how the “material evidence of the political clash [in the poem] . . . is absorbed and recirculated through atmospheric, geologic, and metabolic cycles,” asks: “Why would Shelley summon the perspective of natural history, an epistemic orientation now faulted precisely for its lack of historical consciousness, to produce what he considered a ‘wholly political’ condemnation of an event of national history?”65 Because, we might reply, from Shelley’s Spinozist perspective, the national is an idea of the natural, which emerges through the amassing of ideas into assemblages capable of exerting their influence in and as thinking force. Such thinking force emerges through the displacement and reorganization of workers’ relations to physical shelters that prevent unity (factories, cottages, workhouses), which reconstitute into an idea that, Shelley states, is freedom: the idea of home.

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Un-homed in Shelley’s Mask

In The Mask, those who comprise the “many” are un-homed when they spend their days in factories, workhouses, cottages and other sites of compelled labor. The poem commences with a parade of ghastly allegories in which abstractions, such as Murder and Fraud, dress as well-known government officials, from the Foreign Secretary to the Lord Chancellor and the Prince Regent himself, all led by Anarchy, who rides a blood-splattered horse.66 As they march from place to place, causing terror and ruin, death and destruction, the parade of allegories also absorbs local cronies in the form of lawmakers and law enforcers, whose actions further impoverish and brutalize those who toil for subsistence under their watch. Shelley calls these conditions “slavery,” and describes their peculiar effects on the bodies of workers, who seem to transform in order to be wielded by the very tools with which the tyrannical state would have them do their work: “[Slavery] ‘Tis to work and have such pay As just keeps life from day to day In your limbs, as in a cell For the tyrants’ use to dwell “So that ye for them are made Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade, With or without your own will bent To their defence and nourishment. (lines 160– 67)

These lines, spoken in the voice (or perhaps straight from the heart) of the English soil that births the nation, link penurious wages to physical weakness, which is then compared to imprisonment. The two comparisons (both turning on “as,” though only one is a simile) pile up, creating in the caesura after “limbs” some slippage between workers as body parts and workers as people. Th is allows “them” in the stanza that follows to be read alternately as the tyrants (in which case people are made for tyrants’ use) or as the tools (in which case tools use body parts, rather than people using tools). Either way, workers’ lack of freedom is clear: under these conditions, working bodies are “as in a cell.”

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Leaving work isn’t going home when your body is a prison. For the laboring class, not to live freely, even in their own bodies, is to occupy “living graves” (line 210). The figure conjures those Foucauldian “docile bodies” who dwell in a perpetual state of readiness to work, remaining ever-att uned to the wills of authorities.67 From the Spinozist view, as Anarchy’s followers pursue their own empowerment (nourishment, security, comfort), they move workers to negative affective states (undernourishment, insecurity, discomfort), which reinforce their subjection. “With or without [their] own will bent,” Shelley writes, workers will work. The inextricability of body and mind emerges in the correlation of willpower and body-power, where the worker who bends to the tyrant’s appetites and desires is also a synecdoche, “limbs,” which bend into the shapes of the tools that they both wield and are. Like Wordsworth’s “Against, or with our will,” Shelley’s lines imply that we are all subject to impressions, but the ruthlessness and relentlessness of these forces, their chronic effects, are in this case entirely more incapacitating. In The Mask, the exhausted worker becomes “a slave in soul,” which is “to hold no strong controul / Over your own wills, but be / All that others make of ye” (lines 184, 185–87). Perhaps we can imagine these figures bending too in dejection, shoulders slumped, as they come to know their “lack of power to moderate and restrain the affects” for what it is: Spinoza’s defi nition of “bondage” and Shelley’s of slavery.68 Of course, for Spinoza “bondage” is the condition of all things and, I want again to stress, all ideas. In a section titled “Of Human Bondage; or, the Power of the Affects,” Spinoza establishes that our imaginations can deceive us even when we know better, and he gives the sun’s distance from the earth for an example. Although we know that the distance is vast, we nevertheless feel a sense of intimacy with the sun, since it warms us, and thus we imagine the sun’s closeness. “And so it is with other imaginations by which the mind is deceived,” explains Spinoza, “they are not contrary to the true, and do not disappear in its presence”; we can know the sun is far and feel the sun is near simultaneously. Our false imaginings “do not disappear through the presence of the true insofar as it is true, but because there occur others, stronger than them, which exclude the present existence of the things we imagine.”69 That an idea is true does not make it powerful. For an idea

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to gain momentum and become persuasive, it is more important that it affect minds more strongly than that it becomes more verifiable or precise. For Sharp, this insight demonstrates why the mind is not free and autonomous, but is “a radically dependent singular thing, an idea composed of many ideas, which desires to persevere in being.” The mind, which we conceptualize as distinct from the body but in reality comprises the same substance (hence “an idea composed of many ideas”), affects and is affected by other minds, and it is also conative. The mind “can only preserve and enhance its being by coordinating its activity and undergoing enabling encounters with other ambient ideas.”70 If those ambient ideas happen to be true, then we will believe in true ideas; if those ambient ideas happen to be false, then we will believe in false ideas. In the same way we are often ignorant of the forces that move our bodies, we are often ignorant of forces that move our minds. Yet in Spinoza’s Ethics this lack of knowledge may be a deficit from which we can increase our freedom, if we can learn to recognize how ideas move us—that is, how ideas gain power in our minds and in the minds of others. Spinoza’s concept of freedom “cannot be understood as a transcendence or escape from determination, but must be produced through an immanent displacement and reorganization of one’s constituent relations with others, including other ideas.”71 The problem Shelley identifies is that workers endure such extremes of deprivation and oppression that they have no energetic reserves from which to coordinate their exposure to external forces—a condition that Shelley recognizes as a state of homelessness: “Birds fi nd rest, in narrow nest When weary of their winged quest; Beasts fi nd fare, in woody lair When storm and snow are in the air. “Asses, swine, have litter spread And with fitt ing food are fed; All things have a home but one— Thou, Oh, Englishman, hast none! (lines 197–204)

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Here Shelley describes wild animals, presumably the most free, as able to organize their activities and encounters in ways that are conducive to their well-being because they have homes: “weary” birds “rest,” and beasts take shelter during a storm. Domesticated farm animals, represented as relatively less free, still receive “fitt ing food” and shelter, which are the barnyard homes that, ironically enough, members of the chronically undernourished working class likely provide for them. Finally, it is the Englishman, prisoner in his own body, who has no home—no place to “rest” or “fi nd fare.” In The Mask, home is more than physical shelter: it is a coincidence of idea and thing, a nexus of generative conditions through which a conative body-mind might fi nd equilibrium. For the working poor, Shelley characterizes home as a modest abode, whose freedom he describes in terms of physical and psychological benefits: “What art thou Freedom? . . .  .

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“For the labourer thou art bread, And a comely table spread From his daily labour come In a neat and happy home. (lines 209, 217–20)

In equating freedom with “bread” and “a comely table,” “in a neat and happy home,” Shelley places nourishment and rest inside the physical space of home, but he also enfolds the idea of home: welcoming and warm, fi lled with good feeling. No matter how humble, Shelley regards home as enabling mental and emotional empowerments. When a “cot,” or cottage, turns into a home, suddenly such life-affi rming pursuits as “Science, Poetry and Thought” become “lamps” that have the power to “make the lot / Of the dwellers in a cot / So serene, they curse it not” (lines 254–57). Education and self-improvement; “Spirit, Patience, Gentleness”—these are the results of having a home, declares Shelley, and they are also ideas that can strengthen other ideas and ultimately prevent the tyrannical abuses that have “wasted” England’s “treasure,” “toil and blood” (lines 258, 239, 242).

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Perhaps this glorification of home is unsurprising, given that Shelley wrote The Mask from self-imposed exile in Livorno. Certainly his many failed attempts to create a utopic “commune of like spirits” motivated numerous relocations in pursuit of fresh starts; from England to Wales to Switzerland to Italy, Shelley, with his family, friends and employees, made temporary homes under the auspices of his “belief in the political force of the small, radical community,” even as his lost inheritance and claim to his family estate remained sources of tension.72 The Mask begins by establishing the poet’s distance from home, framing its composition as the result of a visitation from afar: “As I lay asleep in Italy,” a “voice . . . / . . . with great power . . . forth led me / To walk in the visions of Poesy” (lines 1–4). For Susan Wolfson, this dream-frame ultimately renders whatever democratic future Shelley envisions part of that fantasy.73 But if Shelley’s biography teaches that the force of one person’s belief in an idea is not enough to make it so, it also returns us to the arbitrary power of ideas, whose prominence can increase whether or not they are true, or good, or justified. “Perfection and imperfection,” Spinoza writes, “are only modes of thinking, that is, notions we are accustomed to feign because” we compare one thing to another, fi nding more perfect that which is more powerful.74 In The Mask’s terrifying parade, Anarchy is an idea whose power exists in relation to other enabling ideas and their sycophants and cronies.75 The result is that it is not just the “many” who are un-homed by Anarchy, and who bend in service to his will. When the gruesome pageant comes to “London town,” those in the professional upper-middle classes also come out to pay their respects: the yeoman cavalry, or local mounted police, whom Shelley calls “hired Murderers,” “with pomp to meet him came / Clothed in arms like blood and flame” (lines 53, 58–60). “Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,” also leave their stations, meeting Anarchy with “their pale brows bowed” to “the earth” (lines 66–67). All this energizes Anarchy, who makes a show of “bow[ing] and grin[ning]” to his new subjects, before installing himself in the grandest house of all: “For [Anarchy] knew the Palaces / Of our Kings were rightly his” (lines 75, 78–79). Even a King of England can be un-homed. Anarchy gains influence not by destroying freedom but by rearranging and redistributing it: drawing

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individuals away from the freedom, home, that best allows them to resist him. When the figure called Hope, who “looked more like Despair,” prostrates herself “in the street, / Right before the horses’ feet” and awaits “Murder, Fraud and Anarchy,” all seems lost (lines 88, 98–99, 101). Yet, at the moment of Hope’s sacrifice, “between her and her foes / A mist, a light, an image rose,” and another “Shape” appears (lines 102–103, 110). The Shape transforms the scene, allowing Hope to triumph, and it does so through a series of similes: As flowers beneath May’s footstep waken, As stars from Night’s loose hair are shaken, As waves arise when loud winds call, Thoughts sprung where’er that step did fall. (lines 122–25)

Thoughts spring up as do flowers, stars and waves. The Shape rearranges and redistributes too, in this case altering the relation of the assembled Reformers (by then a “prostrate multitude”) to ideas, including the idea of hope, in ways that disempower Anarchy profoundly enough to leave him “dead earth upon the earth” (line 131). “A sense awakening and yet tender” moves the crowd, and they “heard and felt” the imperative to “Shake [their] chains to Earth like dew” (lines 136, 137, 153). That the Shape does all this by figuring, three times, what thought is like reveals the Shape’s poetical nature, which does not invent language but reorders and recombines it, transforming its meanings to include grassroots resistance strong enough to revive Hope. In line with Spinoza, the similes imply that it is not individual minds but nature that generates these thoughts, since what is like thought (flowers, stars, waves) is in each case the effects of natural causes (spring, nightt ime, wind). Moreover, ideas become more powerful by their coordination with other, similar ideas, which anaphora here emphasizes (As . . . / As . . . / As . . .). No matter how empowering these thoughts, they can succeed—can “exclude the present existence of ” other, disempowering thoughts—only if they coordinate with other ambient ideas that increase their stability and strength.76 Put another way: in Shelley’s poem, democratic reform is nature’s idea. Like the ironic contrast with which “Peterloo” won the public relations batt le by its alluding to the Tories’ pride in their victory at Waterloo (and,

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quite literally, making history out of a formal provocation, a portmanteau), Shelley’s Mask compresses and combines in order to galvanize. Its metaphors and similes transform subsistence living into imprisonment and home into freedom. Yet, by the poem’s fi nal stanza, its “visions of Poesy” have led neither to the poet’s return home to England to aid the Reformers (imagined or otherwise), nor to the fortification of a nation of workers safely ensconced in homes. Instead, the thoughts that spring up in the Shape’s footsteps rally the working poor to leave the shelters that, in some cases, had been merely masquerading as homes all along: “From every hut, village and town,” “From the workhouse and the prison,” “From the haunts of daily life,” and “Lastly from the palaces,” all should leave in order to Let a great Assembly be Of the fearless and the free On some spot of English ground Where the plains stretch wide around. (lines 272, 275, 279, 283, 262– 65)

It is here, out in the open, that The Mask calls upon the Reformers and their allies to stand fi rm and nonreactive, “With folded arms and steady eyes,” even while those around them might be killed (line 344). Along with the transformational capacities of figurative language, repetition and refrain are formal provocations by which Shelley encourages collective action, and as many critics have noted, the poem’s political afterlife has depended on them.77 The fi rst call to “Shake your chains to earth” came in the immediate aftermath of Hope’s return, but it now repeats at the poem’s conclusion: “And that slaughter to the Nation Shall steam up like inspiration, Eloquent, oracular; A volcano heard afar. “And these words shall then become Like oppression’s thundered doom Ringing through each heart and brain, Heard again—again—again—

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“Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number— Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you— Ye are many—they are few.” (lines 360–72).

In these stanzas, unity materializes as changes of state—from blood to voice, from slaughter to steam—that result from the Reformers bearing to be moved by “those who fi rst should violate” the law, their assembly and, most chillingly, their bodies (line 336). Simile and metaphor enact the transformations for which the poem’s rousing declarations call, and border-crossing political affects take on all sorts of guises: changes in air pressure, wind and weather; condensation and evaporation; forces of feeling, voice and breath. These atmospheres transform into patterns of reference and resemblance that bear repeating “again—again—again—” as they seem to march into a future that, sooner for some Reformers than for others, will be an unavoidably posthumous existence. As in Wordsworth’s expressions of Louverture’s material legacy, these transformations of persons into forces of feeling strongly imply affect’s revolutionary potential. By transforming rather than destroying “oppression’s thundered doom,” Shelley’s figures seem to indicate once more a Spinozist conception of mind that does not end at the body’s death but persists eternally as an idea of God in/as nature.78 It might seem strange that to transform “oppression’s thundered doom” into “words” that are “like” it in power (“Ringing through each heart and brain”) but contrary in effect requires exposure to the elements. Scholars have typically focused on the importance of dreams and awakening in these stanzas, where “Rise like lions after slumber” “articulates a strength within the multitude that has gone unapprehended even by them,” and “Shake your chains to earth like dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you—,” “reveals that [this] shaking off occurs to the extent that the renewing properties of dew accompany a person’s or people’s sleep.”79 As Julie Carlson shows, the simile’s enjambment “corrects an initial misimpression (chains are like dew)” by asking us to “read through to a different conclusion”: that of dew formation accompanying renewal through sleep.80 To this we must add that the chains’ shake-ability is a function not just of sleeping, but of sleeping out of

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doors, where dew condenses out of the cooler night air, lett ing the Reformers see and feel the shackles that, presumably, had been surrounding them as water vapor all along. Only when they are outside the confi ning walls of dirty factories or unlivable huts does oppression—an aerosolized heaviness, like humidity—become apprehensible to the Reformers as something that can be shaken off when it transforms into the dew that also signals the “renewing properties” of sleep and of natural cycles like the earth’s rotation, the weather and the chemical properties of H2O.81 Th rough the Shape’s poetical intervention, democratic reform has already emerged as an idea of nature that springs up like flowers, stars or waves. Newly exposed to the natural cycles of sleep and waking, night and morning, bedewed Reformers might come to recognize the inverse: that oppression is also an idea of nature. In one way, this would be the bondage that, for Spinoza, renders all minds “naturally and necessarily subject to other minds, along with infi nitely many other ideas within the productive and infi nite power of thought.”82 However, in another, more optimistic and revelatory way, for the Reformers standing on “some spot of English ground / Where the plains stretch wide around,” this would be a recognition which signals that “the mobilization of alternative constellations of thinking force” against “disabling assemblages of thought” has even now built enough momentum to give insurrectionary ideas a chance (lines 262– 65).83 The assembly already stands beyond the borders of what was once presumed to be known. Thus, even though the force of an individual’s belief that their “hut” is a home is not enough to make it so, the force of these assembled body-minds’ reassertions of their right to the home that is freedom here proceeds with a momentum that comes of having already overstepped the boundaries—doorsteps, vestibules, entranceways—of an illusory freedom in order to get there. Conclusion

