Life: Organic Form and Romanticism 9780300155587

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Life

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Life Organic Form and Romanticism

DENISE GIGANTE

Yale University Press

New Haven and London

Copyright © 2009 by Denise Gigante. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Minion type by Integrated Publishing Solutions, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gigante, Denise, 1965– Life : organic form and Romanticism / Denise Gigante. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-13685-2 (alk. paper) 1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. English poetry—18th century—History and criticism. 3. Life in literature. 4. Life sciences in literature. 5. Literature and science—Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. Literature and science—Great Britain—History—18th century. 7. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Title. PR575.L54G54 2009 821´.709—dc22 2008044344 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). It contains 30 percent postconsumer waste (PCW) and is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Harold Bloom

What distinguishes life from the inanimate matter in which it has its origins is the continuous self-exceeding by which it bursts forth from the lifeless and ecstatically maintains itself in being through expenditures that increase rather than deplete the reserves of vitality. Life is an excess, call it the self-ecstasy of matter. —robert pogue harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

Contents

Color illustrations follow page 114 Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations ONE

T WO

THREE

xi

Introduction 1

Smart’s Powers: Jubilate Agno

49

Blake’s Living Form: Jerusalem 106

FOUR

FIVE

ix

Shelley’s Vitalist “Witch”

155

Keats’s Principle of Monstrosity: Lamia 208 Notes

247

Index

287

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Acknowledgments

n the opening lines of his sonnet remembering Percy Bysshe Shelley, Arthur Henry Hallam quotes the end of Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life”: “‘Then what is Life, I cried.’ From his rent deeps / Of soul the Poet cast that burning word.” He is remembering the end of a poem written shortly before the poet drowned in the Bay of Spezia off the coast of Italy. “Some are who never grow a whit more pale,” Hallam wrote, “For thinking on the general mystery.” I have had no choice but to confront that “mystery” following the death of my friend Jay Fliegelman as I was finishing this book. Jay’s vitality always seemed unbounded, and in that respect this book (if it is not autobiographical, which it must, however, be) is about him. It was certainly written in dialogue with him, and my greatest acknowledgment will be poor recompense for the enormous wattage of vital power, intellectual as well as emotional, that I received from this extraordinary individual over the past seven years. Writing is solitary; interlocution is everything. But the book goes back further than seven years. Christopher Rovee was with the author at its inception, and I am grateful for his tireless reading of unformed, even monstrous, drafts with scrupulous, intelligent, and uncompromising attention. Karl Kroeber, Sharon Ruston, and two anonymous

x

Acknowledgments

readers from Yale University Press offered constructive criticism of the book as a whole, and I thank them along with other readers including John Bender, Terry Castle, Steve Goldsmith, Erik Gray, Gavin Jones, Diego Rasskin-Gutman, Abe Stoll, and Alex Woloch. I am obliged to John Kulka at Yale University Press for supporting the book based on its intellectual (rather than market) value, and to Jennifer Banks, Lindsay Toland, and Susan Laity, also at the Press, for their expert care. The KeatsShelley Association of America provided the initial prompt with a Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Grant, and the Stanford Humanities Center and School of Sciences and Humanities at Stanford generously sponsored research. Stuart Curran, Anne Mellor, Rob Polhemus, and Starry Schor helped obtain funding, and Lauren Caldwell, Nora Soledad Martin, and Eliza Ridgeway provided excellent research assistance. For invitations to speak from the book, I thank Rowan Boyson, Monika Class, Claire Colebrook, Penny Fielding, Tim Fulford, and Rebecca Lemon. The students in my graduate seminars (“Romantic Poetry and Poetics,” “Romanticism and Science,” “The Sublime and the Ugly”) and undergraduate and continuingeducation classes on William Blake offered invaluable insights and inspiration, for which I am indebted. Finally, for support during a difficult time I want to acknowledge Sarah Benenson, David Clark, Dan Edelstein, Zephyr Frank, Sepp Gumbrecht, Stephen Hinton, Nick Jenkins, Angela and Matt Jockers, Barbara Klein, Peter Levitt, Andrea Lunsford, Christina Mesa, Thomas Pfau, Jessica Riskin, Hollis Robbins, Jean Romolo, Joanne Rovee, Julian Rovee, Gabriella Saffran, Jennifer Summit, Beth Wahl, and Paul Youngquist. An early version of part of Chapter 1 was published in European Romantic Review and of Chapter 5 in PMLA; I appreciate the journals’ permission to reprint.

Abbreviations

AE

BL CCW

CJ E

EO

EPR

F

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man; in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in CCW, vol. 7, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols. to date (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969– ); cited by volume, part (where applicable), and page Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman; commentary by Harold Bloom (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1988) John Hunter, Essays and Observations on Natural History, Anatomy, Physiology, Psychology, and Geology, 2 vols. (London: John van Voorst, 1861) John Abernethy, An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern

xii

HCW I

J

JA

KL L

LPS M

MR

PU

Abbreviations

Prometheus, ed. Marilyn Butler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930) William Lawrence, An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology; Being the Two Introductory Lectures Delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons on the 21st and 25th of March, 1816 (London: J. Callow, 1816) William Blake, Jerusalem, in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (New York: Thames and Hudson in association with the William Blake Trust, 2000); cited by plate number Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, in The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh, vol. 1 of 6, ed. Karina Williamson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–83); cited by fragment and line number John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958) William Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, Delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons (London: Printed for J. Callow, 1819) Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964) William Blake, Milton, in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (New York: Thames and Hudson in association with the William Blake Trust, 2000); cited by plate number Theodor Schwann, Microscopical Researches into the Accordance in the Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants, trans. Henry Smith (1847; New York: Kraus, 1969) Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound,” in SPP, cited by line number

Abbreviations

SPP

TG TL U

UB

UOS

xiii

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2002) Caspar Friedrich Wolff, Theorie von der Generation (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966); translations mine Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Theory of Life, in CCW, vol. 11, part 1, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, in The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. David Bindman (New York: Thames and Hudson in association with the William Blake Trust, 2000); cited by plate and line number Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte (Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich, 1791); translations mine Samuel Thomas Soemmerring, Über das Organ der Seele (1796), vol. 9 of Werke, ed. Manfred Wenzel and Sigrid Oehler-Klein (Mainz: Schwabe, 1999); translations mine

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1 Introduction

A poem may be quite nice and elegant and yet have no spirit. . . . Spirit in an aesthetic sense is the animating principle in the mind. —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment

omantic poets and makers of all sorts—from the philosophical to the fictional, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Victor Frankenstein—were in quest, literally, of the principle of life. Such a principle or power, whose permutations were many, promised to relieve “the burden of the mystery” by explaining “the mystery of life.” We are all too familiar now with the latter phrase; the former (for which Keats had a particular fondness) derives from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” in which the speaker enters that “blessed mood” when “the breath of this corporeal frame, /

2

Introduction

And even the motion of our human blood” seem suspended, and we “become a living soul.” What might this mean: to become a living soul? For Wordsworth, as for others, it was above all a condition of power, when “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things.”1 The result of aesthetic concentration is the animation of the soul, the part of us that rises from corporeal slumber to penetrate the life of things. But what, then, is life? The question is asked a thousand times in a thousand ways by all the major British Romantic poets writing in the period from 1760 through 1830. Shelley, who died before he could finish “The Triumph of Life,” left the question dangling at the end of that last major work: “‘Then, what is Life?’ I said . . . the cripple cast / His eye upon the car which now had rolled / Onward, as if that look must be the last, / And answered . . .” (ellipses in original). How the cripple responds is of no consequence. The question remains fundamentally unanswered and, for the poet seeking wisdom in mangled forms, perhaps unanswerable. “We are struck with admiration of some of its transient modifications,” Shelley wrote of life in a notebook of 1819, “but it is itself the great miracle” (SPP 505). The ephemeral configurations of a power known as life could be discerned in its material forms, the result of a transcendent power named variously Lebenskraft, Bildungstrieb, vis essentialis, and vis vitae, to give a few of the linguistic constructs most popular at the time. Life was a version of power, and power was life. That was all the Romantics knew perhaps, but not all they needed to know. For unlike the other terms we are accustomed to seeing in that equation—Beauty and Truth—power is fearsome, and life, for most mortals, in need of control. To perceive beauty as a harmony of parts may be one thing, but to see living form as a harmony of power (or powers) is to risk the object’s slipping

Introduction

3

out of representation, and hence out of imaginative control. As the Romantics recognized, power, even when in balance, is still power, and the slightest alteration in circumstance or environment could set that power in unpredictable motion. European writers across the intellectual and historical field that fell somewhere between God and cellular biology could find no escape from the conundrum of life conceived as power: the unifying principle of organic form. Just as beauty was conceived as “multëity in Unity” (Coleridge’s phrase), life became defined in similar terms as “unity in multëity” (CCW 11.1.369; TL 510). What the exchangeability of these definitions of life and beauty suggests is that once life was viewed vitalistically as power, science and aesthetics confronted the same formal problems. This, in a nutshell, is the rationale for treating literary works of the Romantic period, particularly some of the more seemingly formless ones, within the wider context of organicism as an interdisciplinary field responding to the problem of life. Despite decades of historical challenge to the rubric of Romanticism as a shared intellectual project, the writers discussed here were all committed to defining and representing the incalculable, uncontrollable—often capricious, always ebullient—power of vitality. Although Romantic life science, obsessed with the idea of life as power, has been considered a dubious episode in the history of science, it made possible the analogy between aesthetic and biological form upon which we still rely. In the early nineteenth century scientists still did not know that mammals develop from a zygote, or fertilized egg, nor that this particle was capable of generating the entire organism through the processes of division and differentiation. Generation and reproduction, or the production of creatures and parts of creatures, marked a threshold in natural science that neither chemistry nor the

4

Introduction

mechanistic physiology of the previous century could cross. The unique properties of living form became the subject of much debate, and, as M. H. Abrams has recounted, they consisted of unity, vegetation (or growth), assimilation, internal design (or self-generation), and the interdependence of parts. Such properties are also sometimes conceived as a triad (assimilation, reproduction, autonomy) or as a binary (generation and reproduction). However grouped, they tend to imply agency and autonomy.2 Yet, even for Coleridge, on whom subsequent ideas of organic form have been based, living or organic form was never equivalent to undifferentiated unity. Instead, the unpredictable vitality of living form, its very liveliness— protean, procreative, for some terrifying—served as a model for “genuine” art. Vitality was, to be sure, the mark, the distinguishing feature, of Romantic aesthetics. When William Hazlitt took up his pen as a knight of “the Round Table” in The Examiner, he insisted that a work of art must have “the internal character, the living principle in it” since without this it is merely “a smooth surface, not a warm moving mass” (HCW 4:77). Any authentic work of art must seem alive: it must contain the living principle that characterized what was called living form. A year later, in Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge defined the imagination as the “living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception,” declaring that “could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art” (BL 1:304, 2:83). Like works of nature, aesthetic products conceived as living form could not be mechanically constructed through rule and line. Nor could they be reproduced. “The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of

Introduction

5

the properties of the material,” Coleridge wrote, “as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form on the other hand, is innate. It shapes, as it developes itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one & the same with the perfection of its outward Form.” Nature provides the model for the artistic genius, whose products are formal expressions of a power that was purposive but not necessarily intentional. “Such is the Life,” Coleridge explained, “such the form” (CCW 5.1:495). By syllogistic logic it would follow: such is the power, such the form. Yet too much power, or power potentially unhinged or gone awry, lay forever on the horizon of Romantic vitalism. As the concept of vital power sparked a preoccupation with self-generating and self-maintaining form, it quickened the category of the aesthetic, elevating natural researchers into natural philosophers attempting to account for a mysterious power buried deep within the structures of nature. Life scientists focused on the dynamics of organic form in an effort to explain how form emerged and maintained itself, despite the physical laws of an environment that worked, meanwhile, to reduce it to its constituent parts. Aesthetic theorists and practitioners alike focused on the vitality of form, which from the 1790s on had been imbued (by way of Kant’s critique of aesthetic and teleological judgment) with the Aristotelian notion of purpose. Yet the problem with the merger of science and aesthetics at the turn of the nineteenth century boiled down to the following: while the sublime object always threatened to exceed formal constraints, when it slid from theory into praxis, from imagined into actual, animated power, it could also slide out of the sublime and into a distinctly Romantic version of monstrosity.

6

Introduction

As long as life was preformed, as earlier Enlightenment science had held it to be, all aberrations from standard patterns (embryological deformities, monstrous births) could be interpreted as static manifestations of evil, material signs of God’s judgment within a greater divine plan. Organic development was a stable, ongoing process of unfolding that plan, and God took responsibility for any wayward forms of life that might be considered monstrous. Yet once life came to be seen as power, monstrosity came to represent life’s relentless fecundity and “the monstrous” a mode of uncontainable vitality.3 It is striking that most scientific works on generation from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led inevitably to meditations on monstrous generation. Because what could grow and generate living form could also change, it ran the risk of going “wrong” in the developmental process—or at least of going its own way. The problem with Romantic organicism as it is traditionally understood on the idealist model is that it leaves out the dynamics of power underwriting unexpected forms of both nature and art. This book takes up poems by Christopher Smart, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats that seem to defeat their own formal and allegorical structures.4 In truth, I have had trouble convincing some readers that the first poem discussed, Smart’s Jubilate Agno, is even a poem, much less a Romantic one. My purpose is to provide a methodology for reading these seemingly “formless” forms as manifestations of an epigenesist poetics, a sadly awkward phrase that will nevertheless serve us well in reading these somewhat awkward poems. Yet before undertaking such a venture, it is necessary to clarify precisely what was meant by the natural-philosophical term epigenesis.

7

Introduction

Epigenesis Aristotle, who formulated the first significant theory of epigenesis, had no microscope with which to investigate living organisms. Originally, the concept stood for a gradual, internally motivated process of morphogenesis, commencing from what we might call an epicenter. The matter making up the ancient world was readily disposed to taking on life—or form or soul. (In Greek these terms were interchangeable, and the ideas were not distinct.) Unorganized but inspirited matter thus had the capacity to produce living, or organic, forms de novo. Following Aristotle, William Harvey’s treatise On Animal Generation (1651) provided the first major study of generation in the modern period, and in it the scientific revolution ran up against the ancient idea of vitalism. Harvey’s empirical methodology and sense of the human body as a hydraulic machine were here put in dialogue with the inexplicable: an invisible living principle. Standing at the crossroads of ancient animism and an orthodox creationism based on the Bible, this work proposed something that had never been heard before: omne viva ex ovum (all life from an egg), as the Latin epigraph to his treatise on animal generation read. Of course, what Harvey meant by egg (ovum) is unclear since this was more of a conceptual category than a distinct, anatomical particle.5 But by overturning the received wisdom that viviparous (producing living young) rather than oviparous reproduction was the model for all organic growth, Harvey, who paradoxically clung to the ancient concept of epigenesis, enabled a competing theory of generation that was more amenable to the Christian worldview. This was called preformationism, a doctrine according to which God, the omnipotent creator, makes the design for each species.

8

Introduction

According to the age-old theory of epigenesis, by contrast, the male animal of each species implants the soul (essence, vital principle, form) into embryonic matter provided by the female. Then, “as soon as it has been formed,” Aristotle noted, “a thing makes itself grow” by incorporating new, unformed material into its substance and shaping it to its own ends.6 Harvey adhered to more rigorous modern standards of evidence, but he too believed that an unspecified “vital principle” was the teleological cause by which an animal makes itself out of nonliving matter. Timothy Lenoir helpfully explains such teleological causality as “cause and effect . . . so mutually interdependent that it is impossible to think of one without the other, so that instead of a linear series it is much more appropriate to think of a sort of circular series, A→B→C→A,” in which the first cause is also the last.7 Harvey contrasted this theory of generation per epigenesin to the alternate model of generation per metamorphosin, whereby “forms are created as if by the impression of a seal, or, as if they were adjusted in a mould”; as he put it, “An animal which is created by epigenesis attracts, prepares, elaborates, and makes use of the material, all at the same time; the processes of formation and growth are simultaneous.”8 The distinctive biological processes of generation and vegetation, through which organic matter takes on and maintains a specific form, thus relied on powers that were only suspected to be present and whose autonomy was potentially in conflict with an all-powerful Christian God. Not surprisingly, when the idea of self-shaping substance came face to face with the Christian view of creation as a divine fiat, a counter-theory of generation emerged. Based on Harvey’s work, this theory, known as preformationism or evolution (from the Latin evolutio, “to unfold”), held that God had premade all forms of life at the time of the Creation, and

Introduction

9

these forms simply awaited their proper time and place in the universe to begin the process of embryonic unfolding. Harvey had described how a chick takes shape gradually inside an egg, but when his Italian contemporary Marcello Malpighi repeated his experiments with a better microscope than Harvey’s, he announced that what his English peer had failed to see during the first three days of incubation—already formed parts of the chick—had been present all along. Malpighi claimed to have observed these embryonic parts prior to the appearance of the famous punctum sanguinum (point of blood), traditionally thought to initiate the heartbeat and other vital processes. He did not explicitly say that these parts were preformed, or that they had somehow preexisted since the biblical Creation, but his work provided the basis for ovist preformation theory: a blueprint model of generation in which God produced the design for each species.9 Such a scenario included no room for unexpected change or invention. Regardless of whether what preexisted in the egg was design or an actual miniature of the animal, advocates of preformation considered generation a mechanical realization, by way of nutrition, of already articulated parts. One can see how this theory lent itself readily to both the mechanistic physiology and the taxonomic approach to nature common within the European scientific community. Naturalists sought to identify and classify given structures, determining how these worked as parts in the natural world, how they related to one another and to the larger machine of the universe. Bit by bit, they were able to accumulate natural knowledge and piece it together, though any view of nature achieved through this means was necessarily flawed—or rent, since the seams between discrete epistemological units were not continuous. Still, the model was self-contained, and the natural researcher did

10

Introduction

not have to account for matter with the capacity to rise up suddenly from its predetermined place in the whole and take on original, possibly unexpected, forms. The emphasis was on analysis, not synthesis, of the creaturely world. When in 1671 the Italian scientist Francesco Redi demonstrated that living creatures which had seemed to appear out of the blue in putrid matter were the result of eggs laid by flies, he finally laid to rest the ancient faith in spontaneous generation. Preformation theory ascribed all productive power to a transcendent maker, and natural historians and philosophers who supported this theory worked to wipe out all remaining vital sparks and spirits from the legitimate sphere of Enlightenment science.10 Throughout the eighteenth century these lingered metaphorically, but they had become associated with a more primitive, superstitious age. Starting in the 1740s, Marc J. Ratcliff explains, “the natural experimental laboratory—with several microscopes at its center, surrounded by a profusion of tools such as glass jars, bottles, labels, scalpels . . . began to acquire its distinctive modern physiognomy, of riotous life enclosed in a designated space. The many jars containing infusions, plants, insects, worms, batrachians, eggs, and the like exhibited the swarming of nature—but under the control of scientific instruments and subjected to the naturalist’s gaze.”11 The obvious fact to which the abundance of scientific instruments paid tribute, of course, was that such control was extremely precarious. Although buried temporarily beneath the structured patterns of Enlightenment science, animating sparks and powers of the natural world remained. Ideas about generation suffused many aspects of culture, such that in A Defence of Poetry Shelley compared poetic language to “the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially” (SPP 528). Whether intentionally

Introduction

11

or not, the image refers back to Nicolas Malebranche’s Search After Truth (1674), which cites Malpighi’s work as evidence that “a chicken that is perhaps entirely formed [can be] seen in the seed of a fresh egg that has not been hatched.” Malebranche, having observed what he thought was a miniature tulip inside a tulip bulb, extended the theory of preformation to plants, postulating that “in a single apple seed there are apple trees, apples, and apple seeds, standing in the proportion of a fully grown tree to the tree in its seed, for an infinite, or nearly infinite number of centuries.” According to Malebranche, “nature’s role is only to unfold these tiny trees by providing perceptible growth.”12 He called his theory of embedded miniature life forms emboîtement (encasement) and speculated that an individual organism contained in a germ needed only to increase in size, gaining new matter but not form, to realize its purpose. This radical version of preformationism, known also as preexistence, led even the preeminent physiologist Albrecht von Haller to some dubious calculations, such as his estimation that our first mother, Eve, must have stored two hundred thousand million diminutive human beings within her ovaries. Within a few years of ovist preformation theory, scientists had discovered a sea of swarming “spermatic animals,” alternately called animalcules or spermatic worms, in the semen of male animals, which many took to be the source of preformed life. Accordingly, an alternate, “spermist” version of preformationism arose. The Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, credited with the discovery of the spermatic worms, concluded in 1678 that only male animals possessed the preformed germs of life.13 As François Jacob remarks in The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, “When Leeuwenhoek and Hartsoeker observed ‘animalcules’ frantically swimming around in the spermatic fluid of many different types of male animals,

12

Introduction

they immediately found a use for them—but not the right one.”14 The spermist creation theory returned the female animal to her ancient role of providing matter for organic growth and raised as many questions as it answered.15 Why, for instance, such a multitude of preformed embryos for a single act of reproduction? Why so much wasted life when experience showed that nature never does anything without a purpose? Some proposed that the swarming, wormlike things found in semen were parasites having nothing to do with sexual reproduction. Others, who were convinced of the utter irrationality of emboîtement and who doubted the logic of either ovist or spermist preformation theory, began to discern new productive powers in nature. Naturalists in the Enlightenment steered clear of the term epigenesis, but starting in the 1740s the concept of vital power reentered the scene of generation. When the English microscopist John Turberville Needham peered through his lens at prepared infusions of vegetable and animal matter (specimens soaked in water and sealed in a vessel), he saw what he took to be an entirely new class of animals, whose “greatest Characteristic is, that they neither are generated, subsist by Nutriment, as other Plants and Animals do, or generate in the ordinary Way.”16 Although Needham’s experiments were retested later in the century by Lazzaro Spallanzani, who proved that Needham had not sealed his vessels tightly enough to prevent the intrusion of air (thereby invalidating his experimental results), Needham’s work formed part of a wider challenge to the theory of preformation that was gaining force at this time.17 Like others, he concluded that there must be some “productive power” in nature that enabled unorganized material to generate new living forms. Like Spallanzani, the French naturalist Charles Bonnet

Introduction

13

was vocal in defending the Christian theory of preformation from dangerously compelling forces produtrices, but he unwittingly provided further evidence against it in 1740 when he discovered the phenomenon of parthenogenesis in aphids. These miniscule animals, commonly known as plant lice, he found, could reproduce without the assistance of a sexual partner (in this case, the male). Although small, the creatures were larger than Needham’s microscopic animalcules, and their manner of reproduction overturned a central tenet of Christian preformation theory, the necessity for sexual coupling to populate and fructify the earth. Bonnet had accused Needham of straying from the literal into “the poetic ground of physiology” (to borrow a phrase from the Romantic physiologist William Lawrence; L 83) by endorsing the concept of formative power. Yet Bonnet’s own effort to defend preformationism through a nebulous definition of the germ as “every pre-ordination, every preformation of parts capable by itself of determining the existence of a Plant or an Animal” suggests that by midcentury this germ could no longer be thought of as a homunculus, or miniature life form complete in all its parts.18 A third major challenge to preformation theory beyond Needham and Bonnet occurred in the 1740s with the discovery of the spectacular ability of the arm-polyp, a creature today called a hydra, to regenerate its lost or mutilated parts. When the amateur naturalist Abraham Trembley cut into the creature, he found that not only could it produce new parts, it could also generate new creatures from dismembered scraps of itself.19 An unusually plastic form of life and a possible link between the animal and plant kingdoms, the polyp was more than a match for proponents of preformation. If all life was preformed, skeptics wondered, how could a severed piece of a creature generate an entirely new living form? Were all the

14

Introduction

fibers of the polyp populated with germs ready to be stimulated into development by the naturalist’s knife? And if this were the case, how many germs (or animating principles, souls) could one polyp have, if indeed it had any? I shall return to the debates surrounding the prolific polyp in Chapter 3; here let us merely situate the creature next to Needham’s animalcules and Bonnet’s aphids on the margins of standard classifications of plant and animal life. Taxonomy had been the goal of Enlightenment scientists seeking to follow an epistemological path to the divine through rational religion and the accrual of facts, but here was a significant challenge to any theory of life based on organic structures. As Linnaeus recognized, botany, or the science of classifying plants, was analogous to comparative anatomy, which also classified animals by way of structure. The morphological oddity of the polyp challenged the structural stability of the natural world and redirected naturalists back to the unsettling idea of formative power. To test the theory of preformation, the French doyen of natural history Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, performed some experiments with Needham in Paris that served as the basis for his own theory of generation, expounded in his Natural History (1749), a monumental work that sparked a revival of vitalism. Buffon decided that what his English peer took to be spontaneously generated creatures “of a class apart” were instead “organic particles,” or indissoluble, rudimentary building blocks of organized life. According to his organicparticle theory, the bodies of animals and plants consisted of a certain number of organic particles, identical in figure and substance to the fully formed organism. Under the guidance of so-called penetrating powers, these organic particles would incorporate themselves into the internal mold of a developing life form.20 For Buffon, the penetrating powers represented the

Introduction

15

agency that made certain material penetrate certain parts of the mold, expanding ultimately into an organized form resembling that of the parent organism. An embryo developed, in other words, as its penetrating powers caused nutritive material to penetrate the internal mold at the right time, in the right place, and in the right proportion to bring about innate design. Buffon’s contemporary Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, the physicist responsible for the dissemination of Isaac Newton’s work in France, developed a similar theory about animals in which male and female “semen” (both viable quantities at the time) contained organic particles destined to form the different organs as like particles were attracted to like and combined. In response to criticism that a simple force, even attraction, was inadequate to account for the production of organisms as complex as mammals, Maupertuis equipped his hypothetical force with memory, to guide the organic particles into a form resembling that of the parents.21 New life forms would occur when an excess of these particles, stored in the “seminal reservoirs” of adult animals, united through the penetrating powers. For Maupertuis as for Buffon, death meant the detachment of these particles, not their destruction. Assuming a minimum level of organization, therefore, the organic-particle theory fell somewhere between preformation and epigenesis, the latter necessitating that the primal matter in which an organism takes shape be undifferentiated and unorganized. Pivoting between natural history and natural philosophy, Buffon’s work was enormously influential on European life science throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century. In England, Erasmus Darwin translated Buffon’s organic particles into “molecules with formative propensities,” reasoning that certain particles might have greater powers of attraction than others (and others a greater aptitude to be attracted),

16

Introduction

which might allow for an explanation of organic self-generation on chemical grounds.22 Shortly after its first appearance in print, Buffon’s moule intérieur was translated into German as Kraft (power), a change that signaled a paradigm shift in the study of organic form: life now denoted power, rather than structure. Painted in broad strokes, this shift entailed the move from an empiricist natural history to a more speculative natural philosophy and the elevation to a symbolic level of powers formerly though to be mere force. The German term for vital power appeared on the scene with Medicus’s On the Lebenskraft (1774), though the idea of vis viva (life force) had been gaining support since 1757, when Albrecht von Haller demonstrated sensibility and irritability, or the powers of the nerves to react and of the muscles to contract, respectively. These vital powers were distinct from chemical or physical forces insofar as they occurred only in matter that was alive.23 The German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who contributed his theory of Bildungstrieb (formative drive) to the rising tide of vitalism, observed that “vitality is one of those subjects which are more easily known than defined, [for] its effects are sufficiently manifest, and ascribable to peculiar powers only. The epithet vital is given to these powers, because on them so much depend the actions of the body during life, and of those parts which for a short time after death preserve their vitality, that they are not referrible to any qualities merely physical, chemical, or mechanical.”24 Following Haller’s work on sensibility and irritability, scientists were forced to acknowledge mysterious powers in living matter that allowed it to resist physical laws: warm-blooded animals maintain a consistent body temperature, for example, despite the changing temperature of the environment, and all living

Introduction

17

creatures resist the chemical decomposition that sets in immediately at death. However, while Haller marked out a path for physiology beyond mechanism, he did so by comparing the vital powers of sensibility and irritability to Newton’s (calculable) force of attraction. So too biologists following Haller based their ideas about nature’s productive powers on an analogy between biology and the physical sciences, physics and chemistry. Newton had left the origin of the attraction of gravitation unexplained, and Haller thereby felt himself liberated to study the effect of vital power (the material phenomena of sensibility and irritability) without explaining its cause. The origin of vital power “is placed far beyond the power of the scalpel or the microscope,” he wrote; “beyond the scalpel or microscope I do not make many conjectures.”25 By the same logic, Blumenbach claimed that “just in the same way as we use the name of attraction or gravity to denote certain forces, the causes of which however still remain hid, as they say, in Cimmerian darkness, the formative force (nisus formativus) can explain the generation of animals.”26 Biologists compared vital power to forces like electricity and magnetism, but the key difference was that their power could not be quantified or mathematically predicted in the same manner as physical force. This conundrum of vitalism applied both to products of nature and of art, to plants and polyps as well as poems. As biology veered away from the realm of calculability that characterized Newtonian science, it came to depend on discursive constructs (moule intérieur, nisus formativus) to guide the science of generation, although none of the forces that emerged from the epistemological ruptures of the 1740s could be equated with life in the way that the Latin anima had been

18

Introduction

or that the concept of Lebenskraft would later be.27 Powers of vegetation and generation had been postulated before, but they were insufficient to explain the self-organization of creatures more complex than microscopic life. Buffon’s organic particles presupposed a degree of preorganization, and Needham’s version of formative power produced mere animalcules. Then, in 1759, the young German embryologist Caspar Friedrich Wolff caused a breakthrough with what appeared to be detailed microscopic evidence for epigenesis in complex animals—mammals, specifically young incubating chicks, whose development he described from the earliest stages of unformed substance. Wolff’s work shocked the scientific establishment of Europe and revived the controversy about epigenesis in the years from 1760 through 1790, itself a philosophical stopping point between Enlightenment notions of preformed life and Kantian notions of teleological power.28 His much-publicized dispute with Haller, based on claims made in his dissertation Theory of Generation (1759), served to focus the debate about life as power that began in earnest in the 1760s. Haller’s own career exemplified the volatility characterizing the science of generation at this time. As a student of the mechanist Herman Boerhaave, he had initially accepted the preformationist theory of spermatic worms, or animalculism. Following Trembley’s discovery of the polyp’s powers of regeneration, however, he ambivalently embraced epigenesis. He simply could not comprehend “how the same parts [of the polyp] which in the morning were little cuttings of a spine, a stomach, or a head, [could] by afternoon change into true heads and whole stomachs.”29 Nor in studying living form as closely as he did could he understand how a simple force could produce the organic complexity he witnessed on a daily basis. After a brief period of anx-

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19

iously lending his authority to the theory of epigenesis, which seemed dangerously close to materialism, he returned to the religious haven of preformation. From there he faced the genius upstart Wolff. What was so radical about Wolff’s theory—and the reason Haller gave it the serious attention he did—was that it demanded viewing living form from a different perspective than either anatomy or physiology could provide. Wolff identified what he called an “essential power” (essentliche Kraft, or vis essentialis), responsible for a particular mode of generation (Enstehungsart) that would allow structure to be seen as a byproduct, and a variable one at that, of power. While anatomists studied organisms through the structure of their parts and physiologists through the internal structure of the relations of diverse organ functions, Wolff assumed that all life forms develop analogously based on the workings of the vis essentialis. He called this “the very power through which, in the vegetable body, all those things which we describe as life are effected.” He assumed that it could explain the development of even the most complex forms of life and labeled it essential “because, namely, a plant will stop being a plant if this power is taken away” (TG 160). As the distinguishing feature of life, it drove the formative activity of the organism and did so in a manner independent of purpose (Zweck). In the second edition of his Theory of Generation (1764), translated from Latin into German, Wolff boldly stated: “I hold the collective opinion of physiologists to be wrong and . . . believe [myself] to have found traces of an essential power in certain plants as well as animals, whose performance I have described as the distribution of juice [Saft] and nutrition in plants and in animals, from the first moment of nutrition into full growth” (TG 269). By

20

Introduction

classifying species independently of structure, he permanently unsettled the theory of preformation and breathed new life into the ancient idea of epigenesis. The chief point Wolff posited and stuck to was that while an organism might look like an assemblage of parts, such organization is accidental, not essential, to living form. Too radical for his colleagues at the College of Medicine in Berlin, Wolff moved in 1766 to the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, where he used his academic position as professor of anatomy and physiology and curator of the royal gardens and cabinets of monstrosities to continue studying the power he believed responsible for generation and vegetation. “What is the nature of this force?” he asked as late as 1789, and the answers he received, in prize-winning essays from Blumenbach and Ignatius Born, published with an essay of his own, suggested that it would be possible to omit the vis essentialis as a cause and still describe the development of creatures in the same way. He recognized his own term as a heuristic device, or “instrument of judgment” as Joan Steigerwald refers to it, which could allow the scientist to explain life in a manner independent of structure.30 Wolff was willing to forgo the name of the power he described to concentrate on its operation, and Born, too, was ambivalent about naming the formative power whose workings he explained: “Call it a vis fluida infita, innata, vis propria feu essentialis, vis organica or vegetationis, vis primordialis or primegenia, a Bildungstrieb or nisus formativus, or a vis essentialis organica,” he wrote, “the important thing is that such a power exists as a motile, formative power.”31 Whereas Wolff theorized generation in terms of a simple force operating universally in matter, his successor Blumenbach, head of the Göttingen school of physiology, posited an explicitly formative drive (Bildungstrieb) that could shape un-

Introduction

21

formed but organizable [organisibare] substance into organic form. “A drive belongs,” he wrote, “to the vital powers, which is just as significant as the other kinds of vital power in the organized body (contractibility, irritability, sensibility) and the general physical power of the body overall, but different. The most important power for procreation, nourishment, and reproduction appears to be this one, which, to distinguish it from the other vital powers, I give the name of Bildungstrieb (nisus formativus)” (UB 32).32 Blumenbach distinguished this drive from Wolff’s essential power, emphasizing that the latter was merely a force driving nutrition through the unorganized material of developing organisms. The vis essentialis was “requisite to the Bildungstrieb, but not by any means the Bildungstrieb itself ” since the former could be discerned even in the most “unnatural outgrowths” of living matter, where no formative power was manifest. By the same token, it was possible for “the vis essentialis in badly nourished bodies to be very weak where the actual Bildungstrieb is undamaged” (UB 39–41). Kant, like other theorists of the Romantic era, came to rely on Blumenbach’s biological concept of formative power in developing his idea of organic purpose.33 This is not to say that all natural philosophers of the Romantic period embraced the concept of vital or formative power. F. W. J. Schelling, who considered the natural world to be an animated whole, refused to acknowledge individual powers like Lebenskraft or Bildungstrieb.34 With his successor Hegel he preferred the idea of spirit (Geist) working itself out in nature according to the teleology of an original image (Urbild ), an idea Goethe accepted as well, though Schelling found himself resorting to the biological term, Bildungstrieb.35 Goethe, likewise critical of the Lebenskraft, proposed a theory of organic morphology based on the concept of Urbild, described as the

22

Introduction

organic recapitulation of certain basic forms that aggregate mechanically, like crystals, without the assistance of formative power.36 Yet Goethe’s Urbild was indebted to Buffon’s internal mold (Kraft) as well as to the physiological concept of Bildung.37 By the end of the century, discussions of formal development were inevitably linked to some version of vitality as power. As long as the organism remained the fundamental unit of life, a unifying principle was essential to that vitality. Kant explained in his “Critique of Teleological Judgment” that all parts of an organism were not only mutually dependent (through the physiology of organ function) but also mutually productive: “Just as each part exists only as a result of all the rest, so we also think of each part as existing for the sake of the others and of the whole”; instead “we must think of each part as an organ that produces the other parts (so that each reciprocally produces the other). . . . Only if a product meets that condition [as well], and only because of this, will it be both an organized and a self-organizing being, which therefore can be called a natural purpose” (CJ 253). The difference between a complex mechanism and an organism that manifested purpose was formative power. The names of the power regulating such purpose might range from vis essentialis to Bildungstrieb, from Lebenskraft to bildende Kraft; in one of his more facetious moods, Coleridge even posited himself in place of that power: “That Life is I myself I!”38 (He later explained more carefully what he meant by the concept of vital power, in his Theory of Life, which cleaves to the Romantic view of the innate tendency of living matter toward form, otherwise known as teleology, entelechy, or emergence.) Of course, only when organic form was regarded as immanent, something that de-

23

Introduction

velops gradually and hence unforeseeably from within, was such a unifying power or principle necessary.

