Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention 9780804798761

Citation preview

Wa t c h w o r d s

Wat c h w o r d s Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention

Lily Gurton-Wachter

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of University of Missouri Research Council Grants. 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 Gurton-Wachter, Lily, author. Watchwords : Romanticism and the poetics of attention / Lily Gurton-Wachter. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-9695-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. . Authors and readers—Great Britain—History—19th century—Biography. . Attention— Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Romanticism—Great Britain. 5. Poetics. I. Title. pr590.g84 2016 821'709145—dc23 2015034983 isbn 978-0-8047-9876-1 (electronic) Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10.5/15 Adobe Garamond

For Andrew & Oscar

C o n t en t s



Figures  ix



Acknowledgments  xi Introduction: Attention’s Disciplines   1



1 Reading, a Double Attention   33



2 The Poetics of Alarm and the Passion of Listening   59



3 Bent Earthwards: Wordsworth’s Poetics of the Interval   84



4 “That Something Living Is Abroad”: Missing the Point in Beachy Head  110



5 Attention’s Aches in Keats’s Hyperion Poems   141

Afterword: Just Looking   179

Notes  195



Works Cited   241



Index  261

F igu r e s

1 Heads, representing the various passions of the soul / Attention, published by Robert Sayer, after Charles Le Brun, 1740–1765

6

2 Attention, from Le Brun Travested [sic], Or Caricatures of the Passions, etched by Thomas Rowlandson, designed by George Moutard Woodward, January 21, 1800

7

3 Attention, by Robert Mitchell Meadows, after John Raphael Smith, 1791

17

4 Inattention, by Robert Mitchell Meadows, after John Raphael Smith, 1791

18

5 A woman paying mild attention to something, by Johann Caspar Lavater and Thomas Holloway, after Nicolas Poussin, 1794

26

6 Puzzles for Volunteers!! September 1, 1803

34

7 Search-Night; or State-Watchmen, mistaking Honest-Men for Conspirators, by James Gillray, 1798

48

8 A woman in a state of attention without interest, by Johann Caspar Lavater and Thomas Holloway, 1789

61

9 John Bull viewing the preparations on the French coast! by William Holland, 1803

115

x f i g u r e s

10 Watercolour of Wounded Soldier, Waterloo, by Charles Bell, 1815

161

11 Watercolour: arm wound, by Charles Bell, 1815

161

12 The Temporary Elgin Room, by Archibald Archer, 1819

163

13 Heads, representing the various passions of the soul / Compassion, published by Robert Sayer, after Charles Le Brun, 1740–1765

168

A c kn owle d gmen t s

T

he deepest imprint on this book comes from the extraordinary teaching, writing, and guidance of Steven Goldsmith and Kevis Goodman, a dream team of intellectual engagement, brilliance, and kindness, who exemplify the kind of attention that Simone Weil called “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” They have given endless encouragement, support, and advice, all the while challenging me at every stage to make this the book they thought it could be. The influence of their own thinking and writing permeates these pages like an atmosphere—everywhere and yet impossible to properly document, despite repeated attempts. I feel incredibly lucky to have close friends who are both brilliant and generous. Andrea Gadberry has read more of this book than anyone else; I owe much in these pages to her persistent pact- and pun-making, her patience with my desperate pleas for help, and her always perceptive, funny, and imaginative feedback. Amanda Jo Goldstein and David Carroll Simon read and responded to chapters with stunning, generous, and incisive commentary. I only met Anahid Nersessian in the final years of writing, but she has quickly become a vital source of advice and inspiration, and this book has benefited from her dazzling editorial comments. Perhaps more importantly, all four of

xii a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

them have brought laughter and friendship to what is often a too serious and lonely pursuit. Noah Heringman welcomed me warmly to the Beachy Head club of Missouri, and read chapter drafts with care, insight, and rigor. I am grateful for Anne-Lise François’s startlingly perceptive comments on early drafts of this project that, along with her own writing, have motivated me throughout. Judith Butler gave crucial support during my years at Berkeley—this project began to take shape in writing I did for her about Celan, Benjamin, and Weil, and I continually return to her generous feedback on this work. I am thankful for Mary Favret’s enthusiastic support, and for her own work, which has been an important inspiration to this project. I am grateful for the warm guidance and encouragement of my colleagues at the University of Missouri, especially to Elizabeth Chang, Stefani Engelstein, Sean Franzel, Joanna Hearne, Seth Howes, Martha Kelly, Emma Lipton, David Read, and Alexandra Socarides. Jonathan Kramnick and Devoney Looser gave decisive help pushing the manuscript toward publication. Thanks to Rachel Feder for her generous brainstorming of many possible titles for this book. So many friendships, near and far, have lightened the weight of writing; thanks to Kathryn Crim, Katrina Dodson, Ian Dreiblatt, Ezra Feinberg, Paul Haacke, Alex Kitnick, Linda Langness, Jenn Lechevallier, Jack Lewis, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Zoe Lister-Jones, Tom McEnaney, Rose Metro, Hillary Miller, Rebecca Poretsky, Beth Rota, Jenni Spitulnik-Hughes, Tristram Wolff, and Betsy Wright. I still feel lucky to have found Tom Keenan and Marina van Zuylen at Bard College, who taught me how to read literature closely and encouraged me to keep doing it, and to Nancy Leonard and everyone in the Language and Thinking program for support and inspiration. I’m especially indebted to Marie Regan, Chris Schmidt, and Matt Longabucco, who made long days spent writing in New York much richer. My students at Bard, Berkeley, and Missouri have made many contributions to these pages, especially those in my Romantic Poetry and Politics graduate seminar in the spring of 2012 and my William Blake undergraduate seminar in the spring of 2015. This book also benefited from helpful conversations during ACLA seminars on “Critical Divestment,” in New York, and “Figural Evasions,” in Seattle. I am grateful to Emily-Jane Cohen and her assistant, Friederike Sundaram, at Stanford University Press for their interest in and support of this proj-

ack now ledgments

xiii

ect. The two anonymous readers gave sensitive and insightful readings of the manuscript that pushed me to make this a much stronger book. Many thanks to John Feneron for moving the book through the production process swiftly and carefully, and to Jeffrey Wyneken for his vigilant copyediting. Work on this book was supported by the University of Missouri Research Council, which gave me a summer travel grant to do research at the British Library, provided a generous subvention, and covered the image permissions, and the University of Missouri Research Board, which provided a grant for the 2013–2014 year that allowed me to finish the manuscript. My parents have given endless love and support from the beginning. My mother, Laura Gurton, taught me how to pay attention to other people, and how to care about art. My father, Gary Wachter, is generous, wise, and steadfast, always ready to help when I need him. My sister, Anna Gurton-Wachter, is a constant source of laughter, poetry, and knowing glances. Thanks to Alan Greenhalgh, Jon Leland, Carol Ott, and Ellen Simon for their support and generosity, and for not minding when I couldn’t explain what this book was about, or when I might finish it. Ahndraya Parlato has been my best listener and inspiration in many things for over fifteen years; it is fitting that her photograph graces the cover of this book. This book is for Andrew Leland, who manages to infuse our most quotidian moments with deep reserves of love, enthusiasm, and hilariousness, and for Oscar Leland, who has given me a more undiluted joy, awe, and love than I ever could have imagined. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as “Ever on the Watch: Wordsworth’s Attention” in Studies in Romanticism 52.4 (Winter 2013). I am grateful to the Trustees of Boston University for permission to reprint. Parts of Chapter 4 were published as “‘An Enemy, I Suppose, that Nature Has Made’: Charlotte Smith and the Natural Enemy” in European Romantic Review 20.2 (2009). Thanks to Taylor & Francis for permission to reprint it here.

Wa t c h w o r d s

I n t roduc t ion Attention’s Disciplines

W

e tend to talk confidently about attention as though it were obvious just how and to what one ought to pay it, but what do we spend and what do we gain when we “pay” attention? Despite the implicit sense that attention is part of a neat economic exchange in which one could simply pay it and be done, the word attention contains its own difficulty: from the Latin ad and tendere, “to stretch to,” attention suggests a stretching or bending of the mind toward an object, though not too far, lest one get lost in the object itself.1 And yet this activity also requires a precarious passivity, one Samuel Johnson identified with “the French meaning” of attend, “to wait for.”2 Neither fully active nor passive, neither wholly voluntary nor involuntary, attention again and again evades definition and categorization, and thus escapes our attention. It is extremely difficult, it turns out, to pay attention to attention.3 This book takes up that challenge, though not through the cognitive approaches that have become increasingly familiar in both science and literary study.4 Instead, I investigate how a variety of people at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain—poets and philosophers, teachers and theologians, politicians and physicians—conceptualized and described attention, how they

2 introduction

demanded it of others or complained about its deficits, how they strategized to command it in individuals or to situate it within broader fields of study. This was, I argue, a particularly troubled and rich moment for attention. Before modern psychology became a distinct discipline of study or a profession at the end of the nineteenth century, attention both distinguished and put into curious alignment the seemingly disparate fields of medicine, aesthetics, theology, poetics, pedagogy, ethics, politics, and rhetoric, all of which, we might say, were competing for attention—competing, that is, for readers, and for the authority to define just how and to what one ought to pay attention to begin with.5 Though “attention” is a term, often a command, used to discipline students and soldiers alike, attention during the years known in literary studies as the Romantic period was exceptionally undisciplined, moving between and interlacing these various fields. In resisting categorization, attention was unpredictable and uncontrollable, never a wholly effective tool of either discipline or security.6 The Romantic period, falling directly between the two periods scholars typically look to for psychological or philosophical definitions of attention— namely, the Enlightenment and the Victorian era—was a volatile interdisciplinary moment in attention’s history, coming in Europe just prior to the development of psychology, a field that would try to adopt attention as its own. Psychological definitions of attention, though, proved complicated as well: in 1905, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus would complain that “attention is a real embarrassment to psychology.”7 Most accounts of attention skip over, perhaps with a similar sense of embarrassment, the turn of the nineteenth century, typically locating the origin of our modern struggle with attention considerably later. Jonathan Crary’s pivotal study of the history of attention, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, pinpoints the emergence of attention as a problem in the 1870s and 1880s, when Crary identifies a uniquely modern distraction as an effect and a constituent element of multiple attempts to produce and maintain attentiveness in human subjects.8 Recent shifts in this history have noted that the late nineteenth-century mania for attention borrowed and revived a quieter concern from a century earlier, linked to early eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy of mind and new concepts of scientific observation.9 Indeed, throughout both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, psychologists, philosophers, and physicians

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

3

argued over whether attention was voluntary or involuntary; whether it was an act of the will or an irresistible and spontaneous reflex of the mind; a quality of mature, adult concentration, or of a child’s wonder. They debated the distinctions between attention, reflection, and consciousness; the possibility of attending to more than a single object at once; whether we can refuse to hear or see by withholding our attention; whether attention to a passion rather than to its object increases or diminishes the passion; whether forgetting is always or only caused by inattention; and whether it is possible to attend to attention itself. Before psychology arrived to discipline it, attention oscillated widely and wildly from theology to pedagogy, from ethics to medicine, and from poetics to politics. Attention is therefore a rich site for understanding how different disciplines intersected and intertwined in the period, as they competed with each other for the authority to define the experience that now seems as basic and minimal as how we pay attention. The poetry of this period, I submit, was not just one of these forces competing for attention. This book will argue that in trying to apprehend how their own readers paid attention, Romantic poets grappled with a variety of other disciplines also vying for those readers’ notice. Romanticism is thus exemplary of an interdisciplinary thinking that understands itself as constituted by the modes of attention that it also criticizes. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy famously define Romanticism as neither “mere ‘literature’” nor a theory of literature, but rather “theory itself as literature or, in other words, literature producing itself as it produces its own theory.”10 I would amend that definition here to suggest that Romanticism names a literature that produces itself as inextricable from both the diverse modes of attention cultivated by other disciplines and the alternative modes of attention it makes possible for its own readers. The Romantic texts I focus on use poetic form to experiment with an attention that always comes to bear on, but is never entirely limited to, the experience of reading. This book traces a poetics of attention that thus understands what and how readers notice as constituted and transformed by the modes of scrutiny, focus, watchfulness, and concentration developed in and by other discursive arenas. These include aesthetics, politics, ethics, theology, natural history, pedagogy, medicine, botany, history, rhetoric, and—most controversially, as I will reveal throughout—the strategy and practice of war.

4 introduction

Even armed with psychology’s organizational tools, late-nineteenth-century thinkers found attention baffling. In Matter and Memory (1896), Henri Bergson complains that an adequate definition of attention cannot be found, lamenting that no matter how we attempt to locate it, “we always come back to a metaphor.”11 Similarly, French psychologist Théodule Ribot’s The Psychology of Attention (1888) calls attention an “attitude of the mind, a purely formal state.”12 Though these descriptions of the formal and figural nature of attention are meant to signal frustration, they are also suggestive of why poetry, particularly concerned with form and figure, might have found in attention’s frustrations an aesthetic opportunity. T h e F i d ge t s

Twenty-first-century scientists have recently traced the first documentation of the disorder that we now call Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to a medical text published in London in 1798, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement, by the Scottish physician Alexander Crichton.13 Crichton, who would later become physician to the Imperial Russian court, devotes an entire chapter to the “morbid alterations to which attention is subject,” one of which he describes as the “incapacity of attending with a necessary degree of constancy to any one object” and “an unnatural or morbid sensibility of the nerves, by which means this faculty is incessantly withdrawn from one impression to another.”14 Contesting the assertion that, in the words of Thomas Reid, “attention is a voluntary act” requiring “an active exertion to begin and to continue it,” Crichton notes a shift in how people were beginning to understand attention at the close of the century.15 His studies insist that attention is often involuntary and that to believe otherwise would be considered, by the 1790s, quite “unphilosophical” (257). Moreover, Crichton suggests that paying too much attention “can prove hurtful,” and he gives a lengthy account of one man whose attention “was constantly kept on the stretch, and was continually shifting from one subject to another” (270). Following one such intense “stretch,” the man tries to write a simple note but cannot find his words (289). He has such a “morbid” case of what Crichton earlier called “the fidgets” that he cannot even speak (272). This overlooked text in the history of attention marks the first medical attempt to understand what Shakespeare had called the “malady of not marking” as in fact an actual malady for doctors to diagnose.16

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

5

Seventeen ninety-eight is also the year of a more well-known event in the history of attention, though it has not yet been thought of in this context: namely, the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which was accompanied two years later by Wordsworth’s complaint in the volume’s “Preface” about a degradation of attention among British readers more pervasive and general than that Crichton described. Wordsworth’s famous diagnosis of the “state of almost savage torpor” in the minds of British readers—minds altered by the speed and pace of reading daily newspapers and frantic novels— is a complaint about attention, and an explicit indictment of his own readers’ “organs of attention,” or lack thereof.17 The fact that Wordsworth blames this communal attention deficit disorder on the “great national events which are daily taking place” and the “increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies,” suggests not just that poetry and newspapers competed for readers’ attentions.18 Rather, Wordsworth’s point is that the political and social transformations of the period, in conjunction with the new media that documented them, altered how people paid attention altogether.19 Indeed, the caricaturist G. M. Woodward’s parody (Figure 2) of Charles Le Brun’s depiction of Attention (Figure 1) as one of the Expressions of the Passions of the Soul suggests that in the year 1800 attention could not be conceptualized as distinct from the eager listening of what Woodward calls a “newsmonger.” As the nineteenth century began, gone was any reliable distinction between a seemingly neutral physiology of attention and the uneasy passions that emerged from reading the newspaper.20 The “great national events” taking place daily in Britain in the 1790s and 1800s—the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the sedition trials, and the indefinite suspension of habeas corpus are only a few of the convulsive repercussions of the French Revolution—not only served as the content of the news that readers “craved.” The events themselves, to invoke Walter Benjamin’s story about Baudelaire’s modern urban shock experience, so drastically altered the structure of experience that a poet could no longer count on readers willing and able to pay attention to his words.21 One crucial change in the structure of experience, I will argue, came with the militarization of attention that emerged in the years of the first “total war,” a war that brought “mass arming on an unprecedented scale” that was so consuming that it had to be fought through its civilians’ senses.22 As Mary Favret shows in her pivotal study of

Figure 1. Heads, representing the various passions of the soul / Attention, published by Robert Sayer, after Charles Le Brun, 1740–1765 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 2. Attention, from Le Brun Travested [sic], Or Caricatures of the Passions, etched by Thomas Rowlandson, designed by George Moutard Woodward, January 21, 1800. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org. Reprinted with permission. The captions reads: “This Passion is strongly express’d in a News-monger listening to the contents of a Gazette, it is therefore selected for this second of Le Brun Travested.”

8 introduction

Romanticism and war, the pervasive sense of “war at a distance” in the Romantic period meant the “transformation of society not by warfare per se, but by a militarization of institutions, social systems, and sensibilities,” a transformation by which “war invades thought itself.”23 In focusing on attention, this book dilates one especially eccentric way that war can invade thought, and expands the important conversation Favret and others have begun toward issues as far-ranging as scientific observation, reading, sympathy, surveillance, pedagogy, affect, medicine, and prayer—all of which converge in the unruly and undisciplined movement of a Romantic attention pressured by, but not limited to, the demands of war.24 Whereas Favret shows how a number of Romantic concerns were affected by the pervasive sense of war at a distance, this book shows how one central wartime concern—attention—quickly and necessarily expands outward onto a wide variety of issues, since attention itself, even when the military tries to discipline it, resists containment. The year 1798, that of Crichton’s Inquiry and of Lyrical Ballads, marked, as Jerome Christensen reminds us, “not only the annus mirabilis but also the thunderous dawn of the Napoleonic invasion threat and the heyday of Pitt’s repression.”25 From 1792 until 1815, the years that historians now refer to as the “Great Terror,” war and the constant threat of invasion put immense pressure on the cognitive capacities of British civilians, who were continually exhorted to watch and remain vigilant for an always imminent (though never successful) French invasion.26 In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary finds the first written indication of “Attention!” as a military command in the publication in 1792 of the first official military field manual issued by the British War Office, Rules and regulations for the formations, field-exercise, and movements, of His Majesty’s Forces.27 This text marks the first public, written attempt to use attention to regulate and systematize the movements, postures, and exercises of the British army, preparing forces for “the exact uniformity required in all movements.”28 The manual instructs: On the word, Attention, the hands are to fall smartly down the outside of the thighs; the right heel to be brought up in a line with the left; and the proper unconstrained position of a soldier immediately resumed. When standing at ease for any considerable time in cold weather, the men may be permitted, by command, to move their limbs; but without quitting their ground, so that upon the word Attention, no one shall have materially lost his dressing in the line.  (6)

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

9

The manual provides a precise example of those “small techniques of discipline” that Michel Foucault describes as “the panopticisms of the every day.”29 The unprecedented militarism in these years made this disciplining an urgent and ubiquitous demand, since it was the first war that involved “the complete mobilization of a society’s resources to achieve the absolute destruction of an enemy, with all distinction erased between combatants and noncombatants.”30 Thus, not just soldiers but all civilians, each of whom was considered a “half-soldier,” were asked in popular pamphlets and broadsides to keep watch and wait, providing a kind of prehistory to the slogan of twenty-first-century America: “If you see something, say something.”31 This militarization was so widespread, as Anne Secord has remarked, that even “a quaker pacifist could advocate a system of education in which ‘every one, like a soldier, must be upon the alert—& like soldiers, all at the same moment—thus the attention is kept in constant exercise and no idlers can live amongst them.’”32 Though a fixed alertness is certainly always crucial for military movement—Milton wrote of force united “with fixed thought” and Jonathan Crary has recently described the twenty-first-century search for a drug that will allow soldiers to remain awake for seven days at a time—the Romantic period marked a newly explicit attempt to describe, regulate, and standardize attention for military purposes.33 Broadsides warning the British of an imminent French invasion asked for the contribution of all civilians’ loyalism, weapons, and—central to a consideration of attention in the period—their senses, exhorting everyone to “strain every nerve in defense of our native land.”34 Alarmist broadsides often linked national security with a communal and constant watchfulness that enhanced one’s “sense of danger,” asking with reference to the potential invasion, “How . . . are we to avert such horrors?” and responding with the imperative: “by feeling the full extent of your danger.”35 These texts directly linked the security of the state to a stretching and bending of its inhabitants’ nerves and senses, as though a communal feeling of safety itself would cause the nation’s political and military vulnerabilities, and as though indulging the feeling of alarm and fear—“that rational sense of danger”—might do some good.36 Coleridge’s enigmatic wish to “excite in every part of the British empire, THE SENSE OF DANGER, WITHOUT THE FEELING OF FEAR” reveals the urgent yet confused demands on the senses during the period.37 War, these pamphlets reveal, feeds off of an attention defined by the deadening of some kinds of

10 introduction

watching in favor of others.38 Romanticism, I will argue, sought to derail that process and reappropriate a mode of attention that, it turned out, was always more mobile and erratic than the state wanted it to be anyway. This militarized attention quickly took the shapes of surveillance, spying, and alarm. “What I say unto YOU, I say unto ALL: WATCH” was indeed the watchword of the period. Watch and wait, the government ordered, for France of course but also for the subtler, more insidious emergence of French opinion.39 A wartime watchfulness inseparable from fear, surveillance, and suspicion was demanded at all times by a new group of politicians who called themselves, proudly, “alarmists.” And resistance to this “system of alarm,” even simply in the form of an attention to something else, transgressed the political rules just as mental derangement disobeyed the discipline of the mind.40 Thus Crichton’s diagnosis of “the fidgets”—that “disease of attention” from which “every impression seems to agitate the person, and gives him or her an unnatural degree of mental restlessness”—echoed the political malady of attention that proved so contagious in the 1790s: “the political fidgets.” “The patient begins with simple scratching,” Noah Webster explains, satirically diagnosing what he calls this most dangerous kind of fidgetiness, “and soon snarles and bites; he then becomes incoherent; and, in his last ravings, nothing can be heard but congress—treason—election—six dollars a day. All the world cries out, the man is mad! No such thing; he is only fidgety.”41 For anti-Jacobin authorities, calls for political change were best dismissed as a disease of the attentive faculty. Though the word “fidgetiness” didn’t arrive in English until 1792, both the medical and political diagnoses of the fidgets draw on the familiar, everyday problem of fidgetiness in readers.42 In 1782, the early Romantic poet William Cowper had written about “sedentary weavers of long tales” who “Give me the fidgets, and my patience fails.” He explains: “At ev’ry interview their route the same, / The repetition makes attention lame.”43 Wordsworth’s complaint in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads implies that poetry—more particularly, his poetry—aims to correct and counter the effects of newspapers, urban life, and politics on how readers pay attention. This book will investigate just how this response happens in Romantic poetry, but we will not find here the predictable oppositions between an agitated craving for newspapers and a slower, calmer, less distracted engagement with poetry, or between frantic wartime alarmism

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

11

and a detached, fearless, apolitical, and self-absorbed concentration on verse. There certainly was plenty of support for poetry’s reputation for demanding a more sustained and heightened absorption than other literary forms, and for its ability to refine or cultivate the attention of its readers. In this vein, for example, Coleridge wrote that “there is no profession on earth, which requires an attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of poetry,” and in a letter to Schiller in 1797, Goethe suggested that “poetry demands, nay, it enforces, a collected state of mind.”44 And yet even Goethe’s affirmation of poetry’s collecting powers proves more disturbing than rewarding, since it is also poetry that “isolates man against his will, . . . repeatedly forcing itself on the attention.”45 Over the course of this book, I uncover a Romantic poetics of attention that, moving beyond a blanket demand for heightened readerly absorption, uses verse form to explore attention’s conditions and its limits, its forcefulness and its finitude. This poetics experiments with the rhythms of reading and thus with the media and conditions of receptivity; it encourages modes of divided, doubled, and multiplied attention, in which it finds not a liability but a strength; and it courts a rhythm in verse between attention and its relaxation, between watchfulness and its withdrawal.46 Furthermore, it does not shy away from attention’s oscillation between disciplines. Rather, the poems I discuss engage attention as a formal problem in which they find an opportunity to reflect both on how they will be read and on their relation to various other shapes attention takes—as affective receptivity or as military defense, as an attitude toward other persons or things, or as a condition for knowledge, sensation, or memory. By paying attention to the divergent ways that attention can be paid, Romantic aesthetics pivots on the possibility that how we watch might alter what we notice. In taking seriously the affective, political, cognitive, theological, and ethical postures taken up by attention, then, the poems I explore not only experiment formally with the reader’s attention but are also about a variety of modes of attention and an assortment of attentive figures, including collectors, animals, historians, soldiers, shepherds, alarmists, hunters, naturalists, doctors, critics, children, and spies—all of which inform how these poems imagine the figure of their own reader. We might say, then, that they actively theorize the experience of reading in a time of tumultuous national events, when the distinction between how and what one reads, again and again, comes undone.

12 introduction

And yet while Romanticism understands itself as molded by these other modes of attention, it also turns to form and figure to carve out alternative modes of attention and inattention. Both borrowing from and critiquing the attentive forces it collects, the poems I focus on offer new ways to imagine attention’s shapes, postures, and attitudes—new “geometries of attention.”47 The Romantic poetics of attention that this book unmasks has many faces: it often dismisses the “despotism of the eye” in favor of the more precarious epistemologies of the ear;48 it replaces a proleptic knowledge of what will arrive with an uncertain phenomenology of the foreign; it turns away from commanding prospect views and toward a more minute observation of the ground and its nonhuman surface and history, finding in a minute attention to particulars a liberation from the constraints of both narrative and argument; and it courts the susceptibility and vulnerability that inevitably accompanies every attempt to keep watch and maintain security.49 At times, this poetics borrows from the resonances of a theological attention linked to vigilant practices of mourning and prayer; at other times, it invites the precise moment when a vigilant brace relaxes. It reorients the minimalism of attention to imagine it as an end in itself, in particular for the experiences of both reading and sympathy for which it is typically only a “necessary preliminary.”50 Trying (and sometimes failing) to separate attention from consciousness, memory, fear, sympathy, knowledge, narrative, thought, and other more seemingly elaborate actions, Romanticism develops a poetics of just noticing. By courting the rhythms of a divided and doubled attention, this poetics makes available views of history that would otherwise overwhelm or elude an observer. In every chapter, attention problems surface in poems that are also about those “great national events which are daily taking place”—poems about war or invasion, surveillance or national alarm. These are poems about witnessing, or failing to witness, history, a term I use to signal both a record of what has already taken place and a historic present, an experience of the contemporary that is marked by an awareness of events so vast and significant that they command and escape any individual’s attention simultaneously.51 The scope of history is one particularly troubling object for an observer whose attention is always limited and selective; consequently, the historic, overwhelming and disappearing all at the same time, emerges over the course of this book as, fundamentally, a problem of attention. This is why, as I suggest in

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

13

Chapter 5, Keats’s Hyperion has to end abruptly, fragmented by a mortal mind unable to attend to all of history. And this is why, I will discuss in Chapter 3, when Wordsworth goes to Paris in the 1790s he admits that he “scarcely felt the shock” of the Revolution’s “concussions,” but was instead “by novelties in speech / Domestic manners, customs, gestures, looks” first “engrossed.”52 In understanding attention as keyed to historic shifts, these texts also suggest that how we witness, understand, and record historical experience can never be separated entirely from the competing forces that try to determine our notice to begin with. For if grappling with history involves facing war and politics and ethics, then the very object of our historical attention is precisely that which shapes how we pay attention to begin with. Romanticism, I argue, diagnoses this bind and seeks to move beyond it. Experimenting with the formal conditions and rhythms of mental absorption and receptivity, these poets encounter other, more elusive types of experience, those “slight historical etchings” that are inaccessible to a more active, proleptic, and overdetermined vigilance.53 Romantic modes of attention emerge, then, out of a concern about how one might pay attention to national events in ways that resist the state-based regimes of keeping watch. “Silent the colonies remain and refuse the loud alarm,” William Blake writes in America (1793), hailing a refusal to pay attention that was itself a crime, since “every inhabitant is bound to keep watch in his turn,” and “an inhabitant is indictable for refusing to keep watch.”54 Blake’s description later in the poem of the moment when “The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations” (53) similarly joins the everyday rhythms of a watchman’s work shifts with the apocalyptic climax that signals there is nothing left to watch for. One argument that takes shape over the course of this book is that military and political modes of watchfulness became exceptionally forceful players in the competition for attention by remaining so fiercely intolerant of any alternative kind of attentiveness, and the militarization of attention was thus palpably felt by poets seeking to articulate other ways to look and listen. When the military insisted that all civilians keep watch for just one object—a French invasion—they were precluding a whole variety of other kinds and objects of attention, on the grounds that any division of attention would be tantamount to a lapse that would leave the nation dangerously vulnerable to its enemies. Strongly discouraged,

14 introduction

then, was the possibility that one might, in Thomas De Quincey’s words, “mind something alien, or remote from the interest then clamouring for attention.”55 Romantic poetry thus practices a “counter-conduct” in cultivating other postures of attention, other “formal states” that engage the narrowness of wartime watchfulness in a direct contest over attention, even as it borrows less polemically from other disciplines.56 To pay attention otherwise, then, could be radical; after all, “government,” wrote William Godwin, “is nothing but regulated force; force is its appropriate claim upon your attention.”57 That said, Romantic authors also hint that the very modes of attention demanded by government could paradoxically lead to these alternative modes of attention to other things, and that minding something alien is an inevitable effect of the temporality of an always mobile attention. In Desmond (1792), her epistolary novel about the French Revolution, Charlotte Smith describes the state of broadened, flexible awareness enabled by alarm. “The truth is,” writes the novel’s protagonist, Whenever I am not suffering under any immediate alarm, my mind, possessing more elasticity than I once thought possible, recovers itself enough to look at the objects around me, and even to contemplate with some degree of composure, my own present circumstances, and the prospect before me, which would a few, a very few months since, have appeared quite insupportable.58

This passage suggests a resistance to political alarm different from the one that Blake offers in America. Instead of refusing to feel alarm completely, Smith recognizes that alarm can produce an “elasticity” of mind which fosters a kind of looking that would have otherwise seemed impossible. As Favret has written, “However fragile or compromised, the psychology and emotional culture called wartime provides its own responses and sometimes its own resistance to the destructiveness of war.”59 In Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), Godwin also finds that a painful vigilance and suspicion, one linked in no ambiguous terms to political obedience and tyranny, can enable a similarly enlarged focus. The mode of attention that Caleb calls the “vigilance of tyranny,” a constant state of “vigilance and suspicion,” has surprisingly empowering effects on the mind, immediate effects that “might have been expected from years of observation and experience.”60 Later in the novel, Caleb identifies these effects in terms of susceptibility, admitting, “I was probably indebted to the sufferings I had endured and the exquisite and increased

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

15

susceptibility they produced, for new energies” (304).61 Both novels insist on a radicalism that resists the oppressive political modes of attention in the period, and yet both also find in political alarm a source of “exquisite” vulnerability when it outlasts its immediate objects and turns elsewhere. Though these passages appear in novels, this book looks to verse for a formal engagement with this exquisite susceptibility, since poetry, I contend, has particularly concentrated and forceful ways of bringing into view the attention problems that all literature must deal with. In verse, the writers I discuss find a medium in which to experiment with the intensification and relaxation of attention in order to seek other styles of receptivity. This concern among Romantic literary writers in a recovered malleability, in the “susceptibility” that comes not just from attention’s brace but also its relaxation, extends an investigation of the strain and slackening of attention that is at work in the casual everyday movements of reading—a rhythm heightened by the pauses and cadences of verse. Verse form, these writers discovered, puts pressure on the reflexes of attention and inattention that are at work in all reading. Given the troubled status of attention in the period, then, it is perhaps not as straightforward as he would like when Coleridge defines meter as “simply a stimulant of the attention.” Indeed, Coleridge seems aware of the complexity when he adds, tautologically, that it “therefore excites the question: Why is the attention to be thus stimulated?”62 For Joseph Priestley, though, as I will discuss in detail in my first chapter, instead of stimulating the attention, meter divides it: “the appearance of verse of any kind . . . shews a double attention,” a divided attention that moves between two objects. So too does poetic language often ask the reader to swing between sound and sense, between opposing significations of single words, between the vehicle and tenor of a metaphor, or between competing syntaxes. Romantic poetics develops an emphatic doubleness and division of attention that counteracts the teleological single-mindedness of war and politics, on the one hand, and of theology, on the other, since Christian models of an attention focused solely on one God also made powerful claims on British minds. In the chapters that follow, close readings of verse by Blake, Cowper, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, and Keats show how poets imagine their readers in ways that are indebted to the various modes of attention they are also critical of. These poems put pressure on poetic language, figure, and form to investigate the ways poetry might

16 introduction

alter how a reader pays attention, and to court modes of attention that divide, double, or stray from their initial objects. S t r aying At t en t i o n

Robert Mitchell Meadows’s engravings of Attention and Inattention (1791) remind us of, and play with, the way we often conflate attention and reading (Figures 3 and 4). Both images depict a young woman: in Attention she, predictably, concentrates on the book being read to her, and in Inattention she has fallen asleep. The images illustrate the “absorptive tradition” Michael Fried has found in early eighteenth-century paintings that evokes realism through a subject’s rapt attention and obliviousness to being watched.63 The joke here seems to be that the young woman is actually oblivious of the book and absorbed instead in the face of the handsome young man reading it to her, since, as the verse caption asks, “when Loves the theme what eye can close?” “Can that be Love,” Blake asks, evoking a different kind of absorption, “that drinks another as a sponge drinks water?” (50). The woman’s inattention is likewise caused by her lack of romantic interest in the elderly woman reading to her (and her apparent preference for Ovid over Fox’s Martyrs). On the other hand, her inattention is not the frantic fidgetiness Crichton describes. Sleeping beside the reader, the woman appears not only content but fully absorbed in her sleep—just as “absorb’d and lost” in sleep as she was in love. I borrow the phrase “absorb’d and lost” from William Cowper, who himself borrows it from religious language to describe that “indolent vacuity of thought” that lets the mind sleep. In Book IV of his long poem The Task (1785), Cowper describes an experience of gazing thoughtlessly at the fire, where he finds “strange visages, expressed / In the red cinders.”64 Staring at the faces in the fire, the poet contemplates his own strange visage, as his face masks his indolence: Meanwhile the face Conceals the mood lethargic with a mask Of deep deliberation, as the man Were task’d to his full strength, absorb’d and lost. (IV: 298–301)

Cowper’s readers have suggested that the poem has something to do with the task of attention (or, we might consider, as the etymology of “task” implies, its

Figure 3. Attention, by Robert Mitchell Meadows, after John Raphael Smith, 1791 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 4. Inattention, by Robert Mitchell Meadows, after John Raphael Smith, 1791 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Reprinted with permission.

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

19

tax).65 These lines complicate that reading insofar as Cowper plays with the way that the task of attention that the face feigns is perhaps more “lost” than the lethargy it hides. For if these lines begin with a seemingly straightforward opposition between a secret mood and a mask that conceals it, foreground and background collapse when the very thing the mask is feigning signals absence rather than the presence it promises. “Absorb’d and lost” could describe both the “mood lethargic” and the “deep deliberation”: after all, if you concentrate on something for too long or too intensely, your concentration may become a blank stare surprisingly close to a lapse in attention, a “sterile act.”66 Both the attentive and the inattentive reader, then, can end up lost. This problem has plagued attention’s theorists. Michael Fried suggests that “absorption and unconsciousness are keyed to one another, to an extent that makes any contrast between them largely empty of meaning.”67 Similarly, Jonathan Crary writes, “attention always contained within itself the conditions for its own disintegration, it was haunted by the possibility of its own excess—which we all know so well whenever we try to look at or listen to any one thing for too long.”68 And in a short fragment titled “Habit and Attentiveness” (1932), Walter Benjamin alludes to the slippery continuum on which attention and distraction lie: “It might be presumed that the soul can be more easily distracted, the more concentrated it is. Yet isn’t this concentrated listening not just the furthest development of attention, but also its end—the moment when it gives birth to habit?”69 Cowper’s “brown study” is famous for echoing Locke’s confession that his soul doesn’t always think.70 Yet it also echoes an important theological model of attention, the goal of which was to lose oneself in its only worthy object: God. Thus we can hear Cowper’s “absorb’d and lost” in John and Charles Wesley’s popular eighteenth-century Methodist hymn: “Thus let me, Lord, Thyself attain, / And give Thee up Thine own again. / Absorbed and lost in Thee.”71 A quick glance over the titles of the Wesleys’ hymns reveals just how pervasive the rhetoric of watchfulness and vigilance was. Almost every hymn in the collection Hymns for the Watch-Night (1744) is about praising and practicing “faith’s most fix’d attention.”72 The Wesleys pick up on a long-standing tradition that understands attention as a theological act or a spiritual operation of the mind, a “force of the soul” according to Charles Bonnet, and the “natural prayer of the soul” for a curious tradition of thinkers from Nicolas Malebranche in the seventeenth century to Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin,

20 introduction

and Paul Celan in the twentieth. And though this line of thought might seem to rely on a model of attention quite distinct from our secular inheritance of Enlightenment philosophy and nineteenth-century psychology, the term’s theological force has persisted even in the most apparently secular of places.73 Cowper’s line, though, does not suggest that he is absorbed and lost in God. Instead, he borrows the structure of vacuous immersion to suggest that attention and the mask of de-liberation that liberates him from the task of attention can both lead to an experience of absorption and loss. As Kevis Goodman has made clear, however, this “unthinking” consciousness is neither a retreat from nor an avoidance of the world, but an unexpected opening—linked in the poem to the experience of reading the newspaper—“through which the world’s strangeness enters.”74 When Coleridge revises Cowper’s lines in “Frost at Midnight” (1798), he relocates this slipperiness between staring, sleeping, and dreaming to school, where, hiding from “the stern preceptor’s face,” his eye is “fixed with mock study on [his] swimming book.”75 The mask of deliberation and mock study both imply a model of attention as an unstable disciplinary tool that is more often mocked and masked than obeyed. In a later text, Coleridge will reveal a more sinister pedagogy, writing that “where no interest previously exists, attention (as every School-master knows) can be procured only by Terror: which is the true reason, why the majority of mankind learn nothing systematically except as School-boys or Apprentices.”76 The twentieth-century French philosopher Simone Weil, for whom attention was the crucial foundation for theology, ethics, and philosophy, also explains the problem of disciplinary attention in schools: Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have been concentrating on nothing. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles. We often expend this kind of muscular effort on our studies. As it ends by making us tired, we have the impression that we have been working. That is an illusion.77

Attention, Weil suggests, cannot be forced, and it often doesn’t look the way we might expect. The muscular effort we expend when trying to pay atten-

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

21

tion, she explains, is always a “mask of deliberation” that will prevent us from becoming truly engrossed in what we turn our eyes, and other muscles, on. The familiar story about Romanticism and education emphasizes the opposition between the swimming book and nature, the “Great universal Teacher!” But there are also other stories to tell here about reading and attention, about books that swim away even when we want to read them, about how, even when students try to pay attention, they end up lost. There are also stories about the strange coincidence between the most absorbed and the most distracted students, and about the various affective shapes attention can take in and out of school. In tracking attention and its cognates, this book uncovers a cross section of Romantic-era thought that also differs from well-known stories about Romanticism and aesthetic philosophy. Though Kant, Lessing, Burke, Reynolds, and the lesser-known Archibald Allison make brief appearances here, my focus on attention—as an unstable, unshareable, and unsustainable faculty that is separable from imagination, judgment, abstraction, memory, and even consciousness—brings to the surface a variety of attitudes and moods that do not quite fit within a Kantian framework of disinterested aesthetic judgment.78 When he does mention attention in The Critique of Judgment, Kant tends to associate it with charm rather than with the aesthetic judgments through which Romanticism has so often been read.79 But even then, attention is marginal, perhaps, as Jonathan Crary writes, because Kant’s goal was a “disinterested aesthetic perception as a desire to escape from bodily time” and attention is “incompatible with any model of a sustained aesthetic gaze.”80 Attention to attention instead uncovers a Romanticism that looks more like what Rei Terada has called looking away, a “phenomenophilic antior protoaesthetic,” or “a counteraesthetic that plays on the periphery of the aesthetic”—one Terada associates with Romanticism’s interest in a noncoercive discourse of mere appearance.81 Indeed, given attention’s structural trait, as Rodolphe Gasché writes, “of a turn toward (something) that is conjoined to a disregarding turn away from something,” the study of attention reveals that looking is always a mode of looking away.82 In refusing to conflate attention with cognition or knowledge, the minimal acts of noticing that this book traces often register the difference between what Terada calls, borrowing from analytic philosophy, “object perception (something crosses my gaze) and fact perception (a dragonfly is passing in front of me),” aligning “mere attention”

22 introduction

with the former.83 Cowper, for example, will seek to separate sound from both fear and knowledge, since “sounds are but sounds,” and Charlotte Smith will assume a posture of just listening for signals that just tell that something living is abroad, without knowing what that something is. And yet neither poet is disinterested, as Kant would have it, since their susceptibility is key to their attentiveness. The posture of just paying attention takes attention’s undisciplined unruliness as an aesthetic—or counter-aesthetic—opportunity. Blake evokes disciplinary attention through the cruel eyes of the teacher and the spy, the latter of which I will discuss in detail in Chapter 1’s treatment of Blake’s “Watch Fiends.”84 Here I’d like to turn to a gentler attention, the pastoral watchfulness of “The Shepherd,” the second of Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789): How sweet is the Shepherds sweet lot, From the morn to the evening he strays: He shall follow his sheep all the day And his tongue shall be filled with praise. For he hears the lambs innocent call. And he hears the ewes tender reply. He is watchful while they are in peace. For they know when their Shepherd is nigh. (7)

After an initial reading, “The Shepherd” seems like one of the more straightforward of Blake’s Songs: “To most of us,” S. Foster Damon writes, “this poem needs no comment.”85 Though this poem might seem to require less concentration than the other Songs of Innocence, this simplicity is deceptive, for the poem throws a number of hurdles in the reader’s way: the ambiguities of syntax, the curious repetition of “sweet” in the first line, and the fact that it is the shepherd who strays rather than the sheep. If a shepherd’s watchfulness typifies another disciplinary mode of attention, the pastoral power that Foucault calls “a prelude to governmentality” insofar as it develops the “art of conducting, directing, leading, guiding, taking in hand, and manipulating men, an art of monitoring them and urging them on step by step,” how should we understand Blake’s shepherd, who rather than guiding the straying sheep, is himself straying?86 Who is watching and shepherding him? In this respect, we might read this poem, with its “Wesley tune,” as upsetting both

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

23

the theological figure of the shepherd, who in popular hymns “brings my wandering spirit back, / When I forsake his ways,” and the figure Foucault calls the king-shepherd or politician-shepherd.87 In contrast to the shepherd’s governing vigilance, which protects the flock from error, Blake suggests a mode of observing that is compatible with straying, and that itself manages to remain unguided and unwatched. But even weirder in “The Shepherd” is the incongruous logic at work in the repetition of conjunctions that actually evade the conditional logic they imply, offering two fors that never provide the explanations they promise. This culminates in the reader’s attention itself straying from the purposefulness that the poem’s syntax suggests. The emphatic illogic of the poem—the combination of explanatory words with lines that decidedly avoid explanation—stresses those out-of-step fors, so that when we ask, what is the shepherd watching for, we ought to hear both senses of for: for what object does he watch, and for what purpose? What for? The poem’s conjunction problem thus points to broader questions about how we conceptualize attention: how do we watch, when we keep watch? What do we watch for? And what do we read for? Blake’s turn from logic to attention intersects curiously with Charles Bonnet’s comment in The Contemplation of Nature (1766) that “there is still wanting a book, which would be the most useful of any that could issue from the human mind, and that is, a History of Attention . . . Were this book well written, and properly attended to, it would put an end to all logic, because it would itself be logick reduced into action.”88 Blake frustrates his reader’s expectations by suggesting that we replace our tendency to read for logic (that is, to expect it) with an experience of reading as a mode of watching that doesn’t watch for anything in particular. The final two lines of “The Shepherd” pair these incongruous conjunctions with a circular logic that binds watchfulness to peace in a strange formulation that raises more questions than it answers. “But he is watchful,” David Simpson asks of the shepherd, “and the implication is that this has something to do with their being at peace. What is the connection?”89 Watchfulness and peace have “something to do” with each other, but what? Which comes first: peace or watchfulness? Does one guarantee the other? These questions are important not only to the pastoral world of shepherding but also to a political realm in which the state was attempting to monopolize the term watchful in

2 4 introduction

order to demand, with unprecedented urgency, that every civilian keep watch for only one thing: a French invasion. Slogans like “Union and Watchfulness, Britain’s true and only security” insisted that watchfulness was necessary for defense, but Blake’s phrase “he is watchful while they are in peace” oddly implies that he might not keep watch during war.90 Insofar as Blake’s lines suggest that either peace is contingent on watchfulness or watchfulness is contingent on peace, the poem gestures toward the inevitability of looking away, of straying, and toward the precarity of maintaining peace, if peace depends on attention. This is not, as Simpson notes, a “happy little poem about protection.”91 Instead it signals a peculiarly Romantic dialectic between keeping watch and invasiveness, a dialectic that finds that vulnerability is inextricable from the efforts to prevent it, and that watchfulness might heighten one’s susceptibility rather than ward it off. Blake elsewhere makes more explicit indictments of how the rhetoric of peace participates in the “Code of War” (67), a phrase that acutely anticipates Foucault’s claim that “peace itself is a coded war”—a code in which watchfulness was crucial.92 “What god is he,” asks Blake, “writes laws of peace and clothes him in a tempest—no more I follow, no more obedience pay” (55). Unlike his more explicit denunciations of the coded or clothed logic of war, Blake’s grammar of irresolution and illogic in “The Shepherd” raises finer questions about the uncertain epistemology and phenomenology of war. In an essay on syntax and sentiment in Blake, James Chandler suggests that we read in the syntactical ambiguity of “The Shepherd” the economic resonance of the word “tender.”93 Such a reading also allows us to hear in the poem’s critique of wartime watchfulness and the code of war that I have been drawing out a question about the economic logic implied in the act of paying attention. In fact, we say that we pay attention for the same reason we pay anything: to pacify our creditors. The English word pay comes from the Latin pax, “peace.”94 If peace, as Blake suggests, cannot be understood apart from its eventual transformation into war, it also cannot be separated from a language of getting and spending tender. This helps tie together Blake’s critique of pity in “The Human Abstract”—“Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody Poor”—with his complaint about peace in the following stanza: “And mutual fear brings peace, / Till the selfish loves increase” (27). I will discuss pity along with other ethical postures of attention in more detail in Chapter 5, but let us just note here that pity is, for Blake, one of the more

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

25

hypocritical modes of attention, a companion to Cruelty, who “spreads his baits with care” (27). Blake describes an oppressive logic in which peace always masks the code of war, and care is just one of cruelty’s enticements. “The Shepherd,” though, is not the wholly experienced poem that “The Human Abstract” is, and if there is a sweetness and tenderness here, I want to suggest we can find it in the alternate mode of watchfulness the poem proposes, an attention that one might stray rather than pay. After all, when the watchmen leave their stations, they are bound to notice something else. When the logics of war, or of reading, come undone, attention takes new forms. This undisciplined, straying, “sweet” watchfulness might thus provide a way out of the absorption and loss Cowper found in the excesses of both attention and its lapse, something akin to that depicted in Lavater’s drawing of a “mild attention” (Figure 5), or David Hartley’s evocation of a gentle one. After one has looked at something and then closed the eyes, Hartley writes, a “clear and precise image” will appear “frequently to Persons, who are attentive to these Things, in a gentle way: for as this Appearance escapes the notice of those who are intirely [sic] inattentive, so too earnest a Desire and Attention prevents it.”95 The flip side of not paying enough attention, Hartley suggests, is paying too much, and both can prevent you from noticing something. Blake’s sweet and tender watchfulness, neither disciplined nor disciplining, is a gentle, straying one that doesn’t know in advance what it is watching for and that, as Amanda Jo Goldstein has written on Blake’s “sweet science,” entails both “an attitude toward the object that is conscious of its fragility, and a concomitant consciousness, indeed, a cultivation, of the plasticity and permeability of the observing self.”96 The challenge of reading “The Shepherd” itself suggests that the reader will not be rewarded for paying attention with a simple purchase: instead the reader has to linger, stray sweetly, and gently wander around these lines aimlessly, to rouse attention without any payoff other than the reader’s own permeability. “The wisest of the Ancients,” Blake wrote, “considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act” (702). War and reading thus emerge among the diverse disciplines vying for attention in a strange kinship formed through the demands they place on watchfulness—a kinship that became a problem for a Romantic poetics that sought gentler ways. Yet instead of opposing the militarization of attention

26 introduction

Figure 5. A woman paying mild attention to something, by Johann Caspar Lavater and Thomas Holloway, after Nicolas Poussin, 1794. Wellcome Library, London.

with an aesthetics of complete distraction, the Romantic poetics that I offer an account of here criticizes wartime watchfulness by suggesting alternate forms of keeping watch that are nevertheless indebted to war’s ramping up of attention—forms that invite the unexpected productivity of a divided, or double, attention; that strain the attention only to perceive something new through its relaxation; that imagine, or lament the inability to imagine, a heightened attention divorced from fear; and that understand attention in the act of sympathy as both painful and sufficient. This is a poetics that finds something surprisingly fruitful in both the movement and the proximity between habit and

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

27

attention, between the blank stare and the moment of noticing something, and it uses the rhythms of verse form to court a dialectic between these extremes and to pause at the tender moments between them. Against the background of wartime watchfulness, I suggest that Romantic texts critique and borrow from the forms of attention demanded by martial vigilance to produce alternative habits that resist definition, conclusion, or telos. These texts imagine attention as an end in itself, all the while reckoning with its inextricability from war and its political effects, which become, I argue, the most powerful claims on attention in the period. After all, war, as Simone Weil will write, is “a way of imposing another reading upon sensations, a pressure upon the imagination of others.”97 Focusing most directly on the experience of reading, my first chapter excavates from Romantic poetics a model of reading with a double attention. I begin by investigating how eighteenth-century philosophers and rhetoricians imagined people paying (or not paying) attention as they read; looking, in particular, at the way that all reading requires a certain inattention—for Erasmus Darwin, to the individual letters, sounds, and shapes in a word, or for Condillac, to the darkness we experience every time we blink. The phrase “double attention” appeared in these years in both military texts and poetic ones. Whereas a double, additional attention was demanded for national security, the phrase also described a division of attention that signaled weakness in Joseph Priestley’s suggestion that one should not write about serious subjects in verse, since it “shews double attention,” dividing the reader’s mind between meter and the serious subject. Romantic poetics, I suggest, reappropriates Priestley’s complaint: from Wordsworth and Coleridge’s theories of meter to Blake’s poetic practice, poets embraced a model of double attention in which division—pace Priestley or the war office—is a strength. For Blake, who was once arrested when his sketching was mistaken for spying, aesthetic and political forms of observation merge in uncomfortable ways. In contrast to “Satan’s Watch Fiends,” figures in Milton and Jerusalem for government-sanctioned surveillance, Blake demands of his reader an attention that is both passive and multiple, divided not only between text and image but also among various, competing grammars and syntaxes, and between multiples ways of reading the minute particulars of punctuation. Blake alludes to the historical practice of surveillance so as to transform it into a poetic theory, one in which reading

28 introduction

entails a double attention that is closer to waiting than seeking, an attention divorced from the fiendish search he calls “suspition.” “The Poetics of Alarm and the Passion of Listening,” my second chapter, looks to attention’s various affective shapes, focusing on its proximity to alarm, terror, fear, and the experience of being startled. Foregrounding the parliamentary debates in the 1790s that made explicit an emerging uneasiness about the feeling of alarm and its elusive origin, I argue that at the same time that alarm and attention were becoming synonymous, critics of alarmism began linking alarm’s uncertainty to language, as the distinction between speaking about fear and causing it came undone. In light of the general climate of alarm, and alarm about alarm, I turn to Cowper’s “The Needless Alarm” and Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” as poems that mark an unexpected and uneasy proximity between alarmism and poetry; the latter, after all, was produced in “an unusual state of excitement” often linked to fear. Both poems consider what Cowper calls “the sounds of war,” pushing apart the gap between sound and signification in order to worry a proximity between poetic language and the “empty sounds” of alarmism. I suggest that Cowper’s and Coleridge’s poetics threaten to empty out language while revealing that, in poetry, such an evacuation can paradoxically produce possibility. Whereas Cowper’s poem finds hope in a mode of listening to sound without thinking of it as the sound of something, Coleridge’s poem does not, and is itself more difficult to read, for it registers satirically the itself frightening impossibility of reading without suspicion. And whereas Cowper imagines the poet’s own widening attention as fearless, Coleridge finds the simple act of attention inextricable from fear. The third chapter, “Bent Earthwards: Wordsworth’s Poetics of the Interval,” begins with a story De Quincey tells about Wordsworth, who when he put his ear to the ground to listen for the arrival of the newspaper, looks up and notices that a new perception arrives only at the moment when the “organs of attention” relax from an attentive brace. Investigating how Wordsworth’s verse formally manages, deflects, and distracts the reader’s attention, the chapter articulates the promise of a signification produced through and at the moment of rest—in the interval. The wartime context of Wordsworth’s observation while waiting for the news of war and De Quincey’s own interest in the military order to “Attend!” make clear that both authors’ curiosity

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

29

about the play of watchfulness and its withdrawal ought to be understood in the context of the wartime demand of vigilance on the part of the English citizenry. De Quincey queries the possibility of noticing something other than that for which one waits: by doing so in a military context, he underscores how alarms of invasion preclude both other perceptions and perceptions of others. Through close readings of passages from The Prelude, I argue that Wordsworth’s verse puts his phenomenological insight to work for an other perception of history. His attempt to experience the Revolution at the site of the September Massacres in Paris highlights how he only gains a sense of the historic in the intervals between two states of heightened attention: reading and keeping watch. In the fourth chapter, “‘That Something Living Is Abroad’: Missing the Point in Beachy Head,” I read Charlotte Smith’s final prospect poem as a response to the pervasive characterization of France as England’s “natural enemy,” a term pivotal to the militarization of attention since it naturalizes a single object of attention and alarm. Attuned to the unexpected intersections of national security and natural history on the coastline, Beachy Head refigures the prospect poem by highlighting the nation’s natural vulnerability: gazing across the Channel from the rocks of Beachy Head toward France, Smith points to geological evidence in the rocks on which she stands that suggests the two enemy nations were once one land mass that was split by a “vast concussion.” The poem is preoccupied with figures of keeping watch, and yet the poet does not limit her own watch to a single, predetermined enemy but rather opens it to the potential arrival of animals, plants, immigrants, gypsies, natural histories, and slight sounds, like that made by the sea-snipe, which “just tells,” she writes, “that something living is abroad.” Smith thus asks how one might sense the arrival of the foreign without knowing in advance what it is, or how one can make sense of a foreign nation that one can neither perceive nor communicate with. Juxtaposing poetic, military, and scientific practices of observation, Beachy Head presents a landscape teeming with both sounds and listeners overlapping and intertwining—sounds of foreignness and nearby life. As Smith multiplies these signals of danger, they lose their urgency, forming instead an archive of outdated modes of attention. Moving from horizon to the ground, from the prospect view to a more minute observation, Smith depicts a heightened, anticipatory, and yet divided attention that she also de-

30 introduction

mands of her reader, who must likewise move between the poetic text and its unfolding notes. My final chapter, “Attention’s Aches in Keats’s Hyperion Poems,” considers the postwar pains of paying attention to another’s pain. Exemplifying an unconventional tradition from the early Romantics to Walter Benjamin that understands attention as weakening rather than strengthening the cognitive subject, Keats’s Hyperion poems explore the experience of paying attention to violence and the violence of just paying attention. Putting Keats’s fragments in the context of both the mutilated sculptures known as the Elgin Marbles and Charles Bell’s medical watercolors of soldiers wounded at Waterloo with amputated limbs, I read Keats’s fragments as meditations on the strange overlap between paying attention to another’s suffering and paying attention to art. In contrast to the theory of sympathy posited by Adam Smith, for whom attention is only a preliminary step to a fuller sympathy grounded in narrative, Keats’s fragments resist the fullness of narrative and find satisfaction instead in the simple act of paying attention, in the mere noticing of pain without explanation or story—as Keats wrote in the margin of Milton’s description of the war in Chaos in Paradise Lost: “so it is.” Keats’s minimal attitude reading Milton’s account of war in Chaos prompts my turn in the Afterword, “Just Looking,” to Simone Weil, who is preoccupied with a “decreative” model of attention as a retreat and passivity, as an experience of not taking sides, and whose interpretation of the Iliad finds Homer remarkable in his ability also to represent war without taking sides. Weil’s 1939 essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” suggests what a literary criticism of just paying attention might look like, since Weil described attention to pain and poetry alike as just looking. In this sense, her theological mode of reading anticipates recent resistance to critique and suspicion in literary studies. For Weil, attention should be radically impersonal, as I suggest it is in Emily Dickinson’s 1863 “Four Trees,” a poem about the mere act of noticing the overlooked background of a landscape, and with it the blank page behind the poem itself. Dickinson’s Civil War poem, along with Paul Celan’s translation of it, suggest an afterlife for the Romantic poetics of attention that invites the slight but pivotal experience of noticing something else during war. For Celan, this comes as the uncanny way in which the poem itself, rather than the reader, pays attention. At its most troublesome, attention is indistinguishable from its lapse, since

a t t e n t i o n ’s d i s c i p l i n e s

31

paying attention itself always means ignoring a variety of other objects. This structural problem in attention means that there are always other things that we do not or only barely notice, or things that we notice but immediately forget. The Romantic poetics of attention that this book traces experiments with methods with which to disrupt our habits of attention so as to notice something else, in some other way—whether it’s the forgotten proximity between England and France, or the overlooked blank page hiding behind a poem. Resisting the powerful wartime demands to view the landscape as a site to be secured and commanded, the poets discussed here develop in verse a “critical attitude,” a posture of countering pastoral power that Foucault calls “the art of not being governed quite so much.”98 While reimagining how their own readers pay attention, these poets practice this art by putting their ears to the ground, by looking to objects more and more minute, or by looking away, to invite the strange and foreign without seeking to protect against it.

chapter 1

Re a d ing , a D o uble A t t en t i o n I’ve discovered that I’m always attentive to, and always thinking about, two things at the same time. I suppose everyone is a bit like that. Certain impressions are so vague that only later, because we remember them, do we even realize we had them. I believe these impressions form a part—perhaps the internal part—of the dual attention we all possess. In my case the two realities that hold my attention are equally vivid. —Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

One might think that it would be possible to pay a double attention, at one moment doing full justice to the verbal intricacy of a poem and at the next inquiring into the agendas in whose service that intricacy has been put. But here one must recall the difficulty of serving two masters; each will be jealous of the other and demand fidelity to its imperatives. —Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness

T

he first of six “Puzzles for Volunteers!!” (1803) (Figure 6) breaks down the word attention into its component sounds: the letter a, a drawing of a tent, a drawing of an eye, and then the final letters o and n, or on. Substituting the eye for the letter i, the sounds of the word come apart to regroup into something like the imperative to keep an eye on something. The puzzle’s clue, “a necessary preliminary,” plays on the nascent militarization of attention at the turn of the century in Britain and on its centrality to the act of reading: attention is a prerequisite for the volunteers’ military service and for cracking the puzzle itself.1 And yet while the puzzle

Figure 6. Puzzles for Volunteers!! Published by W. Holland, September 1, 1803. Curzon Collection, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Reprinted with permission.

r e a ding, a double at tention

35

demands the continued attention of all war volunteers, it also reminds us of the inattention built into the experience of reading, highlighting the sounds and letters that readers pass over every time they read a word—the eye lurking inconspicuously behind attention, or the bard of bombardment (as the second puzzle reveals). These are the overlooked sounds and shapes that poetry, I want to suggest, keeps an eye on. Blake pushes an attention to these “Minute Particulars” to its limit, while insisting on a readerly attention that is emphatically distinct from the paranoid watchfulness of political surveillance. Indeed, the puzzle’s use of images both to divide the reader’s attention and to point to the inattention built into reading itself echoes Blake’s larger poetic project, well known for its juxtaposition of word and image that complicates the work of illustration. Blake’s interest in the overlap of political and aesthetic modes of observation might be less familiar. In this chapter, I turn to the physiology of reading, the description of which in the eighteenth century repeatedly guards against attention’s division. In contrast to this anxiety, I find in Romanticism a poetic tradition that courts a double attention strengthened rather than diminished by its division. Blake, I suggest, both describes and demands a model of reading poetry in which meaning is produced when the reader’s attention divides and interrupts itself. This gesture is at once critical of the paranoid claims on attention made by surveillance, spying, and the political demands to keep watch at the turn of the nineteenth century in England and yet is also suspicious of the ideological assumptions at work in everyday reading practices. I invoke Blake to gesture more broadly to the double attention of Romantic poetics: for Blake cultivates in his reader a heightened though unsuspicious attention, vigorous in its passivity and rigorously divided, an unprepared attention that is always ready to be surprised.2 Where Blake has often been read as a paranoid, self-scrutinizing critic of the mind-forg’d manacles of ideology, I’d like to suggest that the reading practices his texts make possible add to that scrutiny an attitude of openness and passivity that we can think of as an attention divorced from suspicion. Where an unsuspicious reading practice might register today as a refusal of historical and political criticism, I follow Blake to argue that on the contrary, to widen the scope of attention, to demand a double or multiple attention, is to open it onto alternative ways of imagining both history and politics. Though the first puzzle is most explicitly about attention, the others play