In a 12 December 1819 issue of the Examiner, Leigh Hunt defends the Reformers’ right to assemble, including and especially their right to hold simultaneous meetings, and he does so through a series of rhetorical questions that, for Mary Fairclough, “conjures a disturbing picture”:

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[I]f all England could assemble and hear a man make an address to his countrymen, it has a right to form one gigantic multitude. We allow that great multitudes present an aspect of alarming physical power; but whom do they alarm, and in what sort of times? Have not the Governors alarming physical power in their hands? Have not the Ministers at this very moment a most alarming and unconstitutional physical power at their service . . . in the shape of a Standing Army? Now it is a part of the very essence of the British Constitution, that the people should have a . . . conscious ability to oppose the aspect of their own physical power to those who would overawe them with theirs.84

Fairclough is struck by these lines’ resonance with another instance in which Hunt “casts the reformers as the hordes of hell, not to demonize such action but to indicate the overawing power of their collective numbers.”85 I’ll agree that the passage’s fourfold repetition of “physical power” in as many sentences emphasizes numerousness as a show of bodily force, whose “alarming” spectacle cuts both ways: both the physical power wielded by the authorities and that of the Reformers have the potential to “overawe.” Yet the vital distinction between these groups is that the people enact their “conscious ability” to gather, while the standing army is “in [the] hands” of the Governors and “at [the] service” of the Ministers. As Hunt goes on to declare, if the people’s right to assemble “is not the fact, then . . . freedom is to live and breathe at the discretion of the Governors.”86 For Hunt, as for Shelley, freedom emerges as and through the thinking force that fundamentally distinguishes one sublime spectacle (citizens gathered in “one gigantic multitude”) from another (a phalanx of yeoman cavalry). Indeed, what should disturb us more about Hunt’s vision is the apparent unconsciousness of the standing army, which allows itself to be so wielded. To fight and stop what Hunt calls “a shallow tyranny” “might cost a stream of blood.”87 Shelley’s Mask encourages individuals to court violence for the sake of unity, in a brutal display which maps, in some ways, onto the Reformers’ own dreadful calculations about the political necessity of personal risk. As the broadside frames it, “murder” will happen—not to “all,” but certainly to some of those who are dispersed-yet-unified by local meetings held all on the same day. The difference, of course, is that when Shelley

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reinterprets individually vulnerable people as an “unvanquishable” multitude, he does so in poetic figures which rearrange and redistribute rather than destroy; the blood that Hunt thinks freedom from tyranny must “cost” is not, to tweak the monetary metaphor, an irretrievably sunk cost for Shelley but quite the opposite (line 369). “[S]laughter” “steam[s] up,” rising like the promise of an emancipatory idea not yet spent—becoming, claims the poet, “like inspiration” (lines 360–61). Newly circulatory, such an aerosolized assemblage of thinking force implies that no revolutionary power is lost even if any person’s life is. Deadly collective action turns out to be both a cause and effect of collective action turned deadly, in a Spinozistic refusal to determine fi rst causes or last effects that might return us to another poem animated by posthumous renewals. In and beyond Wordsworth’s sonnet, the political feeling that continues to be inspired (and expired) as “a breathing of the common wind” galvanizes the fight for Haitian self-determination even for those, I have argued, who know not why they are moved. For these Romantic poets, the global force of ideas and affects suggest that affective boundary-crossing’s figurative power (like wind, like inspiration, like breath) extends beyond any poet’s individual capacity to describe the conditions of political possibility—indicating, perhaps, that the very winds of revolutionary change are an idea of God in/as nature too.

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Provocation’s Ends

T h i s b o ok c r y s ta l i z e d f or m e in 2015, with Jordan Scott’s Vancouver talk that would become his Clearance Process (2016) and a question about what it means to bear being moved—whether compelled to listen to what we do not want to hear; believing, under tyranny, what we would not choose to think; or risking, for freedom’s sake, what we never hoped to concede. By “bearing to be moved” I am aiming to capture the precognitive but nonetheless experiential conditions through which we, and all things, persist conatively; I want to conclude by reflecting once more on how conative striving occurs at the same time as the undergoing of inescapable forces that buffet and propel. For, with the prison at Guantánamo Bay still open and abuses of power churning the news cycle every day, the Romanticism that Spinoza’s Ethics has helped this investigation frame cannot have emerged but through the endurance of this present. These “five summers, with the length / Of five long winters” have borne injustice after injustice, protest after protest.1 The verb “to bear” implies resilience as well as resistance (“to suffer pain”; “to be patient”), but it also, in its transitive sense, describes a transferable, social kind of strength, such as when we bear another’s burden or bear something or someone in mind.2 In response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020, and informed by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, 175

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Claudia Rankine’s poem for the New York Times Book Review, “Weather” (2020), sees the burden of our political climate and raises us the weather: a system, not an atmosphere. She writes, “I say weather but I mean / a form of governing that deals out death / and names it living” (lines 23–25).3 As Shelley saw Anarchy, Rankine sees tyranny’s power as having no correlation with truth. Equate “making a living” with “life” often enough, and the idea justifies any means necessary to protect the status quo. Also like The Mask, Rankine’s poem demands that readers listen, believe and risk. Floyd’s death is “a call / to protest, fi re, glass, say their names, say / their names, white silence equals violence” (lines 13–15). To replace tyranny with another idea, like justice, requires the persuasive force of a white majority willing to replace what they imagine about the police with what the names of Black people killed by the police allow them to know.4 Yet the difference from Shelley’s Mask, and, indeed, from many of the poems this book has examined, is not just Rankine’s recognition of the unequal distribution of disempowering affects—from police brutality to the undue “weathering” of Black life under political, social and economic adversity—but also her insistence that this unequal burden makes the difference between those who can and do bear being moved (“to suffer pain”; “to be patient”) and those who ought to bear being moved on others’ behalf (“to support, to keep from falling”).5 By analyzing how Romantic poets intervene, affectively and aesthetically, in readerly expectations of form and genre, this book has shown how provocations disrupt and invite, disturb and compel—interrupting or suspending or retreating in ways that ask readers to orient themselves, materially and socially, in relation to literary experiences that are at once virtual and embodied. Poets develop these dynamics of activity and receptivity with various strategic interests, from Charlotte Smith’s refusal of a normative concept of hope that links moral action to sympathy for women’s suffering, to Keats’s desire for affective reciprocity and Shelley’s vision of freedom as home. But what Rankine’s “Weather” demands of this volume now, I think, is a return to Romantic presumptions about who should bear being moved, under what conditions and for how long, which theories of the pre-personal affections can too easily elide. These are presumptions that Smith’s hope against hope most clearly works to expose as misogynistic and naïve, but which, in the march towards political optimism in this book’s

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fi nal chapter, become less the focus of the poems’ ethical orientations towards their subjects and readers, and, it seems to me, less likely to be challenged. Put another way: there are limits to tasking Romantic poetry with answering what it means to bear being moved. Th is coda, which is like its musical counterpart in that it brings this work to a close by offering one last section for reflection, elaborates some of those limits by centering the uneven modes of vulnerability and powerlessness that provocations make material to the work of poetic form. In my Introduction, I quoted the “struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness” that Wordsworth describes in the 1798 “Advertisement” to Lyrical Ballads as evidence that provocative forms encourage readers to wrestle with difficult feelings rather than to merely undergo them.6 Yet what stands out to me now is my own presumption that we undergo anything “merely.” Even below the threshold of conscious awareness, ideas and affects operate in powerfully constructive and destructive ways. Give the smallest drop of water enough time and it might carve a path through granite. In the test case that I have been making of Wordsworth’s “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” I argued that posthumous revolutionary forces operate through their capacity to move, unawares, even those who do not listen— who, we might say, merely meet the “common wind” and are swept up. At the same time, Wordsworth does not specify who will be moved in this way. In the sonnet, Louverture’s “friends” are not people but feelings (“exultations, agonies, / And love”) and the milkmaid, who I have suggested stands for a generalizable European population, seems oblivious to the Haitian leader’s nearby presence and therefore also to his cause, seemingly so far away. Th is juxtaposition between Louverture and the milkmaid is the formal provocation that disappoints expectations of both a political sonnet’s laudatory tone and the progressive potential of white Abolitionism— and, as the following discussion explores, it remains far from clear whether Wordsworth intends for his disappointment of the former to indicate the impossibility of the latter. For Wordsworth, as we have seen, the poet’s ability to bring form to experience is uniquely responsible for poetry’s power. Unlike Scott’s Guantánamo project, which does not impose any formal structure (e.g., rhythm, melody)

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on the recorded sounds so as to prevent listeners’ orienting themselves aesthetically in relation to the prison, Wordsworth recognizes the sonnet, whose form is bound by rules of meter and line, as a structure of generative confi nement that suits the investigation of confi nement itself. In “Nuns Fret Not At Their Convent’s Narrow Room,” Wordsworth calls the sonnet a “scanty plot of ground” that nevertheless offers “brief solace” for those overwhelmed by the freedom of other forms (lines 11, 14).7 The sonnet’s organizing metaphor, confi nement as productive space, pivots on the idea that, “In truth the prison, into which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is”—which the line’s enjambment (perhaps too cutely) reinforces (lines 8–9). That the liberal use of enjambment, that boundary-breaking device, is also the central innovation of the Miltonic sonnet upon which Wordsworth bases “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” further implies that the emancipatory potential of trespass depends on the existence of barriers, whether of line length or physical enclosure. The suspense and the pleasure of enjambed lines like “Thou hast left behind / Powers” depend on the fleeting pause and subsequent revelation transgressing both pentameter and prison. In Milton’s Italianate, encomiastic sonnets, the turn from octave to sestet is often a turn outward, a direct address to the poem’s subject, whether Oliver Cromwell or Lord Fairfax, that exhorts political action.8 Wordsworth borrows this convention in order to revise it, urging Louverture to fi nd solace not in what he should do, but in what those powers he “has left behind” can and will continue to do—beyond the walls of his prison and in ways he can neither direct nor control. In these post-agential and affective ways, the poet treats confi nement as not simply a challenge to be overcome but a condition of feeling and of boundary-crossing potential to be explored. Thus Wordsworth’s approach to the sonnet suggests that confi nement prepares us to discover the sorts of limited freedoms that, blinded by our dreams of perfect autonomy, we might not have valued or thought to consider. An October 1802 anecdote in the Fenwick Notes may seem to extend this thesis, by recording that Wordsworth composed another sonnet, now lost, after being detained by “a severe storm” near “Bolton Hall, where Mary Queen of Scots was kept prisoner soon after her unfortunate landing at Workington. . . . The subject [of the sonnet] was our own confi nement

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contrasted with her’s.”9 Here the poet recalls turning to the sonnet as a fit vehicle for juxtaposing the imprisonment of a world-historical figure with the situation of modern, inconvenienced travelers. That both parties were halted by forces beyond their control literalizes at the same time that it democratizes the limited freedoms to which confi nement alerts us; the social leveling suggested by the contrast equates the Queen’s disempowerment through her loss of motion with that of the travelers. As Celeste Langan has shown, Wordsworth often renders analogous the freedom to move (to walk, to wander) with a conception of individual agency that, as the traveler meets and greets along his route, allows for the social encounters that are at the heart of Romanticism’s “pathos of liberalism.”10 In the greater Romantic lyrics, Langan connects this “vagrancy” to the emergence of a modern, liberal subject for whom the leisure to walk is the simulation of a freedom wrung out of emergent capitalism’s surplus value. When it comes to the sonnet, it seems a fitt ing inversion that Wordsworth aligns the restricted form instead with the preindustrial activities of cottage-industry confi nement: Nuns in “narrow cells,” “students with their pensive citadels,” and “Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,” make up the array of “blithe and happy” inhabitants in “Nuns Fret Not” (lines 1–4). These figures return us to an earlier time, both as an antidote for those who have “felt the weight of too much liberty” and as a set of exemplary instances of quarantine productivity; they are figures who make good use of staying indoors (line 13). To these spaces of productive confi nement, the poet adds his own: remaining within the sonnet’s form “’twas pastime to be bound” and pleasure to be gained (line 10). For “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” the implication that the confi ning sonnet might have offered a pleasing and productive exercise in expressing Louverture’s worthwhile imprisonment cannot help but seem a heartless sort of pedantry. The perversity of aligning actual torture with a poetic form to which Wordsworth elsewhere compares the lives of “contented” “hermits” must seem to do nothing but demean Louverture’s grave reality (line 2). Even the other, laudatory associations that the poet’s borrowings from Milton inspire (memorialization; calls to political action) falter at the suggestion. Still, the anecdotal account of a lost sonnet comparing the

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Queen of Scots’s sixteen-year imprisonment by her cousin and former ally, Queen Elizabeth I, with travelers detained by the weather, might urge us to explore Wordsworth’s apparent callousness as, I’ll submit, not unrelated to the sonnet’s facility for historical thinking. If sonnets return us to a time when we made do with less liberty, then their limited freedoms might capture something of the foreignness of that bygone era—a sense of estrangement, perhaps, from the world we thought we knew, and from our (modern, liberal) ways of being in it. In the lost sonnet, the impossible proximity that the contrast implies (where Queen and travelers occupy the same space rent apart by centuries), would seem to expand the experience of detainment in 1802 and 1803 to include both the magnitude of a transformative historical moment and the long-ago suffering of the “unfortunate” Queen.11 Was this a poem that revealed the sublime of history to be one of the limited freedoms made perceptible by confi nement? A poem that injected timelessness into what Kathleen Stewart might see as the “ordinary affects” of just waiting around?12 We’ll never know, but certainly the high-low nature of the comparison, its fusing of the momentous and the mundane, suggests that formal restriction concentrates tensions that might not register otherwise. Such an affective force depends on boundaries in order to intensify, and recalls another instance of impossible proximity thrown into relief by confi nement: the clash between Louverture and the singing milkmaid. Th is juxtaposition—which will become, in an 1824 revision, a clash between Louverture and a “whistling Rustic”—produces a tension that neither the sonnet’s volta nor its Miltonic enjambments resolve. Introduced in the second line, the milkmaid, or her equally tuneful replacement, is a sonic reminder of the distance between European inhabitants and those in SaintDomingue and elsewhere. Whether tending “her Cow” or “his plough,” the naïveté of these musical figures suggests the poet’s self-reflexiveness about listening’s limits, and also about capturing those limits in art.13 That milkmaid and rustic might also be, like Wordsworth’s “blithe and happy” workers, relics of a preindustrial past, raises the related suggestion that they stand too for a pre-global worldview, representing a European population unable or unwilling to recognize the transatlantic exchanges that had already reorganized life on a massive scale. Milkmaid and rustic mark a

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present moment, but one that is not fully present to its globalism.14 Unlike the comparison of sensitive travelers and historical Queen, here juxtaposition pits modern obliviousness against assurances of a future revolution, in a poem that impatiently imagines Louverture’s current suffering as already part of a historically significant past. Emily Rohrbach calls this kind of anticipation the “literary future anterior,” which she describes as a Romantic poetics of “what might will have been” and which may help develop the juxtaposition as generative of a sense, not just of history, but of the future’s history as well.15 Milkmaid and rustic locate Louverture in relation to a present from which his posthumous powers might—indeed, must—will have been dispersed, and their blithe unawareness casts this future history as one through which they must will have been living without sensing how those powers shape their experiences or the experiences of others. In this way, the sonnet’s juxtaposition seems more in keeping with the formal dissonances that many of the lyrical ballads express. It reminds us that, in Wordsworth’s disappointment aesthetic, to be proximate to a letdown is to feel what diversity is like. Whether that diversity inheres in the rift between Simon Lee and the poet-speaker or in the clash between Louverture and the milkmaid, the “feelings of strangeness and auwkwardness” with which the poet wants his readers to “struggle” become, in these poems, goads towards the apprehension of other people’s lives and opinions, and of an affective relationality, in which “relational dynamics (such as ownership, commerce, and conversation) . . . [are] in a strong sense constituting individual identity rather than merely characterizing it.”16 Affecting and being affected by other people changes us and them. As in Spinoza’s philosophy, affective encounters are part of the knowing of other people as well as ourselves. And even though Wordsworth’s approach to what it means to move and be moved by the affections carries a strong moral impulse, it is an impulse that, as these chapters have shown, values a stoic kind of resilience that many would fi nd impossible to achieve. When Wordsworth lauds those who are vulnerable, like the sailor’s mother, for the dignity with which she bears to be moved, he shifts our focus away from the systems and governments that legitimize exploitation and violence, and onto the endurance of body-minds already long subject to the caloric deficits,