Unity in Multëity In Theory of Life (1816), Coleridge defined living form as “unity in multëity” or “the power which discloses itself from within as a principle of unity in the many,” emphasizing that “the former, the unity to wit, is produced ab intra” (TL 510). According to this logic, life is a principle of unity disclosing itself from within, and the greater the complexity—or the more numerous the parts and the relations between them—the greater, or more intense, the life. The same was true of beauty. In his lecture series On the Principles of Genial Criticism, Coleridge explained that beauty is “multëity in Unity,” or “that in which the many, still seen as many, becomes one” (CCW 11.1.369–71). The life of an organism, like the aesthetic power of a work of art, cannot be reduced to a component quality or part. It constitutes, rather, a biological je ne sais quoi, mediating between existing parts. Coleridge likens it to a copula, performing the function of an “is” in a philosophical statement. However, what that “is” is (whether material or immaterial, mind or spirit, transcendent power or quantifiable force) could not be determined absolutely. The fact that products of nature as well as art defy analytical reduction and, within a framework of certain necessary rules, maintain their freedom, helps explain the convergence of science and aesthetics on the fulcrum of living form. Two decades later, Shelley declared that a “poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth” (SPP 515), and although that statement might not make much sense to us

24

Introduction

today (its vague terms may even prove something of an embarrassment to the professional literary scholar), it comes into more immediate focus—and its stakes attain more obvious relevance—when we recall the ways in which the concept of life, its meanings and material expressions, were being contested across a range of developing disciplines.39 Natural philosophers and poets were on a relatively even playing field when it came to discovering and representing “the character of all life and being,” to use Shelley’s words once more (SPP 506–7). As Trevor H. Levere put it, Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb “provided a suggestive metaphor that was almost a model for imagination, raising questions about the relation between imitation and imagination.”40 Kant acknowledged the influence of Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb on his Critique of Judgment, just as Blumenbach later relied on Kantian formulations of purposive power (zweckmässige Kraft).41 The imagination, like a biological purposive drive, was capable of establishing unity in multëity, the condition of possibility for both beauty and life. To produce living form the critic must tap into the same productive power whose presence in the natural world can be discerned throughout Romantic poetry. Coleridge’s “one Life within us and abroad” and Wordsworth’s “one / Surpassing life” refer to this same source of vital productivity.42 In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), Friedrich Schiller wrote that unliving matter, “though it is and remains lifeless, can nevertheless, thanks to the architect or the sculptor, become living form [lebende Gestalt],” particularly as in the case of a statue when that “form lives in our feeling and his life takes on form in our understanding . . . and this will always be the case whenever we adjudge him beautiful” (AE 101). To perceive the beauty of living form is to become a living soul, to see into

Introduction

25

the life of things as a synthesizing power capable of bringing about unity in art and nature. Schiller, like his contemporary Coleridge, helped to found Romantic aesthetics on an organic model—and to articulate its sociopolitical implications.43 For both writers living form was inherently political, and aesthetic education involved modeling one’s character on the ideal of beauty. To turn oneself into a work of art, one must follow an impulse identical to “the formative drive [Bildungstrieb],” as Henrich Steffens also argued.44 Art, meanwhile, must take its lessons from nature, and not in the form of mimesis: it must be or realize, not copy, nature. In the language of epigenesis, Schiller wrote that the ideal form of society is one in which each individual or “independent existence . . . could, when need arose, grow into the whole organism.” He called this the “polypoid character” (Polypennatur) of living form, alluding to the regenerative powers of the polyp (AE 34–35). In the ideal state of society, for which the ancient Greeks were the standing example, “every individual enjoyed an independent existence but could, when need arose, grow into the whole organism.” Only then could we sprout from a somatic particular into a subjective whole. Only then could we occupy our truly human state, exercising our “living understanding” (lebendigen Verstand) in the communal capacity of living form (AE 35). This is the reason for aesthetic education and the rationale for change through this model, rather than through the existing structures and organizations that constitute society. We get nowhere tinkering with the latter, since these can never reconstitute new relations from the ground up in the manner of epigenetic particulars. Schiller, who was indebted to his own training in physiology as well as philosophy, was even more explicit than Kant

26

Introduction

about insisting on the degree to which an aesthetic attitude, accessible through aesthetic education, could reanimate and regenerate the world. Only when we turn from the restrictive specialization that informs life in modern society to the aesthetic ideal of unity in multëity, he argued, could we return from “clumsy mechanism” to the “polypoid character” of living form (AE 34–35). (The broad rubric of this statement applies, as discussed below, to the discipline of literary studies.) We moderns are, in Terry Eagleton’s phrase, “free particulars,” a concept laden with irony, though a necessary one (from Schiller’s point of view) to be actualized through aesthetic education, the best pragmatic means to the unity of living form.45 Instead of evolving as an organic whole, Western society had been responsible for turning the collective form of humanity into “an ingenious clock-work” founded on the principles of commerce and mechanics: “Out of the piecing together of innumerable but lifeless parts, a mechanical kind of collective life ensued” (AE 35). Modern society, itself run like a mechanism, obviates the natural drive toward the synthesis of diverse fields of intellection. Instead of living form (the beautiful state of society), we wind up with an assemblage of parts that do not add up to organic unity in multëity—an awkward creature clanging along at its own spiritually debilitating pace. We are, so to speak, the living dead. While this was not a problem for traditional society, whose members operated under the control of an absolute power often claiming divine authority, our collective understanding of ourselves as moderns is based on an organic model. The modern body is (in theory at least) self-shaping—its activity, in a word, epigenetic. In this version of society, parts are bound to the whole through the voluntary activity of an internal drive toward unity. Such self-determination signals a radical rever-

Introduction

27

sal of terms: parts now no longer exist for the sake of the whole; rather the whole exists for the sake of the parts. Modern society is, to be clear, ideologically patterned after organic development, according to which parts organize themselves. This is above all the difference between what Schiller called a “State of compulsion” and “a State of freedom” (AE 23).“When the artisan lays hands upon the formless mass in order to shape it to his ends,” he wrote,“he has no scruple in doing it violence; for the natural material he is working merits no respect for itself, and his concern is not with the whole for the sake of the parts, but with the parts for the sake of the whole” (AE 19). Such a whole is mere mechanism, or craft. It is no work of genius modeled on living form, nor is it an adequate prototype on which leaders of the state should organize their materials. “With the pedagogic or political artist things are very different indeed,” Schiller argued: “For him Man is at once the material on which he works and the goal toward which he strives. In this case the end turns back upon itself and becomes identical with the medium; and it is only inasmuch as the whole serves the parts that the parts are in any way bound to submit to the whole” (AE 19–21). Political integration, to be achieved and preserved through aesthetic education, must not do violence to particularity (Mannifaltigkeit), for it exists only for the sake of the latter. A too-easy analogy for what we are talking about is multiculturalism.46 Better, perhaps, would be to say that instead of lowly or despicable raw stuff, material Mannifaltigkeit is the raison d’être of living form. Schiller set out theoretically to address a question that still haunts us today, namely, why speak of art when political exigencies are pressing and political freedom is at stake? The answer is that in a society conceived of as a living form, moral law hinges on the same principles as aesthetics. When the whole

28

Introduction

exists for the sake of the parts—that is, when we live in a state of alleged freedom—each individual has a manifest responsibility to the whole. Schiller warns, “Because the State is to be an organization formed by itself and for itself, it can only become a reality inasmuch as its parts have been tuned up to the idea of the whole” (AE 21). If individuals operate as atomized particulars—on the model, say, of cell theory, in which each somatic cell is equipped to perform certain specific tasks within the body—the center will not hold. In current biological language, the objective is to reprogram ourselves, which we know to be possible in the case of somatic cells, to the capacity of a “totipotent” embryonic stem cell, capable of generating the entire organism on its own.47 Even more than “pluripotency,” defined as the capacity of a cell to generate different types of cells, our goal is subjective totipotency. (I do not wish not to be facile in invoking stem-cell research, whether in relation to poetry or society, but its terms are remarkably suited to Romantic organicism and its debates about generation, arguments with which we have lost touch.) In articulating the political significance of living form, the Romantics were defending something that has since become confounded with aesthetic ideology. This may be because political organizations, insofar as they are founded on the idea of living form, are functionally aesthetic: parts are bound to the whole, and the whole makes sense only to the degree that it helps make sense of the parts. If this counts as aesthetic ideology, it also, as Marc Redfield suggests, defines “the Romantic ideology,” or ideology tout court, where ideology entails the politically problematic universalization of a particular.48 To think of living forms as stubborn particulars, resisting logical abstraction and preserving (however partially) their freedom, is to better understand the critical problem facing eighteenth-

Introduction

29

century taste philosophers and Romantic natural philosophers alike. So far as they retain their capacity to rise up from their prescribed place in a system and assert their own Polypennatur, such forms manifest vitality and resist a priori definition, hence abstract principles of classification and prescribed patterns of organization. Biology today confirms the fact that organic parts cannot mechanically add up to a life. Material factors beyond genetics have some part in determining, in a completely unpredictable way, which of the many millions of hereditary factors an organism will express, and which it will not. Epigenesis plays a role in embryogenesis, which is at once conservative, preserving preferred properties of species, and innovative, allowing for change. If such were not the case, and living beings were the mathematical sum of their genes, identical twins would be, in fact, identical, rather than similar. Even a clone is not the exact replica we understand it to be from the popular sense of the term. The implications of this across many strands of culture at the end of the eighteenth century, when the paradigm change from a Christian cosmology to a world of self-shaping matter took place, were vast.49 Far from an obfuscation of natural facts by overzealous natural philosophers, the hermeneutic field constituting Romantic life science addressed the complexity of the organism (or organic whole) in a way that twenty-firstcentury biologists have once more begun to do.50 In this, it may be time for literary critics to take a lesson from their peers in the human (and to this degree, humanistic) sciences. Among other things, the paradigm shift from God to nature helped reconfigure the field of inquiry from natural history to natural philosophy.51 A defining feature of the latter was that it sought to elevate epistemological particulars (in the form of natural details or facts) into a larger ontological com-

30

Introduction

prehension of living form. After a century’s disputation over the aesthetic principles of taste, philosophers had found no universal rules upon which to base a judgment of beauty, though they did not conclude from this that beauty could not be judged or that it had no universal appeal. Similarly, by the end of the eighteenth century natural philosophers had discovered little more about life than that they could not define what made something alive. Yet this did not mean that there was no life to be found. Because living creatures could not be constructed from individual parts any more than aesthetic beauty could be obtained from static “beauties,” the principle of life remained elusive, a biological je ne sais quoi.52 Natural researchers seeking the unifying principle of life in the unmapped—and possibly unmappable—terrain of living matter thus recognized a fundamental impenetrability into their primary object of investigation. In the introduction to his Theory of Generation, Wolff historicized the shift from preformation to epigenesis within a wider paradigm shift from historically organized to philosophically organized knowledge. He based his account on the work of the Enlightenment philosopher Christian Wolff (no relation), a follower of G. W. Leibniz who applied the principles of mathematics to philosophy. The earlier Wolff believed that the former discipline, governed by principles of reason and able to define the nature of the relations between diverse facts, might assist the latter, lost in the scholastic morass of metaphysics and unable to elucidate its own principles of organization.53 As long as the procedures for organizing information about its objects of study in order to arrive at verifiable truth remained the same, Wolff ’s Leibnizian philosophical system could apply to any area of demonstrable knowledge.54 His universal method dominated the university system of the German-speaking lands, subsuming all disci-

Introduction

31

plines into one logical methodology. Yet when the disciplinary object of investigation was living form, the logic grounding that system disappeared. By resisting the predictive value of scientific formulas, living matter kept alive the fortuitous developmental chance: the contingency which entailed not only the chance of going “wrong” within a system but of veering out of systematicity altogether. Christian Wolff himself recognized that when it came to living form the scientific commitment to demonstrable truth foundered on the insufficiency of universal method. So he carved out a special place in his system for natural philosophers, who must pursue a different method of obtaining knowledge, which he labeled ars inveniendi.55 Unlike “common knowledge” in which facts are available to be logically arranged, “hidden truth” (the object of ars inveniendi) needed to be approached through methods other than logic. Such knowledge resembled what Buffon called “probable knowledge” in the first discourse of his Natural History. Buffon’s challenge to static systems of classification, such as those established by his rival Linnaeus in which organic parts could be thought of as exchangeable variables (a stem for a stem, a stamen for a stamen), consisted in the idea that external as well as internal characteristics of organic form were merely accidentals, not essential features, of living form.56 Even if one were to add up all the empirically evident characteristics of an organism, he argued, the sum would amount to no more than probable knowledge. The techniques of morphology, physiology, and chemistry could provide insight into the essence of living form, but they could not determine the nature of the relations between diverse facts obtained through these methods. For the epigenesist Caspar Friedrich Wolff, a real theory of generation (or genuinely philosophical knowledge about

32

Introduction

generation) must explain how an organized body originates: it must explain how the structure of the relations between its component parts comes about causally, or how its physiology necessarily emerges. He claimed that such a theory must provide “reasons and causes” for the mode of development since only a person “who can say the thing must be so and not otherwise, that it must have certain qualities and not others, has philosophical knowledge of the thing” (TG 8). Following the philosophical demand for an essential unity amid a multëity of facts, Wolff announced that none of the voluminous writings on generation since the time of Aristotle contained a proper theory of generation.57 Natural historians were still as far from being able to fill in the lacunae of their picture of nature as natural researchers were from unifying the disparate data they had accumulated into a philosophical truth whose system of relations was understood. Like other natural philosophers of the period, Wolff thus faced a methodological challenge to navigate the Scylla of empiricists shuffling facts and the Charybdis of reasoners determined to subordinate living matter to universal laws. The theory of epigenesis, accordingly, became the model for an organicist approach to objects of study across the disciplines. For Friedrich Schlegel, the vitality of art occurs “wherever living spirit appears bound in a structured letter,” and for the poet Novalis there was no compromise: “Language is either mechanical—atomistic—or dynamic. But true poetic language should be organic and living.”58 Coleridge was hardly the only person who sought “to destroy the old antithesis of Words & Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, & living Things too.”59 The German literary historian Helmut Müller-Sievers has argued that the widespread preoccupation with epigenesis around the turn of the nineteenth century in Europe repre-

Introduction

33

sented “more than merely the replacement of one scientific paradigm with another: an entirely new method of argumentation and legitimization [was] introduced into a variety of discourses.”60 Moreover, he claims, the multifaceted inquiry into the phenomena of life at this time placed the biological concepts of preformation and epigenesis “in the same relation to each other as allegory and symbol,” and the two continue to engage each other in a complicated ideological and methodological struggle whose stakes involve the future of literary studies. While I believe this to be the case, I do not agree with Müller-Sievers’s conclusion that, translated into literary form, epigenesis (like the symbol) is always unsuccessful, or that “the romantic project of literature . . . is that failure.”61 The very fact that the poetic forms discussed in this book have been dismissed as failures provides incentive to consider them in the biological context of organicism. Failures of teleology they may be, but teleology was not always linked to ideas of organic form and its generation. Nonetheless, it is worth pausing over the parallel between preformation and allegory, epigenesis and symbol that MüllerSievers suggests. If beauty in the Romantic period hinged on the idea of vital power, so too did symbol, a key site for literary-critical debate about the ideology of organic form. Paul de Man, in seeking a corrective to the Romanticization of symbol over allegory, remarked that in the case of the former, “the material perception and the symbolical imagination are continuous, as the part is continuous with the whole.” By contrast,“the allegorical form appears purely mechanical.”62 Symbol is living, animated by internal vital power, while allegory is a mechanism put together from parts. This distinction derives from Coleridge, who in The Statesman’s Manual defined symbol as organic unity in multëity; the symbol “always partakes of the

34

Introduction

Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity of which it is the representative” (CCW 6:30). The symbol has the philosophical power to unify its parts into a living form in such a way that the parts work themselves into a whole that exists only for the sake of those parts. “The symbol is the product of the organic growth of form,” de Man explains; “In the world of the symbol, life and form are identical.”63 Allegory, by contrast, which does not pretend to an idealized symbolic unity, has the capacity for more truthful (because more disjointed, poststructuralist) representation. This is an oversimplification, but the distinction between the two devices in literary-critical theory holds fast. Extended past individual literary works to the discipline of literary studies, symbol becomes a way to represent the subcategory of Romanticism. As a Zeitgeist more than a mechanical accrual of parts, it rises into a thing of its own, rendering arbitrary historical points of departure or demise based on political and cultural events (dates defining boundaries and texts, or decades of inclusion and exclusion) forever flexible. For those literary critics, historians, and theorists seeking to unmask the ideology of organic form—or Romantic ideology properly so-called, ideology in its deep heart’s core—the discontinuities laid bare through the mechanics of artificial form (allegory) perform a useful critical function: because they cannot be glossed over through philosophical ideas about unity in multëity, they denaturalize, de-romanticize if you will, material reality, its conditions and forms. Seen as coterminous with organicism, Romanticism has thus become something of an embarrassment to literary historians, much as Naturphilosophie has been for historians of science.64 By retrenching into empiricist methodologies both disciplines have participated

35

Introduction

in the later erasure of any association of vital power—hence beauty, Romantically defined—with truth: Beauty is not Truth, nor Truth Beauty. Despite the fact that current developments in the biological sciences have caused a return to organicism from less holistic studies such as genetics (a descendant of nineteenthcentury cellular biology), there is no unity in multëity on the horizon for literary scholars. The cell theory that transformed life scientific investigation at the end of the 1830s, on the cusp of the Victorian period, marked an epistemic break with Romantic investigations into the phenomena of life as such, and in an analogous move literary developments dispatching the spirit of unity in multëity have done away with the Zeitgeist of Romanticism as a genuinely cross-disciplinary, transnational approach to living form. It remains to be seen what this will mean for the study of poetry, particularly poetry based not on versified language or metrics but on the idea of organic form, and for formalist approaches more generally. As formal analysis struggles back into life through the auspices of the “new formalism,”65 scholars would do well to realize the complexity of organic form in the Romantic period, its dangers, potential, and significance for the internally conflicted discipline of literary studies at large.

Zeitgeist As long as the continuity of living form had not yet been replaced by cellular particulars, and the mystery of life did not reduce readily to discrete epistemological evidence, the principle of unity in multëity defined both beauty and life. Goethe was consequently able to view his heterogeneous endeavors, ranging from poetry to optics to the morphology of plants, as

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analogous ventures into that undiscovered terrain, the truth about living form. His cabinets and libraries enshrined in Weimar today attest to the degree to which a sense of beauty defined scientifically as life, and life defined aesthetically as beauty, characterized the cross-disciplinary response to organic form at this time. Whereas Romantic writers worked to ascribe meaning to the organism as a whole, the cell theory articulated in the late 1830s by Theodor Schwann and Mattias Schleiden reduced living form from an organic flow of power to a structural assemblage, analyzable in its living parts.66 In so doing, we might say, cellular biology killed off the unifying principle of Romanticism: the Geist defining both beauty and life. Traditionally, life had always been an enigma of interconnected elements. Living forms had been thought of as larger systems composed of fibers and atoms (from Democritus’s a-tomos, “indivisible”), but these “smallest” units were mere subdivisions of matter, not independent units of life. Around 1800 the French physician Xavier Bichat proposed a different level of organization somewhere between the atom, the fiber, the organ, and the organism that he labeled tissue and conceptualized as a cross-section of interwoven systems (nervous, muscular, and vascular). But this, too, was a subdivision of a larger whole, the organism. Not until the publication of Schwann’s Microscopical Researches (1839) did the study of life turn from the totality of living form to the self-enclosed cell.67 In this work Schwann explicitly likened the cell to a person, defining a whole that was suddenly explicable in terms of biochemistry and cellular metabolism: “Each cell is, within certain limits, an Individual, an independent Whole” (MR 2). The external form of the creature no longer constituted the boundary between self and objective world; the cellular membrane

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took over as the principal interface between inner and outer, regulating metabolic processes such as assimilation, division, and excretion. Although cells behave in certain ways like larger organic systems, once the fundamental unit of life was redefined as the cell the organic whole lost its status at the center of life science. As a result, metaphysical concerns parted ways (for the time being) with experimental biology.68 When, more than a decade earlier, in 1826, Karl Ernst von Baer announced his discovery of the mammalian egg, now no longer a vague concept but a distinct material particle, he paved the way for the identification of the cell as the starting point of life. Early cell theorists had thought that cells spontaneously emerged from unformed liquid (in a manner similar to what C. F. Wolff had described), but developments from the mid-nineteenth century on proved that all cells are produced through cellular division, starting with the original embryonic germ cell, or fertilized egg.69 “Every animal that originates from the copulation of a male and female develops from an egg,” von Baer announced, “and none from the pure ‘formative’ liquid.”70 Unlike the idea of the egg associated with animal reproduction since Harvey’s seventeenth-century work on generation, the egg that von Baer observed was an actual cell.71 Microscopes had improved such that by the 1840s researchers would discover the spermatozoon (formerly considered a spermatic worm, alternately parasite) in the egg after fertilization. This they inferred to be the cause by which the egg divides, initiating embryogenesis. By the 1870s science would move even further into subcellular space, with the discovery of chromosomes opening up the field of molecular biology. Soon, heredity was discovered at the heart of the cell, and the wide-ranging study of life that preoccupied many different strands of culture in the first decades of the century broke down into the special-

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ized fields of molecular biology, themselves constructed like cellular units of a former epistemic whole and housed in increasingly institutional spaces.72 Cell theory demystified nature because living forms, no longer perplexingly purposive, were in Schwann’s words “remarkable for the simplicity of their internal structure” (MR 1). Doing away with the transcendental mystery of life, as well as the necessity for a unifying principle or soul, scientists could rest content with the idea that nature’s “extraordinary diversity in figure is produced solely by different modes of junction of simple elementary structures, which, though they present various modifications, are yet throughout essentially the same, namely, cells” (MR 1). The immense variety of living forms populating the world all reduced to a single structural unit, and biologists could study a range of organic functions in heterogeneous matter without worrying about how these added up to a synthetic ideal of unity in multëity. Striking a deathblow to the purposive workings of vital power, therefore, the cellular biologist assumed that the power responsible for “nutrition and growth resides not in the organism as a whole, but in the separate elementary parts—the cells” (MR 192). Living form no longer implicated beauty as its philosophical correlative, and the study of nature lost its philosophical connection to aesthetic judgment. Once the natural-philosophical approach to a single, impenetrable object, call it the Zeitgeist of living form, gave way to a properly “scientific” heuristic, disease no longer needed to be feared as a dark phantom or specter of evil attacking the healthy organism, any more than health could be understood in vitalist terms as a Naturheilkraft (healing power). Schwann’s successor Rudolph Virchow saw fit to banish all such animating principles from the day-to-day practice of medicine: “We

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don’t need something like an innate force [einheitlichen Kraft] or soul [Seele] or vital power [Lebenskraft] or spirit [Spiritus],” he wrote in 1875, since “each simple part out of which [the organism] is put together—the cell—can individually be looked at as a person who is self-standing and self-consistent, whose power comes from his own structure, his physique.”73 With life thus defined as an aggregate, the unified force field of Romantic vitalism became seen as a species of bad dream: “If one looks rationally at this purposive working [Wirkung], the tendencies ascribed to this force,” Virchow declared, “then another goblin flies out and the Naturheilkraft turns into a ghost.”74 Thus in a gust vanished the spirit of vital power animating living form. Romanticism became, from the point of view of science, a Walpurgisnacht, and the threat—or sublime possibility, depending on perspective—of an intangible living power with its own agency and formative purpose dissolved into an array of metabolic functions, suddenly explicable through biophysics and biochemistry. Reduced from a system of powers to a structural assemblage, organic form lost touch with the broader philosophical context of ontology and its motivating concerns, freedom and subjective agency. Scientists could now study organic morphology without becoming embroiled in the metaphysics of selfhood. Another way to put this is to say that when cell theory dismantled Romantic-era vitalism, it dismissed the types of questions that vitalism had generated and that had generated Romanticism as a wide-sweeping inquiry into the phenomena of life. Until that time, cross-references to such diverse areas of knowledge as mechanics and poetry were still common. In a lecture of 1818, for instance, Coleridge adapted the language of physics to aesthetics: “The principle of unity must always be present, so that in the midst of the multëity the centripetal

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force be never suspended, nor the sense be fatigued by the predominance of the centrifugal force.”75 But the turn in scientific investigation from living form to cellular biology signaled a corresponding turn away from the natural philosophical concern with organic form, or life seen as vaguely equivalent to self. No longer was the central object of life science an organic whole requiring a unifying principle and linking the study of nature inescapably to aesthetics. The story of this loss, as we might provocatively call it, is familiar to historians of science, but its implications for literary history are due to be considered. For in chasing the literary Zeitgeist from our midst, we seem also to have lost touch with the centrality of form to the discipline. As the critical focus of literary studies has shifted from formal technique to cultural influence, literary production has come to be seen as a sociological field driven by market forces, economic factors, and other historical determinants. The critique of ideology has simultaneously helped to reconfigure literary history from a unified field of study into a heterogeneous collection of cultural products and events that, falling within certain dates, have been catalogued for institutional purposes through literary period designations (Enlightenment, Romantic, Victorian). Literary scholars, it seems, have successfully cleared up the mist of Zeitgeist haunting literary periodicity just as historians have swept away its natural-philosophical twin, the benighted concept of vital power. Yet the concept of Zeitgeist so congenial to Romantic writers like Hazlitt in The Spirit of the Age (1825) and Shelley at the end of A Defence of Poetry implies unity. We may be rediscovering the stakes of this concept more rapidly in the field of environmental science than in cultural or literary studies, though it is one that makes a field like Romanticism make sense. Literary scholars may have opened the metaphorical

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window and let the superstitious concept of Zeitgeist, founded on the concept of organic power, fly out. But as that goblin flies out, Romanticism turns into a ghost. True, there may be other ways to find patterns in literary and cultural history than those we inherit from Romanticism. Franco Moretti, for one, has advocated a “quantitative approach to literature,” which involves charting, graphing, and breaking down data about literary production into more arbitrary mathematical categories such as the decade.76 On the one hand, his approach takes the disciplinary trend toward the appropriation of external methodologies (sociology, economics, history, mathematics, science) to its logical extreme: if literary critics want to be taken seriously by a society and an academic system increasingly aware of their own corporate status—one that quantifies value economically within a larger system of commodity production—then they may as well embrace quantitative methodology and quiet their public-sphere critics. Yet such an approach also recognizes the need to account for the “internal shape” of literary history over and above content if they are not to lose disciplinary coherence.77 “See here how a quantitative history of literature is also a profoundly formalist one—especially at the beginning and at the end of the research process,” Moretti points out; “At the end, because it must account for the data; and at the beginning, because a formal concept is usually what makes quantification possible in the first place.”78 The recognition has long been familiar to scientists: methodologies, like instruments, can provide answers only to questions previously posed or respond to others that arise in the research process. In biology as in the study of literary texts, there can be no escaping the imaginative leap from fact to form—from empirical investigation to representation, interpretation, theory.

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The Romantic Zeitgeist (though any Zeitgeist will do) supports the use of analogy as an interpretive device. In the eighteenth century physiologists had begun to find that analogical thinking could define their methodological difference from the physical sciences.79 Life science was built upon the principle of analogy, as vital powers were likened to gravitation, and strange hybrids like animal magnetism and elective affinity abounded. “Had physiology been cultivated by men before physics,” Bichat suggested, “many applications of the former would have been made to the latter; rivers would have been seen to flow from the tonic action of their banks, crystals to unite from the excitement, which they exercise upon their reciprocal sensibilities, and planets to move because they mutually irritate each other at vast distances.”80 For scientists, philosophers, and poets (or polymaths like Coleridge, Goethe, and Schiller, who qualified as all three) the analogy was a viable heuristic approach to the phenomena of life. Defending the idea of the Lebenskraft in 1795, the German physiologist Johachim Dietrich Brandis wrote, “There are analogies, which make the idea possible.”81 In Britain around the same time, Erasmus Darwin employed the analogy in The Botanic Garden (1791) as a pragmatic way to forge new relations between ideas and images, permitting hidden knowledge to emerge.82 It was, in short, a Romantic approach. In his 1809 novel Elective Affinities, Goethe spotlighted the ubiquitous cultural presence of analogy. Before the events of the plot get rolling, Goethe’s heroine Charlotte remarks, “These figures of speech are pretty and amusing, and who does not like to play with analogies?”83 Her comment reveals the degree to which analogies, such as chemical bonds and human relationships, had become a parlor game by the early nineteenth century. But Charlotte is extremely rational, and lest her

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male companions let their imaginations run away with them, she warns them about the consequences of such imaginative play: “Man is so very much elevated above these elements, and if he has in this instance been somewhat liberal with the fine words ‘choice’ and ‘elective affinity,’ it is well for him to turn and look within himself, and then consider truly what validity such expressions possess.”84 Naturally, play goes too far in the novel, disrupting the established social order and the lives of the central characters. Like his German peer, Coleridge cautioned readers about the limitations of chemistry to explain life. By the same token, he warned, we must “guard against the opposite error of rejecting its aid altogether as analogy, because we have repelled its ambitious claims to an identity with the vital powers” (TL 500). The technique of analogy, although risky, promised a way past the strictures of logic to the hidden knowledge of living form. By noticing a resemblance between parts that are structurally or functionally diverse but seem the same, the synthetic technique of analogy could in fact assist the analytic reason in the study of nature. The historian Peter Hanns Reill suggests that by redefining living form as “a teeming interaction of active forces vitalizing matter, revolving around each other in a developmental drama,” scientists at the end of the eighteenth century made the principle of relation—rapport or Verwandschaft—the key to investigating nature.85 “Analogical reasoning became the functional replacement for mathematical analysis,” he proposes: “With it one could discover similar properties or tendencies between dissimilar things that approximated natural laws without dissolving the particular in the general. . . . The major task of comparison was to chart similarities and differences and mediate between them, finding analogies that were not immediately apparent.”86 This seems

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to me both an accurate and a useful way of thinking through the relation between science and literature from 1760 to 1830, when the debate over vital power was at its height. And it has its application to literary studies, where two possibly contradictory or counterintuitive elements (texts, ideas, images) held in balance may produce provocative and creative criticism.87 The historian of science Robert J. Richards cautions that in order to avoid what he calls the Zeitgeist of an outmoded history of ideas, we “must be careful not to mistake analogies for homologies, not to assume that because one set of ideas is similar to another it must have descended from that other.”88 Homology, as used in comparative analysis and evolutionary biology, refers to structures that have a common origin and that exhibit the same structure and function, even though they may appear different. (Take the example of a human arm and a bird’s wing.) Analogy, by inverse logic, refers to structures with different origins that exhibit similar structure and function. A less technical definition given by the eighteenth-century naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire distinguishes analogy from homology as parts that seem similar but are actually structurally or functionally diverse from parts that are structurally the same. Geoffroy, known as the founder of teratology, the science of monstrosity, believed that successful morphological deviations allow for creaturely innovation and change. In this respect, he helped articulate the idea of evolution before Charles Darwin. Along with others, including Charles’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Herbert Spencer, Geoffroy saw form as dynamic rather than static— adaptable and plastic. His technique of homology grounded his idea of “unity of composition” in the assumption that individuation (the tendency toward organic wholeness, also ontogeny or ontogenesis) took place homologously across species.89

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The homology might well be taken as a disciplinary model for history, with its twin aims of local certitude and general truth, but when it comes to disciplinary objects that are themselves not facts but sites of hidden truth (like literary objects conceived as living form), the analogy may prove a hermeneutic tool of greater value. For literary critics, the credo that descended from the younger Darwin not to mistake analogies for homologies might be effectively reversed: do not mistake homologies for analogies. Do not seek to present as fact, in other words, what rightly viewed is “only” metaphor. Homology may guarantee certitude about the nature of the relation between diverse facts, but in so doing it becomes just one more fact.90 “Analogy implies a difference of sort, and not merely in degree,” Coleridge wrote, “and it is the sameness of the end, with the difference of the means, which constitutes analogy” (TL 530–31).91 Writers at the end of the eighteenth century, as Reill argues, found a productive difference in the analogy, which provided a way to keep two entities in play without collapsing them into each other. Reill himself considers this characteristic of “Enlightenment Vitalism,” a mode of thought he believes that Romantic Naturphilosophen, in their quest for idealized unity (culminating in the transcendental biology of Lorenz Oken), left behind.92 Where one draws the line designating historical periods may vary, but particularly if one intends more than an influence study, direct links and exact correspondences so crucial to the writing of history become less important than the possibilities opened up through analogy.93 This book seeks to recover the era of vitalism, roughly 1760 through 1830, as a context for making sense of the life contained in the poetry of the time, at the level not only of content but also of form. It aims to test the literary-critical value of the analogy by juxtaposing artistic expressions of liv-

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ing form with biological ideas in circulation at the time and offers a pragmatic methodology for reading certain seemingly formless poems and central symbolic figures contained within them as living forms. The critical goal is not closure or the definitive reading. Rather, my hope is to provide a way back into several major, ostensibly unwieldy, works of literary Romanticism through an epigenesist poetics. The very concept of organic development, we must remember, indicated by the German word Bildung (meaning something like education, acculturation, and ontogenesis bound up together), merges the diverse fields of biology and aesthetics.94 Literary historians may be familiar with the concept of Bildung from the genre of the Bildungsroman, but as Reill points out, “It is often forgotten that Bildung was, for eighteenth-century German thinkers, a physiological concept,” born in the battle between preformation and epigenesis.95 Thomas Pfau, also noting the connection between Bildungsroman and Bildungstrieb (formative power), argues that a more rigorous understanding of Bildung must underwrite any narrative theory that bears its name.96 The root of the German Bild (image) may be associated semantically with the Creation story of Genesis, but it is tied naturalphilosophically to epigenesis: its etymology embeds a paradox. If the Bildungsroman is the “symbolic form” of modernity, as Moretti suggests, or at least one of its symbolic forms, then we would do well to recall its origins in a longer history of aesthetics that converged with Romantic life science around the turn of the nineteenth century.97 To be sure, the early Romantics produced creaturely poems obsessed with generation. Smart’s Jubilate Agno (1759– 63), the focus of the next chapter, acts out the boundless productivity of nature, as alphabetical units (phonemes, morphemes, and the all-prolific word) spin out new poetic forms,

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complex and self-standing sections of verse that reveal the poetics of epigenesis at work before the reign of teleology. That language can be self-organizing in the manner of organic life is a fundamental assumption of Smart’s, whose poetics are best read as developing from the smallest point, or minute particular, within a wider mass of self-shaping verse. For Blake as well the natural-philosophical categories of vegetation and generation provide a fertile arena for aesthetic experimentation (and I make such a statement knowing that it challenges received critical wisdom that Blake is antagonistic to these categories of material growth). As is the case with Smart, powerful spiritual convictions motivate his work. At all costs, he avoids structural fixity, and his masterwork, Jerusalem (1804– 20), presents a verse form that critics have not been able to categorize, either through narratology or the patterns of neoclassical and biblical poetics. Like its predecessor Jubilate Agno, it models an open organic form that we ought to consider with respect not only to Romanticism but also to literary history at large. Roughly halfway through the book there is a jump from the early Romantics to the later generation of Romantic poets, a rift I have not attempted to fill in since it represents the divide separating an earlier poetics of epigenesis from a later, more symbolic one. Although they are not metrically “unformed” like Jubilate Agno or Jerusalem, poems like Shelley’s Witch of Atlas (1820) and Keats’s Lamia (1820) fail to add up to allegorical romance, and not just because of their fragmentary status. Shelley and Keats push at the edge of containment in these eponymous poems, whose key figures are symbolic expressions of Romantic monstrosity. “An object is monstrous,” according to Kant, “if by its magnitude it nullifies the purpose that constitutes its concept” (CJ 109). In the Romantic period,

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exuberance was beauty. Beauty, in turn, inevitably verged on monstrosity. Wolff spent the final thirty years of his life studying monstrous aberrations of his so-called essential power, and Blumenbach (who kept a separate notebook on monstrosity) indulged in sublime speculation about the monstrous results of runaway formative power in the final sections of On the Bildungstrieb.98 The tendency toward individuation that characterizes life worked, and still works, against regulation. Differentiation often takes place spectacularly, the organism performing its greatest feats of originality in the struggle against regulative forces that seek to shape and maintain it.99 When pushed to an extreme, life in its plenitude—in the sheer gusto of its living power—threatens to overwhelm formal containment. No mere ill assemblage of parts (the deformed sign of the monster since time immemorial), the sublime vitality of the Romantic period, in refusing to submit to preestablished conceptual or ideological categories, defined a new mode of monstrosity. The poets I discuss all consciously sought to wrench power from existing structures and put it to work imaginatively. Their project was not hermetic or escapist but anchored in a strong conviction that aesthetic power can have real-world transformative capacity. The concept of vital power upon which they relied made possible a world in which material structures were plastic and subject to ongoing change. Stasis was the ultimate form of death, and morphological prolificacy (to some, perversity) provided a model for the fluid organization manifest as, and in, poetry.