36

r e a ding, a double at tention

with many of this chapter’s concerns. The second puzzle, spelling out bombardment, suggestively juxtaposes military attacks and poetic bards. The third, breaking down the word lookout, speaks to the vertiginous and intersecting amping up of watchfulness that accompanies war: eyes looking in every direction, looking out, are themselves, as the caption instructs with irony, “a thing to be attended to.” The title “Puzzles for Volunteers!!” also speaks to a broader irony about the militarization of attention in the period. As the volunteer movement emerged in the 1790s, so did the question of just how voluntary it was. In his Political Dictionary (1795), Charles Pigott defined “sailor” as “a seaman who is taken voluntarily by force from his native home, to fight for a country which he is indebted to for nothing, except it be misery and wretchedness.”3 Thus alongside Crichton’s sense that by the end of the eighteenth century the idea that attention was voluntary was considered “quite unphilosophical” (257), we also find the insistence that voluntary military service was “by force.” Wartime ideas of force and volunteerism complicate an already tricky interplay between attention and habit. An example from William James from the end of the nineteenth century makes light of what happens when habits of attention are militarized: There is a story, which is credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out “Attention!” whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its affects had been embodied in the man’s nervous structure.4

Despite its humor, James’s anecdote takes seriously the way attention always threatens to become habit, a threat that becomes particularly paradoxical when attention is militarized. T h e P h y s i o l o gy o f Re a d ing

Implicit in the puzzles’ use of the rebus form is the suggestion that war volunteers are readers, who need to attend to all that casual readers do not. Yet a number of eighteenth-century philosophers of attention found a central preoccupation in the curious way that readers must, to some extent, overlook or forget individual letters and marks.5 For though reading often stands metonymically as a figure of attention as absorption, it also requires inattention

r e a ding, a double at tention

37

and forgetting. Close observation of the close observation of reading raises the question of what happens to those objects that one perceives but doesn’t remember, like the tent in attention or the bard in bombardment. Condillac, for one, believes we are conscious of every perception that we have, but that certain perceptions are so faint—from our inattention to them—that we forget them immediately. Locke uses the clock, the landscape, and the operations of one’s own mind as his key examples of those objects which come in our way but which we barely notice: “he will have but a confused idea of all the parts they are made up of, till he applies himself with attention, to consider them each in particular.”6 For Condillac and a number of eighteenth-century thinkers, reading is an even better example: “If we reflect on what we have been doing the moment we stop reading,” he writes, we don’t notice “that we have also perceived each letter as well as the darkness every time we close our eyelids. But we will not be deceived by this appearance if we consider that, without consciousness of the perceptions of the letters, we would not have had the perception of the words and thus the ideas.”7 Thus reading requires at once a complete attention and a consciousness of the minute particulars of a text without any retention of them. In 1792, Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart investigated the same problem, explaining that when we read, “we must perceive successively every different letter, and must afterwards combine these letters into syllables and words, before we comprehend the meaning of a sentence. This process, however, passes through the mind, without leaving any trace in the memory.”8 Though attention is typically linked to memory so that one remembers only what one attends to, the experience of reading suggests that one can pay attention to something without it “leaving any trace in the memory.” Stewart unearths a model of minimal attention that lies below the threshold of consciousness and volition, a way of noticing things that are immediately forgotten, or as Anne-Lise François has written, a way to “register a hardly noticed passing.”9 Stewart’s interest, he explains, is not in “those different degrees of attention which imprint things more or less deeply on the mind,” but rather in “the act or effort without which we have no recollection or memory whatever.”10 Nearly thirty years later, Thomas De Quincey would bring memory back into the picture, extolling “this pertinacious life of memory for things that simply touch the ear without touching the consciousness.”11 Whereas Stewart separates attention from memory, De Quincey queries the

38

r e a ding, a double at tention

gap between attention and consciousness.12 For De Quincey and Stewart both find that our attention or lack thereof to language has a particularly strange effect. De Quincey writes: “Said but once, said but softly, not marked at all, words revive before me in darkness and solitude; and they arrange themselves gradually into sentences, but through an effort sometimes of a distressing kind, to which I am in a manner forced to become a party.”13 Erasmus Darwin uses the experience of reading in his Zoonomia (1796) to illustrate what he calls “irritative ideas,” those peripheral perceptions that exist but are not actively attended to: “thus when we read the words ‘PRINTING-PRESS’ we do not attend to the shape, size, or existence of the letters which compose these words, though each of them excites a correspondent irritative motion of our organ of vision, but they introduce by association our idea of the most useful of modern inventions; the capacious reservoir of human knowledge, whose branching streams diffuse sciences, arts, morality, through all nations and ages.”14 Darwin’s choice of “printing-press” is a bit dizzying, but it also gives a hint as to why these thinkers would turn to reading when there are examples everywhere of the inattention built into attention; for the entanglement of marking and not marking is particularly striking in the experience of reading printed text, where what has been perceived persists even after we forget having noticed it. Unlike the sounds of speech, which disappear after they have been spoken, the marks and letters of writing remain present even after they have been overlooked, as if to mock our inattention.15 Darwin is quick to point out that such inattention is not just a matter of the printing press, but a function of language itself, since it is on this “kind of connection” that all “language, letters, hieroglyphics, and every kind of symbol, depend” (53). We typically do not attend, Darwin explains, to the “the symbols themselves” (53). Yet readers can and do attend with consciousness and volition to individual letters and marks, as the “Puzzles for Volunteers!!” playfully remind us. This possibility is most clear in the anxious attempts to guard against it. George Campbell, for example, who believed that rhetoric was “the pleasantest way of arriving at the science of the human mind,” describes rhetorical perspicuity in his Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) by warning that a reader can attend to the sign rather than that to which it points.16 Echoing Condillac’s model of a theatrical absorption that increases the more spectators there are in the theater, Campbell

r e a ding, a double at tention

39

explains that the less the medium of language “intervenes,” the more the reader’s attention will be properly and fully absorbed in a text. In order for a reader to attend fully to a text, she must not get stuck on the particularities of language: Now, in corporeal things, if the medium through which we look at any object be perfectly transparent, our whole attention is fixed on the object; we are scarce sensible that there is a medium which intervenes, and can hardly be said to perceive it. But, if there be any flaw in the medium, if we see through it but dimly, if the object be imperfectly represented, or if we know it to be misrepresented, our attention is immediately taken off the object onto the medium . . . A discourse, then, excels in perspicuity, when the subject engrosses the attention of the hearer, and the diction is so little minded by him, that he can scarcely be said to be conscious, that it is through this medium that he sees into the speaker’s thoughts. On the contrary, the least obscurity, ambiguity, or confusion in the style, instantly removes the attention from the sentiment to the expression, and the hearer endeavours, by the aid of reflection, to correct the imperfections of the speaker’s language.17

From a rhetorical perspective, the curious division between an attention absorbed in an idea and an unconscious overlooking of language describes the ideal conditions of clarity—and yet the precariousness of this combination rightly suggests how easily it may be disturbed. The intervention of the medium and the resulting division of attention is linked, for Campbell, to error, whereas a successful reading experience would remain fixed—a single, stable, selective attention—on what is represented. Implicit in this model is the way that aesthetic experience involves a fight over attention, between sign and signified, and thus faces the danger that an already divided attention will divide exponentially, and fall unsteadily on the medium rather than its message. Thus Kant warns about the danger of charms, those “foreigners” that “actually do damage to the judgment of taste if they attract attention to themselves as grounds for the judging of beauty,” and Rousseau cautions teachers: “never substitute the sign for the thing itself save when it is impossible to show the thing; for the sign absorbs the attention of the child and makes him forget the thing represented.”18 Thomas Reid is therefore unique in encouraging a childlike philosophical attention to the sign when he writes: “When one is learning a language, he attends to the sounds; but when he is master of it, he attends only to the sense of what he would express. If this is the case, we must

40

r e a ding, a double at tention

become as little children again, if we will be philosophers: we must overcome this habit of inattention which has been gathering strength ever since we began to think.”19 V e r s e ’ s D o uble At t en t i o n

Up! Up! my friend, and quit your books Or surely you’ll grow double. —William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”

For Campbell, rhetorical obscurity divides the reader’s attention between the object of representation and its medium. Attention to the latter, we will see in Chapter 2, turns words into “empty sounds” that seem close to the empty rhetoric of propaganda. Though Campbell’s focus is on rhetoric, he does concede that poetry can benefit from the confusion that divides the attention: Yet there is a sort and a degree of obscurity which ought not to be considered as falling under this censure . . . a species of darkness, if I may call it so, resulting from an excess of vivacity and conciseness, which to a certain degree, in some sorts of composition, is at least pardonable. In the ode, for instance, the enthusiastic fervour of the poet naturally carries him to overlook those minutenesses in language, on which perspicuity very much depends. It is to abruptness of transition, boldness of figure, laconism of expression, the congenial issue of that frame of mind in which the piece is composed, that we owe entirely the “Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” (II: 268)

Campbell can forgive the poetic species for dividing the reader’s attention between sense and sound, between what is said and the “minutenesses of language” that say it. Yet in pardoning poetry, he is still participating in a tradition that denigrates poetry. According to this model, verse’s excesses and enthusiasm, which replace perspicuity with abruptness, boldness, and laconism, create an obscurity that diverts the proper, full absorption of attention, and redirects it onto the sign. A year after Campbell’s book was published, Joseph Priestley described a similar competition over attention in his Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, explaining that the “more manifest signs there are of art in any composition, the more the mind is drawn off from an attention to the subject of it, if it do at all taste the foreign pleasures which result from an attention to those marks of art and design.”20 Because verse has more of those artful marks than prose,

r e a ding, a double at tention

41

Priestley makes the case that when we write about anything serious, we should not write in verse, for verse divides its reader’s attention: In considering a serious subject, which wholly engrosses the mind, we are not at liberty to attend to any other ideas than those which the naked scene exhibits. It cannot be supposed, therefore, that any person describing such a scene, and properly impressed with it, should at the same time attend to, and introduce into his description, any other ornaments than those which necessarily belonged to it. In those cases, consequently, plain prose, the only language of real and serious emotions and passions, is the only mode of expression that is tolerable. The appearance of verse of any kind, which shews a double attention, could not be borne.  (268)

Verse is here presented as unserious and ornamental, as unfit for important subjects in which the mind must be fully engrossed, precisely because it divides the attention, preventing full absorption of the mind. There are many reasons why Priestley could have claimed that serious subjects should not be represented in poetry. His emphasis on “double attention” reveals an anxiety not only about verse but about the unsteady attention in all reading, one that finds a powerful legacy when Jean-Paul Sartre reserves prose for political writing, dismissing poets as “men who refuse to utilize language . . . who consider words as things and not as signs.”21 Yet Priestley’s italicized double attention is more ambivalent than he might wish. For the phrase also appeared in these years to evoke neither distraction nor foreign pleasure, but rather the additional attention necessary for national defense and security. For example, An Essay on Field Fortification instructs, “Double attention ought to be given to those places where an attack appears most practicable.”22 Arthur Young similarly explains that the political climate in 1795 “DEMANDS A DOUBLE ATTENTION TO THE MEANS OF PROVIDING FOR THE DEFENSE OF THE ISLAND &C.” For Young, double attention is synonymous with alarm, and requires alarm’s literalization: “arming every taxed householder.”23 Double in these political texts thus suggests an increase of attention to a single object: defense against invasion. The phrase double attention also circulated elsewhere, closer to the way Priestley used it: as an attention divided between and comparing two objects. In contrast to philosophers like Burke, who believed that “the mind in reality hardly ever can attend diligently to more than one thing at a time . . . and what is not attend-

42

r e a ding, a double at tention

ed to, and what does not exist, are much the same in the effect,” this doubleness entailed an attention divided and yet undiminished.24 Maria Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798) highlights Condillac’s use of the phrase double attention to define the act of comparison. Condillac writes, “in comparison we may have a double attention, or two attentions, which are only two sensations, which make themselves be taken notice of equally, and consequently comparison consists only of sensations.”25 For Condillac (and for Edgeworth), when we compare, we simply pay attention to two things at once. The phrase double attention thus itself doubles in these years, oscillating between contradictory meanings: an amped up, militarized attention with a single aim, and a divided, comparative attention to two objects, what Edgeworth calls “the doctrine of simultaneous ideas” (358). Where Priestley meant the phrase to indicate poetry’s weakness, it could also be read as a strength, suggesting that poetry might require an attention that is divided and yet undiminished. Consider again the second of the “Puzzles for Volunteers!!” The words, bomb, bard, men, and the letter t divide bombardment, accompanied by the hint of “a serious attack.” This is an evocative constellation of terms, especially since Priestley worried not only about how a bard would represent a serious attack, but also about what kind of vulnerability a bard makes possible by dividing the reader’s attention, about how verse might formally enable attack. In what follows I would like to suggest that Romantic poetics invites the very experience of simultaneous ideas for which poetry was maligned, asking its reader to use both senses of double attention (incompatible in the military context) and to seek a kind of bombardment or surprise, insofar as one can seek surprise. Indeed, we can already hear in the complaints against poetry that I’ve cited echoes of Romanticism’s own self-definitions. Sartre’s worry about using words as things rather than signs, which recalls Campbell and Priestley’s concern about a mode of reading that would attend to the sign itself, appears explicitly in insistent claims by Wordsworth and Coleridge that words are things, “active and efficient, which are themselves part of the passion.”26 If words are things to be attended to rather than through, then the reader’s attention must always be both increased and divided. We might hear familiar claims about poetry demanding more attention than other forms differently in light of this formulation, for the more is always also a division, which in theories of attention is typically understood as a subtraction. The doubling of attention

r e a ding, a double at tention

43

I have been describing suggests that Wordsworth’s interest in preserving the “discriminating powers of the mind” blunted into a “savage torpor” is not just a matter of good taste or of a resistance to frantic urbanization, but a concern more specifically about the power of the mind to discriminate: from the Latin discriminare, to divide.27 Priestley’s concern about the double attention of reading verse assumes that different forms of verse require different amounts of doubleness. If a text is not intended to raise a serious emotion, verse “and even rhyme,” he writes, echoing Campbell’s pardon of the poetics, can be used to give “one of those foreign species of pleasure.”28 In between prose and rhyme Priestley puts blank verse, which is suitable for works that only “moderately elevate and affect the mind.” His hierarchy of forms, or species, is based on the extent of their “marks of artful composition”—prose has the fewest, blank verse has a moderate amount, and rhyme has the most—and he then goes on to categorize various meters and forms on the basis of their “degrees of art and design,” which is to say, “the number of objects attended to at the same time.”29 The stricter the meter or the more rhyme is used, the more “redoubled and redoubled” the reader’s attention becomes.30 According to this model, art is defined not exactly by how much attention it demands, but by how divided that attention is. And yet it is meter, and the division of attention it requires, that provides the counter-argument to Priestley. Wordsworth’s defense of poetry and account of meter build off of Priestley’s concern, but suggest that the doubleness of attention to both a poem’s subject and its meter, what Wordsworth describes in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads as a “co-presence,” makes “more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them,” endured and even tempered more easily “in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose” (248). In other words, Wordsworth reverses Priestley’s hierarchy: it is precisely the doubleness of attention, the copresence of excitement with “something regular, something to which the mind has been accustomed,” that allows verse to represent serious or painful topics, since meter can “temper and restrain the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling” (248). Whereas Priestley claims that a double attention cannot be borne with serious subjects, Wordsworth suggests that double attention is actually what makes pathetic subjects bearable. And whereas Priestley sees verse as unfit to describe any real or serious subjects or

4 4

r e a ding, a double at tention

emotions, Wordsworth argues that “there can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments . . . which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition.”31 And yet Wordsworth’s model differs from Condillac’s definition of comparison as an equal, double attention, since the reader does not equally attend to meter and pain. Instead, meter acts like Darwin’s “irritative idea,” entering the consciousness habitually and without retention through what he describes as “small, but continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise.” It is not entirely certain how the continual and regular become surprising, but what is clear is that for Wordsworth the alternative to attention is not inattention but habit, and the two form an interdependence that reveals all attention as double. In this, Wordsworth anticipates the dialectic Walter Benjamin would describe in his fragment “Attentiveness and Habit”: “All attentiveness has to flow into habit, if it is not to blow human beings apart, and all habit must be disrupted by attentiveness if it is not to paralyze the human being. To note something and to accustom oneself to it, to take offense and to put up with a thing—these are the peaks and troughs of the waves on the sea of the soul.”32 For Wordsworth, it is meter that makes this dialectic possible, preventing the paralysis that attention to serious and painful subjects might otherwise cause. Wordsworth invites such doubling and the vulnerability it brings, welcoming what we might call a gentle shock of mild bombardment.33 According to Wordsworth’s logic, then, we might amend Coleridge’s claim that Wordsworth excited a “feeling analogous to the supernatural” in the Lyrical Ballads by “awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom” to something more like this: verse doubles the mind’s attention and divides it from a custom to which it is always returning.34 The idea here is not that Wordsworth (or Benjamin) is simply opposing habit to attention, or meter to passion, but that the former makes the latter bearable. Describing the pains of paying attention for children, Edgeworth reminds teachers not to use violent motives to excite attention lest they “disturb and dissipate the very attention which they attempt to fix.” Instead, she suggests “small, certain, regularly recurring motives, which interest, but which do not distract the mind” (60). Wordsworth’s understanding of meter builds off of a similar combination of gentle habit and pulses of attention. He describes meter as “small, but continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise,” a phrase that, revealing both

r e a ding, a double at tention

45

the slightness of meter’s impact and the bodily rhythms of its pulse, refuses to oppose habit to attention. Coleridge famously objects to Wordsworth’s claim that the languages of poetry and prose do not differ, insisting instead that “I write in metre, because I am about to use a language different from that of prose.”35 “About to” suggests that Coleridge is drawing on an anticipatory mode of attention, when he writes: As far as metre acts in and for itself, it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprise, 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. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation; they 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.36

In addition to echoing Wordsworth’s alignment of regularity and surprise, Coleridge makes explicit what Wordsworth only hints at, when writing that meter “throws a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition.” Meter heightens the reader’s attention, but itself remains unnoticed like a “medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation.”37 Even while Coleridge describes a nonretentive consciousness and an inattentive attention, he doubles his reader’s attention through his proliferation of mixed metaphors, reminding us that poetry also multiplies its reader’s attention by separating vehicle and tenor. The metaphors of drinking and eating in particular suggest that rather than the reader becoming absorbed in the book, the book is absorbed in the reader. Like something we breathe or drink or eat, meter enters our bodies even if we don’t notice it, and trying to hear it is thus akin to hearing our own pulses. B l a ke ’ s Wat c h F ien d s

If Wordsworth and Coleridge’s models of meter only make the connection between prosody and anatomy implicitly, we find in the “species of darkness”

46

r e a ding, a double at tention

that is Blake’s Milton direct evocation of the pulses of both poetry and artery: Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years. [plate 29] For in this Period the Poets Work is Done: and all the Great Events of Time start forth & are conceivd in such a Period Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery. (126–27)

Steven Goldsmith devotes a stunning chapter of his Blake’s Agitation to discussing this remarkable definition of poetic labor as an experience of time, affect, and the unnerving feeling of blood moving through the body.38 Goldsmith is interested in the pulsation of the artery not so much as a figure of meter but as a figure that opens onto an entangled history of sentimental, sympathetic, and scientific approaches to the heart. When Goldsmith finds echoes of Blake’s pulsation in William Harvey’s description of the alternating movement between contraction and expansion that is pivotal to all life but that “happens almost too quickly for empirical observation” (239), he reminds us that even as Blake’s pulsation of the artery expands into six thousand years, suggesting “history in terms of a pulse, not a plot,” it immediately contracts back to the minute, the tiny period or the fleeting pulse, evading both observation and conventional narration. Blake’s lines tell us about the work of the poet but also suggest a task for the reader, who is asked to watch for that which evades conventions of observation and narration. How and when do we notice our own pulses, those regular and yet often surprising impulses in which the poet’s work is done? Erasmus Darwin’s account of irritative ideas includes a discussion of how we can notice those objects we typically ignore: “as in the night,” Darwin explains, “when we listen under the influence of fear, or from voluntary attention, the motions excited in the organ of hearing by the whispering of the air in our room, the pulsation of our own arteries, or the faint beating of a distant watch, become objects of perception” (52). For Darwin, the kind of listening that allows one to hear one’s own arteries is the same attitude of attention—an attention to “small indistinct sounds”—that would bring to view each letter in the word PRINTING-PRESS rather than just the sense they evoke. Taken to an extreme, an “undivided attention to inner, bodily sensations” would be, for Kant at least,

r e a ding, a double at tention

47

a “sickness of the faculty of attention,” or hypochondria.39 He describes this malady, which takes its German name from “the chirping noise of a cricket in the house,” as the problem of “paying attention to certain local impressions,” and he recommends abstraction caused by distraction as a cure.40 But for Blake, paying attention to one’s own bodily pulses is akin to the kind of minute attention with which the poet’s work is done. Connecting the pulse with the period, Blake aligns an attention to the minute pulsations that we take for granted in our own bodies with those punctuation marks of a text.41 If the poet’s work is done in a sound or mark that we rarely notice, though, how can a reader make sure to find it? How are we to follow that brief, fleeting pulse of poetic labor? How, in other words, does Blake desire his reader to pay attention? For Blake, the question of how to pay attention was particularly pressing since it registered a joining of his aesthetic and political concerns. This becomes most clear in his later prophecies as he begins to vilify a certain watchful attitude through the figure of Satan’s Watch Fiends, those spies and informers whom Nicholas Williams calls “the authorities of Blake’s ideological world.”42 The Watch Fiends have a clear historical correlate: the government-issued spies and informers that William Wickham called “the most powerful means of Observation and Information” that “was ever placed in the hands of a Free Government.”43 We can see them fervently searching in James Gillray’s 1798 cartoon, Search-Night; or State-Watchmen, mistaking Honest-Men for Conspirators (Figure 7), an image that as Thomas Pfau writes, reveals politics to be “a game of mutual suspicion and apprehension.”44 In 1780, Blake was himself mistaken for a conspirator when he was briefly arrested with a group of friends during a sketching trip at the River Medway on suspicion of spying for the French government, their sketching misconstrued as “surveying for purposes inimical to the safety of Old England.”45 Merely looking at and drawing a landscape, it turned out, was highly suspicious behavior. Twenty years later, his more well-known and serious trial for sedition (during which Jerusalem was written), of which he was eventually acquitted, also included a curious mix-up of sketching and spying: apparently part of the accusation involved a confusion of the phrase “miniature painter” for “military painter” and the fact that Blake was seen “taking a drawing near this town.”46 The distinction between aesthetic and political modes of observation comes undone in these

48

r e a ding, a double at tention

Figure 7. Search-Night; or State-Watchmen, mistaking Honest-Men for Conspirators, by James Gillray, 1798 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Reprinted with permission.

encounters with the law, since drawing the landscape looked suspiciously close to surveying it for vulnerabilities.47 (And in fact, David Worrall tells us, engravers were often informers, known as “engraver-spies.”48) The preoccupation with both watching and eluding the watch of others in Blake’s poetry is, I’d like to suggest, not only about the visionary as that which transcends the five senses through a hallucinatory or spiritual enthusiasm, as it has typically been read; for it also speaks to this confusion of sketching and spying, of aesthetic and political modes of observation, in the political culture of the period. In this sense, Blake’s obsession with vision, his assertion that “as a man is so he sees,” is a more textured response to the historical, political, and ethical resonances of watching, keeping watch, and being watched (702). Readers of Blake are likely familiar with his preoccupation with a percep-

r e a ding, a double at tention

49

tion inhibited by the postlapsarian senses: the reptile forms that include “wither’d” ears (83), “shrunken eyes clouded over” (82), “Senses inward rush’d” (82), and a general shrinking, closing, and clouding over of the body and organs into the five senses that “shut out true harmonies” (198). The human body as we know it, for Blake, is neither neutral nor given—it is fallen and limited. I want briefly to register the ethical and ideological suggestions implicit in this imagery: Blake insists, for example, in The Book of Urizen that the eyes were shrunken and clouded over and thus “discerned not the woven hypocrisy” (82). For Blake, the phenomenological is inseparable from the ideological, and his suspicion of the five senses is part of what makes him such a powerful critic of ideology. When the brethren shrink together in The Book of Urizen and the ears of the inhabitants “were wither’d and deafen’d and cold,” the eyes, according to Blake, could not “discern / their brethren of other cities” (83). Not seeing is thus the precondition for enmity, false borders, and nationalism, producing the hypocrisies of war and politics. We might then rethink the phrase “Watch Fiends” as commentary on the unthought relation between how we watch and how we distinguish fiend from friend.49 For the way one watches, Blake insists, determines both how a man is and whom he considers an enemy. The Watch Fiends appear repeatedly in Milton and Jerusalem as figures of the pervasive state-sanctioned surveillance and spying in these years, and point to a link between watching and empire that recalls the watchmen in Blake’s America, who leave their stations once apocalypse has arrived and empire is no more (53). Watching comes from and maintains power, and a loss of power brings what is for Blake a redemptive and liberating state of what we might call watchlessness, or freedom from the burden of being watched. And yet the Watch Fiends in Milton and Jerusalem are distinguished by their inability to find things, particularly their inability to find the most important, transformative, sweet, or redemptive things, and by their thorough though misguided searches. In Milton, Blake writes, “these lovely females form sweet night and silence and secret / Obscurities to hide from Satans Watch Fiends” (119). In Jerusalem, though they number every grain of sand on earth every night, the Watch Fiends cannot find the “gate” (181), or the “grain of sand” (183). Blake is careful to emphasize that others can find what the Watch Fiends cannot: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it: tis translucent and has many Angles

50

r e a ding, a double at tention

But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven But should the Watch Fiends find it, they would call it Sin And lay its Heavens & their inhabitants in blood of punishment. (183)

The Watch Fiends cannot find this promise of sweet silent night, pleasure, and loveliness, but if they could, they would mistake it for sin and punish those honest men who enjoyed it. Political surveillance is here joined, as one might expect, with Urizenic modes of punishment, government, and religious law to evoke a climate of pervasive suspicion, a “vigilance of tyranny” that is the focus of Godwin’s depiction of “things as they are,” which we can also hear in Thelwall’s complaint that “every key-hole is an informer, and every cupboard ought to be searched.”50 During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, British civilians were asked to watch others while always aware of the possibility that they were being watched. Indeed, the emergence of a pervasive spy culture in the Romantic period was so intense that according to Worrall, “even the surveillers were surveilled,” upsetting any easy alignment of watchfulness and power.51 Saree Makdisi’s description of the wrong way of reading Blake sounds strikingly close to Blake’s description of the Watch Fiends, who “search numbering every grain / Of sand on Earth every night” (181). Some readers of Blake, likewise, “confronting the seemingly impenetrable wall of words and images, arm themselves with formidable scholarly guides, dictionaries, and code books, writings of long-forgotten mystics and visionaries, and they seek out the text’s buried treasures, relishing the extraction of what they take to be the mysterious knowledge contained within” (162). Blake’s account of the Watch Fiends suggests that he would reject a model of reading based on seeking and even discovery, and replace it with a sense of drift and impasse that cannot be overcome through even the fiercest suspicion. Blake thus takes the double attention of reading that concerned Priestley and Campbell to its limit, demanding that the reader divide her attention not only between sign and signified, getting stuck on the impasses of words and marks, but also between conflicting interpretations of lines, and between text and image, which often pull from rather than illustrate each other in Blake’s illuminated books.52

r e a ding, a double at tention

51

In Milton, Blake reveals that the Watch Fiends also cannot find the “Moment,” in a formulation that suggests a connection to the moment that expands into six thousand years, in which the poet’s work is done. The poet’s work might thus be defined precisely by its occupation of a space or time that the Watch Fiends cannot find: There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find This Moment & it multiply. & when it once is found It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed[.] (136)

The minute particulars of Blake’s language reveal not only how the poet might work against the Watch Fiends, but also how the reader might otherwise watch. The brackets surrounding the period at the end of the passage, indicating that Blake later cut the punctuation mark out, suggest his own uncertainty about and interest in the “right” placement and discovery of punctuated moments. But it is the period after “it multiply” that really stands out here, suggesting a link between the “Moment,” the “Period” in which the poet’s work is done, and the grammatical period. He thus connects the work of the poet to a distrust and exposure of the rules of grammar that leads to what Adorno describes as “a kind of eccentricity and doing harm to their [punctuation marks’] nature by calling attention to what is inconspicuous—and inconspicuousness is what punctuation lives by.”53 For in the sentence “The Industrious find / This Moment & it multiply.,” the period disrupts more than concludes the sentence, marking not a full stop at the end of a sentence or line, but an interruption that suspends and transforms the sentence’s legibility. The ampersand and lowercase w following the period confirm that the mark does not end the sentence but interjects midsentence, underscoring the most striking aspect of this passage, which is neither the action of the Industrious nor the apocalyptic renovation of every Moment of the Day, but rather the unnerving experience of trying to read the phrase “it multiply.” For “it multiply” reads as both a syntactically incorrect way to say that they (the industrious) “multiply it,” the moment, and a grammatically incorrect way to say that “it multiplies,” as if the poet were confusing singular and plural. For the issue here is precisely one of the single versus the plural: what seems like error suggests that midsentence, the moment multiplies on its own, changing from singularity to plurality, as

52

r e a ding, a double at tention

though the sentence could not catch up with the multiplication of the moment fast enough to recognize that the moment is no longer alone. Blake’s refusal to say either “it multiplies” or “they multiply” suggests the difficulty and promise of reading a disruptive grammar that performs the very multiplication of time that it describes all in one minute period or pulse. It also makes good on the promise of dividing a reader’s attention between contradictory readings. According to this logic, the Industrious, despite the word’s resonance with the disciplinary forces of industry that Blake would likely have resisted, describes the poem’s own reader, whom the poet imagines watching in a way that the Watch Fiends cannot.54 What kind of reading is this that is industrious and yet decisively not the fervent, frantic numbering, counting, and adding of each and every grain? Blake’s industrious reader reveals a counter-attention and a counter-mathematics: he passively and perhaps confusedly watches multiplication rather than performing addition or accumulation, as though if one were just to leave the moment alone and stop counting, it would multiply on its own. Quietly sitting back and watching language multiply, this reader can never quite keep up with the speed of language, always having to reread, always dividing his attention between alternating, conflicting readings that never neatly reconcile. And yet, paradoxically, this attention—that refuses to seek, search, or suspect—is what produces transformative work, and should be understood not in opposition to, but as necessary for the kind of ideology critique for which Blake is so famous. Blake thus redirects the language of labor and industry, and the attention they require, to propose a mode of industrious labor guided by an unpredictable and unmanageable attention. This is in clear contrast to the “industrious laborers” whom, Saree Makdisi has shown, the unprecedented proliferation of disciplinary institutions in the 1790s aimed to produce. Citing an account of the Foundling Hospital in London to show how disciplinary institutions relied on regularity and uniformity from as early an age as possible, Makdisi explains that the goal of these institutions was the production of “a steady flow of ‘useful labourers,’ people with ‘a habit of labour, of cleanliness, and of decency,’ who have been ‘gradually accustomed to regular and early habits of order and attention’” (102–3). Of course by the middle of the nineteenth century, Ruskin would lament an industriousness in which all of a worker’s “attention and strength” is required to “make cogs and compasses of them-

r e a ding, a double at tention

53

selves.”55 Countering this new disciplinary cultivation of laborers, Blake offers an alternative kind of industrious labor, one ruled by an attention indebted to the very idleness and disorder that these disciplinary institutions sought to avoid. M inu t e Pa rt i c ul a r s

As Poetry admits not a Letter that is Insignificant so Painting admits not a Grain of Sand or a Blade of Grass [Insignificant] much less an Insignificant Blur of Mark. —William Blake, “A Vision of the Last Judgment”

Blake’s industrious reader must thus “Labour well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little-Ones” (205), an attentive labor that finds in the minuteness of punctuation not the completion of Blake’s sentences but their interruption and transformation, as the reader’s attention divides between what is being described and the materiality of its description. Here Blake is directly countering a familiar aesthetic tradition that understood too much attention to too minute an object as precluding aesthetic pleasure. This is one of Blake’s main objections to Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art. Where Reynolds writes that the genuine painter should not try to “amuse mankind with the minute neatness of his imitations” but instead by the “grandeur of his ideas,” Blake objects: “Without Minute Neatness of Execution. The. Sublime cannot exist!” (646). A few pages later, when Reynolds calls “peculiar marks” defects, Blake responds: “Peculiar Marks. Are the Only Merit” (657). Reynolds’s emphasis on an absorption in grandeur rather than an attention divided among minute peculiarities thus aligns him with Campbell and Priestley’s concern for an aesthetic experience uninterrupted by its medium. Also in this tradition would be the aesthetic theory of Archibald Alison, who in 1790 complains about criticism that wields a too minute attention: When we sit down to appreciate the value of a poem, or of a painting, and attend minutely to the language or composition of the one, or to the coloring or design of the other, we feel no longer the delight which they at first produce. Our imagination in this employment is restrained, and instead of yielding to its suggestions, we studiously endeavor to resist them, by fixing our attention upon minute and partial circumstances of the composition. . . . All this, however, all this flow of imagination, in which youth and men of

54

r e a ding, a double at tention

sensibility are so apt to indulge, and which so often brings them pleasure at the expense of their taste, the labor of criticism destroys. The mind, in such an employment, instead of being at liberty to follow whatever trains of imagery the composition before it can excite, is either fettered to the consideration of some of its minute and solitary parts; or pauses, amid the rapidity of its conceptions, to make them the objects of its attention and review. In these operations, accordingly, the emotion, whether of beauty or sublimity, is lost, and if it is wished to be recalled, it can only be done by relaxing this vigour of attention, and resigning ourselves again to the natural stream of our thoughts.56

Alison opposes imagination, nature, feeling, and pleasure to the labor of criticism and the vigor of an attention to “minute and solitary parts.” This is an aesthetics that suggests that an overexertion of attention destroys the natural flow of imagination, and thus the delight of both the beautiful and the sublime. Only a relaxation of “this vigour of attention” can help bring emotion or aesthetic pleasure back. What we have found in Blake suggests, on the contrary, that the vigor of an attention to the most minute parts and pauses is not a fetter but a liberation, and he proposes a labor of both writing and reading poetry in which attention is both relaxed and vigorous, divided and undiminished. Where Alison would consider attending minutely to language as a restraint and restriction of the imagination, Blake suggests the opposite: it is only by attending minutely to language and composition that the imagination can be liberated. Just as we need heaven and hell, so we need attention’s brace and its relaxation—“Damn braces: bless relaxes,” Blake tells us in one of his “Proverbs from Hell” (37). We see in Campbell, Priestley, and Alison an anxiety about too minute an attention, but Blake finds in such minuteness all that it was feared to destroy: emotion, imagination, pleasure, and liberty. For Blake, this is not only an aesthetic imperative but also an ethical one, since if one attends to the little ones, then “those who are in misery cannot remain so long / If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth” (205). By labor, it seems he means a relaxed but minute attention to minute particulars. Given the work that the minute punctuation mark is doing to the reader, I want to return to Blake’s interest in the “period” in which the poet’s work is done. As Goldsmith suggests, Blake’s description of the poet’s work pivots on this play on the word “period,” which refers at once to the punctuation mark

r e a ding, a double at tention

55

that ends both the sentence and the previous plate, and to the historical epoch identified in the previous plate—the period of Six Thousand Years.57 The period that follows “it multiply” suggests that the renovating period in which the poet’s work is done is here not the period that closes a sentence but one which transforms it, because it marks a multiplication that disrupts the time of reading. This is the period that Satan’s Watch Fiends cannot find because their gaze is both too instrumentalizing and too suspicious. Blake proposes an attitude of reading that gets stuck on such periods, the minute particulars of writing that we typically forget when we read, suggesting a punctuated reading experience that adds an entirely new sense to the word “mark” in the command repeated eight times throughout Milton: “Mark well my words! they are of your eternal salvation” (100). This would imply a quieter kind of salvation that comes in daily reading habits, a redemption from the sin of failing to mark “little-ones,” those minutest aspects of text. The ambivalence of the deictic “in this period” in Blake’s lines about the poet’s work opens up an important tension then between poetry and history, insofar as a period is both the minor punctuation mark and an expansive historical era. Is the poet’s work done in an epoch or a punctuation mark? Is Blake’s work done in the 1790s and 1800s or in the small punctuations of a sentence? And is it done, as in finished, or as in practiced? It is Blake’s characteristic ambivalence and density that keep our attention moving between all of these options. Here the promise of finding what the Watch Fiends cannot find is that of new forms of reading and temporality. Blake thus requires an alternate and alternating experience of history: with a double attention, the reader has to move between the material marks on the page and the six thousand years onto which they expand in an “ongoing rereading” of both grammatical and historical periods.58 In this context we can also hear in the phrase “Watch Fiends” the resonance of the timepiece and its strict, linear temporality, and find a connection between alternative modes of watching and alternative modes of keeping time, both of which would be pleasurable and transgressive.59 The minute attention Blake demands also resembles the industrious labor of early scientific observation. Robert Boyle’s interest in the seventeenth century in the hidden qualities of the air, for example, is part of his observation of “an extreme and scarce conceivable minuteness.”60 Likewise, when Robert Hooke

56

r e a ding, a double at tention

turned his microscope to “minute bodies” in his Micrographia (1665), he began by looking at a period and found there not the regular fine point one might expect of a punctuation mark, but the “smutty daubings” of an ink splotch. Turning the punctuation mark itself from an instrument into an object of scientific observation, Hooke found in writing a messy materiality, something that would interrupt rather than make meaning—like a “great splotch of London dirt.”61 With a microscopic attention, the period is not a fine regular point but a pulse of opacity, a misshapen blot: “Where Luvahs World of Opakeness grew to a period,” Blake writes, finding expansion by means of contraction, “It Became a Limit. a Rocky hardness without form & void Accumulating without end” (228). Thus when we read lines like “the Poets Song draws to its period” and “in this period the poet’s work is done,” we ought to hear not the sense of a clear delineation of time, but an entangled interruption of meaning by materiality and the doubled attention it enacts. The minute attention made possible by the microscope confirms Blake’s sense that our five senses are restrictive rather than given, a problem that applies not just to vision but also to our experience of time. As Dugald Stewart writes, “if our powers of attention and memory were more perfect than they are, so as to give us the same advantage in examining rapid events, which the microscope gives for examining minute portions of extension, they would enlarge our views with respect to the intellectual world, no less than that instrument has with respect to the material.”62 At t en t ive Alt e r n at ive s

To recognize in paranoia a distinctively rigid relation to temporality, at once anticipatory and retroactive, averse above all to surprise, is also to glimpse the lineaments of other possibilities. —Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling

If, let us say, we were to live vis-à-vis some things more calmly and vis-à-vis others more rapidly, according to a different rhythm, there would be nothing “subsistent” for us, but instead everything would happen right before our eyes; everything would strike us. — Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

In Jerusalem, Blake names the gate the Watch Fiends cannot find: “It is the Gate of Los” (181). It is also in Jerusalem that Los, Blake’s figure for poetry and the “spirit of Prophecy,” begins to keep watch himself, singing his “watch

r e a ding, a double at tention

57

song” in the middle of war and providing a telling contrast to the Watch Fiends whose search produces no poetry. “The night falls thick: I go upon my watch: be attentive,” says Los with an imperative whose addressee is ambiguous. Blake later explains: While Los arose upon his Watch, and down from Golgonooza Putting on his golden sandals to walk from mountain to mountain, He takes his way, girding himself with gold & in his hand Holding his iron mace: The Spectre remains attentive Alternative they watch in night: alternative labour in day Before the Furnaces laboring, while Los all night watches The stars rising & setting, & the meteors and terrors of night! (242)

The link here between remaining attentive and alternating between watchfulness and labor is intriguing, suggesting that attention is a kind of labor, and that as such it works by alternating, by dividing or doubling. Blake helps us see the proximity between attentiveness and alternativeness, which intertwine in the attempt to notice otherwise, which the following chapters will track across Romantic poetics. Los’s alternative watch brings into view both history and prophecy, as he walks up and down in six thousand years. His view of Albion’s bosom, which is to say the British landscape, reveals in a moment “all that has existed in the space of six thousand years,” showing him at once the major events of “history”: “So Los terrified cries: trembling & weeping & howling! Beholding /What do I see? The Briton Saxon Roman Norman amalgamating / In my Furnaces into One Nation the English” (252). We will encounter similar painful and trembling attempts to pay attention to the overflow of a past history and an overwhelming historic present in Wordsworth, Smith, and Keats. For Blake, seeing “all that has existed” in six thousand years also, importantly, includes those minute particulars typically overlooked by historians—“every little act, / Word, work, & wish, that has existed, all remaining still . . . For every thing exists & not one sigh nor smile nor tear, / One hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away” (157–58). History and poetry converge in the preservation of these minutiae: from the affective sigh, tear, and smile, to the material strand of hair and particle of dust, “not lost not lost nor vanished,” to what Campbell calls “minutenesses of language,” Blake so stunningly anticipates

58

r e a ding, a double at tention

Benjamin’s historical materialist who “narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones” and thus “acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history.”63 On the one hand, we have the vertiginous paranoia of a spy culture in which even the surveillers were surveilled: the Watch Fiends watch Los, who is himself up all night watching. On the other hand, Blake wants to distinguish between attitudes of watchfulness, and encourage alternative and alternating modes of attentiveness. At odds are a watch that involves seeking, counting, numbering, and accumulating every grain of sand but which still never finds what is most important, and what Blake twice calls Los’s “attentiveness,” a quality, I hope to have shown, he also asks of his readers. The former belongs to war, and we can hear echoes of wartime enmity in the term Watch Fiend, as well as in the “Fiend of Righteousness,” whom Los calls the “brooder of tempests and destructive War” and whom Los accuses, “You accumulate Particulars & murder by analyzing” (251).64 Los’s attentiveness, in contrast, entails a labor of not laboring, a watchfulness not of sand but of the “stars rising & setting,” detaching attention from suspicion and surveillance and tying it instead to a temporality in which anticipation and history join to mark and remark every little act, word, work, and wish. And yet this patient, passive attention to the given offers what we might not ordinarily notice and what we can’t seek because it’s always there—the pulsation of the artery, the inconspicuous moment that renovates every other moment or that makes us go back and reread. Blake sharpens the contours of this distinction between an active search and a heightened attention that is divided and alternating, that allows a reader to notice both sign and signified, to find in a period not a clear end to a sentence but its interruption. Though Benjamin did not write about Blake, their kinship is striking. In Benjamin we find a form of intense listening that hears not the foreign invasion or a suspicious other but just oneself, something that has always been there but that lies overlooked: “For what comes to us when we dream is a new and unprecedented attentiveness that struggles to emerge from the womb of habit. Everyday experiences, hackneyed expressions, the vestiges that remain in a glance, the pulsating of one’s own blood—all this, hitherto unnoticed and in a distorted and overly sharp form, makes up the stuff of dreams” (592). This is also the stuff—the words, work, and wishes—of Blake’s poetry.

chapter 2

T h e P o e t i c s o f Al a r m a n d t h e Pa s s i o n o f L i s t ening

The passions rouse attention, and attention increases passion by a sort of re-action. —Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on Education

Our attention is fugitive: strong passions are necessary to keep it fixed. —Claude Adrien Helvétius, A Treatise on Man

A person under the power of love, or fear, or anger, great pain or great sorrow, hath so little government of his soul, that he cannot keep it attentive to the proper subject of his meditation. The passions call away the thoughts with incessant importunity towards the object that excited them; and if we indulge the frequent rise and roving of passions, we shall thereby procure an unsteady and inattentive habit of mind. —Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind

T

he frontispiece to one of the many eighteenth-century English editions of Charles Le Brun’s Expressions of the Passions of the Soul juxtaposes the title page with Sayer’s engraving of Attention (Figure 1).1 By beginning with Attention, the book implies that attention is a crucial or primary expression of a passion, but if it is, which passion does it

60

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

express? Is attention itself a passion? Is it caused by a passion or does it cause passion? Or as the passage above from Isaac Watts suggests, do the passions prevent attention?2 The quotations above from Hamilton, Helvétius, and Watts suggest little consensus about the relation between attention and passion. Indeed, throughout the various editions of Le Brun’s images, attention is sometimes linked to Compassion (see Figure 13), sometimes to Esteem and Wonder, and sometimes to Astonishment and Fear.3 When Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy were published later in the century, it became clear how ambiguous attention is as a passion or passionate expression. Much of the second volume of the Essays is devoted to “physiognomic and pathognomic exercises,” in which Lavater describes and interprets images copied from Le Brun and Daniel Chodowiecki.4 The results reveal just how many diverging attitudes, mental states, and passions attention can express: in the facial expressions, Lavater finds a child “whose face expresses too much attention, but not enough of softness” (64); “astonishment mixed with a certain degree of attention and interest” (66); “the curious attention and profound look of a violent man, but concentrd and half mad” (67); “attention and terror mingled with pity” (67); “the stupid attention of a vulgar fellow, whose head is unfurnished with ideas” (69); the combination of “fear, terror, and attention” (70); that of “attention, pity, indignation” (71); and most interesting to him, “attention without interest,” or without feeling at all. “I see in it emptiness rather than tranquility” (81), Lavater explains of this last image (Figure 8). Attention expresses passion, then, but we cannot be sure which one. It could signal pity or fear, indignation or terror, interest or lack thereof. In his Essay on the Powers of the Human Mind (1785), Thomas Reid explains the “difficulty of attending to the operations of our own minds.” In addition to some of the obvious reasons why this would be (the speed of the mind, the number of objects it attends to, and so on), he points to the particular difficulty caused by the passions: When the mind is agitated by any passion, as soon as we turn our attention from the object to the passion itself, the passion subsides or vanishes, and by that means escapes our enquiry. This, indeed, is common to almost every operation of mind: When it is exerted, we are conscious of it; but then we do not attend to the operation, but to its object. When the mind is drawn off from the object to attend to its own operation, that operation ceases, and escapes our notice.5

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

61

Figure 8. A woman in a state of attention without interest, by Johann Caspar Lavater and Thomas Holloway, 1789. Wellcome Library, London.

Attention and passion, for Reid, are thus in a difficult bind: if passions require an attention directed toward an object, then attending to the passion itself will make the passion disappear. This means that we cannot attend to our own passions, even while our passions often depend on, or inspire, attention. In an essay about Reid’s concept of attention, Gideon Yaffe explains this passage by asking us to “imagine an emotional state which necessarily involves inattention to it.”6 His example of such a state is panic, a “peculiar species

62

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

of fear which is accompanied by general mental discombobulation.” Panic, according to Yaffe, is exemplary of the problem Reid is describing, since “one can’t attend to the state one is in while in a panic of this sort because attending to anything would necessarily preclude the possibility that you are in such a panic.”7 Indeed, for Reid, panic is one of a group of “violent emotion[s] that engross the mind,” which preclude not only attention to the passion itself but also attention to its objects. “A man who is put into a panic,” Reid writes, “by thinking he sees a ghost, may stare at it long, without having any distinct notion of it.”8 Panic thus seems to prevent attention even while Lavater shows that attention is often keyed to fear and terror. It is this curious relationship between attention and fear that will occupy this chapter. But the argument rests on a different term from the vocabulary of the passions: alarm. Though I will be discussing attentive and inattentive states of fear, terror, surprise, and the experience of being startled, my focus on alarm draws out the political stakes of these distinctions in the era of the invention of modern “alarmism.” For Reid’s philosophical point about the passions is one that politicians put to good use in the 1790s: critics of the war disapproved of alarmists by suggesting that they conjured a communal panic with the precise goal of preventing people from paying attention to the cause of their own fears and thereby obscuring what Coleridge called the war’s “total causelessness.”9 Thus despite a political rhetoric that equated alarm with alertness, its effect was a carefully manipulated panic that could not reflect on itself. As Elaine Scarry has explained, political leaders who bring about chronic emergencies have a single goal: “to stun the mind, to immobilize, to bring about a genuine enslavement of attention.”10 This chapter reframes the best-known poem about political alarm, Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude, written in April 1798, during the Alarms of an Invasion,” as a response to William Cowper’s poem “The Needless Alarm” (1789), and finds in both poetic investigations of the interlacing of attention and alarm. Whereas Cowper separates from fear the heightened state of attention that makes his poem possible, trying to avoid through solitude the very cycle of alarm, and alarms about alarm, that his poem diagnoses, Coleridge finds the mere act of attention inextricable from the feeling of fear, since the “the very act of poetic composition itself is, and is allowed to imply and produce, an unusual state of excitement,” an excitement associated with fear.11 “Where no interest previously exists,” Coleridge writes,

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

63

“attention (as every School-master knows) can be procured only by Terror: which is the true reason, why the majority of mankind learn nothing systematically except as School-boys or Apprentices.”12 Al a r m ’ s I nven t i o n s

Alarm, n. < Old French alarme, < Italian allarme = all’arme! ‘To (the) arms!’ originally the call summoning to arms, and thus, in languages that adopted it, a mere interjection; but soon used in all as the name of the call or summons. —“Alarm,” Oxford English Dictionary

Transcripts of parliamentary debates in England during the 1790s reveal a central, strikingly self-aware point of controversy: the necessity, origin, and consequences of alarm. The elusive origin of this feeling, and the kinds of alertness it at once demanded and precluded, became the crucial center of political debate as pervasive fears of invasion and the birth of the British volunteer movement caused the military resonances of the word alarm (“To arms!”) to intersect daily with the word’s more colloquial sense of a sustained quotidian fear. Indeed, if we keep its etymology in mind, the word alarm is distinct from its synonyms—words like fear, terror, surprise, or shock—in that alarm is both a feeling and an imperative: it combines the passivity of an overwhelming emotion that stunts action with a call to action, or rather a call to prepare for action, a call to arms. Crucial to this debate over what was more threatening—a potential French invasion or what Charles James Fox called the “invasion of our constitution” by alarmism itself—the “alarm” became a genre of its own by the end of the eighteenth century, when wartime broadsides, ballads, and pamphlets proliferated with titles that began with the words “an alarm to . . . ,” some of which warned the British of an impending invasion of French troops or ideas while others warned of the dangers of alarmism itself.13 Throughout the century, these alarms had addressed the public regarding a wide variety of topics, from public health (An alarm to all persons touching their health and lives) to religion (An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners.)14 But the form became a particularly useful tool for politicians once fears of invasion and insurrection began to take hold of the nation, as a form of address that could also literalize the term’s etymology; An alarm to the public, and a bounty promised to every loyal subject, who will come forward to repel the enemy, for example, used the alarm genre to promise, in 1798, Arms and Accoutrements promised

64

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

for every man, gratis.15 Alarm is thus a form of text—“fright is a form,” writes Barthes, “(since its contents vary)”—but also a demand to stop reading and to pick up arms.16 Alarms spread with an electrifying speed in the Romantic period. Anna Barbauld remarked “how quick the alarm has been taken, and sounded from the Church to the Senate, and from the press to the people; while fears and forebodings were communicated like an electric shock!”17 Five years later, Daniel Eaton would describe Europe as “electrified by the universal fluid of nature’s liberty” which “starts, as yet unconscious of the power that shakes it. The tocsin has once been sounded to the world, and man universally enquires the cause of the alarm.”18 This was both a metaphor for alarm’s power to shock and a metonymic gesture toward the new technologies that spurred the feeling’s contagiousness, evoking recent innovations in telegraphy and in the proliferation and spread of the newspaper, which Burke called a “kind of electric communication everywhere.”19 Lamenting the absence of newspapers in France, Arthur Young described “that universal circulation of intelligence, which in England transmits the least vibration of feeling or alarm, with electric sensibility, from one end of the kingdom to another.”20 Sensibility and feeling reached the height of electric life through the newspaper’s spread of alarm, shocking people with unprecedented speed and communicability, a dizzying combination given the already quite contagious nature of fear itself: “there is nothing more communicable,” explained one alarm pamphlet, “than this very Passion.”21 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) identifies one of the first uses of the word “alarmist” in a self-appraisal by the most famous alarmist of the Romantic period—Edmund Burke, who insisted in a letter in 1793 to his fellow parliamentarian William Wyndham that “we must continue to be vigorous alarmists.”22 The term was not immediately derogatory: in May 1794, the Duke of Leeds still took pride in identifying himself as an “alarmist of a long date, ever since the month of November, 1792.”23 Indeed, the etymological resonances of the word as taking up arms were not lost on the Duke of Leeds, who “was convinced that if they did not now arm government with large powers, they would not long have any Habeas Corpus either to maintain or suspend.”24 According to one reader of the radical publication Politics for the People, the word in 1794 was “much in vogue,” though its meaning

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

65

“not precisely understood by many.”25 The positive connotations of the term quickly vanished, though. As the pamphlet The Alarmist (1796) laments, “the application of this title to particular Public Characters has fixed upon it a signification entirely opposite to that which it bears in the language of Those who originally invented the term.”26 The OED also finds in the period the first use in English of a related epithet: “terrorist.” Burke is cited here as well, warning the British in 1795 of the danger of the Jacobins (“Thousands of those Hell-hounds called Terrorists . . . are let loose on the people”).27 Yet by 1803, the word “terrorist” carried the possibility of its reversal and could refer to those alarmists who warned of danger, rather than to the presumed danger itself. In other words, not long after the creation of the term, it became unclear whether the “terrorists” were those who might inflict violence or those who incited or inspired—by speaking about—fear and terror. For by 1803 the term could designate not only “the Jacobins and their agents and partisans in the French Revolution, esp. those connected with the Revolutionary tribunals during the ‘Reign of Terror,’” but also, unfavorably, “one who entertains, professes, or tries to awaken or spread a feeling of terror or alarm; an alarmist, a scaremonger.”28 This linguistic ambiguity raised an important question that emerged with the invasion scares: Does alarm come from danger or from the act of speaking about and spreading the word about danger? Immediately after the invention of the word “alarmist,” it became clear that an alarmist could cause, rather than prevent danger. Historians have described Pitt’s systematic use of alarm in the period to gain power and keep civilians in a state of fear and passivity. First, the government announces that it has information about a great threat to the nation; then it sets up secret committees to deal with the information, moves legislative action (such as the suspension of habeas corpus) to gain power, and finally, “when the emergency comes to an end, an Act of Indemnity is brought in to absolve Ministers from actions at law consequent upon their use of their temporary and exceptional powers. At this stage, a general debate takes place on Government’s conduct during the period of ‘Alarm.’ At no stage does Government reveal the sources of its information.”29 What is most striking is not so much the government’s use of alarm in these scenarios to suspend the law in a state of exception, but the extraordinary awareness of and very open discussion about the technique at the time of its use, both in and out-

66

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

side of parliament, rather than only in retrospect.30 During the 1794 debates over the suspension of habeas corpus, for example, Grey, arguing against the suspension bill, explained that “this measure was part of that system of alarm which had been adopted to keep the public from seeing their real situation.”31 Debates in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords about the 1792 Alien Bill, which suspended habeas corpus for foreigners, prompted a vertiginous self-reflexivity about what Coleridge later called “the magnifying mists of alarm.”32 There is a surprising self-consciousness among politicians in the period about this public feeling, the authenticity and validity of which is never certain, exemplifying Lauren Berlant’s definition of politics as “a scene of emotional contestation.”33 The debate over alarm was a disagreement about what the public ought to pay attention to, and how. Thus John Stewart defines the “Tocsin of the world” in 1803 as “the object of universal attention.”34 Alarmism’s critics argued that political alarm was so powerful and absorbing that it prevented the public from focusing on and thinking about anything but their frantic fear. In particular, they couldn’t attend to and criticize the war itself. In parliamentary debates about the Alien Bill, Charles James Fox, alarmism’s fiercest critic, diagnosed the problem as follows: The alarm then on the propagation of opinions could not justify the remedy which Ministers had adopted, especially when it was coupled with a false assertion of insurrections; and therefore it did not create, it certainly augmented the alarm—he meant not in the mind of his Honourable Friend; he had been full of alarm for several months; an alarm that had taken such complete possession of his ardent imagination, that he could attend to nothing else, and he feared it would be several months more before it could be set right.35

Fox indicts alarmism constantly in these years, arguing that the purpose of these suspensions of law was “to keep alive the passions of the people . . . to agitate and alarm their minds, so as to put them under the dominion of terror, and take from them the exercise of their rational faculties.”36 It is telling that Burke was one of the first parliamentarians to use this strategy, since he had described the same effect in his description of the sublime, which is caused by a terror that produces a mind “so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.”37 “Terror,” according to Burke, “is a source of the sublime, that is, it is

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

67

productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,” a feeling so powerful that “no passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”38 Echoing the aesthetic insights of theorists of the sublime, alarmists, Fox believed, knew “that if the alarm should be suspended for a moment, and if men had time and leisure for the exercise of their understandings, the war and the principles on which it was undertaken would be scrutinized and discussed.”39 In his 1798 essay “Personification in Poetry,” John Aikin discusses the distinction in poetry between causing fear and warning of danger, highlighting the unsteady difference in Collins’s “Ode to Fear” between the cause of danger and the person subject to it: Collins, who in his Ode to Fear has personified Danger, mixes the two ideas, of an author of danger, and a person exposed to it; and a degree of confusion is the necessary result . . . Danger, as a gigantic figure, terrible to the sight and hearing, is properly formed to excite the apprehensions of fear; but he is not more an object of terror for throwing himself on the ledge of a rock to sleep; on the contrary, any hazard to which he is exposed, takes off from the dread he inspires.40

According to Aikin, the personification of danger collapses the distinction between inspiring fear and being exposed to it, so that it becomes impossible to parse the act of alarming others from a more authentic experience of feeling alarm. Fear, it seems, is so absorbing and disorienting, is so “destructive of presence of mind,” that the distinctions between object and cause, between person and feeling, come apart in a circular logic according to which one finally becomes scared of oneself. Indeed, the uncertain distinctions Collins’s poem makes between its speaker and the personifications of fear and danger suggest that fear itself, through its contagiousness and confusion, makes these figures indistinguishable. Collins’s insight helps explain the collapse of a similar distinction in politics—between alarmists who warn of, and those who produce, danger—for it remained ambiguous throughout the debates in Parliament just how scared the alarmists actually were. Anna Barbauld, Aikin’s sister, connects these literary insights about fear with the wartime context with which they so suggestively resonate. In “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,” Barbauld’s controversial antiwar poem prophesying the end of the British empire, she describes the naiveté with which Britain

68

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

remains “at ease . . . while danger keeps aloof,” addressing the nation with the prophetic message: “Thou who hast shared the guilt must share the woe.” She goes on to explain: Nor distant is the hour; low murmurs spread, And whispered fears, creating what they dread; Ruin, as with an earthquake shock, is here.41

Barbauld had earlier condemned “governing by systems of blinding or terrifying the people.”42 Here, echoing Aikin’s analysis of Collins, is a new sense that fear creates that which it dreads, that a public feeling can create because, as Brian Massumi has written, “you trigger a production of what you fear.”43 If the whispered fears themselves produce what they dread, then the poem’s prophecy is not simply that ruin is coming, or even “here” as the line insists, but that it is alarmism that precipitates that ruin, and that the watchword, as Jerome Christensen has put it, “constitute[s] that evil which it averts.”44 This mirrors the odd logic of Aikin’s reading of Collins: speaking about a fear might produce rather than prevent its fulfillment, suggesting a distorted chronology in which the object of alarm may not even exist until someone feels alarmed. T h e d ying s o un d .   .   . t h ’ uninju r e d e a r

But quiet and security are now at an end. Our vigilance is quickened and our comprehension is enlarged. We not only see events in their causes, but before their causes; we hear the thunder while the sky is clear, and see the mine sprung before it is done. Political wisdom has, by the force of English genius, been improved at last not only to political intuition, but to political prescience. —Samuel Johnson, “The False Alarm” But farewell now to unsuspicious nights, And slumbers unalarmed. Now, ere you sleep, See that your polished arms be primed with care, And drop the night-bolt. Ruffians are abroad, And the first larum of the cock’s shrill throat May prove a trumpet, summoning your ear To horrid sounds of hostile feet within. —William Cowper, The Task (IV: 565–71)

In “The False Alarm” and The Task, Samuel Johnson and William Cowper mark the present moment—1770 for Johnson, 1785 for Cowper—as a loss