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sleep deprivation, exposure to the elements and other chronic conditions that render them particularly affectable. In Ferreira da Silva’s estimation, such “affectability”—that is, “the condition of being subjected to both natural (in the scientific and the lay sense) conditions and to others’ power”—is a concept through which the already powerful come to see some categories of people, particularly women and people of color, as inherently more “affectable” than others.17 One fi nal question that the Spinozist reading of “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” leaves us with, then, is the degree to which we can or should read Wordsworth’s formal provocations as expressing a monism stringent enough to reject the racial hierarchies central to Ferreira da Silva’s concept of affectability. If the milkmaid stands for a European population whose ignorance is also a kind of un-affectable state—an automatic stoicism made possible by white colonial and imperial power—then Louverture’s affectability differentiates him along racial lines. His misery may evince his more profound susceptibility to negative affects, while his posthumous powers might be expected to have the strongest influence on the other, highly affectable Black and Brown bodies laboring on distant plantations. By contrast, if the milkmaid stands for a European population blithely unaware of their own affectability (but who are affected nonetheless), then the critique that Wordsworth’s sonnet levels, from the Spinozist perspective, lands squarely on the mistaking of such ignorance for an exemption. When the “common wind” whips round the globe, moving and inspiring common persons in common ways, and when “[t]here’s not a breathing of ” that wind that “will forget” Louverture, then even those who never knew him cannot help but exist in an affective and material relation to his force. Speculating in this way makes me think of Wordsworth, his imperfect abolitionism and the willful forgett ing of everyday inhumanity and global atrocity into which he at times surely retreated. I imagine him at a garden party that he attended in September 1825, put on by the prominent slave trader John Bolton, where he “led the cheers” with his friends Robert Southey and John Wilson that welcomed George Canning and Sir Walter Scott to the festivities.18 Standing on the lawn before Lake Windermere, watching colorful regattas float by, what must it have been like for

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Wordsworth to enjoy the “dazzling” party while knowing Bolton’s Liverpool connections?19 To enjoy some small fraction of the vast fortunes of a man who would receive compensation for being required, after emancipation in 1836–1837, to free the 783 enslaved people on West Indian estates in which he had fi nancial interests?20 Did the Wordsworth who attended that party have in common with the milkmaid the privilege of un-affectability or the bliss of ignorance—and what, practically speaking, would make the difference? In my reading of “To Toussaint Louverture,” the poet’s refusal of the expected protocol for a legacy sonnet, his refusal to defi ne Louverture through a record of his achievements, forces us to engage with Louverture’s life and death in other ways. One such way discovers, through the difficulty of listening in places of trauma, the suggestion that revolutionary affects, by moving even those who do not listen, can galvanize revolutionary fervor. Yet another reveals, through the juxtaposition with the milkmaid, a crucial tension between racialized and unracialized concepts of affectability that must be left unresolved. Without radical openness, no radical feeling. Th roughout this book, a Spinozist conception of the affections has framed the metaphysical insights, as well as dilemmas, shadowing Romantic approaches to feeling and thinking as material and embodied; mobile, contagious and often untraceable; predetermined and pre-individual. In poetic experiments that affi rm poetry’s special capacity for generating embodied anticipations through language, rhythm and rhyme, only to trip readers up or leave them cold, I have explored how poets use form to challenge the normative trajectories of feeling that, by reinforcing notions of free will and bounded subjectivity, would seem to ensure the smooth operations of society. The ethics and politics of poems that disappoint, deflate or disrupt these trajectories instead have helped to reframe provocative poetic forms more often in terms of social dissonance than social harmony, and on scales ranging from intimate to global. For the development of literary theory and criticism in Romantic Britain, this reframing has allowed us to discover connections between the eighteenthcentury sonnet revival and conative striving; between Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads and freedom’s limits; between early nineteenth-century theatrical

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innovations and Keats’s poetics of affective reciprocity; and between a long Romantic era sense of perpetual political crisis, on the one hand, and the ethical concessions at the heart of expecting those who are most vulnerable to risk violence in pursuit of reform, as a result of the affections’ external stronger force, on the other. By choosing to explore poetry through a radical materialist lens, rather than radical materialism through the lens of poetry, I have also chosen to leave open avenues of inquiry that might have shifted this book’s perspective from the former to the latter. One such avenue is the influence of John “Walking” Stewart’s Moral Motions, a work that seems perfectly fitted to further investigations of the extent to which radical materialist ideas circulated in the popular press and among readers of popular genres. Stewart seems destined to be a key figure in our understanding of the radical Enlightenment, especially for the ways his idiosyncratic Spinozism marries radical politics to an anthropological fascination with cataloguing cultural difference. Indeed, an inability to give up on human (and, frankly, British) exceptionalism while promoting democratic reforms based on radically leveling theories of matter and motion remains an unresolved tension worth tracking both in Stewart’s work and beyond it, as the discussion of Wordsworth’s sonnet has illustrated. The heuristic of the deceptive cadence, with which I began, helped illustrate how poetic provocations can set disappointed hopes into motion without lett ing go of pleasure. Even an unresolved musical phrase carries on, in our ear and in our minds, because music, like verse, can generate momentum. And perhaps it is by joining with this momentum—or with what Spinoza would call the affective forces that agree with our natures—that we can learn to live as best we can in a world of dissonance. In Rankine’s poem, when she says “weather” she also “mean[s]” systems capable of moving beyond the tyranny: “a November that won’t be held off. Th is time / nothing, no one forgotten” (lines 25–27). Injustice can be weathered, and Rankine represents hope as both preparedness and resistance in the form of waterproofi ng: “We’re out / to repair the future. There’s an umbrella / by the door” (lines 20–22). The worldwide protests following Floyd’s murder risked both immediate violence and the delayed suffering that comes from

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the inevitable spread of COVID-19 in a crowd. The umbrella, which recalls the 2014 Hong Kong protests, the “Umbrella Revolution,” is also suggestive of a shield, of the personal protective equipment that has been in short supply in hospitals and care facilities, of mask wearing in public. The umbrella might symbolize a new way to live, shelter on-the-move, a placeholder for Shelleyan home-as-freedom while we lend ourselves to strengthening the movement. The point is to give oneself over to the momentum: “We are here for the storm,” writes Rankine, “that’s storming because what’s taken matters” (lines 29–30). Foregrounding subjection, vulnerability and powerlessness while remaining committed to freedom, the poems this book has explored are ones that, however imperfectly, position themselves as “here for the storm,” and in so doing reveal that “storming because what’s taken matters” has a Romantic era history and a history in Romanticism.

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Notes

Introduction: Provocation’s Means

1. William Wordsworth, in the 1798 Advertisement, calls his lyrical ballads “experiments”; John Keats, in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law, references Anne Radcliffe, the author of gothic novels including The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), when he notes “what fi ne mother Radcliff names” he’s chosen for “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil,” “Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Eve of St. Mark”; Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a letter to Leigh Hunt, envisions publishing “a litt le volume of popular songs wholly political.” See Wordsworth, “Advertisement,” in Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1800, 47; Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February 1819, Letters of John Keats, 2:62; and Shelley to Leigh Hunt, 1 May 1820, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2:191. 2. Raymond Williams describes “structures of feelings,” in part, as “a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies” (Marxism and Literature, 128–135, 132). 3. Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, 5:167; quoted in Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language. The verb form, “to provoke,” puts Johnson in mind of “rage,” “wrath” and “war.” 4. Johnson, Dictionary; Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, 5:167. Hooker more completely describes this feeling of agreement as “love insoluble” (149). 5. Coleridge, “The Nightingale,” 233.

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6. Wordsworth, “Advertisement,” 47. 7. Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, 1; Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xiii. 8. Bennett , Vibrant Matter, xi‒xii. 9. Horace, Ars Poetica, 123–35; Milton, “The Verse,” in Paradise Lost, 11; Pope, Peri Bathos. 10. Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, 2; Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, 282. 11. Marvell, “Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost,” 184. 12. Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, 1800 edition, 187 (hereinafter, Wordsworth, “Preface”). 13. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 27. Even in the throes of “violent and disagreeable passions,” the sufferer “longs for that relief which nothing can afford him but the entire concord of the affections of the spectators with his own”; he wants their hearts to beat in time with his own (27). Yet, fearing at the same time that the intensity of his passions will alienate his audience, the sufferer may actually restrain himself from showing all that he truly feels. See Chapter 2 for further discussion in light of Smith’s musical metaphors (harmony and concord). 14. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 27. 15. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 23. 16. Burgess, “On Being Moved,” 298, 304. 17. Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 10, quoted in Burgess, “On Being Moved,” 303.” 18. For Hume, sympathy is both a medium for communicating affect and the mechanism by which affect transforms from an external force, such as other people’s approbation, into a private emotion, such as pride. For a discussion, see Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, 30–32. 19. Burgess, “On Being Moved, 289. 20. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment. 21. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 16. 22. Burgess, “On Being Moved, 307. 23. Smith does admit that, on “some occasions sympathy may seem to arise merely from the view of a certain emotion in another person,” so that passions “may seem to be transfused from one man to another, instantaneously, and antecedent to any knowledge of what excited them in the person principally concerned” (Theory of Moral Sentiments, 13). 24. For Romantic history in a global context, see especially Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease. For Romantic history along the lines of affect and sensation, see Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism; Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History; Pfau, Romantic Moods; and Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist. 25. Th is defi nition of affects owes much to Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual. Generally speaking, the affections align with Enlightenment discourses

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of the passions, although for this study’s purposes, they have their philosophical home in Spinoza’s Ethics. 26. Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works (hereinafter, Spinoza, Ethics). 27. Questions of form, which have preoccupied thinkers from Plato to the New Critics and beyond, have recently reemerged in a series of electric sallies and replies. See Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network; Kramnick and Nersessian, “Form and Explanation”; and also responses to the latter from Levine, Levinson and others (Critical Responses I to IV in Critical Inquiry 44, no. 1 (2017), 129‒163) and the authors’ responding in turn in Kramnick and Nersessian, “Forms and Explanations.” 28. Th is reasoning resonates with post-Bakhtinian approaches to genre, developed since the 1980s, by emphasizing genre’s “social meanings” over its ontological ones. Following Carolyn Miller’s “Genre as Social Action,” genre theorists have established methods for interpreting genre as situation-specific “rhetorical action,” rather than seeing genres as stable categories based purely on form. See Campbell and Jamieson, “Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism.” The shorthand “situation + form = genre” I borrow from Janet Giltrow et al., Academic Writing. 29. Lynch, “Shandean Lifetime Reading Plan,” paras. 160, 161. 30. Shelley, Defence, 513, 515. 31. Shelley, Defence, 533. 32. Silvan Tomkins’s theory of the affects has been influential in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam J. Frank. See especially, Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling. 33. Macpherson, “A Litt le Formalism,” 385. 34. The term appears in two of Macpherson’s essays: “A Litt le Formalism,” 390; and “The Object of Literal Criticism,” 491. 35. Macpherson, “Litt le Formalism,” 390; and “Literal Criticism,” 492. 36. Shelley, Defence, 511. 37. Shelley, Defence, 511. 38. Nersessian, Utopia, Limited. 39. For the influence of Lucretius on Romanticism, see Goldstein, Sweet Science. 40. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 114. 41. The force of matter is important for other materialisms proper to the period as well; see Sha, Imagination and Science in Romanticism. For a discussion of felt and unfelt affect, see Noggle, Unfelt. 42. Shelley, Defence, 511. 43. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 207. 44. Spinoza, Ethics, 244 (emphasis in original).

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45. Important reassessments of Romantic “Nature” include Morton, Ecology Without Nature; Morton, Hyperobjects; Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease; and Bewell, Natures in Translation. 46. Here, I am thinking about Ada Palmer’s recovery of Lucretius’s influence in Renaissance literary circles after the 1417 rediscovery of De rerum natura (Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance), as well as work by scholars of  the  Restoration and early eighteenth century on the neo-Epicureanisms of the age. 47. That is, beyond usual lines of influence we’ve drawn from Coleridge to Wordsworth. It also reminds us that there is more work to be done connecting “Walking” Stewart’s influence to Spinoza’s Romantic reception more widely. 48. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind. Israel opposes the radical Enlightenment to the Enlightenment, but I would suggest that Romantic thinkers extended and complicated the latter with the former. Coleridge’s fascination with pantheism does not destroy his fascination with Kant, nor Shelley’s Lucretianism his skepticism. Even Kant, in the 1780s, was drawn into a public dispute between his friend Moses Mendelssohn and the polemicist Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi about the nature of Spinoza’s thought—and more critically, about the nature of those who admit to having been influenced by it. 49. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 105. 50. Spinoza, Ethics, 111. 51. These types of people “will not stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, that is, the sanctuary of ignorance” (Spinoza, Ethics, 112–13). 52. Spinoza, Ethics, 112. 53. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 105. 54. Lord, “Introduction,” in Spinoza Beyond Philosophy, 4. 55. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 125. 56. Spinoza, Ethics, 159. 57. Curley, “Introduction,” in A Spinoza Reader, xxx–xxxi; Bennett , Vibrant Matter, 22. 58. Montag, “Imitating the Affects of Beasts,” 60. 59. Spinoza, Ethics, 116. 60. See Spinoza, Ethics, Part 3, Prop. 2, 157–58. The affections move in and between all things, not just human beings, so something as seemingly neutral as a plant or as immobile as a boulder can nevertheless affect and be affected. 61. Spinoza, Ethics, 157. 62. Sharp, “Force of Ideas in Spinoza.” 63. For a discussion, see Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.

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64. Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, with the telling subtitle A Political Ecology of Things, has become a touchstone for this kind of work, though the dividends to which I refer also include posthumanist, queer and second-generation ecocritical work that is generally contemporaneous with Bennett’s study. See Braidott i, Posthuman Feminism; Morton, Hyperobjects; and Morton, Dark Ecology. See also, Singer, Cross and Barnett’s important “Introduction” to Material Transgressions, 2. 65. Sharp, “Force of Ideas,” 733, 743. Sharp opens her essay by describing Louis Althusser’s seminal contribution to ideology critique and his thoroughgoing interest in Spinoza. Given this genealogy, the Neo-Marxism and Neo-Spinozism of thinkers like Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Warren Montag would also seem important exceptions, as would Levinson’s approach in Thinking Through Poetry. See, for instance, Hardt and Negri, Assembly. N. Katherine Hayles’s Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, though far from ideology critique, takes an interdisciplinary approach to distributed cognition that reveals ideas to often be something that “nature” (understood as an external force, such as electric grids and high frequency trading algorithms) mobilizes rather than what individual minds think. 66. Sharp, “Force of Ideas,” 733. 67. Curley, “Introduction,” xix. 68. Coleridge, Notebooks, 2:2208. 69. Spinoza, Ethics, 244–46. 70. Whether we already know and love that thing, or if it is a stranger to us, we feel pity so long as “we judge [the thing that suffers] to be like us” (Spinoza, Ethics, 166). 71. Spinoza, Ethics, 226. 72. Spinoza, Ethics, 168. 73. “Exp.: There seems to be no difference between pity and compassion, except perhaps that pity concerns the singular affect, whereas compassion concerns the habitual disposition of this affect” (Spinoza, Ethics, 191). The Latin is found at htt ps://thelatinlibrary.com/spinoza.ethica3.html. 74. Spinoza, Ethics, 226. 75. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 13. 76. Spinoza, Ethics, 241‒2. 77. Spinoza, Ethics, 226. 78. Spinoza, Ethics, 244. 79. Spinoza, Ethics, 244. 80. Coleridge, “On the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power,” chap. 13 in Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 1:295; Keats to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818, Letters of John Keats, 1:282–83.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

81. The dates given reflect the probable year of composition, since neither poem was published in Keats’s lifetime. 82. Keats, Poetical Works, 3:229–30. 83. The phrase “dynamic materiality” I owe to Richard C. Sha, “John Keats and Some Versions of Materiality.” Chapter 1: Hope Against Hope in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets

1. Smith, Collected Letters, 34. Smith’s uncertainty over whether or not Moral Motion is “worth it” likely springs from the book’s other claim to heterodoxy: its author’s well-established reputation as an eccentric; see Thomas De Quincey’s accounts of “Walking” Stewart, in De Quincey, Collected Writings, 3:93–120. 2. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, 100. Kelly Grovier has made the most significant contributions to the study of “Walking” Stewart’s influence on major Romantic thinkers: see Grovier, “Shades of the Prison-House”; “Dream Walker”; and “Paradoxes of the Panoscope.” Recently, Ewan James Jones has sought to reignite interest in “Walking” Stewart’s views in “John ‘Walking’ Stewart and the Ethics of Motion,” 119–31. 3. Stewart, “Advertisement,” in Travels. 4. Not long before, Smith had requested Darwin’s The Loves of Plants (part 2 of The Botanic Garden) in an 8 May 1791, letter to Thomas Cadell Sr. For Darwin’s influence on Smith, see Bailes, “Linnaeus’s Botanical Clocks.” For Smith’s interest in natural philosophy, see Bailes, “Plagiarism and the Poet-Naturalist.” 5. Although I am not calling Smith a dedicated Spinozist, I am att uned to the wide-ranging influence of Spinoza’s thought on the intellectual climate in which she lived and wrote, which, as “Walking” Stewart’s notoriety and loose adherence to monism together suggest, was never going to reflect interpretive consistency anyway. For an elaboration of Spinoza’s relevance here, see this book’s Introduction. 6. In Part 3, Props. 6 and 7, of the Ethics, Spinoza explains: “Each thing,” from a rock to a tree to a human being, “so far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its own being,” and that this “striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing” (159). 7. Moore, “Lesbian History of the Sonnet,” 838. 8. Moore, “Lesbian History,” 815. 9. Kate Singer’s Romantic Vacancy (3) is an exception that also mentions Spinoza in light of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, although by way of Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. 10. See Kelley, “Romantic Histories”; Goodman, “Conjectures on Beachy Head”; Favret, “Telling Time in War,” in War at a Distance, 78–80; and GurtonWachter, “That Something Living Is Abroad: Missing the Point in ‘Beachy Head,’” in Watchwords.