2 Smart’s Powers: Jubilate Agno For matter is the dust of the Earth, every atom of which is the life. . . . For putrifying matter nevertheless will yield up its life in diverse creatures and combinations of creatures. For a toad can dwell in the centre of a stone, because—there are stones whose constituent life is of those creatures. —Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno

hristopher Smart’s brilliant (if baffling) poem Jubilate Agno has form, though it is certainly not preformed. It is no ode, romance, blank-verse epic, or Augustan assemblage of heroic couplets. What remains of it are seven pairs of folio sheets (there were originally eleven, but four were lost) scribbled in a cramped hand, one or

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two lines per day, during the four years (1759–63) that Smart was confined to George Potter’s private madhouse in Bethnal Green.1 Many of these versicles, as the extremely long lines of the poem are called, are self-conscious meditations on generation, poiesis, and autopoiesis that put poetry on a par with science as a means of revealing the nature of life. Smart’s explicit purpose in the poem is to bring language to life, to infuse letters and their various combinations (frequently multilingual) with a distinct vitality he labels “the life” (JA B160). To view the poem in this light is to see it anew as living form: a creaturely process of epigenetic generation manifested in a vibrant, generically resistant form of early Romanticism. Just as Smart’s contemporary Caspar Friedrich Wolff broke with the traditional disciplines of anatomy and physiology to define organic form in a way that no longer depended on structure, Smart broke with conventional poetic forms, demanding that we let go of his poem anatomically or resist taxonomizing it according to given poetic structures. Sharply attuned to the raw matter of sound, he was self-conscious about the scripted form language can take on the page, starting with the simple (or perhaps not so simple) alphabetical unit, the letter. In Jubilate Agno, the simplest parts of language take on the generative power of epigenetic particulars, as phonemes and morphemes combine into larger semantic units: words and combinations of words that make up lines beginning with Let and For. These versicles constitute the tissue of Fragments A, B, C, and D of the poem, which modern editors have assembled into the various forms the poem can take on the page. In 1939 W. F. Stead printed Smart’s Let and For versicles as though they were independent, while in 1954 W. H. Bond, noticing a connection between them, paired them horizontally on opposite pages. In a further editorial intervention in 1980, Karina

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Williamson wove the versicles vertically together on the same page, with Let followed by For.2 I would agree with Harriet Guest’s suggestion that “a far more fluid relation” between the Let and For versicles than either one posited by Bond or Williamson is necessary to a reading of the poem since, as she observes, “Smart’s For versicles often form autonomous groupings, even when the corresponding Let lines are extant.”3 This chapter does not rely on the structure of parallel members that characterizes biblical poetry or the liturgical pattern of call and response that scholars, starting with Bond, have taken as their point of departure.4 Instead, it presents Smart’s sprawling, seemingly open-ended poem through the scientific lens of epigenesis in order to show how formal patterns of self-shaping verse suit the poem’s larger epistemological and aesthetic effort to manifest life. Jubilate Agno is bursting with life—an encyclopedia of natural historical creatures—yet according to the epigenesist poetics it enacts individual parts do not add up anatomically to a classifiable whole. Scientific systems such as Linnaean botany, which categorize products of nature according to their visible structure as aggregates of juxtaposed parts, come under fire in this poem, as do the “dead materials” that Smart associates with instruments of mechanical science (JA B687). The linguistic activity of his poetics participates in a larger world of animated matter as versicles take shape analogously to the vesicles that epigenesists saw developing from unorganized fluid matter into living form. As discussed in the previous chapter, Smart’s contemporary C. F. Wolff posed a groundbreaking theory of generation that conceptualized all forms of life as analogous, or no different in kind and produced in the same way. The force he called essential (vis essentialis) drove nutritive fluid substance through unorganized material in such

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a way that structure emerged gradually, epigenetically, from the most “simple” parts he called Bläschen and Gefässe (vesicles and vessels). These rudimentary structures then combined into more complex, bound-together (Zusamengefasse) parts, which in turn combined into autonomous parts we might call selfstanding. This last type of part concluded the process of selfgeneration, for it produced no further parts from itself. In Jubilate Agno, Smart’s self-standing parts include Alphabets, a Rainbow, Pneumatics, and Instruments, not to mention (as it is commonly anthologized) My Cat Jeoffry. These make best sense, I would argue, within the wider context of organicism that had been brewing since mid-century.

Mechanical Powers Smart’s most intense engagement with contemporary science in Jubilate Agno occurs in the second part of Fragment B (Bond’s B2), which many readers consider the poem’s heart and “spiritual battlefield.”5 This section contains only For lines, and, as Noel Chevalier contends, much of it “consists of Smart’s deconstruction of science as a means of discerning truth.”6 More specifically, the versicles making up this section pose an explicit challenge to the received notion of Newtonian matter as inert and governed by physical force. In the mechanistic science of the seventeenth century, matter was explicable through mechanics. Force applied to matter could be measured, and following Descartes’s explanation of mechanistic movement and William Harvey’s discovery of the hydraulic circulation of the blood, Enlightenment physiology became grounded on mechanical principles as well. Newton added force to the Cartesian world of extended matter, which had been clanking away through springs, pulleys, hydraulic pumps, and other mecha-

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nisms, but he left open the possibility of the existence of a subtle and universal ether, which might be operative in a manner scientists did not and perhaps could not understand. Such a mysterious force, however, got lost amid the physical forces that Newton did identify, all of which could be calculated and predicted through scientific formulas. By the time Smart was writing, natural science had come to a resting place between the Enlightenment conviction that life was preformed (and nature a mechanism operating according to eternally fixed laws) and subsequent, vitalist conceptions of matter as animated through its own powers—powers that would become purposively self-shaping. The seventeenthcentury chemist Robert Boyle, in defining the mechanical principles of pneumatics, had helped make even the seemingly vacant air accessible to mathematics. Yet he too had left open the possibility that a mysterious vital power (or powers), which he did not understand and which he referred to as secret qualities, might suffuse the atmosphere. While experimental science dominated natural-philosophical inquiry of the first half of the eighteenth century, mapping mechanistic methodology onto the study of organic form, it did not successfully stamp out all the inexplicable sparks and spirits that had been haunting the universe. Smart was “up-to-date with the latest developments in science,” as his biographer Chris Mounsey and Jubilate Agno itself suggest.7 Even if we cannot trace all his reading and sources of influence, it is apparent that he was feeling his way aesthetically in the poem toward a representation of the same secret powers scientists thought to be quickening nature and producing its immense variety of living forms. In Fragment B, he responds to Newtonian science at the level of both content and form. In versicles that directly rewrite the first five principles of Newton’s Principia (1687)—those of

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matter, motion, resistance, and the centripetal and centrifugal forces—he contends: For matter is the dust of the Earth, every atom of which is the life. For motion is as the quantity of life direct, and that which hath not motion, is resistance. For Resistance is not of god, but he—hath built his works upon it. For the Centripetal and Centrifugal forces are god sustaining and directing. For Elasticity is the temper of matter to recover its place with vehemence. For Attraction is the earning of parts, which have a similitude in the life. [JA B160–65] Smart begs to differ with Newton’s physical definition of the material world in the opening section of Principia by reconceptualizing the substance of that world as living and invested with self-shaping and self-propagating powers.8 Newton had defined the centripetal and centrifugal forces as two directions energy could take based on circular motion: the centripetal force had a tendency to move toward some point as a center, and the centrifugal had a tendency to recede from that point. Smart reworks these deterministic laws to reflect a living power with its own agency: “god sustaining and directing.” The explanation for Newton’s force is physical, but Smart gives free agency to that force as a power that stands for the indwelling God. This is not to say that Smart literally disavows Newton or denies the physical principles upon which the universe spins. But whereas Newton set forth the laws of planetary motion based on gravitational laws of attraction and mathematical

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proofs, Smart describes a world of vital substance, whose movements do not rely on the application of force. The expression of this vitality translates not into abstract mathematical variables but into the multiple forms of nature as the Word, the language of God. No doubt Smart intends a pun on Adam, every “atom of which is the life,” when he defines matter as “the dust of the Earth.” Alluding to the clay from which Adam was formed in Genesis, he suggests that neither Adam nor atom—neither the first human nor the elementary particle of matter—can exist as an autonomous unit. The corpuscular theory descended from the atom of Democritus pivoted on the idea of a supposedly irreducible particular. Yet in Smart’s cosmos, Adam and atom both form part of a larger dynamic system, energized by a power he calls “the life.” Such power renders individual units of being, much like individual units of matter, accidental appearances. When in Genesis, “The Lord god formed a human being from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being,” the Hebrew for “living being” was nephes (npX), meaning vitality (Gen. 2:7).9 In the King James translation, this was rendered as “soul,” so that “man became a living soul.” Given the metaphysical significance of soul starting with the early Church fathers, the “living being” used in the Oxford translation of the Bible comes closer to the original Hebrew—and closer, too, to the ancient concept of soul that was synonymous with living principle. Smart, like his successor Blake, knew Hebrew and uses it playfully throughout Jubilate Agno. Despite his Anglican system of belief, he displays a vitality that substantiates the latter version of soul. When he prays for a blessing, punning on the creaturely nature of his poem by asking “the Lord Jesus to translate my magnificat into verse and represent it” (JA

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B43), he is praying for the power to translate the “life” of his cat (Jeoffry) into language. Having redefined matter as “the dust of the Earth, every atom of which is the life,” Smart goes on with his poetic reappropriation of Newton’s Principia to define motion (the second principle) as “the quantity of life direct.” Similarly, he defines resistance, the third Newtonian principle, as a power opposed to motion as the biblical adversary is opposed to God: “Resistance is not of god, but he—hath built his works upon it.” Without Satan (the Hebrew word for adversary), paradise would never have been lost, though neither, for that matter, would it have been regained. As Milton interprets the biblical Creation story, the earth, brimming with new life, was made to replace the loss of the rebel angel and his ranks who withdrew from the divine community. Such a withdrawal took place through a willful act of self-concentration, a retreat into atomistic singularity. The Let and For versicles of Jubilate Agno echo the Creation in every breath of the poem, leading us to understand Let and For as performative utterances of command and actualization: “Let there be light,” and—for, therefore—“there was light.”10 As the single consistent formal feature of the poem, these terms invoke the catalogue of ur-utterances at the start of Genesis: Let there be and, therefore, there was. Yet Smart’s idea of genesis has nothing to do with the Enlightenment theory of generation based on Genesis, namely preformation, which held that God produced a predetermined number of germs at the Creation, containing the parts or imprint for every form of life predetermined to unfold mechanically at a specific time and place. Such autonomous and deterministic units of life contradict a more animated (or vitalist) version of nature. Shortly after the section of verse quoted above, Smart claims to “have shown the Vis Inertiæ to be false,

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and such is all nonsense” (JA B183). The idea of stasis suggested by Newton’s inertia must be “false,” since matter has a tendency toward “the life.” While Newtonian science may provide insight into the operations of nature, explaining motion through the effect of force upon matter, Smart would deny Newton’s natural-philosophical principles access to the deeper truth about nature and its hidden powers. To suggest the insufficiency of physics to explain life, he transforms elasticity, the physical property that enables matter to recover its usual form after being bent or disturbed, into an anthropomorphic mood or “temper.” The latter term used as a verb means to mollify or to soften chemically by mixing with other liquids or compounds. It was central to humoral science and described the process by which the body restored itself to a balanced system. For Smart elasticity amounts to a kind of agency (“the temper of matter to recover its place with vehemence”), and in this sense it reads as the internal responsiveness of a system animated by physiological spirits. Attraction, the cardinal principle of Newtonian physics, also takes on new life in this poem. Newton defined the attraction of gravitation as the tendency in all bodies to fall in lines nearly perpendicular to the earth’s structure and the attraction of cohesion as the chemical tendency of bodies, or portions of bodies, to adhere to one another with a force that increases or diminishes as the amount of matter in those bodies increases or diminishes. For Smart, it is tantamount to desire, or the “earning of parts, which have a similitude in the life,” based on the archaic definition of the verb “to earn” meaning “to long for” or “yearn.” (Spenser uses the word in this sense in the opening stanza of The Fairie Queene: “Ever as he rode, his hart did earne / To prove his puissance” [1.1.3]). Like the naturalphilosophical concept of Streben (striving or yearning) in the

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Romantic period, Smart’s earning is more a drive than a physical force. This drive has its place in life science insofar as it relies on the physiological concept of sympathy, defined as an affinity of parts that tend toward one another or that influence one another, or that are affected by an equivalent influence. In Smart’s world, the yearning and mutually attracting parts of organic form participate in a larger body that is ultimately incorporated into Christ, the materialized logos. In repudiating the idea of purely physical force, Smart repudiates likewise the “mechanical powers,” a technical phrase for mechanisms designed to increase or diminish force or to alter its direction. Although he was attempting no systematic theory along the lines of Newton’s Principia, he was working to reimagine physical force as “power . . . direct as the life” (JA B179).11 By mentioning “the Skrew, Axle and Wheel, Pulleys, the Lever and inclined Plane,” he reveals his knowledge of the six mechanical powers, which he claims are all “known in the Schools.” He qualifies this knowledge, however, by adding that “the power of the wedge is direct as it’s altitude by communication of Almighty God” (JA B180–81). The wedge is an instrument consisting of two mechanical powers, specifically two inclined planes, joined at their bases. By turning the wedge upside down, Smart converts the mechanical power into a steeple: an architectural emblem of direct communication with and yearning for God. Its power is now directly proportional to its capacity to reach the divine. By the same logic, the center of a physical mass in Smart’s cosmology cannot be accessed through geometry or the application of mechanical instruments. Instead, he writes that “the Centre is not known but by the application of the members to matter” (JA B182). Whether we interpret these members as parts of the human body or as individuals in the larger collective

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body of Christ—as organs, one might say, or as organisms— they have the epistemological power to penetrate a center where no mechanical instruments may presume to go. Organic powers, guided by the principle of sympathy and defined as the yearning of parts for one another, bear resemblance to the ancient teleological drive that the Greeks called entelechy, the vital principle that guides organic forms in developing toward a certain, inwardly determined end or completeness. Similarly, Smart’s center of gravity, or the point from which gravity can be said to act, is no mathematical point of focus measurable through centripetal and centrifugal forces. Rather, he redefines the center of gravity as “the hold of the Spirit upon the matter in hand” (JA B184). Newton’s work paved the way for a conception of matter as a fluid force field, consisting of particles suspended in space and affected by the attractions of chemical cohesion and gravity, but Smart posits such a demystified picture of nature, subject to mathematical calculation, as incomplete. If Newton used mechanical powers to gauge the forces of attraction, Smart depicted a world of spiritualized matter in perpetual motion. In place of vectors of physical force spurring inert matter into motion and the vis inertae as the heart and soul of matter, he posits a more lively sort of matter with a propensity for motion rather than rest, the latter associated with resistance and death: “For the perpetual motion is in all the works of Almighty god,” he writes: “For it is not so in the engines of man, which are made of dead materials, neither indeed can be” (JA B186–87). Classical physics identified force as the key principle through which particles extended in space relate to one another, whereas Smart (like other plenists) believed the world to be full of integrated substance and power. Instead of defining friction as force acting between bodies to oppose motion, he thus depicts it as “inevitable because the

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Universe is full of God’s works” (JA B185). The ultimate tendency of matter in a Newtonian world is toward stasis. Smart prefers to define friction, based on its Latin root “to rub,” as an inevitable activity in a universe abounding in divine productivity. Such friction is likely to produce sparks or even fire as visible signs of spiritual life, and we shall return to these below by way of Smart’s Pneumatics. The six so-called mechanical powers provide the basic categories from which more complex powers can be devised. In addition to the wedge, Smart calls attention to the shears, which are constructed from a doubling of the lever. He follows Newton in associating this mechanical contrivance with “the first of the mechanical powers,” but he asserts, “the power of the Shears is direct as the life” (JA B177, 179). Not only for the purposes of gardening perhaps (one of Smart’s favorite activities during his confinement) does one kneel to use shears. Stead and Bond both annotate the shears as a reference to ancient methods of divination, and Geoffrey Hartman suggests that Smart’s phrase “to be used on the knees” carries sexual implications in the context of the bi-syllabic “she-arse” (a pronunciation not out of place in Smart’s bawdy, occasionally misogynistic poem).12 The position of kneeling also suggests an attitude of reverence to God, who is responsible for sustaining and directing all such powers. One wonders how the first human ought to have used the shears, “For if Adam had used this instrument right, he would not have fallen” (JA B177– 78). Should he have applied them more vigorously to the growth of the garden, pruning the tree of knowledge before Eve could pluck the forbidden fruit? As eighteenth-century encyclopedists believed, fallen knowledge is fractured knowledge. So too did natural historians facing a shredded multiplicity of facts, sheared from their original unity in the Chris-

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tological Word. The mechanical instrument of the shears, associated with pieces rather than a unified whole, therefore reflected the broader multiplicity of systems contending in a fallen world. Smart may have also been thinking, by way of this instrument, of the multifaceted, lower-urban world of Grub Street, in which he participated from 1744 through 1756 as a journalist, political satirist, and vaudevillian transvestite actor.13 The pastiche mode of literary production that characterized Grub Street was a method incorporating snippets of text from diverse authors into a single periodical assemblage.“Such fragmentation undermined the integrity of the writer, who bore a marginal relation to the works he helped to produce,” as the cultural historian John Brewer explains: “What he wrote was not properly his: it was designed by another and had value only as part of a larger whole.”14 The mechanical and industrial powers sustaining print culture in Smart’s day included the bookseller, who sponsored patchwork publications “whose parts were produced by writers but whose whole belonged to [the] bookseller,” thereby diminishing the power of individual authors.15 The bookseller Smart knew best was his father-inlaw, John Newbury, who was part of the power structure that had him locked up for madness. Mechanical form bears no connection to commercial industry motivated by money—a form of “dead matter” impressed “with the stamp of human vanity” (JA B279). As later writers including Friedrich Schlegel and Samuel Taylor Coleridge would argue, mechanical form differs from living form as clay with form stamped upon it differs from a thing that grows. Whereas products of the commercial print world were stamped with the letterpress, Smart’s poem left intentionally in manuscript reflects a desire to escape the fractured productivity of the marketplace. At its con-

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ceptual core, Jubilate Agno recognizes itself as an aesthetic product reflecting on its own production, and Smart’s eclectic range of references all point back to the Creation. This does not imply, however, a creationist view of generation. The poem turns mechanical into organic or vital powers complicit with a different kind of yearning and animating substance, including the textual substance of his verse.

P is for Power: Smart’s Alphabets Yet Smart’s critique of stamped materials, whether money or printed matter, entailed more than his verse sallies against Newton’s Principia read as a manifesto for a world of dead matter. In Jubilate Agno he also challenged the mechanical Enlightenment episteme at the level of form. Among other techniques to avoid standard patterns of classification, he scripted his own alphabet not just once but three times. Like other simple parts of language that he manipulates to the same end—phonemes and morphemes—his individual letters spin off self-perpetuating lines of signification, much as the human stem cell does, through patterns of epigenetic development. As characters on the page, his letters often signify in strange and unfamiliar ways, and collectively Smart’s Alphabets feature the multivalent, multilingual letter as a pluripotent (even totipotent) particular within the self-organizing system of the poem.16 Two of the alphabets occur in section B and are linked structurally as well as semantically. The third appears at the start of Fragment C. All three emphasize the “power of the English letters taken singly” (JA B517). As a combined meditation on the materiality of poetic form, they challenge not only Enlightenment taxonomies of nature but also neoclassical theories of poetry, which emphasize structure over emergent, self-expressive power.

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As John Aikin explained in An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (1777), neoclassical poets saw nature through its visible structures and translated these into verse. Taking James Thomson’s The Seasons (1725) as his point of departure, he claimed that “the artist who has not studied the body with anatomical precision, and examined the proportions of every limb, both with respect to its own several parts, and the whole system, cannot produce a just and harmonious representation of the human frame”; by the same token, “the descriptive poet, who does not habituate himself to view the several objects of nature minutely, and in comparison with each other, must ever fail in giving his pictures the congruity and animation of real life.”17 Yet this approach, characteristic of eighteenth-century natural-philosophical poetry, will not do for Smart. His version of organic form requires that the artist mimic nature’s uncontainable prolificity. Just as he sought to go beyond the known quantities of matter and physical force in a comprehension of the natural (Newtonian) world, Smart attempted to represent living forms without the anatomist’s or botanist’s reliance on fixed structure. His problem with the scientific method of naming, ranking, and classifying forms of the natural world according to their external appearance was that it disregarded the essence of “the life” present within. Plants in botanic systems were identified according to the proportion and arrangement of their parts, as were animals studied by anatomists—although plant life could be schematized more easily since its organs were readily visible to the eye, rather than obscured beneath skin, fur, or feathers.18 To examine the internal parts of an animal usually meant destroying the life. In a linguistic extension of this idea, Smart’s creaturely world was “endangered by the deadly Latin of modern anatomical analysis,” as Hartman notes.19 Whereas Linnaeus distinguished parts and characteristics of plants as ex-

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changeable entities (a stem for a stem, a stamen for a stamen), fitting them into a Latin binomial system as structural assemblages, Smart endowed flowers with their own living language: “There is a language of flowers” (JA B503). He prayed, “God make gard’ners better nomenclators,” and proclaimed: “The right names of the flowers are yet in heaven” (JA B509). He resisted the practice of linking organic life to language in a deterministic manner. Linnaeus, by contrast, while recognizing that there could be no necessary connection between sign and signifier, believed that some such connection must perforce be established. In the architecture of his scientific system, the vegetable world broke down into 24 classes, 120 orders, 2,000 families or genera, 20,000 species, and a goodly number of varieties.20 Linnaeus identified these as “natural” groupings, based on the number and relations of parts in any given organic assemblage. Overall, his binomial system of nomenclature accorded with the contemporary view of nature as preformed and in need of analysis more than discovery. This attitude set the terms for naturalists of the eighteenth century, who sought to compare “plant organography to an alphabet spelled out by the hand of God to be read off by the naturalist as knowledge,” as James Larson explains.21 Yet Smart’s orthography is no organography along the lines of Linnaeus. While he recognized an analogy between natural features and parts of language (“elegant phrases are nothing but flowers”), in the vitalist medium of Jubilate Agno, “The warp and woof of flowers are worked by perpetual moving spirits” (JA B501, 505). Linguistically, such spirits spring from the individual letter that, along the lines of the Christological logos (or the totipotent stem cell), serves as a generative site for new formations and self-generative tracks toward meaning.22

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Directly following the critique of natural historical language, Smart’s Alphabets emerge as self-standing sections of the poem that, among other things, perform an implicit critique of scientific aims and methodologies. It is not to the purpose to quote all three alphabets in full, but what I am calling Alphabet 1 may serve as a representative example of a selfstanding part of the poem that develops organically, as it were, from the fluid substance of Smart’s verse: For A is the beginning of learning and the door of heaven. For B is a creature busy and bustling. For C is a sense quick and penetrating. For D is depth. For E is eternity—such is the power of the English letters taken singly. For F is faith. For G is God—whom I pray to be gracious to Livemore my fellow prisoner. For H is not a letter, but a spirit—Benedicatur Jesus Christus, sic spirem! For I is identity. God be gracious to Henry Hatsell. For K is king. For L is love. God in every language. For M is musick and Hebrew m is the direct figure of God’s harp. For N is new. For O is open. For P is power. For Q is quick. For R is right. For S is soul.

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For T is truth. God be gracious to Jermyn Pratt and to Harriote his Sister. For U is unity, and his right name is Uve to work it double. For W is word. For X is hope—consisting of two check G—God be gracious to Anne Hope. For Y is yea. God be gracious to Bennet and his family! For Z is zeal [JA B513–36; fig. 1] Rejecting the Latin used by botanists and comparative anatomists alike, Smart takes a morphological approach to language to emphasize its developmental flexibility and show how patterns of verse need not be metrically or phonetically predetermined. Although he does not scramble the order of the English alphabet, he does force us to think about beginning as an epistemological jumping-off point and portal of aesthetic perception. Alphabets are, after all, preestablished orders presenting themselves in the guise of naturalness. Based on the Greek alpha (A or a), the first English letter “is the beginning of learning and the door of heaven.” Smart’s versicle echoes Saint John’s version of God’s self-annunciation in the book of Revelation: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:13). The Greek alpha is linguistically related to the Hebrew aleph (Å), which also stands for a presence escaping spatial and temporal dimensions. The Hebrew precursor for John’s enunciation in Revelation does not even rely on the linearity of alphabetical structure. In Isaiah’s version of God’s self-avowal, the prophet states simply, “I am the first, and I am the last; and besides me there is no God” (Isa. 44:6). The circularity of his statement favors the immedi-

Fig. 1. Christopher Smart, Alphabets 1 and 2, Manuscript Page from Jubilate Agno, Fragment B. MS Eng 719. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.

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acy of performative language over and above narrative cause and effect. The challenge to the reader is to imagine simultaneous, rather than sequential, language—or a pattern in which all letters stand in the same relation to a generative center. In Alphabet 3, Smart develops this idea: “For Christ being A and W is all the intermediate letters without doubt” (JA C18). Christ, divine symbol for logocentric power, is embedded in the poet’s first name, Christopher, and substantiates the Christianized version of the Greek logos we encounter at the start of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1–3). The Word (logó~), whose various meanings in Greek include “energy” and “power,” contains the vitality of creation that repeats in the multitudes of creaturely generation. John’s Christological logos descends, of course, from the divine fiat of Genesis: Let there be. As the nonspatial, nontemporal center of the poem, Smart’s shorthand for this performative utterance represents the vital hold of the spirit upon matter (rather than a mathematically quantifiable center of mass). The point rather is power, and Smart’s Alphabets read as fluid, anti-deterministic arrangements within the larger organic form of the poem. As starting points for an epigenesist poetics, each letter demonstrates how simple parts of language can be wrenched out of their sequential or grammatical pockets and turned into semantic events. We might say that the beginning of learning in the gospel according to Smart is not the “A” found in hornbooks. With further emphasis on the generative capacity of the simplest parts of language, the letters immediately following “A” come to stand for a creature (“bee” for B) and the sensory act of per-

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ception (“see” for C), now based on their pronunciation rather than morphology. In Alphabet 2 (lines B538–61), a different pronunciation causes these letters to assume another form. Here, “B pronounced in the animal is bey importing authority,” and “C pronounced hard is ke importing to shut” (JA B539–40). Rather than as a noun (bee: “a creature busy and bustling”), Smart interprets the letter through the sheeplike pronunciation of “bey,” a Turkish word for ruler. Similarly, the verb see (“a sense quick and penetrating”), which results when we pronounce a soft C, becomes “ke” (with a hard C), “importing to shut,” an act in which one is assisted by an object known as a key. In Alphabet 1, the letter C leads through the sensory perception of sight (see) to a deeper mode of perception: “For D is depth” (JA B516). In Alphabet 2, on the other hand, the C that represents closure (key) leads unexpectedly to light: “For D pronounced full is day.” From deep to day, Smart’s letters spring directly from Genesis. In this respect, his linguistic play, like the symbolic play of his favorite cat Jeoffry serves as a form of praise. Each letter of the Alphabet is meant to be living and to demonstrate how the simplest parts of language can generate new forms in a creaturely world defined through its powers. Each, in other words, serves as a pluripotent particular able to develop into any number of the specialized parts that make up the organic form. For Smart, the “dead” languages underwriting English are in fact very much alive. He believes they can play a role in undermining the reified taxonomies we are used to encountering. Adding to his critique of the deadly Latin of natural and experimental philosophy, Smart opposes elisions of language that treat certain letters as if they did not exist. He observes that in English, “God has given us a language of monosyllables

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to prevent our clipping” (JA B579). The process of clipping may be another misappropriation of the shears; here it refers to the Latin practice of cutting (or failing to pronounce) the final syllable of a word. Linguistic clipping, from Smart’s perspective, like the clipping of angels’ wings from Keats’s, suggests as much demystified Enlightenment science as it does such Augustan verse forms as neatly clipped couplets. Clipping hinders the articulation of logos, which finds its full expression in living creatures and which those creatures owe back to God in the form of praise. When Smart claims, “The Romans clipped their words in the Augustan thro idleness and effeminacy” (JA B417), his critique is targeted beyond Octavian poets like Virgil to their neoclassical successors in English verse. The robust, even masculinist, language of the Anglo-Saxon John Bull (a figure who turns up later as the animal power motivating English) opposes clipping. John Bull speaks a language of monosyllables of which Smart in Jubilate Agno makes the most: bee, see, key, and so on. The letter H, privileged for its aspirational aspect as spiritus, recurs as the “alpha” of Smart’s third Alphabet, begun on the first folio page of Fragment C. (Although the previous folio page may have been lost, Smart begins Alphabet 1 on the first line of folio 5, and the placement of this alphabet at the top of the page may signify a point of departure from H, despite the absence of the first seven versicles.) For H is a spirit and therefore he is God. For I is person and therefore he is God. For K is king and therefore he is God. For L is love and therefore he is God. For M is musick and therefore he is God. For N is novelty and therefore he is God.

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For O is over and therefore he is God. For P is power and therefore he is God. For Q is quick and therefore he is God. For R is right and therefore he is God. For S is soul and therefore he is God. For T is truth and therefore he is God. For U is union and therefore he is God. For W is worth and therefore he is God. For X has the pow’r of three and therefore he is God. For Y is yea and therefore he is God. For Z is zeal and therefore he is God, whom I pray to be gracious to the Widow Davis and Davis the Bookseller. [JA C1–17] The ancient Greek idea that all matter was imbued with soul and that there were different gradations of soul for vegetables, animals, and minerals philosophically grounds versicle H. Indeed all the versicles of this, Smart’s third alphabet, end with the phrase, “and therefore he is God.”23 The blessing refers back to versicle H of Alphabet 1: “For H is not a letter but a spirit—Benedicatur Jesus Christus, sic spirem!” The breath, classically associated with the vital principle, now derives from Christ, who as logos comes to replace the ancient pneuma or spirited breath. In the service of a distinctly Christian brand of vitalism, Smart’s Alphabets all emphasize the generative potential of each creaturely letter. Smart’s H leads in Alphabet 3 to creaturely identity, or the pronoun “I.” In Alphabet 1 that “I” leads back cyclically to H: “For I is identity. God be gracious to Henry Hatsell” (JA B521). Smart has the habit of blessing people in his poem, and Hatsell (a barrister known to the poet) is undoubtedly invoked

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for his alliterative name, emphasizing H—aspiration and, by association, inspiration—in a poem where the vital principle is figured as breath. “Hatsell” sounds mercantile, but the name obtains new life through its phonetic emphasis on “a,” alpha. Whereas in Smart’s first Alphabet “I” leads to Hatsell, in Alphabet 2 the first-person singular transforms into the organ of vision, for, as Smart recognizes, the latter is pronounced the same but spelled differently (eye): “For I is the organ of vision” (JA B546). In Alphabet 2, E also represents vision, metonymically through the eye, though in this case the connection is morphological, rather than phonetic. The shape of the lowercase letter e suggests in its upper loop the spherical sun rising in the east, which in poetic convention is the eye of the sky: “For E is east particularly when formed little e with his eye” (JA B542). This celestial eye begins east, suggesting dawn and the emergence of light. Just as gaps within letters (the loop of lowercase e) can be pregnant with power, so too can gaps in the alphabet. In Latin the letters U and V, like “I” and J, overlapped, and the English alphabet in the eighteenth century followed this same pattern. Smart’s first Alphabet lacks a V, while his second lacks a U. These letters are not completely missing, for they come together in W, the alphabetical symbol for Word. In Alphabet 1, “U is unity, and his right name is Uve to work it double.” The next line spells out this doubling more explicitly: “For W is word.” Roughly paraphrased, U is that Unity (or Absolute) whose correct name is “Uve” (you’ve) “to work it double.” You have to work the U twice to make W, which represents the creative power of the logos. Such power is manifest in every letter and combination of letters, even if the W of Alphabet 1 translates directly and metonymically into Christ. In Alphabet 2, W is logos manifest as “World.” In such a world, Smart suggests, a

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single letter can be endlessly prolific: “For R is rain, or thus, reign, or thus rein” (JA B554). Alphabet games like these are instructive not only for children. They demonstrate to all “the power of the English letters taken singly.” Alphabet 2 moves from “For V is veil” to “For W is world” (JA B557–58). Behind the veil, which those who live call life, is the world as manifest Word.24 Christ as logos is the alpha and omega of a poetics that echoes the diversity of creaturely expression. Smart is self-conscious that his first name contains “Christ,” whose power he associates with life, and through the cruciform X he identifies with the one in whom all things came to be: he whose “right name” is Word (JA B532). In Alphabet 1 the X contains serifs, or printer’s flourishes, which Smart extends in such a way that the Christological cross (X) comes to resemble two G’s drawn back to back (see fig. 1). Christ is, among other things, a symbol of hope, and the double G’s of versicle X in Alphabet 1 invoke a blessing on Anne Hope, formerly Anne Vane, with whom Smart was in love as a youth. In Alphabet 2, he exaggerates the serifs further so that the letter reads as a loop in the shape of infinity (∞): “For X beginneth not, but connects and continues” (JA B559). As Guest remarks, “The very number and variety of alphabetical exercises, playing on many different aspects of the letters—their sound, their shape, their ‘powers,’ and so on—serve to indicate that the combination of letters that the poem represents is at once of indeterminable and of potentially infinite significance.”25 The conclusion of Smart’s third alphabet in fact reminds us that “there is a mystery in numbers” as well as in letters (JA C19). His letters resist their status as abstract variables in an alphabetical system, and his numbers give rise to numerology, or a mathematics whose comprehension requires methods other than logic. In short, God is present in the gaps of Smart’s po-

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etics like the unifying principle of life; both stand for the spirit filling in cracks of the natural world and establishing relations between parts that would not otherwise be apparent. Unlike botany and comparative anatomy, which treat living creatures as structural assemblages classifiable through the deadly language of Enlightenment taxonomy, Smart explicitly depicts natural objects as manifestations of beauty, whose definition (unity in multëity) likewise defines life. Smart’s “L is light, and L is the line of beauty” (JA B548) refers to Hogarth’s curved “line of beauty,” expounded as the basic principle in his 1753 Analysis of Beauty. Here the squiggly line represents the Hebrew letter lamed, the equivalent of the English letter L, pronounced El, which means “God” in Hebrew. It becomes a visible sign for the unifying principle present in living forms of nature and by extension, art: For the letter L which signifies god by himself is on the fibre of some leaf in every Tree. For L is the grain of the human heart and on the network of the skin. For L is in the veins of all stones both precious and common. For L is upon every hair both of man and beast. For L is in the grain of wood. For L is in the ore of all metals. For L is on the scales of all fish. For L is on the petals of all flowers. For L is upon all shells. For L is in the constituent particles of air. For L is on the mite of the earth. For L is in the water yea in every drop. For L is in the incomprehensible ingredients of fire.