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

69

of security. And both bid farewell to security by listening, since, as Valéry will suggest, “Hearing is the sense most / favored by attention; it holds the / frontier, so to speak, at the point / where seeing fails.”45 Johnson equates security with quiet, and figures a quickened vigilance as an ability to hear thunder while the sky looks clear.46 Cowper traces the fall from safety to danger through a casual transformation of the word “alarm,” which moves from “slumbers unalarmed” to “your polished arms,” and then finally to “the first larum of the cock’s shrill throat.” To hear an ordinary rooster’s crow as a “larum” suggests that the passion precedes the sound, demanding a vigilance heightened so that one wakes every day ready to hear even the most ordinary sound as a call to arms, and a signal of “hostile feet.” Both authors register the sense of readiness and alertness to danger as a mode of a more acute listening: even before the ear is summoned, it is already listening, and it hears the most quotidian sounds as alarms. Cowper’s quick jump from “unalarmed” to “arms” to “larum” is mirrored in his use of three synecdoches—“ear,” “sounds,” and “feet”—which reveal that fear, like listening, can fragment its objects. He alludes elsewhere in The Task to the particular correspondence between sound and war. Describing the experience of reading the newspaper—particularly news of war—from a position of secure and quiet retirement, he writes: ’Tis pleasant through the loop-holes of retreat To peep at such a world. To see the stir Of the great Babel and not feel the crowd. To hear the roar she sends through all her gates. At a safe distance, where the dying sound Falls a soft murmur on th’ uninjured ear. Thus sitting and surveying thus at ease The globe and its concerns, I seem advanced To some secure and more than mortal height, That lib’rates and exempts me from them all. It turns submitted to my view, turns round With all its generations; I behold The tumult and am still. The sound of war Has lost its terrors ’ere it reaches me, Grieves but alarms me not. (IV: 88–102)

70

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

These lines make explicit the link between the “safe distance” the newspaper provides in its mediation of war, and the experience of “sitting and surveying at ease” from a “secure and more than mortal height.” Kevis Goodman has suggested that we read the term “loop-hole” in its original sense as an opening or passageway, for both communication and fortification.47 The hole through which Cowper peeps, in other words, allows him to survey with ease and safety, but it also always threatens to let in that noisy world and its dying sounds. Indeed, Cowper’s emphasis on the position of safe distance that seemed a privileged and immortal exemption is accompanied by an awareness of his precarious privilege that suggests the presence of either guilt or doubt, especially since earlier in the same poem he describes the pain of reading the newspaper: “My ear is pain’d / My soul is sick with ev’ry day’s report / Of wrong and outrage with which earth is fill’d” (II: 5–7). Which are we to believe, the pained ear hurt by each report of wrong, or the unharmed ear that can hear noisy news from afar and remain happy and exempt from its pain? The issues Cowper raises here—of distance and contagion, of safety and spectatorship—became pressing in the period for thinking about the ethics of reading daily about a faraway war, the dilemma Coleridge will describe in “Fears in Solitude” as how we “all read of war / The best amusement for our morning meal!”48 Cowper’s word “exemption” alone in this context evokes the odd position of Britain engaged in a war and yet exempt from having to witness it, the privilege Mary Favret identifies “of knowing war at a distance.”49 But as Favret has also noticed in Cowper, “detachment and rationality sometimes give way in his poem to a closer, more intimate sense of war.”50 The sound of war, Cowper writes, is dying by the time it reaches the poet on his secure summit, arriving in a weakened, fading form and no longer carrying the threat or alarm of a noisy world. And yet, given the wartime context, we ought to consider hearing in the “dying sound” an echo of the sound of dying, the sound of war that grieves and pains, even if it does not immediately alarm. In following Goodman’s suggestion that the newspaper as loophole “admits the threat it parries,” we might reckon with the particularity of the sounds that are admitted here, the kind of dying they involve, and what it therefore means to “behold the tumult.”51 The sound of war might be “dying” by the time it arrives via newspaper, but it also still carries the sounds of the “dying,” performing a different injury on the speaker’s ear.52 Ears, like those

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

71

“uninjured” or “pain’d” in Cowper’s lines, evoke a particular vulnerability and violence, perhaps because of how their fortification differs from that of the eye. “The ear,” Geoffrey Hartman explains, “must deal with sounds that not only cannot be refused entry, but penetrate and evoke something too powerful for any defense.”53 Sound thus has a unique relation to attention, since as Erasmus Darwin explains, “we confide principally in the organ of hearing to apprize us of danger” (148). Consider Burke’s account of the “sudden beginning or sudden cessation of sound” by which the “attention is roused” and “the faculties driven forward, as it were, on their guard.”54 The “sounds of war,” then, refers to the particular ways one hears during war, but also evokes the invasive power of sound and the fear that often undergirds listening itself. N ee d le s s Al a r m s

Cowper’s poem “The Needless Alarm: A Tale” (1789) questions the necessity and origin of this passion by staging a debate about listening.55 The poem presents an alarmist sheep, which Cowper calls a “mutton.” At the sound of the frightful noise of a hunter, the “mutton” urges the rest of his flock of sheep that in response to the violent sound, “life to save, we leap into the pit” (104).56 The contradiction inherent in this phrase alone reveals the kind of irrational prolepsis Cowper associates with both alarm and alarmism. It also explains why the sheep is a mutton: quick to imagine his own death, the sheep is already dead meat.57 Cowper’s poem begins with a “peace” that “by kind contagion spread” (42), but the sound of the hunting horn prompts the sheep to panic and to take a military position—“huddling into phalanx.” The poem thus literalizes the warning of one printed Alarm that warned of the danger of fear: “Danger is always brought nearer and magnified by this Passion [fear], and very often even created out of nothing but Fancy. A Flock of Sheep, or a Thicket of Shrubs, has been by Fear converted into an Army, and a Man’s own Shadow has been imposed upon him for an Enemy.”58 If the worry here is that a flock of sheep might be mistaken for an army, Cowper wonders about a flock of sheep mistakenly feeling like an army. All seem’d so peaceful, that from them convey’d To me, their peace by kind contagion spread. But when the huntsman, with distended cheek, ’Gan make his instrument of music speak,

72

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

And from within the wood that crash was heard, Though not a hound from whom it burst appear’d, The sheep recumbent, and the sheep that graz’d, All huddling into phalanx, stood and gaz’d Admiring, terrified, the novel strain, Then cours’d the field around, and cours’d it round again; But, recollecting with a sudden thought, That flight in circles urg’d advanc’d them nought, They gather’d close around the old pit’s brink, And thought again—but knew not what to think. (41–54)

Unlike the “sound of war” in The Task that “Grieves, but alarms me not” (IV: 100–101), the sound of violence here throws the sheep into a state of panic, and produces an experience of thinking without thought. This is not the idle, unthinking consciousness of Cowper’s “brown study,” for this unthinking is a panicked response to an emergency, and thus repeats the misconception Elaine Scarry has described as the way “the acts of thinking that go on in emergencies are not recognized by us as acts of thinking.”59 This contentless thought also anticipates Simone Weil’s paradoxical description of the person subjected to force in the Iliad—“still thinking, he can think no longer.”60 Indeed, Cowper was working on his own translation of the Iliad in these years, and though the sheep are responding to the sounds of hunting in the poem, both the scope of their fears and the poem’s allegory suggest that war’s contagions are also at stake in these brass claws and fangs. The alarmist mutton exclaims: But ah! those dreadful yells what soul can hear, That owns a carcase, and not quake for fear? Daemons produce them doubtless, brazen-claw’d And fang’d with brass the daemons are abroad. (99–102)

The poem goes on to present opposing arguments about the relation between sound and sense, dramatizing Goodman’s insight that for Cowper, “different ways of hearing are . . . different ways of knowing.”61 The “mutton” and the “ewe,” wearing “periwigs of wool” (75), stage their own parliamentary debate about the sound of alarm: “Friends!” the mutton begins, with an appropriately oratorical tone, “I never heard / Sounds such as these, so worthy to be

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

73

fear’d” (83–84). The fact that Cowper calls the mutton “statelier than the rest” implies a mocking yet telling link between pastoral power and a collective, contagious alarmism that rushes to imagine violence (81). Picking up on the peculiar connection between alarm and the ear evoked in the rhyme of “fear’d” and “heard,” the mutton continues: “But ah! those dreadful yells what soul can hear / That owns a carcase, and not quake for fear?” (99–100). The word “carcase” repeats the joke about the “mutton”: the alarmist’s imagination performs a proleptic violence, as if he becomes a carcass (or “owns” one) from the sound of violence rather than from violence itself.62 To invoke Weil on the Iliad again: “From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet—he is a thing” (5). The same applies, it seems, to animals. The “discreet ewe” responds to the alarmist mutton by pointing to the senselessness of leaping to their death out of a fear of death, advocating the position espoused in the poem’s antialarmist moral to the poem: “Beware of desp’rate steps. The darkest day / Live ’till to-morrow, will have pass’d away” (132–33). Granted there is a menacing undertone to this optimistic moral, heard in the uncertainty of the tomorrow and the haunting phrase “pass away.” Nevertheless, the ewe’s sobering voice in the dialogue also frames her perspective as an argument about sound, when she suggests that “Meantime, noise kills not” (115), a line that itself asks the reader to endure the harmless “noise” of the interruption of meter.63 The ewe proposes that Sounds are but sounds, and till the cause appear, We have at least commodious standing here. Come fiend, come fury, giant, monster, blast, From earth or hell, we can but plunge at last. (119–22)

The time of waiting, recalling what Favret calls “the vacant meantime of war,” is here a time of listening without knowing what one listens to.64 This is the time in which sounds can be heard as “but sounds,” with neither cause, referent, nor violence: “Meantime, noise kills not.” Sounds might die, in other words, but they don’t kill. This objectless listening transforms the objectless thinking in which the sheep paradoxically engage in the line “And thought

74

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

again—but knew not what to think,” for thinking without knowing what to think here finds a more redemptive shape in a listening that knows not what to listen for. The debate between the mutton and the ewe—animating Foucault’s description of “politics seen as a matter of the sheep-fold”—thus allows Cowper to stage two opposing positions about the work of listening, and to offer the gap between sound and sense as a space not of fear but of mere attention.65 Cowper challenges the assumption that, as Susan Stewart has put it, “when we hear, we hear the sound of something,” and asks about the possibility of hearing noise without needing to know what that something is, courting an uncertain attention not as easily available to sight.66 Cowper contrasts the needless alarm that the poem describes with a claim that the interjection describing the poet’s ability to perceive sheep speech “was needful as a text” (71). One might think that the poet’s capacity to hear looks, gestures, herbs, and flowers resembles the hallucinatory, alarmist perception of more than is actually there. Yet the poet insists that his own anthropomorphizing listening comes easily, fearlessly, and from “intuition’s light.” Out of a habit acquired in solitude, the poet also experiences an intensification of perception, but it requires no work or strain, no panic or alarm. In fact, he replaces needless alarm with a heedless attitude, writing that “when, exercise and air my only aim, / And heedless whither, to that field I came” (31–32). This careless kind of listening is similar to the ethos David Simon has found in Andrew Marvell “of carelessly diffuse attention” and “careless receptivity.”67 Heedless habits of solitude and silence allow Cowper to hear the sheep’s alarm, suggesting a mode of poetic attention that is imaginative and intensified and guided by the “light” of “intuition” rather than by fear. C o le r i d ge ’ s F e a r s

Coleridge’s most famous war poem rewrites Cowper’s alarm to suggest that by 1798, neither solitude nor attention could be so easily separated from fear. Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude,” published with the subtitle “Written in April, 1798, during the Alarms of an Invasion,” is the best known of the numerous poems written about or under threat of invasion in the 1790s. Concerned with many of the same questions as “The Needless Alarm,” Coleridge’s poem is also preoccupied with sound, yet it cannot find the kind of heedless listening Cowper proposes. Coleridge also describes the poet’s “silent spot” and “silent dell,”

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

75

but he finds in the silent hills the fear of “Invasion, and the thunder and the shout, / And all the crash of onset; fear and rage / And undetermined conflict” (33–38). For Coleridge, the thought of invasion comes prior to having even heard its sounds, as though the fear itself might cause it to happen. “Fears in Solitude” has proved troublesome for readers, who have been confounded by its ambiguous status between “Poetry” and “Oratory,” and by the political position that the poem may or may not reveal. “The above,” Coleridge wrote of the poem, “is perhaps not Poetry,—but rather a sort of Middle thing between Poetry & Oratory.”68 Critics have struggled with the poem’s “instability as a document of alarm, signifying patriotism and anxiety, bellicosity and revulsion,” and often run into trouble deciphering the poem’s politics because, at some points, it seems to criticize war and, at others, to incite it.69 The former appears as a disapproval of the “clamour” for war, suggesting that the threatening noise in the poem is not that of war or invasion but the loud rhetoric of war-mongering: We, this whole people, have been clamorous For war and bloodshed, animating sports, The which we pay for, as a thing to talk of, Spectators and not combatants! (90–94)

Here Coleridge critiques the hypocrisy of a desire to watch war without having to fight it, the eagerness to be a spectator of “calamities taking place in another country” that Sontag calls “a quintessential modern experience.”70 But later in the poem he will ask clamorously: Stand forth! be men! repel an impious foe, Impious and false, a light yet cruel race, Who laugh away all virtue, mingling mirth With deeds of murder; and still promising Freedom, themselves too sensual to be free, Poison life’s amities, and cheat the heart Of Faith and quiet Hope, and all that soothes And all that lifts the spirit! Stand we forth; Render them back upon th’insulted ocean, And let them toss as idly on its waves As the vile sea-weeds, which some mountain-blast

76

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

Swept from our shores! And O! may we return Not with a drunken triumph, but with fear, Repenting of the wrongs, with which we stung So fierce a foe to frenzy! (136–49)

For many critics, this identification of the French as the “impious foe” alone indicates a crucial shift on Coleridge’s part from his earlier support of the Revolution, even though he ends the passage by replacing triumph with fear and repentance. As early as August 1799, an unsigned review of the poem claimed that “without being a ministerialist, Mr. Coleridge has become an alarmist. He pictures the horrors of invasion, and joins the war-whoop against what he calls ‘an impious foe.’”71 When Jan Mieszkowski wonders whether the poem “is diagnosing the problem of savage torpor Wordsworth describes or if it is itself an example of precisely the sort of sensationalism Wordsworth deplores,” he helps us see in this incongruity that Coleridge is writing about wartime attention while challenging how and what his own reader notices.72 Given the poem’s interest in the sound, speech, and clamor that invite war, it is important to note how much this passage sounds different from the rest of the poem and borrows from the clichés of political propaganda in a way that Coleridge’s language rarely does. Indeed, “Stand forth! be men!” sounds more like an impersonation of the way people had been “clamorous / for war and bloodshed” “as a thing to talk of,” an ironic imitation of the rhetoric the poem describes than a change of heart, though the poem refuses to mark it as such. In doing so, the poem upsets its reader’s capacity to hear the difference between poetic and political language, between verse and clamor, and performs the very critique of wartime attention that it also describes. In October 1961, the BBC hired an actor to read Peter Porter’s poem “Your Attention, Please” aloud on the air. Porter’s poem parodies the voice of an alarmed radio announcer warning of the arrival of a nuclear rocket strike and instructing listeners on how to proceed. The poem begins (referring to the Distant Early Warning Line): The Polar DEW has just warned that A nuclear rocket strike of At least one thousand megatons

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

77

Has been launched by the enemy Directly at our major cities. This announcement will take Two and a quarter minutes to make, You therefore have a further Eight and a quarter minutes To comply with the shelter Requirements published in the Civil Defence Code—section Atomic Attack.73

The rest of the poem is a series of imperatives to the listener, which range from the absurd to the somewhat more realistic. Porter juxtaposes the calm collectedness of an attention invited by the poem’s title with the fear and panic he describes, playing with the attention of a listener who has to be alert both to military danger and to the danger of misunderstanding parody. In fact, the day after the broadcast, the BBC had to issue an apology. An American visitor heard the poem as an actual alarm and ran down into his hotel lobby yelling, “Where are the shelters?!”74 The poem is thus about a false alarm, but it also caused one. The American tourist could not hear the line breaks that Porter inserted in his poem; he could not hear the irony; and he could not distinguish poetry from oratory.75 I’m suggesting a similar problem with “Fears in Solitude,” an irony that is hard to read as such and that Coleridge may have himself been ambivalent about. For both Coleridge and Porter, the attempt to write about the heightened attention demanded by political alarmism leads to uncertainty about how their own readers will hear their language—as empty or excessive, as critical of fear or guided by it. If just speaking about alarm can cause it, there is a slippery path between satire and sincerity, between a critique, or even just a description, of alarmism and participation in it. These poems reframe the issue of what attention feels like as a question about how passions are crucial to, and can prevent, different kinds of reading. Just like Porter’s listener, Coleridge’s reader faces a discomfort that is hard to separate from feelings of fear, alarm, or suspicion. E mp t y S o un d s

Children, who have not the habit of listening to words without understanding them, yawn and writhe with manifest symptoms of disgust, whenever they are compelled to hear sounds which convey no ideas to their minds. All

78

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

supernumerary words should be avoided in cultivating the power of attention. —Maria Edgeworth, Essays on Practical Education

The contrast in Cowper’s poem between “needful text” and “needless alarm,” and the final lines prior to its moral—“I . . . Much wonder’d that the silly sheep had found / Such cause of terrour in an empty sound” (129–30)— reveal a concern about the distinction between language and noise, and the possibility that a poem could function as an alarm. The proximity between alarm and language—both of which threaten to become “empty sounds”— hovers throughout “The Needless Alarm,” in its descriptions of the hunter’s “crash” as “sound,” “noise,” “clamour,” the “speech” of his “instrument of music,” and the “yells by tongues of daemons utter’d,” descriptions that conflate political rhetoric with the sounds of alarm bells, tocsins, and the noise of violence itself. As Elaine Scarry writes of the experience of emergency, “Words are replaced by loud noises, crude sirens, harsh horns—one-syllable sounds that act as placeholders for language until it can return.”76 Coleridge writes of clamoring for war and uses the phrase “empty sounds” to describe the war-mongering rhetoric that people use without understanding either its referent or consequence: The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers From curses, who knows scarcely words enough To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father, Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute And technical in victories and defeats, And all our dainty terms for fratricide; Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which We join no feeling and attach no form! As if the soldier died without a wound; As if the fibres of this godlike frame Were gored without a pang; as if the wretch, Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds, Passed off to Heaven, translated and not killed (108–22)

The criticism of political rhetoric gets thorny here as it rapidly shifts registers: when people use language as empty sound, detached from feeling or form,

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

79

they begin to think of other people as language. They think of death, he suggests, as just a kind of translation. The language of propaganda might seem smooth, fluent, and even dainty, technical and absolute, but its absoluteness is also an abstraction that evacuates the feeling and form of actual bodies dying in war. Thus if we use words without feeling or form, we will only be able to think of forms—of dead bodies, in this case—as words. As Hazlitt would later write about Pitt, “It was Pitt’s object . . . to fix the attention of his hearers on the pomp and sound of his words.”77 The problem is that this is also how some people characterize poetry. A few days after reprinting a long excerpt from “Fears in Solitude” in the Morning Post in 1802, Coleridge published an anonymous editorial titled “Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin,” in which he accuses Pitt of using the titular phrase as a “blank assertion” and a “convenient watch-word.” “It is a blank assertion,” he writes, “the truth of which would be strange, inexplicable, monstrous; a fact standing by itself, without companion or analogy.”78 In his lecture “On the Present War” (1795), Coleridge had made similar claims about “watch-words,” those “unmeaning term[s]” that acquire “almost a mechanical power” over well-informed men, and that become more powerful the more indistinct the ideas associated with it.79 Pitt’s war-mongering alarmism is, for Coleridge, nothing but empty sound, and yet it retains an automatic power over public feeling. Given this concern, it is difficult not to hear his oratorical “Stand forth! be men!” in the “impious foe” passage as an imitation of the empty sounds of war-mongering, an example of how words—like both prayers and curses—can do something mechanically without meaning anything.80 Coleridge is interested in what happens to language that becomes habituated, that loses feeling when one has become too fluent with it—a vacancy that can happen to speaker and reader alike. The word cliché had not yet emigrated from France, so diagnoses of the overuse of and insensibility to language were figured primarily in Coleridge’s time in terms of emptiness: “good morrow citizen,” wrote Wordsworth, “a hollow word / As if a dead man spake it!”81 The epithet “empty sound” appeared repeatedly during the eighteenth century to describe both political alarm and poetic language, though not typically in the same context. Consider, though, Samuel Johnson’s writing on both topics: in “The False Alarm,” which begins with the assertion that “one of the

80

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

chief advantages derived by the present generation from the improvement and diffusion of Philosophy, is deliverance from unnecessary terrours, and exemption from false alarms,” Johnson assures his reader that “a few weeks will now shew whether the Government can be shaken by empty noise.”82 But Johnson’s allusion to “empty noise” also coincides with his description, in the 1755 preface to his Dictionary, of the difficulty he encountered defining certain kinds of words. There he writes that Other words there are, of which the sense is too subtle and evanescent to be fixed in a paraphrase; such are all those which are by the grammarians termed expletives, and, in dead languages, are suffered to pass for empty sounds, of no other use than to fill a verse, or to modulate a period, but which are easily perceived in living tongues to have power and emphasis, though it be sometimes such as no other form of expression can convey.83

Expletives may “pass for empty sounds,” but they have exceptional “power and emphasis,” suggesting a crucial ambivalence in poetic language between an empty sound and a powerful one. Readers have long distinguished poetry from prose by the threat that the former will use empty sound, a vacancy that threatens to divide or double a reader’s attention.84 For Burke, poetic language is “but mere sounds.”85 The anxieties about poetry’s double attention that I gave an account of in the preceding chapter can also be understood as a problem of empty sound, since hearing the sound of language rather than just its sense entails an attention to the medium of language itself—a problem Locke associates with the “abuse of words.”86 George Campbell puts his worry about the reader’s attention in terms of empty sounds as well: “Without perspicuity, words are not signs, they are empty sounds; speaking is beating the air, and the most fluent declaimer is but a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.”87 For Campbell, poetic language threatens to become “empty sound,” but insofar as it is detached from fixed meaning, it is also overflowing with an “excess of vivacity and conciseness”— the same “power and emphasis” that Johnson identified. Emptiness and excess thus converge in poetry, where a standard rhetorical balance between absorption and loss comes undone. Cowper’s and Coleridge’s poems put pressure on verse’s proximity to empty sound. In “The Needless Alarm,” this comes through the emphatic use of tautology—“perhaps the closest words can come to being themselves empty

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

81

signs.”88 Tautology, Wordsworth reminds us, reveals our attachment to words as things, and thus interferes with a unidirectional, undivided attention.89 Wordsworth’s distinction between “virtual tautologies,” which consist of using different words for the same meaning, and “apparent tautologies,” repetition of the same word, which nevertheless produce fuller, denser, more powerful meaning, suggests that not all repetition, in Cowper’s phrase, “makes attention lame.”90 Whereas virtual tautology empties language of meaning, apparent tautology fills it. In “The Needless Alarm,” Cowper uses the latter, accumulating meaning through repetition. The sheep “thought but knew not what to think” and “puzzling long at last they puzzle out”; the speaker admits, “though ears she gave me two, gave me no ear”; and the ewe argues that “sounds are but sounds.” The first three tautologies all function in the same way, so that the second iteration of each word negates the first. Sounds might seem to become empty from repetition, but by unhinging and repeating them, they gain rather than lose meaning. The final tautology is even more self-reflexive, and we might imagine Gertrude Stein taking Cowper’s joke to the next level, “sounds are but sounds are but sounds are but sounds,” until the word “sound” becomes nothing but empty sound.91 The self-reflexivity of this final tautology is instructive: if Cowper’s point is to listen without knowing what one listens to, then the sounds of poetry make this possible. Tautology may look like empty sound, but it only dulls attention if we don’t understand it as an activity.92 “Fears in Solitude” is filled with the empty clichés Coleridge seems to both ventriloquize and criticize and the “empty sounds” of exclamatory language. This appears most often in the poem in the form of the apostrophic “oh” or “o,” which Celeste Langan calls “really more a sound than a word . . . it is merely the gesture of invocation itself.”93 Coleridge’s repeated recourse to the empty “O,” that visual image of vacancy, in the poem is striking: “Therefore, evil days / Are coming on us, O my countrymen!” (123); “Father and God! O! spare us yet awhile!” (130); “O Britons! O my brethren!” (155); “But, O dear Britain! O my Mother Isle!” (177); “O divine / And beauteous island!” (193–94); “O soft and silent spot!” (208); “O green and silent dell!” (228); “O my god!” (32). He also shifts at a few points to “Oh”: “Oh! ’tis a quiet spirit-healing nook!” (12); “Oh! my countrymen!” (41); “Oh! blasphemous!” (70).94 Apostrophe, like tautology, calls attention to an emptiness of language, and to the threat that sound will vacate.95

82

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

In challenging us to distinguish propagandistic language from poetic language in a poem about the destructiveness of the former, Coleridge points to the impossibility of a neutral mode of reading not already determined by feeling. Onita Vaz suggests Coleridge’s point is that “the penetration of solitude by fear, of tranquility by insecurity, is what generates the creative process.”96 This seems to confirm that proximity between poetry and propaganda, but whereas Vaz claims that the “‘empty sounds’ to which neither feeling nor form attach are in direct contrast to the poem itself ” (58), my view is that Coleridge does not make such a clear opposition. The poem has a more conflicted relation to empty sound, which it at once criticizes and finds itself emulating. On the other hand, we might argue that despite its reputation, propaganda does not actually allow sound to remain vacant, since alarmists rush to fill sound in with a referent (“so fierce a foe”!) while poetry keeps sounds empty of certainty. In this sense, only poetry can do what the discreet ewe demands and hold open the gap between sound and sense, listen to a sound without filling it with an object. And though opponents of alarmism often characterized it as empty rhetoric or sound, these poems suggest that the real problem with alarmism lies in its rush to fill in emptiness, and so in its inability to do what poetry does; namely, allow sounds to remain unfixed. “Fears in Solitude” ends with a different kind of fear—the generative experience of being “startled.” Whereas Cowper suggests his hallucinatory perception comes from a heedless instinct, Coleridge explains that the landscape becomes animated when he is startled: I find myself upon the brow, and pause Startled! And after lonely sojourning In such a quiet and surrounded nook, This burst of prospect, here the shadowy main, Dim-tinted, there the mighty majesty Of that huge amphitheatre of rich And elmy fields, seems like society, Conversing with the mind, and giving it A livelier impulse, and a dance of thought! (209–17)

In contrast to Cowper’s heedless intuition that animates the sheep, Coleridge understands his own heightened attention as ultimately inextricable from

t h e p oe t ic s of a l a r m a n d t h e pa s s ion of l i s t e n i ng

83

some kind of fear, anticipating Valéry’s claim that “the impressions and sense perceptions of man actually belong in the category of surprises; they are evidence of an insufficiency in man.”97 Poetry itself, for Coleridge, is a form of surprise, as the line break between “pause” and “startled” brings to view, and as he reminds us in his description of meter as the “continued excitement of surprise.”98 Christopher Miller has written that the difference between alarm and surprise “is, in part, a function of time: the former is a state of sustained fear or anxiety; the latter is a briefer flare of feeling, a passage to some other emotional or cognitive state, and an experience that can be a source of either discomfort, or pleasure, or both.”99 If being startled entails a briefer flare of feeling than being alarmed, it might then make room for—we might say, start—a perception that would be inaccessible during a sustained period of alarm. Thus, though being alarmed and being startled are both kinds of fear, the former prevents thought or inquiry by absorbing attention, while the latter can start it insofar as its attention is mobile, elastic, and unabsorbed. This closing to the poem, then, not only presents an alternative and more productive kind of fear to alarm, but it also suggests how poetry—using the resources of meter and pauses to constantly startle the reader—might provide a counter-model of attention, even if it is one still indebted to fear. This is what we could call, following Freud, a poetics of fright rather than of alarm.100 For just as Coleridge finds everyday behavior structurally indebted to postures of defense, writing that “we live by continued acts of defense, that involve a sort of offensive warfare,” he finds the mere act of attention constituted by fear.101

chapter 3

B en t E a r t h wa r d s Wordsworth’s Poetics of the Interval At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam Startles the pensive traveller while he treads His lonesome path, with unobserving eye Bent earthwards; he looks up—the clouds are split Asunder,—and above his head he sees The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens. —Wordsworth, “A Night Piece”

With forehead bent Earthward, as if in opposition set Against an enemy, I panted up With eager pace. —Wordsworth, The Prelude (XIII: 28–30)

I

n his 1839 recollection of Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey recalls an evening during the Peninsular War when he and Wordsworth went for a walk to await the mail carrier whom they expected to arrive with the newspaper. According to De Quincey, the two writers used to walk every evening—in what he calls “the deadly impatience for earlier intelligence”—to meet the carrier of the London newspapers.1 On this particular evening when according to De Quincey, “some great crisis in Spain was daily apprehended,” the two waited for over an hour with particular impatience, an impatience Wordsworth himself might have called a “craving for extraordinary incident” or “intelligence.”2 “At intervals,” De Quincey explains, “Wordsworth had stretched himself at length on the high road, applying his

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

85

ear to the ground, so as to catch any sound of wheels that might be groaning along at a distance” (122). Stretched out on the road, with his ear firmly pressed to the ground of Dunmail Raise—a peak in the Lake District and the mythic site of a battle from the year 945 where, according to legend, a slain king is buried—Wordsworth listens for the arrival of the Courier so he can read the daily news of the current war. But that which Wordsworth, according to De Quincey’s account, calls his “intense condition of vigilance”—a phrase perhaps more likely to describe a posture in the current war itself than that of the quotidian wait for the post carrying news of it—is not only met with disappointment when the carrier does not arrive, but also encounters an effect that puts into question the very conditions and consequences of vigilance itself. For even though the gesture of stretching himself on the ground might seem the perfect caricature of attention, as though Wordsworth were acting out and literalizing the term’s etymological link to the Latin tendere, “to stretch,” when the poet reflects upon his act he remarks neither on the distention of his body nor on the application of his ear to the ground. He is struck, rather, by what happens when he relaxes and interrupts the attentive stretch. According to De Quincey, Wordsworth observed: I have remarked, from my earliest days, that if, under any circumstances, the attention is energetically braced up to an act of steady observation, or of steady expectation, then, if this intense condition of vigilance should suddenly relax, at that moment, any beautiful, any impressive visual object, or collection of objects, falling upon the eye, is carried to the heart with a power not known under other circumstances. Just now, my ear was placed upon the stretch, in order to catch any sound of wheels that might come down upon the lake of Wythburn from the Keswick Road; at the very instant when the organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their tension, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy blackness, fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of the Infinite, that would not have arrested me under other circumstances.  (122)

Wordsworth’s emphasis on slackening rather than contracting the organs of attention, on the spontaneous and surprisingly productive moment of turning away from—of no longer—paying attention, reveals an important contribution on the part of a poet to the sciences of attention at the time, redirecting the controversy in early psychology over whether attention is a voluntary act

86

b e n t e a r t h wa r d s

to ask about the perception produced by an involuntary shift in, or withdrawal of, voluntary attention.3 Wordsworth is, I want to argue, obsessed with what happens during the intervals between acts of attention, an interest that extends beyond phenomenology to his thinking about poetics and history, and how the two intersect. In this chapter, Wordsworth’s experiment with his ear to the ground serves as a guiding figure with which to reread both his famous “There Was a Boy” and his attempts to witness the violence following the French Revolution in Paris. Once he encounters the impossibility of a voluntary, direct attention to historical experience, the poet uses the rhythms of keeping watch and its relaxation to generate a feeling of alarm that offers a sense of history as anticipation and as quotation, which ends up being as close as he can get to an authentic historical experience. The rhythm between watchfulness and its withdrawal, and the emphasis on the shock of relaxation, allows Wordsworth to rethink the attentive posture in and to poetics, politics, and history, and the intertwining of all three. For this interest in the new perception that arrives only with the relaxation of the organs of attention suggests a new way to think about the experience of reading poetry, and an alternative mode of observing history in which the remains of events appear only in the intervals between looking. A century later, Walter Benjamin would give an account of the “reception in a state of distraction” that characterizes a modernity he associates with Baudelaire, the poet who “envisaged readers for whom the reading of lyric poetry would present difficulties,” because “will power and the ability to concentrate are not their strong points.”4 Though both Wordsworth and Benjamin replace a conventional concentration with a kind of involuntary, tactile, fugitive perception, Wordsworth’s observation differs from Benjamin’s diagnosis of “reception in a state of distraction” in a number of ways, the most striking of which is that the poet is really interested in that moment of turning away as one moment in a rhythm between attention and its relaxation, rather than in a sustained state of distractedness. Wordsworth is thus closer to what Kant describes as the rare art of being able to “distract oneself without being distracted.”5 Both models of inattention, though, take seriously the impossibility of a sustained state of attention, an impossibility embraced by a number of Romantic authors. William Godwin, for one, admitted that “the intellect cannot be always on the stretch, nor the bow of the mind for ever bent.”6 And

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

87

yet, he suggests, “the happiest and most valuable thoughts of the human mind will sometimes come when they are least sought for, and we least anticipated any such thing.”7 Indeed, Wordsworth’s observation about the organs of attention echoes and anticipates a number of like-minded observers of attention. When Erasmus Darwin describes how one can notice irritative ideas, he too evokes the possibilities generated by a relaxation of attention, which he also calls an interval: When our attention to other objects is most relaxed, as just before we fall asleep, or between our reveries when awake, these irritative ideas of motion and sound are most liable to be perceived; as those, who have been at sea, or have travelled long in a coach, seem to perceive the vibrations of the ship, or the rattling of the wheels, at these intervals; which cease again, as soon as they exert their attention. That is, at those intervals they attend to the apparent motions, and to the battement of sounds of the bodies around them, and for a moment mistake them for those real motions of the ship, and noise of wheels, which they had lately been accustomed to: or at these intervals of reverie, or on the approach of sleep, these supposed motions or sounds may be produced entirely by imagination.  (227)

Darwin, like Wordsworth, describes the peculiar perceptions that are available only when one relaxes one’s attention, those “which cease again, as soon as they exert their attention.” In his Principles of Psychology, William James quotes the German experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who notes: When we wait with strained attention for a stimulus, it will often happen that instead of registering the stimulus, we react upon some entirely different impression,—and this not through confounding one with the other. On the contrary, we are perfectly well aware at the moment of making the movement that we respond to the wrong stimulus. Sometimes even, though not so often, the latter may be another kind of sensation altogether,—one may, for example, in experimenting with sound, register a flash of light, produced either by accident or design. We cannot well explain these results otherwise than by assuming that the strain of the attention towards the impression we expect coexists with a preparatory innervation of the motor centre for the reaction, which innervation the slightest shock then suffices to turn into an actual discharge. This shock may be given by any chance impression, even by one to which we never intended to respond.8

88

b e n t e a r t h wa r d s

Wordsworth anticipates Wundt not only in his attempt to encounter “some entirely different impression,” the wrong stimulus, but also in seeking the “slightest shock,” or what Wordsworth calls “gentle shocks of mild surprise.” The sudden distraction, the surprise or shock, these thinkers suggest, prompts a more sensitive receptivity than that gained by any voluntary attempts at an attentive and sharp ear. Su r p r i s e d in to a P e rc ep t i o n

And, attention now relaxed, A heart-felt chillness crept along my veins. —William Wordsworth, The Excursion

Wordsworth’s theory of the powerful perception that comes in the moment of relaxation raises the question of how his own poetry might demand, manage, deflect, or distract the reader’s attention, and of whether his verse experiments with the very withdrawal from watchfulness that it thematizes. In contrast to Burke’s claim that “reliefs prevent that powerful emotion so necessary to produce the sublime,” Wordsworth finds the most powerful emotions precisely in relief from an attentive brace.9 At stake here is the temporality of attention in his own verse, when and how Wordsworth’s own reader might relax, and whether perception or insight comes during the brace of attentive reading or in its lapse. Wordsworth’s model of attention suggests the possibility of a poetics that would offer meaning when the organs of attention relax, which would challenge Coleridge’s Ciceronian demand for a poetics that provides “perpetual and distinct attention to each part,” since it makes a slackening of the reader’s attention the condition of perceiving anything other than that which one already expects.10 In fact, De Quincey presents the anecdote about Wordsworth’s ear to the ground not as a contribution to the philosophy of mind but as a corrective to literary critics: in recalling the conversation between the two writers, De Quincey argues that Wordsworth’s “There Was a Boy” has been “ludicrously misconstrued” by critics, who have neglected the “philosophical hint” that the poem offers about what he calls “the experience of the eye and the ear” (122). For, De Quincey recalls, Wordsworth actually illustrated his observation about the “organs of attention” by pointing to his exploration of the “same psychological principle” in the Boy of Winander’s “gentle shock of mild surprise,” which entered “unawares” at the

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

89

very moment that follows the boy’s attentive brace when listening for the owls’ mimic response: And, when there came a pause Of silence such as baffled his best skill: Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received Into the bosom of the steady lake. (16–25)

De Quincey is particularly intent on refuting Francis Jeffrey’s interpretation of this passage, which locates the poem’s focus in the boy’s skill at mimicking the owls so accurately that he fools the owls themselves. The “dismal oversight” in this reading, according to De Quincey, is that the “very object of the poem is not the first or initial stage of the boy’s history—the exercise of skill which led him, as on occasion, into a rigid and tense effort of attention—not this, but the second stage, the consequences of that attention” (122). The centrality of “There Was a Boy” to Wordsworth’s poetics has been noted by many critics, who have pointed to an early version of the lines in the first person, as well as to the relation between the loss of correspondence with nature and the boy’s sudden death. Readings, like that by Paul De Man, that link the loss of correspondence in which the boy “hung / listening” and his death (as well as Wordsworth’s own anticipated death) might then, according to De Quincey’s logic, speak to the violence of Benjamin’s claim that attention, without habit, threatens to “blow the human being apart,” as though it were precisely the intensity of the boy’s listening that causes his death.11 Wordsworth’s gloss on the poem in his “Preface from 1815” confirms De Quincey’s emphasis on the moment when attention relaxes. The poet explains: “The Boy, there introduced, is listening, with something of a feverish and restless anxiety, for the recurrence of the riotous sounds which he had previously excited; and, at the moment when the intenseness of his mind is beginning to remit, he is surprised into a perception of the solemn and tranquilizing images

90

b e n t e a r t h wa r d s

which the Poem describes.”12 If “There Was a Boy” describes the moment when intenseness and anxiety begin “to remit,” the question emerges of how poetry might formally engage this insight to produce its own remission and to shock its readers gently. The fact that poetic form is intervallic makes verse a particularly apt medium for producing a situation in which the reader is repeatedly “surprised into a perception,” since, according to Susan Stewart, “meter disrupts the absorptive dominance of time and makes time manifest as the dimension of interval.”13 The break between “pause” and “of silence,” recalling Coleridge’s “pause / Startled!” insists that the reader stop at “pause” to experience the silences of verse and become like the boy, listening to the silence of the poetic scene. Indeed, Wordsworth recognizes that what he calls in his letter to John Thelwall the “passion of metre” is “felt especially at line boundaries,” which is to say in the intervals of verse.14 The line break between “hung” and “listening” thematizes a heightened attention while underscoring how an anticipatory listening is built into verse form, as though the reader’s attention hung or suspended in the space from one line of verse to the next. De Man reads the poet’s preoccupation with hanging as “the exemplary metaphor for metaphor, for figuration in general,” which he describes as “suspended meaning” and “loss and restoration.”15 In addition to figure, this elastic rhythm of loss and return is also built into verse form, where the rhythms, line breaks, and enjambments put pressure on the receptivity that comes in the moment of relaxation. This rhythm is felt by all readers, but particularly by the reader of poetry as a tautening and relaxing of the organs of attention as she hangs waiting for the next verse. This is not saying much about poetry or reading that we do not already know: reading is temporal, and thus provides the reader with a regular experience of suspense and waiting. But Wordsworth’s poetics both exacerbates and thematizes this rhythm: by putting pressure on the ends of lines, he brings into view the rhythms of attention that are present in all reading experiences. Though Wordsworth’s gloss on the poem emphasizes the “moment when the intenseness of his mind is beginning to remit,” the lines actually obscure that lapse. The poem moves so quickly from “hung / Listening” to the “gentle shock of mild surprise” that “has carried”—has already, we might add—“far into his heart,” that we are given no description of remission other than its implied inevitability and effects. The grammatical disagreement between the

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

91

habitual “while he hung” and the definitive “Has carried” inserts a gap in the narrative temporality at the exact moment of receptivity. We are expecting something like what Wordsworth wrote in the 1799 version of these lines: “while I hung / Listening, a sudden shock of mild surprise / would carry.”16 Yet by 1805 and later versions, the lines suggest that while the act of hanging happens often and repeatedly, the shock has already happened—and it happens so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that we always miss the moment of transfer in what Anne-Lise François calls a “typically Wordsworthian collapse of the irrevocable and the habitual.”17 Similarly, one also might not notice the moments when readerly attention relaxes, though we assume, with Barthes, that “we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual.”18 Whereas for Barthes, the novel-reader’s attention relaxes when skimming “descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations,” we can imagine that the reader of “There Was a Boy” relaxes at the pause provided by the end-stopped line that coincides with the boy’s bafflement, or perhaps at that simple comma between “listening” and “a gentle shock.” The discrepancy between the poem and its gloss thus reveals that for Wordsworth, no matter how gently and imperceptibly intenseness of mind begins to remit, the withdrawal from watchfulness surprises the reader “into a perception” so swiftly that we barely notice it happening. In his short essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” De Quincey describes the way that we only feel “suspended life” in the moment of its recommencement, when “the pulses of life are beginning to beat again: and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.”19 De Quincey’s use of the word “parenthesis” here is telling, revealing that the rhythms of sensibility and insensibility, of attention and its lapse, are, firstly, rhythms of reading. But how are these readerly rhythms shaped by genre? Nicholas Dames finds in Thackeray “a rhythmic oscillation between attentiveness and distraction, or alertness and obliviousness, that characterized all reading, particularly all reading of novelistic narrative.”20 Dames claims that Thackeray both acknowledges and indulges this rhythm by offering readers “spaces to ‘opt out’ of attention.”21 Does poetry work in the same way, since, as Brendan O’Donnell writes, “verse formalizes the basic physical rhythm of tension and release, exertion and relaxation, in the speech apparatus itself ”?22

92

b e n t e a r t h wa r d s

Are the line breaks, the caesurae, and the blank spaces around verse, then, similar “spaces to ‘opt out’ of attention”? Or do they serve as anticipatory spaces in which the reader “hangs / listening” with a heightened alertness? Does attention increase or decrease as the reader moves from one line to the next? Margaret Koehler and Natalie Phillips have both written about eighteenth-century poems that were about attention while also aiming to cultivate it in readers. Phillips writes that while eighteenth-century novelists incorporated distraction within their works, poets “by contrast, tended to render distraction as something that existed outside their verse” (even while, she suggests, “they used profoundly multifocal methods to sustain it”).23 Even though Wordsworth’s diagnosis of “savage torpor” positions poetry in opposition to the distracted frantic novels and newspapers, “There Was a Boy” suggests that the possibility of cordoning off verse from distraction is no longer a stable, or even attractive option, since perception, in Wordsworth’s view, comes at the moment of attention’s remission. Wordsworth’s description of the boy of Winander listening with a “feverish and restless anxiety” recalls another strain of attention the poet exerted as a child, which also anticipated a death. In Book XI of The Prelude, he writes: I watched, Straining my eyes intensely as the mist Gave intermitting prospect of the wood And plain beneath. Ere I to school returned That dreary time, ere I had been ten days A dweller in my father’s house, he died, And I and my two brothers, orphans then, Followed his body to the grave. The event, With all the sorrow which it brought, appeared A chastisement; and when I called to mind That day so lately past, when from the crag I looked in such anxiety of hope, With trite reflections of morality, Yet in the deepest passion, I bowed low (XI: 360–73)

This “spot of time” (XI: 257) suggests a curious connection between the child’s “anxiety of hope” and his sense of guilt or chastisement from his father’s death—the apparent result of what Geoffrey Hartman calls “an om-

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

93

inous, even murderous anticipation.”24 Given what we know about Wordsworth’s theory of attention, I want to suggest that this is a spot of time because of the nuances of the anxious watch itself, and the odd relationship between the boy’s strain and the mist’s intermitting prospect. For here we find again a dialectic between an intense strain of the organs of attention and a rhythmic perception. The “intermitting prospect” that the mist creates suggests an intervallic movement between obscurity and perception that mirrors the intermitting prospects given by poetic form itself. Indeed, the enjambment of “appeared / A chastisement” provides the reader with her own intermitting prospect, suggesting first that the event merely appeared, and then turning appearance itself into loss and chastisement. Similarly for the boy, a quotidian anticipation of appearance is punished by a more irrevocable loss. The intermitting movement between the strain and relaxation of attention not only allows a new perception, but imprints the experience on the mind in a “spot of time” so powerful it upsets chronology and disturbs the work of memory.25 In an essay on how the Romantics recited poetry, David Perkins has shown how the intervallic quality of verse was in transition during the Romantic period, as poets debated how long one should pause at the end of a line while reciting verse aloud.26 “The great fault,” Perkins quotes Sheridan, “almost universally committed, is that of making them [pauses] too short.” Blank verse posed a particular problem in this sense. In his letter to Thelwall on the topic, Wordsworth wrote that “as long as blank verse shall be printed in lines, it will be physically impossible to pronounce the last word or syllable of the lines with the same indifference as the others, i.e. not to give them an intonation of one kind or other, or to follow them with a pause, not called out for by the passion of the subject, but by the passion of the metre merely.”27 Wordsworth seems to be agreeing with Priestley’s claim that “intervals are peculiarly adapted to express a variety of affections of the mind. For it is manifest that the breaks or rests we make in our voice, the length or shortness of our sentences, and the like, vary with the state of mind with which we deliver ourselves upon any occasion” (292–93). The idea here is that pauses express passions. In Coleridge, we found reading and fear deeply enmeshed, but here Wordsworth is trying to connect the “passion of metre” and the feeling of guilt. When one stops reading at “appeared,” the event seems to have just appeared—it became present.

94

b e n t e a r t h wa r d s

But the next line turns appearance into a rebuke and a punishment, as though Wordsworth were punishing his reader for expecting appearance, just as he felt punished for the anxiety of anticipation. The simple rhythmic movement between attention and its relaxation is neither neutral nor free of passion, suggesting an intertwining of looking and chastisement that we might understand as analogous to the guilt Rei Terada associates with a “dissatisfaction with the given” and the shift from “fact perception to the merely phenomenal as an evasive maneuver.”28 This reading would suggest that it is not just Wordsworth’s intense looking that causes guilt, but also his more evasive enjoyment of the intermitting prospect as a phenomenality that the mist provides. Also at work here, we will see, might be a more political sense of guilt, one tied to the way the public is both asked to watch and chastised for watching too closely. E a r to t h e G ro un d

’Twixt Host and Host but narrow space was left, A dreadful interval. —Milton, Paradise Lost

The comment Wordsworth makes while waiting for news of the current war while putting his ear to the ground of an earlier war puts into question the voluntary, sustained, and teleological mode of attention demanded by wartime alarmism. His posture combines the attempt to listen to the past by listening to the ground of a historic battlefield with current military positions of guarding and keeping watch—“With forehead bent / Earthward,” he writes, describing the ascent of Snowdon in The Prelude, “as if in opposition set /Against an enemy” (XIII: 29–31). Consider the posture demanded by one pamphlet published in The Anti-Gallican (1804), which instructs farmers and other inhabitants of Sussex in the case of an invasion to Observe where the enemy takes up his quarters, approach at night as near as possible, and fire at the centinel; this will make the whole party stand to their arms, and by breaking their rest will distress them. A party formed for this laudable purpose, should, when they halt, post a centinel in a tree to discover the enemy. At night, should the centinel be doubtful of any one’s approach, let him put his ear to the ground. Every person going towards the enemy, or being where he has no obvious business, should be arrested and sent to headquarters.29

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

95

The poet’s ear to the ground thus conflates the military demand that the sentinel listen for the approach of the enemy with the civilian frustrations of waiting to hear news of a distant and inaccessible war, as well as with the more general difficulty of finding or sensing auditory traces of history in the landscape. Carolyn Forché will borrow this wartime trope in her famous “poem of witness” about El Salvador in 1978. After the colonel spills a bag of human ears on the table, Forché recalls: “Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.”30 It is surprising that De Quincey does not make much of the wartime climate in which he and Wordsworth were waiting together for the newspaper, nor of the content of the newspaper that failed to arrive that evening. He unemphatically locates the anecdote on one of many evenings “during the Peninsular War . . . when some great crisis in Spain was daily apprehended,” even though he had already elsewhere compared the daily distribution of newspapers to “the opening of apocalyptic vials.”31 This omission is particularly odd since Wordsworth’s interest in a form of keeping watch that notices something else at the moment attention relaxes echoes what De Quincey calls the ability “aliud agere, to mind something alien, or remote from the interest then clamouring for attention.”32 In the short late essay called “Presence of Mind: A Fragment,” De Quincey writes about the particular form of focused and controlled vigilance demanded by war, likening what he calls the “modern military orders of ‘Attention!’ and ‘Eyes strait!’” to “the Roman formula for summoning an earnest concentration of the faculties . . . Hoc age, ‘Mind this!’” an imperative he equates with “do not mind that—non iliud age,” and holds responsible for what he considers the primary characteristic of the Roman character: “the morbid craving for action, which was intolerant of anything but the intensely practical” (49). De Quincey mentions this Roman characteristic, outlined in the fragment via an opposition between military action and contemplative thought, as his own warning to “we of the Anglo-Saxon blood,” a group whom he characterizes as similarly unable to “to mind something alien.” This challenge—to mind something other—is precisely what Wordsworth aims for: to notice something other than that for which one looks or waits, so that “under the giving way of one exclusive direction of his senses, began suddenly to allow an admission to

96

b e n t e a r t h wa r d s

other objects.”33 “Presence of Mind” suggests that the stakes of De Quincey’s recollection of Wordsworth are thus higher than he lets on, since it reveals an interest in the kinds of attention demanded by—and excluded from—war. Indeed, the phrase aliud agere, “to attend to something else,” is particularly resonant in this context since agere can mean not only “to do” in Latin but also “to wage,” as in agere bellum, to wage war.34 Thus, De Quincey’s interest in the ability aliud agere suggests an implicit contrast with the decision agere bellum, as if the choice were simple: either one wages war or one pays attention to something else. It may come as a surprise to associate De Quincey with a concern for alterity after John Barrell’s influential study The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism, a book which pathologizes De Quincey’s relation to otherness by characterizing his writing as an inoculation of the self with a small amount of otherness in order to immunize against the radically other—the East.35 De Quincey’s discussion of paying attention to something else in “Presence of Mind” certainly fluctuates in its approach to otherness, and it does not present a consistent position on race, nationalism, or imperialism. (Only a page after aligning presence of mind with “fearful” power, he seems to admire it.) While there is no question that De Quincey gives voice at times to a fervent nationalism, “Presence of Mind” reveals that he is willing to make explicit the links between presence of mind and power, between how we pay attention and how we respond to others, and that he recognizes the intersections of attention, ethics, and imperialism. In this way, he not only participates in the shared Romantic-era interest in attention’s elasticity, but also helps us to understand how that elasticity informs historical and political modes of observation. De Quincey’s account of Wordsworth’s “intense condition of vigilance” thus provides an insight into how the state’s wartime watchfulness precludes other perceptions—or perception of others—by excluding the ability “aliud agere.” Wordsworth’s “intermitting prospect” might thus provide a relaxation from what he elsewhere calls the “unremitting warfare” waged against the imagination.36 Indeed, the resonance with warfare is pervasive here: interval comes from the Latin inter, meaning between, and vallum, meaning ramparts or palisades, and is not just an indication of discontinuity or suspension but one of insecurity and vulnerability, with direct military connotations.37 The Rules and regulations manual that introduced “Attention!” as a

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

97

military command in 1792 also specified that the “greatest fault a battalion in line can make is increasing its interval.”38 Paying At t en t i o n to Hi s to ry

But there is something else—call it a consistent eventfulness, A common appreciation of the way things have of enfolding When your attention is distracted for a moment, and then It’s all bumps and history, as though this crusted surface Had always been around. —John Ashbery, “A Wave”

In her famous new historicist reading of “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798,” Marjorie Levinson writes that one would expect from the poem’s title “some allusion or attention to the time or place of composition.” Instead, she writes, “‘Tintern Abbey’ does allude, although it does not attend, to the dimension designated by its title.”39 Given Wordsworth’s investigations of attention, I’d like to suggest that we upend the very idea of what direct attention to both time and place—attention to history—should look like, and what it should yield. At stake in Wordsworth’s poetry is precisely the difficulty of paying attention to those “unfixed elements of history” that Kevis Goodman has so strikingly found in the mediated problem of presentness, the “difficulty of recording and recognizing history-on-the-move.”40 For attention is pushed to its limits by a historical experience that overwhelms and disappears all at the same time. When I use the phrase “historical attention,” I mean not an encounter with a history that is completely gone, dead, and distant. On the contrary, I am using “historical” to describe the problem of paying attention to events with a scope and importance that we might call “historic” (as in “having or likely to have great historical importance”), even before they enter the past tense of history.41 The problem of an attention to history is not only everything one must record about the past but also the experience of historical transformation in its midst. The quality of attention that De Quincey describes in his recollection of Wordsworth’s ear to the ground is thus historical in two ways: Wordsworth presses his ear to the ground of that “narrow field of battle,” as if listening for both the arrival of the news which will provide information about the current war giving access to history in the present as it unfolds, and for the sounds of

98

b e n t e a r t h wa r d s

the historical battle of 945 which took place at the site where he waits. The image of Wordsworth’s ear pressed to a mythic battlefield—one that according to legend still serves as the grave for a king—suggests a haunted relation to sites of history and death akin to Godwin’s demand, in his “Essay on Sepulchres,” to “indulge all the reality we can now have, of a sort of conference with these men, by repairing to the scene which, as far as they are at all on earth, they still inhabit!”42 The poet is listening for the sounds of both the current war and prior wars, like the child in Benjamin’s “Berlin Childhood around 1900,” who witnesses history by “steeping” his senses in history’s material remains: “A looted shopwindow, the house from which a dead body had been carried away, the spot on the road where a horse had collapsed—I planted myself before these places in order to steep my senses in the evanescent breath which the event had left behind.”43 The gesture literalizes the idea that we can sense or feel history, as though Wordsworth might hear of past wars by listening intently to the ground on which they occurred while waiting for the news of current wars.44 Waiting for the news of war on a historic battlefield, it is as though his attention to history didn’t care for chronology, conflating history long past with its making in the present, as if Wordsworth’s attentive posture signaled an openness to any wartime sounds. His wartime listening refuses to distinguish past from present, the uncanny effect of listening at and to what De Quincey elsewhere calls “bas-reliefs of battle-fields; of battles from forgotten ages—of battles from yesterday—of battle-fields that, long since, nature had healed and reconciled to herself with the sweet oblivion of flowers . . . battle-fields that were yet angry and crimson with carnage.”45 Wordsworth repeatedly registers the problem of how to witness the historic through figures of attention and inattention, often through attempts to steep his senses in the French Revolution. In Book IX of The Prelude, he explains his initial indifference in Paris to the Revolution with the simple fact that his attention was engrossed in other things: But hence to my more permanent residence I hasten: there, by novelties in speech, Domestic manners, customs, gestures, looks, And all the attire of ordinary life, Attention was at first engrossed: and thus Amused and satisfied, I scarcely felt

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

99

The shock of these concussions, unconcerned, Tranquil almost, and careless as a flower Glassed in a greenhouse, or a parlour-shrub, When every bush and tree the country through Is shaking to the roots—indifference this Which may seem strange, but I was unprepared With needful knowledge, had abruptly passed Into a theatre of which the stage Was busy with an action far advanced. (IX: 81–95)

Unprepared and thus unable to comprehend his spectatorship of the theatre of Revolution, Wordsworth ascribes his insensibility to the absorption of his attention in the novelties of foreign life, an inattention equated to carelessness, lack of concern, tranquility, and indifference. The lines also play with the reader’s attention and indifference, syntactically deferring the arrival of the object of his indifference, so that the reader must become engrossed in the lengthy list of ordinary distractions and also cannot attend to the historical crisis. Even when descriptions of revolutionary events do enter these lines, they are always coupled with their own negation: “The shock of these concussions” is joined by “unconcerned,” and “shaking to the roots” is followed by “indifference this.” These pairings of shock and unconcern suggest the difficulty of attending to historical convulsions while they are happening.46 It may seem obvious, but the sense that we can only pay attention to one thing at a time, or that attention can only hold so many objects, suggests quite simply the impossibility of paying attention to ongoing history, especially a history in which the country is “shaking to its roots.” “History,” writes Godwin in his “Essay on Sepulchres, “is necessarily limited, by the limited faculties of the human mind to take in and store up facts, and masses of facts.”47 The mediation of history, in other words, is shaped by attention’s limits. The line “I scarcely felt / The shock of these concussions” echoes those “gentle shocks of mild surprise” that poetic form enacts, while suggesting that there is actually a slight registration of historical event here. After all, the lines do follow an attempt to attend to the events, which fails: “in honest truth,” he writes, “I looked for something that I could not find, / Affecting more emotion than I felt” (IX: 71–73). The words “shock” and “concussion” have a dizzying effect since both words, though describing external historical events,

100

b e n t e a r t h wa r d s

also suggestively resonate as descriptions of internal emotional or medical conditions. Both words can describe an event, but they can also describe a numbing of the mind that makes that event difficult to perceive or comprehend, obfuscating the separation between attention and its object through the negation of both. Even though Wordsworth insists that he was indifferent and unconcerned, the word “concussion” suggests that attention or concern may not have been entirely feasible. For a “concussion,” like a “shock,” implies a description not only of the historical crisis that he scarcely felt, but also of an injury to the mind that itself causes insensibility and prevents full attention. In this sense, his description implies that a direct attention to a historical “concussion” may not have been possible because even a scarce, slight encounter with it “concusses” the mind and thus averts the attention, since a “concussion,” by definition, prevents sensibility and distracts the attention. John Abernethy, who refers to a concussion as “the immediate consequence of the shock,” lists in his Surgical and physiological essays (1797) the “whole train of symptoms following a concussion of the brain,” which include those Wordsworth faced upon his arrival in Paris: a “state of insensibility” in which the patient is “inattentive to slight external impressions” or seems “as if his attention was occupied by something else.”48 There is a kind of metonymic slip from the shock of the political concussion to the mind, which attempts to attend to it and thereby is concussed, as though trying to understand or diagnose a concussion reproduced the object onto the observing mind. A concussion was also a familiar metaphor for historical experience at the time. Injuries caused by external violence, concussions nevertheless leave no external marks, “a derangement . . . which does not leave such marks of its existence behind it as to render it capable of having its real nature ascertained by dissection” (132). This is the same problem with historical upheaval: it leaves no mark of its existence behind and thus its “real nature” cannot be “ascertained by dissection.” In her account of witnessing the French Revolution in the introduction to her Poems, Helen Maria Williams explains the difficulty of paying attention to the convulsions of history: I have seen what I relate, and therefore I have written with confidence; I have there been treading on the territory of History, and a trace of my footsteps will perhaps be left. My narratives make a part of that marvellous story which the eighteenth century has to record to future times, and the testimony of a

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

101

witness will be heard. Perhaps, indeed, I have written too little of events which I have known so well; but the convulsions of states form accumulations of private calamity that distract the attention by overwhelming the heart, and it is difficult to describe the shipwreck when sinking in the storm.49

Echoing Wordsworth’s metaphor of walking into a theater in the middle of the action, Williams’s worry about describing the shipwreck when sinking in the storm registers the impossibility of paying direct attention to historic change. Both writers posit a certain distance necessary for an attention to history. Yet Williams presents a slightly different account of how political convulsion leads to the mental concussion and distraction of its witnesses. Williams’s idea, that such convulsions “form accumulations of private calamity that distract the attention by overwhelming the heart,” suggests that attention to public, political history is distracted by way of private calamity. Political and personal crises are in a causal relation with one another but also in a competitive one insofar as they compete for attention. In contrast, Wordsworth seems to rid this equation of private calamity, insisting that even without personal loss, one cannot fully pay attention to convulsive historical experience as it unfolds. We might assume from the lines that claim that his attention was absorbed elsewhere that if Wordsworth tried he could witness history simply by paying attention to it. Yet when he returns to Paris, this time engaged with revolutionary ideas, he looks directly at the site of the September Massacres but still encounters only “mute leaves”: I crossed—a black and empty area then— The square of the Carousel, few weeks back Heaped up with dead and dying, upon these And other sights looking as doth a man Upon a volume whose contents he knows Are memorable but from him locked up, Being written in a tongue he cannot read, That he questions the mute leaves with pain, And half upbraids their silence. (X: 55–63)

The pain of trying to attend to historical violence is registered here as blankness and incomprehension: history is a foreign language that is painful—if not impossible—to translate. It injures its witness, spreading the concussion

102

b e n t e a r t h wa r d s

and its empty blankness from object to observer. Looking for a feeling that the poet cannot find, he is overwhelmed by what Keats will call “the feel of not to feel it.”50 The proximity between the poem’s own dashes and the word “cross” suggests as well that the poem performs this illegibility for its reader, crossing out black and empty areas of the page. The figures of reading and illegibility proliferate in the passages on the Revolution with varying connotations: they metaphorize a spectatorship of history in which a sign is registered but not understood, while they also, on a different level, ask more literally how language and books mediate history. The “mute leaves” act as the poem’s metaphor both for an unavailable history and for itself. Wordsworth refuses the correlation between clear, descriptive language and historical experience advocated by Lord Kames, whose historiographical principle of “ideal presence” demands a use of language “spread out in a lively and beautiful description” which narrativizes history so that “incidents long past [are] as passing in our sight.” Kames writes, “I am insensibly transformed into a spectator: I perceive these two heroes in act to engage: I perceive them brandishing their swords, and chearing their troops; and in that manner I attend them through the battle, every incident of which appears to be passing in my sight.”51 For Kames, attention and history can coincide seamlessly through a model of history as fiction. The Prelude, in contrast, deals with the impossibility of being “insensibly transformed into a spectator”: it registers instead the difficult sensibility of such a transformation, and asks what kind of a spectatorship of history is actually possible, especially with a stage that is always “busy with an action far advanced.” If Kames’s history is one that passes before our eyes as in “ideal presence,” Wordsworth’s access to history is marked by absence and loss. Through figures of muteness and pain, these lines mark the limits of the poet’s capacity to attend, and yet suggest that attention’s finitude, rather than its fidelity, may be the defining characteristic of historical spectatorship. In Wordsworth’s account, the Revolution only becomes available to the poet when he retreats to his room at night and no longer tries to attend to the site of history. History arrives when he turns away from it, relaxing his attention.52 As though experimenting with the rules outlined in his phenomenological observation about the “organs of attention,” the poet exercises an elasticity of mind that allows a historic feeling to emerge only in the relaxed

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

103

intervals between two modes of heightened attention: reading and keeping watch. When the poet retreats to his room to relax after encountering the “mute leaves” at the square of the Carrousel, he begins to strain his attention by keeping watch: But that night When on my bed I lay, I was most moved And felt most deeply in what world I was; My room was high and lonely, near the roof Of a large mansion or hotel, a spot That would have pleased me in more quiet times— Nor was it wholly without pleasure then. With unextinguish’d taper I kept watch, Reading at intervals. The fear gone by Press’d on me almost like a fear to come. I thought of those September Massacres, Divided from me by a little month, And felt and touch’d them, a substantial dread (The rest was conjured up from tragic fictions, And mournful calendars of true history, Remembrances and dim admonishments): ‘The horse is taught his manage, and the wind Of heaven wheels round and treads in his own steps; Year follows year, the tide returns again, Day follows day, all things have second birth; The earthquake is not satisfied at once’— And in such way I wrought upon myself, Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried To the whole city, ‘Sleep no more!’ To this Add comments of a calmer mind—from which I could not gather full security— But at the best it seemed a place of fear, Unfit for the repose of night, Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam. (X: 54–83)

There is a lot to say about these lines, which David Bromwich aptly calls a “political ‘spot of time,’” and which bring together literary and military modes of attention to incite both anticipatory fear and historical remembrance in

104

b e n t e a r t h wa r d s

the safe retreat of the poet’s own room.53 The movement from the phrase “these concussions,” that we saw earlier, to “those September Massacres” suggests that it was the proximity of the concussions—marked by “these” rather than “those”—that prevented their understanding and feeling. Thus the phrase “those September Massacres” reveals that it is distance that makes them nameable, a distance made possible by relaxation and retreat.54 Although the poet writes of feeling and touching the September Massacres, we should note that this historical experience actually emerges as an experience of anticipation and alarm—“a fear to come,” “a substantial dread,” and as a disembodied voice that cries, quoting Macbeth, “Sleep no more!” Wordsworth experiences history here as anticipation rather than either present event or memory of the past. History is not in the perceptual present, as in Lord Kames’s insistence that “I attend them through the battle, every incident of which appears to be passing in my sight,” but as a kind of retrospective fear and dread, belatedly experiencing the feel of anticipating an event that has already happened. De Quincey will echo this model of history as anticipation when he writes of his desire for “the past viewed not as the past, but by a spectator who steps back ten years deeper into the rear, in order that he may regard it as a future.”55 Bromwich reads Wordsworth’s paradoxical anticipation of history literally, writing that the poet fears because he “expects the city’s violence to come back,” and, writing in retrospect, the later Wordsworth is certainly aware that there is more violence to come in France.56 Yet phrases like “conjure up” and “wrought upon myself ” evoke a labor and artificiality at work in his feeling, and suggestively remind us of the proximity of alarmism and conjuration, since many of alarmism’s critics worried about the “phantoms of invasion conjured” by alarmists.57 Wordsworth’s emulation of a posture of keeping watch that emphatically conjures fear out of nothing thus reveals the poet in a surprising mimicry of the alarmists, pointing to an unexpected overlap between the Romantic imagination and wartime alarm. And yet the reading I have been suggesting overlooks an important aspect of these lines from The Prelude. For the poet is not simply keeping watch, but is actually alternating between keeping watch and reading, two activities that strain the attention. “I kept watch, reading at intervals,” he writes, recalling both the intervals with which he waited for the newspaper with his ear to the ground and the intermitting prospect that made possible his early spot of

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

105

time. There is an ambivalence in these lines as to whether the act of reading comes in opposition to keeping watch, as a relaxation from the exertion of the attention, or in apposition, as though reading were another form of watching, as in Blanchot’s advice to the reader to “keep watch over absent meaning.”58 Yet regardless, as if aware that a new perception will only come with the relaxation from an intense brace of the organs of attention, in the intervals between states of heightened alertness, the poet creates a rhythm between watchfulness and withdrawal which itself conjures up historical feeling as the state of alarm it would have produced.59 The lines “The fear gone by / Press’d on me almost like a fear to come” do not explain the role of reading, but instead turn the time of reading into a time of anticipation, and point to the way that verse form heightens and highlights the rhythms of attention and inattention at work in all reading. Here the relaxation of attention and the mediation of history converge with the rhythms of verse: though enjambed, the line break between “The fear gone by” and “Press’d on me almost like a fear to come” offers a space for the reader’s attention to slacken while suspending the return of the past. At the end of the initial line, we might momentarily pause and believe that the fear is irrevocably gone by, until the next line turns that loss into an adjective modifying a noun that is suddenly no longer gone but that returns, presses, with the urgency of anticipation—“almost like a fear to come.”60 Because the line breaks of verse put pressure on the experience of anticipation, the reader experiences the past as something to come: in this way, the passage is as much about poetics and its use of enjambment as it is about history. For enjambment prompts the expectation that the line that has just gone by (history) will be picked up by the line to come (anticipation). Sleep N o M o r e !