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11. Béres Rogers, “Permeability and Its Uses,” 137. 12. Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, 71. See, for instance, Béres Rogers’s claim that the Elegiac Sonnets are not political (137). Critics who regard Smith’s novels as feminist include Adriana Craciun, who identifies the novels’ “feminist and revolutionary cosmopolitanism,” and Diane Long Hoeveler, who regards Smith as “a sentimentalist with a social and political agenda . . . an incipient gothic feminist” whose novels influenced Wollstonecraft’s political fiction. See Craciun, “Empire Without End,” 56; and Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism, 37. 13. Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, 71. 14. In just the last decade, scholarship on the formal and epistemological dimensions of women’s writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has remapped the field. See especially Singer, Romantic Vacancy; Cross, Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism; and Wolfson, Romantic Interactions. The following two essays have also been influential for my thought: Burgess, “Sydney Owenson’s Tropics”; and Lee, “Bad Plots and Objectivity in Maria Edgeworth.” 15. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 113. 16. Spinoza, Ethics, 160. 17. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility, 157. 18. Wollstonecraft , Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, 12. Curran makes a similar observation: “In her private poetry, particularly in the bulk of her ninety-two Elegiac Sonnets, that external system is an unspecified but pervasive, ominous presence that threatens the autonomy of the self that records it” (“Introduction,” in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, xxiv). 19. Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern, 7. 20. Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern, 3. 21. Smith, Sonnet XII, “Written on the Sea Shore,” in Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works, 64. 22. Th is interpretation is encouraged by an accompanying illustration by Thomas Stothard that fi rst appeared in the fi ft h edition of Elegiac Sonnets, which depicts a young woman seated on the rocks, book in hand, looking down at the sea. The image is reproduced in Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works, 65. 23. Smith, Sonnet XXXVI, in Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works, 80. 24. Smith, “Preface to the Sixth Edition,” in Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works, 55 (emphasis in original). 25. Smith, “Preface to the Sixth Edition,” 55 (emphasis in original). Curran writes that “according to Smith’s sister, Catherine Anne Dorset, this friend is probably Bryan Edwards, himself a poet” (Poems of Charlotte Smith, 5). 26. In 1798, Nathan Drake described “a long chasm” in sonnet production after Milton’s death, but now, “within the last forty years numerous cultivators of sonnet writing have sprung up. Among these, we may mention with particular distinction

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Charlotte Smith” (Literary Hours, 113). The Critical Review, the most direct, avows in 1802 that the sonnet “has been revived by Charlotte Smith,” whose “sonnets are assuredly the most popular, in the language, and deservedly so” (“Poetical Works of John Milton,” 393). 27. “Review of Elegiac Sonnets,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 56, 1 (April 1786): 333. htt ps://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hw2943. 28. Gentleman’s Magazine, 333. 29. Gentleman’s Magazine, 333. 30. Gentleman’s Magazine, 333. 31. Smith, “Preface to the Sixth Edition,” 55 (my italics: “the sad songs”). 32. Smith, “Preface to the Sixth Edition,” 55. 33. Smith, “Preface to the Sixth Edition,” 55 (my italics: “Always the sad songs!”). 34. McGann, Poetics of Sensibility, 164. 35. McGann, Poetics of Sensibility, 164. Classically, perdurance is one answer to the ontological problem of temporality, which posits that we exist in time not only spatially (i.e., our whole selves move through time as a unit), but also temporally (i.e., parts of our selves move through time while other parts are left behind or exist in some future time). McGann seems to understand this as a Modernist imperative to “shore up” “ruins and fragments” (spatial and temporal parts) with feats of imagination that aim to preserve the “dominions” and “powers” that they once were (and might be again) (164). 36. McGann, Poetics of Sensibility, 6. 37. These figures reflect versions of the poems collected in Knowles and Horricks’s Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works (Broadview, 2017), which is based on the two-volume ninth edition of Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Poems (London, Cadell and Davies, 1800). 38. The line reads: “Till in the rising tide, the exhausted sufferer dies” (Smith, Elegiac Sonnets [R. Noble, 1792], 12). Neither of these variants is preserved in Knowles and Horricks’s Broadview edition (2017) or Stuart Curran’s Oxford University Press edition (1993); Smith, Elegiac Sonnets (London: J. Dodley, H. Gardner, and J. Bew, 1786), 13. For help tracking these changes (and the chance to peruse Smith’s fi rst edition), my thanks to the Houghton Library Special Collections. 39. White recommends that the word “fi sh” should be replaced with “scaly race” in one of Mr. Steven’s poems. H. White, “Letter of Dec 2,” The Gentleman’s Magazine Supplement 58, no. 2 (1786): 1109–10, htt ps://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu .32435054261615. 40. White, “Letter of Dec 2,” 1109–10. 41. White, “Letter of Dec 2,” 1110.

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42. Seward, “Preface,” in Original Sonnets on Various Subjects, iii–vi. Without Seward and Thelwall’s amplifications to underscore the link, it’s likely that White’s attempts to overwhelm Smith with praise for a rival male poet would have been, like White himself, forgotten. 43. Thelwall, “Essay on the English Sonnet,” 232. 44. Thelwall, “English Sonnet,” 232. 45. Thelwall, “English Sonnet,” 232. 46. Seward, “To Mr. Henry Cary, on the Publication of his Sonnets,” in Original Sonnets, 67. 47. Seward, “Preface,” in Original Sonnets, iii‒vi. 48. Wordsworth visited Smith in 1791; he remarked in 1833 that she was a poet “to whom English verse is under greater obligations than they are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered,” quoted in “Curran, “Introduction,” Poems of Charlotte Smith, xix. 49. Wordsworth, “Nuns Fret Not At Their Convent’s Narrow Room,” 133. 50. Wordsworth, “Nuns Fret Not,” 133. 51. Robinson, “Preface” to Sappho and Phaon, 144. 52. Wordsworth, “Advertisement,” 47. 53. Coleridge, “Introduction.” 54. Coleridge, “Introduction,” 1139. 55. Smith’s prefaces to the fi rst and second editions of Elegiac Sonnets (both published in 1784) differ only slightly. The Houghton Library’s fi rst edition reads: “The lines [litt le poems] which are here called Sonnets . . . ,” with the strikethrough and emendation possibly att ributable to Smith. 56. Coleridge, “Introduction,” 1139. 57. Coleridge, “Introduction,” 1139. 58. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 1:14–15. 59. Wordsworth, Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, 73. 60. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 75. 61. Authorized [King James] Version. 62. West, “Reconstructing the American Left ,” 10–11. 63. Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” 23. 64. Bliss, “Hope Against Hope,” 93. 65. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 114. 66. Shakespeare, King John, 3.4.43. Smith adds the word “pale.” The other quotation in Sonnet VI (line 12) is from “Pope’s ‘Imitation of the 1st Ode of the 4th Book of Horace,’” according to Smith’s note. 67. Shakespeare, King John, 3.4.92. 68. Froid, “Charlotte Smith’s Ugly Feelings.”

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69. Froid, “Ugly Feelings,” 616. 70. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 1. 71. Spinoza, Ethics, Part 3, Prop. 3, 157–58. 72. Spinoza, Ethics, Part 3, Prop. 6, 159. 73. Montag, “Imitating the Affects of Beasts,” 60. 74. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 1. 75. Lynch, “Shandean Lifetime Reading Plan,” para. 160. 76. Lyndgaard, Captivity Literature, 12–14. 77. Lyndgaard, “Redemption Deferred,” in Captivity Literature, 14. 78. Arsić, “Mary Rowlandson and the Phenomenology of Patient Suffering,” 248. 79. Logan, “Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity,” 255. 80. “Reptile-monsters” may be a clue that Smith is thinking here of the American Southeast as William Bartram describes it in his Travels (1791), a book thrilling in its account of alligators and swamps, which Smith elsewhere cites as source material for her poems. 81. Nersessian, Utopia, Limited, 113. 82. Labbe, “Introduction,” in Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, 5. 83. Smith, “Preface to the Sixth Edition,” 55; Labbe, “Introduction,” 5 (emphasis in original). 84. OED Online, s.v. “experience (n.),” www.oed.com/view/Entry/66520. 85. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 261. 86. Coleridge, “Introduction,” 1139. 87. Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, Sonnet XLI, line 1; Sonnet LIX, line 14. 88. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 27. 89. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 13. 90. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 27. 91. Lippman, History of Western Musical Aesthetics, 444. 92. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 20. 93. Kelli Holt aligns Charlotte Smith’s theory of sympathy in Beachy Head (1807) with that of Adam Smith (“Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head”). However, even if Charlotte Smith’s granular descriptions might suggest Adam Smith’s “minutest incidents,” this is not evidence for her positioning her poet-speaker as an impartial spectator. For a discussion of the work of Charlotte Smith and of William Wordsworth in light of Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy and of the challenges posed by impartiality, see Richey, “The Rhetoric of Sympathy.” 94. For Spinoza, to refuse hope is also to live rationally: “the more we strive to live according to reason, the more we strive to depend less on hope, to free ourselves from fear” (Ethics, Part 4, Prop. 47, 225).

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Chapter 2: The Disappointment Aesthetic

1. Quinney, Poetics of Disappointment, 1; Freer, “Wordsworth and the Poetics of Disappointment,” 124. 2. Nersessian, “Hazlitt’s Disappointment,” in Utopia, Limited, 146. 3. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 173. 4. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 123. 5. Potkay, “Ethics of Th ings,” in Wordsworth’s Ethics, 82. 6. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 123; Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802),” 605. 7. Spinoza, Ethics, 191. The Latin is found at htt ps://thelatinlibrary.com/spi noza.ethica3.html. 8. Spinoza, Ethics, 166. 9. Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802),” 605. 10. Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802),” 605. 11. Spinoza, Ethics, 190. 12. Spinoza, Ethics, 225. 13. Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802),” 605. 14. Both critics are thinking about “Old Man Travelling,” although numerous other examples also come to mind (e.g., “The Leech Gatherer”; “The Old Cumberland Beggar”). Noggle, Unfelt; Jacobus, Romantic Things, 156. In “Of the Affects,” Part 3 of his Ethics, Spinoza asserts “there is neither hope without fear, nor fear without hope” (190). 15. “Remorse is a sadness, accompanied by the idea of a past thing which has turned out worse than we had hoped,” writes Spinoza (Ethics, 191); Wordsworth, “Preface,” 173. 16. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 173. 17. Pope, Peri Bathos, 190– 91. 18. Wordsworth, “Advertisement,” 47. 19. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 174. 20. Wordsworth, “Advertisement,” 47. 21. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments,12. 22. Monthly Mirror, no. 11 (June 1801), 389– 92, 389. 23. Monthly Mirror, no. 11 (June 1801), 389– 92, 389. 24. See Parrish, “Dramatic Technique in the Lyrical Ballads”; Giffi n, “Wordsworth and the Problem of Imaginative Story”; and Hegele, “Wordsworth’s Dropsy.” For a discussion of the poet-speaker’s realization of his unkind kindness, see McGrath, “Wordsworth, ‘Simon Lee,’ and the Craving for Incidents.” See also Freer, “Wordsworth and the Poetics of Disappointment,” on how “Simon Lee” reveals erotic and poetic frustrations to function similarly, in an essay whose observations

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about disappointing poetic rhythms chime in many ways with my own, whilst also differing in its psychoanalytic approach. 25. McLane, Balladeering, 77, 22. 26. McLane, Balladeering, 225–28. 27. Sharren, “Introduction” to “Simon Lee.” 28. James MacPherson’s so-called Ossian poems, “translations” and fragments of archaic Gaelic ballads, scandalized the British literary scene of the 1760s. 29. According to the OED, Coleridge coined the term in 1782; in the 1800 Preface, Wordsworth self-consciously proclaims: “there is a numerous class of critics” who make it their mission to point out “prosaisms as they call them” as a form of error (178). See OED Online, s.v. “prosaism (n.),” htt ps://www.oed.com/view/Entry /152906?redirectedFrom=prosaism. 30. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 178. 31. Wordsworth, “Note to The Thorn,” 287. 32. Wordsworth, “Note to The Thorn,” 287. 33. Spacks, Gossip, x. 34. William Richey reads Lee’s “insistence” on his relative youthfulness as a “mildly comical effect” (“Rhetoric of Sympathy,” 438). 35. See Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, 164– 65; Richey, “Rhetoric of Sympathy”; and McGrath, “Craving for Incidents.” McGrath observes: “the poem reminds one of—and responds to—other poems published during this period that chronicle the experiences of the poor, the forgotten, the mad, etc., like Robert Southey’s ‘The Widow’ and ‘The Idiot,’ or Charlotte Smith’s ‘The Dead Beggar,’ in other words, the humanitarian protest poem” (570). 36. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 178. 37. Wordsworth, “Advertisement,” 47; Wordsworth, “Preface,” 187. 38. McGrath, “Craving for Incidents,” 566; Wordsworth, “Preface,” 183. 39. Austen, Austen’s Letters, 23. 40. Austen, Austen’s Letters, 23. 41. Barrett Browning, Barrett s at Hope End, 141. 42. Croker, Croker Papers, 145. htt p://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK /rec ord _details.php?id=24256. 43. Croker, Croker Papers, 145. 44. Of course, the history of taste is an important backdrop to my discussion. See Bate, Classic to Romantic; Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic; De Bolla, “Toward the Materiality of Aesthetic Experience”; Gigante, Taste; Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste; Morton, Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite; and Rejack, “Blackwood’s Magazine and the ‘Schooling’ of Taste.” 45. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 186 (emphasis in original).