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For L is in the stars the sun and in the Moon. For L is upon the Sapphire Vault. [JA B477–91; fig. 2] As a basic building block of organic form, the scripted line of beauty resembles vegetable and animal fibers, contributing to the organic nature of Smart’s poem. His individual versicles treat parts of the world as manifestations of beauty, and the Hebrew letter lamed (L or El) serves as a physical sign for that beauty. Beyond its standard referentiality as an alphabetical sign, in other words, L becomes a power animating the fibers of leaves, the grains of the human heart, the veins of stones, and other parts of an organic whole whose message is its own vitality. Cutting across cultures and the different linguistic organizations that sustain them, Smart draws on the sound as well as the shape of the letter to find beauty in every fiber of nature. Immediately following Alphabet 2, Smart registers the stakes of his alphabet games when he remarks, “Action and Speaking are one according to God and the Ancients” (JA B562). In the philosophical tradition of logos guiding this poem, to pronounce is to produce. The single versicle between Alphabets 1 and 2 warns, “In the education of children it is necessary to watch the words, which they pronounce with difficulty, for such are against them in their consequences” (JA B537). John Locke took a philosophical interest in education, which makes sense given his conviction that sensory ideas obtained through childhood experience add up to individual identity. In cases where these ideas become misconnected, he believed, psychopathology and even madness could ensue. Smart, however, turns Locke on his head, suggesting that creative mispronunciations and misprisions may actually reinvent the world. His own Christian brand of vitalism traced all formative powers

Fig. 2. Christopher Smart, El and Flowers, Manuscript Page from Jubilate Agno, Fragment B. MS Eng 719. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.

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back to God, the centripetal center of creation: “G is God,” as he writes in versicle G of Alphabet 1, adding, “whom I pray to be gracious to Livemore my fellow prisoner” (JA B519). Livemore was Smart’s fellow prisoner because, his name suggests, he lived more. The linguistic virtuosity of Jubilate Agno reflects a similar, potentially frightening moreness: a polymorphous prolificity (to coin a phrase) manifest at the level of content as well as form.26 One may surmise that Smart, like his fellow, Livemore, exhibited more “life” than contemporary systems, cultural and philosophical, could contain. He was all too familiar with the various forms power could take and had sufficient motivation for reorganizing it in a world whose actual and ideological structures confined him (literally) in the years he was writing the poem. Philosophers who sought to reconcile Christianity with ancient doctrines of creation recognized that the concept of logos descended from the power or principle actualizing the Platonic world of forms. “The whole outward visible world with all its Being is a Signature, or Figure of the inward spiritual World,” wrote the mystic Jakob Böhme, whose work later helped mediate neoplatonism and Naturphilosophie: “Whatsoever is internally, and howsoever its operation is, so likewise it hath its Character externally.”27 Speech reflects character, and the Greek word for character (carakthvr) derives from an instrument used for marking or engraving. Etymologically, therefore, character bespeaks a stamp or distinctive mark. The Alexandrian Philo compared the powers of the universe to “seals which when brought into contact with wax or similar material stamp on them any number of impressions . . . supplying qualities to things which have no qualities and to things which have no shapes and yet changing or lessening nothing of their eternal nature. Some among you call them not inaptly ideas

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(ideva~), since they bring form into everything that is.”28 Such ideas were the precise inverse of the empiricist idea defined by Locke, in which a sensory perception produces a simple idea that, once impressed on the blank stuff of the mind, combines with other (simple) ideas to form more complex ideas.29 These combinations of ideas add up psychologically to human identity, the accretive result of sensory experience. The empiricist idea, in other words, was not the logocentric idea synonymous with innate form. Smart made use of the same analogy between language and emergent nature, or natura naturans (to borrow Spinoza’s term), in which organic forms realize an interior, spiritualized design.30 At one point, he explains that his “talent is to give an impression upon words by punching, that when the reader casts his eye upon ’em, he takes up the image from the mould which I have made” (JA B404). A talent was a Greek unit of currency, and in numismatic terms the image recalls Philo’s metaphor for the organic manifestation of ideal forms through the punching of a die. By Smart’s day, punching referred to the typesetting process whereby typographical characters were thrown into relief on paper.31 Despite his confinement, he obviously continued to think of language in relation to contemporary print culture and its mechanisms of reproduction. An organic form reflecting on its own autopoiesis, his poem reads as an alternative to more classifiable verse.

Animal Power Rejoice in the lamb. Rejoice in the cat. In Jubilate Agno, humans join a vibrant natural world in praise of Creation through the expression of individual character, also conceived as animal power. “For I have a providential acquaintance with men

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who bear the names of animals,” Smart writes,“For I bless God to Mr Lion Mr Cock Mr Cat Mr Talbot Mr Hart Mrs Fysh Mr Grub, and Miss Lamb” (JA B113–14). In response to the “deadly” language of scientific classification, his poem produces its own catalogue of natural history. William Powell Jones points out that the “ingenious parade” on the surviving folio pages of Fragment B includes 295 creatures.32 Smart, who from a young age answered to the nickname Kit, or Kitty, associated his given name with a particular animal. His first love poem, written at four years of age, concludes with memorable lines, punning on his nickname and suggesting the depth of his identification with that creature: “Madam if you please to pity, / O poor Kitty, O poor Kitty!”33 His Collection of Pretty Poems for the Amusement of Children Three Feet High (1756) features a caricature of himself on the frontispiece as an elongated child with whiskers, and throughout his life Smart continued to associate with the animal power of the cat. I am hardly the first to recognize that his reference to Jubilate Agno as a Magnificat, or song of praise to the Virgin Mary, is also a reference to his magnificent (because lively) cat Jeoffry. In a verse form preoccupied with its own processes of generation, it is appropriate that the power of this highly subjective creature should come into play. The differentiation necessary to complex forms of organization takes place, biologically as well as linguistically, through multiplications and magnifications of rudimentary parts, whether the microscopic vesicles and gaps described by epigenesist generation theory or the basic script of letters. The latter advances phonetically to larger units like the preposition kat av, which in Greek is omnipresent and stands for various > kinds of motion (downward, against). Later in the poem Smart suggests that the power of the Greek katav, shortened to

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kat and transliterated into English as “cat,” informs the Greek language and thus informs his poem by underwriting English. “For the power of some animal is predominant in every language,” he writes following Alphabets 1 and 2, from whence he proceeds to animate the Greek language with the power of his favorite animal: “For the power and spirit of a CAT is in the Greek. / For the sound of a cat is in the most useful preposition kat euchvn / For the pleasantry of a cat at pranks is in the language ten thousand times over” (JA B626–28). Shelley also figured his playful verse as a feline creature in the prefatory stanzas to “The Witch of Atlas,” where he demanded: “What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten, / May it not leap and play as grown cats do, / Till its claws come?” (SPP 367). Smart’s preferred term was brisking, a verb that means “to frisk,” with the added sense of “to enliven”: “For he [Jeoffry] counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life” (JA B720). For these poets, aesthetic play, represented as kittenish frisking, can perform a real, invigorating service in the mundane (often mind-numbing) round of a modern society run like a mechanism.34 Smart’s Jeoffry is an animal “compleat in all its parts,” who puts physical force to work as vital power (JA B227). The poet gives his own impression to words in the poem by “punching,” and he makes his own mold for kat: “For tiger is a word and his satellites are Griffin, Storgis, Cat and others,” he announces, for just as “all the stars have satellites,” words have synonyms thrown off from their original mold (JA B402–3). These engenderings may be wild (tiger) or mythic (Storgis, Griffin), but in all cases they refer back self-consciously to the animal vitality of the poem. Smart describes such activity as “Clapperclaw,” an archaic term meaning “to scratch, claw, and attack with tooth and nail” (JA B630). As Moira Dearnley re-

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marks, “Smart seems to be implying that the words in a poem should be associated as violently and powerfully as cats in a fight claw and bite one another.”35 Associating the cat phonetically with the Greek language also helps establish the wordplay of this poem, whose most famous instantiation is the selfstanding part My Cat Jeoffry, as feline frisking. “For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion,” Smart writes of Jeoffry (JA B739). Like his poems for children, Jubilate Agno is a catechism for using—and reinventing—language from the perspective of a child. Hartman observes that Jubilate Agno is “not so much a renovated liturgy as a marvelously inflated hornbook” and that “the overdetermination of simples like ‘cat’ or ‘mus’ [mouse] keeps us within a sphere of childlike instruction.”36 Because children do not bring to language the same predetermined associations and expectations as adults, Smart urges his readers to return to the condition of perpetual motion that characterizes childhood, rather than rely on fixed structures of thought and behavior. The cat’s animal vitality joins a chorus rejoicing in the lamb (agnus) as the logocentric emblem of creaturely life. In Smart’s textually animated Magnificat, as words spin off new formations in succeeding generations of the poem, they suggest the seemingly endless productivity of language. Besides the nickname Kit, Smart had another given him by his father, Jack, which adds to the self-referentiality of the poem: For jack upon pranck is in the performance of peri together or separate. For Clapperclaw is in the grappling of the words upon one another in all the modes of versification.

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For the sleekness of a Cat is in his aglaihϕi [splendor, beauty]. For the Greek is thrown from heaven and falls upon its feet. For the Greek when distracted from the line is sooner restored to rank and rallied into some form than any other. [JA B629–33; fig. 3] If the animal power of the cat (for which kat is metonymic) animates the Greek, the pranks of Jack again pivot on a preposition, this time peri, “upon.” As in the case of kat the preposition establishes relation through movement. The metaphorical power of language to hold together things that would normally fall apart resembles the vital power of organic form to overcome forces working against its coherence (for example, the chemical processes of decomposition that set in upon the death of an organism). When wrenched free from its grammatical structures and “thrown,” Smart’s prankster cat, conceived as the animal power animating the epigenesist poetics of Jubilate Agno, will always land on its “feet,” restoring itself to verse. These are not the metered feet of Greek hexameters, based on the calculation of long and short syllables, or of neoclassical pentameter, the common denominator of English verse in the eighteenth century. To the degree that classical poetry could be measured, it was quantifiable (and, as it would have seemed from the common schoolboy exercises in which Smart excelled, even somewhat mechanical). By eschewing given verse patterns, Smart opted out of a quantifiable system into an organic approach to poetry made available through contemporary biological science based on vital power. In renouncing neoclassical versification, in other words, Jubilate Agno offers an alternative to linguistic preformation

Fig. 3. Christopher Smart, Instruments, Cat, and Mouse, Manuscript Page from Jubilate Agno, Fragment B. MS Eng 719. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.

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and is best comprehended, I am suggesting, through the poetics of epigenesis. As David B. Ricks writes, Smart was aware that the Greek word for verse (stivco~) meant “rank” or “line,” a military metaphor for a structured versification.37 But for Smart “the Greek and Latin are not dead languages” (JA B645). It was not Greek so much as Enlightenment versification based upon it, just as it was not Latin so much as the scientific nomenclature used to classify structures of plant and animal life, that was in need of revitalization. The dominant symbol of beauty in the poem is the cat, an overdetermined figure who brings all Smart’s classical learning to bear on the organic form of his poem. But Smart also cleverly brings Latin to life through the animal power of the mouse (from the phoneme mus): For the Mouse (Mus) prevails in the Latin. For Edi-mus, bibi-mus, vivi-mus—ore-mus. For the Mouse is a creature of great personal valour. For—this is a true case—Cat takes female mouse from the company of male—male mouse will not depart, but stands threatning and daring. For this is as much as to challenge, if you will let her go, I will engage you, as prodigious a creature as you are. For the Mouse is of an hospitable disposition. For bravery and hospitality were said and done by the Romans rather than others. [JA B636–42; see fig. 3] Taken together these lines, which we might call (and why not?) Smart’s Mouse, make up another complex, arguably self-stand-

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ing part of the poem. By wrenching the first-person-plural marker mus from its bound condition as a verbal suffix into the free morpheme mus, Smart gives it its own vitality as an independent word. The Latin word for mouse accordingly comes to motivate a language whose words frequently end in mus: “For Edi-mus, bibi-mus, vivi-mus—ore-mus” (we eat, we drink, we live—let us pray). The suffix indicates the first-person plural, but it can also signal the imperative mode in which mus means “let us.” Let once more. Let there be, in this case, praise. No hymn or preformed prayer will do, for the correct form of worship in this poem is creaturely expression—natura naturans, the mousing of the mouse. Smart’s mouse is brave and he is also hospitable, both qualities of the Roman character. When cornered, he will fight back, earning his place alongside the cat as a vivacious animal capable of reanimating the allegedly dead languages. Following the cat-and-mouse play of Latin and Greek, Smart presents “Bull” as the animal power prevalent in English. In this case, the adjectival phoneme -ble unbinds itself into bull, a word signifying a quite full-blooded animal: For there are many words under Bull. For Bul the Month is under it. For Sea is under Bull. For Brook is under Bull. God be gracious to Lord Bolingbroke. For Rock is under Bull. For Bullfinch is under Bull. God be gracious to the Duke of Cleveland. For God, which always keeps his work in view has painted a Bullfinch in the heart of a stone. God be gracious to Gosling and Canterbury.

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For the Bluecap is under Bull. For the Humming Bird is under Bull. For Beetle is under Bull. For Toad is under bull. For Frog is under Bull, which he has a delight to look at. For the Pheasant-eyed Pink is under Bull. Blessed Jesus rank el. For Bugloss is under Bull. For Bugle is under Bull. For Oxeye is under Bull. For Fire is under Bull. [JA B678–94; fig. 4] Like the monosyllabic language he speaks, the English John Bull is distinguished for his straightforward style. In the lines above, creatures such as the bullfinch, the bluecap (a type of salmon), a type of beetle known as a bull-comber, the bullfrog, the pheasant-eyed pink (a type of flower or fish), the bugloss (a type of plant), and the oxeye ( a type of bird) offer occasions for word games with typically English flora and fauna. The English landscape of Bull Brook, for instance, in the English county of Berkshire, leads phonetically to Bolingbroke (pronounced “Bullenbrook”), the English lord nicknamed Bully. Two lines later, the singing Bullfinch contains the name of Smart’s patron, Henrietta Finch, who married one William Fitzroy, Duke of Cleveland, whom Smart blesses according to this chain of association. From the rocky terrain of Bull Rock through the wildflower known as oxeye or black-eyed Susan, he invokes a variety of natural objects spinning out of -ble. The pheasant-eyed pink provokes an uncomfortable association with pinkeye, which rankles. Smart then tears the implied verb apart into its constituent phonetic units “Rank El,” meaning

Fig. 4. Christopher Smart, Rainbow, Bull, and My Cat Jeoffry, Manuscript Page from Jubilate Agno, Fragment B. MS Eng 719. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.

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“in the rank of God,” foremost therein being Jesus. Smart’s ranking system marks its difference from standard natural historical taxonomies by classifying all objects “under Bull”—in other words wonderful, not demystified or dispirited. The bull as symbol for the animal vitality of English challenges both neoclassical verse, with its Latinate vocabulary and alternating patterns of stress, and classification systems with Latin scientific nomenclatures that would stamp out wonder from nature. In Smart’s version of art and nature, creatures are all under bull, if they are not magnifi-cat. The Sea Bull (JA B680) is a horned fish described in the popular natural history book The Wonders of Nature and Art (1750), which Karina Williamson argues, based on internal evidence, that Smart knew. Fire too is “under Bull,” and it flashes from Jeoffry as a sign of vitality. For Smart, “all the words ending in ‘-ble’ are in the creature,” including the attributes of the Almighty: “Invisi-ble, Incomprehensi-ble, Ineffa-ble,” and “A-ble” (JA B644). Between 1750 and 1756, Smart competed for the Seatonian prize for poetry given by Cambridge University and won it five times running for poems on each of the divine attributes: “On the Eternity of the Supreme Being” (1750), “On the Immensity of the Supreme Being” (1751), “On the Omniscience of the Supreme Being” (1752), “On the Power of the Supreme Being” (1754), “On the Goodness of the Supreme Being” (1756). Turned from nouns into adjectives, these qualities recur in Jubilate Agno as animal powers associated with -ble, the animal power of English. Through further wordplay, this adjectival suffix morphs into that quintessentially English figure, the bulldog. Smart’s poem “The English Bull Dog, Dutch Mastiff, and Quail,” written just before Jubilate Agno in 1758, jokes that “of all dogs it stands confess’d, / Your English bull dogs are the best.”38 He re-

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turns to the theme in this poem when he writes that “can is (canis) is cause and effect a dog. / For the English is concise and strong. Dog and Bull again” (JA B646–47). The pun is based on the English verb for being, both in its actuality (is) and in its potentiality (can). Combined, the two moods produce canis, the Latin word for dog. Like Greek, Latin informs the English language, and through the merger of the -ble and canis, we obtain that English icon the bulldog. The goal of such wordplay is to shake off the straightjacket of scientific nomenclature and reveal the vital power behind linguistic structures compiled of monosyllables. Smart’s “Dog and Bull” also represents his version of “cock and bull,” which had been a term for a nonsensical jest or story for well over a century. In his version of Genesis, God himself speaks bull: “For bull in the first place is the word of Almighty God” (JA B674). There is a play on a bull as a papal proclamation, a blustering and false form of logos from the Protestant perspective. Yet Smart’s “Dog and Bull” contains sound sense, and more “sound reasoning” than the scientific logic that would characterize matter as inert and unreceptive to change from within (JA B504). The latter is the real form of “nonsense” (JA B184). Whereas existing taxonomies tended to treat living forms as if they were quantifiable and to that degree repeatable (abstract, exchangeable), Smart’s poem lets God speak “bull,” and all the wonders of nature emerge.

Smart’s Pneumatics: Powers of Air Unlike scientific instruments or the mechanical powers to which Smart objects at various points in Jubilate Agno, living instruments are inspired through the vital medium of air. Just as God speaks bull, the poet “speaks himself” through the

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“spiritual musick” of his poem (JA B228, 582). In a world in which animals are instruments of sound, he forms part of a larger organic system, the “earth which is an intelligence” and which “hath a voice and a propensity to speak in all her parts” (JA B234). For this reason, he considers it absurd to imagine pockets deprived of “ life,” or, in more technical terms, vacuums. “For the man in vacuo is a flat conceit of preposterous folly” (JA B264). Voice depends on the plenitude of what seems vacant, as invisible particles in the air stimulated into vibration produce a wave that carries sound through all forms of matter, fluid or solid. Even from a mechanical perspective, then, neither voice nor music can exist in a void. Smart builds on the basic principles of natural science to adapt pneumatics, the science devoted to the mechanical powers of air, to an incipient vitalist aesthetic that objected in principle to the concept of a vacuum. From the seventeenth century on the vacuum could be simulated mechanically through an instrument known as the air pump—a machine that segregated and evacuated part of an otherwise integrated whole.39 As devilish adversary to the life of an interdependent organic system, this mechanism designed by Robert Boyle was used to study creatures in a glass receptacle by gradually withdrawing the air—and, inevitably, the animal’s life. It could apply to a range of natural phenomena, which were placed in vacuo within an enclosed glass chamber. In Smart’s assessment, the air pump contrived pockets of emptiness by artificially separating matter from the living earth “with which it is intimately and eternally connected” (JA B214). Boyle’s experiments had deadly effects on birds and other small animals, for while it was impossible to produce an actual vacuum, the simulated vacuum came close enough for the results to be tragic. Smart refused to accept the reality of

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this vacuum, insisting instead that “the air-pump weakens and dispirits but cannot wholly exhaust” (JA B218). A vacuum simply could not exist, he believed, nor in the vitalist world of his poem could death. In this world, creatures speak themselves in a mode we might call creature creaturata. Like the human being who “speaks himself from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet,” the lion “roars himself compleat from head to tail” (JA B228–29). Conceived in the same manner as his “compleat cat” Jeoffry, the king of all cats is an instrument of vital power (JA B742). Robert D. Saltz remarks that Smart “can find in the distinctive voice of each species in creation or the sound associated with each letter and each musical instrument the unique identity which fits a creature or object for a particular function.”40 By figuring identity through an instrument that is simultaneously physiological and vocal, Smart evokes not physical structure but fluid, organic power. “For the voice of a figure is compleat in all its parts,” he claims (JA B227). Anatomical parts, including organs and the bellows-like lungs, become obsolete as “sound is propagated in the spirit and in all directions” (JA B226). Smart’s experience as a vaudevillian actor in London with the bellows, windbags, and other animal organs that supplied air to wind instruments—as well as the “cat” gut that provided strings for stringed instruments—might go some way to explain his ambivalence about literalizing living creatures as instruments in this way. (The material from which musical strings were made was catgut, a contraction from cattle, though the term conjured for most people the evisceration of cats.) Smart describes Jeoffry as “an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon,” and he states elsewhere that “stuff’d guts make no musick; strain them strong and you shall have sweet melody” (JA B727, 307). He was hardly the

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only poet aware of the biological origin of lyric music. Blake’s 1798 depiction of Thomas Gray’s Pindaric ode “The Bard,” for instance, features a harp with red strings that in the words of one scholar “drip profusely with ruddy gore.”41 Smart advocates a less bloody method of stringing instruments,“For harpsichords are best strung with gold wire” and “harps and viols are best strung with Indian weed” (JA B241–42). Nevertheless, the association of catgut with the living instrument of Jeoffry resounds throughout the poem. In a parodic letter “to the Royal Society, containing some new and curious Improvements upon the cat-organ,” published under the pseudonym Mary Midnight in The Midwife (1750), Smart discussed an instrument known as the cat harpsichord (alternately, cat piano), which was designed to make music from actual cats that were arranged according to the pitch of their voices. The idea behind this curiosity piece was to line up cats in such a way that when a player struck one of the keys of a keyboard, a spike would be driven into the tail of a corresponding cat (or a hammer would be lowered on its head), prompting the afflicted animal to cry out.42 Smart described his own version of the instrument: “A plain Harpsichord, which instead of having Strings and Jacks, consists of Cats of different Sizes, included in Boxes, whose Voices express every Note in the Gamut, which is extorted from the imprison’d Animals, by placing their Tails in Grooves, which are properly squeez’d by the Impression of the Organist’s Fingers on the Keys.”43 In a further flourish, he included music, along with dance instructions, under the title “Mrs. Midnight’s Maggot: A New Country-Dance for the Cat Organ.”44 Cats whose body parts were assailed by this mechanism understandably put up quite a howl. It occurred to at least one physician to use the caterwauling as an experimental cure for catatonia: “A

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fugue played on this instrument,” wrote Johann Christian Reil, “particularly when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expressions on their faces and the play of these animals—must bring Lot’s wife herself from her fixed state into prudential awareness.”45 As part of the popular culture of eighteenth-century science, the cat piano or organ (and it is fitting that Smart preferred the latter term) represents another way in which the feline creature representing the poet is turned inside out as an instrument for children of all ages. Before the discovery of oxygen scientists speculated that there might be a vivifying spirit, or pabulum vitæ, animating the atmosphere and sustaining animal life. Boyle himself spoke of “secret qualities” of air, which he imagined to emerge from beneath the earth or from heavenly bodies and to have lifegiving capabilities.46 He collectively termed these airborne powers a “vital substance” and suggested that it might have not only life-giving but formative power: “The air is so vast and rich a magazine of innumerable seminal corpuscles, and other analogous particles, that almost any body long expos’d thereto, may there meet with particles of kin to it self, and fit to repair its injuries and losses, and restore it to its natural state.”47 Although it has gone relatively unremarked in the history of science,48 the ancient idea of a vital principle informed the mechanical science of pneumatics from its inception—and held out the possibility for regeneration. Boyle’s “seminal corpuscles” prefigure Buffon’s “organic particles” as basic building blocks of organized life. In addition to its mechanical properties (expandability, compressibility, springiness, elasticity), therefore, the mysterious properties of air promised to give new life to creatures that had been weakened and dispirited but not wholly exhausted from the air pump and other instruments of experimental science.

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Among these were the barometer and the thermometer, pneumatic devices designed to calculate the density and temperature of air, respectively. Yet insofar as they were blind to “the life,” they were ineffective in gauging Smart’s air: For mercury is affected by the air because it is of a similar subtlety. For the rising in the barometer is not effected by pressure but by sympathy. For it cannot be seperated from the creature with which it is intimately and eternally connected. For where it is stinted of air there it will adhere together and stretch on the reverse. For it works by ballancing according to the hold of the spirit. For quick-silver is spiritual and so is the air to all intents and purposes. For the air-pump weakens and dispirits but cannot wholly exhaust. For sucktion is the withdrawing of the life, but life will follow as fast as it can. For there is infinite provision to keep up the life in all the parts of Creation. [JA B212–20] The above versicles form part of the larger tissue of Smart’s Pneumatics, in which fluids move together through an internal dance of “sympathy,” itself a physiological term for the internal responsiveness of organized structures. According to Smart, the rising of the fluid in the barometer’s gradated measuring glass is caused not by quantifiable pressure but by sympathy. While the latter term mainly derives from life science, it also had its meaning in pneumatics, the study of the mechan-

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ical powers of air. Scientists observed, for instance, that if two strings of different instruments were tuned in unison and one string was struck, the other would reply despite a distance of several feet or more between them. “If I put two pianos beside one another and play a key on one of them, producing a note,” Friedrich Schiller observed in his 1779 Philosophy of Physiology, “the same string on the other piano, and that alone, will sound without my touching it.”49 For Schiller, aural sympathy provided a useful analogy to explain the workings of the mind through the nervous system: living systems were characterized by an internal affinity of “the life,” or the mutual sympathy of parts, a key principle of relation in an organic whole. Smart adapted the concept of sympathy to all instruments. Matter could prank itself into an array of agreeable forms in his vitalist poem, and even unorganized fluids could display aspects of the creature who “performs in ten degrees” and who “rolls upon prank to work it in” (JA B700–702). Although the versicles I have just quoted refer specifically to Jeoffry, all creaturely life in the poem refers back to the dominant animal power of Smart’s cat, the king of all pranks. In another self-standing section of verse, which we might call Smart’s Hydrostatics, matter proves once more anything but static: For water is not of solid constituents, but is dissolved from precious stones above. For the life remains in its dissolvent state, and that in great power. For water is condensed by the Lord’s frost, tho’ not by the florentine experiment. For gladwick is a substance growing on the hills in the East, candied by the sun, and of diverse colours.

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For it is neither stone nor metal but a new creature, soft to the ax, but hard to the hammer. For it answers sundry uses, but particularly it supplies the place of Glass. For it giveth a benign light without the fragility, malignity or mischief of Glass. For it attracteth all the colours of the great bow which is fixed in the east. For the fountains and springs are the life of the waters working up to God. For they are in sympathy with the waters above the Heavens, which are solid. For the Fountains, springs and rivers are all of them from the sea, whose water is filtrated and purified by the earth. For there is Water above the visible surface in a spiritualizing state, which cannot be seen but by application of a capillary tube. For the ascent of vapours is the return of thanksgiving from all humid bodies. For the rain water kept in a reservoir at any altitude, suppose of a thousand feet, will make a fountain from a spout of ten feet of the same height. For it will ascend in a stream two thirds of the way and afterwards prank itself into ten thousand agreeable forms. [JA B196–210] Water, like air, had been tortured by scientific experimentation, and the false Florentine experiment to which Smart objected refers to the barometer. This instrument was invented

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by the Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli in order to prove that vacuities approximating vacuums could exist in fluids just as they did (through the experimental machinations of Boyle at least) in air. Liquids are not so easily compressed as gases, but when contained in a glass receiver and forced through the pores of a copper ball they could produce empty spaces that could be loosely interpreted as vacuums. “When the Torricellian experiment is made,” Boyle noted, “in the upper part of the tube, deserted by the quick-silver, there is a Vacuum, in the strict philosophical sense of the word.”50 But in a poetic system in which rainwater pranks itself into an array of aesthetically pleasing forms, such empty spaces are nonsensical. To the poet for whom all creation is alive, scientifically engineered vacuities deprived of “the life” are as logical as dead matter. Better, with God, to speak bull. In this context, perhaps, one might understand why Smart’s poetic sallies against experimental science show such a strange hostility toward glass. Just as common air was manipulated by the air pump into pockets of lifelessness, as fluids were by way of the barometer, common glass was manufactured into glass receivers used to segregate and analyze, weaken and dispirit God’s creation. More obviously, glass was the material from which Newton’s prism, designed to quantify the rainbow, was made. In place of this experimental glass, Smart celebrates Muscovy glass, or Gladwick, an exotic, naturally occurring form of glass known for its ability to produce a fascinating display of colors. Newton calculated that this micalike substance caused a prism angle of sixty degrees, but his calculation was at odds with Smart’s more spiritual view of the rainbow: “For due East is the way to Paradise” and “gladwick is a substance growing on the hills in the East, candied by the sun, and of diverse colours” (JA B168, 199). Such synesthetic beauty

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resisted being broken down into fractal angles and measurable wavelengths; nor could it divide neatly into discrete sensory perceptions suited to an empiricist explanation of aesthetic experience. For Smart, beauty, like life, entailed a unifying and harmonizing power that could not be reduced to calculation or mechanical manipulation. It could not be separated like the strands of Newton’s rainbow or put to work as physical force. It was, like life, sui generis. Smart’s acoustics followed the same principles as his optics, for sound entailed more than the physical concussion of particles in air. He wrote that “there is a language of flowers / For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers / For elegant phrases are nothing but flowers” (JA B503‒5), and his pun, “sound reasoning,” evokes the synesthetic ideal of “ocular harmony” that was fundamentally opposed to Newtonian logic.51 It suggests an aural logic out of tune with common sense. Nevertheless, in the eighteenth century the French mathematician Louis Bertrand Castel constructed a mechanism known as a color organ, or ocular harpsichord, attempting to prove a discrepancy between the seven-tone chromatic scale used in music and that described by Newton in his Opticks (1704). As Castel remarked, “If the system of Mr Newton is true, mine will be turned on its head, there is no ocular music, harmony or harpsichord: and everything I have said so far is nothing but a beautiful chimaera.”52 In opposing the aesthetic idea of ocular harmony to Newtonian physics, Castel risked exposing the theory behind his instrument as no more than a chimera. But Smart, who used the pseudonym Chimaericus Cantabrigiensis in his schooldays at Cambridge, celebrated the idea of ocular harmony, along with other chimeras of beauty (JA B508). In Jubilate Agno, he redirects attention from mathematical logic

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to a “sound reasoning” of beauty best reflected in candied glass, flowers, and other natural phenomena. This ocular harpsichord (clavecin oculaire), designed to play colors instead of musical notes, was part of the Enlightenment craze for science that included the air pump and the cat piano. The basic idea was “to take an ordinary harpsichord, but to change the mechanism so that ‘the pressing of the keys would bring out the colours with their combinations and their chords; in one word, with all their harmony, which would correspond exactly to that of any kind of music,’” as Maarten Franssen explains.53 The idea fascinated natural philosophers— Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, Erasmus Darwin, Kant—who in the words of the historian Thomas Hankins, “used the example of the cat piano to show that sound was not beautiful by itself and that the beauty of music lay only in the sequence and harmony of the notes.”54 By literalizing the analogy between the seven-tone minor musical scale and the sevenfold spectrum of light, Castel hoped to prove Newton and his prism made of common glass wrong about the rainbow. As we have seen, Smart also took issue with Newtonian physics, formally as well as thematically, in an effort to show that organic form can be “musical in ocular harmony” (JA B508). He declared outright that “Newton’s notion of colours is alogos [a-logos] unphilosophical./For the colours are spiritual” and gave, in response, his own gorgeously revitalized rainbow: For white is the first and the best. For there are many intermediate colours, before you come to silver. For the next colour is a lively grey. For the next colour is blue.