And yet is Leonce and Lena not full of words which seem to smile through invisible quotation marks, which we should perhaps not call . . . goose feet, but rather rabbit’s ears, that is, something that listens, not without fear, for something beyond itself. —Paul Celan, “Meridian Speech”

Wordsworth’s access to history comes in a rhythmic movement between keeping watch, reading, and conjuration from “tragic fictions, / And mournful

106

b e n t e a r t h wa r d s

calendars of true history, / Remembrances and dim admonishments.” Though these lines are ambivalent about how to distinguish among these three activities, the act of reading pervades them all, even if it is the restless kind of reading in which you keep putting down your book to keep watch. “Conjuring” was used derisively to critique alarmism, but it also evokes the effect of a quotation, a way for one text to conjure another. If Wordsworth is likening reading to keeping watch, his quotation marks suggest that the watchman has found his object—“Student and hunter,” writes Benjamin, “Rustling in the underbrush—the idea, skittish prey, the citation—another piece ‘in the bag.’ (Not every reader encounters the idea).”61 And so Wordsworth’s quotation marks suggest “another piece ‘in the bag’” for the hunter of historical experience: ‘The horse is taught his manage, and the wind Of heaven wheels round and treads in his own steps; Year follows year, the tide returns again, Day follows day, all things have second birth; The earthquake is not satisfied at once’— And in such way I wrought upon myself, Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried To the whole city, ‘Sleep no more!’

The intervallic movement between reading and keeping watch summons voices from the past, inviting the kind of aural hallucination we saw in Cowper’s “The Needless Alarm,” except that in The Prelude the poet hears the voice of Macbeth advising him, not to calm down and just listen but rather to “sleep no more!” If quotation is the product of a heightened watch, here the yield is itself a demand to pay more attention. After all, Johnson defined the verb to watch as “not to sleep, to wake,” and the noun watching as “forbearance of sleep; attendance without sleep; attention; close observation.”62 And yet this scene’s relation to quotations and the histories they invoke is not as straightforward as it might seem, since the first quotation marks surrounding “the horse is taught his manage . . . the earthquake is not satisfied at once” do not actually directly conjure another text. Wordsworth has instead borrowed echoes from various texts—the first line is from As You Like It, but others appear to be completely made up—leaving scholars to assert that he is just quoting himself.63 The quotation marks, which he removed in later

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

107

versions of The Prelude, are oddly ambivalent: do they indicate the citation of other texts, presenting the product of the poet’s reading experience, or do they evoke a hallucinated disembodied voice that the poet “wrought upon” himself?64 His revisions suggest that Wordsworth is not sure whether these lines belong in quotation marks, and neither is his reader. Likewise, neither the poet nor the reader can tell whether the broader feeling of alarm he experiences belongs to him or to those who suffered from the September Massacres or perhaps to someone entirely unrelated, like Macbeth. This feeling of fear, which provides an experience of history as alarm, is ambivalent in both its origin and its authenticity, hovering in the atmosphere without belonging to anyone in particular. Adela Pinch has discussed how characters in Romantic texts often “fall into quotation when accounting for their own feelings, other people’s, the knowability of feelings, their origins and their movements.”65 Quotation, she writes, serves as a name for “the tendency of affective life to get located among rather than within people, or in the interstices between different explanations and stories of their origins, arising as much from rhetorical or fictional situations as from the mind’s own motions.”66 By highlighting the ambivalence of alarm’s origins, as well as its possible origin in literary history and figure, Wordsworth both underscores the fabricatedness of the feeling (confirming the fears of political alarmism’s critics that I discussed in Chapter 2) and suggests, nevertheless, that compared to the muteness he found earlier, these quoted feelings might be as close an encounter with historical experience as he can get. I have been focusing on the historical feeling of fear that emerges here, but these quotations also suggest the presence of guilt and recall Wordsworth’s earlier chastisement. Wordsworth is after all quoting not a victim but a murderer, and Macbeth can’t sleep because he has murdered Duncan and thus murdered sleep.67 The constellation of vigilance, quotation, fear, and guilt here also hints that Wordsworth is not only quoting Macbeth but also perhaps thinking of Godwin’s quotation of the same line in Caleb Williams (1794). Once Caleb discovers the villain Falkland’s murderous secret, he explains: The ease and light-heartedness of my youth were forever gone. The voice of an irresistible necessity had commanded me to “sleep no more.” I was tormented with a secret of which I must never disburthen myself, and this consciousness was, at my age, a source of perpetual melancholy. I had made myself a

108

b e n t e a r t h wa r d s

prisoner, in the most intolerable sense of that term, for years—perhaps for the rest of my life. Though my prudence and discretion should be invariable, I must remember that I should have an overseer, vigilant from conscious guilt, full of resentment at the unjustifiable means by which I had extorted from him a confession, and whose lightest caprice might at any time decide upon every thing that was dear to me. The vigilance even of a public and systematical despotism is poor, compared with a vigilance which is thus goaded by the most anxious passions of the soul.68

Caleb’s invocation of the disembodied voice in Macbeth that cries “Sleep no more!” curiously links his irresistible need to spy to the already linked vigilances of a tyrant’s “conscious guilt” and of a “public and systematical despotism.” Guilt prompts vigilance, but vigilance also prompts guilt in Godwin’s novel, which ultimately suggests that an incessant and guilt-ridden experience of watching and being watched is an apt illustration of “things as they are,” of a society in which you are made to feel guilty for paying too much attention. Both Godwin and Wordsworth express a concern for the relation between this public watchfulness and the private attention of a scholar or reader. In “Of History and Romance” (1797), Godwin describes the genuine scholar with what Thomas Pfau calls the “principle of unrelenting surveillance,” explaining: “His curiosity is never satiated. He is ever upon the watch for further and still further particulars. Trembling for his own fallibility and frailty, he employs every precaution to guard himself against them.”69 In Book XIII of The Prelude, Wordsworth echoes this principle of watchfulness, describing the capacity of the mind to “build up greatest things / From least suggestions, ever on the watch / willing to work and be wrought upon” (XIV: 101–2). Wordsworth’s use of “wrought” here recalls all that he “wrought upon” himself in the “keeping watch” passage until he hears a voice that isn’t there. These lines forge a connection between a mind “ever on the watch” and a fabrication or hallucination based only on suggestion; they imply that the simple experience of keeping watch might explain alarmism’s tendency to “build up greatest things / From least suggestions,” and that how we watch might alter what we see or think we see. And yet this passage is not a critique of alarmism’s faulty relation to knowledge, nor a description of the demands for wartime vigilance. Wordsworth is here celebrating and praising the “glorious faculty” of “higher minds”: the imagination. We can nevertheless hear echoes of a militarized

w o r d s w o r t h ’s p o e t i c s o f t h e i n t e r v a l

109

attention and of debates about alarm in the poet’s glorification of the transformative powers of the imagination.70 For both Godwin and Wordsworth, “ever on the watch” is a mode of intense reading, study, imagination, and receptivity, one that they don’t want to let go of, even if they recognize its unnerving proximity to a “systematical despotism” and to the fear and guilt it induces.

chapter 4

“ T h a t S o me t h ing L iving I s Ab r o a d ” Missing the Point in ‘Beachy Head’ It was in more settled times that what was explicitly looked for was not the movement of enemies or strangers but the view itself: the conscious scene. Yet we have to remember that we do not know, from the times of disturbance, what was seen, what appreciated, in the long hours of watching, by generations of men. Most of the men who did the watching have left no records. —Raymond Williams, The Country and the City

I

n ‘the country and the city,’ Raymond Williams considers how war alters the experience of looking at a landscape, evoking the shift from a wartime watch, when one waits for enemies or strangers, to peace, when one can appreciate “the view itself.”1 Yet Williams, quick to admit that we don’t actually know what wartime watchfulness brings, collapses the opposition between the peacetime appreciation of the view itself and the wartime anticipation of invasion just as swiftly as he sets it up. Williams suggests instead that the long hours of watching during times of disturbance might provide unexpected insights about landscape, war, and their intertwining. Through the poetry of Charlotte Smith, this chapter dilates a broader argument that has been hovering in this book—that troubling the opposition between keeping watch for an enemy and simply looking at the view itself is the goal of a certain strand of British Romantic poetry, and that Romanticism responded to war by asking what else might appear in the long hours of watching. In Zoonomia, Erasmus Darwin defines the “language of attention” with which birds, rabbits, and other animals keep “a kind of watch.” For humans,

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

111

Darwin writes, the “language of attention” is one of posture and expression: The eye takes in at once but half our horizon, and that only in the day, and our smell informs us of no very distant objects, hence we confide principally in the organ of hearing to apprize us of danger: when we hear any the smallest sound, that we cannot immediately account for, our fears are alarmed, we suspend our steps, hold every muscle still, open our mouths a little, erect our ears, and listen to gain further information: and this by habit becomes the general language of attention to objects of sight, as well as of hearing, and even to the successive trains of our ideas.  (148)

Darwin is possibly objecting to Lord Kames’s definition of attention (later reprinted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica): “the eye can take in a considerable field at one look.”2 “The eye,” Darwin objects, is imperfect, failing to notice everything no matter how intensely we keep watch. Hearing is backup. Darwin’s “language of attention” allows animals to become aware of, and alert each other to, danger, following a grammar of both fear and warning. Darwin follows this passage with an analysis of the various ways in which animals keep watch for danger, cataloguing a variety of examples of animal languages of attention. Observing how they alert each other to “the general enemies of themselves, or of their eggs and progeny” (149), Darwin describes the note of danger given by the mother-turkey, the rabbits’ thump on the ground to produce a sound of danger, and the loud scream “squallers” let out “as soon as they see a man . . . as if their intent was to warn other birds, which upon hearing the cry immediately take wing” (153). He goes into detail about how this process works for migrant birds: The fieldfares, which breed in Norway, and come hither in the cold season for our winter berries; as they are associated in flocks, and are in a foreign country, have evident marks of keeping a kind of watch, to remark and announce the appearance of danger. Of approaching a tree, that is covered with them, they continue fearless till one at the extremity of the bush rising on his wings gives a loud and peculiar note of alarm, when they all immediately fly, except one other, who continues till you approach still nearer, to certify as it were the reality of the danger, and then he also flies off repeating the note of alarm. (153)

Darwin’s interest in 1796 in how animals keep “a kind of watch” and in the possibility of false alarms among fieldfares is suggestive in light of the con-

112

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

troversies about alarmism that I described in Chapter 2. My point though is not to uncover a latent politics in Darwin’s writing, but to introduce another writer who puts in direct conversation animals’ language of attention and the natural history of alarmism: the poet Charlotte Smith.3 In her final poem, Beachy Head, published posthumously in 1807, Smith finds in the landscape of the Sussex coast both kinds of keeping watch—that of the bird and that of the alarmist, or as Williams would call it, that from times of disturbance and from more settled times—explicitly juxtaposing wartime signals with a naturalist’s language of attention. The poem collects and catalogues a variety of modes of attention—military, historical, geological, naturalist, geographic, pastoral, and poetic—to depict a landscape marked by competing modes of watchfulness. This chapter’s reading of Beachy Head proposes that Smith’s understated political thinking about the simple experience of watching or keeping watch over a landscape during war both undermines the militarization of attention during the period and causes the prospect poem genre to come undone. Smith’s poem subverts the pervasive political demand at the start of the nineteenth century to keep watch for invasion, in two ways: first, by accumulating and collecting a range of competing, crisscrossing figures of both watchfulness and the experience of being watched, which disperses and redirects the military targeting of an invasion as the only valid object of a highly selective attention; and second, by cultivating an alternative form of attention to the landscape that hears just the slight sound of foreignness without guarding against it or even naming it. Beachy Head presents a landscape teeming with sounds and listeners that overlap and intertwine—sounds of foreignness, of potential danger, of neighboring life. And yet the more they multiply, the more they signal only slightly, negating each other as anything but evidence of how we confuse foreignness with danger and fear with knowledge. Smith insists on the productivity of an attention divided between the prospect view and a more minute observation of the ground and its materials. And Smith demands the same division of attention of her reader, who has to oscillate between verse and the long, detailed notes that both add to and distract from it. P ro s pe c t s o f Wa r

“So extensive are some of the views from these hills,” Smith writes, describing the expansive prospect view from the cliff on the Sussex coast called

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

113

Beachy Head, while lamenting the failure of both vision and language to conceive of it, “that only the want of power in the human eye to travel so far, prevents London itself being discerned. Description falls so infinitely short of the reality, that only here and there, distinct features can be given.”4 At stake for Smith in the prospect poem is the view—or the “here and there” of a view—that emerges when she looks out from the coast toward France, imagining the distances and possible connections between Sussex and France, between the coast and London, or between France and London—all crucial lines of connection for viewing (or imagining) a French invasion and its consequences. Smith’s concern speaks to the way in which the militarization of attention determined and naturalized a teleological form of keeping watch that looked exclusively for one specific appearance: the French, England’s supposedly “natural enemy.” Landscape poetry allows the stakes of that naturalness to come to the fore. In contrast to a vigilance that keeps watch solely for the enemy’s arrival and expects perception of nothing or no one else, Smith’s poem suggests that how we watch determines who or what we encounter, rather than the other way around. Attuned to the unexpected intersections of national security, perception, and natural history on the English coast, Beachy Head aligns the prospect poem with the nation’s vulnerability rather than its security. Through a natural history that undermines the political rhetoric of natural enmity, Smith suggests that the turn to nature typically associated with Romantic poetry is not an apolitical retreat from sociality into solitude, but is instead a serious inquiry into the political rhetoric of the period. In pitting national history against natural history, Smith also inquires into the epistemic consequences of the differing modes of political and scientific observation, particularly those made possible by naturalists. For as the military was striving to monopolize and shape the attention of civilians, scientific practice offered an alternative “art of observation”—an intense, arduous, and narrow focus without abstraction that followed Charles Bonnet’s claim that “attention is nothing other than the spirit of observation.”5 The typical prospect poem presents a wide, extensive view from a great height and distance, above which the usually male viewer is often said to “survey” or “command at a distance.”6 From a “commanding height,” the prospect view presents the land as, according to John Barrell, “something out there, something to be looked at from a distance, and in one direction only.”7 Tim Fulford describes the authority and class position built into the act of surveyal

114

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

in the prospect view, which mirrors “the commanding position of the noblemen and gentlemen who owned it [land].”8 The eighteenth-century prospect poem expressed a broad sense of commanding—the poor, the military, the land, and the attention.9 Of course, as Foucault has shown, the legacy of this attitude shaped the use of surveillance in the workhouse and the prison, as well as the military control over bodies. By the time Smith was writing Beachy Head, the Peace of Amiens was over, and Britain was experiencing a second wave of invasion scares caused by Napoleon’s establishment of a series of camps along the Channel coast.10 In 1803, one broadside claimed that “the alertness of our People, employed in the several Yards along the Coasts, never had a parallel.”11 France had such a strong hold over the national imagination that the British landscape became saturated with its absent presence, so much so that William Cobbett would eventually refer to English coastal hills themselves as “enormous mass[es] of anti-jacobin expenditure” and “very anti-jacobin hill[s].”12 William Holland’s 1803 caricature of John Bull viewing the preparations on the French Coast! for example, reveals how the posture of looking out at the landscape on the English coast became synonymous in these years with viewing the “preparations on the French Coast”—preparations, that is, to invade (Figure 9). The prospect view is here inextricable from war preparations: Holland replaces the landscape’s clouds with Bull’s smoke and the speech bubble damning the French, below which is a coastal view in which water measures only a short distance between England and the French ships and troops we see preparing to invade. Indeed, the poems of the Romantic period that directly address the “prospect” or possibility of invasion find conflict rather than comfort in the commanding prospect view: Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” ends as “the prospect widens” and the poet remarks “how wide the view!”—as though the poet could finally, after his reflections on the alarm, encounter that which Wordsworth, in his invasion poem “Anticipation, October 1803,” calls “even the prospect of our brethren slain.”13 Even the word “prospect” took on new connotations as it emerged in pamphlets with titles such as The prospect; or, the great advantages which the common people of England are likely to gain, by a successful invasion from the French (1798). Many of Smith’s poems take place on “airy summits” where “the prospect widens,” and layer past and present wartime perception.14 At the coast, she

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

1 15

Figure 9. John Bull viewing the preparations on the French coast! by William Holland, 1803 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Reprinted with permission.

finds “the beacon’d ridge,” which she notes now has a telegraph (or semaphore) (490); the “ruin’d battlements / Of that dismantled fortress” (496–97) that are now converted into farmhouses; and “the blast land,” a result of “War, wide-ravaging,” which “annihilates / The hope of cultivation.”15 The coastline, in particular for Smith, is marked and eroded by history, inseparable from the sights and sounds of war, both real and imagined. This is not because it was the site of warfare, but because, for Smith, the view from the coast is inextricably linked to its proximity to France, to the anticipation of the French, and thus to the wars with and enmity for the French that persisted in England throughout Smith’s lifetime. And yet Smith tends to replace the prospect poem’s convention of authority and power with porousness, vulnerability, and a multiplication of viewers and views.16 In the section of her pedagogical text Rural Walks titled “The Alarm,”

116

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

Smith writes that the sight of a fleet sailing by conveys “only painful ideas,” since the soldiers would, inevitably, “become mangled carcasses for the prey of the monsters of the deep, and dye, with their blood, the waves over which they were now so gaily bounding.”17 The play on “dye” and “die” returns along with these mangled bodies in her sonnet “The Sea View,” where the relaxed posture that begins as the reclining of the shepherd “mark[ing] the bright sea-line mingling with skies” shifts at the poem’s volta when he notices, “far seen,” the “war-freighted ships,” which “fierce and red, / Flash their destructive fire—The mangled dead / And dying victims then pollute the flood.”18 For Smith it is as though there were some kind of necessary relationship between the mingling of the sea-line with the sky and the mangled bodies falling into the waters, as though the relaxation of the senses that mingles sea and sky were culpable for war’s mangling of bodies. The takeaway of such mangling is, as Susan Sontag notes, that “the scale of war’s murderousness destroys what identifies people as individuals, even as human beings. This, of course, is how war looks when it is seen from afar, as an image.”19 L a ngu a ge s o f At t en t i o n

Smith’s final work, Beachy Head, which she called her “local poem,” takes place at the cliff of Beachy Head on the Sussex coast, a “promontory of frightful ridges, covered with short turf, turning its eastern chalky side towards East Bourne. It is esteemed the highest cliff of all the south coast of England.”20 It was also a distinctly military landscape in the years leading up to the poem’s composition: according to Brayley and Britton’s The Beauties of England and Wales, “On one of the highest points [of Beachy Head] is a signal station; and two pieces of cannon near it command an extensive range.”21 This was necessary because Beachy Head is, as Smith notes in the poem’s first of many notes, the “first land made” when one is “crossing the Channel from the coast of France” (3n).22 The sublime rock rearing over the Channel, halfway at sea, thus allows Smith to present a figure on English land but as close to France as possible. In this liminal position as the first land encountered in the journey from France to England, the cliff figured prominently in the national imagination at the time as a border space rife with questions of immigration, commerce, smuggling, fishery, shipwrecks, war, cartography, disease, the development of telegraphy, and of course, anxieties about a French invasion.23 Smith’s

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

117

poem invites and accumulates all these various, competing associations with the landscape, reminding us of each of these contexts for the prospect view and the attitudes of watchfulness they demand. Formally, Beachy Head has a fragmentation and nonlinearity that seem to go deeper than Smith’s inability to finish the poem before she died, what Theresa Kelley describes as “narrative eccentricity” and “indirection.”24 The poem reflects an unusual appreciation of Linnaean classifications, natural histories, local legends, and strange names for mollusks, and a preoccupation with notes, with notes within notes, and with notes within those notes, a structure that divides the reader’s attention almost exponentially. With site-specificity as its organizing principle, the poem is an unwieldy collection of the heterogeneous signs and interpreters of the language of attention in the coastal landscape.25 Like Darwin, Smith describes creaturely languages of attention, noting the sounds of the sea-snipe, which indicates that something is abroad, and the yellow wagtail or “The social bird,” which the French call “La Bergeronette, and say it often gives them, by its cry, notice of approaching danger” (467n). But Smith, unlike Darwin, extends her dictionary of the language of attention beyond animals to the political and military mediation of alarm, as though there were little difference between a bird’s cry and a telegraph signal. In fact, Beachy Head is obsessed not only with attention but with the way that its politicization extends to everyday perception. Keeping watch atop “the rough cliff,” the speaker of the poem seems at first to inhabit both the familiar poetic posture of the prospect poem and the military posture of a sentinel or watchman, keeping watch over the coast with eyes “intently fix’d” (523).26 From the very start, the poem occupies an ambivalent position in between poetic representations of landscape and military modes of watching. Out of the convergence of the two postures emerge seemingly simple questions that resound during times of war: What do you notice when you watch a landscape? What are you looking at or waiting for when you stare out from the coast? As Raymond Williams suggests, a firm distinction between wartime watching and a more neutral, peaceful observation doesn’t hold. This is perhaps most clear in the way that war spread to other seemingly peaceful modes of observation in the Romantic period. Consider, for example, the observation practiced by cartographers in the period. William Mudge, one of the Ordnance surveyors who began measuring and surveying the coastland

118

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

around Beachy Head in preparation for an invasion, wrote that “accurate surveys of a country are universally admitted to be . . . the best means of forming judicious plans of defence . . . Hence it happens, that if a country has not actually been surveyed, or is but little known, a state of warfare generally produces the first improvements in its geography.”27 Smith collects not only those signals of warning—whether bird or telegraph—but also the precarious experiences of receiving, noticing, and waiting for such signs. For postures of vigilance multiply throughout Beachy Head, tying together the various figures otherwise related only through the poem’s location: the first-person speaker, who begins the poem by reclining on the sublime rock and looking out at the water; “Contemplation,” who “High on her throne of rock, aloof may sit” (118–19); the revenue officers, whose “eager eye” and “watchfulness” the shepherds and laborers must elude in their contraband trade with the opposite coast, a “clandestine traffic” that itself requires watching “on the heights” (176n; 183); “The guardian of the flock,” whose “watchful care” is necessary “to keep the flocks from trespassing” (459); and Parson Darby, a vigiliae minutiae, who keeps watch on the coast for shipwrecks to rescue, with a sympathetic attention so strong that his “heart / Was feelingly alive to all that breath’d” (687–88).28 The poem ends with a “stranger” who sat “on the hill top so late” and stared with “eyes intently fix’d” at nothing but the little space where “elms and firs obscured a grange,” so that local girls think “his senses injur’d” (520). The stranger’s blank stare is fixed on a site of obscurity, as though gazing at obscurity obscured the mind, or as though sensing injury injured the senses. Indeed, given the atmosphere of war throughout, we could read the entire poem as framed by this question: Does sensing injury injure the senses? Though the posture of keeping watch on the coast might appear to mimic the defensive posture of the thousands of soldiers stationed there in anticipation of invasion, Smith’s poem proliferates and archives a variety of watchful postures in a move that dislocates them from security or defense. The watching is also, significantly, multidirectional, and the attentive figures all seem to watch each other, as though dramatizing David Worrall’s observation that “even the surveillers were surveilled.”29 In Beachy Head, the “watchful care” and “attention of the shepherds is particularly required to keep the flocks” from trespassing; at the same time, these shepherds are engaged in “contra-

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

119

band trade with the opposite coast” and Smith explains that they “hazard their lives to elude the watchfulness of the Revenue officers” (176n). Watchfulness is thus disjointed from the single focused target of an invasion, and the watchful figures in the poem are also watched—“a panopticism,” Foucault writes, describing Napoleonic France, “in which the vigilance of intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and the sun.”30 There is a similar crisscrossing of signals of danger in Smith’s poem: the yellow wagtail gives the French cry of approaching danger, while the beacons give the English notice of the approaching French; the revenue officers watch for smugglers, while the smugglers see the stranger sitting on the cliff, and the stranger stares into obscurity. This is a dispersed, atmospheric watchfulness, a mood of attention that picks up on the momentary and slight hints of the foreign as potential indications of danger or invasion, but the signals seem to short-circuit: there are so many of them in so many divergent directions that we are left with a collection of empty forms of vigilance divorced from both urgency and usefulness. In fact, the poem is far more interested in the natural and political histories of the mediation of danger and alarm than in any current or actual threats of invasion, uncovering the epistemology of mediation that, according to Mary Favret, is “the epistemology of modern wartime.”31 In collecting these warning signs and their history, Smith looks beyond the “natural” or animal language of attention to the “beacons formerly lighted up on the hills to give notice of the approach of an enemy.” “These signals,” Smith explains, “would still be used in case of alarm, if the Telegraph now substituted could not be distinguished on account of fog or darkness” (228n). She thus brings together the bird’s cry, the beacon, and the telegraph, not to alarm her reader but to archive and historicize languages of attention, from the bird’s cry to the “telegraphic alphabet.”32 This gesture differs in significant ways from that of alarming her reader: by accumulating the various ways one might communicate and learn of danger, Smith notes their fallibility, and denaturalizes and de-authorizes any single alarm. S t r a nge a n d F o r eign F o r m s

Smith subverts the posture of keeping watch and looking out over a landscape as the primary mode with which to watch for the foreign and suggests instead that one only notices the foreign by turning away from the expansive view.

120

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

She demonstrates this at one point quite explicitly when she finds the “strange and foreign” by withdrawing from the prospect view to look down at the soil: Ah! hills so early loved! in fancy still I breathe your pure keen air; and still behold Those widely spreading views, mocking alike The Poet and the Painter’s utmost art. And still, observing objects more minute, Wondering remark the strange and foreign forms Of sea-shells; with the pale calcareous soil Mingled, and seeming of resembling substance.* Tho’ surely the blue Ocean (from the heights Where the downs westward trend, but dimly seen) Here never roll’d its surge. (368–78)

*Among the crumbling chalk I have often found shells, some quite in a fossil state and hardly distinguishable from chalk. Others appeared more recent; cockles, muscles, and periwinkles, I well remember, were among the number; and some whose names I do not know. A great number were like those of small land snails. It is now many years since I made these observations. The appearance of sea-shells so far from the sea excited my surprise though I then knew nothing of natural history. I have never read any of the late theories of the earth, nor was I ever satisfied with the attempts to explain many of the phenomena which call forth conjecture in those books I happened to have had access to on this subject.

The repetition of “still” in these lines marks a movement away from “those widely spreading views” and onto the ground of the pale soil, mingled with strange, foreign seashells. If at first “still” signals continuity, it then shifts to indicate the suspension of movement Darwin attributes to the “language of attention,” as Smith’s speaker’s view moves from the prospect to “objects more minute.” The speaker may stand still, but her attention shifts rapidly from widely spreading hills to objects more and more minute. But “still” also reminds us that the ground is a repository for all that still remains of history. Here, unlike in “The Sea View,” the word “mingled” points not to mangled bodies but to the mixing of soil and shell that a viewer could only notice by observing objects still more and more minute. The problem

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

121

with which these lines end—that seashells appear where “surely the blue Ocean” never did—alludes to the geological convulsion that the poem begins by imagining, a concussion that split England from France and thus redefined the very conditions of the “strange and foreign.” When Smith writes that the fossils found by “observing objects more minute” are “strange and foreign forms,” we are given a kind of foreign invasion, one in which foreignness turns out not to be a French military invasion but rather the momentary experience of noticing faint traces of the foreign in the ground that have been there, mingling, all along, made available only to an eye that turns away from the expectant prospect view and toward the minute particularities of calcareous soil.33 The note suggests we align the distinction between the prospect view and a more minute attention with that between conjecture or theory and observation, a different mode of attention to natural history.34 Smith, like Blake, locates the minute as a register of the historically vast and finds the invasion of the foreign not in the militarized prospect view but by looking down on to the ground, and into the text’s notes. She continues: What time these fossil shells Buoy’d on their native element, were thrown Among the imbedding calx: when the huge hill Its giant bulk heaved, and in strange ferment Grew up a guardian barrier, ’twixt the sea And the green level of the sylvan weald. (384–89)

Still observing the fossil shells found on the coast, Smith here returns to the protective function of the landscape and imagines the geologic production of a “guardian barrier.” And yet these barriers do not keep out the strange, as war propaganda urged, since they have the strange—“strange ferment”—at and as their origin. Smith shows that it is at the very place on which we rely for borders and security—the coastline—that we find our proximity to, our inherent mingling with, the foreign, not through the lookout or overlook, but by looking down. Whereas many authors saw in the rocks a source of terror for England’s foes and thus a wide barrier, Smith finds in the same rocks cause for national susceptibility rather than security.35 In “The Alarm” in Rural Walks, then, it is important that the alarming gypsies emerge “from an excavation in

122

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

the rock which had concealed them,” speaking a foreign language, as though foreignness comes from beneath the ground itself.36 Smith is interested less in what the rocks of Beachy Head defend against than in what they disclose: for she invokes the rocks in the landscape not only to stand on and look out from, but also to observe a geological history of a vast concussion which subverts the division between England and France altogether. T h e Va s t C o n c u s s i o n

Haec loca vi quondam et vasta convulsa ruina Dissiluisse ferunt quum protenus utraque tellus Una foret. [These lands, they say, were once an immense unbroken mass but long ago—such is the power of time to work great change as the ages pass—some vast convulsion sprang them apart.] —Virgil, The Aeneid

They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between, But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been. —Coleridge, “Christabel” (409–14)

Smith’s observation of the cliff of Beachy Head excavates the very rock on which she sits, and finds in it not a firm protective wall intimidating the French enemy, but an originary geological openness to neighboring France. For instead of finding in the landscape a source of defense against the French, the opening lines of Beachy Head show how the rocks conceal the natural history of a geological concussion that once delineated the British coastline, dividing Britain from France, and thus pointing to a time when the two countries were, in Virgil’s words, one “immense unbroken mass.”37 Smith’s poem begins with an address to the rock on which she sits: On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime! That o’er the channel rear’d, half way at sea The mariner at early morning hails, I would recline; while Fancy should go forth, And represent the strange and awful hour

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

123

Of vast concussion; when the Omnipotent Stretch’d forth his arm, and rent the solid hills, Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between The rifted shores, and from the continent Eternally divided this green isle. (1–10)

These lines come with a note about the vast concussion that fancy represents, explaining that the verse “allud[es] to an idea that this Island was once joined to the continent of Europe, and torn from it by some convulsion of Nature,” though confessing that she “never could trace the resemblance between the two countries” (6n). In contrast to Hannah More’s characterization of the woman who reclines and “fanc[ies] how things will be once their [the French] army has got footing in old England,” Smith’s speaker reclines and fancies a history of nature that shows that the two nations were once indistinguishable.38 Although Smith’s opening lines evoke the prior union of the two nations, she is characteristically modest about the implications of the geological hypothesis described in 1751 by Nicolas Desmarest as “a revolution that, rapidly or insensibly, appears to have detached Great Britain from the continent of the Gauls.”39 The word “revolution,” central to Desmarest’s geological treatise as well as to other contemporary theories of the earth, is conspicuously absent from Smith’s poem, hovering as an unspoken measure of the geological and political distances between Britain and France by 1807.40 Although Smith does not make explicit the political implications of the “vast concussion” in her poem, she had already unambiguously and didactically explained the stakes of this originary “vast concussion” eight years prior to Beachy Head, at a time when it was less risky to do so openly, by pointing to the way that it delegitimized the most popular British epithet for neighboring France at the time: the “natural enemy.” In her educational children’s book Minor morals, published in 1798, the text’s pedagogue, Mrs. Belmour, suggests to her nieces and nephews: My information indeed says, that this island called Britain was peopled from Gaul, as that part of the Continent was then named which we now call France: —so you see we can trace our origin no farther than to the people we despise and hate. There is a remote tradition, which tells that this island (so little a while since esteemed the mistress of the world) was, by some violent

124

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

concussion of the earth, severed from the Continent, and it must have been precisely from France. There are fanciful people who imagine that vestiges still remain of this fact in the disposition of the rocks of the opposite shores, and say, that there is a chalk bed between Dover and Calais, which seems a sort of continuation of the Downs on either coast. I own I did not discover the resemblance of the soil on the margins of the two kingdoms.41

Mrs. Belmour’s recourse to the same geological theory with which Smith begins Beachy Head, which suggest that “we can trace our origin no farther than to the people we despise and hate,” comes in this text as a direct refutation of her nieces and nephews’ assumption that France is their “natural enemy.” For the passage above responds to the following discussion of whether England would do better without the butcher or the soldier: Fanny: “Why, the butcher: for, if we had no mutton and beef, we could live upon bread and rice, and pies and puddings and fruits; but if there were no officers nor soldiers, the enemies of England would come and kill us all.” Mrs. Belmour: “But is it necessary for England to have enemies?” Julius: “They say the French are our natural enemies.” Mrs. Belmour: “And what does that mean? What is a natural enemy?” Julius: “An enemy, I suppose, that Nature has made.”  (260)

Julius’ hesitation answering the question “What is a natural enemy?” points to the surprising difficulty of defining a term that was nevertheless part of the everyday political rhetoric in England, and underscores the conceptual awkwardness of an enmity made by nature. In the context of Minor morals, this dialogue, one of Smith’s “Slight Historical Etchings,” seems to ask what it would mean to see the “natural enemy” placed between “the life of an insect” and “the progress of a flower” on the list of natural life observed and classified throughout the rest of the book. Smith’s turn to the geological history that finds in England’s history a primary proximity to France not only reveals the political implications of the geological concussion dividing the two nations but also suggests that Smith’s broader interest in landscape and her recourse to the prospect poem is intimately tied to her interest in nations and to an attempt to expose the folly of the term “natural enemy” altogether. There were many attempts in these years to show that the epithet “natural enemy” was irrational and illogical, an “unmeaning term,” or “watchword,” as if “nature,” Anna Barbauld wrote, “and not our own bad passions, made us

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

125

enemies.”42 John Thelwall’s is crucial because it highlights the conception of nature at stake in the term: What is this nature? Tell me ye sophists, ye who first abuse our ears, that you may afterwards abuse our understandings, and then, by way of climax, deprive us of our rights and our existence! tell me, I say, ye juggling sophists, what do you mean by nature? Do you mean to create a fourth deity to add to your Trinity? Do you mean to represent to us, under the denomination of nature, some undescribable divinity whose laws you pretend to propound, though you pretend not to know the volume in which they are written? If this be the sort of meaning, or no meaning, which you affix to the word nature, I confess you come forward with a logic so subtle that I cannot answer you— because I cannot comprehend you. But if, by nature you mean the deductions and calculation drawn from the harmonized system of the universe—the laws of general interest deducible from what I call nature, that is to say, the phenomena of the world, then do I say that natural enmity is nothing more than a contemptible and unintelligible affectation of speech, a false metaphor, in which the epithet and the substantive are at war, and destroy each other.43

In the final sentence of this passage, Thelwall figures the expression’s irrationality as a linguistic violence that mirrors the violence of the war that the term enables. Natural enmity is an example not only of the destructiveness of language but of language’s capacity to self-destruct. But it is Thelwall’s simple question “What is this nature?” that I want to underscore as the surprisingly difficult question necessary for an enquiry into the natural enemy, and that is central for Smith, whose poem puts nationalist modes of watchfulness beside those of naturalists. In fact, the political stakes of asking the simple question “What is this nature?” in an enquiry into the “natural enemy” suggest that we might think of the turn to nature typically attributed to Romantic poetry not as an isolated, asocial retreat into the natural world, but as an engagement with Thelwall’s question, an investigation into the natural history of nations, foreign relations, and foreignness itself, and into the tenuous intersections of nature and nation in distinctions like that between the naturalization of plants and citizens or between geologic and political revolutions.44 The violent convulsion that once divided England from France provides Smith with an entryway to challenge the pervasive rhetoric of the natural enemy: How, she asks, can we think of France as our natural enemy if natural history itself shows that the two nations were once united? How could

126

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

the two nations have a “natural antipathy,” if the British can “trace [their] origin no farther than to the people [they] despise and hate”?45 Yet as Smith’s skeptical insistence that she herself can find no resemblance between the two countries suggests, she also does not insist on the alternative to antipathy— sympathy. Instead, she suggests an impersonal, geological, and naturalist relation toward France premised on close observation of natural history rather than natural enmity. In addition to her dismissal of the term through geology in Minor morals, Smith objects to the term “natural enemy” elsewhere in her prose work, noting in The Old Manor House (1794) that “France, contrasted with his banishment in America, seemed to him to be part of his country, and in every Frenchman he saw, not a natural enemy, but a brother.”46 Smith italicizes “natural” there, as well as in the preface to Desmond (1792), where she modestly worries that “the slight skirmishing of a novel writer can have no effect [on those] who still cherish the idea of our having a natural enemy in the French nation; and that they are still more naturally our foes, because they have dared to be freemen.”47 I propose, however, that it is not until Beachy Head that Smith rigorously, though with her characteristic italicizing slightness—through the “slight skirmishes” and “slight historical etchings”—draws on a naturalist mode of observation with the potential to undermine the nationalist rhetoric of natural enmity. Indeed this is not just about modesty, for Smith cultivates throughout her work an ethos of slightness, an attitude that echoes what Anahid Nersessian finds in Romantic texts: Romanticism, Nersessian explains, “applies the lessons of art to consider how slightness might be optimized as a principled relation to imperiled life.”48 The “vast concussion” passage of Beachy Head follows a poetic tradition of looking to nature for the natural conditions of enmity and nationalism. Consider Collins’s “Ode to Liberty,” which recalls that “The Gaul, ’tis held of antique story, / Saw Britain link’d to his now adverse strand,” and Cowper’s assertion in The Task that “Mountains interpos’d / Make enemies of nations, who had else, / Like kindred drops, been mingled into one” (II: 17–18).49 Yet the tentative suggestion of a shared origin with the enemy is only where Beachy Head begins. Rather than directly pursuing either the geological theories or the political polemic at stake in this “vast concussion” of the earth, Smith’s poem goes on to collect, as I have argued, a series of figures of competing and overlapping modes of attention to the historic coastal site of invasion. Instead

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

127

of directly addressing the rhetoric of the natural enemy, the poem suggestively and slightly gestures toward it but is more concerned with the modes of attention demanded on the British coast in anticipation of that enemy’s invasion, and thus uses the multiplicity of modes of attention to quietly undermine the political rhetoric of enmity. By pointing to the geological flux that formed this particular condition of foreignness, Smith is not simply repeating Rousseau’s claim in The Social Contract (1762) that “men are not naturally enemies.”50 Rather, she critiques the rhetoric of the natural enemy as part of a broader resistance to the even more insidious demands made by alarmism on how we keep watch, and provides instead an alternate mode of attentiveness open to other more slight, tentative, and unknowing encounters with the foreign. Smith insists, in this sense, that how and what we are able to attend to is, in fact, what mediates the political. Hi d d en Q u a li t ie s o f t h e Ai r

Smith was not alone in thinking about natural enmity as a problem involving attention. In her Letters on Education (1801), Elizabeth Hamilton instructs teachers: “Watch, I beseech you, the early operation of the mind; and if you observe any symptom of its having caught by contagion any of those antipathies so falsely denominated natural, make it your business, by counteracting, to destroy the association which excited them.”51 The idea here is not just that one ought to keep watch for the rise of a misconception. Rather, Hamilton attributes the very concept of natural antipathy to the way people pay attention more generally—not just to their own minds, but to what Robert Boyle called in the seventeenth century the “hidden qualities of the air.”52 In her letter about “Attention” in education, Hamilton argues that observation of the habits of attention can actually invalidate the concept of natural antipathies altogether. Hamilton is interested not so much in enmity and war as in aversion, though the two are linked. She argues against “the advocates of natural antipathy” who try to “prove, that persons under the influence of such antipathies have a sort of instinctive knowledge of the presence of the objects of their aversion.”53 Her examples are all about disliking animals: someone with a natural antipathy to cats will know immediately when one is in the room, even if it is not visible; a woman with a strong aversion to dead birds went to a friend’s house, and immediately became sick. Sure enough, when

128

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

the friend looked, he found his bird had died. But Hamilton suggests that the theory of natural antipathy with which these cases were typically explained will be refuted by a closer consideration of how attention works: I at that time became a convert to the doctrine of antipathies, and should probably have remained so ever after, had I not been led to reflect on the power of attention in the seeming improvement of the faculties. On considering this subject, it appeared to me, that if the sense of feeling can, by the power of habitual attention, convey those nice perceptions of the surfaces of body, which, to people who have not thus exercised their attention, appear astonishing and incomprehensible; why might not attention (stimulated, as it must be in these instances, by the impulse of aversion) produce a like lively perception of smell? That a person who has had his attention frequently thus directed, may be able to perceive a certain effluvia which escapes the observation of others, is no more extraordinary, than that a blind person should be able to distinguish colours by the touch.  (66–67)

Hamilton denaturalizes antipathy, then, by suggesting that what people are calling “natural” is actually a “power of habitual attention,” a heightened attunement to what others ignore that comes from a repetitive attention to it. Like a blind person who learns to distinguish color through touch, “the mind,” according to Dugald Stewart, “gradually acquires a power of attending to and remembering those slighter sensations of which it was formerly conscious, but which, from our habits of inattention, made no impression whatever on the memory.”54 What we notice, then, is neither natural nor given but an accumulation of ours habits of attention and inattention, the result of an itself unnoticed process that Smith calls “learning to look.”55 Hamilton’s evocation of “a certain effluvia which escapes the observation of others” refers to a scientific interest made famous by Boyle, whose Essays on Effluviums (1673) describe effluviums’ “Strange Subtlety” and the “Great Efficacy” of the hidden qualities of air. Boyle’s interest in things not visible to the human eye leads him to “the invisible Effluvia of Bodies that wander through the Air,” which may be “strangely minute.”56 “Our atmosphere,” explains Boyle, “is a confused aggregate of effluvia,” each so minute and subtle that they “are wont either to be judged very faint, or to be pass’d by unheeded.”57 Thus Hamilton’s description of the otherwise undetected smell of cats or dead birds suggests a heightened attunement to the presence of what Amanda Jo Goldstein has de-

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

129

scribed, with reference to Goethe’s Journals on Morphology, as “an atmosphere laden with everything from odors to images.”58 Indeed, “the most delicate flowers,” Joseph Priestley writes in his Experiments and observations on different kinds of air (1790), “injure the air much more than I had imagined.”59 Thus Smith’s reliance on botany is linked to the hidden qualities of the air, as is her preoccupation with excavating rock, since Boyle believes that “the chief of the heterogeneous effluvia, that endue the air with secret qualities, may, probably, proceed from beneath the surface of the earth.” If we follow the thread from Boyle to Hamilton to Smith, we find another reason why Beachy Head combines resistance to the term “natural enemy” with an unwieldy collection of diverging modes of attention: antipathy to the French is not a natural aversion but a mode of attention that fails to notice “the strange subtileties” in the air that come from beneath the surface of the earth, and that link England to France. Exemplifying what Robert Mitchell has described as a Romantic “need to attune oneself to the strangeness and hiddenness of life,” Smith’s poem can be read as a response to Boyle’s suggestion that we would have access to these slight effluvia “if our Sensories were sufficiently subtile and tender.” These more subtle sensories are, for Smith, also a kind of “political prescience,” to borrow Johnson’s phrase, for Smith contributes to the natural history of effluvia by unfolding their political stakes.60 Smith mentions effluvia once in Beachy Head, in a passage that likens happiness to an ignis fatuus, or will o’ the wisp: Ah! who is happy? Happiness! a word That like false fire, from marsh effluvia born, Misleads the wanderer, destin’d to contend In the world’s wilderness, with want or woe (255–58)

These lines come just twenty lines after Smith’s evocation of “hostile war-fires flashing to the sky” (228) and the accompanying note describing “the Beacons formerly lighted up on the hills” which “give notice of the approach of the enemy” (228n). Moving from a false alarm on the coast about war-fire to the false fire of an ignis fatuus, Smith connects not just plants and politics but also the phenomenological problem of our “Sensories” not being “sufficiently subtile and tender” to the tasks of war. These lines complicate that even further by introducing problems of language and emotion. For it is happiness here,

130

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

and the rhetoric surrounding it, that misleads and even sickens the wanderer, since “marsh effluvia,” the fumes given off by decaying vegetable matter, was a leading explanation for a variety of fevers.61 Implicit here, too, is an anxiety about the decay of language and its potential to mislead the wanderer—or reader—of Smith’s poem. How are we to know which fire to follow, and which is false? And how might we gain a more tender and subtle receptivity to the invisible decay of language that is making us ill? Slig h t Hi s to r i c a l E t c h ing s

Mention of the coast at Beachy Head would have raised particularly strong anxieties about invasion because of its history. The cliff, the site of the battle of Beachy Head of 1690, marks the English military defeat that figured as the starting-point to many eighteenth-century histories of invasion, texts that often blurred the genres of history and military propaganda by merging the history of invasions of Britain with strategies for coastal defense and national security, as if a compulsive narration of the history of invasions would itself protect and secure the coast.62 This peculiar logic, by which the best defense against invasion is to reiterate prior vulnerabilities and thereby “feel . . . the full extent of your danger,” imposed a compulsive sense of historiography as defense, which made a site like Beachy Head a particularly vexed intersection of history, security, and susceptibility.63 Smith’s poem combines geography with military, political, and geological histories, using the site-specificity of the poem as a chance for lengthy notes that provide a history of Sussex, and yet she resists the temptation to find security or patriotism in the narration of history. While Smith’s poem provides a number of histories—national and local, natural and political—the poem also represents historiography itself through the coupling of “Contemplation,” who sits high on a cliff, keeping watch, and “recording Memory,” who unfolds her scroll: Contemplation here, High on her throne of rock, aloof may sit And bid recording Memory unfold Her scroll voluminous—bid her retrace The period, when from Neustria’s hostile shore The Norman launch’d his galleys, and the bay

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

131

O’er which that mass of ruin* frowns even now In vain and sullen menace, then received The new invaders; a proud martial race (118–25)

The fact that Contemplation’s posture resembles that taken by the poem’s first-person speaker, high on the rock, aloof, and keeping watch, implies a correlation between “recording Memory” who unfolds “her scroll voluminous” and the passage’s own very long note (at *), which interrupts the verse to tell about Scandinavian invasions of England in the eighth century and which itself contains its own notes.64 Throughout the poem, memory unfurls through the poem’s voluminous scrolling notes, or more specifically as these lines suggest, through the combination of text and note, of Contemplation and Memory, and of aloofness and a more minute vigilance. The relation between text and note mirrors not only that imagined here between Contemplation and Memory, but also that between the prospect view and a more particular, narrow view of minute objects on the ground. Smith thus uses the convention of the prospect poem to expose its inadequacy, suggesting that the prospect view and the kind of aloof Contemplation that it makes possible is not enough for documenting history. She thus registers the necessity of another mode of historical attention.65 Beachy Head details numerous histories of invasion, often by way of the particular fossils and traces such migrations left behind, but avoids the argumentation that she aligns with both war and popular nationalist historiography. In her important essay on the poem, Theresa Kelley shows how Smith dramatizes an impasse in Romantic historiography created by the presence of two historiographical models: the grand, linear march of history, and the narrative description of minutiae, fragments, and particularities, the second of which, Kelley shows, often appeared in the eighteenth century as local natural histories written by women.66 Beachy Head, Kelley claims, aims to move between these two levels, and reveals the difficulty of writing history when it records at so many discordant levels, from both above and below.67 The problem of enmity I have been describing aligns the historiographical oppositions Kelley outlines with the tension between national security and geological proximity in the poem. Though Smith does, at times, ventriloquize the nationalist rhetoric of defense, her engagement with local natural histories

132

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

and her turn to a minute attention to fossil remains puts pressure on the very framework in which defense can be imagined.68 Smith is sensitive to the politics of historiographical form. In Desmond she makes the direct connection between the ideology of historiography and the rhetoric of natural enmity: I might, indeed, read history; but whenever I attempt to do so, I am, to tell you the truth, driven from it by disgust . . . almost every page offers an argument in favour of what I never will believe,—that heaven created the human race only to destroy itself, and that, in placing the various species of it in various climates, whence they acquired various complections, habits, and languages, their Creator meant these men should become the natural enemies of each other, and apply the various portions of reasons he has allotted them, only in studying how to annoy and murder each other.69

The grand, linear march of history is a problem for Smith not simply because it argues that enemies and war are natural, but more importantly because “almost every page offers an argument.” For regardless of her sympathies with France, Smith is interested not in arguing that Britain and France are natural allies or friends, but rather in uncovering the dispersed material traces of natural life that discredit the ideological claims made in alarmist, argumentative historiographies, and that disrupt argument altogether. Making an argument is akin to knowing in advance what one is watching for. Instead, the writing of history, Smith suggests, should neither support an agenda nor instill fear, but rather embrace a slightness that she aligns with a naturalist mode of observation which relies on note-taking rather than conjecture, abstraction, or theory. Charles Pigott’s entries for “history” and “historiographer” give a sense of the intellectual climate of historiography to which Smith is responding: History,—formerly a true and just record of past transactions; which if executed now in the same manner, would be termed a libel, and call down the vengeance of the Attorney-General, History,—the relation of past events. Historiographer,—historian, paid to conceal THE TRUTH. It seems the ancient despots had neglected this precaution, to save their memory from the judgment of posterity. It is not requisite to unite the qualities of TACITUS to be a modern historiographer, but those of Dr. Johnson, Arthur Young, &c. &c.70

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

133

Smith’s avoidance of argument is not just about dodging the term “libel.” She offers a historiography of slightness—of slight sketches, minor morals, and slight skirmishes—that is an emphatic refusal to attribute a polemic to nature or to history.71 If we consider this refusal of polemic in light of the Greek Polemos, or war, it becomes clear that finding an argument in history and an enmity in nature is, for Smith, one and the same warlike gesture.72 L e a r ning to L o o k

Smith finds an alternative mode of attention in the minute observation that she associates with naturalists, botanists, and (some) geologists, and their earthward gaze—a way, Jacqueline Labbe writes, “of paying attention to the part.”73 Smith’s readers have rightly pointed to her lament in Beachy Head, “Ah! very vain is Science’ proudest boast” (390) and considered the poem a critique of the “inefficiency of science and history” and a challenge to “the new geology’s claim of expertise and professionalism.”74 Yet Smith finds in the minute, narrow modes of scientific observation a withdrawal from the wide expanses of the commanding prospect view and the speculative view of conjecture. She seems to have cultivated in her poetry, for example, the part of geology that entailed both “the utmost meticulousness in observation,” and a comparative, historical attention, since geohistorical significance entailed comparing fossils “with their counterparts in the living world.”75 Lorraine Daston has written about the intense endurance of scientific observers who took part in what she calls the Enlightenment “cult of attention”: François Burnens, for example, observed bees for twenty-four-hour stretches “without permitting himself any distraction, taking neither food nor rest.”76 On one occasion, he observed every single bee in a hive by hand, “examining them with attention without fearing their rage . . . and even when he was stung, he continued his examination with the most perfect tranquility.”77 Anne Secord puts the close observation of early seaweed investigators in the context of war and its watchfulness to remind us that this close scientific attention could only go as far as the coast during wartime.78 But Smith found that the coast’s wartime constraint on observation nevertheless opened onto an observation of the conditions of war itself. For if reaching the coast prompts her to turn back her gaze toward England, she finds there, in close observation of the minutenesses on and under the

134

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

ground, indications of a disarming foreignness from which England can never be disentangled. What Smith calls “learn[ing] to look” is not just a cultivation of a scientist’s fine or close observation skills, though.79 For one, Smith’s interest in a close observation without knowing in advance what it seeks does differ from much scientific observation at the time, which often entailed an “agenda,” listing “in advance what specific observations needed to be made on the trip that was being planned.”80 Furthermore, the multiplicity of Smith’s watchfulness suggests that she seeks a less specialized mode of observation. Writing about wildflowers in Rambles Farther, Smith explains: But these and many other small plants are rather the pursuit of the botanist than the landscape painter, who ought, however, in drawing these rocky scenes, to catch the forms, though he cannot minutely describe the long tangling branches of the blackberry; the festoons of briony woodbine, night shade, or wild hop, that creep or flaunt among the rugged hollows.81

The poet of Beachy Head combines the attentive work of both landscape painter and botanist, “catching” these forms while reveling in the minutest descriptions of a naturalist vocabulary of poetic strangeness, a language of briony woodbines, that can creep or flaunt among the rugged hollows of verse.82 The conflict between a botanist’s attention and that of a landscape painter also comes up for Hamilton in a passage that reveals a broader concern about what happens to habits of observation as intellectual disciplines take shape and knowledge becomes specialized. Hamilton writes: A landscape painter, if deficient in habits of general observation, while he directs his attention towards those combinations of objects which are associated in his mind with the ideas of sublimity or beauty, observes not the peculiarities of the soil, nor of the plants which cover it: he gazes on a mass of rock without perceiving that it differs, except in respect of form, from any other rock; and, if a wretched human figure meets his eye, thinks only of the picturesque effect of the rags by which it is partially clothed. Let us suppose him to be followed through the same scene by a mineralogist, whose perceptions have also been but partially cultivated. With what insensibility does he pass the venerable oak, whose tortuous branches had at first sight attracted the attention of the painter, and excited the warmest admiration?83

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

135

Hamilton then contrasts these modes of observation with that of the botanist, who would, in the same place, find nothing but the plants he’s searching for. “Such,” writes Hamilton, “are the consequences of habitually confining the attention to the examination of any one distinct class of the objects of perception, where habits of general observation have not been previously formed.”84 Hamilton’s concern is that disciplinary specialization prevents “general observation” and instead cultivates involuntary habits of attention that are too particular, too limited, and that are carried on “not only without effort, but without consciousness.”85 The fact that Smith collects so many ways of watching suggests that she aims to develop a “general observation” that does not shy away from the conflict and competition between these different modes of attention. M i s s ing t h e P o in t

Beachy Head registers the sounds of nature as wartime sounds, not as the trumpet’s voice but as another way to hear foreignness that resists appropriation or understanding. Attending to the sights and sounds of the foreign in the coastal landscape, the poet hears the cry of the sea-snipe, which despite the violent connotations of its name, designates neither a danger nor an enemy’s arrival, but “just tells,” she writes, “that something living is abroad”: Yet more remote Where the rough cliff hangs beetling o’er its base, All breathes repose; the water’s rippling sound Scarce heard; but now and then the sea-snipe’s cry Just tells that something living is abroad; And sometimes crossing on the moonbright line, Glimmers the skiff, faintly discern’d awhile, Then lost in shadow. (110–17)

The word “just” appears throughout Beachy Head to indicate the temporal movement of the poem, as in the lines “afar off / and just emerging.” Yet at this point the word “just” signals the slightness of the signification—the cry barely or faintly tells the simple fact that something living is abroad, and provides no additional information. The phrase “Just tells that something living is abroad” after all is most striking for what it does not tell. It does not tell