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46. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 173. 47. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, 63‒64 (emphasis in original). 48. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, 64. 49. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 18. 50. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, 64. 51. OED, s.v. “disappointment (n.),” 2.a., 1, 3. 52. Johnson, Dictionary, s.vv. “disappoint (v.a.)”; “balk (n.s.),” 1.; “balk (n.s.),” 2. 53. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, 64. 54. Wordsworth, “Note to The Thorn,” 287. 55. McGrath, “Craving for Incidents,” 572. 56. Baudrillard, Conspiracy of Art, 27. 57. Baudrillard, Conspiracy of Art, 28. 58. Baudrillard, Conspiracy of Art, 44, 43. Baudrillard writes of Warhol: “His principle was to say, ‘I am a machine, I am nothing.’ Since then, everyone has just repeated the same mantra, only pretentiously. He, however, thought it as something radical” (43). 59. Langan and McLane, “Medium of Romantic Poetry,” 242. 60. Langan and McLane, “Medium of Romantic Poetry,” 242. 61. McLane, Balladeering, 227. 62. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria. 63. Zadie Smith, thinking about novels, imagines something similar: a “reading system” in which the “fi rst blueprint is drawn from [an] original novel” (an “ur-novel”), “which is usually a work of individual brilliance, one that shines so brightly it creates a shadow large enough for a litt le cottage industry of novels to survive in its shade. Such novels have a guaranteed audience: an appropriate reading system has been created around the fi rst novel and now makes room for them” (How to Fail Better). 64. Dorothy Wordsworth, “Letter of 10 and 12 September 1800,” in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 297. 65. Cross, “From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales,” in Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism,166. 66. Cross, “From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales”; Judith Pascoe writes: “It is important to be reminded of Wordsworth’s borrowings of popular poetic subjects from the pages of newspapers and magazines in which Robinson’s work was  so  prominently featured” (“Introduction,” in Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, 54). 67. Robinson, letter to an unknown publisher, 17 June 1800, Garrick Club, London, quoted in Pascoe, “Introduction,” 54. 68. Jones, “Revising for Genre,” 97.

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69. Labbe, “Deflected Violence and Dream-Visions in Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales,” 166– 67. 70. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 177. Wordsworth claims that “personifications . . . may be well fitted for certain sorts of compositions  .  .  . [but] I do not fi nd that any such personifications make any natural or regular part of [the very language of men].” 71. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 177. 72. Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter- Spirit, 27–28. 73. Rejecting personification, the poet rejects “a specious stability,” says Ferguson, which presumes, continues Adela Pinch, “that we know what a person is.” Ferguson, Language as Counter Spirit, 28; Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, 48. 74. Keenleyside, “Personification for the People,” 451. 75. Keenleyside, “Personification for the People,” 458–59. 76. Labbe, “Deflected Violence,” 167. 77. Pascoe, “Introduction,” 21. 78. Keenleyside, “Personification for the People,” 458–59. 79. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 183. 80. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 177. 81. Wordsworth, “Hart-Leap Well,” 294. Chapter 3: Coleridge Tripping

A slightly shorter version of Chapter 3 was previously published in Carmen Faye Mathes, “Coleridge Tripping: The Biographia Literaria and Proprioceptive SelfPossession.” Copyright © 2020 Trustees of Boston University. Th is article fi rst appeared in Studies in Romanticism, Volume 59, Issue 2, Summer 2020, pages 185‒208. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. For Romantic era medical experts like William Cullen and Robert Whytt , the delicate distribution of nerves creating and carrying impulses (including feeling) throughout the body was at the forefront of discussions about mental and physical health. For an instructive overview, see Broman, “The Medical Sciences.” For literary scholarship that situates its claims in terms of Romantic nervous vibrations, see Burgess, “Transporting Frankenstein”; Goodman, “Uncertain Disease”; Goodman, “Reading Motion: Coleridge’s ‘Free Spirit’”; and Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Literature, especially the section “Nerves and Heart.” For a discussion of cognition, perception and bodily motion in Wordsworth, see Williams, “Glad Animal Movements.” 2. In addition to the works in the previous note, see Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion; Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism; Pfau, Romantic Moods; and Goldstein, Sweet Science. For discussions of the effects of the air on

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Romantic bodies, see Bewell, “Keats and the Geography of Consumption,” in Romanticism and Colonial Disease; Ford, Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air; and Carroll, “Regions of the Air,” in An Empire of Air and Water. 3. Catherine Morland is the novel-reading heroine of Jane Austen’s Nor thanger Abbey (1817), whose overactive imagination and susceptibility to impressions leads her to confuse her comedic reality for a gothic one. 4. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 193; Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics, 82. 5. Halmi, “Coleridge’s Ecumenical Spinoza.” 6. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:123. 7. Investigations of Coleridge’s “sensory-perceptual dynamics” from Kathleen M. Wheeler and Kerry McSweeney have prepared the ground for more recent work from Noel Jackson (on the intersections between the life sciences and Coleridge’s self-experiments), Rei Terada (on his phenomenological dissatisfactions), and Andrea Timár (on his fraught relationship to embodiment and addiction). See McSweeney, “Coleridge’s Blessed Interval”; Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry; Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenology and Dissatisfaction; and Timár, A Modern Coleridge. 8. Levinson fi rst reads Wordsworth in relation to Spinoza in “Romantic Poetry: The State of the Art.” In 2007, Levinson applies the tenets of Spinozist thought to “A slumber did my spirit seal,” in “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza.” These essays have now been collected in Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry. 9. These figures are found in Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, bks. 2:14, 1:124, and 2:66, respectively. 10. Proprioception is a distributed sense. Not simply located in the brain, it is interoceptive insofar as it also operates in the reflexes of muscles and ligaments, and contributes to balance, muscular memory, depth perception, and even, as has been lately shown, reading. Brian Massumi describes proprioception as a mediating sense, at once “translator” and “lubricant,” which anticipates action by bringing the “cumulative memory of skill, habit, posture  .  .  . into the motor realm of externalizable response” (Parables for the Virtual, 59). For a discussion of proprioception in the novel, see Auerbach, “Gett ing Lost: Proprioception and Th inking in the Gothic Novel.” 11. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2: 66. 12. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 176. 13. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2: 70. 14. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2: 14. 15. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:14. 16. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:14. 17. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:124.

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18. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:14. 19. Goodman, “Reading Motion: Coleridge’s ‘Free Spirit,’” 353. 20. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:66. 21. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:124. 22. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:124. 23. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:124. 24. Favret, “Pathos of Reading,” 1319. 25. See Jackson, Science and Sensation, 117. For a discussion of Coleridge’s obsession with visual stimuli, or “spectra,” see also Terada, Looking Away, 35–72. 26. Favret, “Pathos,” 1319. 27. Goodman, “Reading Motion: Coleridge’s ‘Free Spirit,’” 353. 28. Goodman, “Reading Motion: Coleridge’s ‘Free Spirit,’” 353. See also Gurton-Wachter, “Reading, A Double Attention,” in Watchwords, 45; Jackson, Science and Sensation; Timár, “Intoxicated Reading,” in A Modern Coleridge. 29. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:66. 30. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:14. 31. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:66. 32. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 98; Pfau, “Retrieving the Human,” 471. 33. Pfau, “Retrieving the Human,” 471. 34. Terada, Looking Away, 35–72. Pfau too locates the incentive behind Coleridge’s desire for Kantian free will in its opposite: the “ongoing struggle with the gravitational pull of life as animated matter—alternatively wayward, sluggish, or defective, and forever clinging to its own, self-consuming physicality” (“Retrieving the Human, 489). 35. Terada, Looking Away, 43. 36. Pfau, “Retrieving the Human,” 489. 37. Coleridge, Notebooks, 2:2208. 38. Levinson, “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza,” 369. 39. Levinson, “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza,” 369; Spinoza, Ethics, 159. For Coleridge’s discussions of Spinoza in the Biographia Literaria, see vol. 7, chaps. 3, 22 and 24, and especially 8 through 10. 40. Th ree critical volumes offer a snapshot of the growing import of affect theory. In The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Patricia Clough edits a collection of essays from doctoral candidates in women’s studies, sociology and cultural studies, and offers a significant introduction to her phrase, the “turn to affect.” In The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth bring into conversation established scholars with a variety of perspectives on affect, and also provide an invaluable introduction to various approaches to affect theory. Most recently,

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Stephen Ahern has edited a collection of essays titled Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text. 41. Curley, “Introduction,” vii. 42. Spinoza, Ethics, 153. 43. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 125. 44. Spinoza, Ethics, 202. 45. Levinson, “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza,” 378; for Goodman too, it is this principle, Spinoza’s “absent cause,” that distinguishes Coleridge’s medically inspired understanding of meter as a “stimulant” that creates “a disturbance of corporeal motion” from a Newtonian account of cause and effect (“Reading Motion: Coleridge’s ‘Free Spirit,’” 353). 46. Spinoza, Ethics, 157. 47. Levinson, “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza,” 369. 48. Wordsworth, “Advertisement,” 47. 49. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 175. 50. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:66. 51. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:67. 52. Coleridge, Notebooks, 2:2625. 53. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:70 (emphasis in original). 54. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:67 (emphasis mine). 55. O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter, 54. O’Donnell notes that a closing hexameter in particular suggests a more lyric mode and that both Coleridge and Wordsworth use it in odes, including Coleridge’s “Dejection” and Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.” 56. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:70. 57. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:66. 58. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:70 (emphasis in original). 59. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:71. 60. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:70–71. 61. Compare also Coleridge’s discussion in Biographia Literaria (vol. 7, 2:120) of Wordsworth’s “Fidelity,” where “the following stanza” refers to stanza four, as it is excerpted in the Biographia, and “preceding stanzas” refers to the three stanzas before stanza four in Wordsworth’s poem. 62. Wordsworth, “The Sailor’s Mother.” 63. Wordsworth, “The Sailor’s Mother,” 78. 64. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 173, 176. 65. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:66. 66. Wordsworth, Fenwick Notes, 54–55.

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67. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:69. 68. Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern, 4. 69. Wordsworth, “The Sailor’s Mother,” 78. 70. Favret, War at a Distance. 71. Wordsworth, “The Sailor’s Mother,” 78. 72. Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern, 3. 73. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 23. 74. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 23. 75. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 23. 76. Curley, “Introduction,” xi. 77. Spinoza, Ethics, 218. 78. Coleridge, Notebooks, 2:2208 (emphasis mine). 79. Coleridge, Notebooks, 2:2208. 80. Spinoza, Ethics, 226. 81. Wordsworth says that the collection risks readers’ having an “unpleasant feeling of disappointment” (“Preface,” 173). 82. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 47. 83. Spinoza, Ethics, 219. 84. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 23. Judith B. Herman convincingly suggests a connection between a letter written by Plutarch “consoling his wife upon the death of their infant daughter,” which “appeals to his wife to bear her sorrow like a Roman matron—to be self possessed, noble in conduct, restrained in grief—and then goes on to . . . compare the experience of the soul, which is imperishable, to that of a captive bird.” Even though it is impossible to prove the influence (especially given the competing account in the Fenwick Notes), Herman posits that Wordsworth means to suggest “that on some level of belief [the mother understands that the] bird in the bird-cage embodies her dead son” (“Roman Matron with the Bird-cage,” 302). 85. Spinoza, Ethics, 219. 86. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” in The Prelude, 542 n†. 87. Carlson, “Measuring Distance, Pointing Address,” para. 21. 88. Coleridge’s original poem exists in two, slightly different manuscript copies, one (now at Dove Cottage Library) that was given directly to Wordsworth and another that made its way into the hands of Lady Beaumont; a heavily revised version, addressed “To a Gentleman,” was published in Sibylline Leaves in 1817 (Paley, “To William Wordsworth,” 45). I discuss here the 1807 manuscript version given to Wordsworth, which is arguably the more immediate reaction to the experience. For a discussion of the different versions, see “Paley, “To William Wordsworth.”

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89. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” 543–44. 90. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” 545. 91. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” 542–44. 92. Coleridge, “Introduction to the Sonnets,” 84. 93. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” 542. 94. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” 544. 95. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:123. Like his critique of “The Sailor’s Mother,” Coleridge’s discussion of Wordsworth’s “Blind Highland Boy” (1815) hangs on the unsuitability of prosaic language in verse. 96. Rowe, “Coleridgean Kink.” 97. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” 543. 98. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” 543–45. 99. Milton writes: “The angel ended, and in Adam’s ear / So charming left his voice, that he awhile / Thought him still speaking, still stood fi xed to hear; / Then as new waked thus . . .” (Paradise Lost, VIII, lines 1–4). 100. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” 544. 101. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” 543. 102. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” 543. 103. Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” 1805 edition. 104. Spinoza, Ethics, 111. 105. Coleridge, Notebooks, 2:2208 (emphasis mine). 106. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” 544. 107. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, 2:66. 108. Coleridge, “To W. Wordsworth,” 543. 109. Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern, 7. Chapter 4: Reciprocal Keats

Chapter 4 contains material published previously in Carmen Faye Mathes, “‘Let us not therefore go hurrying about’: Towards an Aesthetics of Passivity in Keats’s Poetics,” in European Romantic Review, vol. 25, no. 3 (2014): 309‒18. My thanks to Taylor & Francis Ltd. for permission to reprint it. 1. Keats, Poetical Works, 3:229. 2. Mathes, “that strong excepted soul.” Such observations extend to the Victorians, so that, in exploring Keats’s “museal poetics,” Christopher Rovee sees the vocabulary of bad writing mobilized around Keats as inextricable from late nineteenth-century debates about the uselessness of art, and museums as an endstop in the circulation of aesthetic objects (“Trashing Keats,” 1007). 3. Richard Woodhouse to John Taylor, 19, 20 September 1819, Letters of John Keats, 2:163– 64. The particular change to which Woodhouse refers is “bringing

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Old Angela in (only) dead stiff & ugly” at the end of the poem. Although Keats made other changes as well, Woodhouse ascribes them different motivations. 4. Keats, Endymion, line 3; Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment, 118; Gerard Manley Hopkins complains that Keats is “wearisome” because “his verse is at every turn abandoning itself to an unmanly and enervating luxury” (Selected Letters, 272); “vulgar” comes from John Bayley, “Keats and Reality,” 98. 5. In a letter to Percy Shelley, Byron writes: “Had I known that Keats was dead—or that he was alive and so sensitive—I should have omitted some remarks on his poetry [from my latest article]” (“Letter of 26 April 1821,” 1130). 6. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, 9. Meanwhile, attention to Keats and politics earlier in the decade had wrought significant changes in the field, so that by the time Levinson was writing, observes Nicholas Roe, it was “no longer possible to view Keats as a poet wanting in political interests, priorities, and commitments.” Roe, Keats and the Culture of Dissent, 6. 7. Chandler, England in 1819, 399. 8. Chandler, England in 1819, 402, 417. 9. Chandler, England in 1819, 401, 425. 10. Keats to George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 (?) December 1817, Letters of John Keats, 1:192– 93; Mulrooney, “Keats, Kean, and the Poetics of Interruption,” 191. 11. Mulrooney, “Keats, Kean, and the Poetics of Interruption,” 217. 12. Sha, “John Keats and Some Versions of Materiality.” 13. Keats, “Notes on Shakespeare and the Acting of Edmund Kean,” in Poetical Works, 3:229–30. 14. Rzepka, Self as Mind, 207. 15. Kahan, Cult of Kean, 53. 16. Kahan, Cult of Kean, 53. In a letter to the George Keatses of 17–27 September 1819, the poet writes that Kean “is the only actor” who can play Otho the Great’s lead role (Keats, Letters, 2:186). 17. Keats, “Notes on Shakespeare and the Acting of Edmund Kean,” Poetical Works, 3:229–30. 18. New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, s.v. “Literary Synesthesia.” In a 1945 essay, Stephen de Ullmann “collect[s] all examples of clear synaesthesia in the poetical works of Keats and Byron,” graphs them, and concludes that “the balance is tipped heavily in [Keats’s] favor” (“Romanticism and Synaesthesia, 814, 817); Keats, Isabella,197. 19. Emphasis mine. 20. Coleridge, Christabel. 21. See Andrew Bennett’s exploration of Keats’s “anxiety of audience” (Keats, Narrative and Audience); and Andrew Franta’s discussion of Keats’s “wait-and-

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see att itude” with regard to reception (Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public, 84). 22. Keats to Charles Brown, 30 November 1820, Letters of John Keats, 2:359. 23. Corcoran, “Keats’s Death,” 336. 24. Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, 16 December 1818, Letters of John Keats, 2:5. 25. Igarashi, “Keats’s Ways,” 172; Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, Letters, 2:5. 26. Igarashi, “Keats’s Ways,” 173. 27. Keats to James Rice, 24 March 1818, Letters of John Keats, 1:255. 28. Keats to James Rice, Letters, 1:255. 29. Keats to James Rice, Letters, 1:255. 30. Sha, Imagination and Science, 31; Sha, “John Keats and Some Versions of Materiality,” 233. 31. Sha, Imagination and Science, 31. 32. Sha, Imagination and Science, 31. 33. Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease. 34. That Keats felt himself to be both living and living towards death is well documented. See Corcoran, “Keats’s Death”; as well as Motion, Keats; and Plumly, Posthumous Keats. 35. Keats to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818, Letters of John Keats, 1:281. 36. Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist, 10. 37. Keats to James Rice, Letters, 1:255. 38. Sha, “John Keats and Some Versions of Materiality,” 239. 39. Keats to James Rice, Letters, 1:255; Keats to J. H. Reynolds, Letters, 1:281. 40. Keats to J. H. Reynolds, Letters, 1:277. 41. Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, Letters, 2:5. 42. Thanks to the Keats Letters Project for drawing my attention to the emphasis on the second “We.” Keats, “Letter #69.” 43. Grovier, “Paradoxes of the Panoscope,” para. 6. 44. Grovier, “Paradoxes of the Panoscope,” para. 19. 45. Spinoza, Ethics, 260. 46. Keats, “Th is Living Hand,” 331. 47. Keats, “Preface” to Endymion, 60. 48. Keats, “Preface” to Endymion, 60. 49. The exact date of composition is unknown. Corcoran records that it was “written on the verso of an early draft of stanzas 45–51 of ‘The Jealousies,’ itself written in late 1819” (“Keats’s Death,” 341, n. 28). 50. Corcoran, “Keats’s Death,” 343.