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For the next is green of which there are ten thousand distinct sorts. For the next is yellow which is more excellent than red, tho Newton makes the red the prime. God be gracious to John Delap. For red is the next working round the Orange. For Red is of sundry sorts till it deepens to black. For black blooms and it is purple. For purple works off to brown which is of ten thousand acceptable shades. For the next is pale. God be gracious to William Whitehead. For pale works about to White again. now that colour is spiritual appears inasmuch as the blessing of God upon all things descends in colour. [JA B648–49, 650–62; see fig. 4] Smart’s Rainbow, comprised of versicles that resist being unwoven into separable units like mathematical bands of color, blooms like his flowers in what is intended to be a natural form of expression. Such expression, logocentric in nature, is “peculiarly the poetry of Christ” (JA B506). Colors along with other aspects of creation that boast the power of logos are philosophical to the degree that they resist physical explanation.55 From a particular place in the rainbow “sundry sorts” of red may emerge, while from another “ten thousand distinct sorts” of green appear as a myriad, or indistinguishable, amount.56 Similarly, from the generative center of brown emerge “ten thousand acceptable shades,” for as with the “ten thousand agreeable forms” rainwater can take, Smart’s optics rely on the undifferentiated idea of immensity or infinity associated with the divine. Nature reveals itself through an incalculable formal

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multiplicity and a full range of sensory perceptions, and any approach to beauty that treats its parts as separable is necessarily a-logos, that is, without the Word, the power (or poetry) of Christ. Any account of matter and motion in purely physical terms is “more of error than of truth,” since truth is “the word of god” manifest organically (JA B195). Smart’s multiple and interacting references to mechanical science, from optics and acoustics to mechanics, pneumatics, and hydrostatics, are all aimed at converting the basic branches of natural philosophy into a genuine philosophy of nature. The branch of natural science that linked physics and life science most closely at the time, however, was electricity. Poets, scientists, and a large part of the educated public were fascinated by the power of electricity in relation to vitality. Physicians used it to restore life to deadened limbs, and William Blake’s wife, Catherine, to take an example close at hand, after three rheumatic years on the shore of Felpham in West Sussex, found relief in John Birch’s “Electrical Magic,” which restored vigor to her swollen legs and knees (E 759).57 Jubilate Agno was composed before the articulation of the branch of electricity known as galvanism, the science of animal electricity, but Smart recognized in contemporary medical practices electricity’s power “to quicken in paralytic cases being the life applied unto death” (JA B267). Williamson suggests that this is a reference to Benjamin Franklin’s electrical experiments, the results of which were published as “The Effects of Electricity in Paralytic Cases” in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1758) and in various articles in the Gentleman’s Magazine from 1755 to 1759. As a direct reference, this seems likely, though experiments with electricity to restore vitality (physical strength and even psychic awareness) had been performed throughout Europe from mid-

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century on.58 Natural philosophers had not yet come to think of the earth as a grand reservoir of electric fluid pervading all substance and even animating it, as they did later in the Romantic period, but the idea was already at work in the selfshaping versicles of Smart’s poem. Thus, we find Jeoffry, symbol of all creaturely life, “counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes” (JA B719). Sparks of static electricity that jumped through the air from one body to another served as visible signs of an all-pervasive vitality. Smart seems to have been successful in producing sparks of static electricity from Jeoffry, “For by stroaking of him I have found out electricity” (JA B760). (Coleridge, on the other hand, was bitten by his cat when he attempted a similar experiment.)59 We have seen how Smart converts mechanical into vital powers, and along the same lines he portrays electricity as a form of sublime vitality in animals. Jeoffry’s skin is electric and his eyes are on fire. The very air is “quick,” and when trapped it will break out in flames (JA B260). It was thought that vivifying spirits of the air could be vitiated by corruption or putrefaction, and with this in mind Smart wrote, “An electrical Spirit may be exasperated into a malignant fire” (JA B266). Such fires are from the adversary insofar as they can destroy living form. The phosphorescence given off from decaying vegetation known as shell-fire or ignis fatuus was “either the fool’s conceit or a blast from the adversary. / For shell-fire or electrical is the quick air when it is caught” (JA B259–60). With its capacity to animate or extinguish living form, air, though seemingly empty, was anything but vacant. It was the crucial medium through which the sparks of Smart’s electrified language had to pass. Accordingly he declared, “All spirits are of fire and the air is a very benign one” (JA B263). He was drawing on earlier traditions that represented the vital prin-

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ciple as the spark of life, theories that substantiated his claim that “the breath of our nostrils is an electrical spirit” (JA B265). Glass was blown into shape through the liquid medium of fire, and with a nod at Job (5:7) he remarked, “Man is born to trouble in the body, as the sparks fly upwards in the spirit. / For man is between the pinchers while his soul is shaping and purifying” (JA B431–32). Although not “a yielding body,” glass could yield itself up to a liquid state through the application of fire, which was alone considered essentially fluid. Fire too could yield itself to glass in the form of electrical current: “glass is worked in the fire till it partakes of its nature. / For the electrical fire is easily obtain’d by the working of glass” (JA B261– 62).60 The reference is to the Leyden jar, a device invented in 1745 for storing electric charges (in the glass itself, according to Franklin). In suggesting that “the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast,” Smart likened the mechanical force of electricity to vitality, and more precisely to animal power (JA B762). Manifested atmospherically, electricity produces lightning as well as thunder, which here betokens the direct voice of God. Handbooks of science in Smart’s day explained that when electrical charges jump from one overly charged cloud to another cloud of a lesser charge, they could produce a momentary pocket in the atmosphere, driving away surrounding air. As adjoining air rushes into this space, the result is the loud report or clap we call thunder. In another self-standing section of verse, which I would call Smart’s Instruments but shall not quote in full (JA B582–94), each of the end-stopped lines echoes the great “thunder-stop, which is the voice of God direct. / For the rest of the stops are by their rhimes” (JA B583– 84). Animated by internal rhymes, alliteration, assonance, and

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sophisticated wordplay, these versicles produce patterns of sound that function analogously to electrical power as the life of the poem rushing into its gaps. Smart’s lines are not metered and they do not always rhyme, but they are in all cases end-stopped to echo the voice of God, “For the voice is from the body and the spirit—and is a body and a spirit” (JA B239). Voice in Smart’s world is not limited to the vocal organs any more than the biological process of generation from the perspective of epigenesis is limited to the sexual organs. Instead, he finds a sublime vitality in animals as he does in language, instruments, and natural phenomena from glass to rainbows. I have proposed that we read Jubilate Agno as developing from the simplest parts of linguistic substance (letters, symbols, and the blank spaces between them) into larger semantic units, such as morphemes and phonemes. These, then, combine into words and combinations of words that make up the Let and For versicles, the tissue of the poem as a deliberate organic form. Smart’s Alphabets, Smart’s Mouse, Smart’s Rainbow, Smart’s Hydrostatics, Smart’s Instruments, and My Cat Jeoffry all stand out among its self-standing parts. I have followed Smart’s lead in pursuing an analogy that holds language on a par with organic material in its capacity to produce living form. My contemporary point of reference for his mode of epigenesist poetics is Wolff, who held that all forms of plant and animal life are analogous in their mode of generation. The theory of epigenesis held implications for living forms for Smart’s contemporary William Blake as well. Blake was born about the time that Wolff first articulated his theory of generation and Smart began Jubilate Agno. He, too, broke from preformed patterns of verse into what I would call an epigenesist poetics.

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Blake not only shared Smart’s desire to escape the conventional constraints of commercial publishing but, even more significant for our purposes, he shared space within a scientific culture obsessed with the idea of vital power before the teleological turn in life science.61 Blake’s patron William Hayley was obsessed with the manuscript of Jubilate Agno, which he somehow obtained from his friend the Reverend Thomas Carwardine during the time he was working on his biography of William Cowper (another “mad” poet), a project in which he was assisted by Blake, who made several engravings.62 Between 1800 and 1803, when Blake was working alongside Hayley in Felpham (and tottering, according to some, on the edge of the same category of madness that afflicted Smart), he developed the long, unmetered line that characterizes his prophetic works, particularly Milton (1804–10/11) and Jerusalem (1804–20). John Hollander has proposed that the Let and For versicles of Jubilate Agno provide the closest antecedent to Blake’s unconventional verse form, and I am inclined to agree.63 While we may assume that Blake had no direct contact with Smart, he certainly knew Jubilate Agno. His seemingly inscrutable poetry shares affinities with Smart’s even as it anticipates, more acutely than its predecessor, the wider cultural ramifications of vital power. Ultimately, the name given to extreme forms of that power, and unruly material forms of that process, was monstrosity.

3 Blake’s Living Form: Jerusalem

Mathematic Form is Eternal in the Reasoning Memory. Living Form is Eternal Existence. —William Blake, “On Virgil”

mart’s vociferous challenge to post-Newtonian mechanism paved the way for William Blake’s visionary illuminated works, which he also conceived as “Living Form.” Nowhere in Romantic poetry, in fact, are the problems and possibilities of living form more powerfully featured than in Blake’s final prophecy, Jerusalem, intermittently produced from 1804 through 1820. This poem portrays the regeneration of a universal human (Albion) into organic wholeness from the discrete, anatomized particulars of his fallen condition. In The First Book of Urizen (1794) and Milton, produced contemporaneously from 1804 through 1810 or 1811, Blake

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narrates the fall of this universal human into four aspects of human nature, which he designates Zoas, after the Greek word for life.1 At the start of Milton, we witness Albion’s petrification from “Living Form” specifically into stultifying anatomical rigidity, as “bones of solidness freeze over all” (M 2). Urizen undergoes the same fate in the poem named after him when “bones of solidness, freeze / Over all his nerves of joy”—nerves that were widely thought to be conveyors of soulish spirits or the highly speculative principle of life (U 9).2 Ossification and petrification are processes symbolically opposed to living form for Blake as they are for other Romantics.3 As Jean Paul Richter wrote in the same year that Blake began Milton and Jerusalem, the materialist “petrifies and ossifies the general into the particular” whereas the author of “living poetry” seeks a symbolic unity of the general and the particular.4 If the tragic prehistory of Jerusalem is the mythic breakdown of an organic whole into falsely differentiated parts, its explicit objective is regeneration through the epigenetic power of “Minute Particulars” (J 91).5 At the start of Milton we learn that “Albion was slain upon his Mountains . . . thro envy of Living Form” and that his destruction took place through “Enitharmons Looms,” mechanisms designed to weave fibers of flesh—hence, broadly speaking, materiality—and associated with dehumanizing systems of industrial production (M 2). The urgent question for Blake is how to begin the processes of regeneration when the powers that be label such disorganization “System” and “Organization.”6 Throughout the poem, we remain aware of the labors of Los,“Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems” (J 11). Such systems are operative in the natural world and at all levels of culture. All biological and by extension cultural organizations consist of vital particulars derived from the human form divine: “Gen-

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eral Forms have their vitality in Particulars: & every Particular is a Man,” although the world (and poem) as we experience it consists of “Minute Particulars in slavery . . . Disorganizd” (J 91, 89). Los, the aspect of humanity associated with the imagination, turns out to be the artistic hero of Jerusalem: “Albion is dead!” he exclaims, “But I am living!” (J 12). Despite his better judgment—or sense of the material costs of his endeavor— Los seeks to liberate humanity from the prison house of structure and to restore Albion to living form. Blake would have us believe that the social body of Albion (Great Britain) can be rebuilt from its most minute, material components, and he was not suggesting merely that this could be done; he was showing how it could be done aesthetically, avoiding the artistic machine and its systems of mechanical reproduction.7 Recognizing that the mechanistic breakdown of organic form affected human experience ideologically and practically, he made it clear that to rely as Enlightenment scientists did on the characteristics of visible structure is to fail to recognize the essence of living forms of the natural world. Instead, under the direction of a mental power, which he called imagination and which is analogous in its workings to the essential (or formative) power of epigenetic theory, apparent structures become fluid and subject to reorganization. In lieu of offering a preformed reading of Jerusalem—a systematic ambition out of sync with the kind of form Blake thought he was producing—I shall focus largely on visual aspects of the poem to provide a rationale for reading in the mode of epigenesist poetics. I would argue that the poem’s seemingly disjointed textual and visual elements illustrate the poetics of epigenesis on an epic scale. While critics have come to understand Blake’s direct attacks on experimental science as a response to Newton, his de-

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ployment of the specific properties of living matter, namely generation (the production of new living forms) and vegetation (the growth of living forms), which figure at the core of his visionary system, remains relatively under thought out and untheorized. Against the eighteenth-century materialist view that “this visible universe is matter, scattered and dead matter” (as articulated by Blake’s nemesis, Jean-Jacques Rousseau), an attitude that would resist “all acquiescence to the idea of unorganized matter moving itself or producing some action,” Blake imbued matter with the power to organize living form.8 For him, organized bodies were “true wonder works,” as C. F. Wolff also called them, living natures that bring about eternal change through their own powers (TG 73).9 Just as Wolff ridiculed those who would go, anatomical instruments in hand, to dissect organisms in order to determine their essence (TG 20), Blake frustrates those who would attempt the literary-critical equivalent of anatomical analysis by structurally parsing the living form of Jerusalem. His goal was to rouse our faculties to act, and ultimately the biological processes of vegetation and generation were to serve as models for the regenerative activity of the reader in organizing the poem.10 In response to the widespread critical assumption that these processes, as portrayed in the illuminated work, are negative, I would point out that they nevertheless define living form. They provide the best, if not the only, way into Blake’s living aesthetic.

A World of Generation As the longest and most ambitious of Blake’s illuminated works, the color manuscript of Jerusalem, which David Bindman judges to be “a final synthesis of his poetic vision and the medium he had invented for its expression,” is divided into

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four sections (like the primal human, Albion) that are no less confusing than the four fragments of Jubilate Agno.11 With his scripted words on the page, Blake integrates visuals bristling with living creatures at various stages of development, from fibrous roots to fully formed organisms. W. J. T. Mitchell, following Northrop Frye and Jean Hagstrum, has made the case for the necessity of reading the elements of the illuminated work as a “composite art,” and that premise is now widely accepted.12 Yet while Mitchell titles his chapter on Jerusalem “Living Form,” he does not speculate about or explicate what that form entails.13 The problem to a large degree lies with defining Blake’s concept of living form outside the interdisciplinary arena of “life” in which his living aesthetic was meant to participate. Besides Blake’s marginalia on several key texts, we have few direct records of his reading, though his range of reference suggests it to have been vast and eclectic, deeply rooted in natural-philosophical concerns. The cultural world of the 1790s percolated with discussion about the concept of vital power, and Blake, who had been apprenticed to James Basire, the engraver for the Royal Society, was affiliated with leading figures from the scientific community who were keenly aware of the latest developments in the field of generation. Among them, Erasmus Darwin and John Hunter commented on and defined their own versions of the various vital powers, forces, and drives emanating from leading research centers in Europe.14 Darwin spoke of a “spirit of animation” in his Zoonomia (1794–96), and Hunter believed in a vital principle located in the blood and argued that “blood is endowed with life.”15 Hunter’s work was influential on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, whose treatise On the Bildungstrieb refers to Hunter’s experiments with monstrosities (UB 110). Of course, the influence worked in the other direction as well. Darwin discussed Blumenbach’s

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monstrosities, specifically those produced from diversely colored dismembered pieces of the polyp, which, as Blumenbach observed, grow together “like a creature out of mythology” (UB 94–95).16 Blumenbach’s work on formative power was translated into English in 1792 by the British physician Alexander Crichton and published by Thomas Cadell, the same man who printed and sold Blake’s designs. Although there is no evidence that Blake knew German, by January 1803 he could read Latin and Greek and was learning Hebrew (E 727). He may have read Wolff’s Theory of Generation (1759), and he would certainly have had access to theories of epigenesis flowing from Wolff, including that of Blumenbach. Far from irrelevant, contemporary physiological debates over the nature of life and its generation provide the context for Blake’s concept of living form. In fact, the context of Romantic organicism may provide a way to organize a number of recurring insights about Blake’s illuminated work that now lack a critical framework, such as the idea that his poetry grows essentially, from the inside out.17 As Morris Eaves observes, Blake’s version of organic form “provides the only unity worth having: organization from the inside out, imaginative organization.”18 Blake believed that “A Machine is not a Man nor a Work of Art it is destructive of Humanity & of Art” (E 575), and his work self-consciously resists the structured patterns of “apparent surfaces.” The phrase derives from the fourteenth plate of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), where the poet announces that he will expunge the notion “that man has a body distinct from his soul . . . by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (E 39). Blake’s unique method of illuminated printing offered a way to avoid the

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commercial mechanisms of industrial production, and it was theoretically implicated in a larger paradigm shift around the turn of the nineteenth century whereby living forms came to be seen less as structures than as the material result of a process or activity that scientists were equating with life. Jerusalem opens itself up to a multiplicity of readings, and in this way seems as generative as the epigenetic polyp. The aesthetic education we receive in reading Blake involves activating our own Polypennatur, to borrow Schiller’s term for the epigenetic capacity of living form (AE 34). Through active engagement with Blake’s poetry we learn to shape new patterns in the mode of the parent organism: we become with Los, what we behold.19 Recall that in the Romantic understanding of aesthetic education, one does not mimic but rather assumes the polypoid character of the work of art. Speaking from the inner core of the Romantic Zeitgeist, Schiller based the aim of aesthetic education on an epigenetic model, and if one’s instructor is Blake such education is bound to be as rewarding as it is demanding. It involves intense engagement with dense and difficult script, integrated with symbolic visual art. As many readers have noticed, the visual elements of Jerusalem are more entangled with the text than any of the other major prophecies. At the same time, there is no consistent pattern dictating how these two elements of the poem are to relate. In places the visuals appear closely interwoven with the words on the page—dividing, demarcating, and illustrating them. Elsewhere they seem to challenge the text by juxtaposing relatively absurd images with oracular pronouncements or occurring in places that mystify the best of minds.20 Owing to this complexity, the relations between elements of Blake’s composite art are fundamental. Occasionally, symbolic patterns of design and poetry

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(worms, nets, spirals) begin to form recognizable wholes. But these just as often fizzle out, so that it becomes virtually impossible to draw universal—or to use Blakean vocabulary, abstract—generalizations from the minute particulars of his composite art. The instability of Jerusalem’s visual iconography is matched by the unstable semiotics of the poem, and Jerusalem (the character) at times appears as a beautiful woman, at times as a city, and at times as a spiritual ideal of the soul.21 Periodically, although never at regular intervals, she merges with Los’s vegetated wife, Enitharmon, or with the figure of Britannia, who in turn suggest other indistinct females occurring in the poem. As the narrative stability of character is undermined, any critical effort to make sense of the poem structurally becomes doomed to endless qualification. Within the narrative, new patterns continually emerge to disrupt established organizations. “To look closely at any of the structures suggested,” Stuart Curran concludes, “is to find them imposed on a generally resistant poem.”22 Yet this resistance makes sense, and even becomes productive, once we forgo structural models and enter into Blake’s epigenesist poetics. An ideal place to enter Blake’s unique “World of Generation” (J 12) is the title page to the poem (ill. 1). This world is one in which neither poems nor bodies conform to typical patterns of organization—rhetorical or biological—and the plate serves as an orientation to that world, giving pointers on how to read in a natural-philosophical context epigenetically. The five winged figures who hover around the elaborately designed title, “Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion,” have been frequently interpreted as the weeping daughters of Albion who are lamenting his worldly disorganization. Yet they embody a strange mixture of animal and plant life that defies natural historical classification. Robert N. Essick refers to these

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creatures as “lepidopterous women” on the order of moths or butterflies, though this is only half (if that) of the equation.23 As we have seen, the aim of naturalists throughout the eighteenth century was to uncover the hidden system of the natural world by identifying features of organic structures and grouping them into logical orders. Linnaeus began his systemmaking process with plants, whose organs were readily visible to the eye. His taxonomy was founded on a key division between plant and animal life, but Blake does away with that division, along with other structural models of organization, at the start of Jerusalem. The most prominent figure on the title page is the leaflike, or butterfly-like, woman spread across the bottom section of the plate. Her torso forms the main stem of a leaf or wing, if we can distinguish between these two homologous structures. At least Blake’s beautifully designed “Human Vegetable” appears to be human and female, even if she resists these basic categories as her viscera branch out beyond the borders of her human anatomy into the side ribs of a wing or leaf (J 56). Her feet form webbed extensions of her circulatory and muscular systems, themselves indistinguishable. Incipient toes reach out through the vegetation as rootlike fibers, seeking new material to organize. In the following plate (plate 3), the figure recurs in a pared-down, less elaborate form with a minimum of color. As it shrinks, its human aspect is subsumed further into its vegetable nature, with vessels extending from the tip of the leaf where feet can no longer be discerned. Reduced to its most basic elements—a human stem with two “side wings” (as Wolff might call them)—the figure makes clear Blake’s effort (if nothing else) to portray the human form in ways other than we have been used to seeing. Certainly the visual arts of his day, from Royal Academy paintings to more functional medical

Ill. 1. William Blake, “Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion,” Jerusalem, Plate 2. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 2. William Blake, “And that toward Eden . . . , ” Jerusalem, Plate 13. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 3. William Blake, “The Four Zoa’s clouded rage . . . , ” Jerusalem, Plate 74. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 4. William Blake, “From Camberwell to Highgate . . . , ” Jerusalem, Plate 47. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 5. William Blake, “His face and bosom . . . , ” Jerusalem, Plate 38. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 6. William Blake, “Then the divine hand . . . , ” Jerusalem, Plate 35. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 7. William Blake, “The Atlantic Mountains . . . , ” Jerusalem, Plate 50. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 8. William Blake, “Jerusalem. Chap: 2. . . . , ” Jerusalem, Plate 28. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 9. William Blake, “What have I said? . . . , ” Jerusalem, Plate 24. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 10. William Blake, “What is Man!” For Children. The Gates of Paradise, Plate 1 (Frontispiece). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 11. William Blake, “Encompassed by the frozen Net . . . , ” Jerusalem, Plate 80. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 12. William Blake, The First Book of Urizen (Copy A), Plate 11. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 13. William Blake, “Awake! Awake Jerusalem! . . . , ” Jerusalem, Plate 97. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 14. William Blake, Jerusalem, Frontispiece, Plate 1. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 15. William Blake, “Of life on his forsaken mountains . . . , ” The First Book of Urizen (Copy C), Plate 20. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Ill. 16. William Blake, “Her voice pierc’d Albions clay cold ear . . . , ” Jerusalem, Plate 95. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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illustrations, provided nothing like the portrayal of human anatomy in Jerusalem. The approach points to the larger ambitions of a poem that would organize its material in the mode of epigenesist poetics. For when viewed through an epigenetic lens, the transgression of traditional distinctions among organic life forms in Blake’s human-vegetable starts to make sense. The delicate convergence of plant and animal life evident in the gorgeously imbricated, fluttering females on the title page indicates, in other words, that standard categories of biological organization will not suffice to comprehend Blake’s world of generation. By implication, too, all existing social and political structures that would support an axiomatic view of life are called into question. In the force field constituting Romantic life science, material organizations coded as natural were no longer so, and vital power (analogous to the imagination) had the capacity to drive through given structures, biological to political, and regenerate both corporate and individual automata as living forms. With apparent surfaces melted away, Blake suggests, “every Generated Body in its inward form, / Is a garden of delight & a building of magnificence” (M 25). In identifying particular forms of life, the leaf was given particular emphasis in the natural-philosophical shift from anatomical structure to “mode of generation” (Zeugungsart). From Wolff’s perspective, this “organ” best demonstrated how vegetation and generation occur in the fluid matter of developing creatures. Goethe too, in his quest to see past perceptible forms of nature to the ur-phenomena or hidden internal forms of the natural world, focused on the leaf.24 Epigenesis depended on continuity rather than atomistic disjointedness, and it required that the Enlightenment rift between animal and plant life be healed. Wolff was not content to rest his the-

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ory of generation on the vegetation of plants and “lower” forms of animal life like insects, and he observed that even more complex animals—bats, for instance, a type of mammal— have wings that develop in the same way as leaves: “The mode of generation of both is the same.” Bats stood as Wolff’s pièce de resistance in his theory of generation, for they paved the way from plants to humans. Their anatomy contained clear traces of how arms and legs, fingers and toes take shape from unorganized fluid substance and ramify in the manner of twigs and leaves. From an epigenetic perspective, Wolff exulted, “The bat is a perfected leaf!” (TG 207). Those familiar with Blake’s illuminated world will know that bats and leaves, occasionally interchangeable, are among its most prominent images. In the illuminated border to plate 13 of Jerusalem, bats and leaves occur conspicuously together, suggesting a correlation between these apparently diverse forms of life (ill. 2). At the bottom of the plate, a female figure in a green dress reaches out with her right hand, holding a leaflike hat to match her dress. The figure reads almost as a parody of the other selfshaping systems that populate the borders of the poem, where individual organisms are often comprehensible through epigenetic patterns of arrangement. Her hand, in this light, would resemble a vegetation point, exuding unorganized material to be organized through a particular mode of generation. Pushing this matter out past the contours of the organism, the power that Wolff calls “essential” would use it to construct more simple parts, which it then shapes successively into complex, interdependent, and finally, self-standing parts like wings and leaves. The broader point I wish to make, and I need not insist on the parody of the human dressed in protoplasmic green to

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make it, is that the borders of Jerusalem mimic the epigenetic edges where the secretion or exudation of self-shaping matter was supposed to take place. As a living form, Jerusalem is no closed system, and its borders enact the ongoing cycle of formative activity that defines epigenetic matter. The homology between bats and leaves is important insofar as it leads to a more important homology between humans and vegetables. From the other hand of the female figure in plate 13, for instance, a winged creature resembling a bat extends, as if developmentally. Its incorporation into the leafy vine creeping up the right-hand border of the plate suggests once more the equivalency between the winged animal and the leaves of the plant. When it comes to the vegetation of organic life, Blake suggests visually, humans, like other living forms of nature, are diverse physical expressions of an essential, formative power.25 The multiplicity of organic forms occurs as the material result of such power when it comes into contact with and is motivated by a given environment. While the batlike creatures fluttering through the illuminated plates of Jerusalem are usually interpreted as our fallen or dark side—our doubts and specters, our erring reason and self-absorbed selfhood— they also represent a form of life whose anatomical arrangement suggests an epigenetic equivalency between animals and plants. Blake scholars have tended to use his biological vocabulary loosely, in a way that does little to explain the nature of his human-vegetable or why it matters so much to the poem. But the human-vegetables, or animal-plants (Tierpflanzen, as German natural philosophers called them) form part of a larger organismic conception of nature characterizing Romantic Naturphilosophie.26 In a poem published in 1800, F. W. J. Schelling captured

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the spirit of Romantic organicism in lines that have obvious affinities to Blake: there is a gigantic spirit trapped within, But it is petrified with all its senses, It cannot get out of its tight shell, Nor break its iron prison, Although it often stirs its wings, Stretches itself forcibly and moves, In dead and living things Strives mightily after consciousness.27 The parallels between Schelling’s protean spirit of nature, “petrified” within its self-wrought selfhood, and Blake’s petrified Albion are apparent. Coleridge, a self-appointed link between German and British perspectives at this time, would no doubt have heard the natural-philosophical echoes in Blake’s claim that “man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern” (E 39). These writers rejected the empiricist conception of human beings as aggregates of sensory experience and suggested instead that to close oneself off to the animate and vitalized world of which one forms a part is to forget one’s divinity (or essential nature). The terrors of that forgetting and the fear with which it shrouds the rest of life are experienced as petrification. As in the case of Blake’s artisthero Los, Schelling’s animating spirit of nature “Torments itself with specters” whenever it loses touch with its own powers, “the God whom [Nature] cherishes in her bosom, / The spirit which moves all, / From the first strife of dark forces / To the outpouring of the first juices of life.”28 These primordial juices evoke the semi-transparent formative fluids in which the epigenetic generation of life was supposed to take place. And they

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provide the material necessary for the workings of a greater synthetic power: “One force, One interplay and weaving, / One drive and impulse to ever higher life.”29 The idea that spirit works itself out literally, through the material stuff of nature, reverberates throughout German philosophy from Schelling to Hegel. It informs not only Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, for example, but also its biological precursor, the Philosophy of Nature. There, as the creative potency in nature takes part in the processes of vegetation and generation, it works toward its own redemption. This symbolic equivalency between plant and animal life associated with epigenetic animal-plants, moreover, is necessary to Blake insofar as it helps overcome the animal’s more limited capacity to regenerate lost or mutilated parts. As his contemporary Hunter pointed out, “A vegetable can, and is always producing new parts” (EO 1:241). Plants and simpler forms of life seemed to be in touch with a power of regeneration that Blake would extend to the structures of human life (biological and by extension cultural). “The human being and his close animal relatives,” Blumenbach wrote, “have only a limited ability to regenerate anything compared to the extraordinary power to do so among many cold-blooded animals, especially water salamanders, crabs, snails, earthworms, sea anemones, sea stars, and arm-polyps.”30 These creatures, as Darwin also noted, “possess so much life throughout a great part of their system, that they may be cut in two or more pieces without destroying them, as each will acquire a new head, or a new tail, or both; and the insect will thus become multiplied.”31 Although humans cannot regenerate parts, or selves, in the manner of more simple, homogenous organisms, Blake and his contemporaries imagined a world of generation in which they could.

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In Jerusalem human beings become as polymorphously prolific as plants and less heterogeneous animals.32 Frequently throughout the poem, roots and other vegetating vessels issue directly from the human form. At the bottom of plate 74, for example, a human figure enroots in a manner normally associated with plants (ill. 3). Joseph Wicksteed refers to this figure as an “Emblem of Man in the Stems of Vegetation,” observing that his body is “immersed in vegetable bondage to This World of nutrition and reproduction.”33 Yet Wicksteed does not explain his use of the biological term vegetation, any more than S. Foster Damon clarifies what he means by “Vegetative Man” when he claims that the figure in plate 74 represents “Reuben, the Vegetative Man, enrooting.”34 There may be other literary precedents for humans turning into trees, Ovid’s metamorphoses for example, but these too suggest changes of biological state that could never take place in a preformed world.“The Gigantic roots & twigs of the vegetating Sons of Albion” portray an enrooting physicality, which is free from preformed structures and epigenetically open to change (J 49). As the veins of the human-vegetable in plate 74 reach down to earth in the manner of gigantic roots, and its hair bristles out in the form of vegetating sticks, we see rendered artistically a mode of generation not normally available to humans. As the illuminated figures of the poem turn away from the lure of sexual reproduction, they suggest a more fluid relation between vitality and form, which the theory of epigenesis made it possible to imagine. In plate 47, an androgynous (though probably male) human figure turns away from the viewer as well as from the two naked women portrayed beside him (ill. 4). Whether this twisted physicality represents Albion, seeking spiritual redemption and spurning (as Damon argues) the female figures of Jerusalem and Britannia—or (as David

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Erdman argues) Jerusalem and Vala, or, in reversed order, Vala and Jerusalem (Minna Doskow), or the collected Daughters of Albion (Laurence Binyon), or the more general idea of the “feminine” (Wicksteed)—the majority of Blake’s readers agree that the torsion entails a symbolic turn away from sexual organization and its corresponding cultural-ideological structures.35 For Blake, as I am hardly the first to notice, artistic, commercial, political, educational, and religious systems were all complicit in the cultural project of transforming “that which is Soul & Life into a Mill or Machine” (E 575). Because epigenetic matter had the capacity to deviate from given structures, to harness an internal formative power and branch off on its own during the developmental process, Blake found it productive to situate his human figures and the poem as a whole in the context of that world of generation announced visually on the title page of Jerusalem. Human forms in his illuminated books do not multiply through the traditional mode of viviparous reproduction, and with the exception of one image at the bottom of the third plate of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his work is relatively bereft of such images. (Nor do humans break forth already formed from eggs, though with Blake there is always an exception: in this case, the sixth emblem of The Gates of Paradise, which alludes to classical mythology rather than embryology.)36 Even the “mundane shell” in plate 32 of Milton has less to do with the generation of life from an egg than with the petrification of the shell: “a vast . . . Hardened shadow of all things upon our Vegetated Earth” (J 16). As the sexually androgynous figure in plate 47 tears itself, like one of Michelangelo’s late unfinished sculptures, from a mound of yellowish earth, it resembles another human-vegetable from several plates earlier—specifically, the figure emerging from a leaflike

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segment of vine along the right-hand border of plate 38 (ill. 5). This human animal-plant with its back toward the viewer is color coded to match and is again sexually ambivalent. Seen as a prototype for the more fully articulated figure in plate 47, the latter reads as a human-vegetable that is not sexually reproduced but rather epigenetically emergent. In the fertile, multicolored world of Jerusalem, I am suggesting, Blake models an ongoing cycle of creative vitality in an aesthetic version of living form. Unlike epigenesis, sexual reproduction relies upon heterosexual coupling, which was sanctioned by God in Genesis. During the biblical Creation, God fashioned Eve from a rib taken from Adam: “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from the man, made he a woman” (Gen. 2:21–22). In Blake’s rendition of this creation story at the bottom of plate 35, Eve (by another name, Jerusalem) vegetates from Adam’s (Albion’s) side (ill. 6). If we assume a visual allusion to Genesis, Adam’s ribcage serves as a vegetation point for new life, from which Blake’s primordial female is driven forth through the force of some unseen power. With her head, shoulders, and bosom articulated, this female figure is more organized, however, than the undifferentiated fluid stuff in which the epigenetic shaping of new parts was supposed to take place. But Blake’s concept of exudation or emanation is complex, deriving in part from esoteric interpretations of scripture, both Gnostic and Kabbalistic. At the least, we can say that the figures represented in plate 35 suggest a mode of generation that is no standard birth and that opposes the idea of prepackaged life in a germ. Still, we need to be careful in pitting preformation against

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epigenesis in any analysis of Blake’s work. Blake relies upon (even as he undoes) binary modes of thinking. In their negative mode, these binaries are negations and in their positive mode, contraries. There are instances in his illuminated work, from America to Jerusalem, in which the mode of generation seems to evoke evolution, or unfolding. But Jerusalem is intentionally a redemptive work, and epigenesis serves it well in avoiding the necessity for sexual reproduction as a matrix of cultural ideology, one that involves marriage, patriarchy, primogeniture, and other institutions and practices that perpetuate gendered division and hierarchy. Regeneration may yield new parts in diminished form, but it is a way of reconfiguring a whole. Sexual reproduction, aligned with the theory of preformation, by contrast, threatens to “swallow up Regeneration” and ultimately becomes a negation (J 90). Overall, the various elements of Jerusalem suggest a mode of generation unbounded by assumptions accompanying sexual reproduction, including a restricted number of progeny limited (except in cases of monstrosity) to ontological singularity. From this point of view Blake’s pronouncements, “Humanity knows not of Sex” (J 30), “Consider Sexual Organization & hide thee in the dust” (J 34), and “Humanity is far above / Sexual organization” (J 79), appear to be less ill-tempered ravings against human sexuality than prompts to reconceptualize generation—and creativity more generally—as a process “far above,” more comprehensive than, socially sanctioned heterosexual intercourse within the institution of marriage. By the time he began work on Jerusalem, Blake was a married man with no children, and deep into middle age. He was sixty-three by the time it was completed. Yet it is safe to say that he was no prude, and he was not against sex. If he recognized the social as well as artistic efficacy of epigenetic generation theory in which matter was

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never static and organization ongoing, he seems also to have been aware of the dangers of unbounded vitality. Like his peers in contemporary life science, he saw the frightening potential of self-propagating power that was unlimited, like preformed germs, to a specific number of generations.