136

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

what, in particular, is abroad; it does not make a judgment or issue a warning; it does not distinguish between animal or human—all we know is that there is “something living” and it is “abroad,” though still close enough to be heard. These are, in Keats’s words, “scarce images of life.”86 Terada’s distinction between “object perception (something crosses my gaze) and fact perception (a dragonfly is passing in front of me)” offers a particularly useful framework for thinking about Smith’s emphasis here that the sound just tells that something living is abroad (object perception) without specifying what is abroad (fact perception).87 The poem is, as this passage suggests, less concerned with who is abroad or what danger the enemy threatens than it is with the mediation of foreignness itself, with how one knows or senses the simple fact “that something living is abroad,” without moving to protect against it. Smith’s lines reveal that what Terada describes as “the romantic and post-romantic discourse of mere appearance” occurs in sound as well and has political implications. Attention to the signal which “just tells that something living is abroad” suggests that the “moonbright line”—on which the skiff “glimmers,” “sometimes crossing,” “faintly discern’d awhile, / Then lost in shadow”—might be Smith’s answer to Helen Maria Williams’s demand for a “line of connection across the divided world.” In her Letters Written in France (1790), Williams likens politics to navigation, and figures a new kind of politics as a ship sailing on a “line of connection”: Perhaps the improvements which mankind may be capable of making in the art of politics, may have some resemblance to those they have made in the art of navigation. Perhaps our political plans may hitherto have been somewhat like those ill-constructed misshapen vessels, which, unfit to combat with the winds and waves, were only used by the antients to convey the warriors of one country to despoil and ravage another neighbouring state; which only served to produce an intercourse of hostility, a communication of injury, an exchange of rapine and devastation.—But it may possibly be within the compass of human ability to form a system of politics, which, like a modern ship of discovery, built upon principles that defy the opposition of the tempestuous elements (“and passions are the elements of life”—) instead of yielding to their fury makes them subservient to its purpose, and sailing sublimely over the untracked ocean, unites those together whom nature seemed for ever to have separated, and throws a line of connection across the divided world.88

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

137

There is clearly a strong affinity between Williams’s turn to the horizon to unite those “whom nature seemed for ever to have separated” and Smith’s speaker’s posture keeping watch over the horizon for a sign that something living— something other than the “natural enemy”—is abroad. Yet Smith’s position is not quite as optimistic or assertive as Williams’s. For Smith, the possibility of a positive politics is only “faintly discern’d awhile, / Then lost in shadow,” and the “moonbright line,” evocative of the lines of poetry as well as the lines on the horizon, is only a faint “line of connection.” And yet Smith’s ultimate question is still broader and more difficult, for she rethinks the political by reframing how and to what she pays attention, a large task that she approaches through observation’s slightness rather than polemic or conjecture, cultivating an attention we might think of, following Adam Phillips, as boredom, as that which “makes tolerable . . . the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be. So the paradox of the waiting that goes on in boredom is that the individual does not know what he was waiting for until he finds it, and that often he does not know that he is waiting.”89 Given Smith’s preoccupation with the relation between landscape and war, it is perhaps not too far of a stretch to hear in “the sea-snipe’s cry” the violent connotations associated with the “snipe” or “sniper” and the verb “to snipe,” which had recently come into use when Smith was writing. The term seems to have developed among British soldiers hunting the bird in India, and the OED attributes the first recorded use of “snipe” as a verb meaning “To shoot or fire at (men, etc.), one at a time, usu. from cover and at long range” to a 1782 letter from George Selwyn to Lord Carlisle, in which Selwyn writes: “Now people have been shot by platoons and in corps, the individual will be popped at or sniped, as they call it, from time to time.”90 Smith may also have had Robert Dodsley’s translation of Aesop’s fable “The Snipe Shooter” (1765) in mind, a short tale about hunting snipe: As a Sportsman ranged the fields with his gun attended by an experienced old spaniel, he happened to spring a snipe, and almost at the same instant a covey of partridges. Surprised at the accident, and divided in his aim, he let fly too indeterminately, and by this means missed them both. Ah, my good master, said the spaniel, you should never have two aims at once. Had you not been dazzled and seduced by the luxurious hope of partridge, you would most probably have secured your snipe.91

138

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

Dodsley compiles a list of all the fables’ morals at the end of the edition, and he summarizes “The Snipe Shooter” with “We often miss our point by dividing our attention.”92 Of course the kind of attention demanded by military postures of keeping watch is nothing if not undivided. And yet Smith’s poem suggests that there is something surprisingly productive about missing the point: dividing the attention while keeping watch, looking down on to the ground with the sense of expectation gained from looking out over the coast, we find the benefits of both brace and relaxation which recall Blake’s and Wordsworth’s poetics. Theresa Kelley’s description of an impasse in Romantic historiography created by the presence of two contradictory historiographical models helps to articulate the link between the modes of watching a landscape I have been describing and Smith’s criticism of historiography. My reading differs from Kelley’s a bit, though, in that instead of finding impasse, Smith’s poem, I would like to suggest, finds a generative movement in an attention divided between these competing modes of watching, organizing, and writing. Beachy Head represents this division of attention through lines that pivot on the word “while.” Recall, for example, the opening lines to Beachy Head: “I would recline; while Fancy should go forth, / And represent the strange and awful hour / Of vast concussion.” Two things are happening simultaneously: the poem’s speaker reclines on the rock while Fancy does something else entirely, just as Contemplation sits back aloof while Memory unfolds her scroll. In both cases, one mind is split between two figures—perception and fancy, or contemplation and memory. In The Emigrants, Smith describes a similar division of mind that occurs when French emigrants stare at the coast, “hang[ing] / Upon the barrier of the rock . . . waiting long / Some fortunate reverse that never comes” (I: 108–11). She writes: Alas! too long a victim to distress, Their Mother, lost in melancholy thought, Lull’d for a moment by the murmurs low Of sullen billows, wearied by the task Of having here, with swol’n and aching eyes Fix’d on the grey horizon, since the dawn Solicitousl’y watch’d the weekly sail From her dear native land, now yields awhile To kind forgetfulness, while Fancy brings, In waking dreams, that native land again! (I: 212–21)

missing t h e poin t in ‘be ach y h e a d’

139

In this poem dedicated to Cowper, Smith presents the “task” as one of watching the weekly sail, of fixing the eyes on the horizon. The passage offers an account of the strangeness of staring, for the intensity of the stare turns into a blankness or evacuation which allows the mind to do something else at the same time. The mother is “lull’d,” “lost,” with “aching eyes / Fix’d,” forgetting, while Fancy does something else—it brings her native land back. For Smith, a fixed stare at the coast wearies, but it also makes room for the preconscious but imaginative work of waking dreams, a structure of experience that recalls Cowper’s “brown study”: “while with poring eye / I gazed, myself creating what I saw” (IV: 284–90). The distinctions between waking dreams and staring, between attention, inattention, and absorption come undone for both Smith and Cowper, who join lethargy and deliberation and ask us to question the opposition between being tasked and being lost. Reading is a particularly tricky example of this. Earlier in Book IV of The Task, Cowper describes the experience of reading the newspaper, which “holds / Inquisitive attention while I read / Fast bound in chains of silence” (IV: 52–53). This “while” inserts an uneasy gap between attention and reading, as though reading and paying attention were at odds: the former active and willed, the latter held and bound. Smith makes a similar move in the section of Rural Walks called “The Alarm,” where she presents reading as a vulnerability to alarm, since every time the children are “hardly” finished reading something, they become alarmed: “Hardly were these lines finished,” Smith writes, when a “grumbling voice was heard,” and “hardly had Caroline finished repeating these lines,” when suddenly a group of gypsies emerge from the rocks.93 Reading lines becomes a way to figure an absorption so intense that the reader is liable to be alarmed by anything else, including her own lines’ sprawling, interruptive notes. Samuel Weber has written that “the more one makes . . . targeting the paradigm of all action, the more that which it denies returns as ‘the missed opportunity.’”94 By dividing her reader’s attention, Smith tries to avoid this denial. Moving back and forth between different postures of watching, overlooking but not overlooking, as it were, she contests Burke’s claim that “the mind in reality hardly ever can attend diligently to more than one thing at a time.”95 While doing so, she also asks the reader to divide his attention, suggesting through extensive, long, and invasive footnotes that he too move back and forth between text and note, looking up at the text and then away to the

140

“t h at somet hing li v ing is a broa d”

note, and then sometimes away again into the notes within notes, replicating the movement of looking up at the prospect view and then down to the ground, and further into the ground’s historical remains.96 Charlotte Smith’s works contain a number of explicit arguments against war, ranging from the comparison of soldiers with butchers, to her contempt in Beachy Head for Ambition since it carries “thro’ the oppressed Earth, / War, and its train of horrors” (421–22). The broader antiwar argument of Beachy Head, though I think we ought to try to avoid thinking of it as an argument, is quieter and slighter, and yet I would suggest more powerful. For the poem criticizes and tries to alleviate the pressure that war puts on the imagination and proposes instead a mode of keeping watch that does not know in advance what it waits for, that hears the sound that just tells that something living is abroad without needing to know what that something is.

chapter 5

A t t en t i o n ’ s A c h e s in K e a t s ’ s ‘ Hype r i o n ’ P o em s What are the stars? There is the sun, the sun! And the most patient brilliance of the moon! And stars by thousands! Point me out the way To any one particular beauteous star, And I will flit into it with my lyre, And make its silvery splendor pant with bliss. I have heard the cloudy thunder: Where is power? Whose hand, whose essence, what divinity Makes this alarum in the elements, While I here idle listen on the shores In fearless yet in aching ignorance? —John Keats, Hyperion: A Fragment

I

n john keats’s abandoned epic poem, Hyperion: A Fragment (1819), the soon-to-be god Apollo’s strange question “Where is power?”—as though the abstract noun power were typically locatable but temporarily missing—links auditory attention (“I have heard the cloudy thunder”; “I here idle listen”) with war’s dislocation of power.1 Both of Keats’s Hyperion poems take place during the Titanomachy, or the War of the Titans, the shift in power from the Titan to the Olympian Gods. They occupy the period of transition following Saturn’s fall from power but prior to either Hyperion’s fall or Apollo’s rise.2 Hyperion’s power is thus in jeopardy, and the power that Saturn once held and that Apollo will soon hold belongs to no one—thus the question: Where is power? The aches of a power that is not yet and no longer embodied in a single sovereign is another way of describing the pains of this war. Keats’s question is followed by another question that we might read as

142

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

simply rephrasing the first: Who made this alarm? For reading this alarm in the sky in the context of wartime alarmism draws attention to the way Keats links power to the creation of alarm, highlighting alarm’s fabrication even in the most seemingly natural or neutral of settings, like the elements. Power resides, Keats suggests, in whoever “makes this alarum.” “Where power is,” William Hazlitt writes in “What Is the People?” an essay published in 1818, three years after Waterloo and the same year that Keats began Hyperion: Where power is lifted beyond the reach of the law or of public opinion, there is no principle to oppose it, and he who can obtain possession of the throne (by whatever means) is always the rightful possessor of it, till he is supplanted by a more fortunate or artful successor, and so on in a perpetual round of treasons, conspiracies, murders, usurpations, regicides, and rebellions, with which the people have nothing to do, but as passive, unconcerned spectators.3

As though anticipating and answering Keats’s question “Where is power?” Hazlitt points to the tautology of force—he who can obtain the throne is always its rightful possessor, when power is lifted beyond law. Writing in the aftermath of Waterloo, both Hazlitt and Keats had seen the indefinite suspension of law, specifically of habeas corpus, as a function of wartime fears on and off since the 1790s. We might thus read Keats’s depiction of Apollo’s listening to the alarm in the elements as a figure for these “passive, unconcerned spectators,” for “the people,” who watch the “perpetual round of treasons, conspiracies, murders, usurpations, regicides, and rebellions” and yet have “nothing to do.” By placing the alarm in the elements, Keats points to the strange naturalization of power that prevents anyone from questioning it. Though Apollo is meant to obtain possession of Saturn’s throne following these lines in the poem, he remains as passive as anyone else to this “perpetual round,” a spectator of his own usurpation. The sense of immobility and impotence that pervades Keats’s Hyperion poems reflects a political atmosphere of “nothing to do,” one that Hazlitt also laments and that marked the years of melancholy and uncertainty which followed Waterloo.4 The contrast between the “alarum in the elements” and Apollo listening “on the shores / In fearless yet in aching ignorance” evokes a wartime watchfulness that is self-consciously idle, deliberately fearless, and yet that still hurts. Indeed, what Keats adds to Hazlitt’s scene of passive and unconcerned specta-

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

143

torship is its aching—the aches, we might say, of Titanomachy. If the aches of attention, though, are from neither strain nor fear, then what are they? Apollo’s idle and fearless attention to alarm offers an alternative to militarized modes of keeping watch by separating the production of alarm from the feeling of fear or active preparation for war. In fact, none of his actions in the poems seem particularly militaristic, and we might better understand both poems as being about war insofar as they describe its aftermath, the postwar pains of attending to the suffering of others, to the evidence of war Keats would have seen daily in 1814—“thousands of soldiers lining the streets, and lounging about the different public-houses with every description of wound and casualty incident to modern warfare.”5 Begun three years after Waterloo during a period of “extended convalescence,” Keats’s Hyperion poems reveal a transformation in the domain of watchfulness from the political anticipation of invasion to a sympathetic (or sometimes apathetic) attention to another’s suffering in the aftermath of war.6 In this chapter, I suggest that the Hyperion poems explore the uncomfortable overlap between the experience of paying attention to pain and the pain of paying attention altogether. Two contexts for thinking about the strange activity Susan Sontag has called “regarding the pain of others” intersect in Keats’s poems: first, the medical care for and observation of returning soldiers, often brought back to England suffering the pains of amputation; second, the fragmented bodies known as the Elgin Marbles, those celebrated Greek sculptures Keats had visited in the British Museum in 1817, which were also brought back to England in the period with missing limbs. The two converge as the image of a broken, fragmented body that cannot simply be relegated to an aesthetic category. By writing about the war in which these Greek gods fell from power to history, ruin, and sculpture, Keats juxtaposes the mutilations of war with those of time, and the experience of looking at the pains of war with an aesthetic experience typically understood as disinterested. Furthermore, the Hyperion poems are also themselves mutilated fragments, and insofar as they are missing parts and thus resemble both fragmented sculptures and suffering bodies, they put the reader in a position of observing fragmentation. This mutilation, we will find, also allows Keats to resist the narrative impulses that dominated both the writing of history and the practices of sympathy in the period, and to suggest a mode of observing history, suffering, and art in which just paying attention, with nothing else to do, is an adequate response.

14 4

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

S t ill T h ey W e r e t h e S a me

The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself. In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. —Keats’s letter to Hessey, October 8, 1818

The stars have to be watched elsewhere in the Hyperion poems, even though they always stay the same. In Hyperion, Coelus tells Hyperion to go down to the Earth to find Saturn. “Meantime I will keep watch on thy bright sun,” explains Coelus, “And of thy seasons be a careful nurse” (I: 347). While Hyperion is away from his stars and seasons, Coelus promises to keep watch. But before he leaves, Hyperion has to practice a sort of watch of his own: Hyperion arose, and on the stars Lifted his curved lids, and kept them wide Until it ceas’d; and still he kept them wide: And still they were the same bright, patient stars. Then with a slow incline of his broad breast, Like to a diver in the pearly seas, Forward he stoop’d over the airy shore, And plung’d all noiseless into the deep night. (I: 350–57)

Hyperion’s watchful posture is put in strikingly simple, physiological terms. We have no idea what his eyes see, if they see anything. All we know is that the lids are kept wide. The mirroring between “still he kept them wide” and “still they were the same,” with the emphatic minimalism of both how and what they describe, suggests a reciprocity between stars and stares, which is to say between ontology and phenomenology, as though it were staring at stars that made them stay the same, as though it were spectatorship, in Hazlitt’s language, that ensured there is “nothing to do.”7 Staring here does a kind of maintenance work. The description has a quality of religious intensity, following the rituals outlined in John Wesley’s hymns for the watch-night: “We will not close our wakeful eyes, / We will not let our eyelids sleep, / But humbly lift them to the skies, / And all a solemn vigil keep.”8 The echo between the

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

1 45

static stars and stares returns us to the stillness of the lids rather than to any particular vision, and is an important reminder of how easily the act of staring can turn into an absorption that prevents rather than produces vision­­­­­—recall Cowper’s “mask / Of deep deliberation, as the man / Were task’d to his full strength, absorb’d and lost” (IV: 298–302). What is kept in the act of keeping watch becomes, then, the eerie ability to keep the lids wide without blinking or flinching, an arduous observation of the stars that resembles the strict attention regimen practiced by astronomers, except that it’s not about seeing or learning anything, but about just keeping the lids open.9 Anne-Lise François has written that “eyes do something other than see in Keats,” and Rei Terada has called this staring “the kind of looking an eye would do if no one were operating it.”10 Terada provides a luminous account of this passage in connection with Deleuze’s film theory, reading Hyperion’s lifted lids on the neutral stars as indicative of “looking as a performance of impasse” (278), a reminder of the “non-cognitive significance of looking,” and as reflective of an “openly absorptive” looking that “withholds realization” (298). This reading is particularly helpful, for I am concerned with what happens to the experience of keeping watch when it marks a painful impasse. The answer concerns not only the military lookout but also the representation of war’s injuries. For descriptions of a “vacant and indifferent expression,” an insensible “wild stare” of one who watches but cannot give an account of oneself, emerge in medical texts from the years around Waterloo to describe not only eye injuries but also the shock or “constitutional alarm” that injured soldiers experienced.11 The wild stare would also, as Philip Shaw has suggested, have been an apt description of the shock that military doctors themselves experienced in trying to attend to so many injured patients. Keats’s language of “still they were the same” returns in The Fall of Hyperion, a poem that has been described as a revision, reframing, and self-translation of Hyperion.12 The most obvious difference between the two poems is that the later poem introduces a first-person speaker, who tells us how he gained access to what happens in the earlier one. In fact, The Fall reframes Hyperion through its emphasis on the attention of the poet, who “scrutinized,” who sat “Upon an eagle’s watch, that I might see, / And seeing ne’er forget.”13 The content of Hyperion thus becomes the object of the intense scrutiny of The Fall, and the later poem is as much about the experience of writing Hyperion

146

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

as it is about reading it. So Andrew Bennett writes that The Fall of Hyperion “is crucially concerned to figure reading as an activity irreducibly bound up with death,” or a “dying into reading.”14 The poet’s “eagle’s watch” in The Fall describes how he accesses the material of Hyperion, but it is also a mode of reading, recalling Keats’s description of reading Chapman’s translation of Homer as staring “with eagle eyes” like some “watcher of the skies.”15 The Fall is a poem about both paying attention to the suffering of others as the origins of aesthetic experience, and the uneasy intersection of aesthetic, ethical, medical, and political ways to watch. Much of Hyperion is repeated word for word in The Fall, transformed only to make explicit that the material of the former has become the object of the poet’s scrutiny. Yet Keats’s description of Hyperion’s eyes kept wide on the stars shifts in The Fall, from a description of staring at stars to one of staring at suffering. Keats rewrites the astronomer’s arduous observation as an ethical position: the poet keeps watch on Saturn and Moneta, fallen gods who sit still as stars, unchanging and immobilized by their sadness and suffering. The implication of the revision is that paying attention to suffering is a way to keep watch. As though explaining how the poet of Hyperion had gained knowledge of the opening scene of the poem, Keats borrows his own lines about staring at the stars to describe staring at the scene of suffering with which Hyperion began: Long, long these two were postured motionless, Like sculpture builded up upon the grave Of their own power. A long awful time I look’d upon them: still they were the same; The frozen God still bending to the earth, And the sad Goddess weeping at his feet, Moneta silent. (Fall I: 382–88)

Keats keeps the line but changes its referent. The phrase “Still they were the same” describes not stars but the still figures of suffering, fallen gods immobilized “like sculpture,” suggesting a curious parallel between keeping watch on the stars and witnessing the petrifying and immobilizing sorrow of others.16 The simile evokes an ambivalence to which I will return: on the one hand, these gods are so motionless that they are still like sculpture, which is

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

147

to say, very, very still. But the distance between vehicle and tenor collapses when we remember that in looking at the Elgin Marbles, Keats imagines the fall from power that turns a god into a sculpture, a memorial of power. The enjambment of “the grave” and “Of their own power” plays with the poem’s broader preoccupation with stone, sculpture, and loss. The line reads at first as though it were likening the two figures to a sculpture made on a grave, but as we keep reading we find that the grave is actually itself a metaphor for their loss of power. There is no material grave here, no stone—only the petrified loss of power that infuses everything with the feeling of death and a sadness so intense that these figures cannot move. The colon connecting “I look’d upon them” and “still they were the same” recalls the echo between keeping the lids wide and keeping the stars the same, suggesting again some kind of causal relationship between looking and sameness, as though intense staring or listening might prevent its object from changing. But instead of evoking an astronomer’s intense observation, keeping the lids wide forms a reciprocal relationship with an ongoing pain.17 These passages suggest a continuity between Hyperion, Apollo, and the poet, and a corresponding continuity between the stars, statues, and suffering Saturn—all stay the same, still. The juxtaposition also highlights the act of attention itself: since nothing changes or even moves in his vision, it is the mere experience of looking that takes the role of action in the poem. If Apollo is meant to take over Hyperion’s power and role as the god who keeps watch on the stars, he transforms Hyperion’s wide-eyed stare at the stars into an idle listening “in fearless yet in aching ignorance.” Apollo is not yet a god in that scene, which may partially explain why his listening aches and Hyperion’s stare does not: he is still subject to mortal pains. The poet, like Apollo, keeps watch on the absence and loss of power. The only thing that changes here is the figure who pays attention, even if there is a still intensity to keeping the lids wide. In fact, when the first-person poet is introduced in The Fall, Keats describes the experience of attention that engendered the earlier poem as a weight that alters the subject who bears it: Without stay or prop But my own weak mortality, I bore The load of this eternal quietude, The unchanging gloom, and the three fixed shapes

148

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

Ponderous upon my senses a whole moon. For by my burning brain I measured sure Her silver seasons shedded on the night, And ever day by day methought I grew More gaunt and ghostly. (I: 388–96)

We can hear the echoes of Coelus’s original offer to keep watch on the stars and seasons for Hyperion in the poet’s comparison of the fixed shapes of the fallen gods to a whole moon and her silver seasons. The object of the poet’s watch is fixed, still as the stars, so it is only the poet that changes, who wearies, “day by day” becoming “more gaunt and ghostly.” If Burke believed that “beauty does not weary or dissipate the attention,” Keats suggests that attention itself wearies and dissipates the observer.18 Both aesthetic and ethical attention gradually destroy the poet, who is doing nothing—“nothing to do”—but watch the unchanging and unchangeable gloom of others: he is a passive, idle spectator, and yet his spectatorship makes him increasingly gaunt and ghostly. Here the gradual slow time of attention’s aches contrasts with the sudden immobilizing violence of a fall from power. And the strong posture of the gods “like sculpture builded up upon the grave” contrasts the weak mortality of a body that can barely bear the load of such gloom. How long can I keep watching this, he seems to say, before I disappear? Can I keep my eyes wide in the face of such pain? “Just the provocation: can you look at this?” writes Sontag about the tradition of “hard-to-look-at cruelties”: “There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.”19 The poet’s watch oscillates between aesthetic, medical, and ethical modes of observation, complicating the disinterested looking at a sculpture in a museum with its proximity to the experience of noticing a body in pain. Staring at figures that vacillate between sculpture and suffering, between the gradual mutilation of marble over time and the sudden fragmentation of bodies during and after war, the poet-figure maintains a wearying endurance that evokes both the hours visiting the British Museum and the exhausting attention of a “careful nurse.” In fact, Charles Bell, the well-known Scottish surgeon who treated soldiers with gunshot wounds at Waterloo, wrote about the exhausting experience of attending to injured soldiers:

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

149

Here [the Hopital de la Gerdarmerie] the very worst aspect of war presented itself; our soldiers were bringing in the French wounded. The wounded continued to be brought in for several successive days; and I saw the British soldiers who, in the morning, were moved by the piteous cries of those they carried, in the evening hardened by the repetition of the scene, and by fatigue, and indifferent to the suffering they occasioned.20

Bell’s account reveals a tense overlap between his attention to injured soldiers and his observation of soldiers who are themselves taking care of injured soldiers, all of whom are vulnerable to hardening, fatigue, numbing, and indifference when pain piles on pain like “forest on forest” (I: 6). Bell’s language of both being moved and being hardened draws out in Keats’s language of gaunt ghostliness the mirroring that occurs between the watcher and the one being watched, a hardening of the person in pain and of the person taking care of him. If Keats chooses the language of ghostliness rather than immobility to describe the harm to the one paying attention to pain, it is because he seeks in this painful attention to remain moved by the pain of others—even if that movement is one of disintegration or loss. Keats tries to avoid the experience described by one visitor to Waterloo: “the feelings must recoil from the consideration of so much human suffering.”21 Before saying more about these moving and unmoving experiences of attending to injuries of war, I want first to suggest how we might understand the aches of attention itself. At t en t i o n ’ s A c h e s

But, of all, the burst And the ear-deafening voice o’ the oracle Kin to Jove’s thunder, so surpris’d my sense, That I was nothing. —Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, lines underlined in Keats’s edition.22

Attention typically serves as a psychological or cognitive category that creates a thinking and acting subject, a prerequisite for memory, cognition, or education, or as the “Puzzles for Volunteers!!” suggest, a “necessary preliminary” for war and for reading. But there is another line of thought, one bound up with theological models of attention, that is concerned as Keats is with the ways that just paying attention can make one “gaunt and ghostly,” or can decreate someone, to borrow a term from Simone Weil.23 From Weil’s

150

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

goal of an attention that becomes “so full that the ‘I’ disappears,” to Walter Benjamin’s warning that attention, when not tempered by habit, threatens “to blow human beings apart,” these thinkers identify a painful attention that instead of reinforcing the rational, powerful subject, makes him come undone, exposing a vulnerability, violence, and loss of power at the heart of the simple experience of paying attention.24 “Attentiveness and pain,” writes Benjamin, “are complementary.”25 To trace this alternative model of attention, one need only look to thinkers who have, despite vehement claims otherwise, understood attention as always, to some extent, involuntary. That this issue comes to the forefront with Romantic-era thinkers should by now come as no surprise. In his Essays on the intellectual powers of man (1785), Thomas Reid had distinguished between attention and consciousness by way of another distinction: that between the voluntary and the involuntary. Reid writes: “Attention is a voluntary act. It requires an active exertion to begin and to continue it; and it may be continued as long as we will; but consciousness is involuntary, and of no continuance, changing with every thought.”26 But this distinction would very quickly come undone. Not long after, the authors of the first definition of “Attention” in (the third edition of ) the Encyclopaedia Britannica borrowed from Lord Kames to question this insistence on the entirely voluntary nature of the act of attention. Though the Encyclopaedia defines attention as an act of the will, it also concedes, “nevertheless, our attention is not always voluntary: an interesting object seizes and fixes it beyond the power of control.”27 Attention can thus be the site not of power but of its loss, encountering in its exertion Keats’s question “Where is power?” By the time Alexander Crichton gave an account of the diseases of attention in 1798, he explained that the idea that attention was increased by volition was “considered as very unphilosophical by modern writers, especially by those who deny the free agency of man” (257). Instead, he explains that “it is said that no man wills to be attentive, without some cause excites him to form that resolution [sic]. The cause that does so is a motive, and all stronger motives overcome weaker ones; therefore, when a person wills to be attentive, he only yields to a stronger impression than that which acted on his mind before this act of volition took place; and therefore we are deceived when we call this a voluntary act” (256–57).28 Crichton’s account of “modern writers” who “deny the free agency of man” suggests a link

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

15 1

between involuntary modes of attention and the political “idea of voluntariness” that Godwin discusses in Political Justice (1793), as well as the growth of the “volunteer movement” in the period. Godwin certainly comes to mind as a “modern writer” who denies “the free agency of man,” since he had written just a few years prior to Crichton’s remark that the voluntary and involuntary “are continually running into each other; our involuntary motions gradually becoming subject to the power of volition, and our voluntary motions degenerating into involuntary.”29 In the section of Political Justice devoted to “Principles of Government,” Godwin takes this claim further while making explicit the political implications of such disintegration of the will: “every voluntary action is an act of obedience,” he explains; “in performing it, we comply with some view, and are guided by some incitement or motive.”30 What Crichton calls yielding to an impression very easily transforms into political obedience and compliance. As Godwin wrote, “government is nothing but regulated force; force is its appropriate claim upon your attention.”31 Crichton’s Inquiry was published in the same year as Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which begins with one of the most famous examples in poetry of a fixed, seized, and involuntary attention—that of Coleridge’s Wedding Guest, who cannot choose but listen to the Ancient Mariner: He holds him with his glittering eye— The wedding guest stood still, And listens like a three year’s child: The Marinere hath his will. The wedding-guest sate on a stone: He cannot chuse but hear; And thus spake on that ancyent man, The bright-eyed Marinere.32

In Coleridge’s poem and in the Encyclopaedia entry, attention may be initially voluntary, but it becomes involuntary when seized or fixed by a particularly interesting, gripping, or bright-eyed object. Lord Kames describes this as the object “forcibly attach[ing] itself.”33 There is a sense in both texts that while attention is typically voluntary, there are unusual or even supernatural exceptions to this rule caused by particular objects that force themselves on the attention. Your attention, in other words, can be seized by an object such that

152

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

it is no longer properly yours. We could say, then, that the Mariner’s violence against the albatross is mirrored both in his experience of being forced to tell his story (“this frame of mine was wrench’d / With a woeful agony” [611–12]) and in the Wedding Guest’s experience of having no choice but to listen to it. The violence of the poem’s central act seems to spread, contagiously, from perpetrator to narrator to listener, as though telling the story reenacted the violence it recounts.34 Wordsworth takes this point further in “Expostulation and Reply,” which suggests not just that there are traumatic or supernatural exceptions, but that attention itself is by definition involuntary. The eye it cannot chuse but see We cannot bid the ear be still; Our bodies feel, where’er they be Against, or with our will. Nor less I deem that there are powers, Which of themselves our minds impress, That we can feed this mind of ours, In a wise passiveness.35

The repetition of “cannot chuse but” from the “Rime” aligns, while putting in sharp contrast, the two poems (the mirroring also extends to structure, since these passages share the same line numbers). For the Wedding Guest, this loss of control is an exceptional experience just as supernatural as the Mariner’s encounter with Life-in-Death. For William in Wordsworth’s poem, it is an everyday and yet overlooked absence of control that is a crucial part of what allows us to feel to begin with. For our bodies to feel, after all, we must be susceptible to the world around us. We must yield to its impressions. Both poets rhyme “still” and “will,” but in the “Rime” the Wedding Guest is held still because his will belongs to the Mariner, whereas in “Expostulation and Reply” the ear cannot be stilled, and the will might belong to the universalized perceiver, or it might not—but its loss is always a likely possibility, bright-eyed mariner or not. Whereas Coleridge describes a violent story so painful that the suffering it describes extends to both the story’s narrator and its listener, Wordsworth suggests that there is something about attention itself that is both involuntary and invasive.

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

153

In his mid-nineteenth-century notes and commentary to Reid’s Essays, Scottish philosopher William Hamilton objects to Reid’s claim about the voluntary nature of attention, arguing that We cannot determinately refuse to hear by voluntarily withholding our attention; and we can no more open our eyes, and, by an act of will, avert our mind from all perception of sight, than we can, by an act of will, cease to live. We may close our ears or shut our eyes, as we may commit suicide; but we cannot, with our organs unobstructed, wholly refuse our attention at will.36

The echo of Wordsworth’s poem here goes beyond both Williams’ apparent obsessions with their first name. Hamilton avoids the difference here between the eye and the ear (he might have specified, for example, that we can and do close our eyes more easily than we can shut our ears) so as to emphasize, as Wordsworth does, the more general way in which our attention is never entirely ours to give or withhold. We can pay attention, but we can never really own it. The echo of Wordsworth’s “We cannot bid the ear be still” is striking in Hamilton’s emphasis on what we cannot block or protect against. Hamilton’s commentary comes some seventy years after Reid’s Essays and sixty years after the Lyrical Ballads, a chronology that suggestively evokes Romanticism’s impact on the philosophy of attention. Perhaps even more striking in this passage, though, is the violence of Hamilton’s comparison of the act of shutting one’s eyes to suicide. This violence to the self coincides with a resistance to the involuntary nature of attention, and yet there is also a violence in attention itself here, or in our subjection to its force. Either one commits suicide or one submits to the violence of attention, to our inability to fully decide what to attend to. To lament our powerlessness to control what enters our ears while comparing shutting our ears with suicide thus reveals the bind in which both the act of attention and any effort to control it are violent.37 Keats’s work reveals an abiding interest in involuntary, magnetic, and violent forms of attention. A few weeks after his letter to Hessey about poetry maturing by “watchfulness in itself,” he writes to Woodhouse and famously defines the impersonality of the poet as a permeability of personal identity: What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the

154

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women, who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity . . . When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, [so] that I am in a very little time annihilated—not only among men; it would be the same in a nursery of children.38

Keats’s description of the “I” that is “in a very little time annihilated” reveals a strange triangulation of attention, distraction, and destruction through the figure of the poet, who is nothing (annihilated) but that on which he speculates—either the creations of his own brains or the other people in the room. His description of the poet’s self-annihilation as “speculation” suggests an extravagant and painful attention, one that anticipates Benjamin’s idea that “attentiveness and pain are complementary” (592) and shows how, as Sharon Cameron writes about Weil, “an ostensibly neutral phenomenon like attention could require violence.”39 This passage presents the poet’s attention as so intense it is self-annihilating, as though the self were evacuated in its permeability to others. It looks back to the violence of William Congreve’s “Let me be all, but my attention, dead,” and forward to William James’s assertion that “the reflex and passive character of the attention which, as a French writer says, makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice, is the first thing which the teacher must overcome. It never is overcome in some people, whose work, to the end of life, gets done in the interstices of their mind-wandering.”40 This intense but destructive watchfulness recalls the attentive relationship from Hyperion and The Fall between the unchangeable star-gods and the poet, who has no identity but who is instead pressed upon and annihilated by everything around him, by everything to which he attends. “True attention,” writes Weil, “is such a difficult state for people to attain, so violent, that any personal, emotional trouble is enough to block it.”41 Indeed, I want to suggest that Weil can teach us a lot about Keats. Yet it is not so much Weil’s more explicit writing on attention that I’d like to invoke here as we return to Keats’s Hyperion poems, but rather her 1938–39 essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” where she, like Keats, turns to both

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

155

epic form and ancient Greek war to reconsider the experience of observing the petrifying and dehumanizing effects of force in modern warfare. T h e Ot h e r F o rc e

Weil’s essay on the Iliad begins with the assertion “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force” (3). This stutter of an opening sentence—from hero to subject to center—evacuates the word “hero” of both praise and humanness, reframing Homer’s epic so that its center is not a particular person or character but force itself. The second paragraph of Weil’s essay complicates this move: “To define force—it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it to a thing.” The hero of the Iliad is thus dehumanized and dehumanizing; which is to say the poem’s hero is not any single person or god but this thing called force, which itself works by turning people into things. The poem’s center is not any single person or even any particular side in the war, but rather an impersonal force that spreads like an atmosphere during war, that pervades everyone and thing, including the poem itself: “nobody really possesses it,” she explains; “violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. It comes to seem just as external to its employer as to its victim” (20). It is this aspect of force—its indiscriminate, equal, nonpreferential obliteration of everything it touches—that makes possible, in Weil’s reading, the poem’s neutrality, the “extraordinary sense of equity which breathes through the Iliad” such that “one is barely aware that the poet is a Greek and not a Trojan” (33). In her analysis of force, Weil is less interested in the force that kills than she is in what she calls “the other force, the force that does not kill just yet” (4). It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone. From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet—he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this—a thing that has a soul. And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this resistance, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required of it. It was not made to live inside a thing; if

156

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done.  (5)

Notice the intertwining here of the anthropomorphism of force with force’s anti-anthropomorphic effect. Force is like a person, and it is the very fact of this anthropomorphism—force’s potential—that allows anthropomorphism’s inverse: turning the human being into a thing while he is still alive. Weil moves back and forth between anthropomorphism and its reversal, and then reverses that reversal, anthropomorphizing the dehumanized human—“a thing that has a soul”—and anthropomorphizing the soul only to emphasize its nonhuman accommodation. “What an extraordinary house it finds itself in,” she writes, this person turned thing and yet with a soul. Weil spends a good deal of time describing this “extraordinary house” in which the soul finds itself when subject to the “other force”: a thing, a stone, a “compromise between man and corpse.” The idea of other force allows Weil to describe a peculiar kind of pained yet numb subject position, as I want to suggest Keats does, between life and death, between human and stone, and between returned soldier and statue. Pain and suffering saturate Keats’s Hyperion poems with a blind equity or neutrality similar to what Weil finds in the Iliad. Just as Homer (according to Weil) represents equally the pains of Greeks and Trojans, so Keats finds both the Titans and the Olympians suffering. The sorrow caused by the dislocation of power is everywhere, creating an atmospheric ache that moves seamlessly from sufferer to sympathizer and back again, and that takes over both poems, becoming a kind of climate of shock and insensibility and immobilizing everyone it touches, including the poet-reader.42 We find in Hyperion the aches of waiting in a war of which we don’t see battles or bloodshed but only the immobility and powerlessness of “anxious men / Who on wide plains gather in panting troops, / When earthquakes jar their battlements and towers” (I: 198–99). Both poems hover between war and its aftermath, describing at once the petrifying effect of force on man and the postwar gesture of commemorating and remembering war in sculpture. Indeed, Keats’s poems point to the visual echo between fragmented marble sculptures in the museum and soldiers returning from war with missing limbs to suggest that the petrifying effects of art repeat the petrifying effects of force. Given the postwar climate in which Keats was writing, the poem’s concern with questions of commemoration, memory, and

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

157

history, its interest in fallen heroes who have turned to stone, and the gradual pain of attending to loss and suffering all resound as ways to hear, or keep hearing, “the thunder of a war / Foughten long since” (Fall I: 222–23). The pain and stillness in the Hyperion poems find a peculiar match in the poem’s preoccupation with the constant wide-eyed “watchfulness” that Tilottama Rajan has linked to both negative capability and an absence of narrative. Rajan borrows from Wordsworth’s “Expostulation and Reply” to describe Keats’s interest in “a wise passiveness removed from the economy of getting and spending and from its mental equivalent—the inability to remain ‘content with half knowledge.’”43 Keats thus rejects a model in which one pays attention to get something in exchange. Nicholas Roe has similarly described negative capability in terms of vigilance, as “the flux of a truly protean intellect—wisely passive, watchful, receptive, but also powerfully equal to all things.”44 While readers of the Hyperion poems have described both the pervasiveness of pain and the extremities of an equal, passive attention, they have not put the two in the same frame. How, I’d like to ask, do these two preoccupations relate to and even come to resemble each other? In these poems that are about paying attention to another’s pain, why is attention itself painful? And what do both have to do with fragmentation or failure? Keats’s still, fixed, epic attentiveness presents a poetics of attention quite distinct from Wordsworth’s: it seems to require no relaxation, unless we consider the poem’s own fragmentation an acknowledgment of the impossibility of sustaining this kind of intensive watch. The self-annihilation here suggests the pain, violence, and difficulty that accompany attention, and yet it does not seem to acknowledge the productivity of distraction—of relaxation and looking away—that we have seen across Romanticism. Instead, the pain of just paying attention is multiplied by the experience of paying attention to another’s pain until the poems just give up and fragment. Hyperion begins with an intense quiet, stillness, and deadness linked to loss of power, immobility, and sadness: Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair;

158

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer’s day Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips. (I: 1–14)

Andrew Bennett calls this a “catatonic opening to a poem which cannot move,” and indeed, the scene describes the power lost during the war between the Titans and the Olympians as a stilling and silencing, and it animates its petrifying force—“quiet as a stone”—though Keats cannot animate it too much without losing the sense of deadness.45 The repetitive heaviness—forest on forest, cloud on cloud—signals the weight of the unchanging loss, as if the lines were performing Bell’s description of soldiers “hardened by the repetition.” Exploring a liminal position between immortality, mortality, and art, Keats describes a place so still that there is “No stir of air,” “No life,” and yet there is still something to describe. As though negating even the slightest hint of life we found in Charlotte Smith’s phrase “something living is abroad,” Keats depicts a scene in which there is “something” to describe, but there may not be much life left in it. Despite this omnipresent voicelessness, or perhaps because of it, the poem then describes the painful listening of, and then to, the fallen Titan Saturn: Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went, No further than to where his feet had stray’d, And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed; While his bow’d head seem’d list’ning to the Earth, His ancient mother, for some comfort yet. (I: 15–21)

Here we find the posture we have traced throughout this book: instead of the commanding prospect view, the Romantic poetics of attention turns to the

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

159

figure of the “bow’d head” which is pressed down and “list’ning to the Earth,” ears to the ground. Saturn is listening in pain, merging his loss of power with a new receptivity, and he is also being listened to: immediately following Saturn’s listening, Keats shows how the Titans “listen’d in sharp pain for Saturn’s voice” (I: 163). And Thea, that Naiad who pressed her finger to her lips, demands silence, and yet “there was a listening fear in her regard, / As if calamity had but begun” (I: 37–38). Is listening painful when there is nothing to hear, when one expects a sound that isn’t there? Or does listening cause “sharp pain” because of the sounds of pain that will surely follow—“as if calamity had but begun” and there is much more of it to hear? Saturn listens for comfort from his own pain, while the Titans listen in pain for Saturn, and while Thea listens in fear for them all. Amid this atmosphere of sharp listening is the sense that the reader too must strain to hear (and read) that which is beyond the reach of human ears: “More sorrow like to this, and such like woe, / Too huge for mortal tongue or pen of scribe” (I: 159–60). I would like to stay with this passage, because it implies another fragmentation, one performed out of care—the amputation of Saturn’s hand. For it is not exactly that the fallen god is listless and dead. Rather, those words describe just one of his hands: “Upon the sodden ground / His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, / Unsceptred.” There is a weight to these lines, to the monosyllabic “old right hand” heavy on the sodden ground, that tells us even before we learn of its nervelessness that this hand is weighing down the body to which it belongs. Given Keats’s medical training and his suggestion in The Fall that the poet is “physician to all men” (1: 190), I want to suggest we take seriously the connotation here that a nerveless hand would have had in the medical community in the years following Waterloo as a reminder of how soldiers’ bodies are “deeply altered” by war and carry those alterations into peacetime.46 Recall Keats’s language of deadening, for example, in relation to John Hunter’s claim, in A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-Shot Wounds (1794), that gunshot wounds are “often not completely understood at first; for it is at first, in many cases, impossible to know what parts are killed, whether bone, tendon, or soft part, till the deadened part has separated.”47 In his Dissertation on Gun-shot Wounds (1814), Charles Bell wrote: “An officer consulted me as to the propriety of amputating his arm . . . the arm and hand were without feeling, and the thumb and fingers were incapable of motion.

160

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

Since the closing of the wound, the arm was covered with a scabby eruption. The arm stuck so awkwardly before him, it was so shrunk, stiff, powerless, and insensible, that I did not wonder that he wished it off, although he no longer suffered from pain.”48 Bell’s account of a nerveless hand even formally resembles Keats’s—the list of “shrunk,” “stiff,” “powerless,” and “insensible” is translated into verse as “nerveless,” “listless,” “dead,” and “unsceptred.” Keats’s list pushes the description further into the figurative, evoking a broader powerlessness, and yet the image persists of a hand that is no longer of use and that must be cut off, even though—or more precisely because—the patient cannot feel it. The note that though the patient’s hand no longer hurt, Bell “did not wonder that he wished it off ” highlights the kind of suffering Keats is getting at: this is not physical pain, but the pain of a loss of power and sensibility, the feel, Keats writes elsewhere, “of not to feel it.” As Bell explains, “sensibility to pain is the grand safeguard to the body.”49 The medical literature surrounding war and gunshot wounds at the start of the nineteenth century was preoccupied with methods for and justification of amputation. The powerlessness and insensibility of Saturn’s hand display the symptoms Bell describes as “proper” for amputation, yet it is not fragmented—not yet. In fact, in Bell’s accounts of surgery following Waterloo, Saturn would have played an important role in the controversy between English and French doctors about deciding the right time to amputate, and how long to let those suffer without power over their limbs: “the French surgeons accuse us,” Bell writes, “of deferring our field operations too long.”50 We can extend the metaphor to ask about how a poet knows the right time to give up on a poem. The image of soldiers returning from war with missing limbs would have been a familiar one at the time, especially to Keats. Keats was in medical school in the Hyperion years, working as a dresser in Guy’s Hospital, and his duties included assisting surgeons and removing amputated limbs.51 But Keats was not alone in thinking about the aesthetic implications of these suffering and fragmented bodies. Charles Bell completed a series of watercolors of soldiers with missing arms (Figures 10 and 11), which blur aesthetic and medical modes of observation and suggest that while a nerveless limb would have resonated with the medical community as an effect of war, it also became an aesthetic object of its own. Watercolour: arm wound (Figure 11) shows an injured arm resting on a book, which is inscribed with the word “Waterloo.”52

Figure 10. Watercolour of Wounded Soldier, Waterloo, by Charles Bell, 1815. Wellcome Library, London.

Figure 11. Watercolour: arm wound, by Charles Bell, 1815. Wellcome Library, London.

162

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

“Necrosis of humerus,” notes Bell in the case notes, “following fracture by gunshot at Waterloo.” To complicate matters even more, Keats and Bell both wrote about visiting the Elgin Marbles, those ancient hardened statues that were mutilated by time, with hands and limbs missing, deposited in the British Museum in 1816. About them Bell remarked that “one’s conceptions are expanded in the contemplation of these fragments,” which, though “mutilated,” are “still very fine.”53 Indeed, Bell’s watercolors look more like these ancient Greek sculptures than medical illustrations, adorned with drapery and accompanied by props.54 The Catalogue of the Elgin Marbles emphasizes their fragmentation, including titles such as “Fragment of a Head,” “Torso of a male figure,” “Fragment of the Neck and Arms rising out of the sea, called Hyperion, or the rising Sun,” and “Fragment of a Statue of Victory.”55 The collection’s sculpture of Hyperion is particularly fragmented: “The Head of this Titan is broken off: there remains a part of the neck and the shoulders: his arms, which are elevated and muscular, but without hands.”56 While ancient fragmented torsos are familiar to us today, they presented an “aesthetic crisis” when first brought to England.57 Sir George Beaumont wrote of the sculptures, “they excite rather disgust than pleasure in the minds of people in general, to see parts of limbs, & bodys, stumps of arms &c.”58 Indeed, one can’t help but wonder if such disgust was not displaced from the discomfort of seeing soldiers return from Waterloo with stumps of arms. The comparison is striking: in the same years that soldiers were returning from war with missing limbs, people were going to stare at Greek sculptures of exactly the same thing within the safe walls of the museum, as Archibald Archer’s “The Temporary Elgin Room” depicts (Figure 12).59 In contrast to the museum-goers’ apparent comfort and nonchalance around the sculptures, we can imagine the more conflicted desire both to look at and to look away from soldiers’ injuries.60 Even so, the language of violent mutilation was commonly used to describe these marble fragments: “the limbs are mutilated,” explain descriptions of the sculpture, “so mutilated and corroded by time.”61 In fact, this tension between aesthetic fragmentation and the violence of war is heightened by the fact that some critics opposed the Elgin Marbles’ transport to England because they believed the money should instead be used for veterans’ pensions.62 Of course, it is not just Saturn’s hand that is—or will be—fragmented, for

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

163

Figure 12. The Temporary Elgin Room, by Archibald Archer, 1819 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Reprinted with permission.

both Hyperion poems themselves have missing limbs. Hyperion was likened in Keats’s day to “the greatest of poetical torsos” and called “a fragment,—a gigantic one, like a ruin in the desart, or the bones of the mastodon.”63 The poems’ fragmentation thus puts the reader in the same ambivalent position they describe, of trying to pay attention to the fragments that hover between the pains of war and aesthetic remains.64 Keats’s poems’ fragmentation draws attention to the torso as the epitome of classical beauty but also to the mutilated bodies of returning soldiers, and ask us to consider the relation between how we look at art and how we look at war. Writing about Michael Fried’s use of his concept of absorption to read Stephen Crane, Tobin Siebers finds a “theoretical claim for a different mode of absorption, one that identifies the power of disabilities and impairments to rivet the attention of beholders.”65 This allows Siebers to articulate for “disability aesthetics” the understanding

164

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

that “to theorize the image, then, is to participate in a form of discrimination, to understand that the attention of beholders depends on images of difference.”66 Though Keats did not have our contemporary vocabulary of disability and discrimination at hand, he is investigating the powers that the images of pain, mutilation, and fragmentation have on the attention of beholders, and the way that attention shifts from museum setting to hospital to street. In The Fall, the poet also loses feeling in his hands: I strove hard to escape The numbness; strove to gain the lowest step. Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart; And when I clasp’d my hands I felt them not. (I: 127–31)

These lines suggest a mirroring, then, between doctor and patient, between Saturn’s numbness and insensibility and that of the poet, who grows heavy and cannot feel his hands as he watches. In both Hyperion poems, listening and watching bring pain and violence. When Clymene listens on the coast to the echoes of her own “songs of misery,” she hears sounds “that did both drown and keep alive my ears.” “A living death was in each gush of sounds,” she explains, evoking figures that oscillate between living and dying just as the suffering stone we see earlier in the poem. “Grief overcame,” she says, “And I was stopping up my frantic ears” (II: 289–90). In The Fall, Keats writes, “I ached to see what things the hollow brain / Behind enwombed” (I: 276–77), a phrase that nicely captures the ambivalence between pain and desire. (Is his ache the pain of wanting to see, as in Keats’s “To follow them I burn’d / And ached for wings” [“Ode on Indolence,” 33–34], or is it the pain of seeing?) To this, Moneta responds by asking whether the experience of looking in her brain, which she refers to as “wonder,” must be painful, a question that recalls Keats’s description of looking at the Elgin Marbles, a “wonder,” he writes, that brings “a most dizzy pain.”67 Moneta instructs the poet-speaker: My power, which to me is still a curse, Shall be to thee a wonder; for the scenes Still swooning vivid through my globed brain,

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

165

With an electral changing misery, Thou shalt with these dull mortal eyes behold Free from all pain, if wonder pain thee not. (I: 243–48)

And yet in that conditional “if wonder pain thee not” is the implication that if such scenes cause the goddess an “electral changing misery,” they are likely to pain “dull mortal eyes” as well. Indeed, “electral changing misery” is a good way to describe what happens when Apollo looks into Mnemosyne’s brain, sees all of history (“names, deeds . . . creations and destroyings”), and becomes a god: “Knowledge enormous makes a God of me” (III: 113). I will return to this scene to discuss Apollo’s attention to history, but I’d like briefly to consider the frantic, dizzy pain of staring in wonder. What kind of attention is wonder, the “first of all the passions”?68 Why is it painful and dizzy? Descartes’ delineation of the passions reveals an interesting ambivalence about the attention of wonder: though wonder is “a sudden surprise of the soul which brings it to consider with attention the objects that seem to it unusual,” it is also dangerous in large quantities. “More often we wonder too much rather than too little,” he explains: “This may entirely prevent or pervert the use of reason.”69 So while “it is good to be born with some inclination to wonder,” we need not hold on to this first passion, since “we may easily make good its absence through that special state of reflection and attention which our will can always impose on our understanding when we judge the matter before us to be worth serious consideration.”70 The implication seems to be that there are two kinds of attention: a voluntary and mature one imposed by the will on the understanding, and a childlike one produced suddenly and uncontrollably by wonder. Descartes calls the latter, in excess, “being astonished” and warns that “it can never be other than bad.”71 But Keats pursues the excesses of wonder, and we might better understand his preoccupation with sculpture and stillness in light of Descartes’ warning that when one feels astonishment, “the whole body remains as immobile as a statue.”72 Apollo’s astonished attention to Mnemosyne allows everything to pour into the “wide hollows of his brain,” an experience so frantic that “wild commotions” shook him, “Most like the struggle at the gate of death” (III: 126). Yet unlike Clymene, who can stop up her frantic ears, Apollo’s only

166

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

reprieve is to cut the poem off suddenly, unable to deal with the astonishing aches that accompany an attention to the fullness of history “all at once”: So young Apollo anguish’d: His very hair, his golden tresses famed Kept undulation round his eager neck. During the pain Mnemosyne upheld Her arms as one who prophesied.—At length Apollo shriek’d; —and lo! From all his limbs Celestial * * * * * * (III: 130–36)

And so Keats amputates his own poem in the middle of a sentence about limbs, cutting off the poem itself “From all his limbs / Celestial.” The pain of Apollo’s wonder comes from the speed, suddenness, and quantity of information that creates a gap between attention and understanding. In “constitutional alarm,” Apollo cannot process all the information he is given, and so the poem must end. The echo between the poet seeing into Moneta’s brain and Apollo seeing into Mnemosyne’s brain also suggests that the agony Apollo feels—dying into life—resembles the hurt the poet experiences in trying to attend to the poem’s narrative (or absence thereof ). The poet’s self-annihilation that comes from attending to others is represented here as Apollo’s shrieking, wild commotions, and dying into life, but also as the poem’s own self-annihilation—its fragmentation. But by repeating this scene in The Fall as the condition of possibility of Hyperion, Keats suggests that the pain of wonder, the aches of attention, is both what makes poetry possible and what causes it to fall apart. M o ving S tat ue s

One of the prettiest touches of all and that which angled for mine eyes, caught the water though not the fish, was when, at the relation of the queen’s death, with the manner how she came to’t bravely confessed and lamented by the king, how attentiveness wounded his daughter; till, from one sign of dolour to another, she did, with an “Alas,” I would fain say, bleed tears, for I am sure my heart wept blood. Who was most marble there changed colour; some swooned, all sorrowed: if all the world could have seen ’t, the woe had been universal. —Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

167

The Titans fall to an uncertain state between person, statue, and god— “one here, one there, / Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque / Of Druid stones” (II: 33–35)—becoming figures that oscillate between anthropomorphism and its reversal, figures Theresa Kelley calls, capturing the ekphrastic element of this ambivalence, “massively sculptured personifications.”73 “Scarce images of life,” Keats calls the fallen Titans, a phrase that suggests that these figures are both scarcely images and scarcely living. Falling into humanness, these gods gain the ability to feel pain. But in feeling pain, they become like all who suffer pain’s intenseness, petrified by it—like “natural sculptures” (I: 86). As Alan Bewell has written, the Titans “never fully escape being seen as sculptures.”74 In feeling their mortality, the gods become vulnerable to a pain so powerful that it paradoxically turns them into things, statues, or rocks, and the very thing that marks their humanness sends them back to the limits of the human. The god-man-stone figures of pain reveal the overlap between Hazlitt’s description of the Elgin Marbles as so lifelike that they are “like living men turned to stone,” and Weil’s description in her essay on the Iliad of “the petrifactive quality of force”; “in whatever aspect,” she writes about war’s violence, “its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone” (27).75 Occupying a strange space between art and death, these figures evoke an ambivalence between dying and becoming sculpture that recalls both The Winter’s Tale and Keats’s reference to the “sculptur’d dead” in Eve of St. Agnes (14). In moving from god to mortal to sculpture, Keats describes a continuum between painless immortality, painful mortality, and the violent obliteration of, or numbness to, pain through its aestheticization. Against Keats’s reputation as an aesthete, then, I want to suggest that the Hyperion poems encounter the porousness of the aesthetic realm to pain and its relief, to medicine and war, and thus suggest that the aesthetic might function for Keats more like an anaesthetic. As the lines in the epigraph to this section from The Winter’s Tale remind us, attentiveness can wound the person paying attention, though conventional accounts of both aesthetics and sympathy tend to avoid such a fate. Keats’s poem is concerned not only with those states of suffering that would dehumanize even the only recently fallen god, but also with the experience of the sympathizer who becomes gaunt and ghostly from staring at those immobile figures: “How unlike marble,” Keats writes of Thea, right before noticing the

Figure 13. Heads, representing the various passions of the soul / Compassion, published by Robert Sayer, after Charles Le Brun, 1740–1765 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Reprinted with permission.