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51. Keats to J. H. Reynolds, Letters, 1: 281. Moreover, the “light and the atmosphere” that characterizes the “Chamber of Maiden-Thought” is actually a different form of blindness: “we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight.” 52. For a discussion of Keats’s misogyny and sexism, see Homans, “Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats.” I based my decision to use she/her pronouns on the case that Corcoran lays out for the addressee being Fanny Brawne (“Keats’s Death,” 343). 53. During this period the poet’s expectations for futurity begin to resemble what he would refer to, in one of his last letters, as “the habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence” (Keats to Charles Brown, Letters, 2:359). 54. Keats to J. H. Reynolds, Letters, 1:279. 55. Levinson, Life of Allegory, 20. 56. In Isabella, Sonia Hofkosh discovers a similar “ghost dance,” in which the intimacy of touch entangles persons and things, destabilizing the idea of dead flesh as unfeeling (“Dancing with Ghosts in ‘Isabella,’” 191). 57. Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, Letters, 2:5. 58. Keats to J. H. Reynolds, Letters, 1:282–83. 59. Keats to J. H. Reynolds, 19 February 1818, Letters of John Keats, 1:232. 60. Keats to J. H. Reynolds, Letters, 1:233. 61. Bate, John Keats, 250. 62. Li Ou, who provides a thorough anatomy of negative capability’s rise to prominence as a philosophical ideal, positions Wigod and Garrod’s debate in relation to Lionel Trilling’s introduction to the Selected Letters of John Keats. See Garrod, Keats; Wigod, “Negative Capability and Wise Passiveness”; and Ou, Keats and Negative Capability. 63. Scholarship that continues to make the negative capability to wise passiveness comparison falls into roughly two camps. On one side are Romanticists and scholars of the long eighteenth century, most notably Donald C. Goellnicht, Thomas McFarland and Patricia Meyer Spacks. Goellnicht makes the most classic comparison, writing: “The main thrust of this passage [from the “passive and receptive” letter (Letters, 1:232)], heavily influenced by Wordsworth’s concept of ‘wise passiveness,’ is that calm, passive receptivity, in which the mind is open to sensations and speculations, is an integral part of the creative process . . . an idea that echoes Keats’s concept of ‘Negative Capability.’” On the other side are nonspecialists, who use the comparison as an evocation of their particular interests, often with litt le thought for accuracy or even relevance. See Goellnicht, PoetPhysician, 100; McFarland, Masks of Keats; Spacks, On Rereading.

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64. Bernice Slote fi rst connects negative capability to Keats’s “dramatic view of the world” (Keats and the Dramatic Principle, 23). Bate’s chapter “Negative Capability” in his biography of Keats contends that Hazlitt’s essay “On Gusto” influenced Keats’s ruminations on poetic style in the negative capability letter (Bate, John Keats, especially 242– 63). According to Bate, Hazlitt’s essay must also have suggested Keats’s use of the term “gusto” in the 21 December 1817 review of Kean (245). Following Bate, see Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School; Kandl, “Plebeian Gusto, Negative Capability, and the Low Company of ‘Mr. Kean’”; Roe, Keats and the Culture of Dissent; and Rzepka, Self as Mind. In 2019, editors Brian Rejack and Michael Theune updated and extended these discussions in Keats’s Negative Capability. See especially two contributions to that book: Brian Bates, “Keats’s Negative Capability,”15–30; and Michael Theune, “Keats’s ‘Negative Capability’ and Hazlitt’s ‘Natural Capacity,’” 47–59. 65. Rzepka, for example, has called William’s repose “essentially disembodied—passive, detached, and observant, not active and deliberate”; in his discussion, Rzepka transitions from Wordsworth’s noun “passiveness” to the adjective “passive” in a way that underlines Rzepka’s point about William’s status—it is not the embodiment of passiveness that is Rzepka’s subject, but the passive state of the body (Self as Mind, 36). For Levinson the poem presents a “meditative quiescence” (Life of Allegory, 8); and for Goodman, “a wisely passive apatheia” (Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism, 123). For Thomas Pfau, William’s leisure is “a stoic form of self-cultivation . . . bordering on indolence” that forces William to justify his economic non-participation by way of the productiveness of inspiration (Wordsworth’s Profession, 196). Th is focus on the relationship between passiveness and poetic production, via an open mind and an idle body, has also found its way into the language of Keats critiques, so that Keats has been portrayed coveting “authority, authenticity, and ease” (Levinson, Life of Allegory, 8); “mere passivity” (Bate, Keats, 250); or even “passive submission,” surely a contradiction in terms (White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, 124). 66. Keats to Benjamin Bailey, 23 January 1818, Letters of John Keats, 1:210. 67. Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply,” in Lyrical Ballads, 188–89. 68. Keats to Benjamin Bailey, Letters, 1:210. 69. Keats to Benjamin Bailey, Letters, 1:210. 70. Keats, “Notes on Shakespeare and the Acting of Edmund Kean,” in Poetical Works, 3:230; Keats to George and Tom Keats, Letters, 1:192. 71. Keats, “Notes on Shakespeare and the Acting of Edmund Kean,” in Poetical Works, 3:230). 72. Keats, “Notes on Shakespeare and the Acting of Edmund Kean,” in Poetical Works, 3:229.

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73. Pascoe, Sarah Siddons Audio Files, 77. 74. Coleridge, “Table Talk, 27 April 1823,” 265. 75. Davis, “Reading Shakespeare by Flashes of Lightning,” 940. 76. Keats, “Notes on Shakespeare and the Acting of Edmund Kean,” in Poetical Works, 3:229. 77. Keats, “Notes on Shakespeare and the Acting of Edmund Kean,” in Poetical Works, 3:229, 230. 78. Keats to Benjamin Bailey, 14 August 1819, Letters of John Keats, 2:139. 79. Khalip, Anonymous Life, 50. Such criticism notices Keats’s dramatic language only to diminish it, as the “display of ease,” Levinson asserts, is “another device for converting nothingness into prolific tension” (Life of Allegory, 24). 80. Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in John Keats: Major Works, 289. 81. Keats, “Ode on Indolence,” in John Keats: Major Works, 283. 82. Spinoza, Ethics, 184. 83. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 158. 84. Rajan, “Keats, Poetry and the Absence of Work,” 344. 85. Rajan, “Absence of Work,” 344. 86. Keats to George and Tom Keats, 23 January 1818, Letters of John Keats, 1:214. 87. Keats to George and Tom Keats, Letters, 1:214. 88. Keats to George and Tom Keats, Letters, 1:193. Chapter 5: The Politics of Provocation

Chapter 5 contains material published previously in Carmen Faye Mathes “Listening Not Listening: William Wordsworth and the Radical Materiality of Sound,” in European Romantic Review, vol. 28, no. 3 (2017): 315‒324. My thanks to Taylor & Francis Ltd. for permission to reprint it. 1. See Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd; and Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation. For a discussion of Romantic border-crossings, see also Cox, Romanticism in the Shadow of War. 2. Scott , The Common Wind, 29–30. 3. Scott , Common Wind, 43–44. See also Daut, Tropics of Haiti. 4. Scott , Common Wind, 45. 5. Shelley, “The Mask of Anarchy,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 316–26. 6. Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, 28. 7. Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 221–22. 8. Burgess, “Transporting Frankenstein,” 249. 9. Nancy, Listening, 7. 10. Nancy, Listening, 10. 11. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 207.

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2 11

12. Spinoza, Ethics, 200. 13. Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. 14. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1850 edition, in The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, 31. In the 1790s, the politics of atmospheres and the fraught political atmosphere collided in the British fear of invasion. See Ford, Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air, 9; and Carroll, “Regions of the Air,” in An Empire of Air and Water, 113. 15. For discussions, see Blank, “Shelley’s Wind of Influence”; Stauffer, “Romanticism’s Scattered Leaves”; and Sympos, “Enchanted Archive.” 16. Chandler, “History’s Lyre,” in England in 1819. 17. Contemporary French spelling drops the apostrophe in “L’Ouverture,” as does most current scholarship in English. 18. Since the time of this chapter’s composition, Scott’s Guantánamo project has become Clearance Process (Scott , 2016), a multimedia chapbook with an audio composition by Jason Starnes. A recording of Scott’s original Vancouver lecture is available on Simon Fraser University’s YouTube channel. 19. Nancy, Listening, 30. 20. Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply.” 21. Pascoe, Sarah Siddons Audio Files, 11. 22. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 176. 23. Wordsworth, “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” in Poems, 160– 61. 24. The songs are unknown probably for the same reason: that the woman sings in a language unknown to the poet. 25. Stanley, “Wordsworth and ‘the Most Unhappy Man of Men,’” 189. “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” has been read as an abolitionist legacy sonnet, an experiment in sympathetic identification, and the failure of both. See Geggus, “British Opinion and the Emergence of Haiti”; Mahlis, “Signifying Toussaint”; and Persyn, “The Sublime Turn Away from Empire.” 26. Popkin, You Are All Free, 8. 27. Girard, Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon, 5. 28. Girard, Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon, 6. 29. Th is briefest of overviews necessarily overlooks much debate about Louverture’s role in various historical events. See Popkin’s discussion of the competing accounts of Louverture’s leadership role, especially in the 22–23 August uprising at Saint-Domingue (You Are All Free, 8–10). 30. See Stanley’s excellent overview of Louverture in the news (“Wordsworth and ‘the Most Unhappy Man of Men,’” 189–190), in which British “writers and editors imagined Toussaint to be as newsworthy as the Haitian Revolution itself ” (189). 31. Wordsworth, “To Toussaint L’Ouverture.”

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32. Mahlis, “Signifying Toussaint,” 333. 33. Mahlis, “Signifying Toussaint,” 333. In fact, Louverture’s leadership role at that particular confrontation has been questioned by historians, although it seems clear he was in fact a participant in the revolt (Popkin, 8). 34. Owing to the “Freedom Principle,” any slave who set foot on French soil would be set free, an edict that French courts upheld consistently from as early as 1571 (Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France,” 5). 35. Mahlis, “Signifying Toussaint,” 333. 36. Garraway, “Introduction,” in Tree of Liberty, 15. 37. McGann, Romantic Ideology, 88; Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, 52; Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern, 2. 38. Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern, 2. 39. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 125–26. 40. Wordsworth, “A slumber did my spirit seal,” in Lyrical Ballads, 318. 41. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 125. 42. Spinoza, Ethics, 73. 43. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 33. 44. Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, 325. 45. These numbers reflect the 1820 “Report of the Metropolitan and Central Committee.” 46. Shelley to Leigh Hunt, 1 May 1820, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 191. For a discussion of the tension between the poem’s loft y political goals and the poet’s “self-absorption,” see Wolfson, “Poetic Form and Political Reform.” 47. Shelley’s friend Thomas Peacock was sending him the Examiner, along with other radical papers, books and letters, over the course of the Shelleys’ time in Italy. 48. See Gilmartin, Print Politics. For a recent accounting of pamphlets in terms of “booklet theory,” see McGill, “Books on the Loose.” 49. Wolfson, “Poetic Form and Political Reform.” 50. For conservative coverage of Peterloo, see The Times, The New Times and Wheelers’ Manchester Chronicle; letters and broadsides are collected in the Wadsworth Manuscripts, Peterloo Collection, Rylands Library, Manchester, htt ps:// luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/Manchester~24~24. 51. Letter 65: To the Editor of the New Times, 6 [?] or 5 October 1819, Common Sense Letter to Waithman, Wadsworth Manuscripts, Peterloo Collection, Rylands Library, Manchester. 52. The OED fi nds the fi rst use of the word protest to mean public political demonstration in 1852: “The expression of social, political, or cultural dissent from a policy or course of action, typically by means of a public demonstration; (also) an

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instance of this, a protest march, a public demonstration.” OED Online, s.v. “protest (n.),” htt ps://www.oed.com/view/Entry/153191. 53. “To the Public and the Reformers of England, Ireland, and Scotland,” Manchester Union Rooms, October 29, 1819. 54. “To the Public and the Reformers of England.” In fact, as Chandler’s inventory of the significant days leading up to and following Peterloo reveals, the goal of synchronized meetings was partially met: on 1 November 1819 “simultaneous meetings [were] held, by prior agreement, at Newcastle, Carlisle, Leeds, Halifax, Manchester, Bolton, Nott ingham, Leicester, Coventry, and elsewhere in England and Scotland,” and on 15 November 1819 “simultaneous meetings [occurred] at Paisley, Glasgow, and other locations across Scotland” (19–20). However, as Mary Fairclough explains, Henry Hunt was not himself in support of such risky meetings, leading to fewer meetings being held than originally planned, and thus, “the opportunity for a nationwide protest was lost.” See Chandler, England 1819; and Fairclough, “Peterloo at 200,” 168. 55. Letter 65, Wadsworth Manuscripts. 56. Reiman, Shelley and His Circle, 8:737. 57. Morton, “Notes to Queen Mab,” 81. 58. Morton, “Notes to Queen Mab,” 87–88. 59. Sharp, “Force of Ideas,” 733, 743. 60. Sharp, “Force of Ideas,” 733. 61. Clover, Strike Riot Strike, 72. The poem and the broadside appear to reflect collective actions in which workers “appear in their roles as workers,” thus signaling what Clover theorizes as the dialectical shift in the early nineteenth century from riot to strike (16). The etymology of strike corroborates this claim, with the OED’s fi rst use in the sense “[a] concerted cessation of work on the part of a body of workers, for the purpose of obtaining some concession from the employer or employers” occurring in 1810. OED Online, s.v. “strike (n.),” 1,” htt ps://www.oed.com /view/Entry/191631. 62. Borushko, “Violence and Nonviolence in Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy,” 101. 63. Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences, 199. See also Young, Shelley and Nonviolence; and Frosch, “Passive Resistance in Shelley.” 64. Sharp, “Force of Ideas,” 733. 65. Goldstein, “A Natural History of Violence,” in Sweet Science, 167. The answer that Goldstein herself brilliantly provides rests on Lucretian logics rather than Spinozist ones. 66. As many critics point out, this reverses the traditional form of the masque, where actors wear masks in order to personify abstractions. Here the abstractions personify people. See Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, 181– 92; Goldstein, Sweet

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Science, 171–77; and Kuiken, “Shelley’s ‘Mask of Anarchy’ and the Problem of Modern Sovereignty,”98. 67. Foucault, “Docile Bodies,” in Discipline and Punish. 68. Spinoza, Ethics, 197. 69. Spinoza, Ethics, 202. 70. Sharp, “Force of Ideas,” 745. 71. Sharp, “Force of Ideas,” 733. 72. Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, 198. 73. Wolfson, “Poetic Form and Political Reform.” 74. Spinoza, Ethics, 199. 75. As Kuiken shows, the illusion that power belongs to authority is precisely what Shelley’s poem unmasks, for if “governmental power is represented in the poem as a form of ‘anarchy’—the illegitimate self-production of authority—then one of the tasks of the poem is to imagine an alternative to the ‘mask’ of legitimacy that the British government gives itself ” (“Problem of Modern Sovereignty,” 97). 76. Spinoza, Ethics, 202. 77. Published thirteen years after the massacre and ten years after Shelley’s death, The Mask never moved its intended audience. 78. Spinoza, Ethics, 260– 61. 79. Carlson, “Like Love: The Feel of Shelley’s Similes,” 88. 80. Carlson, “Like Love,” 88. 81. For explorations of Shelley and Romantic chemistry, see Sha, “Imagining Dynamic Matter: Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, and the Chemistry and Physics of Matter,” in Imagination and Science. 82. Sharp, “Force of Ideas,” 744. 83. Sharp, “Force of Ideas,” 745. 84. Fairclough, “Peterloo at 200,” 168; Hunt, “Proposed Despotic Measures,” 785 (emphasis in original). 85. Fairclough, “Peterloo at 200,” 168. 86. Hunt, “Proposed Despotic Measures,” 785. 87. Hunt, “Proposed Despotic Measures,” 785. Coda: Provocation’s Ends

1. Th is Coda was written in June 2020; this note was revised in May 2021. As of 20 April 2021, George Floyd’s murderer has been found guilty but is not yet sentenced. Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” 131. 2. Johnson, Dictionary, s.v. “bear (v.n.),” htt ps://johnsonsdictionaryonline .com/1755/bear_vn. 3. Rankine, “Weather,” htt ps://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/books/review /claudia-rankine-weather-poem-coronavirus.html.