The Mighty Polypus Dead center of Jerusalem, embedded physically in the firmament of the British isles, the vegetating human organism in plate 50 represents cause for alarm in Blake’s world of generation (ill. 7). Whether one reads the poem spatially or temporally, linearly or circularly, this form provides a frightening, even monstrous, vision of runaway creative power that stands for the poem as a whole. From what appears to be a vegetation point in Albion’s bosom, where we might expect to find a heart, a vinelike chain of human body parts extends. The idea that humans can (and do) vegetate in the manner of plants is one we see confirmed throughout the illuminated plates as headless human torsos unfold like modified leaves and other human-vegetables enroot. But here at the heart of the poem, Albion, the patriarchal source of a brood of exuding Britons, vegetates as a mighty polypus. A pair of cryptic lines earlier in the text describes this generation and the necessity for keeping down or devouring Albion’s polymorphous excess: “Soon Hand mightily devour’d & absorb’d Albions Twelve Sons. / Out from his bosom a mighty Polypus, vegetating in darkness” (J 18). In the family structure of Jerusalem (insofar as we can discern one), Hand is the oldest son and dangerous enemy of his progenitor. Like Los as well as Urizen, who often appear as dark reflections of each other (in Urizen and, especially, in Milton), Hand the Devourer matches the might of Albion the Prolific:

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And this the form of mighty Hand sitting on Albions cliffs Before the face of Albion, a mighty threatning Form. His bosom wide & shoulders huge overspreading wondrous Bear three strong sinewy Necks & Three awful & terrible Heads Three Brains in contradictory council brooding incessantly. [J 70] These lines suggest a mutual dependence between the antagonists Albion and Hand, the latter of whom critics usually associate with the Romantic poet and essayist Leigh Hunt. Hunt’s brother Robert had scathingly reviewed Blake’s 1809 exhibition of paintings in The Examiner, the Hunt brothers’ periodical, where Leigh Hunt’s signature was a pointing hand. In this sense, Hand reflects the critical contrary to Albion cast as “the Devourer,” a typology described in plates 16–17 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “These two classes of men [the Prolific and the Devourer] are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence” (E 40). The Prolific needs its contrary the Devourer as a regulatory force to prompt its own exertions. By the same token, the Devourer (Hand) finds his own meaning in Albion’s powers of self-renewing generation; his task is to restrict the self-generation of the mighty polypus. Exuberance is beauty in Blake’s world, but overexuberance, or unregulated self-production, always runs the risk of veering into the monstrous. Albion’s Polypennatur implies an autopoiesis whose analogues, cultural and political, colonial and imperial, are overt. The figure of Albion is triple-headed, and so he may represent the combined British monarchy of England, Scotland, and Ire-

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land, whose authority derives from the Christian Trinity. Epistemologically, in the context of the poem’s polemic against “Demonstration,” he embodies another triumvirate: the monster of empiricist psychology and experimental science headed by Bacon, Newton, and Locke, which Blake held responsible for the wrongheaded domination of the structures of analytical thought and sensory perception. Here as elsewhere, he analogizes biological and other forms of ideological and cultural-material power, and without a critical check on Albion’s self-propagation this symbolic figure and his female double Britannia could easily assimilate all supposedly unorganized material, from raw “uncivilized” peoples to the raw materials grasped through the tentacles of British commercial expansion, into itself. Blake based his “mighty Polypus, vegetating in darkness” on the creature whose powers of pluripotent, even totipotent, regeneration had caused a massive sensation in the scientific community of eighteenth-century Europe.37 In 1703, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek had classified the polyp as a plant, but when the Swiss naturalist Abraham Trembley took another look at the creature thirty-eight years later, he remarked its animallike capacities to walk and seize its food.38 Cutting into its flesh to perform some experiments, he found that within a week, the polyp could generate as many organisms as there were pieces. Kathleen Raine has observed that “Blake saw in this soulless vegetation the same error at work that produced Newton’s soulless physics.”39 True, insofar as the polyp could be seen to represent a strictly material mode of self-proliferation it offered no model for human productivity, whether biological or aesthetic. Although the regeneration of animal limbs had been observed before, the polyp’s capacity to produce new creatures from its dismembered parts suggested the presence

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of a power in matter with the ability to organize new living forms.40 Aram Vartanian refers to this creature as “the most fascinating single curiosity of natural history in the 1740s,” for it “emphasize[d] the need of a radically new approach to the phenomena of life.”41 The polyp, to reiterate, by providing empirical evidence for the generation of new life forms beyond the traditional coupling of the sexes, decentralized God’s creative power, spreading it through all the fibers of nature and shattering those structures (preformed parts and germs) supposed to contain it. Because every part of the polyp seemed to possess as much generative capacity as any other, it prompted new definitions, materialist in nature, of organic form. It had symbolic power beyond the arena of the biological sciences, for, as leading figures from the French Enlightenment (always anathema to Blake) recognized, it had serious metaphysical consequences for human beings. In Le Rêve d’Alembert (1769), Denis Diderot imagined the possibility of “human polyps” populating other planets. And he reasoned that because the polyp contained its own cause in its own breast, so to speak, hidden physical causes for the generation of all life must necessarily exist.42 Julien Offray de La Mettrie, author of the scandalous Man: A Machine (1748), used the creature as evidence that each miniscule part or fiber of an organized body moves by a physical principle inherent to it, rather than through the voluntary actions of a spirit or soul. On the other hand, as we have seen, Albrecht von Haller, interpreting the same evidence somewhat differently, became temporarily convinced through the strange powers of the polyp of the theory of epigenesis. From the center of Jerusalem, where “Albion coverd the whole earth . . . Vegetating Knot by / Knot” (J 24), to later in the poem, where he is linked to “A mighty Polypus nam’d Albions

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tree” (J 66), Albion is spiritually, if not physically, sick. As a selfpropagating mass of dead matter, he spreads little but his own mindless materiality over the land. On whichever level one chooses to interpret the prolific materiality he represents, the danger is that it will enroot in all nations: And Hand & Hyle rooted into Jerusalem by a fibre Of strong revenge & Skofeld Vegetated by Reubens Gate In every Nation of the Earth till the Twelve Sons of Albion Enrooted into every Nation: a mighty Polypus growing From Albion over the whole Earth: such is my awful Vision. [J 15] The antagonists in this case are not only Hand but also Hyle (a contraction of Hayley, another of Blake’s self-appointed critics) and Skofeld, the consistently misspelled name of the reallife dragoon John Scofield, who accused Blake of treason in 1803. Skofeld enters the poem with Reuben, symbolizing, according to S. Foster Damon, the average sensual man.43 Both characters root into Jerusalem, violating Albion’s spiritual bride and her political correlative in the ideal regenerated city of art and science. Following their lead, Albion’s offspring advance the disease of materialism, taking advantage of their polymorphous prolificity to spread out from an imperial center, London, and encompass the earth like a cancerous version of the polyp. Blake was opposing specifically the proliferation of “dead matter” (for Smart, money), which he saw repeated in diverse

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cultural registers—social, political, commercial, artistic. In plate 50 the manner in which the vegetating Sons and Daughters of Albion exude visually from their parent organism and from one another makes it difficult to discern where one form leaves off and another begins. Yet this lack of discrete creaturely identity, while frightening, also holds out hope for transformation. Viewed as an epigenetic shred of living form, each part of the polyp could potentially revitalize the whole as a polypus joining all Britons in regenerative energy. The cue for apprehending this ideal nature of Blake’s polyp comes earlier, in Milton, where we are told that “every Man born is joined / Within to One mighty Polypus. And this Polypus is Orc” (M 28). Orc is the spirit of revolutionary energy who inspires the colonists in Blake’s America: A Prophecy (1793) to throw off the constraints of the British government. Because the poem is really a history, those constraints represent the false structures of a political system that curtails human freedom. Although it goes somewhat against the grain to propose, Blake ultimately reappropriates the “mighty Polypus” as a symbol of revolutionary power. In Jerusalem, as in earlier illuminated works, he associates fluid transparency with epigenetic potential on a greater scale. For Blake, “every-thing in Eternity is translucent” (J 71). The key point is that this translucence applies also to human beings, who must emulate the Polypennatur of aesthetic existence. Ideally, in Albion’s bosom “there is no Limit of Expansion! there is no Limit of Translucence”(J 42). “Inward expansion is perhaps the key to Jerusalem,” as Karl Kroeber maintains, proposing that we read the poem as a deepening, chapter by chapter, of the concerns announced in the opening section. He adds that the “simplest analogy for expansion through interiorization is provided by a water drop under a

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microscope. To the naked eye a drop looks small; seen through a microscope it turns out to be a richly complex ‘cosmos.’”44 Wolff observed that the first transparent fluid drops of a developing organism take on the “figure of water drops, half liquid and transparent” (TG 154). Like the cells Theodor Schwann would later describe in his Microscopical Researches (in fact, Wolff’s self-shaping vesicles turned out to be cells), each of these fluid embryonic drops “is, within certain limits, an Individual, an independent Whole” (MR 2). Each has what Schiller might call an “independent existence” that could, “when need arose, grow into the whole organism” (AE 35). From the perspective of Romantic life science, and those who applied biological theories to aesthetics, translucent substances suggested matter with the epigenetic capacity to generate living form. Hard opaque substances, by the same token, stood for matter that is already fixed and on the road to death. In Milton, Los addresses Satan with these words: “Every thing in Eternity shines by its own Internal light: but thou / Darkenest every Internal light with the arrows of thy quiver” so that “every thing is fix’d Opake without Internal light” (M 8). Epigenetically, once translucent fluid solidifies into a given anatomical part, it becomes opaque. “A newly excreted or deposited substance is always see through,” Wolff emphasized; “the older, on the other hand, is opaque” (TG 199). Whereas fluid transparency is the condition of possibility for creative activity, opacity is the symbolic condition for death. Accordingly, in Blake’s work Satan becomes the “Limit of Opakeness,” and Adam, following him on the road to death, the “Limit of Contraction” (J 73). As the agent of Urizenic creation, modeled on Genesis, Los by the ninth plate of Jerusalem has “Condens’d his Emanations into hard opake substances” (J 9). He works diligently at his anvil, creating animal and plant life by “hard restricting condensa-

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tions” of the metal of vegetative nature (J 73). If Jerusalem is a redemptive poem (and in the end I believe that it is), the redemption must take place in a material world through material means. Yet in the end apparent structures must be melted away and regeneration begun in a symbolically fluid substance, or at least a substance that is no longer opaque. Regeneration always begins with the epigenetic particular, and the best the artist can do perhaps is model the organic processes of vegetation and generation that, bound to the Polypennatur of Orc, lead to regeneration. Thus, despite all the hardened resistance of the “opake blackening Fiend,” there remains a minute but redemptive “Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find . . . tis translucent & has many Angles” (J 7, 41). Lambeth, the section of London where Blake was living in the mid-1790s, has symbolic resonance as the “house of the lamb” (from Hebrew beth). Like Smart in Jubilate Agno, the poet identified with the lamb as Christ, the sacrificial logos. Christ was, in turn, “The Real Man The Imagination” (E 783). The elemental kernel of regenerative energy buried in Lambeth triggers the inward expansion of Blake’s poem. It echoes the “Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find” in Milton, a temporal particular that again regenerates, or “renovates every Moment of the Day” (M 35). As an epigenetic point of departure, moreover, it responds directly to Voltaire and Rousseau: the “mockers” for whom every particle of the world is a mere atomistic unit of dead, opaque matter. In a ballad beginning, “Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau,” Blake insists that “every [grain of] sand becomes a Gem / Reflected in the beams divine” (E 477). This translucent, gemlike grain recurs in his “Auguries of Innocence,” where it is possible “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And Heaven in a Wild Flower” (E

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493). Candied by the sun, one might say. The translucent grain of sand, as an epicenter in Lambeth, triggers the materially “vegetating Cities” of the “Opake Globe” to begin the spiritual regeneration necessary for the growth of the symbolic, multifaceted city of Jerusalem (J 49). In effect, to imagine a world in a grain of sand is to produce a world, which the Romantics believed to be philosophically possible. In Blake, the “Eye altering alters all” (E 485). “The Microscope knows not of this nor the Telescope,” he remarked, for they are mere mechanical lenses that “alter / The ratio of the Spectators Organs but leave Objects untouched” (M 28). They have nothing to do with vision as a power of imagination, which according to contemporary physiology was “a real essence, as material in substance as any part of the body,” as G. S. Rousseau puts it.45 In his First Outline of a System of Natural Philosophy (1799), Schelling argued that all products of nature contain within them “the impulse to infinite development,” for they are merely the empirical representation of an ideal infinity. They contain within them, that is, the “germ [Keim] of a universe.”46 In this respect, imagination was on a par with vital, formative power. For Stefari Engelstein, Blake’s “Matter is not only redeemable but redemptive because it is indistinguishable from imagination.”47 That matter can convert into power Romantic natural philosophers recognized no less than today’s quantum physicists. In their dynamic view of matter, solids were simply a “lazy” form of force. In his effort to produce living form, Blake modeled a particular mode of generation with a basis in fluid, self-organizing matter—matter that remained necessarily alive to the contingency of alternative formations—and resisted condensing the substance of his poem into an opaque structure. For this reason, among others, Jerusalem as a manifestation of epigenesist poetics is intentionally no easy product to consume.

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Visions of Regeneration Blake’s purpose was to rouse the faculties to act, and in Jerusalem elements of structure lead no closer to knowledge of the poem’s essence than the dissecting table did to the principle of life. Structural patterns cut across the text and visuals in such a way that its sections cannot be neatly categorized as units. Yet formal divisions do appear regularly in the poem, dissecting it into four chapters of twenty-five plates each, each chapter preceded by a full-page prose preface addressed to a specific audience (the public, the Jews, the deists, and the Christians) and set off by a full-page illustration. Because these formal structures seem to be in place, critics have sought to make sense of the fourfold pattern. Readings have ranged widely, based, for example, on the four stages of biblical narrative (fall, human history, redemption, apocalypse), the four gospels, the four seasons of the year, and the four aspects of the human form divine (body, rational mind, emotions, imagination).48 To these we might add Blake’s theory of fourfold vision and the mythology of the four Zoas, each of whom embodies a particular aspect of the universal man Albion. However, as Mitchell remarks, “None of the fourfold models proposed to explain the structure of Jerusalem has been compellingly successful in clarifying the progressive unfolding and ordering of parts in the text.”49 In part, this is due to the fact that the language of preformation (“the progressive unfolding and ordering of parts”), when applied to the living form of Jerusalem, leads down the wrong hermeneutic path in assessing the poem. Instead I would suggest that Blake’s poem displays a polymorphous prolificity that is sympathetic to epigenesis. His formal experimentation allows for the poem’s minute particulars, or simple parts (words or visual bits like spirals, arches, and squiggly lines), to combine into stuck-together or

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interdependent parts, such as individual lines of poetry and fictional characters. These, in turn, form self-standing parts (prefaces, passages of verse, composite designs), which combine into the various forms the poem as a whole can take. The force driving this combination is imaginative power, which works analogously to essential power and which Blake models for the reader. I adapt this critical theory of reading from Wolff’s Theory of Generation, and in the previous chapter I examined more carefully how such emergent patterns can come about in another sprawling, structurally defiant work of early Romanticism. Rather than accepting given structures as preformed, Blake’s readers are urged to rethink even biological organization—and more precisely within that same category, “Sexual Organization” (J 34). For the danger is that in a preformed world “Sexual Generation” will “swallow up Regeneration” (J 90). Sexual organs provide the mechanism necessary to realize an already accomplished act of creation, and by the 1790s what Blake called sexual organization had caused a number of the social problems he encountered on an everyday basis, from the harlot’s cry to the marriage hearse. In one of the most overtly autobiographical and deeply vulnerable moments of the poem, he confesses: I have tried to make friends by corporeal gifts but have only Made enemies: I never made friends but by spiritual gifts; By severe contentions of friendship & the burning fire of thought. He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children

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One first, in friendship & love; then a Divine Family, & in the midst Jesus will appear; so he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole Must see it in its Minute Particulars; Organized & not as thou O Fiend of Righteousness pretendest; thine is a Disorganized And snowy cloud: brooder of tempests & destructive War You smile with pomp & rigor: you talk of benevolence & virtue! I act with benevolence & virtue & get murderd time after time: You accumulate Particulars, & murder by analyzing, that you May take the aggregate; & you call the aggregate Moral Law: And you call that Swelld & bloated Form; a Minute Particular. But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars: & every Particular is a Man; a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus. (J 91) Ideologically, Blake challenged the inductive methodology of building up social organizations atom by atom (or Adam by Adam) into structures of family, church, and state. The aggregated bodies so disgusting to him in this passage are not spiritually organized. As mere accumulations of parts, they can have nothing to do with living form. The very idea of an atomistic unit (not the same thing, by any means, as a minute par-

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ticular) is a fiction, “A Thing that does not Exist” (E 783). From the physical atom to the civic individual, such units suggested a larger atomistic approach to the world as itself an aggregate, accessible through partition and analysis. Compress the parts of an aggregate how one will, it is impossible to mold its particulars into living wholes. Blake saw the aggregate as founded not only on the idea that wholes can be construed mechanically from parts but on a blind materialist drive toward accumulation. When he rails against the “Swelld & bloated Form” of “the aggregate Moral Law,” he sounds much like Milton attacking the hypocrisy of the Anglican Church in “Lycidas”; there the prelates are all “swoll’n with wind, and the rank mist they draw,” doomed to “Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.”50 Like Milton, Blake opposed those false aggregations masquerading as valid forms of social, political, and religious organization. The “Swelld & bloated Form” of the aggregate does not have the organic integrity or unity necessary to life and is portrayed, therefore, as well on the road to chemical dissolution. Unlike the “Disorganized” cloud, an amorphous and fundamentally unintegrated object breeding tempests and destructive war, living forms subsist by their own powers. Whatever does not continue to vegetate and regenerate itself therefore is already dead, breeding nothing but death. As the fallible but heroic Los, so Blakean in his ambition, stands in the midst of a material world unawakened to life, he recognizes all abstract categories, from the moral (Benevolence, Virtue) to the biological (Male, Female, Animal, Plant), as artificial. When he cries, “Minute Particulars in slavery I behold among the brick-kilns / Disorganizd” (J 89), his allusion is to the book of Exodus in which the Hebrew people, enslaved by the Egyptians, build pyramids enshrined to death. Blake

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was concerned with the slavery of the British people, laboring in the brick-kilns of the Industrial Revolution. Capitalism and the corporate structures that support it depend on the generic exchangeability of parts, and for Blake the system of mechanical reproduction made possible through capitalism was most odious in its application to human beings: “Since the French Revolution Englishmen are all Intermeasurable One by Another Certainly a happy state of Agreement to which I for One do not Agree” (E 783). Instead organic forms originate in the experiential particular, and the ideal form of society has an epigenetic Polypennatur. Enslaved to economic and political systems whose values Blake rejects, the Sons and Daughters of Albion are urged to rouse themselves through their own powers, seeing past apparent surfaces toward yet-unrealized forms. As the first step in this regenerative process, he exhorts every Christian to “engage himself openly & publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem” (J 77). Once creation is liberated from the constraints of the singular event described in Genesis, its work must be continuous. As Saree Makdisi remarks, “Our collective life is—or ought to be—a life of endlessly proliferating creation, a life of ontological power.”51 An enigmatic visual in plate 28 of Jerusalem, which depicts two human forms entwined at the center of a giant flower, indicates Blake’s desire to inscribe sexual generation into an ongoing process of regeneration (ill. 8). The anatomy of each figure is notoriously difficult to discern, and Blake’s effort to conceal or confuse the sex of each can be seen through changes he made to an early proof plate for Copy F of the poem. Among the most conspicuous changes to this plate are the slimming down of the bodies (to make them more androgynous) and the erasure of a large phallic caterpillar, which originally descended

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from the center of the embrace. Some read the congress of the two figures as a homosocial or homosexual portrayal of relations between various characters in the poem, whereas others believe it to be a heterosexual embrace.52 Yet the deliberately confused anatomy of these two human beings destabilizes, and is meant to destabilize, sexual organization in such a way that it amounts to no more than another social construction—and this before the interventions of feminist theory that call into question biological essentialism.53 In Jerusalem, Blake is concerned with the structural conditions of social oppression in London as a center of European power that radiates toward the Americas, Africa, and Asia. His undoing of sexual organization is metonymic for what he hopes to see on a larger scale: the dismantling of apparent structures and false aggregates thought to be natural. Whereas preformation requires a divine infusion of new life into a world of dead matter, from an epigenetic perspective sexuality forms part (and only a part) of an ongoing cycle of generation. Wolff studied “fructification” in animals as well as in plants, and he remarked that the “creation of fructification” in the former occurs upon the maturation of the animals’ sexual organs (TG 228). “The last part of the animal to develop is the egg,” he wrote, “which compares to the semen, and which like fruit is held in the ovary” (TG 225). Plant parts produced through the process of fructification “are nothing but modified leaves,” and “in sunflowers and many other plants this happens so clearly, so beautifully, that one cannot say where the regular leaves of the plant terminate and where those of the sepal begin” (TG 228, 232). The process of animal vegetation lasts longer, through pubescence or adolescence, when the animal produces its “fruit” and starts to dry out (meaning that its parts begin to die off at a more rapid rate than they can be re-

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produced). The sexes come together for the purpose of driving the “pure nutriment” of semen to the place where vegetation has stopped, prompting the growth of new life. Whether or not Blake portrays human fructification directly in plate 28, he does suggest that to reduce human sexuality to a few condensed organs is to obscure the potential for regeneration implicit in the epigenetic model. His phrase “Visions of Regeneration” crops up four plates earlier, in a section of text that begins with the questions “O what is Life & what is Man” (J 24). These questions occur directly beneath an image portraying a chain of human body parts that vegetates from a double point of origin: two disembodied eyeballs that trail blood vessels back into open space, as was common in anatomical illustration (ill. 9). Blake was always careful to distinguish between the material ball of the eye, projecting images onto the retina through the physical laws of optics, and the mode of seeing that he called vision, which was not limited to specific organs. It may be no coincidence that in Jerusalem these “Perceptive Organs” are associated with organs of sexual organization: If Perceptive Organs vary: Objects of Perception seem to vary: If the Perceptive Organs close: their Objects seem to close also: Consider this O mortal Man: O worm of sixty winters said Los Consider Sexual Organization & hide thee in the dust. (J 34) Scholars have recognized in Newton’s Opticks a motivating factor for Blake’s fourfold response to “Single vision and New-

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tons sleep” (E 722). The physically embodied organ of vision that Newton discussed was no visionary organ, but “a little narrow orb, closd up & dark. / Scarcely beholding the Great Light; conversing with the [void]” (J 49). Blake’s disparaging remarks against mechanical sight in Jerusalem echo earlier attacks on the unvisionary “Eye of Man a little narrow orb closd up & dark / Scarcely beholding the great light conversing with the Void” in Milton (M 5a). Throughout his poetry, he rejected a physical understanding of the senses, particularly sight, which Newton had described in mechanical terms. In A Vision of the Last Judgment (1810), Blake disdained to question his “Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it” (E 566). In an epigram from his “Auguries of Innocence,” he emphasizes the same idea: “We are led to Believe a Lie / When we see not Thro the Eye / Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night” (E 492–93). It might be productive to ask what the “Perceptive Organs” have to do with either sexual organization or the “worm of sixty winters.” In a notebook sketch of May 17, 1793, titled “What is Man,” Blake also depicted human life in its embryonic form as a worm (ill. 10). Below the image and caption in the 1818 revised version of the plate, For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, are two lines of verse: “The Suns Light when he unfolds it / Depends on the Organ that beholds it.” Again, Blake seems to be associating the physical organ of vision with the worm. In the light of contemporary life science, his seemingly slapdash association of symbols, from eyes to worms to sexual organization, may contain its own inner logic. As discussed in the Introduction, ovist preformation theory was temporarily superseded in the early eighteenth century by a spermist version in which preformed creatures were thought to be contained in

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the semen of male animals. The carriers of these preformed germs were “spermatick worms,” or what we now call spermatozoa. As an embryonic life form experiencing “a death of Six thousand years” (the time traditionally thought to have elapsed since the biblical Creation), this spermatic worm waited passively to develop, through no powers of its own (J 65). For Blake, as for his contemporaries refuting preformation and embracing epigenesis, spermatic worms conjured a horrid vision of a world of dead matter. Blumenbach, for one, ridiculed the preposterous idea that an “ocean of small, flickering little animals” in a drop of male semen could “sprout into whole creatures.” How, he demanded, could one “expect these little worms to become spiritual sprouts capable of developing into future men and animals”? How could such lowly “semenworms” contain within them “the key to the mystery of human procreation”? He found it absurd to believe that “these little worms could transmogrify so entirely” as to produce a human being (UB 17–18, 19). Blake also refused to subscribe to the idea that “The Human is but a Worm” (J 64). Instead, he put these words in the mouth of Vala, veil of the material world. Likewise it is not the poet but Albion’s “Rational Power,” his Enlightenment rationalist side, that claims “That Human Form / You call Divine, is but a Worm seventy inches long / That creeps forth in a night & is dried in the morning sun” (J 33). The worm is a lowly form of life, and it meets with sympathy in The Book of Thel, but in Jerusalem, a poem preoccupied with generation, it represents preformed life. Blake’s human “worm of sixty winters” need only multiply his life span by one hundred in order to trace his origins back to the Creation, when a Urizenic God, in preforming all creatures, doomed them to a frozen world of uncreative nature. When Los addresses mortal man as a “worm

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of sixty winters,” he reproaches him with his own degraded view of himself as a product of sexual organization. At one point in the poem, Albion is symbolically nailed to a tree, a martyr to the various forms of disorganization prevailing in Blake’s day, and the text narrates how Luvah (a dismembered part of Albion’s fourfold existence who represents human sexuality) had been crucified on the same tree to suffer “a death of Six thousand years bound round with vegetation” (J 65). In a preformed world, the organic processes of generation and vegetation are reduced to mechanical acts of unfolding (evolutio). This is equivalent to “the Generation of death” or the propagation of dead matter (J 17). Whether as cosmos or microcosm, organic life is no machine, nor is its proper mode of development “Vegetation. / Forming a sexual machine” (J 44). Elsewhere in the borders of the poem, Blake plays with the idea of the human form emerging from the worm. Most explicitly, in the border of plate 80 he portrays a worm turning into a human or (the causality is not explicit) a human turning into a worm (ill. 11). The upper shoulder and lower leg of this figure extend in vermicular formations, and its lower half wraps around the middle of a naked female, from there creeping down with implied sexual desire between her legs. Spermist preformation theory, by denying matter’s inherent synthetic and productive powers, accorded with an empiricist worldview that subjected natural phenomena to physical laws, and as a symbol of sexual generation, Blake’s human-worm is ordered to hide its head in the dust for shame (J 34). Albion refers to the “crucifying cruelties of Demonstration” in plate 24 at the bottom of a section of text containing the phrase “Visions of Regeneration.” His questions “O what is Life & what is Man” allude to the same experimental science to which Smart objected in Jubilate Agno when contemplating the cruelties of

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the air pump. Los complains of those who lose sight of the great mystery of life, as they “Converse concerning Weight & Distance in the Wilds of Newton & Locke” (J 34). Blake associated mechanistic science with Newton, but his gripe was less with Newton the man—the scientific genius who finds his way into the regenerated city of Golgonooza—than with those who applied physics to life, subordinating metaphysics to mechanism. Similarly, while Blake’s lived reality may have been one in which “whatever enters: / Becomes Sexual. & is Created, and Vegetated, and Born,” his problem with “Becoming a Generated Mortal, a Vegetating Death” was not women or sexuality per se (J 44, 69).54 Sexual generation, duplicitous in nature, perpetuated itself through ancestral, patriarchal contracts and was finally incapable of the kind of regeneration he envisioned. This is why the “Sexes must vanish & cease / To be. when Albion arises” (J 92). Instead of living wholes, what he saw surrounding him were aggregates engendering other false structures, such as the institution of marriage, which he called “Condemnation and double Generation” (J 30).55 Instead of doing away with sexual generation altogether, he suggests in Jerusalem that sexuality must serve a greater process of regeneration that is prior to and “far above / Sexual organization” (J 79). He would knock the former down from its cultural apex as a symbol of patriarchy and primogeniture, reflected in the gendered structures of British society.

The Globe of Life Blood To understand better what Blake meant by the biological term regeneration, we might turn back to The First Book of Urizen, the illuminated work that narrates humanity’s fall from un-

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differentiated being into the condensed, reified structures of contemporary life. Unlike the more utopian Jerusalem, which depicts the regeneration of Albion through disorganized particulars, Urizen constitutes a dystopian vision, the vivisection and hence destruction of a primordial organic form. The story is Urizenic in structure and the poem is more overtly blocked (broken down into chapters and numbered) than Blake’s other illuminated prophecies. The visuals are sharply segregated from the text, and they highlight the categorical thinking of the title character. Urizen features a Satanic would-be creator who separates from the indistinct, unified realm of the “Eternals.” The prehistory of this Creation story is revealed when Urizen, “Unorganiz’d,” though seeking organization, “rent from Eternity” (U 5). His withdrawal marks the beginning not only of time and space but also of the innumerable opaque forms that result from his acts of division and differentiation. As he condenses, he delimits himself and his world. However ironically Blake chose to identify with his mythic, headstrong creator, he maintained a degree of critical distance from the Urizenic perspective that usurps all power. Critics have recognized Blake’s portrayal of creation in Urizen as “a rather remarkable piece of embryology,” as Northrop Frye calls it.56 Carmen S. Kreiter suggests a source for such embryology in William Harvey’s 1651 account of animal generation, which (as discussed in the Introduction) held fast to the ancient idea of formative power even as it paved the way for ovist preformation theory.57 From Aristotle through Harvey, the famous punctum sanguineum had always been considered the first sign of animal life. “There appears at first,” Harvey explained, “a red-coloured pulsating point or vesicle, with the lines or canals extending from it, containing blood in their interior.”58 This pulsating point, which he also called a

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leaping point (punctum saliens) and which the ancients called a bloody point (punctum sanguineum), served as the center from which the rest of the organism would develop. Haller, after his conversion to preformationism, proposed that the inherent power of irritability (the vital property defined as the capacity of muscles to contract) triggered the preformed heart to beat and the embryo to begin the mechanical process of unfolding. As Shirley A. Roe explains, “Irritability became the central force responsible for initiating the process that turns preformed and rudimentary parts into a fully developed organism.”59 While Blake was hardly attempting a dissertation on embryology, The First Book of Urizen describes Urizen’s embryogenesis in physiological terms: From the caverns of his jointed Spine Down sunk with fright a red Round globe hot burning deep Deep down into the Abyss: Panting: Conglobing, Trembling Shooting out ten thousand branches Around his solid bones . . . [U 10] A visual counterpart to these lines occurs in the eleventh plate (of Copy A) of Urizen, a memorable, if deeply mystifying, fullpage illustration of a red globe that sinks down from the caverns of a human figure’s jointed spine (ill. 12). This red, throbbing globe sends forth its bloody vessels and fibers, as if “Shooting out ten thousand branches.” Despite (or perhaps owing to) the fact that the placement of the illustration varies in all known copies of the poem, the image can be seen to encapsulate its major concerns. Mitchell proposes that the “‘pul-

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sative’ dynamics” of Urizen represent “an embodiment of Blake’s understanding of form as governed by the life of the body—internally in the systole and diastole of the heartbeat, externally in the dilation and contraction of sensory openings.”60 But Blake was extremely critical of the idea that life could develop mechanically, starting with something as automatic as a muscle spasm. His depiction of this pulsating red globe, exuding as it does from the lower portion of the spine, may indicate an alternative understanding of embryogenesis. From an epigenetic perspective the spine (rather than the punctum sanguineum) was supposed to initiate the processes of life. Wolff, for instance, believed that it is “the first part and foundation of all the rest” (TG 220). The spine is the initial part of the chick, which it excretes directly from the egg, itself produced in the ovary as “the last Vegetation, which has its origin immediately out of the spine” (TG 220). In the second edition of his Theory of Generation, Wolff declared that it was a mistake of long standing to assume, as preformationists did, that the developing animal’s “breast has always been closed and the heart always lain within it. . . . One need only observe the creation of the breastbone and the body parts of the ribs to see that the case must have been different earlier” (TG 259). He watched these parts shape themselves gradually from unformed material, and his work, as Elizabeth B. Gasking explains, “reached a new level in descriptive embryology”: “The modern period can be said to have begun at this time, and no historian of biology could possibly deny the significance of Wolff ’s observations for the development of the cell theory.”61 Whereas Haller had seen no movement of the heart or any other part until the end of the second day (Blake’s Second Age), Wolff observed a number of changes take place during the two first days of in-

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cubation. Specifically, he described the beginnings of the head, spine, brain, and eyes of the chick, and he observed the formation of the embryonic edge from which the wings and feet develop. All this occurred before the appearance of the embryonic heart, and in an appendix to his work, Wolff disputed, point for point, Haller’s claim to have seen tiny preexisting blood vesicles in the eggs. Whereas Haller believed the heart to be itself an enclosed, preformed vesicle, Wolff described meticulously how it emerged from unorganized, and initially inert, material (TG 264–65). Blake’s striking visual in the full-plate image of Urizen presents, in this respect, a viable version of epigenesis. The globe of life blood, as it exudes from the spine of the human figure, challenges the version of creation in which Urizen claims omnipotence. Los, like his rival brother Urizen, assumes the task of making to be his, and Urizen appears to him therefore as a horrific mass of “Branchy forms. organizing the Human / Into finite inflexible organs” (E 92). Insofar as he shrinks down into his senses, subordinating vision to perception and losing the capacity to see past apparent surfaces to a world of essential power, he too becomes the “shadow of a horror.” Whereas in Jerusalem human forms vegetate in the manner of plants from epigenetically prolific extremities, Urizen’s hands and feet are the unprolific endpoints of his bodily organization. As he condenses into the solid parts of human anatomy, the visual closure of his hands and feet, fingers and toes, closes off the potential for further proliferation. Often we find Urizen’s hands pushing against the edge of the plate, as if to escape. His credo expressing faith in universal law, “One command, one joy, one desire, / One curse, one weight, on[e] measure, / One King. one God. one Law” is Newtonian (U 4a), and his spirit of analysis works to reduce the poem from a living unity to mechanistic parts: a false assemblage that Blake

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works against by scrambling the order of the (nonnarrative, nontextual) plates in different copies of the poem. Physicists since the advent of quantum theory have deserted the classical Newtonian quest for a unified field theory, but Blake was already skeptical of the scientific determinism represented by the universal law in which Urizen had so much faith. His prophetic works perform a formal as well as thematic critique of Enlightenment science and its taxonomies of axiomatic thinking without, however, offering alternative visions of regeneration previous to Milton and Jerusalem. As Blake reworked the Creation story from the perspectives of other characters in the sequence, beginning with The First Book of Urizen and proceeding through The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los, he reveals his greater ambition to challenge predetermined organic systems with a dynamic model of system making and unmaking. On many matters (epistemological, psychological, ontological, aesthetic) he was deliberately inconsistent, as Leo Damrosch has shown.62 To Urizen’s proclamation, “One King, one God, one Law,” he responds, “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression,” the concluding motto for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In the mid-1790s when Blake produced the Urizen series, the cultural and political structures of his day were being rethought in earnest, and by connecting biological organization to structures of state and religion, he suggests that just as there can be no explaining the universe through physical laws, there can be no correct, a priori regulation of human life. This is always unpredictable and depends on the very thing ruled out by deterministic universal law, namely experience. Biologists now confirm that embryogenesis is at once conservative, preserving preferred properties of species, and innovative, allowing for change through developmental con-

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tingency. Ontogenesis is a complex process, guided by necessity and freedom, calculability and chance. Material factors beyond genetics go some way to determine in a completely unforeseeable way how an organism will turn out: which of the many millions of hereditary factors it will express and which it will not. Life cannot be abstracted past the material reality of its expression, and unaccountable factors, such as the relative arrangement of cells in the epiblast (interior cell mass of a developing embryo), contribute to organic autopoiesis. This is as true now as it was in Blake’s day, and Urizen, like all tyrannical fathers, finds himself breeding a world he cannot control. Ultimately, Los turns from Urizenic disorganization (“Minute Particulars in slavery . . . Disorganizd”) to the more utopian project of regeneration, as the role of Urizen shrinks proportionately. The “globe of life blood” returns once the regeneration of Albion has begun in full force. In plate 86, we see Blake’s universal human “Filling with Fibres from his loins which reddend with desire / Into a Globe of blood beneath his bosom trembling in darkness” (J 86). This “Globe of blood” echoes Urizen’s pulsating red globe as an unwitting emblem of epigenesis. Just as Smart transforms mechanical powers into vital powers, Blake transforms Newtonian globes of attraction into globes of life blood pregnant with power. In Milton, he writes that For every Space larger than a red Globule of Mans blood, Is visionary: and is created by the Hammer of Los And every Space smaller than a Globule of Mans blood opens Into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth is but a shadow;

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The red Globule is the unwearied Sun by Los created To measure Time and Space to mortal Men, every morning. [M 28] Globules of blood become cosmic globes of fire in an organismic universe, imagined as a “large animal that moves itself ” (as Rousseau skeptically phrased it), and the reverse also holds true.63 Astral Newtonian bodies convert readily enough into wombs. If we look carefully at the eleventh plate of Urizen, we can discern a fetal, gestating mass in the bloody globe hanging from the open spine of the human figure. These two related images, the “globe of fire” and the prolific “globe of blood,” explode in visual intensity in the final plates of Jerusalem. In plate 97 a regenerated human grasps the artist’s globe of fire, an Apollo-like symbol of sun and poetry, and holds it out in his left hand (ill. 13). (Los is, after all, Sol, the Latin word for sun, in reverse.)64 The figure in plate 97, a classic image of Blake’s human form divine, has been interpreted variously as Los or a regenerated Albion. By this point in the poem, however, the two overlap. Los and Albion have merged into “the Poetic Genius / Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity” (J 12). This “Poetic Genius” mirrors in exact reverse the two-dimensional figure, usually associated with Los, who enters the poem through the portal in the frontispiece (ill. 14). Clothed in the contemporary garb of broad-brimmed hat and close-fitting hose, this figure bears all the symbolic markers of class, religion, and nationality with which Blake identified as an artist—working class, dissenting, English. Jean Hagstrum describes him as “a very human figure, dressed humbly in contemporary dress and wearing the hat of the earthly pilgrim, showing fear on his simple, Cockney face.”65 Much like

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Blake in his workday rags, he enters the poem covered in the drab trappings of social identity that obscure his “inward form” (M 25). In its movement from habited to living form, the poem works to melt away such signs of identity as no more than apparent surfaces. We are told that “Los took his globe of fire to search the interiors of Albions / Bosom,” and throughout the poem we remain aware of “the red Globe of fire in Los’s hand / As he walks from Furnace to Furnace” (J 31, 85). He is, in a sense, retracing Urizen’s steps in The First Book of Urizen, where the title character seizes his “globe of fire” to explore his dominions (ill. 15). In the frontispiece to Jerusalem, Los seizes this fiery globe as a symbol of regeneration, although here it is not three-dimensional but decidedly flat, a disk. Incapable of organic growth or reproduction, the metallic disk would seem an unlikely instrument of regeneration for Los. Nevertheless, as Blake proves through his copperplate relief-etching process, copper can be a prolific enough metal once apparent surfaces are burned away.66 In plate 97 of Jerusalem, we might say, Los takes over Urizen’s “globe of fire,” holding it Prometheus-like in his opposite hand. By the end of the poem, it has transformed into a three-dimensional globe of vital—indeed vitalist— power. The cue for this visual climax occurs two plates earlier, in plate 95, when Albion awakes from his sleep-drunk death of six thousand years and consigns his former organization to the flames (ill. 16). Although difficult to see unless one looks for it, his death mask from the previous plate (plate 94, where Albion lies corpselike across the bottom of the plate) appears in the same position in the lower-left corner of the image. Slightly above his left foot in plate 95, it is cast off now as a former self or false structure, inessential to his true living form. As AlbionLos stretches his right arm forward and his left leg back, his

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posture makes it impossible to tell where the flames leave off and the fibrous flesh of his body begins. His raised right hand shows incipient signs of closure, though for the most part the fingers are open-ended, as if to serve as vegetation points organizing more of the self. The fingers of the left hand are even less defined, branching down in the epigenetic fashion that Jerusalem has trained us to recognize. They suggest the possibility of extending oneself past the contours of biological form, a process that when applied to Blake’s poem extends his aesthetic version of living form past the borders of its individual plates. Once Albion wakes from his death sleep, somewhere between plates 94 and 95, he finds himself regenerated from an aggregate of the British nation into the “Divine Humanity.” In plate 96, Jesus appears to Albion as “the Universal Humanity,” and we learn that his “Divine Appearance was the likeness & similitude of Los” (J 96). The association suggests that Los has lost his tyrannical, Urizenic ambitions as creator. Finally, the artist’s effort is and must be self-sacrificial. Although he invites us to organize the poem for ourselves, not just any mass of linguistic material will qualify as a poem. Blake shrewdly gives us the semblance of a frame within which to work, along with an array of disorganized particulars masquerading in the guise of organization. If we can learn to recognize these as simple parts of an epigenesist poetics, rather than a hidden structure that must be uncovered, we might approach the poem with more satisfaction than many of us (who have not abandoned it altogether) manage to receive. While this might not leave us with a clearly defined reading, Blake would deny that progress toward any fixed arrangement of parts is in fact progress. Such a thing would resemble Urizen’s “one Law” as a type of critical unified field theory, an unholy grail.