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

169

“listening fear in her regard / As though calamity had but begun” (I: 34–37). In contrast to the statue-like obliteration of feeling these gods experience from too much suffering, their sympathetic observer becomes remarkably unlike marble, which is to say she is moved by what she sees. At stake in staring at petrified figures of pain and violence is the issue of whether the onlooker is moved or wounded, for if suffering is bound up with immobility and impotence, so spectatorship and sympathy are often put in terms of whether one is moved by another’s pain. And just as there is the metaphoric possibility of a person changing into marble, so as The Winter’s Tale suggests is there a metaphoric possibility of marble changing color, of someone previously unsympathetic being suddenly moved by another’s pain. The Titans may be particularly still, but they are moving, in that they move the person (poet or god) who attends to them, even if it is a decreative movement. The constant comparison of statues with figures of suffering interrupts the supposed neutrality of the aesthetic gaze with an ethical one. Keats’s description of the experience of seeing the Elgin Marbles portrays the act of looking at sculpture as staring with “browless idiotism”—“Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.”76 But if we consider the Elgin Marbles as figures of a pain and violence turned numb, then this astonished staring may indicate an ethical stance in which idiotic and sick wonder may be the only possible or appropriate response to another’s pain, especially if wonder is, as Descartes put it, how we register that something is “almost unbearable simply because it is not part of our ordinary experience.”77 What is the role of attention in experiences of sympathy, empathy, or compassion? Charles Le Brun’s depiction of Compassion (Figure 13) looks remarkably similar to that of Attention (Figure 1), and the caption to the former describes compassion as “the lively attention to the misfortunes of another,” which “causes the eyebrows to sink towards the middle of the fore-head; the eye-ball to be fix’d upon the object; the sides of the nostrils next [to] the nose to be a little elevated, making wrinkles in the cheeks; the mouth to be open; the upper lip to be lifted up & thrust forwards; the muscles & all the parts of the face sinking down & turning towards the object which causes the Passion.”78 Is compassion then just a lively attention to another’s misfortune? Is fixing our eyeball on an object enough?79 In her Letters on Education, Elizabeth Hamilton writes: “Instead of teaching children that they ought to appear sorrowful when they behold any person in pain, they ought to learn alacri-

170

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

ty in serving and relieving them. These attentions will awaken sympathy by awakening attention.”80 Children shouldn’t just appear sorrowful at the sight of another’s pain, but the alternative is not entirely clear. Attention awakens sympathy by awakening attention in a circular logic that might leave children (and adults) unsure just what sympathy is. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith’s seminal account of sympathy, attention and spectatorship contribute to the standard sympathetic experience: “We sit down by them [the sufferer], we look at them, and while they relate to us the circumstances of their misfortune, we listen to them with gravity and attention.”81 Attention for Smith is just a preliminary, though, since he then adds, “But while their narration is every moment interrupted by those natural bursts of passion which often seem almost to choak them in the midst of it; how far are the languid emotions of our hearts from keeping time to the transports of theirs?”82 Simply paying attention to someone else in pain is not enough, then, for what he considers a proper sympathetic exchange, because it can be interrupted and fragmented. For Smith, an appropriate experience of sympathy requires a complete narrative, which passion tends to disrupt. Smith also demands narrative because it ensures a moderation of the pain, protecting the sympathizer from what Steven Goldsmith describes as an “invasive excess of sympathy” that would threaten the sympathizer’s self-preservation.83 Framing the passions through narrative allows only the kind of sympathetic attention that would be properly contained by the comprehensible and explainable limits of story. Keats, as the poems’ fragmentation and resistance to progress and narrative suggest, pushes back against these limits and the kind of contained sympathetic attention they engender.84 By presenting fragments of extreme and often silent suffering, he demands both more and less than Smith: Keats asks for a mere, minimal attention to another that is, yet, more difficult and painful for the one paying attention than pity or sympathy would be. Simone Weil makes this point explicit by reversing the hierarchy inherited from Smith: “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough. Only he who is capable of attention can do this.”85 Whereas Smith suggests that attention is only a preliminary step toward sympathy,

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

171

Keats (and Weil) asks instead what would happen if our goal was stupefied wonder—an attention as impasse—to the fragmented and fragmenting nature of pain. This gesture resists what Steven Goldsmith has recently described, in the context of Blake, as “the narratability that entangles grief in a calculus of blame and approval.”86 Blake’s depiction of Jesus in “On Anothers Sorrow,” who upon hearing another’s sigh, just “sits by us and moan[s],” is echoed most explicitly in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” “where men sit and hear each other groan.”87 As Goldsmith explains, the sitter “holds no one accountable, asks no questions, says nothing, indeed does nothing to relieve the sorrows he makes himself adjacent to” (203). Smith attempts to manage the preservation of the self in the sympathetic encounter through the figure of the impartial spectator, the “man within the breast,” who monitors sympathy and prevents the listener from getting carried away or losing control.88 And yet implicit in Smith’s attempt to preserve the self from the perils of sympathy is precisely the possible violence likely to come from a more extreme sympathy, a less contained or controlled encounter with a pain not mediated by narrative. Smith’s recommendation that the sufferer maintain a certain moderation in how he presents his own suffering suggests the possibility of the inverse: a lack of moderation followed by an immoderate sympathy. For example, the sufferer is obliged, as much as possible, to turn away his eyes from whatever is either naturally terrible or disagreeable in his situation. Too serious an attention to those circumstances, he fears, might make so violent an impression upon him, that he could no longer keep within the bounds of moderation, or render himself the object of the complete sympathy and approbation of the spectators. (59)

Smith’s attempt to manage the possible violence of both experiencing one’s own pain and noticing someone else’s compels him to advise the sufferer to avoid “too serious an attention” to his own circumstances. No one will be able to sympathize with you, he warns, if you pay too much attention to your own pain. Instead, moderation is paradoxically the only way to attain the “complete sympathy and approbation of the spectators,” but by “complete” Smith seems to have in mind a mild, manageable sympathy that interrupts neither narrative nor the conscience or security of the person listening to it. There is a strange circular logic at work here, in the interest of a painless sympathy that

172

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

can be easily accommodated: the sufferer’s obligation to make his own pain palatable to others is rewarded with sympathy and spectatorship, leaving no room for any extremity of suffering or sympathy. And yet we are left wondering: What happens to the “naturally terrible,” to the “violent impression,” and to the “too serious an attention” in Smith’s account? Smith’s violent impression from too serious an attention is also a problem in aesthetics. In his Laocoön (1766), Lessing contrasts poetry to visual art through the amount of physical pain each can represent without hurting their audience, and through the kinds of attention each requires. The problem with conflating poetry and the picturesque, Lessing explains, is that the latter cannot be too interesting “lest our attention . . . be diverted” by one interest from another, whereas in a poem describing the same events, the two objects are not “pictures side by side; they do not form a whole which our eyes can or should be able to survey at a glance . . . The description of one follows the other,” and thus the two objects do not compete for attention.89 This formal difference between poetry and visual art has further implications for the representation of pain. In visual art, Lessing explains, “the demands of beauty could not be reconciled with the pain in all its disfiguring violence, so it had to be reduced. The scream had to be softened to a sigh, not because screaming betrays an ignoble soul, but because it distorts the features in a disgusting manner” (23). Yet since it doesn’t compress everything into a single moment, poetry need not maintain the same moderation (23). In this Lessing takes direct issue with Adam Smith: “We despise a man, says the Englishman [Smith], whom we hear cry out violently under physical pain. But not always,” Lessing counters, for “nothing is more deceptive than the laying down of general laws for our emotions” (28). Poetry, unlike painting, can represent intensities of pain without the reader having to look away. For when that pain is transformed into the spectator’s pity, his “attention is arrested not so much by the lack of proportion between their sympathy and these screams as by the change which pity causes, or ought to cause, in the bystanders’ sentiments, whether this pity be weak or strong” (30–31). Keats thus follows Lessing in refusing Smith’s moderate and manageable sympathy and the process of narration Smith encourages.90 And in insisting on describing a pain and suffering that is in excess of the bounds of the poem, he asks for a different kind of spectatorship than Smith, one that tarries with

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

173

both a serious attention and the violent impressions it is subject to. In fact, instead of narrating their pains, the Hyperion poems’ sufferers maintain an intense silence that spreads a violent impression throughout. As Smith predicts, this violent impression and too serious attention do threaten the self-preservation of the spectator, who becomes gaunt and ghostly from the encounter.91 Contesting Smith’s ideal of a moderate sympathy to moderate pain, Keats considers what happens when one stares in wonder and astonishment at utter calamity and war, violence and pain, loss of power and loss of limb. In his letters, he had described the overwhelming experience of caring for his dying brother Tom in similar terms to the poet’s self-annihilation. Just as “the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon [the poet],” so Tom’s “identity presses upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out” or “obliged to write.”92 Paying attention to another, and especially another who is in pain, is painful for Smith and for Keats, but Keats tries not to shy away from that pain. While Smith’s mediated process of moderation and self-protection involves a spectatorship that narrates and that only responds to narration, Keats’s poems refuse this process, imagining instead a wide-eyed attention to an extreme pain of epic proportions that exceeds narration and explanation and that presses upon the identity of the spectator in stupefying wonder. Bell’s account of medicine at Waterloo also recommends organizing and managing attention to another’s pain, but Bell’s goal seems to be heightening the forcible impression rather than diminishing it. His aim at Waterloo, he writes, in accepting the job was originally to find “cases” with which to study gunshot wounds for the improvement of medicine. Yet as soon as he witnessed the “very worst aspect of war”—“a scene of which the public can have no distinct conception”—he realized: “the objects for which I had come abroad were laid aside, for it was necessary to put hands to the work. I was now convinced of the injustice of expecting information from those who, at such a time, if they have the common qualities of our nature, must have every faculty bound up in duty to the sufferers; cases, and observations cannot be drawn, a certain general impression remains, and the individual instance must be very remarkable that is remembered at all.”93 Philip Shaw has noted that Bell was one of the few military doctors to acknowledge his own experience of shock, and this passage, with its recognition of his forgetting, goes some way in that direction.94 Bell goes on to instruct military surgeons how to organize their

1 74

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

patients so that they can both care for them and observe them, since taking care of patients turned out to be surprisingly counterproductive to medical observation. Though attention and care tend to be paired together, Bell found a tension between them: When the surgeon comes to determine on the cases under his care, it is distracting to pass from a man with a wound in the bell to one with a shattered bone; from a case of wounded lungs to the question of amputation; here a gun-shot fracture of the skull, and the next a ball lodged in the knee joint. If, instead of this, the cases are properly arranged, the prevailing symptoms of danger press forward strongly on the attention, and one case illustrates and clears the obscurities in another. Where there are many cases of fracture of the skull, or of bullets through the head, the prevailing symptoms of danger make the most forcible impression on the surgeon’s mind, where these cases are classed together.95

Whereas Smith recommends narrative in order to prevent violent impressions, Bell seeks an organization of pain that makes “the most forcible impression,” since, as Elaine Scarry has written, the “success of a physician’s work will often depend on the acuity with which he or she can hear the fragmentary language of pain.”96 Bell’s language of “forcible impression” and “symptoms of danger press[ing] forward on the attention” suggests that unlike Smith’s moderation, the doctor and the poet seek modes of attention that will allow them to be pressed upon by the violent suffering of others. Hi s to ry E n o r m o u s

If history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper, and are spread wider. History treats, for the most part, of the cumbrous and unwieldy masses of things, the empty cases in which the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads of intrigue or war, in different states, and from century to century: but there is no thought or feeling that can have entered into the mind of man, which he would be eager to communicate to others, or which they would listen to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry. —Hazlitt, Lecture on Poetry

In “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” Keats suggests that the stupefying and aching wonder he feels when looking at the mutilated statues has to do with their historicity. It is time, after all, that amputates the sculptures.97

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

175

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old time—with a billowy main— A sun—a shadow of a magnitude. (11–14)

What causes the seer pain and dizziness in the sonnet seems to be the mingling of grandeur and the “wasting of old time,” the shift from power to its ruin and commemoration. The Hyperion poems mark a wartime transition when the Titans are turning from magnitude into its shadow, from god to sculpture. We could thus say that the poems describe the becoming-historical, the experience of watching power turn into its monument. Yet they also register the impossibility of fully paying attention to history, which is too large and too dizzying, which unfolds too fast for apprehension and makes too violent an impression. If someone else’s pain becomes bearable and sympathizable only through its narration, imagine the problem of paying attention to the vast collection of stories, feelings, objects, and pains that make up history. This is the problem that prompts the poem’s fragmentation. The scene of Apollo looking into Mnemosyne’s brain, which fragments Hyperion, is a scene about the impossibility of attending to the “knowledge enormous” of history. After Apollo listens idly to that “alarum in the elements,” he addresses Mnemosyne, who has been mute: Mute thou remainest—Mute! yet I can read A wondrous lesson in thy silent face: Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, Sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal. (III: 111–20)

Forest Pyle is right to read this figure of pouring as an “experience of history— or, more precisely, an incorporation of history—without context.”98 And De Man describes history in this passage as “no longer the static example of cer-

176

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

tain high achievements, as antiquity was to the neoclassic age, but a movement that includes destruction and chaos (‘creations and destroyings, all at once . . .’) as well as achievements.”99 Indeed, Keats’s inclusion of “destroyings” suggests that what is attended to “all at once” is not of the simple present but of the progressive: it comes “all at once” but is also ongoing, destroying. How can we pay attention, these lines ask, to that which destroys attention? Keats’s account of historical witnessing here recalls the list of historical events and texts that enter Wordsworth’s mind as he alternates between keeping watch and reading in Book X of The Prelude. Both poets contrast muteness with reading, lamenting an object that resists attention to suddenly give way to an outpouring of “tragic fictions, / And mournful calendars of true history, / Remembrances and dim admonishments” (X: 69–70) for Wordsworth, and of “Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, / Majesties, Sovran voices, agonies, /Creations and destroyings” for Keats. For both poets, this sudden, overwhelming flood of history comes from an experience of reading—as an alternation, for Wordsworth, between reading and keeping watch, despite the muteness of the Place du Carousel, and for Keats, as the wonder Apollo feels reading Mnemosyne’s face. Both of these passages rely on enumerations of overwhelming, inassimilable fragments of history that—despite their incongruity—demand to be attended to “all at once,” and that pile up with the impossible weight of “forest on forest” like “cloud on cloud” and thus leave “no room for anything to be said.”100 Keats’s enumeration shows how history and historiography accumulate without context, without becoming digestible or bearable, in what Marjorie Levinson describes as the “‘sheer puzzle of pain,’ the very form of irrecuperable otherness: the exact opposite of meaning.”101 Indeed, Keats’s painful list registers a history that floods the mind, causing either pain or fear or dizziness, allowing neither understanding nor insight. To describe attention as having something poured into the hollows of the brain suggests that it is involuntarily entering the observer with a disarming speed. Attention to history comes as a stupefying wonder insofar as wonder is a mode of attention that marks an impasse and that doesn’t just consider itself a step toward further cognition. For after this deifying transmission of “knowledge enormous,” Apollo is not more capable or knowledgeable. Instead, he undergoes “wild commotions” which are “most like the struggle at the gate of death” or more like one who “die[s] into life.” All of history pouring into his brain is

a t t e n t i o n ’s a c h e s i n k e a t s ’s ‘ h y p e r i o n ’ p o e m s

177

too much for him to handle: described simply as “the pain,” Apollo’s attention to history causes him to “shriek,” and lo!, the poem, or its limbs, break off. The poem resists the narrative containment of Smith’s sympathetic spectatorship, and it also resists putting narrative boundaries on history, which like the pain that is a part of it, is in excess of understanding. As Jonathan Mulrooney writes, “the only way to finish Hyperion is to acknowledge that its historicity demands fragmentation.”102 Why do poems end? From a sense of completion or failure? Finality or frustration? Apollo’s pains where the poem breaks off are the pains of attending too intensely, to too much at one time—“knowledge enormous.” This is at once the strange and impossible situation of Apollo becoming a god and dying into life, and the very quotidian situation of, say, reading the morning newspaper, of trying to attend to a historic event as it is happening, and trying to sort through all of the names, events, and legends that we hear every day and organize them into something that is both bearable and accurate.103 In 1819, Keats wrote to his friend Reynolds to say that he was finally abandoning Hyperion. “I have given up Hyperion,” he writes, explaining that there were too many Miltonic inversions in it. And then a sentence later, he says, “I wish to give myself up to other sensations.”104 What is surrendered and what is received in Keats’s fragmentation? What is given and what is given up? In transforming giving up on something to giving oneself up to something, Keats reminds us that what might look like failure is also a way to notice other sensations.

Af t e rw o r d Just Looking

So It Is

In his copy of Paradise Lost, Keats underlined almost an entire page of Milton’s description of the war in heaven, the “Anguish, and doubt, and fear, and sorrow, and pain” in both “mortal and immortal minds” (I: 558–59), a line that could also describe Hyperion. In the margins of the page, Keats wrote the following: The light and shade—the sort of black brightness—the ebon diamonding— the ethiop Immortality—the sorrow the pain. the sad-sweet Melody—the P[h]alanges of Spirits so depressed as to be “uplifted beyond hope”—the short mitigation of Misery—the thousand Melancholies and Magnificences of this Page—leaves no room for any thing to be said thereon, but: “so it is.”1

Keats’s experience of reading Milton evokes an attention so full and a pain so immense that he feels like there is “no room.” There is not much room on the page to write, and there is not much room in the observer to say or do anything when faced with so many melancholies. His only response is “so it is.” The experience of reading Milton, for Keats, recalls the excess of both grief and information that causes Clymene to stop up her “frantic ears” and that

180 a fterwor d

shakes Apollo in “wild commotions.” Reading with an unwavering and painful attention mirrors the excess of suffering to which it attends, suggesting a reciprocity between how and to what one pays attention. The limited space in the margins of the page thus comes to figure the constraints to pity, sympathy, compassion, and other conventions for responding to suffering that might seem more active or helpful than just looking at pain and saying, “so it is.” Evoking Hazlitt’s “nothing to do” or Apollo’s idle listening, Keats emerges as a reader who is stupefied with wonder and whose response to war is just to acknowledge it—“so it is.” This might seem overly resigned, but as we have seen in the preceding chapter, the Hyperion poems affirm this gesture by suggesting that just paying attention to another’s pain is both more difficult than Adam Smith makes it seem, and more satisfying a response than going through the motions of an empty moral convention. And in reading, as well as in watching others’ pain, merely paying attention to violent impressions without trying to organize or contain them into a complete and meaningful narrative may actually be harder than other more elaborate responses that involve interpretation, assimilation, or self-protection. “So it is,” I want to suggest in these closing pages, speaks to an afterlife of Romantic attention to and during war that rejects narrative, closure, explanation, or argument to understand reading as just looking, and says with a simple constative, as Goya did in his series of etchings from 1808, The Disasters of War, “I saw this.”2 L o o king a s M e t h o d

If reading can be understood as a minimal mode of mere attention with little room for commentary, what about criticism? Or translation? Are these activities more than attention? Are they activities for which attention is just “a necessary preliminary”? In an essay called “Attention and Will,” Simone Weil gives, in her characteristically elliptical form, a hint about her methodology: “Method for understanding images, symbols, etc. Not to try to interpret them, but to look at them till the light suddenly dawns. Generally speaking, a method for the exercise of the intelligence, which consists of looking.”3 Looking—just looking—is Weil’s method for, or perhaps instead of, interpretation, echoing Keats’s interest in avoiding intervention. The link between a reader’s attention and the attention used to respond to someone in pain is implicit in Keats’s writings, emerging out of the likenesses between reading about war

just look ing

181

in Milton and caring for soldiers, or between the way the poet responds to the hand’s nervelessness and the way he asks his reader to pay attention to the poetic fragment itself. Weil makes this connection explicit. Attention to texts, she insists, is only an exercise to strengthen our ability to pay attention to someone else, which is itself both more difficult and more important than sympathy, pity, or compassion. Weil’s interest in attention throughout her work is always, ultimately, in the service of the rare and difficult task of giving one’s attention to a sufferer. In “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” (1942), Weil argues that the purpose of all study is to exercise the faculty of attention so that the child will someday be able to attend to another’s pain: “Although people seem to be unaware of it today,” she explains “the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.”4 It doesn’t matter what we learn in school, so long as we practice the art of paying attention: “paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of great service one day . . . they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need.”5 By help, though, Weil means nothing other than the kind of intense theological attention she describes as “a kind of loosening,” as suspension, detachment, an emptying of thought, an experience of pulling back, waiting, retreat, and prayer.6 In fact, Weil explains that this mode of attention as withdrawal actually coincides with a physical relaxation, despite our tendency to confuse it “with a kind of muscular effort.”7 Most students, Weil suggests, pay too much attention to paying attention, or to what they think will look like attention, when real attention can be neither forced nor planned and happens through a relaxation rather than a stiffening of muscles. “What could be more stupid,” Weil asks, writing again about what happens to our bodies when we try to pay attention, “than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem.”8 This brief mention of poetry—of the wrong way to attend to poetry—raises the question of how one might look at poetry without this tension, suspicion, or sense of seeking, without turning into Blake’s Watch Fiends who “search numbering every grain / Of sand on Earth every night” (181). How might we read and wait and stare and exercise the intelligence without trying to interpret? In this sense, Weil provides a kind

182 a fterwor d

of prehistory to recent attempts to move past the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” revealing the theological undertones of what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus call “freedom in attentiveness.”9 In their 2009 description of “surface reading,” Best and Marcus deploy this phrase to suggest that an attention to the artwork without suspicion or judgment—“an attentiveness,” they explain, “that does not reduce [texts] to instrumental means to an end”—might offer a liberation from suspicion.10 This desire for a mode of reading that would be solely or purely attentive, without suspicion or agenda, is itself historically contextualized as the curious result of a contemporary political climate in which everything is already on the surface. There is no need to interpret, Best and Marcus suggest, “in an era when images of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were immediately circulated on the internet; the real-time coverage of Hurricane Katrina showed in ways that required little explication of the state’s abandonment of its African American citizens; and many people instantly recognized as lies political statements such as ‘mission accomplished.’”11 The suggestion here, one specific to war and its representation, is that one need only simply pay attention to find the forms of domination that were once the yield of strenuous interpretation and analysis. But what is the implied connection between how we pay attention to war and how we read? If images of war and the deceit it produces are circulated and recognized “instantly” and “immediately,” how should that change the way we read literary texts? What is the correlation between a dissatisfaction with the world and a frustration with the way we read? In fact, much recent resistance to critique, suspicion, and interpretation comes as a response to war. Bruno Latour begins his 2004 essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” with the frustration: “Wars. So many wars. Wars outside and wars inside. . . . Should we be at war, too,” he asks, “we, the scholars, the intellectuals?”12 Even in 1982, Sontag wrote “Against Interpretation” because “The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough” and “We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”13 Recall Archibald Alison’s criticism of the critic, who pays too minute an attention and doesn’t really feel the artwork. Likewise, these critics oppose critique, suspicion, and interpretation to feeling, peacefulness, and to a gentler mode of attention, one described variously as attention’s relaxation and suspension, or as just or mere attention.14 The fantasy of not interpreting and just looking is thus a wartime one, and it

just look ing

183

is not new. Indeed, we can look to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as the background of Blake’s warning that “you accumulate Particulars & murder by analyzing” (251) and of Wordsworth’s “we murder to dissect.”15 Though just paying attention is itself a metaphor, as Apter and Freedgood’s afterword suggests (recalling Bergson’s complaint that when defining attention, “we always come back to a metaphor”16), what interests me here is the connection between the obviousness of disasters of war and how we (should) read.17 The goal of a criticism of just paying attention, of an attentiveness that replaces the hermeneutics of suspicion with the minimal methodology of just looking, relies on a model of attention evocative, ironically, of the “evenly suspended attention” that Freud demands of the analyst, which hovers and waits since “the things one hears are for the most part things whose meaning is only recognized later on.”18 Though he is famous as a key member of what Paul Ricoeur calls the “school of suspicion,” Freud’s recommendation to the analyst, at first at least, is to listen without suspicion, “not directing one’s notice to anything in particular.” Freud explains: In this way, we spare ourselves a strain in our attention which could not in any case be kept up for several hours daily, and we avoid a danger which is inseparable from the exercise of deliberate attention. For as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him; one point will be fixed in his mind with particular clearness and some other will be correspondingly disregarded, and in making this selection he will be following his expectations or inclinations. This, however, is precisely what must not be done. In making the selection, if he follows his expectations he is in danger of never finding anything but what he already knows; and if he follows his inclinations he will certainly falsify what he may perceive.19

Freud echoes strikingly the Romantic poetics of attention this book has uncovered, particularly Charlotte Smith’s refusal to know in advance what she keeps watch for, and Wordsworth’s attempt to be surprised into a new perception by relaxing, or suspending, an attentive brace. Of course, Freud only asks for a temporary suspension of suspicion during the practice of the psychoanalytic session, a pause just long enough for the analyst to hear what he or the patient might not expect. The suspicious interpretation of a symptom through the disclosure of an unconscious very much below the surface is still his ultimate

184 a fterwor d

goal. And yet Freud’s initial instructions are remarkable as a model of a suspended attention that seeks surprise, though seek is the wrong word here. We might think of this as the Romantic side of psychoanalysis, for though Freud’s “not directing one’s notice to anything in particular” might seem the opposite of Blake’s call to attend to each and every Minute Particular, Freud’s nothing and Blake’s everything merge in their avoidance of a something selected too early or too easily. Both Freud and Blake want to unshackle the “mind-forg’d manacles” by taking into account the way that attention itself can become a restraint.20 Given Weil’s insistence on looking as method, her essay on the Iliad promises an example of what not-interpreting-but-still-writing-about-poetry might look like. Weil’s essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” also positions her attitude of suspended attention as a response to war—to the Trojan War but also to the impending war Weil is watching as she writes in Europe in 1939. War, for Weil, is “a way of imposing another reading upon sensations, a pressure upon the imagination of others,” and reading the Iliad is thus about how to read about war, but also about the ways war puts pressure on how we read.21 Much like Keats’s “thousand Melancholies” that “leaves no room” in Milton, Weil finds in the Iliad an overwhelming “heaping-up of violent deeds” and presents both herself and Homer with a bitter “so it is” attitude. For Weil finds Homer marking the fact that war happened but refusing to take sides. This accumulation of violence is not numbing, though, because of an elusive note, tone, or color that spreads throughout the text: Such a heaping-up of violent deeds would have a frigid effect, were it not for the note of incurable bitterness that continually makes itself heard, though often only a single word marks its presence, often a mere stroke of the verse, or a run-on line. It is in this that the Iliad is absolutely unique, in this bitterness that proceeds from tenderness and that spreads over the whole human race, impartial as sunlight. Never does the tone lose its coloring of bitterness; yet never does the bitterness drop into lamentation. Justice and love, which have hardly any place in this study of extremes and of unjust acts of violence, nevertheless bathe the work in their light without ever becoming noticeable themselves, except as a kind of accent. Nothing precious is scorned, whether or not death is its destiny; everyone’s unhappiness is laid bare without dissimulation or disdain; no man is set above or below the condition common to all men; whatever is destroyed is regretted. Victors and vanquished are

just look ing

185

brought equally near us; under the same head, both are seen as counterparts of the poet, and the listener as well. If there is any difference, it is that the enemy’s misfortunes are possibly more sharply felt.  (30)

Difficult to notice because it is everywhere—“impartial as sunlight”—this odd mixture of the tone and taste of war “spreads over the whole human race” in the Iliad with “extraordinary equity.” Is this the same light that “suddenly dawns” when one has been looking and waiting instead of trying to interpret? This spreading neutrality doesn’t feel entirely neutral, though, for it is governed by the feeling—which is also a taste—of bitterness, recalling Coleridge’s claim at the close of “Fears in Solitude”: “I have told / Most bitter truth, but without bitterness” (151–52). According to Weil, Homer’s bitterness continually makes itself heard so imperceptibly, so slightly, that it is heard only in a single word or stroke of the verse or a run-on line. Where those single words are Weil doesn’t tell us, but a phrase like “makes itself heard” suggests that we need only wait and keep reading and it will find us. This tone is such a slight coloring, which can be neither sought nor pointed to, but which is nevertheless everywhere, spreading over the whole book and the whole human race, like sunlight, everywhere and yet nowhere in particular. There is a kind of synaesthesia of faintness here that recalls the slight phenomenality of the foreign that we saw in Charlotte Smith’s collapse of the difference between mingling and mangling in Chapter 4. For Weil, it is as though the slightness of this bitterness made it impossible to distinguish between taste, color, and tone, as though the evidence were so imperceptible and yet ubiquitous—like the “medicated atmosphere” Coleridge calls meter—that it is not clear whether we are tasting something bitter or feeling the spread of sunlight or hearing a constant low tone in every line we read. I hope readers will notice how foreign this passage is from the way we tend to read and write about literature today, as is Weil’s entire essay. The idea that there is a feeling pervading the entire book, which we cannot quote or unpack but which we sense is there; her reliance on constant passive constructions so that things make themselves felt or heard but we cannot tell where or how; the generalizing about not just the entire text but the whole human race; the absence of close reading or analysis of passages that she quotes as though they were self-evident—all of this is very different from how literary critics today tend to pay attention to texts, or how we teach our students to direct their

186 a fterwor d

notice. Weil’s description of the text is not an account of its narrative but a static portrait of how war—all wars—function, unchanging and unchangeable, as if an illustration of Weil’s idea that “war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own ‘war aims.’ It effaces the very notion of war’s being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end. The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence” (23). Indeed, Weil’s critics suggest that she finds violence in the Iliad where it isn’t there, mistranslating the Greek word for gently as just a bit, a small amount, so as to avoid admitting that, in Homer, the mind can look outward.22 Among classicists, Weil’s essay has been called “perverse,” “bizarre,” “passionately one-sided,” “seriously wrong,” a “useful legitimate misreading,” and a “splendid, though absurdly and deliberately partial” reading.23 I am less interested however in whether Weil’s interpretation is faithful to Homer’s text than I am in tracing the strange resemblance between how Weil imagines herself reading and what she is reading, between her model of a suspended attention and her understanding of Homer’s neutral representation of war. Weil’s refusal to interpret what is in the Iliad, then, yields a poem that itself refuses to take sides. Weil finds in Homer the same neutrality of attention that she cultivates in herself. The connection between Homer not taking sides and Weil not taking sides hinges on attention, since to refuse to take sides during war is not far, for Weil, from refusing to take sides toward a poem. Weil’s essay “Note on the Abolition of All Political Parties” (1942) makes this connection clear: “Almost everywhere,” she writes, “and often for purely technical problems—the operation of taking sides, of taking position for or against, has replaced the obligation to think. This leprosy of the mind began in political circles then spread throughout the country to almost all thinking. It is doubtful that we can cure this disease, which is killing us, if we do not start by abolishing political parties.”24 Using the example of students in school who are given a text by a famous author and asked, “Do you agree or not? Develop your argument,” Weil suggests that asking students to take sides and formulate an argument is fundamentally destructive of what she considers real attention and thought. In this sense, Weil echoes Charlotte Smith’s replacement of an argumentative

just look ing

187

historiography with an attentive one, or even Charles Bonnet’s suggestion that attention could supplant logic. Weil explains the inverse relationship between political parties and attention: By desiring truth alone and by not trying to guess its content in advance, one receives the light. This is how attention works. It is impossible to examine the frighteningly complex problems of public life by being attentive to both discerning truth, justice and the public good on the one hand and maintaining an attitude appropriate to being a member of a group on the other. The human faculty of attention is not capable of both concerns simultaneously. In fact, whoever holds on to one abandons the other.25

We cannot thus take sides and pay attention at the same time. Following this logic, Homer’s refusal to take sides in the Iliad—his neutrality which is present as the nearly imperceptible tone and taste of bitterness—is what allows him to pay attention to war, to understand the basic fact that war itself doesn’t take sides, turning everyone it touches, victor and vanquished equally, into a thing. “An Oblique P l a c e ”

Whereas Blake sought an attention so minute that even the pulsation of the artery would be noticed, Weil figures the heartbeat as a disruption of a theological attention predicated on an impossible renunciation of the self: “To see a landscape as it is when I am not there,” she wishes, and yet “when I am in any place I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.”26 In seeking to “get herself out of the way,” as Anne Carson has put it gently, Weil tries to imagine an impersonal mode of attention that would adequately match the nonhuman landscape.27 Emily Dickinson’s “Four Trees” (1863) experiments with a similar desire: Four Trees—upon a solitary Acre— Without Design Or Order, or Apparent Action— Maintain— The Sun—upon a Morning meets them— The Wind— No nearer Neighbor—have they— But God—

188 a fterwor d

The Acre gives them—Place— They—Him—Attention of Passer by— Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply— Or Boy— What Deed is Their’s unto the General Nature— What Plan They severally—promote—or hinder— Unknown—28

Dickinson’s poem presents a landscape with no one watching it, except the slight possibility of the attention of a passerby, shadow, squirrel, or boy, whose views of this scene remain, emphatically, potentialities through the repeated “or.” Indeed, Dickinson’s variants for “action” were “notice” and “signal,” underscoring the sense that these are trees that, like Erasmus Darwin’s “irritative ideas,” we likely “shun in walking near [them] without attention” (129)—trees without notice or signal. What kind of chance attention is this, then, that could pass by, and if it does, could belong to a boy, squirrel, or even a shadow? Syntactically, the reader of this poem, whom I want to suggest is the poem’s shadowy passerby, stumbles over the paratactic elision of the verb “to give” in the second line of the third stanza: “They—Him—Attention of Passer by—.” The poem is determined to make its reader falter over the ultimately unsuccessful possibility of an enjambment that would cross over all four stanzas. For the transition from the first stanza to the second causes two successive, but conflicted, readings: the first enjambed reading pivots on the way the word “maintain” typically has an object, and suggests that the four trees “Maintain— / The Sun.” The second, corrective reading rejects the prior enjambment and asserts instead that “The Sun—upon a Morning meets them—” leaving “maintain” suspended without any object.29 Intransitive, then, the four trees simply maintain; they subsist. A similar syntactical doubling occurs in between the second and third stanzas, moving us from “But God— / The Acre gives them” to the more likely reading, “The Acre gives them—Place—.” In both cases, the second reading replaces the first to leave the ends of each stanza hanging, with unanswered dashes that ask the reader to hesitate and reread the poem with an attention that heightens as it doubles. Whereas Wordsworth emphasized the ends of lines to experiment with the rhythms of attention and its lapse, Dickinson puts pressure on the

just look ing

189

end of each stanza. In doing so, “Four Trees” brings into view the negative space between each of the four stanzas as an active space that disturbs the reader’s attention rather than as neutral or overlooked background. In other words, these four trees (which recall the “four huge elms” [219] that Coleridge notices at the close of “Fears in Solitude”) are gentle reminders that the poem has four stanzas. Though the landscape has no “Design,” “Order,” or “Apparent Action,” the third stanza describes one action, albeit a slight one that “include[s] its own erasure or deflection,” as Anne-Lise François has found in many of Dickinson’s poems.30 The action of “Four Trees” is the mere experience of noticing something, which the poem figures as the giving of “Place” in exchange for “Attention” (of Passer by, Shadow, Squirrel, or Boy). The exchange of setting for attention reveals why the poem is so intent on arresting the reader’s attention with the interruptive non-ending of each stanza: likening the blank space that surrounds the stanzas to the acre and its sense of place, Dickinson figures the experience of reading the poem itself as that of looking at the landscape. Dickinson is thus figuring her own reader’s attention as the chance attention of a passerby, shadow, squirrel, or boy, all of whom would only notice the acre because of the four trees upon it, just as a reader only looks at a page if there is something on it. Attention is thus a kind of maintenance fee in exchange for “Place,” literalizing what it might mean to pay attention in a very slight poetic economy where notice is the only currency. To be clear, though, the stanza-trees are not themselves paying attention to the page-acre. Rather, it is as though the two parties came to an agreement whereby instead of paying rent, the stanzas attract the attention of the reader, who would otherwise just pass by the page without noticing it. The four trees pay the passerby’s attention to the acre by showing that they have been interrupted by something. The poem is thus about its own demand—or command—of an attention to the blank page which serves as its “Place” in a lyric economy of natural exchange that stages Mallarmé’s “page blanche” as an understated actor in the mutual exchange between text and paper.31 Dickinson wrote “Four Trees” in 1863, and a few critics have identified it as one of her Civil War poems.32 In the same year, she wrote in a letter to T. W. Higginson, “War feels to me an oblique place.”33 “Four Trees” is an experiment with the obliquity of both place and page, the attention to which is re-

190 a fterwor d

warded not with wartime security but with the simple disclosure of that which the viewer would have otherwise just walked right by—the blank acre or page. The poem’s closing word “Unknown” evokes, as Drew Gilpin Faust reminds us, the “hundreds of thousands of men . . . perished without names, identified only, as Walt Whitman put it, ‘by the significant word UNKNOWN.’”34 This resonance complicates my sense that this poem is about reading by suggesting a fundamental wartime illegibility. If, as Karah Mitchell suggests, these trees are anonymous graves of unknown soldiers that passers-by might not even notice, then the mere act of noticing becomes tied up with the difficult wartime experience of mourning hundreds of thousands of unnamed people, and the relation between tree and acre (and stanza and page) takes the shape of an exchange between the violence of war and its landscape.35 The experience of reading, the delicate balancing act of what a reader does and doesn’t notice, becomes inextricable in “Four Trees” from the oblique and illegible places of war. Dickinson’s poem highlights the shift from what Raymond Williams calls “the view itself ” to an understanding of the viewed environment as inseparable from the effects of war; “military geographies are everywhere,” writes Rachel Woodward; “every corner or every place in every land in every part of this world is touched, shaped, viewed, and represented in some way by military forces and activities.”36 Like Beachy Head, “Four Trees” evacuates the posture of paying attention to the landscape during war of the telos of invasion, and wonders instead about what lies under the ground. Dickinson’s poem is not a typical war poem, and as such it signals one shape taken by the afterlife of the Romantic poetics of attention that this book has traced: a poetics that responds to war by imagining other ways to look at the landscape and other ways to read. Almost a hundred years later, in 1960, Paul Celan completed a series of translations of Dickinson’s poems, which included “Four Trees.”37 His translation is strange, eliminating the syntactical ambiguities that ground the reading that I have just provided, definitively end-stopping each stanza, removing all but one of Dickinson’s signature dashes, and imposing a rhyme scheme. And yet, as Marjorie Perloff notes, he somehow makes Dickinson’s poem even more oblique.38 He translates, for example, Dickinson’s “Attention . . . Of Shadow” as “Ein Aug, das huscht, jetzt hier—schon dort [an eye, that flits, now here— already there],” transforming the eye from something that pays attention to

just look ing

191

that which escapes the attention of the poem. He also turns Dickinson’s poem into a prayer, with a direct address to God, which would seem misguided were it not for his quotation, in the same year, of Malebranche’s maxim that attention is prayer. In his famous Meridian speech, given upon receiving the Georg Büchner Prize for literature, Celan announced: The poem attempts to pay careful attention to everything it encounters; it has a finer sense of detail, of outline, of structure, of color, and also of the “movements” and the “suggestions.” These are, I believe, not qualities gained by an eye competing (or cooperating) with mechanical devices which are continually being brought to a higher degree of perfection. No, it is a concentration which remains aware of all of our dates. “Attention”—permit me at this point to quote a maxim of Malebranche which occurs in Walter Benjamin’s essay on Kafka: “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.”39

There is something uncanny about a poem paying attention, noticing us rather than letting itself be noticed, sort of as if a shadow were watching. Celan resists some of the anthropomorphism of this gesture by displacing attention away from a seeing subject (“not qualities gained by an eye”) and toward the formal concentration or compression that also characterizes his own very dense and oblique verse—a density that most of his readers have understood as a response to the difficulty of writing after and about the Holocaust. Indeed, Celan makes it hard to separate the compression of poetic language from the mind’s concentration on a violent history, and speaking to a German audience, Celan is aware that the word Konzentration, as Derrida notes, is a “strong and charged name,” charged with echoes of the Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp.40 A mind concentrating on historical violence, Celan suggests, undergoes its own violent attention. I am aware of moving quickly here from one war to another, of repeating Weil’s gesture of generalizing and conflating wars. Accounting for poetic attention to the American Civil War or World War II would require books of their own, but what I want to propose here is that one of Romanticism’s powerful legacies is a wartime poetics of attention, a poetics obsessed with other ways to watch and other ways to read, that sketch out the contours of an unrecognized and ongoing tradition of war literature that is about neither giving testimony nor representing warfare, but rather about using poetry to consider the ways we do and do not pay attention to and during war.41

192 a fterwor d

T h e Rem a in d e r o f t h e Pa ge

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken. —Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

In his translation of the Iliad (1791), Cowper provides a footnote to the word watchful in a passage that describes Antilochus and Thrasymedes keeping watch from a “distant station,” explaining that “the proper meaning of the Greek eÆpiossome¾nw is not simply looking on, but providing against. And thus their ignorance of the death of Patroclus is accounted for. They were ordered by Nestor to a post in which they should have little to do themselves, except to superintend others, and were consequently too remote from Patroclus to see him fall, or even to hear that he had fallen.”42 Cowper’s note paradoxically links wartime watchfulness, in which the two warriors have “little to do” but watch, with neither seeing nor hearing and thus with not knowing. Keeping watch—that strange combination of something to do and little to do, of providing against and looking on—they neither see Patroclus fall nor hear that he had fallen, and thus they miss the very war they were supposed to be watching. Keeping watch, Cowper suggests, in reading and translating the Iliad, always means not paying attention to something. When overlooking a landscape, looking out and over it, one always, inevitably overlooks something. The wartime poetics of attention identifies this problem with how we look at landscapes and how we read, but it also seeks alternative ways to watch that allow background to drift into foreground, so as to alter “the rhythm of perception and experience . . . in such a way that everything—even the seemingly most neutral—comes to strike us; everything concerns us.”43 What could be more neutral, Dickinson suggests, than the acre behind some trees that we walk by without notice, or, hidden in plain sight of every writer, the blank page behind a text? Keats’s “so it is” brings background into foreground only to find that the space surrounding the text offers no room for the excesses of his wonder. Elizabeth Hamilton finds potential texture there too in her Letters on Education: The skin of my hand is as fine, the nerves are as exquisitely susceptible, as any blind person’s whatever; yet on feeling the sheet of paper on which I write, with the utmost attention of which I am now capable, I cannot perceive any

just look ing

193

difference betwixt the part that is written, and the remainder of the page; yet this, I know, would have been instantly distinguished by a blind lady with whom I was formerly acquainted . . . by Attention the sense of touch might be made much more useful to us than it generally is.44

Hamilton laments her inability to notice through touch “the remainder of the page,” and suggests that attention might improve the sense. This is the optimistic side of a Romantic pedagogy, that rather than asking readers to take sides or contract their brows into a “mask of deliberation,” courts an “exquisite susceptibility” to the empty space around a text and to all that is not written.45 This book has suggested that when Romanticism invites new rhythms of perception that stray from their objects and allow readers to notice the neutral, overlooked, or untouched, this is, on the one hand, a reaction to our countless quotidian habits of attention and lapse, and on the other hand, a response to the various disciplines vying for attention, particularly to the regime of wartime watchfulness. Attention oscillated, sometimes erratically and sometimes seamlessly, in the Romantic period between theology and pedagogy, aesthetics and medicine, and rhetoric and ethics. Particularly conflicted, I hope to have shown, was attention’s role as a hinge attaching reading to war. The insistent question of how to read about and during war—whether it is Keats reading Milton, or Weil reading Homer, Cowper reading Homer, or Celan reading Dickinson—suggests that from Dickinson’s lesson about reading we might take another approach to war, one that pays attention to what is not said or noticed and to the oblique places where there seem no “Design / Or Order, or Apparent Action.”

Note s

I n t ro d u c t i o n

1. s.v. “Attention,” Oxford English Dictionary. Johnson’s Dictionary defines “attention” as “the act of attending or heeding; the act of bending the mind upon any thing.” s.v. “Attention” in Samuel Johnson, A dictionary of the English language: in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers, sixth edition (London: 1785). Eighteenth Century Collections Online, hereafter ECCO. 2. The French attendre means “to wait.” See s.v. “Attend” in Johnson’s A dictionary of the English language. 3. On the philosophical problem of attending to attention itself, see Rodolphe Gasché, “On Seeing Away: Attention and Abstraction in Kant,” CR: The New Centennial Review 8.3 (Winter 2008), 4; and Paul North, The Problem of Distraction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 3–4. 4. See, for example, recent fMRI experiments that “study how our brains respond to literature . . . how cognition is shaped not just by what we read, but how we read it.” Corrie Goldman, “This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen, and Stanford Researchers Are Taking Note,” Stanford Report, September 7, 2012. http://news.stanford.edu/ news/2012/september/austen-reading-fmri-090712.html 5. Though the emergence of “modern psychology” is typically located at the end of the nineteenth century, when it became a profession, the word and the interest

196

notes to the introduction

began much earlier. Gary Hatfield writes, noting the “air of paradox,” that attention actually first became a chapter heading in psychology textbooks in the 1730s. “Attention in Early Scientific Psychology,” in Visual Attention, ed. R. D. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3. See also Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Fernando Vidal, The Sciences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Christopher Fox, ed., Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS Press, 1987). 6. On interdisciplinary or predisciplinary knowledge formations that resisted divisions of labor in the Romantic period, see Jon Klancher, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 4; and Amanda Jo Goldstein, “Irritable Figures: Herder’s Poetic Empiricism,” in The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy, ed. Dalia Nassar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 273. On the instability of attention, see Gasché, who explains via Kant that attention is “inherently unsteady and changeable,” and thus “everything that reposes on attention, everything that attention makes possible—transcendental apperception, self-consciousness, cognition, to name only a few—is likewise inherently unstable.” “On Seeing Away,” 25. Paul North also discusses attention’s undisciplined nature: “Attention may be asserted by disciplines; they may even practice it or claim they are practicing it; nevertheless it cannot be understood in a disciplined way, at least insofar as discipline is associated primarily with attentive thought.” Problem of Distraction, 4. 7. Qtd. in Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 45n. 8. Crary, Suspensions, 49. In his Techniques of the Observer, Crary considers the first few decades of the 1800s, when, he explains, “the individual observer became an object of investigation and a locus of knowledge” and “the status of the observing subject was transformed.” Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 6. Since Crary’s Suspensions, the study of attention in the humanities has proliferated in a variety of directions: Jonathan Beller’s The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), and Kenneth Rogers’s The Attention Complex: Media, Archaeology, Method (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) discuss attention in cultural studies, media, and cinema, building on work by Debord, Hayles, Kittler, and Stiegler; Paul North’s Problem of Distraction provides a philosophical history of the problem of distraction from Aristotle to Benjamin. In literary studies, the recent interest in cognitive science and literature has brought attention to the forefront: Nicholas Dames’s The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) describes novel-reading in the Victorian period as “a rhythmic oscillation

notes to the introduction

197

between attentiveness and distraction, or alertness and obliviousness, that characterized all reading, particularly all reading of novelistic narrative” (77), while Margaret Koehler’s Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) reframes British poetry of the eighteenth century, through cognitive science, as attempts to cultivate attention in readers. Koehler’s very helpful history of attention considers Archibald Alison’s aesthetics (which I discuss in Chapter 1) illustrative of the “pivotal role of attention in the shift from eighteenth-century to Romantic models” (18). I view some of these eighteenth-century models, particularly William Cowper, as more continuous with Romanticism than Koehler does. Natalie Phillips complicates Koehler’s argument by suggesting that though eighteenth-century poets often aligned poetry with a traditional view of attention as a narrowing of thought, in practice “they used techniques that emphasized readers’ ability to maintain concentration amidst distraction, manage multiple information streams, and recognize layered rhythmic patterns.” “The Art of Attention: Navigating Distraction and Rhythms of Focus in Eighteenth-Century Poetry,” in Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered, ed. Kate Parker and Courtney Weiss Smith (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 188. 9. One early exception to this tradition is David Braunschweiger, Lehre von der Aufmerksamkeit in der Psychologie des 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Hermann Haacke, 1899). More recent shifts in focus that have started to account for earlier theories of attention include Gary Hatfield, “Attention in Early Scientific Psychology”; Matthew Riley, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Matthew Bell, The German Tradition of Psychology in Literature and Thought, 1700–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Margaret Koehler, Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 234–46; Lorraine Daston, “The Empire of Observation, 1600–1800,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Lorraine Daston, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 10. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 12. Unless noted, emphasis within quotations appears in the original source. 11. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 122. 12. Théodule Ribot, The Psychology of Attention (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1890), 17–18. 13. Klaus W. Lange, Susanne Reichl, Katharina M. Lange, Lara Tucha, and Ol-

198

notes to the introduction

iver Tucha, “The History of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,” ADHD 2.4 (December 2010): 241–55. 14. Alexander Crichton, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement, Volume I (London: T. Cadell, 1798; New York: AMS Press, 1976), 270–71. Hereafter cited parenthetically. On Alexander Crichton’s life and influence, see E. M. Tansey, “The Life and Works of Sir Alexander Crichton, F.R.S. (1763–1856): A Scottish Physician to the Imperial Russian Court,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 38.2 (1984): 241–59. 15. Thomas Reid, Essays on the intellectual powers of man (Edinburgh: John Bell, 1785), 60. ECCO. Reid’s understanding of attention is more complicated than this. See Gideon Yaffe, “Thomas Reid on Consciousness and Attention,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39.2 (2009): 165–94. 16. “Up until the end of the eighteenth century, when Crichton published his inquiry, it was uncommon to focus on mental issues from a physiological or medical perspective.” Lange et al., “History of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,” 242. Interestingly, Gasché points out that Kant understood hypochondria as a “sickness of the faculty of attention” in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, which was also published in 1798. “Attention, in this case, suffers from being undivided, that is, from giving undivided attention to inner, bodily sensations.” Gasché, “On Seeing Away,” 23. See Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 106. “Malady of not marking” comes from William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II; Act I, Scene 2, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 933. 17. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (New York: Routledge, 2013), 239–40. “Organs of attention” is Thomas De Quincey recalling Wordsworth in Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets (London: Dent, 1961), 122. 18. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 240. 19. Wordsworth’s claims suggest the extent to which our contemporary anxieties about attention are limited neither to our time nor our specific new media, but rather echo those that accompanied the emergence of the newspaper, of novels, of big cities—concerns that are perhaps more endemic to the precariousness of our concept of attention itself than they are determined by any specific media. 20. Benedict Anderson calls newspaper-reading in the eighteenth century a “ceremony incessantly repeated at daily intervals.” Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 35. See also Kevis Goodman’s excellent chapter “Cowper’s Georgic of the News: The ‘Loophole’ in the Retreat” in Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

notes to the introduction

199

21. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 156. 22. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 283. On total war, see David Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), esp. 7–20. 23. Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 12; 39. 24. In addition to Favret’s important study, I am thinking of John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Jeffrey Cox, Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Jan Mieszkowski, Watching War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillon, 2002). 25. Christensen, Romanticism, 84–85. 26. H.F.B. Wheeler and A.M. Broadley, Napoleon and the Invasion of England: The Story of the Great Terror (London: J. Lane, 1908), I: 104. On the pervasiveness of the fears of invasion and the way that “daily life for most people would have been punctuated with reminders of the threat of invasion and the need for public vigilance and support,” see Mark Philp’s “Introduction: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815,” in Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006). 27. s.v. “Attention,” def. 5a, Oxford English Dictionary. 28. By His Majesty’s command. Adjutant General’s office, June 1. 1792. Rules and regulations for the formations, field-exercise, and movements, of His Majesty’s Forces (London: War-Office, 1792), vi. ECCO. 29. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 223. 30. Bell, First Total War, 7. 31. The phrase “half soldier” is from Frank J. Klingberg and Sigurd B. Hustvedt, eds., The Warning Drum: The British Home Front Faces Napoleon; Broadsides of 1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944), 34. Compare with Judith Butler’s recent claim that “when the alert goes out, every member of the population is asked to be a ‘foot soldier’ in Bush’s army.” Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London/New York: Verso, 2004), 39. 32. Qtd. in Anne Secord, “Coming to Attention: A Commonwealth of Observ-

200

notes to the introduction

ers during the Napoleonic Wars,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 422–23. Secord’s excellent essay shares my interest in how wartime watchfulness extended to a variety of disciplines in the period, arguing that scientific observation was intertwined with wartime attention, since “the watchfulness of a nation at war, in some cases at least, provided an observational context that contributed to the study of marine plants” (429). 33. John Milton, “Paradise Lost,” in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1957), 225. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), 1–3. 34. Klingberg and Hustvedt, Warning Drum, 38. Critics of political alarmism also linked the propagation of war to the straining of nerves. Thomas Erskine writes of the attempt to “save the country rushing down this precipice of ruin into the phrenzy of alarm, which every nerve of government had been strained to propagate.” A View of the Causes and Consequences of the present War with France (London: J. Debrett, 1797), 43. ECCO. 35. Klingberg and Hustvedt, Warning Drum, 33. 36. The Alarmist (London: J. Owen, 1796), viii. ECCO. 37. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Men and the Times,” in Essays on His Times in the Morning Post and The Courier, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 volumes, Volume 3 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 1: 423. 38. I am borrowing here from Judith Butler’s suggestion that “[w]ar sustains its practices through acting on the senses, crafting them to apprehend the world selectively, deadening affect in response to certain images and sounds, and enlivening affective responses to others.” Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 51–52. 39. Francis Wollaston, The origin and insidious arts of Jacobinism: a warning to the people of England (London: 1799), 1. ECCO. In a speech in 1793, Charles James Fox asserted, “The danger, whatever might be its degree, had two sources: first, the fear of the propagation of French opinions in this country, and next, the fear of the progress of the French arms.” The Speech of the Right Hon. Charles James Fox, in the House of Commons, Jan. 4, 1793 on the Alien Bill (London: Printed for James Ridgway, 1793), 4. 40. The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Volume 31 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1818), 534. 41. Noah Webster, Sentimental and Humourous Essays, conducive to economy and happiness (London: Printed for J. and A. Arch, 1798), 4–5. ECCO. 42. s.v. “Fidgetiness,” Oxford English Dictionary. 43. William Cowper, “Conversation,” in The Poems of William Cowper, Volume 1,

notes to the introduction

201

ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), lines 207–8, 213–14. 44. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 volumes, Volume 7 of Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1: 45. Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe, from 1794 to 1805, trans. L. Dora Schmitz, Volume 1 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1877), 366. 45. Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe, 366. 46. On the tendency in the eighteenth century to view divided attention as a liability, see Koehler, Poetry of Attention, 26. 47. See Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 175–81. 48. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1: 107. 49. On the term “security” and its relation to “care,” see John T. Hamilton, Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 50. See my discussion of “Puzzles for Volunteers!!” in Chapter 1. 51. I am drawing here on Kevis Goodman’s description of “that teeming historical presentness that is ‘not yet’ fully formed as knowledge, but presses insistently, insinuating itself at the level of recurrent figure.” Georgic Modernity, 105. Lauren Berlant also provides a helpful description of the experience of “feeling historical in the present,” when “the atmosphere suggests a shift of historic proportions in the terms and processes of the conditions of continuity of life. Norms and intuitions suddenly feel off: a sensed perturbation of world-shaping dimensions impels recasting the projected impact of small and large gestures, noticings, impulses, moments.” “Thinking about Feeling Historical,” Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008): 5. 52. All quotations from The Prelude are from the 1805 version from The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), here IX: 85. Hereafter cited parenthetically by book and line number. 53. The phrase is Charlotte Smith’s. See Charlotte Smith, Minor morals, and sketches of natural history (1798), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, Volume 12, ed. Stuart Curran (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), 259. 54. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 55. All references to Blake’s work are to this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. The quotations from the Statute of Winchester (1285) are from William Hawkins, A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown; or, A System of the Principal Matters relating to that subject, digested under proper heads, sixth edition (Dublin: Eliz. Lynch, 1788), 2: 874. ECCO.

202

notes to the introduction

55. Thomas De Quincey, “Presence of Mind,” in The Works of Thomas De Quincey (London/Brookfield: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), 17: 49. 56. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), 201. Foucault uses “counter-conduct” instead of his preliminary term “dissidence” for “these forms of resistance that concern . . . a power that assumes the task of conducting men in their life and daily existence” (200). Foucault is talking specifically about countering the pastoral power undergirding modern governmentality, a power linked to the act of keeping watch (127). 57. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its influence on morals and happiness. The Third Edition Corrected (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798), 1: 230. ECCO. 58. Charlotte Smith, Desmond (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001), 311. 59. Favret, War at a Distance, 18. 60. William Godwin, Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1988), 128. 61. In “Psychology and Politics in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams: Double Bond or Double Bind?” Melinda Alliker Rabb notices a similar connection, writing that “perhaps the problem with the bonds between politics and psychology in the novel is that Godwin makes political injustice and emotional agitation so compelling.” In Fox, Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century, 63. My suggestion here is that Godwin’s point may be that the emotional agitation caused by political injustice can be mobilized against the very injustice which causes it. 62. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2: 69. 63. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 64. William Cowper, The Task, in The Poems of William Cowper, Volume 2, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), book IV, lines 288–90. Hereafter cited parenthetically by book and line number. 65. Marshall Brown reads these lines as reflecting the “divorce of consciousness from attention.” Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 69. See also chapter 7, “The Task of Attention,” in Margaret Koehler’s Poetry of Attention. 66. Maurice Blanchot evokes the “sterile act” when he warns and instructs his reader: “The attention should be exerted, so to speak, by this narrative in such a way as to draw it slowly out from the initial distraction, without which, however—he senses it well—attention would become a sterile act.” Awaiting Oblivion [L’Attente l’oubli], trans. John Gregg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 9. 67. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 31. 68. Crary, Suspensions, 47.

notes to the introduction

203

69. Walter Benjamin, “Ibizan Sequence,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 592. 70. See Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 88–91. 71. For this, as well as a lengthy list of how the figure of absorption was used in hymns, see Gordon Mursell, English Spirituality: From 1700 to the Present Day (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 160. 72. John and Charles Wesley, The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, Volume 9 (London: Wesleyan-Methodist Conference Center, 1870), 408. 73. Ribot refers in his section on “Morbid States of Attention,” to the “Castillo interior” of Saint Theresa where he finds a description of the seven stations, or degrees of prayer, one must pass to arrive at the interior castle of the soul. Psychology of Attention, 96–100. On theological modes of attention, see David Marno, “Easy Attention: Ignatius of Loyola and Robert Boyle,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44.1 (2014): 135–61; and Moshe Barasch, “Waking: A Form of Attention in Ritual and in Religious Art,” in Aufmerksamkeiten, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Munich: Fink, 2001). Lorraine Daston also discusses the influence of natural theology on early modes of scientific observation: “Throughout the eighteenth century, natural theology—the worship of God through the study of His works—supplied the motivation and rationale for an expenditure of attention that contemporaries perceived as uncomfortably close to religious reverence.” “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” 105–8. Daston discusses the conflict between attention to God and attention to science, writing that in theory, each minute observation “was the bottom rung on a ladder that ascended to God’s wondrous providence,” but in practice, there was a real anxiety among naturalists about an attention that should have been devoted to God (108). On the relation between the theological model of attention and the military one, see Rogers, Attention Complex, 79. 74. Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 90. 75. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight,” in Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano (New York: Norton, 2004), 121, lines 42–43. 76. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, 2 volumes, Volume 4 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 1: 17. 77. Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 109–10. 78. According to Gasché, Kant views attention as a “purely sensible faculty,” one not as developed as abstraction, which “presupposes something higher—the freedom

204

notes to the introduction

of thought, autonomy, and culture.” “On Seeing Away,” 11. And yet Gasché goes on to suggest that attention is more complicated than this, since it actually requires abstraction. 79. See, for example, Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 109–10. Cowper’s “brown study” and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” both echo an interest in these charms “for the imagination,” since in staring at the fire, they are exploring what Kant calls not beautiful objects but “beautiful views of objects.” “In the latter, taste seems to fasten not so much on what the imagination apprehends in this field as on what gives it occasion to invent, i.e. on what are strictly speaking the fantasies with which the mind entertains itself while it is being continuously aroused by the manifold which strikes the eye, as for instance in looking at the changing shapes of a fire in a hearth or of a rippling brook, neither of which are beauties, but both of which carry with them a charm for the imagination, because they sustain its free play” (126–27). On charms as ineligible for aesthetic judgment, see Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 23. Kant also discusses this in Anthropology, writing that “things like flickering fires . . . play in the mind and it becomes absorbed in thought” (66–67). 80. Crary, Suspensions, 46–47. Gasché explains that Kant gives his most elaborate account of attention in Anthropology. “On Seeing Away,” 4. See also Riley, Musical Listening, 9–10. 81. Terada, Looking Away, 116; 6–7; 4. 82. Gasché, “On Seeing Away,” 22. Gasché and Terada’s titles are strikingly similar, but Gasché’s “seeing away” is abstraction, whereas Terada’s “looking away” is a cultivation of perceptions that “seem below or marginal to normal appearance” (3–4). 83. Terada, Looking Away, 19. Terada’s argument is directly concerned with Kant. She writes that “the Critique of Judgment excludes the most ephemeral and indefinite perceptions from aesthetic experience because they cannot sustain the thought of commonality that Kant wishes to affirm” (6), and that though Kant’s disinterested aesthetic judgment is an attempt to subtract “the coercive effect of fact perception,” he differs from the phenomenophiles she describes by suggesting that these judgments “are also able to present themselves as necessary conclusions to which everyone ought to come” (98–99). 84. See Steven Goldsmith’s reading of the instructor’s “cruel eye” in “The Schoolboy” as indicating a visual discipline figured by the letter O, an eye that “drives all joy away.” Blake’s Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 216. 85. S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (New York: Peter Smith, 1947), 268.

notes to the introduction

205

86. Foucault, Security, 184; 165. 87. Psalms, carefully suited to the Christian worship in the United States of America (Philadelphia: 1799), 43. ECCO. On the possible provenance of the “Wesley tune” in “The Shepherd,” see Martha Winburn England and John Sparrow, Hymns Unbidden: Donne, Herbert, Blake, Emily Dickinson and the Hymnographers (New York: New York Public Library, 1966), 49. On Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience as revisions of popular hymns, see chapter 5 of Michael Farrell, Blake and the Methodists (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Foucault, Security, 128; 141. 88. Charles Bonnet, The contemplation of nature, 2 volumes (London: T. Longman, 1766), I: liv–lv. ECCO. 89. David Simpson, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1979), 87. Harold Bloom calls Blake’s shepherds “ironically accepted figures,” writing that the poem’s “disturbing element” is that “the Shepherd inspires a confidence in his flock which is entirely dependent upon his actual presence.” “Introduction,” in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 2–3. 90. Klingberg and Hustvedt, Warning Drum, 131. 91. Simpson, Irony and Authority, 87. 92. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 51. Foucault gives a history of Christian pastoral power as a “power of care” with a “sense of vigilance with regard to any possible misfortune” that he links to the emergence of modern governmentality in Security, 127. The entire lecture series develops a history of pastoral power through the figures of the “king-shepherd” and the “god-shepherd” and the “crisis of the pastorate” that precipitated new political structures. See esp. 121–51. 93. James Chandler, “Blake and the Syntax of Sentiment: An Essay on ‘Blaking’ Understanding,” in Blake, Nation, and Empire, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 113. 94. s.v. “Pay,” v.1 def. 1a, Oxford English Dictionary. 95. David Hartley, Observations on man, his frame, his duty, and his expectations. In two parts (London: S. Richardson, 1749), 1: 10. ECCO. 96. Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2017). 97. Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills (New York: Routledge, 2004), 24. 98. “What Is Critique?” in The Essential Foucault, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: New Press, 2003), 265. For Foucault, this art is a direct response to the idea instilled by Christian pastoral that each individual “had to be governed and had to let himself be governed” (264).