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4. Let these selected names testify not only to systemic police brutality, but also to the sea change in public awareness that has made them immediately recognizable: Eric Garner; Michael Brown; Tamir Rice; Philando Castile; Breonna Taylor. 5. “Weathering” is the socio-medical hypothesis that “Blacks experience early health deteriorations as a consequence of the cumulative impact of repeated experience with social or economic adversity and political marginalization,” which Arline T. Geronimus et al. posited in 2006 to help explain why “Blacks experience poor health at earlier ages than do Whites  .  .  . producing ever-greater racial inequality in health with age” (“‘Weathering’ and Age Patterns of Allostatic Load Scores,” 826). “To support, to keep from falling” is the eighth sense of the transitive verb “bear” in Johnson’s Dictionary, htt ps://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com /1755/bear_va. 6. Wordsworth, “Advertisement,” 47. In one way or another, Wordsworth has appeared in all these chapters, and it is because of this thoroughgoing significance that I am convinced more needs to be said about the affectable readers and subjects that, through the Spinozist lens, his poems at once project and obscure. I was interested to learn that, in scholarly works from the last ten years, Wordsworth is “discussed half as much again as the next author [Percy Shelley],” which Yohei Igarashi and Allen Riddle call “a taxonomic bias of a particularly literary historical variety.” Wordsworth’s outsized presence in British Romantic studies implies that what we think of as Romantic is also, or perhaps even actually, Wordsworthian— which helps explain why it is worth centering him in this book’s limitations (one of which might also be that he is overrepresented). See Igarashi and Riddle, “Towards a Bibliometric History of Romantic Studies,”126, 127. 7. Wordsworth, “Nuns Fret Not,” 133. 8. Mueller, “Mastery of Decorum: Politics in Milton’s Sonnets,” 499. Milton’s Sonnet XVI begins with similar syntax and cadence to Wordsworth’s, with “Cromwell, our chief of men . . .” (line 1). 9. Wordsworth, Fenwick Notes, 80. The arrival of Mary Queen of Scots on Cumberland’s shores in 1568 was followed the next day by her imprisonment by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. 10. Langan, Romantic Vagrancy, 14. 11. Wordsworth, Fenwick Notes, 80. 12. Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 6. 13. There is artifice in all mediated productions; my thanks to Judith Pascoe for this insight. It seems telling that, of all the poem’s revisions (five in total, published and unpublished), the only variant of the rustic figure that was not published is the “all-cheering sun,” which is also the only inaudible figure. 14. See Gott lieb, Romantic Globalism, 3.

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15. Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist, 13. 16. Wordsworth, “Advertisement,” 47; Levinson, “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza,” 106. 17. Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Theory of Race, xv. 18. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, 6:79. My thanks to Laurence Westgaph for drawing the anecdote to my attention. 19. Lockhart, Memoirs, 79. 20. Pope, “John Bolton, 1756–1837.”

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Index

Abraham, 44 absent cause, 203n45 abstract sonority, 152 admonitions, 5 aesthetic disappointment, 9, 59, 61– 62, 73, 131. See also disappointment aesthetic affect, situating, 9–15 affectability, 182 affective boundary-crossing, 147, 149 affective negotiations, 93 affective reciprocity, 116, 119 affects/affections: aesthetic power of, 140; changes of, 181; characteristics of, 9; constructive and destructive ways of, 177; defi ned, 9; encounters within, 181; external stronger force of, 22; negative, 16–17, 20, 47, 57, 60, 61; ordinary, 180; perspectives of, 202–3n40; pity as, 20, 60; as prepersonal, 6, 9–10; Spinozist concept of, 183; views regarding, 86 agreement, 7–8

alcohol, 96 “All Alone” (Robinson), 77 Althusser, Louis, 191n65 Anarchy, 164, 168– 69. See also The Mask of Anarchy (Shelley) animals, 88, 167 anticipation, 8 Arthur Fitz-Albini (Brydges), 70–71 ataxia, 6 atheism, 15 atmospheres, mapping of, 148 Austen, Jane, 50, 70–72, 201n3 authority, 214n75 Barnett , Suzanne, 18–19 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 71 Bate, Walter Jackson, 137 Baudrillard, Jean, 75–77 bearing to be moved, 175, 177, 181 bees, imagery of, 136–37 Behrendt, Stephen C., 163 benevolence, 21 Bennett , Jane, 5, 191n64

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Berlant, Lauren, 45 Bewell, Alan, 127, 148–49 Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 92, 94– 99 Black life, weathering of, 176 blank verse, 5 Bliss, James, 45 Bloch, Ernst, 44 bodily inactivity, psychological openness versus, 137 bodily power, diminishments of, 108 Bolton, John, 182 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 150, 153 bondage, 165 Borushko, Matt hew, 163 The Botanical Garden (Darwin), 28 Bowles, William Lisle, 42 Bramble, Tabitha, 77 Brydges, Samuel Egerton, 70–71 Burgess, Miranda, 8, 149 Burke, Edmund, 23, 73–74 Byron, Lord, 71–72, 120 caesura, 38, 79, 164 Canning, George, 182 captivity novel, 51 Caribbean Sea, 147–48 Carlson, Julie, 171 categorical imperative (Kant), 14 Chandler, James, 120, 150, 213n54 Characteristics of Men, Matters, Opinions, Times (Shaftesbury), 7 Christabel (Coleridge), 77, 123 Clearance Process (Scott), 175 Clough, Patricia, 202n40 Clover, Joshua, 162– 63 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Biographia Literaria, 92, 94– 99; characteristics of, 6–7; Christabel, 77, 123;

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disappointment of, 93; “Introduction” to the sonnets, 41; metaphysical motions and, 91; meter use by, 93, 95, 96– 98, 99–101, 105, 113, 203n45; “The Nightingale, A Conversational Poem,” 2–3, 14; Notebook, 19–20, 109; overview of, 24; quote of, 41, 55, 77, 93, 95, 99–101, 102, 109, 110–11, 123; reading selfexperiments of, 97; Remorse, 103; Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 77–78; “The Sailor’s Mother” and, 101–5; “To William Wordsworth,” 24, 111– 17; viewpoint of, 22, 37, 42–43, 140; writing style of, 97– 98 collecting, 94, 102 The Common Wind (Scott), 147 compassion, 60, 191n73 complex things, striving of, 17 conatus, 17, 18, 98 concurro, 17 congregation, pastor and, 2 The Conspiracy of Art (Baudrillard), 75–76 Constance (character), 46–47 Corcoran, Brendan, 124–25 COVID-19 pandemic, 184–85 Craciun, Adriana, 193n12 Croker, John Wilson, 71 Cross, Ashley, 18–19, 77 Culler, Jonathan, 48 Curley, Edwin, 61, 108 Curran, Stuart, 193n18 darkness, reading and, 96 Darwin, Erasmus, 28 Davies, William, 27 Davis, Tracy, 140 death, feeling past, 124, 131–36

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deception, through pity, 21 deceptive cadence, 4– 9, 184 A Defence of Poetry (Shelley), 11, 150 Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 98, 107, 143 delight, 73 democratic reform, 172 De rerum natura (Lucretius), 17 Descriptive Sketches (Wordsworth), 153 “The Deserted Cottage” (Robinson), 77 Desmond (Smith), 30 Dictionary of the English Language (Johnson), 2 disappointment, 8, 9, 59, 70–75, 109, 131 disappointment aesthetic, 63, 73–74, 75, 85–86, 92, 100, 181 disharmony, within poetry, 57 dissonance, 22–26, 56, 184 distress, psychological, 59 dominant structures of feeling, 1 Don Juan (Byron), 71–72 double syllable rhymes, 100–101 Drake, Nathan, 193– 94n26 dynamic materiality, 126 dynamic passivity, 121 elegiac sonnets, 31, 34, 38, 42–43, 54, 55 Elegiac Sonnets (Smith): criticism of, 35, 39; description of, 29; illustration within, 193n22; overview of, 31; social concern within, 33–34. See also specific sonnets Elements of Criticism (Kames), 95 Elizabeth I (Queen), 180 emotions, 9, 56, 88–89 encomiastic sonnets, 178 end-stopped feel, 134 Endymion (Keats), 132, 137 energy, 124

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enjambment, 66, 79, 116, 131, 171, 178, 180 Ethics (Spinoza): affections within, 9, 28, 190n60; conatus within, 30, 98, 192n6; description of, 30–31; disappointment within, 197n15; eternity within, 130–31; freedom within, 166, 196n94; hope within, 196n94, 197n14; influence of, 15, 59, 162; morality within, 108– 9, 110; nature within, 16; pity and suffering within, 20, 21, 191n70, 191n73; quote within, 17, 18, 175, 192n6; structure of, 130–31 The Eve of St. Agnes (Keats), 119 “Expostulation and Reply” (Wordsworth), 138–39, 152 extravagant feeling, 6 Fairclough, Mary, 147, 172–73 faith, hope against hope within, 44–45 The Fall of Hyperion (Keats), 144 Favret, Mary, 96, 107 fear: hope and, 57, 61; as negative affect, 44, 46, 61; in “The Shepherd’s Dog,” 83, 84, 85; Spinoza’s idea of, 21, 196n94, 197n14 feeling: end-stopped, 134; form and, 183; over vast distances, 124, 125– 26; past death, 124, 131–36; reciprocal, 25; structures of, 1, 29, 187n2; thinking versus, 16 Fenwick Notes, 178–79 Ferguson, Francis, 80 Ferreira da Silva, Denise, 148–49 flowers, imagery of, 136–37 Floyd, George, 175–76, 184–85 “The Force of Ideas in Spinoza” (Sharp), 18, 191n65

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form: as adjustment, 12; defi ned, 10, 12; to experience, 177–78; feeling and, 183; genre and, 1, 10, 22–23, 40–42, 47, 50, 55, 176; Keats’s provocations of, 119–20; new formalism and, 12, 189n27; Shelley’s Defense and, 11– 12; use of, 183. See also specific formal poetic elements Fort de Joux, 153 freedom, 19, 166, 167, 173, 174 Freer, Alexander, 59 free will, 14, 18 French Revolution, 8, 30, 112, 117, 153 Froid, Daniel, 47 Garrod, H. W., 137 genre: affect in, 23, 30; captivity novel, 51–52; defi ned, 10, 189n28; expectations of, 22, 43, 47, 68, 85; form limitations of, 41; humanitarian protest poem, 75; role of, 10–11; social meanings of, 189n28 ghost poet-speaker, 130 God: Abraham and, 44; as/in Nature, 3, 14, 19–20, 25, 48, 60, 98, 171; rationality and, 115; Spinoza’s treatment of, 10, 15, 16, 98, 108, 115 Goellnicht, Donald C., 208n63 Goldstein, Amanda Jo, 163 “Golfre” (Robinson), 77 Goodman, Kevis, 92, 95, 203n45, 209n65 gossip, of moral avoidance, 67 gratitude, 69– 70 gravity, 95– 96, 113, 115–16, 126–27, 135, 138, 146, 202n34 Gregg, Melissa, 202n40 Grovier, Kelly, 130 Guantánamo project (Scott), 150, 151– 52, 177–78

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Haitian Revolution, 147–48, 153, 211n30 Halmi, Nicholas, 92 happiness, 88 Hardt, Michael, 191n65 harmony, 7, 8– 9, 12, 57 “Hart-Leap Well” (Wordsworth), 62, 85– 90 Hartman, Geoff rey, 92, 137 hateful idea, material force of, 19 “The Haunted Beach” (Robinson), 77 Hazlitt , William, 140 Hemans, Felicia, 36 heptameter, 37 Herman, Judith B., 204n84 hexameter, 79, 101, 203n55 Hoeveler, Diane Long, 193n12 Holt, Kelli, 196n93 homelessness, 166 Hooker, Richard, 2 hope: as anticipatory affect, 21; defi ned, 44; disappointment and, 73, 109, 184; fear and, 61; as negative affect, 57; Spinoza’s idea of, 61, 109, 168–70, 196n94, 197n14, 197n15; suspension of, 36 hope against hope, 23, 28, 29, 31, 44– 49, 54, 55, 58, 176–77 humanitarian protest poem, 75 Hume, David, 5, 6, 188n18 Hunt, Henry “Orator,” 160 Hunt, Leigh, 140, 159, 172, 173 Hyperion (Keats), 144 ideals, 19, 20, 177 Igarashi, Yohei, 125, 215n6 “I” lyric, 49 imaginary change of situations, 7 imagination, 16, 20 immorality, 110 intellectual-poetic energy, 124

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“Introduction” to the sonnets (Coleridge), 41 Isabella; or the Pot of Basil (Keats), 71, 120, 122, 187n1, 208n56 Israel, Jonathan, 15, 190n48 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 190n48 Jacobus, Mary, 61 Johnson, Samuel, 2, 74 Jones, John, 134 joy: of characters, 85–86, 88; loss of, 74, 96, 101; pain and, 35, 43; Spinoza’s idea of, 16, 59– 61 juxtaposition, 180–81 Kames, Lord, Henry Home, 95 Kant, Immanuel: aesthetic judgment of, 8, 70, 86; categorical imperative of, 14; freedom and agency of, 97, 202n34; music and, 13, 149; Spinoza and, 190n48 Kean, Edmund, 119, 120, 121–24, 127, 130, 136, 140–41, 146 Keats, George and Georgiana, 125, 135, 144 Keats, John: aesthetics of passivity and, 136–45; background of, 121; conduits of feeling of, 124–31; criticism of, 71; Endymion, 132, 137; The Fall of Hyperion, 144; feeling-ata-distance and, 125–26; Hyperion, 144; influences to, 42; instant feeling model of, 119, 124; Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil, 71, 120, 122, 187n1, 208n56; Kean and, 120; King Lear and, 144–45; law of conservation of intellect of, 130, 145–46; “Mist” concept of, 128–30; negative capability concept of, 120, 137–38, 144, 146, 208n63, 209n64; “Ode