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As many readers have noticed, Blake’s work, his collected oeuvre, demands to be read organically as a whole. As such, it offers the possibility for aesthetic education, helping readers see past seeming structures to the polymorphous prolificity of the poetry—and by extension, of the world. Blake’s preoccupation with organic form privileges the relations between parts over their positions in a static assemblage. As Blumenbach’s student Joachim Dietrich Brandis wrote in 1795 (the period of Blake’s greatest illuminated prolificity), organized parts “have a certain structure, which contributes to the completeness of the whole, and are closely related to one another. . . .We call this purposeful structure of the smallest parts, and their relation to a useful whole, organization.”67 Organization thus defined is not aggregation. By the mid-1790s, the concept of vital power (Lebenskraft as Brandis called it, Bildungstrieb for Blumenbach) had come to define living form, and it did so with purpose. Vitalists tended to care less about the name of the power they studied than its Wirkung, or material effect. Blake called it “Imagination” or “Divine Humanity,”“Poetic Genius” or “God himself,” leaving his readers to grapple with its effects. Following his lead, I would propose epigenesist poetics as a methodology open to participation and best left to individual readers to practice. Theoretically, Blake frees us from the task of seeking, like critical anatomists, to articulate preformed patterns in Jerusalem. This may allow us to enter less suspiciously, even paranoically, into its bewildering world of generation. If there is one thing critical tradition has taught us, it is that reading Blake’s work as an aggregate of parts is the surest way to miss some of its more vital aspects. Most narratological approaches feel strained, as do analyses based on structure. On the other hand, to read Blake out of context as a visionary of eternal

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form is to risk becoming lost in vague abstractions that he himself would condemn. Whereas the former approach involves energy and engagement, the latter, if less misdirected, risks marginalizing Blake’s poetry from the center of cultural concerns, past and present, where it so rightly stands. Aesthetically original as he was, Blake participated in a larger interdisciplinary field seeking the truth about living form. This field defined the Romantic Zeitgeist, and one could go so far as to say that our natural world, our planet, is currently suffering the cumulative effects of that Geist’s expiration.

4 Shelley’s Vitalist “Witch”

Life, and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications; but it is itself the great miracle. —Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On Life”

ercy Bysshe Shelley shared more with William Blake than visionary power and a conception of poetry as prophecy. We might say that in keeping with the greater Romantic project, all his major poetry, from “Queen Mab” through “The Triumph of Life,” constitutes an aesthetic inquiry into life, “the great miracle” that bears no reduction. By the end of the eighteenth century, as we have seen,

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the concept of life had been vitalized or energized into a power, and by the early decades of the nineteenth century, this power had become confused with the idea of a physiological soul running through the nerves to the brain. As Hermione de Almeida remarks, the vitalism of this period “is to be distinguished from the vitalism of earlier periods and the century preceding . . . by its deliberate and urgent attempt to place consciousness at the center of the theory of life.”1 In On Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778), Johann Gottfried von Herder speculated that a stimulated nervous fiber might be the key to unlocking the mystery of life, and Schiller voiced a neurological understanding of the soul in his Philosophy of Physiology (1799): “Through the senses the outside world projects its image into the soul. . . . A perception is nothing but an alteration in the soul, which is the same as a change in the world, and in the course of which the soul distinguishes its own self from that change.”2 He called this watery, neuroanatomical soul flowing through the fluids of the nerves and brain caverns a “transmutative force,” for like other Romantics he wanted to believe that the mind at least half-creates the world it perceives. Relatively little was known about either vital power or soul, but there was a growing sense that whatever about the human being was spiritual could be traced to a principle that scientists located no longer in the blood (as Hunter had argued in the 1770s) but in the nervous system. Such spiritual activity included seemingly transcendental operations like love and imagination. In An Essay Toward a Definition of Animal Vitality (1793), John Thelwall, taking the temperature of the times, wrote that “from what we are now acquainted with concerning the nervous system, there would be much better reason to suppose, with some later philosophers, that the life of the animal

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is in the brain, rather than in the blood.”3 The idea of a physiological living principle had become bound up with the concept of soul, envisioned more as a transcendental center of consciousness than as a metaphysical entity. Those like Shelley’s friend and physician William Lawrence who believed that life was nothing but organization ran the risk of being branded materialists. Lawrence in fact came close to being forced to resign from the Royal Society in 1819 for having lectured to that effect.4 Shelley identified life not with physical organization— mere figures rising on the bubble, as he put it in “The Triumph of Life”—but with the power behind it, plastic and vast, capable of realizing inherent forms of nature and engendering new ones.5 Coleridge, a friend of Thelwall’s and an antagonist of Lawrence’s, precedes Shelley in linking the idea of vital power to soul, and when he speaks in Biographia Literaria of “imagination the soul that is every where, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole,” he probably has in mind the same vital power thought to be circulating through the fibers of the manifest world (BL 2:18). His aesthetic definition of living form is identical to the one articulated in his Theory of Life, which defines “life” as a power animating and unifying a multëity of parts. The imagination, he wrote,“struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead” (BL 1:304). The language of Romantic organicism, drawn from contemporary life science, shaped the definition of symbol as living form in opposition to the more mechanical allegory. Unlike the symbol, which in Coleridge’s words “abides itself as a living part in that Unity of which it is the representative,” the allegory “is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses” (CCW 6:30). Whereas allegory adds up mechanically to an aggregate

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or semblance of a whole lacking the vital spark to animate its parts, the symbol manifests the Polypennatur of living form: it is a part with the polyplike power to bring about the whole.6 This concept of symbol is at the heart of Shelley’s vitalist poetics, itself grounded in the endlessly generative ur-symbol of his “witch Poesy.”7 I have been arguing that the early Romantics (defined within a period of vitalism, commencing around 1760) broke out of preformed patterns of verse into the vitality of epigenesist poetics. Here I wish to demonstrate that in “The Witch of Atlas” Shelley breaks free from the narrative allegory implied by the ottava rima verse form of his romance into an original use of metaphorical language as symbol. The practice is true of Shelley’s best and most characteristic verse, but it is thematically featured in his brief romance, named for its title character. The Witch of Atlas, I would argue, is Shelley’s poetic equivalent of living form. Despite the efforts of critics like Carl Grabo and Harold Bloom to show the poem’s centrality to Shelley’s mythology and work,8 “The Witch of Atlas” has been too often neglected as an unsignifying flight of fancy, a view that began with Shelley’s own claim to his publisher Charles Ollier that “if its merit be measured by the labour which it cost, [it] is worth nothing” (LPS 2:257). It may be worth everything or nothing, depending on the standard by which we measure worth, but it is true that the poem consistently defeats all allegorical labeling of its spirits and powers. Their condition of fluid transparency, I would venture, defines a certain phenomenology of life, or ontopoietic ground, that is generative in the mode of epigenesist poetics.9 Shelley’s vitalist poetics takes place from within, through the poem’s symbolic centers—Witch, boat, hermaphrodite—and resists the structured patterns of allegory that the verse form might otherwise cue.

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In “The Witch of Atlas,” his master symbol is the title character herself, master of the kind of self-making that we have previously called autopoiesis and that we might go further in Shelley to call ontopoiesis. The terms may seem offputting, but in the Romantic era “life” involved a species of soulish consciousness, defined through the transcendental biology of the time and enacted in the metaphorical language of Shelley’s poetry and poetics. In his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1800), Wordsworth states that poetry must be “alive with metaphors and figures,” anticipating claims Shelley makes in A Defence of Poetry for poetic language as “vitally metaphorical” (SPP 512).10 To the degree that Shelley’s witch Poesy represents a fluid mode of being in the world, she is symbolic of the boat in which she rides and the hermaphrodite she crafts. The romance she inhabits is one of self-generating and self-renewing life, not constricted to preformed structures of the past. Whether this ideal amounts to Error or Truth (the rationalist twins denounced at the start of Shelley’s poem), I will not pretend to say. What matters is the effort that authors like Shelley and Blake thought they were up to, the process they sought to model for their readers. What they believed to be possible through aesthetic education was something more: a comprehensive reworking of power in all its relations.

The Witch As we have seen, Romantic organicism, a field traversing many facets of culture, encompassed scientific as well as aesthetic experimentation. It has helped us read early instantiations of aesthetic living form in the poetry of Smart and Blake, and it can also help to reveal what is vital about Shelley’s poetry and how he intended that vitality to play out in language. In A De-

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fence of Poetry, Shelley said of the ideal poet: “His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor” (SPP 528). Just as scientists sought to understand how the vital spark might be communicated through experiments involving galvanic electricity, poets like Shelley sought to harness that spark in language as part of a larger aesthetic project based on the idea of organic form. From his rooms at Oxford University whose floors and furniture he ravaged with his unrelenting chemical experimentation, to the lecture halls and operating rooms of London’s Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, which he visited with his cousin Charles Medwin during the summer of 1811, Shelley’s world teetered on the brink of discovery with respect to the “great miracle” of life.11 He had initially resolved to study surgery, but even after confirming in his own mind his vocation as poet he continued to interact with leading figures in the public debate over the principle of life, and many of his statements about the nature and role of poetry were colored by current scientific thought.12 A few years later, Mary Shelley portrayed her husband as the fictional Victor Frankenstein, disturbing with profane fingers the secrets of the human frame. First published in 1818, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus introduces Shelley in propria persona in the revised edition of 1831, conversing with Lord Byron and the latter’s surgeon John Polidori about the “nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated” (F 195). The novel allegorizes the Romantic obsession with discovering the power or principle of life, and it dramatizes like no other work of fiction from the time just what the dis-

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covery and manipulation of that power might entail. Recall that eighteenth-century notions of vital power, from Needham’s productive power to Blumenbach’s more anthropomorphic formative drive, granted matter an agency capable of both generation and organization that had formerly been attributed to God. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the transcendent Christian God had receded, and nature had begun to sparkle with powers that came to stand in for the divine. When Frankenstein harnesses these powers, he becomes the new Promethean hero of the day, stealing from God and giving to man. Even an empiricist like John Hunter, forefather of a second generation of Romantic physiologists including John Abernethy and Percy Shelley’s physician Lawrence, had become convinced that a “living principle” animates the body. Different versions of vital power had filtered into Britain from more speculative centers of European science, and in addition to Hunter, Erasmus Darwin popularized scientific discovery for the British reading public. Shelley’s poetry reveals the influence of Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, most obviously perhaps in “The Sensitive Plant” but also (as Grabo has shown) in Prometheus Unbound. Darwin qualified as a vitalist insofar as he acknowledged an organizing “spirit of animation” in Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life. There he speculated about certain life-creating and preserving powers (vis fabricatrix and vis conservatrix) that might provide evidence for the possibility that “the world itself might have been generated, rather than created.”13 Hunter’s idea of a living principle prompted a series of debates between Abernethy and Lawrence that were publicly staged at the Royal College of Surgeons between 1814 and 1819, and in her introduction to Frankenstein Marilyn Butler considers the Abernethy-Lawrence debates as the immedi-

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ate context for Victor Frankenstein’s quest, which Sharon Ruston extends convincingly to the main body of Percy Shelley’s poetry.14 In this high-profile controversy over the principle of life, Abernethy claimed (based on the work of Hunter) that a power superadded to organization and analogous in its operations to electricity was the source or principle of life. Hunter maintained that this power was located in the blood, but subsequent experiments with animal electricity and animal magnetism opened up new paths for the living principle in the purportedly hollow fibers of the nerves. While Abernethy endorsed some version of vitalism (he did not claim to know where or how the living principle worked), Lawrence argued that any such principle was mere imaginative whimsy, having nothing to do with Hunter’s work. Scientists should not wander onto “the poetic ground of physiology,” as he called it, though that ground covered a vast expanse of European Romanticism (L 83).15 It included the fictional triumph of Frankenstein in his workshop of filthy creation at Ingolstadt, pace Lawrence’s belief that an “immaterial and spiritual being could not have been discovered amid the blood and filth of the dissecting-room floor” (L 18–19). For the skeptic of vitalism, life was the effect of biological organization, defined as the system of relations between the functions of the organs making up an organism. Such a definition of life uncoupled metaphysical concerns from the practical study of life science, and Lawrence was content to leave the problem of the cause or origin of life to theologians. Still, fiction can go places that science cannot, and while Mary Shelley narratively explored “the poetic ground of physiology,” allegorizing the quest for the hidden principle of life, her husband participated in it through the “vitally metaphori-

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cal” medium of his verse. Both saw narrative—unlike poetry— as a mechanical literary form. In her introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley explained that because her husband was not suited to “invent the machinery of a story,” the task of narrating the Promethean pursuit for the principle of life fell to her (F 194). In A Defence of Poetry, Percy Shelley defined narrative in similar terms as a mechanical “catalogue of detached facts,” opposed to poetry, which is modeled more closely on living form: A Poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond of connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. [SPP 515] Narrative defines a structure that is accidental insofar as it is experiential, mired in time and place. It resembles Coleridge’s definition of allegory as a mechanical grouping of images. Poetry, or the “high poetry” with which Shelley was concerned, must on the other hand transcend mechanism as “the very image of life.” It must surpass the temporary structure of ap-

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parent surfaces, which could have nothing to do with the essential “unchangeable forms” of human nature, and communicate the “germ of a relation” to whatever moves. It must entail the capacity for regeneration, the perpetual possibility for new relations and hence organizations. The “germ” of which Shelley spoke was no container of preformed life. Rather, like “organic particles” that enabled new shapes in the theory of Buffon, Maupertuis, and Darwin, this germ was defined as a generative particular of living form.16 What was distinctive about poetic or metaphorical language, according to Shelley, was its capacity to sprout new relations, and from these, organic forms. To be, if I can, more explicit: for Shelley narrative is essentially preformed. It can be unfolded once or many times but never re-created. Poetry, by contrast, is plastic and even ontopoietic: it is in touch with the same creative power responsible for living forms of the natural world, or the transient material shapes that power can take. Modeled on biological form, it unfolds not as a historical product but as a process, a mode of epigenesist poetics that the poem stages for future generations. It would appear from these comments that Shelley aligns the “machinery of a story” with the mechanical idea of allegory and the poetic “image of life” with the symbol, and in fact I believe this to be so. His application of biological thought to poetic theory was highly self-conscious, and his reinvention of romance involved destabilizing the division between these two literary methods. Coleridge, in some reflections on poetry from 1818, observed that if the artist “proceeds from a Form, that answers to the notion of Beauty, namely, the many seen as one—what an emptiness, an unreality. . . . The essence must be mastered—the natura naturans, & this presupposes a bond between Nature in this higher sense and the soul of Man”

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(CCW 5.2:220–21). This is the starting point for ontopoiesis, which involves tapping into nature’s inventive genius at the subconscious level. For both Coleridge and Shelley the aesthetic equivalent of preformed life (natura naturata) was dead, flat, mechanical. It presupposed no bond with the genial spirit of nature but represented a pale mimesis of its apparent surfaces. Form, however, defined essentially, or as the aftereffect of power (natura naturans), provides an “image of life” that never dies.17 It is Shelley’s version of living form, manifest through symbol, his point of origin for poetic regeneration. To replicate natura naturans, moreover, the artist must tap into the genial spirit of nature whose element in human beings is called soul. Working his way toward a theory of organic form, Coleridge argued that the artist must imitate “that within the thing, active thro’ Form and Figure as by symbols,” and he explained that this symbolic unfolding is the aesthetic embodiment of “Natur-geist . . . the Idea that puts the forms together . . . its Essence, the Universal in the Individual, Individuality itself—the Glance and the Exponent of the indwelling Power” (CCW 223). Coleridge’s use of the term Natur-geist derived from Schelling, who helped clarify its meaning: “The artist should certainly emulate that spirit of nature active in the soul of things, speaking through form and shape only, as through symbols, and only insofar as he seizes this by vitally imitating it has he himself created anything truthful” (CCW 5.2:223n). This was a distinctively Romantic version of mimesis. The living form of poetry could not be imposed mechanistically as a stamp upon wax. Instead it must work itself out materially from within, and this activity manifest in language was called symbol, the defining feature of Shelley’s vitalist aesthetics opposed to allegory and its pre-patterned system of correspondences. Whereas Mary Shelley employed the “machinery

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of a story” to allegorize the quest for the hidden principle of life, Percy Shelley’s poetry of the same period (at the end of the vitality debates) defied allegory, as it did the narrative structure upon which romance is based. This holds true for “The Witch of Atlas” as well as for his other poems in that genre, from Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude to Prometheus Unbound, whose lyrical fourth act gives up the ghost of story completely. “The Witch of Atlas” first appeared in Shelley’s Posthumous Poems (1824), edited by Mary Shelley, where, far from announcing its preoccupation with the mystery of life, it was prefaced by stanzas addressed “To Mary (On her Objecting to the following Poem, upon the Score of its Containing No Human Interest).” Mary Shelley’s criticism of the poem on the grounds of its having no human interest is interesting to consider in relation to her husband’s own (ahistorical) concept of poetry as “the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth,” with a symbolic—rather than mimetic or allegorical—relation to things that are. Her criticism echoes Samuel Johnson’s complaint about Paradise Lost that there, “the want of human interest is always felt.” For Johnson, Milton’s epic portrayal of Genesis “has this inconvenience, that it comprises neither human actions nor human manners. The man and woman who act and suffer are in a state which no other man or woman can ever know.”18 The point applies readily to “The Witch of Atlas” and the majority of Shelley’s major poetry in which those who act and suffer are about as substantial as a mist or cloud. Souls and fairies, spirits and Titans, form the substance of Shelley’s best and most characteristic verse. But this does not mean that in forsaking the green earth for the poetic ground of physiology, it forsakes “the human” or what is most essential to it. “The Witch of Atlas,” written in August 1820, may be

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lighter in tone than Prometheus Unbound, but it delves just as deeply—formally and thematically—into the problem, or mystery, of life. We are told in the preface that its stanzas “tell no story, false or true” (l. 3). Yet, while this may be true in terms of Shelley’s definition of story, we know from the sequence of events that the following takes place: a devastatingly beautiful witch is born in a cavern of gray rock; she attracts all the nymphs, dryads, and other “living spirits” of the created world to her; they worship at her fountain, and in compassion she weaves a veil to shield them from the full force of her beauty. We see her weep to think that they must die and that she must not, and after a period of intense creative activity “broidering pictured poesy,” she departs from Mount Atlas in a magical boat, accompanied by a winged hermaphrodite, whom she creates as a companion for her voyage (ll. 116, 252). The second half of the poem traces her jaunts through lands of mist and snow as she amuses herself with play, fashioning pavilions from clouds and puppeteering humans who lie buried in dreams. While she is still engaged in her rakish activities among the world’s mortals, the romance breaks off, hinting toward future adventures in the realm of sprites and gods: “A tale more fit for the weird winter nights / than for these garish summer days, when we / Scarcely believe much more than we can see” (ll. 670–72). As a “living form” (and she is called this in the poem), Shelley’s Witch inhabits the twilit, metaphorical space stamped out by “Error and Truth” (ll. 79–80). These ambassadors from the world of Enlightened knowledge have “hunted from the earth / All those bright natures which adorned its prime, / And left us nothing to believe in, worth / The pains of putting into learned rhyme” (ll. 52–54). Like the spirit of vital power, the “embodied Power” of the Witch threatens to dissolve under the scrutiny of those whose vision does not

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extend past the apparent surfaces of natural and linguistic structures (l. 79). Critics have noticed that the poem features its own generative processes, and in this vein, Stuart Curran claims that “The Witch of Atlas” is “a romance about romancing, and invention concerned with its own inventiveness.”19 Harold Bloom, who considers it “Shelley’s best long poem, the most individual and original of his visions,” holds it up as “the supreme example of myth-making poetry in English.”20 Similarly, and without any specific discussion of contemporary scientific culture or its debates over generation, Jerrold Hogle remarks that “the poem is ‘about’ (in the process of) the sheer release of further transfigurations from the potentials in existing metaphors, so much so that every image comes less from a ‘seed’ or ‘cause’ and more from the ways that metaphor shifts beyond or beside itself into new analogies repeating old ones with some differences.”21 The description refers back to Shelley’s idea of the “germ,” wrenched free from preformation theory into a unique brand of epigenesist poetics. Shelley operates more directly through symbol than earlier practitioners of living form, who forgo the structure of rhyme and neoclassical meter that his romance retains. To read in the way his work demands is to acquire an aesthetic education through trial by fire: to participate in the Natur-geist of aesthetic activity rather than to consume a marketable, preformed commodity. This critical perspective may strike the reader as idealistic, but Shelley, like Blake, believed that life is made—perpetually, moment by moment—not given. Shelley’s Witch prefers the fluid elements of water, air, and fire to the more solid earth or stone, and this enables her to avoid the processes of petrification and ossification that are opposed to living form. In maintaining her fluidity, we might

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say, the Witch escapes these crusts of ideology, the residue of living processes. She represents the most powerful symbol in a symbolic landscape in which even atmospheric phenomena are cast as vital, and in the grander scheme of Shelley’s poetry she emerges from “the still cave of the witch Poesy” named in “Mont Blanc.” The running waters of Mont Blanc, a topographical region that stands also for consciousness, are largely physiological, to a certain extent neurological, navigating the mysterious recesses of consciousness and soul. “The birth of Shelley’s Witch,” Stuart M. Sperry remarks, is “virtually a spontaneous generation . . . deep within the cave that symbolizes consciousness.”22 At the start of the poem, the sun’s rays penetrate her mother, one of the Atlantides: “He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden / The Chamber of grey rock in which she lay— / She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away” (ll. 62–64). Her conception lends itself to allegory, for as Bloom points out, “If we wished to practice a severely reductive reading we could make that ‘chamber of grey rock’ the poet’s brain, impregnated by Apollo in the guise of the Sun so as to produce the Witch.”23 Although I agree with his argument that the verse ultimately undoes allegory, the brain imagery is apt, if not inescapable. When Shelley depicts the welling waters of a mountain ravine issuing from the still cave of the witch Poesy in “Mont Blanc,” the stream imagery, as scholars have noticed, applies to the mind itself. By the end of the second stanza, as David Perkins suggests, there is “no clear distinction between the human mind and the phenomenal world.”24 Instead, the phenomenology at work entails an unseen power, which inhabits the “secret chasms” of a misty mountain in a sublime expansion of the mind’s activity. In speaking of his own poetry, Shelley admitted that the “imagery . . . will be found in many in-

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stances to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed” (SPP 207). Here he refers specifically to Prometheus Unbound, but the statement holds true for the branching streams of Alastor no less than those in “The Witch of Atlas”— all tributaries of the same poetic consciousness. “A great Poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight,” noted Shelley, “and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and unconceived delight” (SPP 528). Like a germ capable of bringing about new life, the fluids within Shelley’s poetry are generative in the mode of epigenesist poetics. Even more than the proverbial fountain of life, these waters contain “life” conceived vitalistically as power, and particularly genial power. By the time Shelley began work on “The Witch of Atlas,” as mentioned, the scientific quest for the principle of life had intersected with the neurological quest to discover the seat of the soul. Physiologists believed that nervous fibers were like hollow tubes transporting a mysterious fluid or juice that resembled an electrical or magnetic fluid. Some believed the principle of life to be contained in this fluid, a soulish fluid, as Coleridge pointed out: “Modern Physiologists have substituted the words vital power (vis vitae) for that of soul” (CCW 4.2:75). Shelley similarly defined soul as “that which makes an organized being to be what it is, without which it would not be so” (LPS 1:192). In 1802, the physician Johann Christian Reil (who also had his thoughts about the cat piano, as we saw in Chapter 2) postulated that the “powers of the soul stand in exact relationship to the structure of the nervous system, which is extended throughout the whole organism and

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has in each part a particular function.”25 Shelley depicted an atmosphere bristling with electric life—his rainwater ascending in streams and pranking itself into ten thousand agreeable forms, as it does in Smart’s Jubilate Agno—and he ascribed the same plastic powers to his vaporous witch. The many pranks she plays throughout the poem, the “quips and cranks / She played upon the water” (ll. 453–54), are more than physical tricks of mist and lightning. They signal vitality in a symbolic landscape animated by a fluid form of power, or soul. The soul powered living form, and in the ancient world (where there was little discrepancy between vital power and soul) it took on three aspects: the vegetative or nutritive soul, which animated the body; the animal or sensitive soul, which was responsible for sensibility and motion; and the rational soul, which ruled consciousness.26 Descartes partitioned the soul as a metaphysical entity off from the body, limiting it to immaterial operations of mind and freeing the body so that it could be scientifically studied as a mechanism. Cartesian dualism helped trigger the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century, and it suited both the Christian belief system, with its basis in a transcendent creator, and the Newtonian worldview, based on a mechanistic account of motion. Descartes argued that the pineal gland (an organ at the nexus of the brain and spinal cord) mediated spiritual and physical activity. When the British anatomist Thomas Willis restricted the soul (or soulish activity) further to the cerebrum and cerebellum with its surrounding network of nerves, he enabled a more physiological conception of soul. Following Willis’s mapping of the cerebral nerves in De Cerebri Anatome (1664), as G. S. Rousseau explains, “The mechanists avidly set about to prove, although they did not succeed, that all nerves were in fact hollow tubes through which the quasi-magical fluid se-

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creted by the brain flowed.”27 This roughly summarizes the status of the soul in eighteenth-century Europe, when the brain anatomist Samuel Thomas Soemmerring, in a highly controversial turn in transcendental physiology, announced his discovery of the soul in the cranial waters, or cerebral humidity. Soemmerring’s 1796 treatise On the Organ of the Soul specifically identified the ventrical moisture surrounding the white tips of the cranial nerves, which came together in the misty caverns (or ventricles) of the brain, as a transcendental center of operation (or sensorium commune) coordinating the work of sense impression and spiritual activity.“Assuming that a sensorium commune exists and is located in the brain,” he wrote,“I believe one can show, although maybe not prove, that this sensorium is the moisture of the ventricles (Aqua Ventriculorum Cerebri); or that it can be found in the fluid of the ventricles, or that it can at least be sought for in the fluid of the ventricles . . . in short, the fluid in the ventricles is the organ itself ” (UOS 193–94). For practical purposes, the quondam humoral spirits thought to be the driving force behind the functions of animate matter had morphed into cerebral humidity. Soemmerring’s definition of the soul, which he posited as a medium uniens (or unifying principle of consciousness) at the convergence of the nerve endings, was too radical for widespread acceptance. Just as Wolff had been banished to Saint Petersburg for insisting on the epigenetic power of his vis essentialis, Soemmerring found his theory of soul relegated to the semi-fictional outpost of Romantic pseudoscience within his lifetime. Yet much as Wolff’s essential power had provided a way to view structure as a byproduct rather than an essential feature of living form, Soemmerring’s soul juice, his watery medium uniens, provided a new perspective on living form as

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a symbolic unity in multëity. Physiologists believe that organisms as complex as human beings produce selves through neurological processes. Neurology determines human subjectivity as well as the nature of the objective world in which a human being imagines him- or herself to exist. In conditions labeled pathological, individuals can become convinced that they consist of more than one self or, conversely, reject parts of themselves as alien.28 Romantic philosophers and physiologists also sought to identify the means by which human beings could transcend a scattered view of themselves and their world, gathered from discrete sensory perceptions, to arrive at a more unified representation of reality. In a letter to Soemmerring, Kant suggested that like the sound produced by a musical choir, whose individual voices remain discernable amid the overall harmony, a unified consciousness might emerge through the transcendental physiology of Soemmerring’s soulish waters (UOS 208).29 Just as the Bildungstrieb provided Kant with a scientific explanation for a teleology inherent in nature and necessary to the judgment of beauty, the cerebral moisture that Soemmerring called soul provided material evidence for a symbolic unity in multëity, the unity of the transcendental self. I would propose that Shelley’s Witch of Atlas inhabits a phenomenological and psychological space sympathetic to transcendental physiology with its microscopic recesses, ravines, and running cataracts. As an “embodied Power,” she represents “life” expressed through vitally metaphorical language. The danger, as in the case of Soemmerring’s soulish waters, which risked veering from the sublime into the ridiculous when their watery insubstantiality became manifest in wet drops, is that Shelley’s Witch can “seem sublime or ridiculous” (as Richard Cronin remarks), perhaps for similar reasons.30 In defending the vitality of blood, Hunter acknowledged that the idea of a

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living fluid might seem far-fetched, and Soemmerring likewise found himself addressing the awkward question of whether a fluid could be alive: “Kann eine Flüssigkeit animert sehn?” (UOS 199). He found evidence for a positive response to this question throughout nature and in the Bible: all living beings are nurtured by water; all seeds are wet; the earth is a seedbed producing new life from rain; chaos is a hot mist or a fog; and at the opening of Genesis the spirit of God hovers above the watery deep (UOS 200–202). Within his or her first days, maybe hours, Soemmerring wrote, the human being takes the form of “a little, seemingly unstable, bright, transparent droplet of an apparently homogenous liquid,” and “even the most cantankerous sophist would not dare refute the fact that organization, soul, and life [are contained] within this seemingly [homogenous] droplet” (UOS 205). The soul, like epigenetic matter, was fluid, perhaps literally water.31 The misty caverns of Soemmerring’s vitalist brain had their aesthetic equivalents. Shelley describes the birth of the Witch of Atlas as follows: “In that cave a dewy Splendour hidden / Took shape and motion: with the living form / Of its embodied Power, the cave grew warm” (ll. 78–80). She never quite solidifies into any form we can visualize, and although stanzas 12 through 20 describe the things (threads and mists, odors and sounds) with which she dwells, no attempt is made to take the measure of her own “living form.”“Life is, as it were, Universality drowned in the Specificity and Individuality which it also needs,” as John N. Findlay notes, whereas from the perspective of Romantic Naturphilosophie, “Cognition is Universality which has come out of specific-instantial immersion, but which still drips with what it has come out of.” This idea of life as a power resistant to but dependent for its material manifestation on delimitation saturates Hegel’s work, from

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his Philosophy of Nature (1799) to The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where the single word that rises to the fore is “Flussigkeit, Fluidity: Life is Flux as a pure concept.”32 There may be other sources for the idea that life is fluid and transmutative (Lucretius, for example, or Heraclitus), but Shelley’s poetry participated in a cultural moment when vital power was being biologically confused with soul. The power his Witch represents may be less a metaphysical abstraction than something he believed really to exist. In his notebook fragment “On Life,” Shelley claimed that the “violent dogmatism concerning the source of all things” that prevailed in his day “had early conducted [him] to materialism.” But by the time he was composing his poetic explorations into the principle of life, he was convinced that “there is a spirit within him [the human being] at enmity with nothingness and dissolution (change and extinction)” (SPP 506). Human motion could be adequately explained through mechanics, but life scientists by the latter half of the eighteenth century were loath to leave the investigation of essential human functions to other disciplines, such as philosophy and theology. The vitalist Paul-Joseph Barthez proclaimed in his New Elements of the Science of Man (1778) that the “science of man” needed to “encompass both research into a Vital Principle (through the vital forces that reside in the organs and are responsible for their functions, both general, such as sensibility and nutrition, and particular, such as digestion, menstruation, and so forth) and research into a Soul.”33 Like other physiologists of his day Barthez redefined the soul as an indwelling, essential human power. Shelley similarly pursued the idea of the soul past orthodox Christianity, which was responsible for preformation theory. “The soul of man [is] to his body, as the vegetative power to vegetables, the stony power to

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stones,” he wrote; “What is man without his soul? he is not a man. What are vegetables without their vegetative power? Stones without their stony? Each of these, as much constitute the essence of men, stones &c, as much make it to be what it is, as your God does the universe” (LPS 1:100–101). To this catalogue, we might add: What is Shelley’s poetry without its Witch? The Witch of Atlas is the symbolic center, the medium uniens, of Shelley’s narrative romance, and when she issues from her misty cavern at the top of Mount Atlas she reveals the multitude of forms that living fluid can take. Her inverse parallel can be found in Blake’s tyrannical creator-God Urizen, who failing to recognize the essential fluidity of life mistakes the nature of creation. He frustrates himself in seeking “a joy without pain, / For a solid without fluctuation.” “I alone, even I!” he rants, as he rises to his full Satanic stature: “A wide world of solid obstruction” (U 4a). To condense in this way, mentally as well as physically, ideologically as well as materially, is to lose touch with eternity and the infinity of living forms made possible through a world-soulish fluidity. By remaining in touch with her own transmutative power, Shelley’s Witch never forgets herself in this way. As the symbolic center of what seems to be a mere gossamer romance (in certain respects, we must respect the poem as such), she has much to teach us about Shelley’s version of living form. Seeing straight through biological organizations to the “souls” sustaining them, she rouses human beings from sleep (even death) to join her in exercising vital power: She, all those human figures breathing there Beheld as living spirits—to her eyes The naked beauty of the soul lay bare,

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And often through a rude and worn disguise She saw the inner form most bright and fair. [ll. 569–73] She delights in toppling social hierarchies, and when the play in which she engages leads to new forms, it is not through sexual generation. She can make any “Spirit mingle with her own,” and she does so as “a sexless bee / Tasting all blossoms and confined to none” (ll. 576, 589–90). She animates not only the poem she names but the boat in which she travels and the hermaphrodite she crafts as symbolic, aesthetically embodied extensions of her own living power.