206

notes to ch apter 1

Chapter 1

1. Anne Secord makes a similar observation in “Coming to Attention,” 422. 2. Here I am indebted to Steven Goldsmith’s claim that Blake’s reader becomes, in Milton’s words, “vigorous most / When most inactive deem’d.” Blake’s Agitation, 145–48. 3. Charles Pigott, A political dictionary: explaining the true meaning of words. Illustrated and exemplified in the lives, morals, character and conduct of the following most illustrious personages, among many others (London: D. I. Eaton, 1795), 124. ECCO. On the volunteer movement, see Austin Gee, The British Volunteer Movement 1794–1814 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Colley, Britons, 287–300. 4. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), I: 120. 5. On reading as a form of self-experimentation in the period, see Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 115–16. 6. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) (Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1956), 21. 7. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, ed. and trans. Hans Aarsleff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 23. Attention, for Condillac, is a liveliness of perception that causes us to seem to not notice other perceptions. Condillac claims that we are actually perceiving everything but only very faintly. Daston and Galison describe Condillac’s model of spontaneous attention in Objectivity, 241–42. 8. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792) (Boston/ Cambridge: James Munroe and Company, 1859), 50. For a helpful account of Stewart’s relation to Reid, Hume, Condillac, and other eighteenth-century philosophers, with an emphasis on language, see chapter 4 of Robin Valenza, Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Koehler’s account of Reid and Stewart on attention in Poetry of Attention, 31–34. 9. Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 150. 10. Stewart, Elements, 53. 11. De Quincey, Confessions, 117. Crary discusses attention “as part of an account of subjectivity not inherently synonymous with consciousness.” Suspensions, 44. 12. Jonathan Crary writes, “it is only when consciousness ceases to have an unquestioned foundational priority that attention emerges as a problem.” Suspensions, 57–58. 13. Ibid.

notes to ch apter 1

207

14. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia: or, the Laws of Organic Life, Volume I (London: 1796; Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2007), 53. Hereafter cited parenthetically. Darwin also explains the difficulty of attending to attention itself through these irritative ideas, which “make up a part of the chain of our waking thoughts, introducing other ideas that engage our attention, though themselves are unattended to, we find it very difficult to investigate by what steps many of our hourly trains of ideas gain their admittance.” 15. De Quincey’s description of listening rather than reading provides an exception to this. 16. Qtd. in Fox, “Introduction” to Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century, 11. 17. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric. In two volumes (London: Strahan, Cadell, and Creech, 1776), 2: 16–17. ECCO. According to Christopher Fox, Campbell was one of the first to use the English word “psychology,” though he considers it a branch of physiology. See Fox, “Defining Eighteenth-Century Psychology” in Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century, 3. Matthew Riley discusses how Campbell’s model of rhetorical perspicuity was used by eighteenth-century music theorists. See Musical Listening, 25–28. 18. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 109; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, Treatise on Education (1762), trans. William H. Payne (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2003), 141. See Brian McGrath’s excellent account of this passage in The Poetics of Unremembered Acts: Reading, Lyric, Pedagogy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 39. 19. Thomas Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the principles of common sense (Edinburgh: A. Millar, 1765), 84. ECCO. 20. Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777) (Menston: Scolar Press, 1968), 268. 21. Jean-Paul Sartre, “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 29. 22. J. C. Pleydell, An Essay on Field Fortification (London: J. Nourse, 1768). ECCO. 23. Arthur Young, An idea of the present state of France, and of the consequences of the events passing in that kingdom (London: 1795), 83. ECCO. 24. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ed. David Womersley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 168. 25. Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 1: 358. ECCO. On Condillac’s model of attention as “an ongoing—almost musical—cognitive process of filtering and prioritizing multiple stimuli,” see Phillips, “Art of Attention,” 196. 26. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 289. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

208

notes to ch apter 1

The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 3: 3762. 27. s.v. “Discriminate,” Oxford English Dictionary. 28. Priestley, Course of Lectures, 268. 29. Ibid., 269. 30. William Wordsworth, “There Was a Boy,” in The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 145. Text citations are to line numbers of this edition. 31. Helpful accounts of Wordsworth and Coleridge on meter include Noel Jackson’s Science and Sensation, 125–28; Brendan O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1995); and Susan Wolfson, “Romanticism and the Measures of Meter,” Eighteenth-Century Life 16.3 (1992): 221–46. See also Adela Pinch’s discussion of the connections between meter and sexual pleasure for Wordsworth in Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 86–97. 32. Benjamin, “Ibizan Sequence,” 592. 33. I am referring to Wordsworth’s “gentle shock of mild surprise” in “There Was a Boy,” which I discuss in detail in Chapter 3. 34. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2: 7. 35. Ibid., 2: 69. 36. Ibid., 2: 66. 37. Meter is thus like Kant’s charm: it makes beauty more intuitable, and it “awaken[s] and sustain[s] attention to the object,” but if one attends to the charm itself, it can damage the judgment of taste. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 109–10. Noel Jackson describes Coleridge’s account as “a consciousness-raising medium that eludes conscious apprehension in its own right.” Science and Sensation, 128. See also Wolfson, “Romanticism and the Measure of Meter,” 230–34. 38. Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation, 226. See also Jackson, Science and Sensation, 91–99. 39. Gasché, “On Seeing Away,” 23. 40. Kant, Anthropology, 106. 41. On Erasmus Darwin’s influence on Blake, see chapter 3 of Desmond KingHele, Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986). 42. Nicholas Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 184. On the Watch Fiends as spies and informers, see also David Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance, and Surveillance 1790–1820 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 6. 43. Qtd. in Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London: Granta Books, 2010), 155.

notes to ch apter 1

209

44. Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 160. 45. See David Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 36. 46. Worrall, Radical Culture, 70. Jerusalem includes the proper name Schofield, the soldier who accused Blake of uttering treasonable words, as well as the names of the magistrates for his case. 47. The same was true of landscape poetry. As Tim Fulford writes of Wordsworth and Coleridge, “even nature poetry became a matter of suspicion—excursions made for the purpose of writing a poem, to be called ‘The Brook,’ after the manner of Cowper, were viewed as attempts to ascertain the navigability of the local rivers for invading French ships.” Landscape, Liberty, and Authority: Poetry and Criticism from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 217. 48. Worrall, Radical Culture, 73. 49. Saree Makdisi describes the repeated departure from Locke’s five senses that decides who we are as “the result of political circumstances rather than inevitable, natural, or divine givens (as they are for Locke).” William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 81. Cited parenthetically in text. 50. Godwin, Caleb Williams, 5. John Thelwall, Political Lectures No. 1 On the Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers, and the Conduct to be observed by the friends of liberty during the continuance of such a system (London: 1793), 7. 51. Worrall, Radical Culture, 7. 52. See Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History, 162–63; and Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation, 304. 53. Theodor Adorno, “Punctuation Marks,” in Notes to Literature, Volume 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1: 96. 54. On Blake’s resistance to the discourse of “industriousness” in the emerging industrial culture, see Makdisi’s third chapter in William Blake and the Impossible History. 55. John Ruskin, “The Stones of Venice” (1853), in Unto This Last and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 84. 56. Archibald Alison, Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste (Dublin: Byrne, 1790), 7–8. ECCO. On this passage as a sign of a distinct shift from the “eighteenth century attentive ideal” to Romantic models of attention, see Koehler, Poetry of Attention, 18–20. 57. Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation, 231. The word “period” was used as a synonym for the full stop in Blake’s time, though it also referred to “a circuit, or a sentence, in which the meaning is suspended, till the whole is finished.” Joseph Robertson, An Essay on Punctuation (1785) (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), 90–91.

210

notes to ch apters 1 and 2

58. Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History, 164. 59. See F. B. Curtis, “Blake and the ‘Moment of Time’: An Eighteenth Century Controversy in Mathematics,” Philological Quarterly 51 (1972): 460–70. See also Makdisi, who discusses the “strict monetization of clock time toward the end of the eighteenth century” which shows how “labor power—the capacity to do work—became a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market.” William Blake and the Impossible History, 111. Mary Favret discusses the temporality of war, and specifically describes how ownership of a watch helped fund the war effort through the tax on time pieces, in War at a Distance, 50. 60. Robert Boyle, The Works of Robert Boyle, Volume 7, 1672–3, ed. Michal Hunter and Edward B. Davis (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), 251. 61. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (Germany: Kramer, 1961), 3. On Hooke’s discussion of the period, see chapter 6 of Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 62. Stewart, Elements, 60–61. 63. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 390. 64. On the friend-enemy distinction in Jerusalem, see Karen Swann, “Blake’s Jerusalem: Friendship with Albion,” in A Companion to Romantic Poetry, ed. Charles Mahoney (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Chapter 2

1. See “Frontispiece to an English edition of Charles Le Brun’s ‘Expressions of the passions of the soul’ (left); a face expressing attention.” Engraving, c. 1760, after C. Le Brun. Wellcome images. wellcomeimages.org 2. Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind; or a supplement to the art of logic (London: 1789), 123. ECCO. The other passages are from Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on Education, Volume 2 (Dublin: H. Colbert, 1801), 63; and Helvétius, A Treatise on Man, his intellectual faculties and his education, Volume 1, trans. W. Hooper (London: B. Law, 1777), 265. ECCO. 3. See Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s “Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière” (New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 1994). 4. Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on physiognomy, designed to promote the knowledge and the love of mankind, illust. Thomas Holloway, trans. Henry Hunter (London: 1789), 2: 69. ECCO. 5. Reid, Essays on the intellectual powers of man, 63. 6. Yaffe, “Thomas Reid on consciousness and attention,” 189.

notes to ch apter 2

211

7. Ibid. 8. Reid, Essays on the intellectual powers of man, 513. Descartes makes a similar point about attention and the violent passions when he writes: “The soul can prevent itself from hearing a slight noise or feeling a slight pain by attending very closely to some other thing, but it cannot in the same way prevent itself from hearing thunder or feeling a fire that burns the hand. Likewise it can easily overcome the lesser passions, but not the stronger and more violent ones.” The Passions of the Soul (1649), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 345. 9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, Volume 1 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 52. 10. Elaine Scarry, Thinking in an Emergency (New York: Norton, 2011), 14. 11. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2: 71–72. 12. Coleridge, The Friend, 1: 17. 13. The quotation from Charles James Fox is from The Parliamentary History of England, Volume 30, 1391. 14. Joseph Alleine, An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners (London: J. Paramore, 1782); Jasper Arnaud, An alarm to all persons touching their health and lives (London: T. Payne, 1740). Both are from ECCO. 15. An alarm to the public, and a bounty promised to every loyal subject, who will come forward to repel the enemy. Arms and Accoutrements provided for every man, gratis (Yarmouth: F. Bush, 1798). ECCO. 16. Roland Barthes, The Neutral; lecture course at the Collège de France, trans. Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 207. 17. Anna Barbauld, “An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts,” in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), 264. 18. Daniel Isaac Eaton, The British Tocsin; or, Proofs of National Ruin (London: 1795), 47. 19. Edmund Burke, “Letters on a Regicide Peace,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, in Twelve Volumes, Volume 5 (New York: J. F. Taylor, 1901), 380. On the development of the telegraph during the Napoleonic Wars, see Howard Mallinson, Send It by Semaphore: The Old Telegraphs during the War with France (Marlborough: Crowood Press, 2005). 20. Qtd. in Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 31. 21. The Alarm. To which is subjoined Great News from Abroad. A most profitable New Ballad (London?: 1745?), 3. ECCO.

212

notes to ch apter 2

22. s.v. “Alarmist,” def. A, Oxford English Dictionary. Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958–78), VII: 415. 23. The Parliamentary History of England, Volume 31, 602. 24. Ibid. 25. Politics for the People; or, a Salmagundy for Swine (New York: Greenwood Reprint Corporation, 1968), 2: 427. 26. The Alarmist, vi. 27. s.v. “Terrorist,” def. 1a, Oxford English Dictionary. Marc Redfield traces our contemporary “war on terror” back to Burke’s counter-revolutionary writing from the 1790s, where he finds “the terms of a modern politics of paranoia.” The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 7. For Redfield’s history of the words “Terror” and “Terrorist,” see 72–73. 28. s.v. “Terrorist,” def. 2, Oxford English Dictionary. 29. R. J. White, Waterloo to Peterloo (London: William Heinemann, 1957), 104–5. White is describing the way that the “Liverpool Administration evolved the technique of repression generally known as ‘Alarm,’” which was “taken over from William Pitt” (104). 30. The shift I am describing participates in Foucault’s description of the birth of the modern state following the sixteenth century that happens “when governmentality became a calculated and reflected practice,” a practice he links to pastoral power and the art of “manipulating men, an art of monitoring them and urging them on step by step.” Security, 165. Giorgio Agamben writes about the origin of the state of exception in Revolutionary France. See State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 11. Paul North writes that “diversionary tactics can perhaps be explained as an excrescence of the state of exception in which we are quoted as living.” Problem of Distraction, 178. 31. The Parliamentary History of England, Volume 31, 534. 32. Qtd. in Mark Jones, “Alarmism, Public-Sphere Performatives, and the Lyric Turn: Or, What Is ‘Fears in Solitude’ Afraid Of?” boundary 2 30.3 (2003): 72. 33. Lauren Berlant, “The Epistemology of State Emotion,” in Dissent in Dangerous Times, ed. Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 47. Berlant discusses the war on terror as a war on a feeling (48). See also Adela Pinch’s argument that the idea that words can “call feeling into being” is an insight that became urgent for both poets and politicians in the Romantic period in England. Strange Fits of Passion,71–73. 34. John Stewart, The Tocsin of Social Life; Addressed to all the nations of the civilized world; in a discovery of the laws of nature relative to human existence (London: 1803), 2. 35. The Parliamentary History of England, Volume 30, 221–22.

notes to ch apter 2

213

36. The Parliamentary History of England, Volume 31, 554. 37. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, 101. 38. Ibid., 86. 39. The Parliamentary History of England, Volume 31, 554. 40. John Aikin, “Personification in Poetry,” in The Monthly Magazine and British Register (London: R. Phillips, 1798), 6: 263. 41. Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, 163, lines 47–49. 42. Barbauld, Sins of government, sins of the nation; or, A discourse for the fast, appointed on April 19, 1793, in Selected Poetry and Prose, 303. 43. Brian Massumi, “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption,” Theory and Event 10.2 (2007), section 18. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/ v010/10.2massumi.html. Mark Jones has described a similar aspect of alarmism, writing of the “‘self-realizing’ alarm—a conception roughly congruent with the Austinian performative,” and pointing to the difficulty of making a nonperformative, “nonacting statement” in light of the question “Can one discuss matters of alarm without becoming, ipso facto, alarmist?” Jones, “Alarmism,” 3, 6. 44. Christensen, Romanticism, 89. 45. Qtd. in Nick Piombino, “The Aural Ellipsis and the Nature of Listening in Contemporary Poetry,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53. On the visible and its capacity to distract, see William Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 12–13. 46. Samuel Johnson, Political tracts, Containing, The False Alarm. Falkland’s Islands. The Patriot; and, Taxation no tyranny (London: W. Strahan; T. Cadell, 1776). ECCO. Johnson’s essay is not about an invasion alarm. It is in defense of the House of Commons’ decision to reject the election of John Wilkes. See Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 444. 47. Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 69. Mary Favret points out that both “loophole” and “retreat” are also military terms. See Mary Favret, “War and Everyday Life in Britain,” in War in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815, ed. Roger Chickering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 402. 48. Coleridge, “Fears in Solitude, Written, April 1798, During the Alarms of an Invasion,” in Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, 112, lines 103–4. Hereafter cited parenthetically by line number. 49. Favret, War at a Distance, 13. 50. Ibid., 23. 51. Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 98. 52. In “War and Everyday Life in Britain,” Favret points out that Cowper’s “imagery deliberately confuses the separation between home and war,” and suggests that

214

notes to ch apter 2

his emphasis on the word “still” recalls earlier wartime questions, such as “Have our troops awak’d? or do they still . . . / Snore?” (401). 53. Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981), 123. 54. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, 123. 55. Cowper, “The Needless Alarm,” in Poems of William Cowper, Volume 3. Hereafter cited parenthetically by line number. 56. For an account of Cowper’s fervent opposition to fox hunting, see Donna Landry’s The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 119–32. 57. The OED is not attuned to Cowper’s joke, citing his use of “mutton” here as an example of using the term to mean “A sheep, esp. one intended to be eaten.” s.v. “Mutton,” def. 2a. 58. The Alarm, 3. 59. Scarry, Thinking in an Emergency, 15. 60. Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” in War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), 5. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 61. Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 86. See also Mary Favret’s discussion of noise in Cowper in War at a Distance, 55–56. 62. Compare this to Burke’s observation in his Philosophical Enquiry: “For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain” (101). 63. On “painful cognitive noise” as the noise of history, an experience of the presentness of ongoing history beyond lived experience or phenomenological verification, see Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 64. See also Linda Colley’s description of the role of sound in military recruitment during these war years. Britons, 307. 64. Favret, War at a Distance, 54. Favret links the meantime of waiting for the news during war to “affective dissonance—not just contending emotions of hope and fear, but also the oscillations between intensity and anomie” (79). 65. Foucault, Security, 130. Foucault makes clear the stakes of Cowper’s pastoral, since he finds the Christian pastorate as the background of modern governmentality as a “calculated and reflected practice” (165). 66. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 100. Scholars of sound in film today call this kind of listening “reduced listening”: it “takes the sound as itself the object to be observed instead of as a vehicle for something else.” Michel Chion, “The Three Listening Modes,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (New York: Routledge, 2012), 50. Chion borrows the idea of reduced listening from the work of Pierre Schaeffer.

notes to ch apter 2

2 15

67. David Carroll Simon, “Andrew Marvell and the Epistemology of Carelessness,” ELH 82 (2015): 556–58. 68. Coleridge, Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, 110n. 69. Mark Rawlinson, “Invasion! Coleridge, the Defense of Britain and the Cultivation of the Public’s Fear,” in Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793– 1822, ed. Philip Shaw (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 118. 70. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2004), 18. See also her citation of Wordsworth’s “Preface” and of Baudelaire’s indictment of the way that civilized man “washes down his morning repast” with the newspaper, “this loathsome appetizer” (106–7). 71. J.R.J. Jackson, ed., Coleridge: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 49. More recently, Paul Magnuson reads the entire volume Fears in Solitude as a strategic self-defense, “presenting simultaneously the author and publisher of ‘Fears in Solitude’ as both patriots and Christians” so as to “take the heat off both.” Paul Magnuson, “The Politics of ‘Frost at Midnight,’” The Wordsworth Circle 22.1 (1991): 4. See also Mark Canuel, “Romantic Fear,” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2008), http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/secularism/canuel/canuel.html; Jones, “Alarmism”; Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination, 123; and Christensen, Romanticism, 84–105. 72. Jan Mieszkowski, “Fear of a Safe Place,” in Fear across the Disciplines, ed. Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 107. Mark Jones also doubts the sincerity of “this hackneyed passage, so different from the rest of the poem,” and suggests that the phrase “impious foe” refers, surprisingly, not to the French, but to the British. “Alarmism,” 85. 73. Peter Porter, The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems (London: Picador, 2010), 27. 74. Anthony Thwaite, “Peter Porter: Poet Celebrated Among the Finest of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century,” The Independent. April 24, 2010. http://www. independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/peter-porter-poet-celebrated-as-among-the-finest-of-the-second-half-of-the-20th-century-1953020.html 75. The Daily Mail reported on the story with the headline “Voice of Doom on the Third: H-Rocket Poem Panics Listeners Expecting an Opera” and quoted the poem extensively as prose, without line breaks. See Bruce Bennett, Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 67–68. 76. Scarry, Thinking in an Emergency, 11. 77. William Hazlitt, The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt. Volume 4: Political Essays, ed. Duncan Wu (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), 291–92. 78. Coleridge, “Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin,” in Essays on His Times, 1: 367; 371. Mieszkowski understands Coleridge’s fear in the poem as one about “whether

216

notes to ch apter 2

permanent warfare in Europe was doing irremediable damage to language itself ” (16) and also notes Coleridge’s emphasis on empty blank language. Watching War, 16–17. 79. Coleridge, Lectures 1795, 52. 80. James Mulvihill explores Coleridge’s use of the phrase “blank assertion” to read the figure of Geraldine in “Christabel” as a poem about Jacobinism and reactionary alarmism. See James Mulvihill, “‘Like a Lady of a Far Countrée’: Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Fear of Invasion,” Papers on Language and Literature 44.3 (2008): 250–75. 81. Wordsworth, “Composed Near Calais, on the road leading to Ardres, August 7, 1802,” in Poetical Works, 241. Jerome Christensen calls Coleridge’s poem itself a “watchword to alarm British men.” Romanticism, 89. 82. Johnson, Political tracts, 57. 83. Johnson, A dictionary of the English language, 9. 84. Pointing to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Kevin Barry discusses the “recurrent figure of language as a kind of music that is heard as if it were the more intense insofar as it is the more empty.” Language, Music, and the Sign: A Study in Aesthetics, Poetics, and Poetic Practice from Collins to Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 17. 85. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, 188–89. 86. See chapter X, “Of the Abuse of Words,” in John Locke’s Essay. 87. Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 267–68. 88. Barry, Language, Music, and the Sign, 179. 89. See Wordsworth’s note to “The Thorn,” in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 289. 90. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 289. For Coleridge on tautology, see Biographia Literaria, 2: 57. See also Kevis Goodman, “‘Uncertain Disease’: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading,” Studies in Romanticism 49 (Summer 2010): 197–227. 91. As an undergraduate at Radcliffe, Gertrude Stein worked in experimental psychology under William James, investigating “the limits of conscious attention, by seeing how long a person could concentrate before fatigue would allow his unconscious reactions to disturb his attentiveness.” Michael J. Hoffman, “Gertrude Stein in the Psychology Laboratory,” American Quarterly 17.1 (Spring 1965): 127–32. 92. Geoffrey Hartman writes: “But repetition as a structure may dull rather than rouse attention, unless we understand it as an activity.” “Scattered Thoughts on Aufmerksamkeit,” in Aufmerksamkeiten, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Munich: Fink, 2001), 130. In Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), David Simpson writes of repetition in Coleridge, “Does it soothe its hearers . . . or does it alert us to a certain lack of conviction . . . ?” (67).

notes to ch apters 2 and 3

217

93. Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 168. See also Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation, 215. 94. On the difference between “O!” and “Oh!” see Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 95. In his seminal essay on the trope, Jonathan Culler writes, “Apostrophes both attempt to make something happen and expose that happening as based on verbal devices—as the empty ‘O’ of apostrophic address: ‘O wild West Wind.’” Literary Theory: A Brief Insight (New York: Sterling, 1997), 107. 96. Onita Vaz, “Half-Asleep on Thresholds: Fragile Boundaries in Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude,’” in Romanticism: Comparative Discourses, ed. Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 55. 97. Qtd. in Benjamin, Illuminations, 161. 98. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2: 66. 99. Christopher Miller, “Jane Austen’s Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise,” Narrative 13.3 (2005): 240. Miller also points to the military senses of the word “surprise”: “In its earliest sense, the word ‘surprise’ meant the military strategy of attacking without warning, from the French surprendre (to seize, or more literally, to overtake); but that meaning quickly migrated into the cognitive realm” (240). 100. Freud distinguishes between fright, fear, and anxiety as follows: “‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one. ‘Fear’ requires a definite object of which to be afraid. ‘Fright,’ however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of surprise.” Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Bantam Books, 1959), 29–30. 101. Coleridge, The Friend, 1: 97. Chapter 3

1. Thomas De Quincey, Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets (London: Dent, 1961), 122. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 2. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 239–40. 3. William Galperin describes a similar experience in the panorama, in which the act of viewing was one of “being enticed in being startled from a stable or commanding vantage.” Return of the Visible in British Romanticism, 42. 4. Benjamin, Illuminations, 155. On Benjamin’s famous “reception in a state of distraction” in his “Work of Art” essay, see North, Problem of Distraction, 143–74. 5. Kant, Anthropology, 102. On Kant’s idea that “to keep attention fresh and focused, one must distract oneself again and again,” see Gasché, “On Seeing Away,” 21–22.

218

notes to ch apter 3

6. William Godwin, Thoughts on Man: His Nature, Productions and Discoveries (London: Wilson, 1831), 123. 7. Ibid., 160. 8. James, Principles of Psychology, I: 427–28. 9. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 183. 10. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge categorizes literary genres by the amount of attention a text demands and maintains, a tradition exemplified by Cicero’s definition of verse, in De Oratore, as a type of writing that gives “equal attention . . . to the beginning, middle and end of a line” and for which “a slip at any point weakens its force.” Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), III: xlix. Coleridge faults Wordsworth’s early poetry for not heeding verse’s requirements, writing that “the novelty and struggling crowd of images acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, demanded always a greater closeness of attention, than poetry, (at all events, than descriptive poetry) has a right to claim” (1: 77). Coleridge often repeats this notion of poetry’s right to claim only a limited amount of attention, also faulting his own early work for demanding too much. 11. Paul De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 52–56. Benjamin, “Ibizan Sequence,” 592. 12. Wordsworth, “Preface from 1815,” in Poetical Works of Wordsworth, 472. 13. Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 83. 14. Qtd. in O’Donnell, Passion of Meter, 188. 15. De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 88–89. 16. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 492. My emphasis. 17. François, Open Secrets, 162. 18. Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 10–11. 19. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 85. 20. Dames, Physiology of the Novel, 77. 21. Ibid., 85. 22. O’Donnell, Passion of Meter, 33. 23. Phillips, “Art of Attention,” 190; 199. 24. Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 170. Alan Liu reads Wordsworth’s self-chastisement at his anxiety of hope in this spot of time as evidence of how the poet’s mind corrected at the start of “overreaching desires,” desires Liu reads as inextricable from imperialism. See Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 448. 25. For a reading of Wordsworth’s revisions to the “spot of time” about finding

notes to ch apter 3

219

the “heap of garments” that emphasizes the child’s attention and long experience of looking, see Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 127–28. 26. David Perkins, “How the Romantics Recited Poetry,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 31.4 (1991): 663. 27. Qtd. by Perkins in “How the Romantics Recited Poetry,” 663. 28. Terada, Looking Away, 17. 29. The Anti-Gallican; or Standard of British Loyalty, Religion and Liberty (London: Vernor and Hood, 1804), 378. 30. Carolyn Forché, The Country between Us (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 16. 31. De Quincey, Confessions, 184. 32. De Quincey, “Presence of Mind,” 49. 33. De Quincey, Reminiscences, 122. 34. I am grateful to Kevis Goodman for this insight. 35. According to Barrell’s persuasive readings, De Quincey’s work is concerned with how that which is first “other” can be brought to the side of the self by a third absolute other. John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 10. For an insightful alternative reading, see E. S. Burt, “Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas chez De Quincey,” ELH 71 (2004): 867–97. 36. From the “MS. Drafts and Fragments of William Wordsworth,” in The Prelude, 499. See Liu’s reading of these lines in Wordsworth, 396–97. 37. s.v. “Interval,” Oxford English Dictionary. 38. By His Majesty’s command, 42. 39. Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 15. 40. Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 8; 3. 41. s.v. “Historic,” Oxford English Dictionary. 42. William Godwin, The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, Volume 6: Essays, ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 12. 43. Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Childhood around 1900,” in Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 378. 44. It’s interesting to note that according to De Quincey, Wordsworth used to read the newspaper several days after it was published, since it first arrived at Coleridge’s and then slowly made its way to him. 45. De Quincey, Confessions, 230. 46. For a reading of these shocks in relation to trauma theory, see Helen Regueiro

220

notes to ch apter 3

Elam and Frances Ferguson, eds., The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), esp. Cathy Caruth’s interview with Geoffrey Hartman. See also a reading of Wordsworthian shock and commodity in David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 121. 47. Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings, 27. 48. John Abernethy, Surgical and physiological essays (London: 1797), 58–59. ECCO. 49. Helen Maria Williams, Poems on Various Subjects (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1992). 50. John Keats, “Stanzas” (“In drear-nighted December”), in Keats’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (New York: Norton, 2009), 105, line 21. 51. Henry Home (Lord Kames), Elements of Criticism, Volumes I and II (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), I: 69. 52. Anne-Lise François has described the way history takes place as “lapse, rather than as a concretization or production of significance.” See Open Secrets, 143. 53. David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 84. 54. On the relation between distance and historiography, see Mark Salber Phillips, “Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography,” PMLA 118.3 (2003): 436–49. 55. De Quincey, Confessions, 174. 56. Bromwich, Disowned by Memory, 84. 57. The European Magazine and London Review (London: Philological Society of London, 1803), 44: 65. ECCO. 58. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster [L’Ecriture du désastre] (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 42. 59. On Wordsworth’s combination of the immediacy of historical events and reflective distance, see Jackson, Science and Sensation, 90, as well as his excellent account of Wordsworth’s “sense of history” in chapter 2. 60. Alan Liu has read this scene as replicating the same pattern he sees in the Simplon passage: an apocalyptic figuration that denies history. Liu, Wordsworth, 35. Mary Jacobus remarks on the importance of reading to the scene, writing that “Wordsworth’s aural hallucination seems as much the result of reading too late as of revolutionary disquiet.” Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 41. 61. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 802.

notes to ch apters 3 and 4

221

62. s.vv. “Watch” and “Watching,” Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, Volume 2. 63. See Geraldine Friedman, The Insistence of History: Revolution in Burke, Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 73–75; and Jackson, Science and Sensation, 89–90. 64. See Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 83. 65. Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, 165. 66. Ibid., 166. 67. “Sleep no more!” also recalls Wordsworth’s insomnia and his sonnets “To Sleep.” See Sara Guyer’s reading of the sonnets as demonstrating “that lyric figures effect an abyss of uninterruptable wakefulness at the very moment that they are marshaled to solicit sleep.” Romanticism after Auschwitz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 143. 68. Godwin, Caleb Williams, 144. 69. Ibid., 364. Pfau, Romantic Moods, 124. 70. See John Barrell’s study of the political stakes of the imagination in the 1790s and the debate about “imagining the king’s death,” where Barrell finds in debates over the imagination “signs of a struggle for ownership of the language of law and politics.” Imagining the King’s Death, 44. Chapter 4

1. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 121. 2. Home (Lord Kames), Elements of Criticism, II: 742. 3. Smith cites Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden often, explaining that his “imagination so happily applies every object of Natural History to the purposes of Poetry, makes the Goddess of Botany thus direct her Sylphs.” Charlotte Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 66. 4. Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head, in Poems of Charlotte Smith, note to line 481. Hereafter cited parenthetically by line number, with notes indicated, e.g., 481n. 5. Qtd. in Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 238. On attention as a scientific practice and the art of observation, see 234–46. 6. C. V. Deane, Aspects of Eighteenth Century Nature Poetry (London: Frank Coss, 1967), 100–101. Samuel Weber discusses surveying as a way to “command at a distance.” Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 7. On the prospect view as gendered in the Romantic period, see Jacqueline M. Labbe, Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (New York: St.

222

notes to ch apter 4

Martin’s Press, 1998). Labbe reads Smith’s use of the prospect poem as a subversive claim to typically masculine power in Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 143. 7. John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 23. 8. Fulford, Landscape, Liberty, and Authority, 3. 9. See Barrell, Idea of Landscape, 24–25. 10. On Napoleon’s invasion plans, see J. R. Watson, Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 92. 11. Klingberg and Hustvedt, Warning Drum, 131. 12. William Cobbett, Rural Rides (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 158. 13. On the significance of this line in Wordsworth’s poem about the anticipation of invasion, see Colin Pedley, “Anticipating Invasion: Some Wordsworthian Contexts,” The Wordsworth Circle 21.2 (1990): 64–75. 14. Beachy Head, 489; 310. 15. Smith, “The Emigrants,” in Poems of Charlotte Smith, lines 73–76. 16. On this multiplicity, see Labbe, Charlotte Smith. Smith’s 1793 prospect poem “The Emigrants” engages this proximity to consider the fate of French emigrants. The poem has two books: Book I takes place “On the Cliffs” in Brighthelmstone in 1792, directly across the Channel from France, and Book II is “on an Eminence on one of those Downs, which afford to the South a View of the Sea” in April 1793, just after the execution of the French king and the declaration of war. These positions afford a view of the sea, and thus of the arriving French emigrants, “Banish’d . . . From their distracted Country, whence the name / Of Freedom misapplied, and much abus’d,” and for whom Smith imagines “how sad / It is to look across the dim cold sea” (I: 157–58). The prospect from the coast is here not a stable national position from which the English can look toward France, but becomes the unsteady site from which French immigrants, displaced, look back toward home. On the “Englishman’s duty to have a watchful eye” on the immigrants, see Amy Garnai, “The Alien Act and Negative Cosmopolitanism in The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer,” in Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism, ed. Jacqueline Labbe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 103–4. 17. Charlotte Smith, Rural Walks, Volume 12 of The Works of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), 76. 18. Smith, Poems of Charlotte Smith, 72. 19. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 61. 20. George Alexander Cooke, Topographical and Statistical Description of the County of Surrey (London: C. Cooke, 1802), 126–27. Google eBook. https://books. google.com/books?id=ZJYIAAAAQAAJ&pg

notes to ch apter 4

223

21. Edward Wedlake Brayley and John Britton, The Beauties of England and Wales; or Delineations Topographical, Historical, and Descriptive (London: J. Harris, 1813), 14: 163. Google eBook. https://books.google.com/books?id=pIlCAAAAYAAJ&pg 22. Text citations are to line number. Smith’s notes (“n”) are keyed to line number (“3”). 23. On the history of smuggling operations with Napoleonic France, see Theresa Kelley, “Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and Beachy Head,” Nineteenth Century Literature 59.3 (2004): 290. On cartography, see Hewitt, Map of a Nation. On wartime innovations in the telegraph, see Mallinson, Send It by Semaphore. On immigration, see Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger. On disease and borders, see Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 24. Theresa Kelley, Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 124. 25. On collecting as an organizing principle of Smith’s poem and of the specimen cabinet, see Dahlia Porter, “From Nosegay to Specimen Cabinet: Charlotte Smith and the Labour of Collecting,” in Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, ed. Jacqueline Labbe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008). 26. Though the phrase describes the stranger at the end of the poem, it also works to describe the poem’s speaker throughout. 27. William Mudge, An account of the operations carried on for accomplishing a trigonometrical survey of England and Wales; from the commencement, in the year 1784, to the end of the year 1796 (London: W. Fader, 1799), 21. ECCO. On the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as exemplary of both the “militarization of European cartography” and the “cartographisation of the military,” see M. H. Edney, “British Military Education, Mapmaking, and Military ‘Map-mindedness’ in the Later Enlightenment,” Cartographic Journal 31.1 (2004): 14–20. For accounts of how scientific observation was directly impacted by war, see Secord, “Coming to Attention”; and Noah Heringman, “‘Very vain is Science’ proudest boast’: The Resistance to Geological Theory in Early Nineteenth-century England,” in The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Gary D. Rosenberg (Boulder: Geological Society of America, 2009). 28. Labbe understands these overlaps as “a dramatic possibility of multiplicity.” Charlotte Smith, 151. The term vigiliae minutiae referred to those who “devote themselves entirely to watching for wrecks and assisting the sufferers.” A Handbook of Travel Round the Southern Coast of England. A Picturesque, Antiquarian, and Topographical Description of the Scenery, Towns, and Ancient Remains on that part of the coast (London: M. A. Nattali, 1849), 194–95. Google eBook, https://books.google.com/books?id=3ggHAAAAQAAJ&pg. The term hoveller also referred to these men, who often charged a

224

notes to ch apter 4

lot of money for their aid. George Cooke mentions “Parson Darby’s Holes,” confirming Smith’s account, writing that “It seems he was induced to undertake this labour out of humanity, as in stormy weather he put out lights to guide the unfortunate mariners to shelter, should any such be near.” Cooke, Topographical and Statistical Description of the County of Surrey, 127. 29. Worrall, Radical Culture, 7. We could also say that even the surveyors were surveyed. The surveyors, according to Hewitt, were themselves observed observing the landscape and were sometimes suspected of being spies. Furthermore, since they used lamps to illuminate their surveying staffs, the lights were sometimes confused with beacons, which residents mistook as a signal of warning. Hewitt, Map of a Nation, 132. Hewitt also explains that the night the surveyors Mudge and Dalby camped at Beachy Head to map the land, they heard “the cries of the poor English sailors” who were attacked by French pirates. “‘For want of cannon,’ possessing merely telescopes and compasses, and posed 530 feet above the sea, the surveyors could only listen in impotent horror” (136). 30. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 217. 31. Favret, War at a Distance, 12. 32. In 1793, French inventor Claude Chappe developed the shutter telegraph, or semaphore, a device with a transverse beam with moveable arms that could assume different positions, a “telegraphic alphabet” detectable to an observer with a telescope in a nearby tower. Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 122. These visual telegraphs distinguished the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in England as the first period, according to Mallinson, in which intelligence and commands could be “transmitted at hundreds of miles an hour along the hilltop telegraph lines” (14). “Routinely from 1794,” Mallinson explains, “dialogue at a distance was possible for the first time in history.” Send It by Semaphore, 15. 33. On Romanticism and the essential strangeness of plants, see Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 194. On Smith’s ambivalent curiosity about “new geology” and its difference from natural history, see Heringman, “Very vain,” esp. 253–55. David Simpson makes a similar point about Austen, writing that the “foreigners that do invade the countryside are inanimate, virtual, or nonhuman ones.” Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, 80. This also resonates with the sense of “‘otherness’ that colonialism produced within Britain itself.” Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, 108. 34. Skepticism about “theories of the earth” was thus not unfounded. See Martin J.S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 203. For a reading of Smith’s

notes to ch apter 4

225

“scientific modesty” as a “resistance to theory,” and particularly an English resistance to continental theory, see Heringman, “Very vain.” Heringman discusses conjectural history on page 253. On Smith’s objections to “armchair geology,” see Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 276. 35. Despite the history of invasion and vulnerability, the rocks of Beachy Head often symbolized, in popular literature during the period, a tall and impenetrable defense against invasion. See East-bourne; being a descriptive account of that village, in the county of Sussex, and its environs (London: Denew & Grant, 1787), 22. ECCO. As David Simpson writes, walls might look like protection, “but they also encourage the imagining of a state of siege.” Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, 7. 36. Smith, Rural Walks, 93. 37. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 2008), 117. In his essay “On the Cannibals,” Montaigne cites these lines from Virgil. Both Smith and Montaigne find in a prior geological proximity the suggestion of an unrecognized proximity to peoples otherwise considered barbaric or altogether other; “every man calls barbarous,” writes Montaigne, “anything he is not accustomed to.” Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection, trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 1993), 80–82. 38. Hannah More, Friendly Advice. In a letter from Mrs. Heartwhole, to Dame Nicholls, on her fears of the French Invasion (London: J. Marshall, 1797), 2. ECCO. 39. Nicolas Desmarest, L’ancienne jonction de l’Angleterre a la France, ou, Le Détroit de Calais: sa formation par la rupture de l’isthme sa topographie et sa constitution géologique: ouvrage qui a remporté le prix au concours de l’Académie d’Ameins en l’annee 1751 (Paris: I. Liseux, 1875), 1. My translation. As Martin Rudwick notes, Desmarest won a prize for his essay, despite the fact that it was entirely based on written sources and “he himself had never yet seen the sea.” Desmarest thus would have fallen on the theory/conjecture side of things. See also Martin Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8. 40. On the geological use of the term “Revolution” at the time and its intersection with the political sense of the word, see Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 246. 41. Smith, Minor morals, 263. 42. Anna Barbauld, “Sins of a Nation,” in Selected Poetry and Prose, 310. For more on the rhetoric of the natural enemy, see my “‘An Enemy, I Suppose, that Nature has Made’: Charlotte Smith and the Natural Enemy,” European Romantic Review 20.2 (2009): 197–205. On “watchwords” more generally as “unmeaning terms,” see Christensen, Romanticism, 5.

226

notes to ch apter 4

43. John Thelwall, The tribune, a periodical publication, consisting chiefly of the political lectures of J. Thelwall (London: D. I. Eaton, 1795–96), 58–59. ECCO. 44. Smith asks implicitly about naturalization in her poem “To a geranium which flowered during the winter.” There she discusses the plant which is a “native of Afric’s arid lands” and then “naturalized in foreign earth.” Smith, Poems of Charlotte Smith, 208. The poem is part of Smith’s Conversations Introducing Poetry, and the conversation following the poem also reveals an interest in race and the naturalization of foreign people. For an excellent discussion of this ambivalence about naturalization, see Alan Bewell, “Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature,” ELH 76.1 (2009): 19–48. For a reading of “To a geranium,” see Kelley, Clandestine Marriage, 120. 45. Smith, Minor morals, 261. 46. Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House (London: Pandora Press, 1987), 378. 47. Smith, Desmond, 7–8. 48. Anahid Nersessian, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 13. 49. William Collins, The Poems of William Collins, ed. Christopher Stone (London: Henry Frowde, 1907), 44. 50. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 145. 51. Hamilton, Letters on Education, 50. Elizabeth Hamilton was a Scottish “educationist” who became friends with Dugald Stewart and Maria Edgeworth, and whose writings on education were influential at the turn of the nineteenth century. According to Edgeworth, Hamilton showed how knowledge of metaphysics could serve the study of education, “how all that metaphysicians know of sensation and abstraction can be applied to the cultivation of the attention, the judgment, and the imagination of children.” See Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman, Women and Education, 1800–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 27–31. 52. See Boyle, Works of Robert Boyle, Volume 8. 53. Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, Volume 2 (Bath: R. Crutwell, 1802), 66–67. 54. Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 67. 55. In Rural Walks, Smith discusses “those who have learned to look . . . with the eye of a painter or a poet” (25). 56. Boyle, Works of Robert Boyle, 7: 241. On Boyle’s emphasis on attention in his Occasional Reflections, see Marno, “Easy Attention.” 57. Boyle, Works of Robert Boyle, 7: 229. 58. Amanda Jo Goldstein, “Obsolescent Life: Goethe’s Journals on Morphology,” European Romantic Review 22.3 (2011): 410. On the early modern science and

notes to ch apter 4

227

philosophy of effluvia, see Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 71–81. 59. Joseph Priestley, Experiments and observations on different kinds of air, and other branches of natural philosophy, connected with the subject, Volume 2 (Birmingham: Thomas Pearson, 1790), 247. ECCO. See also section 13 of volume 2, “On the effect of putrid marshes on air.” 60. There are interesting intersections here with what Mary Favret calls “war in the air”—the way “a new weather science provided forms for mediating distant war.” War at a Distance, 120. Particularly resonant with my reading of Smith is Favret’s discussion of “a science of worldwide weather” that signals “a concern with world-wide war” (135). See 119–44. 61. On marsh effluvia as a cause of disease and epidemic, see Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, 41. 62. In a note in Beachy Head, Smith provides a history of the 1690 invasion that links observation of the coast with military power, concluding that “the French, from ignorance of the coast, and misunderstanding among each other, failed to take all the advantage they might have done of this victory” (158n). For a more detailed account of how invasion was “threaded through its [Britain’s] history and origins,” see Rawlinson, “Invasion!” 116–17. Matthew Bray argues that Smith subverts British historiography in Beachy Head to point out that in fighting the French, the British are fighting none other than themselves. Bray details numerous ways in which Smith’s historiography, particularly her choice of examples for narrating the history of the site of Beachy Head, not only emphasize a prior union between England and France but celebrate a history of French invasion and British vulnerability and thus actually welcome the potential arrival of the French. While Bray ultimately makes the startling argument that, for Smith, “Napoleon, as the second conqueror of England, may be the messiah” who will force England to recognize its historical and political ties to France, my view is that Smith requires neither such a messianic position nor a military invasion to enable such a recognition, since it is available simply by observing strange and foreign forms. For Smith, the slight kinds of observation practiced by geology and botany are more radical and liberating than those offered by religion or politics alike. Matthew Bray, “Removing the Anglo-Saxon Yoke: The Francocentric Vision of Charlotte Smith’s Later Works,” The Wordsworth Circle 24 (1993): 155–58. 63. Klingberg and Hustvedt, Warning Drum, 32. 64. It is interesting to note in this poem that takes place on the coast that the word “aloof ” had a nautical connotation of sailing close to the wind so as to stay clear of the shore. s.v. “Aloof,” def. 1, Oxford English Dictionary. 65. For a history of the footnote as a “high form of literary art” in the eighteenth century, see Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard

228

notes to ch apter 4

University Press, 1997), 1. On the footnote as a figure of foreignness, see chapter 4 of Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger. On Smith’s footnotes in particular, see 125. Jacqueline Labbe views Smith’s notes as a space for dissent and authority. Charlotte Smith, 44. 66. Kelley, “Romantic Histories,” 278. See also Jacqueline Labbe’s argument that Smith celebrates the “detailed point of view to which the feminine is relegated.” Romantic Visualities, 31. 67. Kelley, “Romantic Histories,” 289–90. 68. Beachy Head gestures toward nationalism and national security: “But let not modern Gallia form from hence / Presumptuous hopes, that ever thou again, / Queen of the isles! shall crouch to foreign arms” (143–45). Kelley suggests that the “patriotic riff may be designed in part to forestall renewed public hostility toward critics who had long been exercised about her Gallic and revolutionary sympathies” (295). 69. Smith, Desmond, 151. 70. Pigott, A political dictionary, 59. 71. The speaker of Beachy Head in this sense fits Rei Terada’s description of the “the solitary, apologetic figure of the phenomenophile, who is afraid of what he might have to say when called upon to endorse the world and tries to avoid that moment by lingering in object perception, looking away at something too slight to present a demand— some wavering reflection or trick of light.” Looking Away, 18. Terada suggests that these phenomenophiles are primarily men, pointing to women writing “two discourses next door to that of mere phenomenality” (27): Gothic novels, and affirming mineral and vegetable nature. I think Smith presents a unique example of a woman who seeks this slight phenomenality and uses a naturalist attention to find it. 72. For a different account of Smith’s “unease with the work of argument and closure that genres help to encode,” see Kelley, Clandestine Marriage, 125. 73. Labbe is discussing botany in Charlotte Smith, 144. On Smith’s debt to botanical science, see Judith Pascoe, “Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith,” in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, ed. Joel Haefner and Carol Shiner Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). See also Kelley, Clandestine Marriage, 119. My interest in the earthward gaze comes from Wordsworth but also anticipates twentieth-century encounters with the creaturely. Beatrice Hanssen has written about Walter Benjamin’s “earthward gaze” which she takes to mean an attention to the creaturely: “With Malebranche, Benjamin called this new ethical modality the ‘natural prayer of the heart,’ or an extreme attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit), characterized by a radical openness to the creaturely—that is, an alterity that surpassed the confines of the merely human.” Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 6.

notes to ch apter 4

229

74. Anne Wallace, “Picturesque Fossils, Sublime Geology? The Crisis of Authority in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head,” European Romantic Review 13 (2002): 79. Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology, 276. Heringman draws out Smith’s ambivalence further in “Very vain,” where he describes Smith’s curiosity about geology despite her hostility to science (253). 75. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, 298. The “utmost meticulousness in observation” is a quotation from Blumenbach. For the important divide between natural history and “new geology,” see Heringman, “Very vain,” 255. 76. Daston, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” 109; 115. 77. Ibid., 115. The quotations are Daston quoting François Huber’s 1792 Nouvelles observations sur les abeilles. 78. Secord, “Coming to Attention,” 429. Noah Heringman also discusses the impossibility of cross-Channel fieldwork for geology in “Very vain,” 251. 79. Smith, Rural Walks, 24. 80. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, 74. 81. Charlotte Smith, Rambles Farther, Volume 12 of The Works of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), 150. See Judith Pascoe’s discussion of this passage in “Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith,” 203. 82. On Smith’s interest in plant names, see Kelley, Clandestine Marriage, 121. Kant gives a similar example of specialized modes of attention: “Flowers are free natural beauties. Hardly anyone other than the botanist knows what sort of thing a flower is supposed to be; and even the botanist, who recognizes in it the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no attention to this natural end if he judges the flower by means of taste.” Critique of Judgment, 114. 83. Elizabeth Hamilton, A Series of Popular Essays, illustrative of principles essentially connected with the improvement of the understanding, the imagination, and the heart, Volume I (Edinburgh: Manners and Miller, 1813), 84–85. 84. Ibid., 85. 85. Ibid. 86. John Keats, Hyperion: A Fragment, in Keats’s Poetry and Prose, 485, line 33. 87. Terada, Looking Away, 19. 88. Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France, ed. Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser (Orchard Park: Broadview Press, 2001), 149. 89. Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 77–78. See Kevis Goodman’s comments on this passage, as well as her description in Cowper of figures “in the impossibly frozen situation of apprehending something without knowing when, who, or what it will be.” Georgic Modernity, 98; 94. 90. s.v. “Snipe,” verb, def. 1, Oxford English Dictionary.

230

notes to ch apters 4 and 5

91. R. Dodsley, Select Fables of Esop and Other Fabulists. In three books (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), 164–65. ECCO. 92. Ibid., index. 93. Smith, Rural Walks, 95; 93. 94. Weber, Targets of Opportunity, 21. 95. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 168. 96. Jacqueline Labbe writes that the notes in Beachy Head are “almost in competition with the poem.” Charlotte Smith, 55. Chapter 5

1. Keats, Keats’s Poetry and Prose, Book III, lines 97–107. Hyperion: A Fragment cited hereafter parenthetically by book and line number. 2. Marjorie Levinson explains the political significance of Keats’s account, writing that Keats departs from tradition by representing this shift in power as a displacement of legitimate power rather than a restoration of right government. Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origin of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 197. Rei Terada reads the poems in the context of Waterloo, and writes that they have always been read in the context of revolution, though they are “interestingly hard to make sense of allegorically.” “Looking at the Stars Forever,” Studies in Romanticism 50 (Summer 2011): 283. 3. Hazlitt, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 259–60. 4. On post-Waterloo melancholy and the question of how to live in the aftermath of war, see Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination; and Pfau, Romantic Moods, 309–78. On Keats and post-Waterloo melancholy, See Vincent Newey, “Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s Epic Ambitions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 71. 5. Qtd. in Philip Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 175. 6. Christensen, Romanticism, 7. 7. Tilottama Rajan describes both Hyperion poems as “oppressively static”: “for Keats the fact that poetry ‘makes nothing happen’ (in W.H. Auden’s words) is not a sign of literature’s difference from a history where things ‘happen.’ For poetry makes ‘nothing’ happen, thus disclosing a negativity that is in history as much as in poetry.” “Keats, Poetry, and ‘The Absence of the Work,’” Modern Philology 95.3 (1998): 335. 8. John Wesley, Hymns for the watch-night (London: 1750), 1. ECCO. 9. On the “arduous, costly, decades-long regimen of observation” practiced by astronomers in the eighteenth century, see Daston, “Empire of Observation,” 94. 10. Anne-Lise François, “‘The Feel of Not to Feel It,’ or the Pleasures of Enduring Form,” in A Companion to Romantic Poetry, ed. Charles Mahoney (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 450. Terada, “Looking at the Stars Forever,” 296.

notes to ch apter 5

231

11. The phrase “constitutional alarm” is from G. J. Guthrie, On Gun-Shot Wounds of the Extremities, Requiring the different operations of amputation with their after-treatment (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815), 24. Charles Bell’s watercolors of wounded soldiers, which I will return to later in this chapter, illustrate this “vacant and indifferent expression.” See Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment, 198–200. 12. See Marjorie Levinson’s Keats’s Life of Allegory, 202, and The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 175. 13. Keats, The Fall of Hyperion, in Keats’s Poetry and Prose, I: 309–10. 14. Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 151–52. 15. Keats, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer,” in Keats’s Poetry and Prose, 55, lines 9–12. 16. See Terada’s account of this repetition in “Looking at the Stars Forever,” 298– 301. 17. Elaine Scarry makes a suggestive connection between looking at stars and looking at the pain of others: “Vaguely alarming yet unreal, laden with consequence yet evaporating before the mind because not available to sensory confirmation, unseeable classes of objects such as subterranean plates, Seyfert galaxies, and the pains occurring in other people’s bodies flicker before the mind, then disappear.” The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4. According to Scarry, there is a long tradition of comparing others’ pain to remote cosmologies, which she views as successfully bringing about “this absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons” (4). 18. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 183. 19. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 41. 20. Charles Bell, Surgical Observations; being a quarterly report of cases in surgery treated in the Middlesex hospital, in the cancer establishment, and in private practice (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), 322–23. Google eBook, https://books.google.com/books?id=y1NAAAAAcAAJ&pg. Peter Stanley describes the military surgeons after Waterloo who “felt overwhelmed by the sight of such misery and which ‘rendered them indifferent to life.’” For Fear of Pain: British Surgery, 1790–1850 (Amsterdam, N.Y.: Clio Medica, 2003), 119. 21. Qtd. by Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment, 35. 22. See John Keats’s personal copy of The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (London: Carpenter and Son, 1814). Keats Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/14637636 23. On decreation in Weil, see Sharon Cameron’s excellent chapter, “Weil’s Per-

232

notes to ch apter 5

formance of Impersonality,” in Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Anne Carson, Decreation (New York: Vintage, 2006). 24. Notebooks of Simone Weil, 179. Benjamin, “Ibizan Sequence,” 592. The proximity between attention, distraction, and destruction at work in the thought of both Weil and Benjamin coincides with both thinkers’ interest in and citation of Malebranche’s aphorism “attention is the natural prayer of the soul.” Malebranche’s phrase is cited so often in the twentieth century that it becomes a kind of prayer to recite, marking an important shift to refigure attention in theological and ethical terms, or perhaps to make explicit the theological resonances already at work in the Western concept of attention. See Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 134. 25. Benjamin, “Ibizan Sequence,” 592. 26. Reid, Essays on the intellectual powers of man, 60. 27. Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, a dictionary of arts, sciences, and miscellaneous literature on a plan entirely new, Volume 2 (Dublin: 1790–98). ECCO. 28. On this debate, see also Stewart, Elements, 75. Stewart believes that the phrase involuntary attention is a contradiction in terms since even unintended shifts in attention are still the effects of particular volitions of the mind. 29. Godwin, Enquiry, 2: 524. 30. Ibid., 1: 226. 31. Ibid., 1: 230. 32. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 10, lines 17–24. 33. Home (Lord Kames), Elements of Criticism, II: 743. 34. The language of contagion is apt here given Alan Bewell’s reading of the poem in the context of colonial military disease. See Romanticism and Colonial Disease, 97– 108. 35. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 104, lines 17–24. 36. William Hamilton, The metaphysics of Sir William Hamilton (Cambridge: Sever and Francis, 1866), 941. 37. Attention is painful, but attention can also alleviate pain. Kant, for example, writes in his Anthropology that “averting attention from certain painful sensations and exerting it on any other object voluntarily grasped in thought can ward off the painful sensation” (106n). Crichton similarly describes how certain “American tribes by fixing their attention on the hatred they owe their enemies, and the injuries which they or their friends have formerly received from them, sustain, without uttering a groan, the most excruciating pains.” Inquiry, 259. 38. Keats, Keats’s Poetry and Prose, 295. 39. Cameron, Impersonality, 109.

notes to ch apter 5

233

40. Congreve, qtd. in Koehler, Poetry of Attention, 92. Koehler is interested less in this passage’s violence than in Congreve’s methodic reduction of self to “pure awareness” (92). Koehler takes this line as representative of her broader argument about eighteenth-century poetry, which she suggests demonstrates a vigilance that teaches readers how to attend closely (2). James, Principles of Psychology, 417. 41. Simone Weil, Note on the Abolition of All Political Parties, trans. Ames Hodges (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014), 21. 42. Vincent Newey calls Hyperion a “veritable gallery of studies in pain.” Newey, “Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s Epic Ambitions,” 75. 43. Rajan, “Keats, Poetry, and ‘The Absence of the Work,’” 344. 44. Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 236. 45. Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience, 144. 46. Scarry, Body in Pain, 113. Keats did not give up on his medical career until 1817. See Alan Richardson, “Keats and Romantic Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 233. 47. John Hunter, A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-Shot Wounds (London: John Richardson, 1794; London: Classics of Surgery Library, 1985), 524. 48. Charles Bell, A Dissertation on Gun-shot Wounds (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), 59. Openlibrary.org 49. Charles Bell, A System of Operative Surgery, Volume I (Hartford: Hale and Hosmer, 1812), 161. Andrew Bennett reads Saturn’s dead hand (along with the Naiad’s “cold finger”) in relation to Keats’s earlier figuration of the hand as a synecdoche for poetry, and thus as a suggestion of the “inevitability of the failure of ‘Hyperion.’” Keats, Narrative and Audience, 150. 50. Bell, Dissertation on Gun-shot Wounds, 8. 51. See Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 91. 52. According to Philip Shaw, Bell was shocked by the quantities of books and papers spread across the field of Waterloo, explaining that “wherever French had been slain there lay a library in confusion.” Suffering and Sentiment, 193. 53. Qtd. in Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment, 202. 54. Philip Shaw notes how Bell’s images are visually indebted to “the damaged grandeur of classical statuary.” Ibid. 55. Chevalier E.Q. Visconti, A Letter from the Chevalier Antonio Canova: and Two Memoirs Read to the Royal Institute in France on the Sculptures in the Collection of the Earl of Elgin (London: John Murray, 1816), iii–xx. Archive.org 56. Ibid., 35. 57. Jonah Siegel describes the “developing aesthetic crisis” brought on by the El-

234

notes to ch apter 5

gin Marbles; see Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 59. See also Noah Heringman, “Stones so Wonderous Cheap,” Studies in Romanticism 37.1 (Spring 1998): 43–62. 58. Qtd. in Heringman, “Stones so Wonderous Cheap,” 58. 59. For more on Archer’s painting, see Siegel, Desire and Excess, 59. 60. On the desire to look at images of pain, see Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 95–99. 61. Visconti, A Letter, 76; 118. On vandalized images as images of disability, see Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 83–100. 62. See Heringman, “Stones so Wonderous Cheap,” 59. See also Jonah Siegel on discussions of Napoleon in debates about the Elgin Marbles. “Owning Art after Napoléon: Destiny or Destination at the Birth of the Museum,” PMLA 125.1 (2010): 145–46. 63. G. M. Matthews, ed., Keats: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 309; 174. 64. On the experience of reading fragments, see Levinson, Romantic Fragment Poem, 26–27. 65. Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 127. Thanks to Rachel Feder for this reference. 66. Ibid. 67. Keats, Keats’s Poetry and Prose, 73. 68. Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 350. For an excellent history of wonder prior to Keats’s time, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001). See also Matthew Riley on Descartes and wonder in Musical Listening, 28–32. 69. Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 353; 355. 70. Ibid., 355. 71. Ibid., 354. 72. Ibid. Daston and Park describe a tradition of seventeenth-century writers who also admired this paralyzing wonder and “underscored its religious significance.” Wonders and the Order of Nature, 317. 73. Theresa Kelley, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 171–72. 74. Alan Bewell, “The Political Implication of Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986): 220. 75. On the Elgin Marbles as ruins, misshapen monuments, or “maimed antiques,” see Theresa Kelley, “Keats, Ekphrasis, and History,” in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 217. On Hazlitt’s description of the Elgin Marbles in light of Keats’s Titans as “monumental, fallen gods

notes to ch apter 5

235

‘like natural sculpture,’” see Kelley, “Keats, Ekphrasis, and History,” 219–21. Maureen McLane’s description is also helpful here: “alternately sepulchral statues and bodies-inpain, the gods trope the oscillation between objectification and feeling that the poem itself wishes to mediate.” Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 212. On this oscillation in relation specifically to mortal pain, see McLane, 203. 76. Maureen McLane writes, “To remain conscious is, as Thea most powerfully demonstrates, to be in pain; to freeze in the face of trauma is to become an unfeeling anesthetized monument.” Romanticism and the Human Sciences, 204. 77. Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 354. 78. Jennifer Montagu suggests that Le Brun did not actually intend this image to represent “compassion,” but rather that it was supposed to be “attention” or “esteem.” Expression of the Passions, 147–49. 79. On the relation between observation and empathy, see Elizabeth Lunbeck, “Empathy as a Psychoanalytic Mode of Observation: Between Sentiment and Science,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 80. Hamilton, Letters on Education, 267–68. 81. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57. 82. Ibid. 83. Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation, 200. 84. On Keats’s discomfort with the notion of progress, see Bewell, “Political Implications,” 229. 85. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 115. 86. Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation, 203. 87. Keats, Keats’s Poetry and Prose, 458. 88. James Chandler writes, “Smith posited a deep human capacity, cultivated in the daily life of commercial civil society, both for functioning as a sympathetic spectator with regard to another person and for recognizing that, as an agent, one performs before a social world of (likewise) potentially sympathetic spectators.” An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 172. 89. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 42. Cited hereafter parenthetically. 90. On Keats’s negation or “stilling” of narrative or in the Hyperion poems, see Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience, 147–51.

236

notes to ch a pter 5 a nd the a fterwor d

91. In his early writings on Keats, De Man observes that sympathy in Keats has a negative aspect. Paul De Man, “Introduction to the Poetry of John Keats,” in Critical Writings 1953–1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 188–89. 92. Qtd. in Newey, “Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s Epic Ambitions,” 776. See also François, “The Feel of Not to Feel It,” 463. 93. Bell, Surgical Observations, 324–25. See also Bell, Dissertation on Gun-shot Wounds, 8. John Hamilton discusses the proximity between the German Sorge, care, and English sorrow: “A certain grief therefore tints the care for persons and objects, as though the attentiveness and awareness involved were motivated by the acknowledgement of eventual evanescence and bereavement.” Security, 78. 94. See Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment, 191. 95. Bell, System of Operative Surgery, Volume II, 443–44. 96. Scarry, Body in Pain, 6. On medicine as “one of the great powers that have been heirs to the pastorate,” see Foucault, Security, 199. 97. They are “mutilated and corroded by time.” Visconti, A Letter, 76. 98. Forest Pyle, Art’s Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 94. 99. De Man, Critical Writings, 54. 100. The use of asyndeton also recalls Hazlitt’s diagnosis of where power is; “and so on,” he explains, with his own enumeration, “in a perpetual round of treasons, conspiracies, murders, usurpations, regicides, and rebellions, with which the people have nothing to do, but as passive, unconcerned spectators.” Selected Writings, Volume 4, 259–60. 101. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, 210. 102. Jonathan Mulrooney, “How Keats Falls,” Studies in Romanticism 50.2 (Summer 2011): 267. Rajan reads the abrupt ending of the poem as indicative of Keats’s uneasiness with this accumulative model of history: “In Hyperion, Keats is still undecided whether art should be a withdrawal from or a preparation for the work of history.” See Rajan, “Keats, Poetry, and ‘The Absence of the Work,’” 348. 103. Rei Terada writes that “the line ‘Still they were the same bright, patient stars’ generates a ‘holding environment’ for the unsalvageability of history.” “Looking at the Stars Forever,” 297. 104. Keats, Keats’s Poetry and Prose, 359. Af t e rw o r d

1. Beth Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). 2. Susan Sontag’s discussion of Goya in Regarding the Pain of Others echoes what I find in both Keats and Weil. “Goya’s print series is not a narrative,” she writes, “each

notes to the a fterwor d

237

image, captioned with a brief phrase lamenting the wickedness of the invaders and the monstrousness of the suffering they inflicted, stands independently of the others. The cumulative effect is devastating” (44). 3. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge, 1952), 109. 4. Weil, “Reflections,” 115. 5. Ibid. 6. See Weil, “Reflections” in Waiting for God, and “Attention and Will” in Gravity and Grace. Sharon Cameron explains that the phenomenon of attention “became a discipline for forfeiting personality and consequently came to be associated with the affliction and violence requisite for such a renunciation.” Impersonality, 109. 7. Weil, “Reflections,” 109–10. 8. Weil, Notebooks of Simone Weil, 205. 9. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108.1 (Fall 2009): 13. 10. Ibid., 16. Also in this vein is Rita Felski’s lament that “literary theory has taught us that attending to the work itself is not a critical preference but a practical impossibility.” Uses of Literature (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), 3. 11. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 2. Thanks to Anahid Nersessian for reminding me of this passage. 12. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225. 13. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Octagon Books, 1982), 7; 14. 14. The idea of “mere attention” can only be understood in opposition to something, and we have seen it, over the course of this book, diverging from a range of more seemingly complicated or elaborate actions, including memory, consciousness, perception, conjecture, interpretation, suspicion, fear, argument, violence, enmity, surveillance, absorption, sympathy, and having an agenda. What Keats might understand as “mere attention” is an intensity of looking that Wordsworth would call attention’s relaxation or interval, and that Coleridge would understand as an experience of fear or surprise. 15. Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” in Poetical Works of Wordsworth, 377. 16. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 122. 17. See Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood, “Afterword,” Representations 108.1 (2009): 139–46. See also Brian Mcgrath’s suggestion that Best and Marcus’s celebration of “just” reading would imply that “seeing and perception were not themselves subject to differential structures (and so, as a result, to the intrusion of figure).” Poetics of Unremembered Acts, 108.