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on Indolence,” 136, 141–44; overview of, 24–25; quote of, 24, 116, 119, 121–22, 126, 127, 128, 132, 133, 135–36, 137, 138; “Sitt ing Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” 124, 144–45; “Th is Living Hand,” 121, 130, 131–36; Wordsworth comparison to, 137, 138, 139; writing style of, 119–20, 124–25, 127–28, 133, 135, 143, 144–46 Keats, Tom, 136, 144 Keenleyside, Heather, 83, 86 Khalip, Jacques, 141 kinetic-affective energy, 124 kinetic poise, 46, 98, 99 King John (Shakespeare), 46 King Lear, sonnet on (Keats), 144–45 knowledge, 16, 20 Labbe, Jacqueline, 54 labor class, 164–72 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, 36 Langan, Celeste, 76, 179 law of conservation of intellect (Keats), 130, 145–46 leaping, symbolism of, 95– 96, 98 Levinson, Marjorie, 15, 59, 60, 98, 99, 120, 134, 156, 157, 191n65, 201n8, 203n45, 206n6, 209n65, 210n79 life force of ideas, 19 “Lines Written in Early Spring” (Wordsworth), 59 listening, during suffering, 150–52, 153 literary conventions, 61 literary future anterior (Rohrbach), 181 living hand, imagery of, 134 Logan, Lisa, 51 Lord, Beth, 16 Louverture, Toussaint, 25, 152, 153–58 Lucretius, 15, 17, 190n48

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Lynch, Deidre, 10, 50 Lyndgaard, Khyl, 51 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), 23, 62, 64, 72, 76, 99, 109, 116, 177 Lyrical Tales (Robinson), 23, 75–85 Macpherson, Sandra, 11–12 Mahlis, Kristin, 154–56 Marino, Giambatt ista, 100 Marvell, Andrew, 6 Mary Queen of Scots, 178–80 The Mask of Anarchy (Shelley), 25, 148, 158– 63, 164–72, 173–74, 176 Massumi, Brian, 143, 201n10 materialism: approaches to, 18; dynamic, 145; historical, 11; as instinctive Spinozism, 27; of Lucretius, 15; populist, 15; radical, 9, 15, 92; role of, 12–13; of Spinoza, 27, 28, 98; of Stewart, 15, 184 McFarland, Thomas, 27, 208n63 McGann, Jerome, 36, 37, 156, 194n35 McGrath, Brian, 70, 198n35 McLane, Maureen, 65, 76 medical geography, 148 mediocrity squared, 75–85 Mee, Jon, 147 melancholy: easing of, 3; within poetry, 52, 57, 86; in sonnets, 32–36, 42–43, 47 Mendelssohn, Moses, 190n48 metaphor, 171 meter: Coleridge’s use of, 93, 95, 96– 98, 99–101, 105, 113, 203n45; heptameter, 37; hexameter, 79, 101, 203n55; motion and, 96– 97; overview of, 11; pentameter, 5, 37, 38, 79, 108, 134–35, 178; rapid, 75; of sonnets, 42, 178; symbolism of, 98, 125; tetrameter, 38, 66, 101

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methexic, 149 milkmaid, significance of, 152, 154–55, 158, 177, 180–81, 182, 183 Milton, John, 5, 40, 126, 127, 146 “Mist” concept, 128–30 molecular law of material conservation, 130 Montag, Warren, 17, 191n65 Montalbert (Smith), 30 Moore, Lisa L., 29–30 moral avoidance, gossip of, 67 morality, 17, 21–22, 24, 93, 108, 110, 117, 118 Morland, Catherine, 91 Morton, Timothy, 162 motions: of collecting force, 102; example of, 94– 95; meter and, 96– 97; within reading, 91, 111–12; wavelike, 115–16 Mulrooney, Jonathan, 120 Murray, John, 71 music, 4–5, 13, 149 musical thinking, within poetry composition, 11 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 149 nature, 16, 17 nature poetry, 3, 14 The Necessity of Atheism (Shelley), 159 negative affects, 16–17, 20, 47, 57, 60, 61 negative capability, 120, 137–38, 144, 146, 208n63, 209n64 Negri, Antonio, 191n65 Nersessian, Anahid, 53, 59 new formalism, 12 Ngai, Sianne, 47, 73 “The Nightingale, A Conversational Poem” (Coleridge), 2–3, 14 Noggle, James, 61 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 50, 201n3

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INDEX

Notebook (Coleridge), 19–20, 109 “Note to The Thorn” (Wordsworth), 66– 67, 74–75 novels, 10, 51 “Nuns Fret Not At Their Convent’s Narrow Room” (Wordsworth), 178, 179 “Ode on Indolence” (Keats), 136, 141–44 “Ode to the West Wind” (Shelley), 149–50 Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Hooker), 2 “Old Man Travelling: Animal Tranquility and Decay, A Sketch” (Wordsworth), 64 O’Neill, Harriet Boyle, 53–54 “On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost” (Marvell), 6 Original Sonnets on Various Subjects (Seward), 39–40 panic, 7 Paradise Lost (Milton), 5, 114 Pascoe, Judith, 85, 140, 152 passivity, aesthetics of, 136–44 pastor, congregation and, 2 pathos of liberalism (Langan), 179 pathos of reading (Favret), 96 Peace of Amiens, 153–54 pentameter, 5, 37, 38, 79, 108, 134–35, 178 Peri Bathos; or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry (Pope), 5, 62 personification, 78, 80–81, 83–84, 86–87 Peterloo Massacre, 147, 158– 63, 169– 70 Pfau, Thomas, 97

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Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Burke), 23, 73–74 A Philosophical View of Reform (Shelley), 150 Pinch, Adela, 5, 30, 34 pitch, in music, 57 pity: acting out of, 20–21; benevolence and, 21, 22; characteristics of, 20, 22; compassion, 191n73; deception and, 21; effects of, 22; feeling of, 191n70; as negative affect, 20, 60, 70, 86; role of, 16; Spinoza’s idea of, 16, 18, 20–22, 28, 60– 61, 191n70, 191n73; suffering and, 20–21; sympathy and, 21 plantations, 147–48 poets/poetry: affective impositions within, 13; as an escape, 33; dynamics of activity of, 176; musical thinking within, 11; origin of, 12; through radical materialist lens, 184. See also specific poetry; specific poets A Political Ecology of Things (Bennett), 191n64 Pope, Alexander, 5, 62 Potkay, Adam, 60, 92 power, authority and, 214n75 “The Power of Music” (Wordsworth), 152 “Preface to the Sixth Edition” (Smith), 34 “Prefatory Sonnet” (Wordsworth), 40–41 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 112–17 pre-personal affections, 6, 9–10 proprioception, 93, 201n10 proprioceptive self-possession, 92– 93, 94–99, 111

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prosaism, 66– 67, 69, 105, 198n29 protest, 212–13n52 provocation: congenial sense of, 14; deceptive cadence and, 4– 9, 13, 37, 184; defi ned, 2; of form, 119–20; forms of, 5– 6; harmony versus, 3; impulse of, 3–4; means of, 1–2, 3; political, 25, 158–59, 163; relationality within, 3; role of, 176; social dimension of, 116 psychological distress, 59 psychological openness, 137 queer rereading, 30 Quinney, Laura, 59 radical Enlightenment, 15 radicalism, 15 Rajan, Tilottama, 143–44 Rankine, Claudia, 26, 176, 184, 185 reading: motions within, 94– 95, 111–12; pathos of, 96; process of, 91; self-experiments of, 97; selfpossession and, 99–105; visual difficulties within, 96 reading around, 29, 39–44 reason, 16, 20, 21 rebukes, 5 Reformers, 160– 62, 172 Reign of Terror, 150, 153 Reiman, Donald, 162 relationality: affective force of, 3, 12, 48, 56; as affective negotiations, 93; as affective reciprocity, 116, 119; forms of, 22; in Keats’s poetics, 120–21, 129, 141; in Spinoza’s philosophy, 108; in Wordsworth’s poetics, 155, 181 Remorse (Coleridge), 103

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A Revolution of the Mind (Israel), 190n48 Reynolds, J. H., 128, 129, 133, 136 rhyme: example of, 33, 41, 65, 66, 103, 105, 133; of sonnets, 42; structures of, 38, 79; types of, 100–102 Rice, James, 126, 128, 130, 138 Ricks, Christopher, 120 Riddle, Allen, 215n6 Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge), 77–78 Robinson, Mary: “All Alone,” 77; “The Deserted Cott age,” 77; “Golfre,” 77; “The Haunted Beach,” 77; Lyrical Tales, 23, 75–85; personification use by, 81, 83–84; quote of, 41; “The Shepherd’s Dog,” 62, 77, 78–80, 81– 83, 83–84, 85–86; “The Trumpeter,” 77; “We Are Seven,” 77; “The Widow’s House,” 77; writing style of, 62– 63, 79 Roe, Nicholas, 206n6 Rohrbach, Emily, 128, 180–81 Romanticism, 1, 3, 15, 179 Rovee, Christopher, 205n2 Rowlandson, Mary, 51 “The Ruined Cottage” (Wordsworth), 77 safety, 158– 63 “The Sailor’s Mother” (Wordsworth), 24, 93– 94, 99–105, 106–10 Scott , Jordan, 150, 151–52, 175, 177–78 Scott , Julius S., 147, 157 Scott , Walter, 182 The Seasons (Thomson), 83 Seigworth, Gregory J., 202n40 self-possession, 99–105 Seward, Anna, 39–40

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INDEX

Shaftesbury, Th ird Earl of, 7 Shakespeare, William, 46, 121–24, 127, 146 Sharp, Hasana, 18, 19, 162, 166, 191n65 Sharren, Kandice, 66 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: background of, 168; as compared to Wordsworth, 158; A Defence of Poetry, 150; influences to, 42; Lucretius and, 190n48; The Mask of Anarchy, 25, 148, 158– 63, 164–72, 173–74, 176; “Ode to the West Wind,” 149–50; A Philosophical View of Reform, 150; quote of, 12; Spinoza and, 162; writings of, 11 “The Shepherd’s Dog” (Robinson), 62, 77, 78–80, 81–84, 85–86 Silva, Ferreira da, 182 simile: connection to refrain in Mask of Anarchy (Shelley), 169–72; connection to volta in Elegiac Sonnets (Smith), 31–33; example of, 164; role of, 33, 100 “Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman” (Wordsworth), 23, 62, 63–70, 73, 74–75, 78, 80 Simpson, David, 106, 116–17 Singer, Kate, 18–19 “Sitt ing Down to Read King Lear Once Again” (Keats), 124, 144–45 situating affect, 9–15 slavery, 147–48, 164 Smith, Adam, 7, 8– 9, 21, 55–56, 64, 188n13, 188n23, 196n93 Smith, Charlotte: alignments of, 54; criticism of, 35, 39–40; description of, 195n48; Desmond, 30; hope against hope concept of, 28, 44–49,

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54, 55, 58, 176–77; influence of, 35, 42; Montalbert, 30; pentameter use by, 38; “Preface to the Sixth Edition,” 34; preface writing by, 35– 36; quote of, 27, 34, 36; reading around of, 39–44; sympathy theory of, 196n93; viewpoints regarding, 193n12; writing style of, 31–32, 36, 43, 48–49, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58. See also Elegiac Sonnets (Smith) Smith, Zadie, 199n63 “The Solitary Reaper” (Wordsworth), 152 Sonnet VI “To Hope” (Elegiac Sonnets), 45–47, 48, 57 Sonnet VIII “To Spring” (Elegiac Sonnets), 49 Sonnet XII “Written on the sea shore” (Elegiac Sonnets), 28–29, 31–39, 49, 52 Sonnet XIII “To Petrarch” (Elegiac Sonnets), 38, 47 Sonnet XXXV “To Fortitude” (Elegiac Sonnets), 49 Sonnet XXXVI (Elegiac Sonnets), 33 Sonnet LVI “The captive escaped in the wilds of America, Address to Hon. Mrs. O’Neill” (Elegiac Sonnets), 50, 51–53, 55 sonnets: characteristics of, 178, 180; debates regarding, 39–43; elegiac, 31, 34, 42–43; encomiastic, 178; juxtaposition of, 180–81; long chasm within, 193– 94n26; melancholy within, 42–43; purpose of, 55; role of, 179; strenuousness within, 28; Wordsworth’s approach to, 178 sorrow, 88 Southey, Robert, 182

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The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (Rowlandson), 51 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 67, 208n63 Spinoza, Benedict de: ethics of, 107; freedom concept of, 166; influence of, 15, 30; matter and mind nondistinction, 59– 60; pitybenevolence dynamic of, 22; quote of, 14, 17, 20, 21, 48, 60, 99, 108– 9, 165, 168, 192n6, 196n94; Shelley’s interest in, 162; viewpoint of, 9–10; writings of, 15, 18, 20, 21 spiriting gently, 136, 140 stagecraft , 25 Stewart, John “Walking,” 15, 27, 130, 184, 192n5 Stewart, Kathleen, 180 Stillinger, Jack, 137 Stothard, Thomas, 193n22 Strange Fits of Passion (Pinch), 34 strenuousness, 28 strike, 213n61 structures of feeling, 1, 29, 187n2 suffering, 20–21, 56, 150–52, 153, 184–85 suspense, 4 sympathy: concept of, 7; as negative affect, 60; pity and, 21; role of, 8, 188n18, 188n23; as structure of feeling, 1; theories of, 196n93; Wordsworth and, 58; writings regarding, 55–56 “The Tables Turned” (Wordsworth), 139 temporality, 194n35 Terada, Rei, 97 tetrameter, 38, 66, 101 Thelwall, John, 39, 40 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 7, 55–56, 188n13

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thinking, feeling versus, 16 Third Critique (Kant), 8 “Th is Living Hand” (Keats), 121, 130, 131–36 Thomson, James, 83 “The Thorn” (Wordsworth), 100 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 139 Tomkins, Silvan, 11 “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” (Wordsworth), 25, 148, 150–51, 152–58, 177, 178, 179–81, 182, 183 “To William Wordsworth” (Coleridge), 24, 111–17 trauma, listening within, 150–52, 153 Travels over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe, to Discover the Source of Moral Motion (Stewart), 27, 184 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 6 tri-syllable rhymes, 100–101 “The Trumpeter” (Robinson), 77 turning away, sociability of, 50–55 umbrella, symbolism of, 185 “Umbrella Revolution,” 185 unhappiness, 88 un-homing, 164–72 unity, 158– 63 volta, 23, 31, 33, 37, 45–46, 49, 50, 53, 180 wage-slavery, 158 Warhol, Andy, 75–76 water-insect, symbolism of, 95, 98 “We Are Seven” (Wordsworth), 77 “Weather” (Rankine), 26, 176, 184 weathering, 215n5 West, Cornel, 44–45 White, H., 39, 42 white Abolitionism, 177 “The Widow’s House” (Robinson), 77

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INDEX

Wigod, Jacob D., 137 Williams, Raymond, 1, 209n65 Wilson, John, 182 wind: affective boundary-crossing and, 149, 174; common, 177, 182; overview of, 148; writings regarding, 25, 32, 52, 79, 85, 149–50, 154, 157, 169 wise passiveness, 137, 138–39 Wolfson, Susan, 168 Wollstonecraft , Mary, 31 Woodhouse, Richard, 119, 205– 6n3 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 77 Wordsworth, William: comparisons to, 137, 138, 139, 158; criticism of, 100, 156; description of, 31; Descriptive Sketches, 153; disappointment aesthetic of, 181; “Expostulation and Reply,” 138–39, 152; “Hart-Leap Well,” 62, 85– 90; influence of, 127, 129, 130, 138; Lyrical Ballads, 23, 62, 64, 72, 76, 99, 109, 116, 177; metaphysical motions and, 91; “Note to The Thorn,” 66– 67,

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74–75; “Nuns Fret Not At Their Convent’s Narrow Room,” 178, 179; passiveness of, 137; personification rejection by, 80–81; political possibility for, 147; “The Power of Music,” 152; “Prefatory Sonnet,” 40– 41; The Prelude, 112–17; quote of, 4, 6, 40–41, 62, 72, 106, 129, 149–50, 165, 195n48; “The Ruined Cottage,” 77; “The Sailor’s Mother,” 24, 93– 94, 99–105, 106–10; “Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman,” 23, 62, 63–70, 64– 65, 73, 74–75, 78, 80; “The Solitary Reaper,” 152; Spinoza’s philosophy and, 58–59, 92, 109–10, 156–57, 182; sympathy writings of, 58, 60– 61; “The Tables Turned,” 139; “The Thorn,” 100; “Tintern Abbey,” 139; “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” 25, 148, 150–51, 152–58, 177, 178, 179– 81, 182, 183; viewpoint of, 23, 43– 44, 182–83; writings of, 177; writing style of, 67, 72–73, 104, 107, 110, 179, 181–82

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