238

notes to the a fterwor d

18. Sigmund Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), XII: 111–12. 19. Freud, “Recommendations,” 112. 20. Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 27. 21. Weil, Notebooks of Simone Weil, 24. 22. On Weil’s mistranslation and misreading, see Michael K. Ferber, “Simone Weil’s Iliad,” in Simone Weil: Interpretations of A Life, ed. George Abbott White (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 71. 23. George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 69; Ferber, “Simone Weil’s Iliad,” 72. See also James P. Holoka’s commentary and bibliography in Simone Weil, Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force: A Critical Edition, ed. James P. Holoka (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). 24. Weil, Note on the Abolition of All Political Parties, 30. 25. Ibid., 20. 26. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 37. 27. Carson, Decreation, 167. 28. Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: variorum edition (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 733. 29. For excellent readings of Dickinson’s syntax here, with particular emphasis on “maintain,” see Monique Allewaert, “Toward a Materialist Figuration: A Slight Manifeso,” English Language Notes 51.2 (2013): 61–77; and Cristanne Miller, “Dickinson’s Experiments in Language,” in The Emily Dickinson Handbook, ed. Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbuchle, and Cristanne Miller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 252–56. 30. François, Open Secrets, 145. 31. On Dickinson’s use of paper in her composition process, see Alexandra Socarides, Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). On the science of mutual exchange and atmosphere in the Romantic period, see Robert Mitchell’s Experimental Life (204–7). 32. Shira Wolofsky’s Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) is the best-known book on Dickinson and the Civil War. Wolofsky reads “Four Trees” in a chapter on “A Syntax of Contention” to suggest that Dickinson’s syntax “presents a world of radical disorder” (3). Benjamin Friedlander finds war’s “symptomatic intrusion” in the poem in its “repetitive sounds, excess meanings, and homonymic suggestions,” which he calls an “unconscious signaling of affect.” “Intention in Extremity: Reading Dickinson after the Holocaust,” Poetics Today 26.2 (2005): 175–207. On Dickinson’s Civil War poetry more generally, see Faith Barrett, “‘Drums off the Phantom Battlements’: Dickinson’s War Poems in Discursive Context”; Renee

notes to the a fterwor d

239

Bergland, “The Eagle’s Eye: Dickinson’s View of Battle”; and Eliza Richards, “‘How News Must Feel When Traveling’: Dickinson and Civil War Media”—all in Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz, eds., A Companion to Emily Dickinson (Malden: Blackwell, 2008). 33. Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 182. 34. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), 102. I am grateful to Karah Mitchell for this reference, and for her excellent interpretation of it. 35. Karah Mitchell, “Inside and Outside ‘the Atom’s Tomb’: Nature, Death, and the Body in Dickinson’s Civil War Poetry,” unpublished manuscript, last modified June 14, 2015. 36. Rachel Woodward, Military Geographies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 13. On the history of the environmental impact of war, including the unintended ecological consequences of the Revolutionary Wars and the American Civil War, see Richard P. Tucker, “The Impact of Warfare on the Natural World: A Historical Survey,” in Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of Warfare, ed. Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004), esp. 26. On the militarization of Salisbury Plain (with reference to Wordsworth) and its inadvertent preservation of nature, see Chris Pearson, Peter Coates, and Tim Cole, eds., Militarized Landscapes: From Gettysburg to Salisbury Plain (London: Continuum, 2010), esp. 136–38. 37. See Paul Celan, Gesamellte Werke, Dritter Band (Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 1983), 196. 38. Marjorie Perloff, “Emily Dickinson and the Theory Canon.” http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/articles/dickinson.html 39. “Meridian Speech,” in Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Riverdale-on-Hudson: Sheep Meadow Press, 1990), 50. 40. Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth for Paul Celan,” in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 12. Derrida understands the word as “at once in that register in which one speaks of the gathering of the soul, of the heart, and of ‘spiritual concentration,’ as, for example in the experience of prayer . . . and in that other sense in which concentration gathers around the same anamnetic center a multiplicity of dates, ‘all our dates’ coming to conjoin or constellate in a single occurrence” (12). As many readers have noted, when Celan goes on to write that every poem has its own January 20th, he refers both to the date in Buchner’s book and to the historical date of the Wansee conference which marked the start of the Final Solution. 41. On the presence of Romanticism in post-Holocaust writing, see Sara Guyer,

240

notes to the a fterwor d

Romanticism after Auschwitz. Particularly relevant here is Guyer’s reading of Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 in chapter 6. 42. Homer, The Iliad of Homer, translated into English Blank Verse by William Cowper, second edition (London: J. Johnson, 1802), 2: 190. 43. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 206. 44. Hamilton, Letters on Education, Volume 2, 60. 45. The phrase “exquisite susceptibility” comes not only from Hamilton but also from Godwin, who writes that Caleb Williams is indebted to his sufferings for his new “exquisite and increased susceptibility.” Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, 304.

W o r k s Ci t e d

The abbreviation ECCO refers to Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale group. A Handbook of Travel Round the Southern Coast of England. A Picturesque, Antiquarian, and Topographical Description of the Scenery, Towns, and Ancient Remains on that part of the coast. London: M. A. Nattali, 1849. Google eBook. https://books.google.com/books?id=3ggHAAAAQAAJ&pg Abernethy, John. Surgical and physiological essays. London: 1797. ECCO. Adorno, Theodor. Notes to Literature. Volume 1. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Aikin, John. “Personification in Poetry.” In The Monthly Magazine and British Register. London: R. Phillips, 1798. Alison, Archibald. Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste. Dublin: Byrne, 1790. ECCO. Alleine, Joseph. An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners. London: J. Paramore, 1782. ECCO. Allewaert, Monique. “Toward a Materialist Figuration: A Slight Manifesto.” English Language Notes 51.2 (2013): 61–77. An alarm to the public, and a bounty promised to every loyal subject, who will come forward to repel the enemy. Arms and Accoutrements provided for every man, gratis. Yarmouth: F. Bush, 1798. ECCO.

242

wor ks cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Apter, Emily, and Elaine Freedgood. “Afterword.” Representations 108.1 (2009): 139– 146. Arnaud, Jasper. An alarm to all persons touching their health and lives. London: T. Payne, 1740. ECCO. Ashbery, John. A Wave: Poems. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Barasch, Moshe. “Waking: A Form of Attention in Ritual and in Religious Art.” In Aufmerksamkeiten. Edited by Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann. Munich: Fink, 2001. Barbauld, Anna. Selected Poetry and Prose. Edited by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. Barrell, John. Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793– 1796. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. ———. The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Barry, Kevin. Language, Music, and the Sign: A Study in Aesthetics, Poetics, and Poetic Practice from Collins to Coleridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Barthes, Roland. Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. ———. The Neutral; lecture course at the Collège de France. Translated by Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Bate, Walter Jackson. Samuel Johnson. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Bell, Charles. A Dissertation on Gun-shot Wounds. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814. Openlibrary.org ———. A System of Operative Surgery. Volumes I and II. Hartford: Hale and Hosmer, 1812. ———. Surgical Observations; being a quarterly report of cases in surgery treated in the Middlesex hospital, in the cancer establishment, and in private practice (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816). Google eBook. https://books. google.com/books?id=y1NAAAAAcAAJ&pg Bell, David. The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Bell, Matthew. The German Tradition of Psychology in Literature and Thought, 1700– 1840. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2006.

wor ks cited

243

Benjamin, Walter. “Berlin Childhood around 1900.” In Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. ———. “Ibizan Sequence.” In Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. ———. “On the Concept of History.” In Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. ———. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Bennett, Andrew. Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Bennett, Bruce. Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Berlant, Lauren. “The Epistemology of State Emotion.” In Dissent in Dangerous Times. Edited by Austin Sarat. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. ———. “Thinking about Feeling Historical.” Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008). Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108.1 (Fall 2009): 1–21. Bewell, Alan. “Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature.” ELH 76.1 (2009): 19–48. ———. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. ———. “The Political Implication of Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics.” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986): 220–229. ———. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose. Edited by David Erdman. New York: Anchor Books, 1988. Blanchot, Maurice. Awaiting Oblivion [L’Attente l’oubli]. Translated by John Gregg. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

24 4

wor ks cited

———. The Writing of the Disaster [L’Ecriture du désastre]. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” In William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Bonnet, Charles. The contemplation of nature. 2 volumes. London: T. Longman, 1766. ECCO. Boyle, Robert. The Works of Robert Boyle. Edited by Michal Hunter and Edward B. Davis. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999. Braunschweiger, David. Lehre von der Aufmerksamkeit in der Psychologie des 18. Jahrhundert. Leipzig: Hermann Haacke, 1899. Bray, Matthew. “Removing the Anglo-Saxon Yoke: The Francocentric Vision of Charlotte Smith’s Later Works.” The Wordsworth Circle 24 (1993): 155–158. Brayley, Edward Wedlake, and John Britton. The Beauties of England and Wales; or Delineations Topographical, Historical, and Descriptive. London: J. Harris, 1813. Google eBook. https://books.google.com/books?id=pIlCAAAAYAAJ&pg Bromwich, David. Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Brown, Marshall. Preromanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757. Edited by David Womersley. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. ———. “Letters on a Regicide Peace.” In The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, in Twelve Volumes, Volume 5. New York: J. F. Taylor, 1901. ———. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958–78. Burt, E. S. “Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas chez De Quincey.” ELH 71 (2004): 867–897. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London/New York: Verso, 2009. ———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London/New York: Verso, 2004. By His Majesty’s command. Adjutant General’s office, June 1. 1792. Rules and regulations for the formations, field-exercise, and movements, of His Majesty’s Forces. London: War-Office, 1792. ECCO. Cameron, Sharon. Impersonality: Seven Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Campbell, George. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. In two volumes. London: Strahan, Cadell, and Creech, 1776. ECCO. Canuel, Mark. “Romantic Fear.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2008). http://www. rc.umd.edu/praxis/secularism/canuel/canuel.html Carson, Anne. Decreation. New York: Vintage, 2006.

wor ks cited

2 45

Celan, Paul. Collected Prose. Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop. Riverdale-on-Hudson: Sheep Meadow Press, 1990. ———. Gesamellte Werke, Dritter Band. Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 1983. Chandler, James. An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. ———. “Blake and the Syntax of Sentiment: An Essay on ‘Blaking’ Understanding.” In Blake, Nation, and Empire. Edited by Steve Clark and David Worrall. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Chion, Michel. “The Three Listening Modes.” In The Sound Studies Reader. Edited by Jonathan Sterne. New York: Routledge, 2012. Christensen, Jerome. Romanticism at the End of History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Cicero. De Oratore. Translated by E. W. Sutton. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942. Cobbett, William. Rural Rides. 1830. New York: Penguin Classics, 2001. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 volumes. Volume 7 of Collected Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. ———. Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose. Edited by Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano. New York: Norton, 2004. ———. Essays on His Times in the Morning Post and The Courier. 3 volumes. Volume 3 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by David V. Erdman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. ———. Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion. Volume 1 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Lewis Patton and Peter Mann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. ———. The Friend. 2 volumes. Volume 4 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Barbara E. Rooke. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. ———. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Collins, William. The Poems of William Collins. Edited by Christopher Stone. London: Henry Frowde, 1907. Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de. Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. 1756. Edited and translated by Hans Aarsleff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Cooke, George Alexander. Topographical and Statistical Description of the County of Surrey. London: C. Cooke, 1802. Google eBook. https://books.google.com/ books?id=ZJYIAAAAQAAJ&pg

246

wor ks cited

Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe, from 1794 to 1805. Translated by L. Dora Schmitz. Volume 1. London: George Bell and Sons, 1877. Cowper, William. The Poems of William Cowper. Volumes 1 and 2. Edited by John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. ———. The Poems of William Cowper. Volume 3. Edited by John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Cox, Jeffrey. Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013. ———. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. ———. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Crichton, Alexander. An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement. Volume I. London: T. Cadell, 1798. New York: AMS Press, 1976. Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Brief Insight. New York: Sterling, 1997. Curtis, F. B. “Blake and the ‘Moment of Time’: An Eighteenth Century Controversy in Mathematics.” Philological Quarterly 51 (1972): 460–470. Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Damon, S. Foster. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. New York: Peter Smith, 1947. Darwin, Erasmus. Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life. Volume I. London: 1796; Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2007. Daston, Lorraine. “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment.” In The Moral Authority of Nature. Edited by Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ———. “The Empire of Observation, 1600–1800.” In Histories of Scientific Observation. Edited by Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 2001. De Man, Paul. Critical Writings 1953–1978. Edited by Lindsay Waters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. ———. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. 1821. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. “Presence of Mind.” In The Works of Thomas De Quincey. London/Brookfield: Pickering & Chatto, 2000.

wor ks cited

247

———. Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets. London: Dent, 1961. Deane, C. V. Aspects of Eighteenth Century Nature Poetry. London: Frank Coss, 1967. Derrida, Jacques. “Shibboleth for Paul Celan.” In Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan. Edited by Aris Fioretos. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Volume I. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Desmarest, Nicolas. L’ancienne jonction de l’Angleterre a la France, ou, Le Détroit de Calais: sa formation par la rupture de l’isthme sa topographie et sa constitution géologique: ouvrage qui a remporté le prix au concours de l’Académie d’Ameins en l’annee 1751. Paris: I. Liseux, 1875. Dickinson, Emily. Selected Letters. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958. ———. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: variorum edition. Edited by R. W. Franklin. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. Dodsley, R. Select Fables of Esop and Other Fabulists. In three books. London: J. Dodsley, 1765. ECCO. Dworkin, Craig, and Marjorie Perloff. “Introduction.” In The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound. Edited by Dworkin and Perloff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. East-bourne; being a descriptive account of that village, in the county of Sussex, and its environs. London: Denew & Grant, 1787. ECCO. Eaton, Daniel Isaac. The British Tocsin; or, Proofs of National Ruin. London: 1795. Edgeworth, Maria. Practical Education. London: J. Johnson, 1798. ECCO. Edney, M. H. “British Military Education, Mapmaking, and Military ‘Map-mindedness’ in the Later Enlightenment.” Cartographic Journal 31.1 (2004): 14–20. Elam, Helen Regueiro, and Frances Ferguson, editors. The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, a dictionary of arts, sciences, and miscellaneous literature on a plan entirely new. Volume 2. Dublin: 1790–98. ECCO. England, Martha Winburn, and John Sparrow. Hymns Unbidden: Donne, Herbert, Blake, Emily Dickinson and the Hymnographers. New York: New York Public Library, 1966. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954. Erskine, Thomas. A View of the Causes and Consequences of the present War with France. London: J. Debrett, 1797. ECCO. Farrell, Michael. Blake and the Methodists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

248

wor ks cited

Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2008. Favret, Mary. “War and Everyday Life in Britain.” In War in an Age of Revolution, 1775– 1815. Edited by Roger Chickering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. Ferber, Michael K. “Simone Weil’s Iliad.” In Simone Weil: Interpretations of A Life. Edited by George Abbott White. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. Fish, Stanley. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Forché, Carolyn. The Country between Us. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Fox, Christopher, editor. Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century. New York: AMS Press, 1987. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. ———. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2007. ———. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. ———. “What Is Critique?” In The Essential Foucault. Edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. New York: New Press, 2003. François, Anne-Lise. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. ———. “‘The Feel of Not to Feel It,’ or the Pleasures of Enduring Form.” In A Companion to Romantic Poetry. Edited by Charles Mahoney. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Bantam Books, 1959. ———. “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XII. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Friedlander, Benjamin. “Intention in Extremity: Reading Dickinson after the Holocaust.” Poetics Today 26.2 (2005): 175–207. Friedman, Geraldine. The Insistence of History: Revolution in Burke, Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Fulford, Tim. Landscape, Liberty, and Authority: Poetry and Criticism from Thomson to Wordsworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

wor ks cited

249

Galperin, William. The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Garnai, Amy. “The Alien Act and Negative Cosmopolitanism in The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer.” In Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism. Edited by Jacqueline Labbe. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008. Gasché, Rodolphe. “On Seeing Away: Attention and Abstraction in Kant.” CR: The New Centennial Review 8.3 (Winter 2008): 1–28. Gee, Austin. The British Volunteer Movement 1794–1814. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Godwin, William. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its influence on morals and happiness. The Third Edition Corrected. London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798. ECCO. ———. The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, Volume 6: Essays. Edited by Mark Philp. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993. ———. Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams. 1794. Edited by Maurice Hindle. London: Penguin, 1988. ———. Thoughts on Man: His Nature, Productions and Discoveries. London: Wilson, 1831. Goldman, Corrie. “This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen, and Stanford Researchers Are Taking Note.” Stanford Report. September 7, 2012. http://news.stanford.edu/ news/2012/september/austen-reading-fmri-090712.html Goldsmith, Steven. Blake’s Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Goldstein, Amanda Jo. “Irritable Figures: Herder’s Poetic Empiricism.” In The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy. Edited by Dalia Nassar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. ———. “Obsolescent Life: Goethe’s Journals on Morphology.” European Romantic Review 22.3 (2011): 405–414. ———. Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2017. Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. “‘Uncertain Disease’: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading.” Studies in Romanticism 49 (Summer 2010): 197–227. Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Gurton-Wachter, Lily. “‘An Enemy, I Suppose, that Nature has Made’: Charlotte Smith and the Natural Enemy.” European Romantic Review 20.2 (2009): 197–205. Guthrie, G. J. On Gun-Shot Wounds of the Extremities, Requiring the different operations

250

wor ks cited

of amputation with their after-treatment. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815. Guyer, Sara. Romanticism after Auschwitz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Hamilton, Elizabeth. A Series of Popular Essays, illustrative of principles essentially connected with the improvement of the understanding, the imagination, and the heart. Volume I. Edinburgh: Manners and Miller, 1813. ———. Letters on Education. Dublin: H. Colbert, 1801. ———. Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education. Volume 2. Bath: R. Crutwell, 1802. Hamilton, John T. Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Hamilton, William. The metaphysics of Sir William Hamilton. Cambridge: Sever and Francis, 1866. Hanssen, Beatrice. Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Hartley, David. Observations on man, his frame, his duty, and his expectations. In two parts. London: S. Richardson, 1749. ECCO. Hartman, Geoffrey. Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981. ———. “Scattered Thoughts on Aufmerksamkeit.” In Aufmerksamkeiten. Edited by Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann. Munich: Fink, 2001. ———. The Unremarkable Wordsworth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Hatfield, Gary. “Attention in Early Scientific Psychology.” In Visual Attention. Edited by R. D. Wright. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hawkins, William. A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown; or, A System of the Principal Matters relating to that subject, digested under proper heads. Sixth edition. Dublin: Eliz. Lynch, 1788. ECCO. Hazlitt, William. The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt. Volume 4: Political Essays. Edited by Duncan Wu. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998. Helvétius, Claude Adrien. A Treatise on Man, his intellectual faculties and his education. Volume 1. Translated by W. Hooper. London: B. Law, 1777. ECCO. Heringman, Noah. Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. ———. “Stones so Wonderous Cheap.” Studies in Romanticism 37.1 (Spring 1998): 43–62. ———. “‘Very vain is Science’ proudest boast’: The Resistance to Geological Theory in Early Nineteenth-century England.” In The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Edited by Gary D. Rosenberg. Boulder: Geological Society of America, 2009.

wor ks cited

251

Hewitt, Rachel. Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey. London: Granta Books, 2010. Hoffman, Michael J. “Gertrude Stein in the Psychology Laboratory.” American Quarterly 17.1 (Spring 1965): 127–132. Home, Henry (Lord Kames). Elements of Criticism. Volumes I and II. 1762. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005. Homer. The Iliad of Homer. Translated into English Blank Verse by William Cowper. Second edition. London: J. Johnson, 1802. Hooke, Robert. Micrographia. 1665. Germany: Kramer, 1961. Hunter, John. A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-Shot Wounds. London: John Richardson, 1794. London: Classics of Surgery Library, 1985. Jackson, J.R.J., editor. Coleridge: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Jackson, Noel. Science and Sensation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Jacobus, Mary. Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt, 1890. Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Johnson, Barbara. A World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Johnson, Samuel. A dictionary of the English language: in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers. Sixth edition. London: 1785. ECCO. ———. Political tracts, Containing, The False Alarm. Falkland’s Islands. The Patriot; and, Taxation no tyranny. London: W. Strahan; T. Cadell, 1776. ECCO. Jones, Mark. “Alarmism, Public-Sphere Performatives, and the Lyric Turn: Or, What Is ‘Fears in Solitude’ Afraid Of?” boundary 2 30.3 (2003): 67–105. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Edited and translated by Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Keats, John. Keats’s Poetry and Prose. Edited by Jeffrey N. Cox. New York: Norton, 2009. Kelley, Theresa. Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. ———. “Keats, Ekphrasis, and History.” In Keats and History. Edited by Nicholas Roe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———. Reinventing Allegory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

252

wor ks cited

———. “Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and Beachy Head.” Nineteenth Century Literature 59.3 (2004): 281–314. King-Hele, Desmond. Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986. Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790–1832. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. ———. Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Klingberg, Frank J., and Sigurd B. Hustvedt, editors. The Warning Drum: The British Home Front Faces Napoleon; Broadsides of 1803. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944. Koehler, Margaret. Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Labbe, Jacqueline M. Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry, and the Culture of Gender. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. ———. Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988. Landry, Donna. The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Langan, Celeste. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lange, Klaus W., Susanne Reichl, Katharina M. Lange, Lara Tucha, and Oliver Tucha. “The History of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.” ADHD 2.4 (December 2010): 241–255. Online. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225–248. Lau, Beth. Keats’s Paradise Lost. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essays on physiognomy, designed to promote the knowledge and the love of mankind. Illustrated by Thomas Holloway. Translated by Henry Hunter. London: 1789. ECCO. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. 1766. Translated by Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Levinson, Marjorie. Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origin of a Style. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. ———. The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

wor ks cited

253

———. Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1956. Lunbeck, Elizabeth. “Empathy as a Psychoanalytic Mode of Observation: Between Sentiment and Science.” In Histories of Scientific Observation. Edited by Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Magnuson, Paul. “The Politics of ‘Frost at Midnight.’” The Wordsworth Circle 22.1 (1991): 3–11. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Mallinson, Howard. Send It by Semaphore: The Old Telegraphs during the War with France. Marlborough: Crowood Press, 2005. Marno, David. “Easy Attention: Ignatius of Loyola and Robert Boyle.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44.1 (2014): 135–161. Martin, Jane, and Joyce Goodman. Women and Education, 1800–1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Massumi, Brian. “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption.” Theory and Event 10.2 (2007). Matthews, G. M., editor. Keats: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971. McGrath, Brian. The Poetics of Unremembered Acts: Reading, Lyric, Pedagogy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013. McLane, Maureen. Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Mieszkowski, Jan. “Fear of a Safe Place.” In Fear across the Disciplines. Edited by Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. ———. Watching War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Miller, Cristanne. “Dickinson’s Experiments in Language.” In The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Edited by Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbuchle, and Cristanne Miller. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Miller, Christopher. “Jane Austen’s Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise.” Narrative 13.3 (2005): 238–260. Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1957. Mitchell, Karah. “Inside and Outside ‘the Atom’s Tomb’: Nature, Death, and the Body in Dickinson’s Civil War Poetry.” Unpublished manuscript. Last modified June 14, 2015. Mitchell, Robert. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

254

wor ks cited

Montagu, Jennifer. The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s “Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière.” New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1994. Montaigne, Michel de. The Essays: A Selection. Translated by M. A. Screech. New York: Penguin, 1993. More, Hannah. Friendly Advice. In a letter from Mrs. Heartwhole, to Dame Nicholls, on her fears of the French Invasion. London: J. Marshall, 1797. ECCO. Mudge, William. An account of the operations carried on for accomplishing a trigonometrical survey of England and Wales; from the commencement, in the year 1784, to the end of the year 1796. London: W. Fader, 1799. ECCO. Mulrooney, Jonathan. “How Keats Falls.” Studies in Romanticism 50.2 (Summer 2011): 251–75. Mulvihill, James. “‘Like a Lady of a Far Countrée’: Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Fear of Invasion.” Papers on Language and Literature 44.3 (2008): 250–275. Mursell, Gordon. English Spirituality: From 1700 to the Present Day. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Nersessian, Anahid. Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Newey, Vincent. “Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s Epic Ambitions.” In The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Edited by Susan Wolfson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. North, Paul. The Problem of Distraction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. O’Donnell, Brendan. The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1995. Otis, Laura. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Third edition. http://dictionary.oed.com Pascoe, Judith. “Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith.” In Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837. Edited by Joel Haefner and Carol Shiner Wilson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Pearson, Chris, Peter Coates, and Tim Cole, editors. Militarized Landscapes: From Gettysburg to Salisbury Plain. London: Continuum, 2010. Pedley, Colin. “Anticipating Invasion: Some Wordsworthian Contexts.” The Wordsworth Circle 21.2 (1990): 64–75. Perkins, David. “How the Romantics Recited Poetry.” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 31.4 (1991): 655–671. Perloff, Marjorie. “Emily Dickinson and the Theory Canon.” http://epc.buffalo.edu/ authors/perloff/articles/dickinson.html Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. New York: Penguin, 2001.

wor ks cited

255

Pfau, Thomas. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Phillips, Mark Salber. “Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography.” PMLA 118.3 (2003): 436–449. Phillips, Natalie. “The Art of Attention: Navigating Distraction and Rhythms of Focus in Eighteenth-Century Poetry.” In Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered. Edited by Kate Parker and Courtney Weiss Smith. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014. Philp, Mark. “Introduction: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797– 1815.” In Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797– 1815. Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. Pigott, Charles. A political dictionary: explaining the true meaning of words. Illustrated and exemplified in the lives, morals, character and conduct of the following most illustrious personages, among many others. London: D. I. Eaton, 1795. ECCO. Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Piombino, Nick. “The Aural Ellipsis and the Nature of Listening in Contemporary Poetry.” In Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Edited by Charles Bernstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pleydell, J. C. An Essay on Field Fortification. London: J. Nourse, 1768. ECCO. Politics for the People; or, a Salmagundy for Swine. 1794. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corporation, 1968. Porter, Dahlia. “From Nosegay to Specimen Cabinet: Charlotte Smith and the Labour of Collecting.” In Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism. Edited by Jacqueline Labbe. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008. Porter, Peter. The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems. London: Picador, 2010. Priestley, Joseph. A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism. 1777. Menston: Scolar Press, 1968. ———. Experiments and observations on different kinds of air, and other branches of natural philosophy, connected with the subject. Volume 2. Birmingham: Thomas Pearson, 1790. ECCO. Psalms, carefully suited to the Christian worship in the United States of America. Philadelphia: 1799. ECCO. Pyle, Forest. Art’s Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Rajan, Tilottama. “Keats, Poetry, and ‘The Absence of the Work.’” Modern Philology 95.3 (1998): 334–351.

256

wor ks cited

Rawlinson, Mark. “Invasion! Coleridge, the Defense of Britain and the Cultivation of the Public’s Fear.” In Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822. Edited by Philip Shaw. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Redfield, Marc. The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Reed, Edward S. From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Reid, Thomas. Essays on the intellectual powers of man. Edinburgh: John Bell, 1785. ECCO. ———. Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the principles of common sense. Edinburgh: A. Millar, 1765. ECCO. Retallack, Joan. The Poethical Wager. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Ribot, Théodule. The Psychology of Attention. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1890. Richardson, Alan. “Keats and Romantic Science.” In The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Edited by Susan Wolfson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Riley, Matthew. Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Robertson, Joseph. An Essay on Punctuation. 1785. Menston: Scolar Press, 1969. Roe, Nicholas. John Keats: A New Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. ———. John Keats and the Culture of Dissent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Rogers, Kenneth. The Attention Complex: Media, Archaeology, Method. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile; or, Treatise on Education. 1762. Translated by William H. Payne. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2003. ———. The Basic Political Writings. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. Rudwick, Martin J.S. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Ruskin, John. “The Stones of Venice.” 1853. In Unto This Last and Other Writings. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. Thinking in an Emergency. New York: Norton, 2011. Secord, Anne. “Coming to Attention: A Commonwealth of Observers during the Na-

wor ks cited

257

poleonic Wars.” In Histories of Scientific Observation. Edited by Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. ———. The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare. London: Carpenter and Son, 1814. Annotated by John Keats. Keats Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/14637636 Shaw, Philip. Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art. Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. ———. Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Siegel, Jonah. Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. ———. “Owning Art after Napoléon: Destiny or Destination at the Birth of the Museum.” PMLA 125.1 (2010): 142–151. Simon, David Carroll. “Andrew Marvell and the Epistemology of Carelessness.” ELH 82 (2015): 553–588. Simpson, David. Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry. Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1979. ———. Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. ———. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Smith, Charlotte. Desmond. 1792. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001. ———. Minor morals, and sketches of natural history. 1798. In The Works of Charlotte Smith. Volume 12. Edited by Stuart Curran. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007. ———. Rambles Farther. In The Works of Charlotte Smith. Volume 12. Edited by Stuart Curran. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007. ———. Rural Walks. In The Works of Charlotte Smith. Volume 12. Edited by Stuart Curran. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007. ———. The Old Manor House. 1793. London: Pandora Press, 1987. ———. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Edited by Stuart Curran. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Smith, Martha Nell, and Mary Loeffelholz, editors. A Companion to Emily Dickinson. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. Socarides, Alexandra. Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

258

wor ks cited

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Octagon Books, 1982. ———. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2004. Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. Stanley, Peter. For Fear of Pain: British Surgery, 1790–1850. Amsterdam, N.Y.: Clio Medica, 2003. Steiner, George. Language and Silence. New York: Atheneum, 1967. Stewart, Dugald. Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind. 1792. Boston/Cambridge: James Munroe and Company, 1859. Stewart, John. The Tocsin of Social Life; Addressed to all the nations of the civilized world; in a discovery of the laws of nature relative to human existence. London: 1803. Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Swann, Karen. “Blake’s Jerusalem: Friendship with Albion.” In A Companion to Romantic Poetry. Edited by Charles Mahoney. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Tansey, E. M. “The Life and Works of Sir Alexander Crichton, F.R.S. (1763–1856): A Scottish Physician to the Imperial Russian Court.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 38.2 (1984): 241–259. Terada, Rei. “Looking at the Stars Forever.” Studies in Romanticism 50 (Summer 2011): 275–309. ———. Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. The Alarm. To which is subjoined Great News from Abroad. A most profitable New Ballad. London(?): 1745(?). ECCO. The Alarmist. London: J. Owen, 1796. ECCO. The Anti-Gallican; or Standard of British Loyalty, Religion and Liberty. London: Vernor and Hood, 1804. The European Magazine and London Review. London: Philological Society of London, 1803. ECCO. The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803. London: T. C. Hansard, 1818. The Speech of the Right Hon. Charles James Fox, in the House of Commons, Jan. 4, 1793 on the Alien Bill. London: Printed for James Ridgway, 1793. Thelwall, John. Political Lectures No. 1 On the Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers, and the Conduct to be observed by the friends of liberty during the continuance of such a system. London: 1793. ———. The tribune, a periodical publication, consisting chiefly of the political lectures of J. Thelwall. London: D. I. Eaton, 1795–96. ECCO. Tucker, Richard P. “The Impact of Warfare on the Natural World: A Historical Survey.” In Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of Warfare.

wor ks cited

259

Edited by Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004. Valenza, Robin. Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Vaz, Onita. “Half-Asleep on Thresholds: Fragile Boundaries in Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude.’” In Romanticism: Comparative Discourses. Edited by Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Vidal, Fernando. The Sciences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2008. Visconti, Chevalier E.Q. A Letter from the Chevalier Antonio Canova: and Two Memoirs Read to the Royal Institute in France on the Sculptures in the Collection of the Earl of Elgin. London: John Murray, 1816. Archive.org Wallace, Anne. “Picturesque Fossils, Sublime Geology? The Crisis of Authority in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head.” European Romantic Review 13 (2002): 77–93. Watson, J. R. Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Watts, Isaac. The Improvement of the Mind; or a supplement to the art of logic. London: 1789. ECCO. Weber, Samuel. Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Webster, Noah. Sentimental and Humourous Essays, conducive to economy and happiness. London: Printed for J. and A. Arch, 1798. ECCO. Weil, Simone. “Attention and Will.” In Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 1952. ———. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 1952. ———. Note on the Abolition of All Political Parties. Translated by Ames Hodges. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014. ———. “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” In Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper & Row, 1951. ———. Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force: A Critical Edition. Edited by James P. Holoka. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. ———. “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” In War and the Iliad. Translated by Mary McCarthy. New York: New York Review Books, 2005. ———. The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Translated by Arthur Wills. New York: Routledge, 2004. ———. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper & Row, 1951. Wesley, John. Hymns for the watch-night. London: 1750. ECCO.

260

wor ks cited

Wesley, John and Charles. The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley. Volume 9. London: Wesleyan-Methodist Conference Center, 1870. Google eBook. https:// books.google.com/books?id=GA8DAAAAQAAJ&pg Wheeler, H.F.B., and A. M. Broadley. Napoleon and the Invasion of England: The Story of the Great Terror. London: J. Lane, 1908. White, R. J. Waterloo to Peterloo. London: William Heinemann, 1957. Williams, Helen Maria. Letters Written in France. 1790. Edited by Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser. Orchard Park: Broadview Press, 2001. ———. Poems on Various Subjects. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1992. Williams, Nicholas. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Wilson, Catherine. Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008. Wolfson, Susan. Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. ———. “Romanticism and the Measures of Meter.” Eighteenth-Century Life 16.3 (1992): 221–246. ———. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Wollaston, Francis. The origin and insidious arts of Jacobinism: a warning to the people of England. London: 1799. ECCO. Wolofsky, Shira. Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Woodward, Rachel. Military Geographies. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979. ———. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Edited by Thomas Hutchinson. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. Edited by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones. New York: Routledge, 2013. Worrall, David. Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance, and Surveillance 1790–1820. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. Yaffe, Gideon. “Thomas Reid on Consciousness and Attention.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39.2 (2009): 165–194. Young, Arthur. An idea of the present state of France, and of the consequences of the events passing in that kingdom. London: 1795. ECCO.

I n d ex

Abernethy, John, 100 absorption: in an artwork, 11, 16, 53, 163; and disability, 163; and education, 21, 39; as being lost, 16, 19–20, 139, 145; and love, 16; of the mind during war, 186; of political alarmism, 66, 67, 83; of the reader, 36, 38–41, 45, 139; religious, 19; and unconsciousness, 19 Adorno, Theodor, 51 aesthetics, 21, 39, 66–67, 167, 172. See also Elgin Marbles; sculpture; sublime Aikin, John, 67–68 alarm: animals’ expression of, 111; compared to other kinds of fear, 63, 83; “constitutional alarm,” 145, 166; as electric, 64; elusive origin of, 28, 63, 107; and empty sound, 79; etymology of, 41, 63; as fabricated,

62, 67, 142; false, 77, 111, 129; as a genre, 63–64; as an imperative, 63, 64; and language, 28; and listening, 69, 72; making the mind elastic, 14–15; as a passion, 62; poetry as, 78; preventing thought, 62, 83; reading and, 139; refusal of, 13, 119; self-realizing, 213n43; as a sense of history, 86, 104, 105, 107; and the sublime, 66; as a system, 10, 65, 66; as a technique of repression, 212n29; technologies of, 64 alarmism: causing rather than preventing danger, 65; Coleridge as alarmist, 76; as conjuration, 104, 106; contagious, 73; criticism of, 63, 200n34; directing attention, 10, 66, 94; as empty sound, 82; and hallucination, 74, 108; history of the term, 64; as an invasion of the constitution, 63;

262 inde x

natural history of, 112; to suspend the law, 65, 66; and terrorism, 65; and watchfulness, 9–10 Allison, Archibald, 21, 53–54, 182 amputation, 159–166 anthropomorphism, 74, 156, 167, 191 argument, 12, 131–133, 140, 180, 186 attention: and alarm, 66; alleviating pain, 232n37; alternative modes of, 3, 12, 13, 14, 55–58, 86, 112, 113, 133, 143, 150, 192; animals’, 110–112, 119; attention to, 1, 3, 21, 195n3; and care, 173–4; childrens’, 3, 39–40, 44, 77–78, 92, 98, 165, 169–170, 181; cognitive approaches to, 1, 195n4; as counting, 50; divided, 3, 27–29, 36–43, 50, 52, 58, 112, 117, 137–140; double 11, 15, 26–27, 33, 35, 40–45; dulled by repetition, 10, 81; economy of paying, 1, 24, 189; etymology of, 1, 85; inseparable from fear, 28, 60, 62, 82–83; as a “formal state,” 4; gentle, 25; and guilt, 108; threatens to become habit, 36, 44; to history, 12, 29, 86, 97–105, 130–133, 165, 174–7; too much as hurtful, 4, 19, 25; as impasse, 171, 176; indistinguishable from inattention, 30; as interdisciplinary, 2; as involuntary, 3, 4, 86, 150–155, 176; language of, 110–112, 117, 119; malady of, 4, 10; medical, 143, 145, 159–165, 173–4; and memory, 37; mere or minimal, 12, 21–22, 37, 143, 170, 180, 182, 237n14; as a metaphor, 4, 183; meter as a stimulant of, 15; microscopic, 56; militarization of, 8, 9, 29, 36, 41, 94–97, 109, 113, 138; minute,

12, 47, 120, 131, 133; too minute prevents pleasure, 53–54; muscular effort of, 20, 181; as a “necessary preliminary,” 33; as painful, 143, 145, 148, 149–177; and passion, 3, 59–62, 94; poetry requiring a double, 40–45; as prayer, 12, 19, 181, 191; readers who cannot pay it, 5; and reading, 36–41, 139; recent studies of, 196n8, 197n9; relaxation of, 85–102; replacing logic, 23; as a restraint, 184; rhythms of, 11, 12, 13, 15, 27, 86, 90–91, 94, 105, 188, 192; scientific observation as, 2, 55–56, 113; in school, 20–21, 39, 44, 62–63, 127, 181, 186, 193; too serious, 171–172; to another’s suffering, 146–149; straying, 23, 25; suspended, 181, 183, 186; as sympathy, 25, 169–174; theological, 12, 15, 19–20, 23, 30, 144, 149, 181, 187, 203n73; unpredictability of, 2; unsuspicious, 58, 181; as violent, 30, 148–155; weakening the subject, 30; as wonder, 165–166 Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, 4 Ashbery, John, 97 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 64, 67–68, 124–125 Barrell, John, 96, 113, 219n35, 221n70 Barthes, Roland, 64, 91 Baudelaire, Charles, 86 Bell, Charles, 30, 148–149, 158, 159–166, 173–174 Benjamin, Walter, 30, 191, 228n73. Works: The Arcades Project, 56, 106, 192; “Berlin Childhood

inde x 263

around 1900,” 98; “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death,” 232n24; “Habit and Attentiveness,” 19, 44, 58, 89, 150, 154; “On the Concept of History,” 58; “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 5, 86 Bergson, Henri, 4, 183 Berlant, Lauren, 66, 201n51, 212n33 Bewell, Alan, 167, 224n33, 225n40, 226n44, 232n34, 235n84 Blake, William, 16, 45–58, 138, 181, 183, 184, 187; arrested for spying, 27, 47; and the body, 47, 49; and industriousness, 52–53; on labor, 52–54; on “Minute Particulars,” 35, 53–57; and pastoral watchfulness, 22–26; and punctuation, 51, 54–58; reading, 47, 50–56; resistance to alarm, 13; sedition trial, 47; on the senses, 49; and surveillance, 35, 49, 50, 58; and suspicion, 28, 35, 50, 58; “Watch Fiends,” 49–53, 55, 57–58; word and image in, 35. Works: America, 13–14, 49; The Book of Urizen, 49; “The Human Abstract,” 24–25; Jerusalem, 27, 47, 49, 56–58; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 54; Milton, 27, 46, 49, 51–53, 55; “On Anothers Sorrow,” 171; “The Shepherd” 22–25 Blanchot, Maurice, 19, 105, 202n66 bodies: when astonished, 165; during act of attention, 85, 181; dying in war, 79; as limited, 49; mangled, 116, 120; and meter, 45; military control over, 8, 9, 114; nerveless hand, 159– 164; in pain, 143, 148, 160; the pulse of, 46, 47; and susceptibility, 152;

violence to, 143, 148; altered by war, 143, 148, 159. See also amputation; pain; senses Bonnet, Charles, 19, 23, 113, 187 Boyle, Robert, 55, 127–130 Bromwich, David, 103, 104 Burke, Edmund, 21, 41–42, 64–66, 71, 80, 88, 139, 148, 214n62 Butler, Judith, 199n31, 200n38 Cameron, Sharon, 154, 231n23, 237n6 Campbell, George, 38–40, 42, 43, 50, 53, 54, 57, 80, 207n17 Celan, Paul, 20, 30, 105, 190–191 Chandler, James, 24, 235n88 Christensen, Jerome, 8, 68, 216n81 Cobbett, William, 114 Coleridge: on education, 20, 62–63; and fear, 9, 62, 66, 83, 93; and poetics, 11, 15, 42, 44–45, 88, 185, 218n10; and satire, 28, 75–77; on war, 62, 75, 76. Works: Biographia Literaria, 44–45, 88, 218n10; “Christabel,” 122, 216n80; “Fears in Solitude,” 28, 62, 70, 74–78, 80–83, 90, 114, 185, 189; “Frost at Midnight,” 20, 204n79; “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 151–2 Collins, William, 67, 126 compassion, 60, 168–170, 181. See also sympathy concussion: as brain injury, 100–102, 104; geological, 121–127 Condillac, 27, 37, 38, 42, 44, 206n7 Cowper, William: and fearless listening, 22, 71–74; on absorption as loss, 16, 19, 20, 25; translator of the Iliad, 72, 192. Works: “Conversation,” 10; “The Needless Alarm, 28, 71–74,

264 inde x

78, 80–82, 106; The Task, 16, 19, 20, 68–71, 126, 139, 145, 204n79 Crary, Jonathan, 2, 9, 19, 21, 196n8, 206n11, 206n12 Crichton, Alexander, 4, 10, 36, 150, 198n16, 232n27 Darwin, Erasmus, 27, 38, 44, 46, 71, 87, 110–111, 117, 120, 188, 207n14 Daston, Lorraine, 133, 203n73, 230n9 De Man, Paul, 89–90, 175–176, 236n91 De Quincey, Thomas: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 37–38, 98, 104; “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” 91; “Presence of Mind,” 14, 28–29, 95–97; Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets, 28, 84–85, 88–89 dehumanization, 73, 155–156, 167, 187 Derrida, Jacques, 239n40 Descartes, René, 165, 169, 211n8 Dickinson, Emily, 30, 187–193 discipline, 2, 3, 9, 22, 52–53, 134–135 distraction, 2, 10, 19, 21, 26, 41, 47, 86, 88, 92, 100, 101, 154, 157. See also inattention Edgeworth, Maria, 42, 44, 77–78 Elgin Marbles, 3, 143, 147, 162–164, 167, 169, 174, 234n75 enmity, 49, 58, 95, 110, 111, 115, 131; as natural, 29, 113, 123–127, 129, 137 Favret, Mary, 5, 8, 14, 70, 73, 119, 210n59, 213n47, 213n52, 214n64, 227n60 fear, 10, 28, 60–83, 104–109, 111, 143 Forché, Carolyn, 95

foreignness, 29, 31, 112, 119–127, 134, 136 Foucault, Michel, 9, 22–24, 31, 74, 114, 119, 202n56, 205n92, 205n98, 212n30, 214n65, 236n96 Fox, Charles James, 63, 66, 200n39 fragmentation, 143, 157; of bodies, 159–166; as giving up, 157, 177; of Hyperion poems, 163, 166, 175, 177; of sculpture, 162 François, Anne-Lise, 37, 91, 145, 189, 220n52 Freud: on “evenly suspended attention,” 183–184; on fear, 83, 217n100 Fried, Michael, 16, 19, 163 Gasché, Rodolphe, 21, 196n6, 198n16, 203n78, 217n5 geology, 29, 112, 121–127, 130, 131, 133 Godwin, William: Caleb Williams, 14, 50, 107–109, 202n61, 240n45; “Essay on Sepulchres,” 98, 99; “Of History and Romance,” 108; Political Justice, 14, 151; Thoughts On Man, 86 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 11 Goldsmith, Steven, 46, 54–55, 170, 171, 204n84, 206n2 Goldstein, Amanda Jo, 25, 128–129 Goodman, Kevis, 20, 70, 72, 97, 198n20, 201n51, 214n63, 229n89 Goya, Francisco, 180 guilt, 68, 92–94, 107–109 habit, 19, 26–27, 31, 36, 40, 44, 74, 89, 127–128, 134 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 59, 60, 127–129, 134–135, 169–170, 192–193, 226n51 Hamilton, William, 153 Hartley, David, 25 Hartman, Geoffrey, 71, 92–93, 216n92

inde x 265

Hazlitt, William, 79, 142, 144, 167, 174, 180 heedlessness, 74, 82 Helvétius, Claude Adrien, 59, 60 Heringman, Noah, 223n27, 224n33, 225n34, 229n74, 229n78, 234n62 historiography: as argumentative, 187; politics of, 130–133, 138; of slightness, 133 history: accessed in intervals, 29, 86, 102–103; as alarm, 107; and anticipation, 58, 86, 104; without chronology, 98; difficulty paying attention to, 12, 97, 99, 100–101, 175; as a historic present, 12, 97; as inassimilable, 176; limitations of, 99; listening for, 95, 97–8; the minute as a register of, 121, 131; natural, 110–140; as painful, 176; and poetic form, 104–5; preserving minutiae for, 57–58; shaping how we pay attention, 13; slightness of, 130–133 Holland, William, 114–115 Home, Henry (Lord Kames), 102, 104, 111, 150–151 Hooke, Robert, 55–56 Hunter, John, 159 Iliad, the, 72–73, 154–156, 184–187, 192 imagination, 21, 54, 73, 96, 104, 108–109, 140 inattention: indistinguishable from attention, 30–31; as a symptom of concussion, 100; as the fidgets, 4, 10; built into the act of reading, 35, 91; to revolution, 99; as sleep, 16, 192; and staring, 139 injury, 70–71, 100–102, 118; to the

air, 129; of soldiers, 145, 148–149, 159–166 interval, 86–102, 104, 105 invasion: footnote as, 139–140; history of, 126, 130, 227n62; of the strange and foreign, 121; threat of a French, 8, 9, 13, 23, 63, 74–76, 94, 104, 112–116, 119, 199n26 Jackson, Noel, 208n37, 220n59 James, William, 36, 87, 154 Johnson, Samuel, 68–69, 79–80, 106, 129, 195n1, 213n46 Kant, Immanuel, 21–22, 39, 46–47, 86, 198n16, 204n79, 208n37, 229n82, 232n37 Keats, John, 30, 57, 102, 141–177, 180, annotations to Paradise Lost, 179, 184; annotations to Shakespeare, 149; letters, 144, 153–154, 173, 177; and medicine, 159–164; and sympathy, 170–173. Works: Eve of St. Agnes, 167; The Fall of Hyperion, 145–147, 157, 164 Hyperion: A Fragment, 13, 136, 141–177, 179; “Ode to a Nightingale,” 171; “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” 192; “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” 169, 174 Kelley, Theresa, 117, 131, 138, 167 Koehler, Margaret, 92, 197n8, 201n46, 202n65, 206n8, 209n56, 233n40 Labbe, Jacqueline, 133, 221n6, 222n16, 223n28, 228n65, 228n66, 230n96 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Nancy, Jean-Luc, 3 landscape, 29, 31, 37, 47–48, 110–140,

266 inde x

187–193, 209n47. See also prospect view language: of attention, 110–112, 117, 119; decay of, 130; as destructive, 125; as empty sound, 28, 78–83; as material, 42; mediating history, 102; minutenesses of, 40; as noise, 78; poetic, 15, 76, 80–83; political, 76, 82; speed of, 52; warning, 65. See also watchwords Lavater, Johann Caspar, 25–26, 60–62 Le Brun, Charles, 5, 6, 59–60, 169 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 21, 172 Levinson, Marjorie, 97, 176, 230n2, 234n64 listening, 22, 68–74, 84–90, 94, 97, 98, 111, 112, 141–142; as the sense most favored by attention, 69; to one’s own body, 46, 58; careless, 74; and fear, 69, 71; to the ground, 84–88, 94, 98, 159; as involuntary, 152; without knowing what one hears, 28, 73–74, 82; as painful, 89, 147, 158–159, 164 reduced, 214n66. See also sound Locke, John, 19, 37, 80 Makdisi, Saree, 50, 52, 209n49, 209n54, 210n59 Malebranche, Nicolas, 19, 191, 228n73, 232n24 Massumi, Brian, 68 Meadows, Robert Mitchell, 16–18 medicine, 4, 10, 100, 143, 148–149, 159–165, 173–174 memory, 37, 93, 130–131 Mieszkowski, Jan, 76, 215n78 Milton, John, 9, 30, 94, 179, 181, 184 minimalism: of attention, 12, 37, 170,

237n14; just looking, 179–193; just noticing, 12, 143; mere appearance, 21, 189; “slight historical etchings,” 13, 130–133; slightness, 30, 126, 127, 132, 133, 135–140, 144, 185 Montaigne, Michel de, 225n37 narrative: absence of, 157, 166, 170, 173, 177, 180, 186; and attention, 91; and history, 46, 58, 102, 130, 143; and sympathy, 30, 143, 170–175 Nersessian, Anahid, 126 newspapers, 5, 7, 28, 64, 69–70, 84–85, 92, 95, 104, 139, 177, 198n19, 198n20, 215n70, 219n44 North, Paul, 195n3, 196n6, 196n8, 212n30 observation, 2, 35, 47, 112, 113; overlap between aesthetic and political modes, 27, 35, 47, 48; the art of, 113; astronomers’, 145, 146; cartographers’, 117–118, 224n29; evading, 46, 128; as “general,” 135; habits of, 134–5; medical, 149, 173–174; peaceful, 117; scientific, 2, 29, 55–56, 113, 126, 132–135; and spying, 47, 48 pain: absence of, 160, 211n8; of attention, 14, 26, 30, 44, 101, 143, 149–155, 157, 159, 164, 170, 180; attention to another’s, 30, 143, 148, 149, 157, 169–175, 180, 181; attention to one’s own, 171; and desire, 164; fear causing, 214n62; as fragmenting, 171; and humanness, 167; as numbing, 156,

inde x 267

169; organizing, 174; poetry and, 43–44, 172; from loss of power, 160; of reading the newspaper, 70; as safeguard to the body, 160; of wonder, 164–166 paranoia, 35, 56, 58, 212n27 passions: attention and, 3, 59–62, 94, 211n8; and enmity, 124; interrupting narration, 170; language as part of, 42; and meter, 43, 90, 93; and political alarmism, 66–67; and reading, 5, 77; wonder as the first, 165. See also alarm; compassion; fear; guilt; wonder passivity, 1, 27, 30, 35, 52, 63, 65, 142, 152, 157 pastoral power, 22, 31, 73, 202n56, 205n92, 212n30 peace: of Amiens, 114; part of the “Code of War,” 24–25, 159; and contagion, 71; and landscape, 110; linked to watchfulness, 23 pedagogy, 20–21, 39, 44, 62–63, 127, 181, 186, 193 Pfau, Thomas, 47, 108 Phillips, Adam, 137 Pigott, Charles, 36, 132 Pinch, Adela, 107, 208n31, 212n33 poetic form, 3, 4, 11, 12, 15, 42, 43, 90, 93, 99, 105; enjambment, 90, 93, 105, 147, 188; and intervals, 90, 93; line break, 77, 83, 90, 92, 105; meter, 15, 27, 43–45, 73, 83, 90, 93, 208n37; rhyme, 43, 73, 152, 190 poetics, 3, 15, 26–27, 40–45, 51, 80–83, 86, 88–94, 105, 172 Porter, Peter, 76–77 Priestley, Joseph, 15, 27, 40–43, 50, 53, 54, 93, 129

propaganda, political, 40, 76, 79, 82, 121, 130 prospect view, 12, 29, 110, 112–117, 119–121, 124, 131, 133, 140, 158, 221n6. See also landscape psychology, history of, 2–4, 195– 196n5 punctuation, 27, 47, 51, 53–56, 209n57 quotation, 86, 105, 106–109 Rajan, Tilottama, 157, 230n7, 236n102 reading: and absorption, 16, 19, 36; as anticipation, 105; opposed to attention, 139; the blank page behind a text, 30–31, 189–190; requiring a double attention, 33, 35, 43; determined by feeling, 82–83; as impasse, 50; requiring inattention, 36–40; without interpretation, 179–187; as just looking, 179–180; as keeping watch, 23, 29, 103–109; as looking at a landscape, 189–193; physiology of, 36–40; poetry, 86, 88–94; rereading, 52; satire, 77; savage torpor of readers, 5, 10–11, 43; as staring, 146; “surface reading,” 182; temporality of, 88, 90, 91, 105; as unsuspicious, 50, 52; as vulnerability to alarm, 139; as waiting, 185; and war, 182, 184; and wonder, 180 Reid, Thomas, 4, 39, 60–62, 150, 153 relaxation, 11, 25, 28, 54, 85–102, 105, 157, 181 religion, 15, 19, 20, 30, 144, 149, 181, 187, 203n73

268 inde x

repetition, 10, 22, 23, 81, 149, 158, 216n92; as tautology, 80–81 Revolution, French, 5, 13, 29, 65, 76, 86, 98–105; as a geological term, 123 Reynolds, Joshua, 53 rhetoric: as empty, 77–83; as misleading, 130; of peace, 24; rhetorical perspicuity, 38–40, 207n17; of political propaganda, 40, 62, 75, 76, 78, 113, 124–127, 131, 132; of watchfulness and attention, 19 Roe, Nicholas, 157 Romanticism: and aesthetics, 21; creating new modes of attention, 3, 12, 13, 35, 193; as a counteraesthetics, 21; courting a double attention, 35; productivity of distraction in, 157; as interdisciplinary, 3; as a poetics of just noticing, 12, 21, 193; legacy as a wartime poetics of attention, 191; derailing the militarization of attention, 10, 110; and pedagogy, 21, 193; impact on the philosophy of attention, 153; as a response to war, 8, 13, 110, 193 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 39, 127 Ruskin, John, 52–53 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 41, 42 Scarry, Elaine, 72, 78, 174, 231n17 sculpture, 30, 143, 146–148, 162, 165, 167, 169, 174–175. See also Elgin Marbles Secord, Anne, 9, 133, 199–200n32, 206n1 security, 9, 12, 29, 113, 118, 121, 130, 190 Sedgwick, Eve, 56 senses: improved through attention, 193; injured, 118; as a limitation, 49; not subtle enough, 129; steeping in

history, 98; strained in response to war, 5, 9 Shakespeare, William, 4, 106, 107, 149, 166, 167, 169 Shaw, Philip, 173, 233n52, 233n54 shock: and alarm, 63–4; and concussion, 100; of the French Revolution, 13, 99–100; gentle, 44, 88, 90–91; of poetic form, 90–91; of relaxation, 86; and trauma, 146, 173, 220n46; of urban life, 5; and Waterloo, 145, 173. See also surprise Siebers, Tobin, 163–4 Simpson, David, 23, 24, 216n92, 219n46, 225n35, 228n65 Smith, Adam, 30, 170–174, 177, 180 Smith, Charlotte, 22, 29–30, 57, 110–140, 158, 183, 186–7; and historiography, 130- 133; and the natural enemy, 122–127; use of notes, 30, 112, 116, 117, 121, 130, 131, 139, 140, 227n65, 230n96; and the prospect poem, 112–116; and slightness, 126, 127, 132, 133, 135–140, 185. Works: Beachy Head, 112, 114, 116–140, 190; Desmond, 14, 126, 132; The Emigrants, 138–139, 222n16; Minor Morals, 123–124; The Old Manor House, 126; Rambles Farther, 134; Rural Walks, 115–116, 121–122, 139; “The Sea View,” 116, 120; “To a geranium which flowered during the winter,” 226n44 Sontag, Susan, 75, 116, 143, 148, 182, 215n70, 234n60, 236n2 sound, 28, 89; as empty, 77–83; as noise, 73; of war, 68–75 spying, 10, 27, 35, 47, 48, 49, 108, 208n42

inde x 269

staring, 16, 20, 139, 144–149, 165, 167, 169, 181, 204n79 Stein, Gertrude, 81, 216n91 Stewart, Dugald, 37, 56, 128, 206n8, 232n28 Stewart, Susan, 74, 90 sublime, 53, 54, 66, 67, 88, 116 surprise: different from alarm, 63; and meter, 44–45, 83; military connotations of, 217n99; and paranoia, 56; and poetic form, 83, 88–94, 99; seeking, 35, 42, 88, 184; sense perception as, 83, 88–94; wonder as, 165 surveillance, 10, 12, 27, 35, 47, 49–53, 58, 108 susceptibility: attention heightening, 22, 24, 192–193; and feeling, 152; of the nation, 121; and poetry, 15, 45; and security, 12, 130; produced by suspicion, 14 suspicion: attention without, 35, 58, 181, 182; hermeneutics of, 182–183; politics as, 47; as productive, 14; reading and, 27–28, 30, 77, 181; and surveillance, 50, 58; and wartime watchfulness, 10 sympathy, 8, 12, 236n91; and antipathy, 126; attention in the act of, 26, 30, 167, 169–174, 181; as being moved, 169; and narrative, 30, 143, 170–174; Adam Smith’s theory of, 30, 170–174, 235n88. See also compassion temporality: of attention, 14, 58, 88, 192; and Blake’s “Watch Fiends,” 55–56, 210n59; and paranoia, 56; and reading 55, 90–91; of war,

210n59; Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” 92–93, 103 Terada, Rei, 21, 94, 136, 145, 204n79, 204n83, 228n71, 230n2, 236n103 terror, 8, 28, 60, 62–63, 65, 212n27; and the sublime, 66–67 Thelwall, John, 125; Wordsworth’s letter to, 90, 93 Valéry, Paul, 69, 83 violence: and alarmism, 65, 71–73; attention to, 30, 169; of attention, 30, 89, 153–155, 164, 237n6; contagion of, 152; dehumanizing effect of, 167; of the French Revolution, 86, 100–104; imagining, 73; and injury, 100; of language, 125; to the mind, 186, 191; and power, 148, 150; sounds and, 72, 78; violent impressions from sympathy, 171–174; vulnerability to, 71–73; of war, 155, 162, 167, 184, 186, 190, 191 Virgil, 122 volunteer movement, 36, 63, 151 waiting, 10, 28, 73, 84–94, 181, 185; without an object, 137–140, 156 war: aftermath of, 30, 143, 156; and alarm, 63, 66, 67, 104, 129, 142, 143; American Civil War, 30, 184; and argument, 133; kinds of attention demanded by, 8–10, 13, 14, 26, 27, 29, 35, 36, 58, 76, 95–96, 110, 133, 199n32; bodies injured in, 79, 143, 145, 148, 149, 156, 159, 160, 162; code of, 24; contagion of, 72; criticism of, 62, 66, 67, 75, 140; deaths in, 79, 116, 190; dehumanizing effect of, 155, 167, 187; effaces purpose

270 inde x

or goal, 186; and enmity, 58, 125, 127, 133; epistemology of, 24, 119; as everyday life, 83; history of, 94, 98; hypocrisies of, 49, 75; and landscape, 31, 110, 112, 114–117, 137, 190; and mapping, 118; militarism, 9; in Milton, 30, 179; news of, 28, 69, 70, 85, 94, 95; pains of, 141, 143, 160–163; Peninsular War, 84; phenomenology of, 24, 114–116, 129; and power, 141, 158; and reading, 25, 36, 76, 149, 180, 182–184, 191, 193; representation of, 30, 182; Revolutionary and Napoleonic, 5, 50, 183; sounds of, 28, 69–72, 78, 98, 115, 135; not taking sides during, 155, 184–186; teleology of, 15; War of the Titans, 141; total war, 5; Trojan War, 184; and waiting, 73, 156; warmongering, 75, 78, 79; World War II, 184, 192. See also alarm; attention (militarization of ); enemy; invasion; Waterloo watchwords, 10, 79, 124, 216n81, 225n42 Waterloo, 30, 142–143, 145, 148, 149, 159–166, 173

Watts, Isaac, 59, 60 Weber, Samuel, 139, 221n6 Weil, Simone: on attention, 19, 20, 30, 149–150, 154, 170, 180–182; “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 30, 72, 73, 154–156, 167, 184–187; on war, 27 Wesley, John and Charles, 19, 22, 144, 205n87 Williams, Helen Maria, 100–101, 136–137 Williams, Raymond, 110, 112, 117, 190 wonder, 60, 164–166, 169, 171, 173, 234n68, 234n72 Wordsworth, William: 28–29, 42, 57, 76, 79, 84–109, 138, 183, 188; attention to history in, 97–105; on tautology, 81; poetics of attention in, 88–94; and quotation, 105–109; “spots of time,” 92–93, 103. Works: “Anticipation, October 1803,” 114; “Expostulation and Reply,” 152–153; “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, 5, 10, 43; The Prelude, 13, 92–94, 98–109, 176; “The Tables Turned,” 40; “There Was a Boy,” 88–92 Worrall, David, 48, 50, 118