The Boat “My soul is an enchanted boat,” sings the character of Asia (if it even makes sense to speak of these misty, spiritualized beings as characters) in Prometheus Unbound (2.5.72). “Borne to the ocean, I float down, around, / Into a sea profound, of everspreading sound” (2.5.83–84). In Shelley and Vitality, Sharon Ruston argues that Asia is an embodiment of the living principle.34 Here I find myself suggesting something similar with regard to the Witch of Atlas, whom I take to be Shelley’s symbolic epicenter. Whereas Prometheus Unbound is an apocalyptic poem whose visions open onto a transformed, transcendental reality, “The Witch of Atlas” depicts a less universal transformation—less programmatic, one might say, and more whimsical. And it commences from symbolic centers inhabited by the Witch, as she mingles with other living forms. For all its caprice, “The Witch of Atlas” is a profound meditation on the nature of poetry, and its preface is critical of

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Wordsworth as a poet who by 1819 had abandoned many of the revolutionary ideals for which Shelley had revered him. In his preface, Shelley compares “The Witch” to Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell” (1819), a contemporaneous poem whose title character rejects visionary travel in an enchanted or “living Boat.” “Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years / Considering and retouching Peter Bell,” Shelley mocks, “Watering his laurels with the killing tears / Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell / Might pierce” (ll. 25–29). This information comes from Wordsworth’s own preface to “Peter Bell,” in which the older poet admits to having taken pains with the poem “to fit it for filling permanently a station, however humble, in the Literature of our Country.”35 It is in precisely this context that we are to understand Shelley’s claims that his poem is the product of a mere three days’ growth (l. 36) and that “if its merit be measured by the labour which it cost, [it] is worth nothing.” He depicts Love as a “horticultural adept,” watering and bringing to fruition from a “strange seed” the boat in which the Witch of Atlas travels (l. 300). Avoiding the “over busy gardener’s blundering toil,” he suggests, his poem grows organically, not in an overly watered, artificially manicured garden (l. 32). In a sonnet composed three years earlier, “To Wordsworth,” Shelley laments: “Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine / On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar: . . . Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, / Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be” (ll. 7–8, 13–14). Wordsworth deserted the light of vision as Peter Bell does the “little vagrant Form of light” he encounters in the form of a boat. More important perhaps, he abandons the aesthetic ideal of poetry as living form for mechanical craft: “The common growth of mother-earth / Suffices me,” Wordsworth announced in the character of Peter Bell; “her tears, her mirth, / Her humblest

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mirth and tears.”36 These in turn become the “killing tears” for which Shelley ridicules him in the verse preface to “The Witch of Atlas” (l. 27). In the Prologue to “Peter Bell,” the title character meets with a “little Boat, / In shape a very crescentmoon,” which lures him to travel “through the clouds.” “We’ll mingle with her lustres gliding / Among the stars,” the boat sings in language that sounds quite Shelleyan, “above Siberian snows / We’ll sport amid the boreal morning.” Clearly, the boat shunned by Peter Bell is no mechanical contraption but an enchanted “living Boat.” In what reads almost as a dare to Shelley, Peter rejects his boat: “Take with you some ambitious Youth! / For, restless Wanderer! I, in truth, / Am all unfit to be your mate.”37 Shelley’s Witch will undertake visionary travel of precisely the sort that Peter refuses to attempt. To follow Shelley’s Witch where Peter Bell dare not go is to leave the oft-catalogued world of nature for an uncharted region in which natural forms are the fluid expression of internal power. Such sport as her boat offers, the playful indeterminacy of undirected travel through a fluid atmosphere of clouds and sky, is fit not only for ambitious Youth but for all those “living spirits” who recognize themselves as such despite the “rude and worn disguise” of corporality (ll. 570–72). Ironically, given his reputation as an atheist, Shelley objected to the attitude he discerned in Wordsworth’s description of “this earth, / Which is the world of all of us, & where / We find our happiness or not at all” (LPS 2:406). The emphasis is his own, from a letter in which he invokes Wordsworth’s emphasis on physical nature as evidence of materialism. In the preface to his parody “Peter Bell the Third,” he repeats the lines with distaste: “The world of all of us, and where / We find our happiness, or not at all ” (SPP 340). And in the preface to “The Witch of Atlas,” he applies the language of vegetation (“roots,”

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“branches,”“leaves,”“flowers”) satirically to a poem he felt had nothing natural about it (ll. 28–30). By contrast, Shelley’s Witch sees through apparent structures of the natural world into true, or living, organization: And all the forms in which those spirits lay Were to her sight like the diaphanous Veils, in which those sweet ladies oft array Their delicate limbs, who would conceal from us Only their scorn of all concealment: they Move in the light of their own beauty thus. [ll. 561–66] Diffuse as Shelley’s misty Witch becomes the more one looks, she is protean in her expressions of power, and her felt presence in the poem never wavers. Shelley’s introduction of the Witch’s boat in the thirtyfirst stanza of the poem marks a pivot that that shifts attention from the generation of the Witch to the generation of her boat. Both are shrouded in mystery: “She had a Boat which some say Vulcan wrought,” we learn at the start of stanza 31, though the following stanza offers an alternative story of its creation: “And others say, that when but three hours old . . .” (ll. 289, 297). The first version of the boat’s genesis is explicitly mechanical, relating how the blacksmith god Vulcan hammered out the boat as a gift to his wife, Venus. The second suggests that the boat is not made at all but grows organically by virtue of its own “internal power” (l. 307). It will be worth commenting on each version of generation in turn, but first what requires emphasis is the sheer fact of speculation, the presence of debate surrounding the nature of the boat’s generation. A similar sense of rumor, or guesswork, marks Blake’s creation myth in The

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First Book of Urizen. There as the title character withdraws from the undifferentiated world of the Eternals (a process responsible for producing the world of spatiotemporal reality), unidentified voices from the “void” demand, what Demon Hath form’d this abominable void This soul-shudd’ring vacuum? Some said “It is Urizen.” But unknown, abstracted Brooding secret, the dark power hid. [U 3] Some say one thing and some say another, but Urizen, finally, is the name given to the “dark power” that recoils on itself, jealously hoarding creative capability like a preformationist God. As Urizen concentrates into himself, he closes himself off from the world of his creation. He is, as we have seen, Blake’s parody of the Old Testament God, and he insists on his monotheistic and monomaniacal “One command, one joy, one desire, / One curse, one weight, on[e] measure / One King. one God. one Law” (U 4a). In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley’s correlative deity, the tyrannical Jove or Jupiter, addresses the “congregated Powers of Heaven” with the command: “Rejoice! henceforth I am omnipotent!” (PU 3.1.1–3). To the extent that each believes in his omnipotence, the characters, like Milton’s Satan, are delusional. Shelley also denounced the creationist God of Genesis in “Queen Mab,” a poem that followed quickly upon The Necessity of Atheism in 1813, when he exclaimed,“There is no God!”38 Yet his statement expresses not the kind of atheism one would expect. “This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity,” he went on to explain: “The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe, remains un-

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shaken.”39 In denying the idea of an omnipotent transcendent God, Shelley means to deny dissociation of creative power from the phenomenal world, as accepted by the biological theory of preformation. For him nature is shot through with power, which the biblical Creation story denies by removing it to an abstracted source, an unknown and unknowable maker. When Asia, in Prometheus Unbound, asks Demogorgon, “Who made the living world?” she forgets her own power (in Ruston’s reading, her status as living principle). Her question merits no response on its own terms, and therefore receives none. Demogorgon simply mirrors back to her the empty signifier “God” (2.4.7–8). To inquire “who made?” is to assume an already accomplished act of creation rather than a world still in the making. From a Romantic perspective, the process of “becoming,” which is privileged over natura naturata, represents nothing less than God, the absolute, or fully inspirited nature. Vitalist poetry aims not to narrate but aesthetically to enact natura naturans. Shelley does not shrink from the mystery of life but makes it the subject of his greatest poems. Nor does he evade the question “What is power?” This he finds to be “a question just as common as, Do you think this lever has the power of raising this weight?”40 He would put physical force, or mechanical power, on a continuum with vital power and subjective consciousness: “id quod potest, that which can produce any given effect. To deny power is to say that nothing can or had the power to be or act. In the only true sense of the word power, it applies with equal force to the loadstone as to the human will.”41 Stones have magnetic force, and human beings have its soulish version, intention or will. Both are extensions of the same power that is capable of bringing about a thing’s identity. Rather than a fait accompli, any given form of nature is ever in the act of becoming, individuating itself by

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means of power inherent within it. In “The Witch of Atlas” the generation of the Witch’s boat, like the generation of the Witch, provides an opportunity (at least in theory) for the symbolic unfolding of such power. In this respect, the rumors surrounding the genesis of the boat indicate an attempt, in the mechanical mode of allegory, to invent the machinery of a story to communicate the ineffable. Shelley does not say which story about its genesis qualifies as “Truth,” but he spans the heterogeneous ground of physiology, making one story mechanical and the other organic. (In the context of the vitality debates of the time, we might say that one is preformationist and the other epigenesist.) The former, positioned first, is dismissed in half the space as the latter (one stanza as opposed to two): She had a Boat which some say Vulcan wrought For Venus, as the chariot of her star; But it was found too feeble to be fraught With all the ardours in that Sphere which are; And so she sold it, and Apollo bought And gave it to this daughter: from a car Changed to the fairest and the lightest boat Which ever upon mortal stream did float. [ll. 289–96] The manner in which the boat was forged by Vulcan for the goddess of love may be less interesting here than the fact that Venus, finding it unsuitable, sold it, releasing it into a system of material exchange from which we imagine divinities to be exempt. Shelley’s use of the language of getting and spending seems especially out of place in a poem devoted to the mystery of origins. But here and in Prometheus Unbound, Love is a

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force reducing all things to liquid as an alternative to preformed structure. The commodification of the boat evokes an unexpected parallel to capital, a fluid form that offered an alternative to structures of landed wealth. Scholars might balk at such an analogy, which suggests that the poet is either aestheticizing capital or advocating transformation by its means. I would not go so far, but the commodity structure does recognize the insubstantiality of things in the world. Translated into capital, things become fungible, to the extent that they can transform into other things. The endlessly plastic commodity (and the Witch’s boat, in its strange prehistory, is turned into such an item of exchange) has the potential to follow a more radical agenda than other structures of political and economic power, including those upon which Shelley’s own fortune was based and whose eradication he supported. Of course, Shelley was a poet, not a politician or a systematic philosopher. In introducing Prometheus Unbound, he cautioned, “It is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life” (SPP 209). Systematization leads to reification, and he (like Blake) was committed to struggling against systems so as to deliver individuals from them. The revolution he imagined in Prometheus Unbound was no mere substitution of one structure with another, for revolution must be ongoing.42 The running streams of “The Witch of Atlas” represent the power of fluid substance to cut its own way and shape that which presumes to contain it. Once Apollo buys the boat for his daughter, it transforms from a machine into an inspired vehicle suited to navigating that fluid medium to which Shelley’s witch Poesy belongs.

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Only a month before writing “The Witch of Atlas,” on July 1, 1820, Shelley depicted himself as a type of Vulcan, a mighty mechanist, Bent with sublime Archimedean art To breathe a soul into the iron heart Of some machine portentous, or strange gin, Which by the force of figured spells might win Its way over the sea, and sport therein. [ll. 16–21] These lines are from Shelley’s verse “Letter to Maria Gisborne,” composed in the workshop of Henry Reveley, Gisborne’s son, who had studied to be an engineer and whose walls were “hung [with] dread engines, such / As Vulcan never wrought” (ll. 22–23). Reveley wanted to construct a steamboat, and Shelley had invested money in the project, although from within his friend’s study he has difficulty imagining how a soul might be breathed into the iron heart of a “strange gin” (engine) whose sports are forced—that is, driven by force, rather than propelled from within. By contrast, the Witch’s boat is “lit / A living spirit within all its frame,” and it lies “Couched on the fountain, like a panther tame” (ll. 313–16). A winged thought waiting to take off down streams that seem to flow from the Witch’s own mind, the boat provides a contrast to the “unintelligible brass” and “horrid mass / Of tin and iron” that clutter the floor of Henry Reveley’s studio-shrine to modern mechanism (ll. 47–49). Against the “jarring and inexplicable frame / Of this wrong world,” Shelley sends forth his “visionary rhyme . . . Struck from the inmost fountains of my brain” as a transcendental center of operation (ll. 159–60, 168–69). All the waters in Shelley’s poem contain life, and the

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Witch’s boat is as much an emblem of soul as the enchanted boat of Asia. In a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, Shelley wrote, “We put an acorn in the ground, in process of time it modifies the particles of earth air & water by infinitesimal division so as to produce an oak,” adding, “That power which makes it to be this oak, we may call it’s vegetative principle, symbolising with the animal principle, or soul of animated existence” (LPS 1:110). Like other contemporary theorists of life, Shelley described the nature and operations of a mysterious power that ranged in name from “vegetative principle” to “soul.” But although in A Defence of Poetry he referred to vitally metaphorical language “as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially,” we must be careful not to take this as an endorsement of preformation theory (SPP 528). At first glance, his discussion of the life embedded in poetic language seems to be referring to Malebranche’s theory of emboîtement (encasement), which posited that all preformed life is encased in germs or seeds dating back to the original Creation.43 But Shelley’s acorn is no epitome of containment. Rather, the same acorn that helps him feel his way toward his own theory of soul recurs as a symbol for high poetry, which “unfolds” epigenetically. The second version of the boat’s genesis suggests that it grew from “a strange seed” by virtue of an essential “vegetative principle,” or formative power: And others say, that when but three hours old The first-born Love out of his cradle leapt, And clove dun Chaos with his wings of gold, And like an horticultural adept, Stole a strange seed, and wrapt it up in mould And sowed it in his mother’s star, and kept

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Watering it all the summer with sweet dew, And with his wings fanning it as it grew. [ll. 297–304] This strange seed, which has affinities with the more famous seed from Shelley’s Defence, serves as an analogue for the prolific power of metaphorical language. “All high poetry is infinite,” Shelley wrote; “Veil after veil may be undrawn and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed” (SPP 528). No deterministic seeds with the blueprint for successive generations, words of genuine poetry are “instinct with spirit; each is as a spark.” By corollary logic, the organic unfolding of the Witch’s boat is no mechanical realization of preformed parts. Instead, as this seed grows, Shelley lets us glimpse its process of vegetation: The plant grew strong and green—the snowy flower Fell, and the long and gourd-like fruit began To turn the light and dew by inward power To its own substance; woven tracery ran Of light firm texture, ribbed and branching, o’er The solid rind, like a leaf ’s veined fan— Of which Love scooped this boat—and with soft motion Piloted it round the circumfluous Ocean. [ll. 305–12] The remarkable detail on the rind of this “gourd-like fruit” has led one critic to interpret the lines as “a vindication, yet sophisticated mockery, of Romantic organicism.”44 While there

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is much parody of Romantic organicism à la Wordsworth, the Witch’s boat nevertheless reads like a text of its own ontopoiesis. Like the channels traced by Wolff in the fluid of embryonic matter, or the tiny white lines traced by Soemmerring in the humid caverns of the brain, the “woven tracery” of Shelley’s germinating vegetable is a signature of inner, formative power. “In the beginning, one remarks no little lines that could be taken for vessels,” Wolff wrote, describing the essential power that drove nutrition through developing tissues, facilitating assimilation and gradual differentiation. “But eventually they burst out in different areas and become little channels, as the areas in which they spring up take on the appearance of little interstices [Zwichenraume]” (TG 167). Shelley also traced the material remainders of vitality in the development of his symbolic boat. Insofar as the poem as a whole develops through its symbolic centers (one of which is the Witch, another the boat that carries her on her sublime watery way through icy crags and misty pavilions), it is no narrative mechanism. As living forms of language, poems are “transient modifications” of an unknown, intangible power pervading all matter. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley wrote that “if the principle of life (that of reason put out of the question as in the case of dogs, horses, & oysters) be soul, then Gravitation is as much the Soul of a Clock, as animation is that of an oyster” (LPS 1:39). If a mechanism like a clock partakes of soul (power by another name, or that which makes a thing what it is), then presumably a poem can too. Shelley’s poetry (like Smart’s and like Blake’s) takes as its premise this power, growing from within, epigenetically, by means of symbol. Besides the “living Boat” that Shelley snatches from Wordsworth and infuses with soul-like vitality, another, more complicated symbolic

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extension of his witch Poesy is Hermaphroditus, surely one of the strangest creatures in the canon of literary Romanticism.

The Hermaphrodite Whereas the origin of the Witch of Atlas’s boat is embroiled in controversy no less conclusive than contemporary debates about the nature of generation, Hermaphroditus is visibly crafted in our midst. Abandoning the strange seed—and more mechanical strange gin—the poet now refers to a “strange art” by which the Witch fashions the hermaphrodite: Then by strange art she kneaded fire and snow Together, tempering the repugnant mass With liquid love—all things together grow Through which the harmony of love can pass; And a fair Shape out of her hands did flow— A living Image, which did far surpass In beauty that bright shape of vital stone Which drew the heart out of Pygmalion. [ll. 321–28] This “liquid love” used by the Witch to temper her creature is a variant of “the liquid joy of life” that Love scatters from his tresses in Prometheus Unbound, prompting renewal (1.766). Although we would want to avoid any one-to-one correspondences or literal interpretations of Shelley’s liquid love as, for example, electromagnetic fluid, his own “strange art” transmutes this liquid from a universal, potentially living fluid that Romantic natural philosophers thought might run through the nerves of all creatures and the veins of the earth, animating all nature. In Prometheus Unbound, when Earth first speaks

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to her son Prometheus, she identifies herself as “she within whose stony veins / To the last fibre of the loftiest tree / Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air, / Joy ran, as blood within a living frame” (PU I.153–56). The Promethean liquid joy of life, like the liquid love animating the hermaphrodite, flows from the same inspirited terrain: the poetic ground of physiology. Magnetism covered much of this ground; electricity vitalized the rest. Animal magnetism had its equivalent in galvanism, also known as animal electricity, which was popularized by Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani through their public experiments with electrophysiology. In his debate with Abernethy over the living principle, Lawrence dismissively referred to this as “the electro-chemical hypothesis of life” (L 13). Abernethy was careful not to say explicitly that electricity equals life any more than that magnetism does, but he did compare both forces to vital power, which correlated to “forms of vegetable and animal matter, as magnetism is to iron, and as electricity is to various substances with which it may be connected” (EPR 39). One English follower of Anton Mesmer explained animal magnetism in 1794 as “an universal fluid, constituting an absolute plenum in nature, and the medium of all mutual influence between the celestial bodies and betwixt the earth and animal bodies.”45 Neither electricity nor magnetism constituted life exactly, but they were both considered aspects of a polar, dynamic equilibrium thought to characterize the living world. Hermaphroditus is described as a “repugnant mass,” and while from the Witch’s perspective repugnant might indicate disgust, technically it defined a tension between counteracting forces—positive and negative, attractive and expansive— thought to be responsible for matter’s dynamic state of vibrancy. For Schelling, these repugnant forces were “the primordial

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forces of all life.”46 What was supposed to keep matter extended in the various guises of living form was the fact of its internal repulsion. As Hegel also explained the “Physics of Individuality,” “Matter maintains itself against its self-identity and in a state of extrinsicality, through its moment of negativity, its abstract singularization, and it is this that constitutes the repulsion of matter.”47 Coleridge elaborated the idea of a power or principle of life as a contractive force of individuation working to delimit specific forms of life and, simultaneously, as an expansive, outgoing force working to return individual being to “the one Life within us and abroad, / Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,” as he calls it in “The Eolian Harp,” his favorite of his own poems (ll. 26–27).48 “Life, as Life, supposes a positive or universal principle in Nature,” Coleridge explained, “with a negative principle in every particular animal, the latter, or limitative power, constantly acting to individualize, and, as it were, figure the former” (TL 557). From the balance of these two mutually repulsive, contending forces sprang all living forms of the natural world. Experimentation with galvanism and electrical conduction in organic matter confirmed suspicions about the relation between electricity and life, as electromagnetic experiments provided a way to explain “how physical being becomes active and develops into modes, like consciousness, that appear to be immaterial,” as Martin Wallen writes.49 The Ages of the World, Schelling’s philosophical creation story of 1815, refers to experiments with galvanism, remarking that these “electrical conduction experiments with the voltaic pile [electrische Säule], experiments that are too little heeded by the great mass of natural scientists, provide a decisive proof that matter is capable of an electrical spiritualization and dissolution in which matter is not just unreceptive to natural chemical affinities, but in which it also dis-

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cards all other corporeal qualities.”50 Based on this dynamic view of matter as fluid rather than corpuscular, Carl Grabo has proposed that the “repugnant mass” of Shelley’s Hermaphroditus represents “a natural personification of the two complementary forces of the world, of attraction and repulsion, of love and hate, for there are two fluid principles in electricity, the positive and negative, the resinous and vitreous, the masculine and the feminine, as they are variously designated.”51 Without turning the hermaphrodite into an “electrical fixture” (which is what Harold Bloom accused Grabo of doing), we might accept the Romantic view that matter is fluid and ultimately resolvable into force, in other words, dynamic, as relevant to the poem (or at least as relevant as Spenser’s Fairie Queene, which Bloom prefers as a source for Hermaphroditus).52 From a natural-philosophical perspective, animate structures were temporary, while the power that sustained them was not. The vital liquid with which the Witch harmonizes the parts of Hermaphroditus into “A living Image,” certainly represents some sort of medium uniens (if not soulish juice) or power necessary to bring about symbolic unity in multëity. Yet the Witch’s repugnant mass prompts quite a different reaction than does the birth of Prometheus, who causes joy to course through his mother, Earth. From the Witch’s perspective, such repugnance is an affective response. Victor Frankenstein’s reaction to the birth of his creature in Mary Shelley’s novel provides a helpful analogue, for, as I am not the first critic to suspect, Percy Shelley’s “Witch and her creation are his playful reply to the darker view of the same paradoxes taken up by Mary in Frankenstein.”53 At bottom, both works constitute imaginative endeavors to comprehend how (to borrow Mary Shelley’s words from her introduction to Frankenstein) “the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought

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together, and endued with vital warmth” (F 195–96). Just as Frankenstein, after selecting all the parts of his creature for their beauty, finds his human creature unbearably ugly once it comes to life, the Witch treats her progeny, if in not so extreme a way, then not much better. “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body,” Frankenstein laments, but at the very moment he succeeds, “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room” (F 39). While the Witch does not abandon her creature so impulsively, her only greeting is the command, “Sit here!” Hermaphroditus may have been intended as a permanent companion for the Witch, but after several stanzas devoted to the nature and process of his generation, he disappears. Like her literary cousin Frankenstein, the Witch of Atlas appears disappointed with her own promethean effort to surpass mortal beauty in material form. To be sure, she envisions her creature as an ideal composite of parts: “The countenance was such as might select / Some artist that his skill should never die / Imaging forth such perfect purity” (ll. 334– 36). However, when she takes her seat opposite to it in the boat (“Beside the rudder, with opposing feet”), her physical opposition may harbor an affective version of repugnance to the hermaphrodite (l. 344). Although there is nothing obviously wrong or ungainly about either Hermaphroditus or Frankenstein’s creature (both are conspicuously well formed proportionally), they hardly evoke the emotional responses we associate with aesthetic beauty. Frankenstein considers his creature a projection of himself, “my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave” (F 57). Hermaphroditus, as a symbolic extension of the Witch, also opposes its creator as a rather

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awkward alter ego. The Witch of Atlas is figured as a “sexless bee,” and the hermaphrodite is “A sexless thing” (l. 89). For all the commands she barks at “it,” Hermaphroditus never seems to rouse himself (to follow the gendered ending of his name) from sleep into consciousness. So too, his corporeal frame, for all its grace (“and in its growth / It seemed to have developed no defect / Of either sex, yet all the grace of both”), never seems to rise the level of living form (ll. 329–31). Instead, Hermaphroditus sits facing the Witch as a blunt materialization of her own “embodied Power.” For many literary critics, Shelley’s hermaphrodite is, as David Rubin notes, “a mere artifact which mocks its maker and the reader alike, expressing the severe limitations of all artistic creation.”54 “For years,” Stuart Sperry points out, “scholars have labored to elucidate the character of the Hermaphrodite with the help of learned analogies, alchemical or Platonic, too often neglecting the essential truth that the creature is funny.”55 But if Hermaphroditus is funny, he is involuntarily so. If he reflects the Witch, he reflects the other side of her sublimity: the bathos of monstrous beauty—conceived as power— when that beauty is rendered concrete. “An object is monstrous,” according to Kant, “if by its magnitude it nullifies the purpose that constitutes its concept” (CJ 109). The definition suits a dynamic view of matter, for it indicates an imbalance of power rather than a deformed arrangement of parts. Whereas the latter defines the classic version of monstrosity, the former entails a Romantic mode of the monstrous, that is, process not product. To put it plainly, we cannot write the hermaphrodite off as a monster, as we might have done in previous centuries, because of the mere anatomical fact of its “abnormal” sexuality. The ethereal, figureless Witch may stand for all that is beautiful, but the hermaphrodite is locked into an embodi-

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ment it cannot transcend. Because the Witch’s hermaphrodite is physically double-sexed, Diane Long Hoeveler argues that it represents “a sort of physical monstrosity that merely accentuates the differences between the sexes.” She contrasts this category with the more abstract one of androgyny, defined as “a merger of psychic characteristics within the imagination.”56 This is also my view, though I believe the kind of monstrosity that the hermaphrodite represents differs qualitatively from that of the traditional hermaphroditic monster. In Plato’s Symposium, which Shelley translated in 1818, the ideal original human condition was hermaphroditic. “The hermaphrodite was a distinct sex in form as well as in name,” Plato claimed, “with the characteristics of both male and female, but now the name alone remains, and that solely as a term of abuse.”57 Androgyny can occur as an ideal merger, but hermaphroditism is a physical fact. It involves, therefore, the potential affective backfire of facing actual repugnant material. What we might call the ontopoietic power of the Witch has been alienated from her, and she faces that monstrous materiality with opposing feet. A sketch made by Shelley on a manuscript page of “The Witch of Atlas” suggests the degree to which he saw Hermaphroditus as a symbolic extension, if not a raw self-parody, of the Witch (fig. 5). Here, the figure seated at the rudder of the boat (whom we may presume to be the hermaphrodite, given the Witch’s insubstantiality), rather than winnowing the Elysian air with “two rapid wings, / Fit to have borne [the boat] to the seventh sphere, / Tipt with the speed of liquid lightenings,” appears as a squat and rather incompetent helmsman, who has swamped his boat in marsh grasses (ll. 337–39). Where, one might ask, are “Its storm-outspreading wings,” which we glimpse in Shelley’s handwriting through the transparent sails

Fig. 5. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Manuscript Page from “The Witch of Atlas.” MS. Shelley adds. E. 6, p. 85rev. Courtesy of Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

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of the boat? While this sketch of the Witch’s sublime living boat might seem a mere doodle having little or nothing to do with the poem, given the manner in which stanza 48 drops down on the page to accommodate it, we must assume it to have been composed simultaneously with the verse—the last we hear of Hermaphroditus before he vanishes from the poem. Like all things beautiful in Shelley’s work, the creature intended as a permanent partner for the Witch is inconstant, a poor companion. It resembles the dayfly to which Shelley compares his poem in the preface: To thy fair feet a winged Vision came Whose date should have been longer than a day, And o’er thy head did beat its wings for fame And in thy sight its fading plumes display. [ll. 17–20] This dayfly, also known as an ephemerid, in its imago or winged stage lives for only one day. It is referenced earlier when Shelley compares his poem to “the silken-winged fly, / The youngest of inconstant April’s minions” (ll. 9–10). And it recurs in “The Sensitive Plant,” composed a few months before the preface to “The Witch of Atlas,” in the spring of 1820, as a “beam-like ephemeris / Whose path is the lightning’s” (ll. 49– 50). With its slender body and small transparent wings, this creature, associated with the psyche, is a winged emblem of soul. It bears resemblance to Hermaphroditus, who is also naturally “companionless” (l. 12). An annual doomed to cyclical decay, the sensitive plant teaches the lesson that For love, and beauty, and delight There is no death nor change: their might

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Exceeds our organs—which endure No light—being themselves obscure. [“Conclusion,” ll. 21–24] Delicately organized in the manner of the poet, the sensitive plant responds to the slightest stimulus by closing into itself.58 It too challenged structural taxonomies of nature based on anatomical sexuality, and in the intensity of its vitality it served as an appropriate emblem for the poem, no less than the poet. Shelley was evidently unwilling to believe that death can annihilate that soulish power that animates, generates, and sustains living form. Some “force of mind” appears to carry this complex figure through the transitory conditions of life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, as “o’er its gentle countenance did play / The busy dreams, as thick as summer flies, / Chasing the rapid smiles that would not stay” (ll. 363– 65). Elsewhere in the poem this soulish power, persisting in dreams and visions, continues not only through sleep but also through death. One corpse encountered by the Witch lies Mute, breathing, beating, warm and undecaying Like one asleep in a green hermitage With gentle smiles about its eyelids playing And living in its dreams beyond the rage Of death or life. [ll. 610–14] For Shelley, “intelligence & bodily animation . . . are in their nature conjoined, and as we suppose, as we observe, inseparable” (LPS 1:100–101). We have seen that his thoughts on this matter, although more exploratory than systematic, transform soul from a supernatural Christian or metaphysical entity into a biological power of mind. Like the “preservative

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power of life,” which even Lawrence accepted as a vital power resistant to chemical decay (I 129), soul is a power that resists material changes of state. “You have witnessed one suspension of intellect in dreamless sleep,” Shelley reflected, “you witness another in Death. From the first you well know that you cannot infer any diminution of intellectual force. How contrary then to all analogy to infer annihilation from Death, which you cannot prove suspends for a moment the force of mind” (LPS 1:116). The bodily reality of the hermaphrodite may be something of an embarrassment to the Witch, with whom Shelley identified just as Mary Shelley identified with the subject position of parent in Frankenstein. But Hermaphroditus is also a “living Image.” Even as he drops out (literally) of any emergent narrative allegory, he remains an imago in more than one sense: an unconscious image of poesy’s power, symbolic of living form.

The Fold On the holograph of the prefatory stanzas to “The Witch of Atlas,” Shelley scribbled: “I shaped her.” But then he crossed out these words and substituted, “I swathed her in the robes of flowing metre.”59 The change is subtle but significant. To shape something is to position oneself as poihthv~ (poetes), or maker, whereas to swathe something in flowing meter is to consign it to an eternal unfolding (guided in Shelley’s version of reality by that same power inherent in all organic forms). We may recall Coleridge’s injunction that the artist imitate a power active within the thing, as he called it, one that revealed itself through form and figure and discoursed through symbols. For the artist, to channel that power into language was to produce living form. Language may shroud or veil such power, just as

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physical form may shroud the “naked beauty of the soul” (l. 571), for according to Shelley, “there are lineaments in the soul as well as in the face; lineaments too, less equivocal & deceptive than those which result from mere physical organization” (LPS 1:315). The soul speaks, and it is not exclusively the language of Platonism. At the start of “Queen Mab” (1813), Shelley portrays the distinction between the language of the soul (in living form) and “mere physical organization” when he describes Ianthe in the following terms: Ianthe’s Soul; it stood All beautiful in naked purity; The perfect semblance of its bodily frame, Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace; Each stain of earthliness Had passed away, it reassumed Its native dignity, and stood Immortal amid ruin. Upon the couch the body lay Wrapt in the depth of slumber: Its features were fixed and meaningless. Yet animal life was there, And every organ yet performed Its natural functions: ’twas a sight Of wonder to behold the body and soul. The self-same lineaments, the same Marks of identity were there. [1.131–47] What Shelley refers to as the “veil of mortal frailty” in Queen Mab (1.181) might be quickly dismissed as platonic allegory, the body as a veil for the ideal form of the soul. Yet we would

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do well to attend carefully to an image that is so pervasive.60 Shelley’s visionary maidens are typically veiled—the dream girl in Alastor, the Witch of Atlas, Emilia in “Epipsychidion.” In Prometheus Unbound, transformation takes place as “veil by veil, evil and error fall” (3.3.62). “Death is the veil which those who live call life,” Shelley continued: “They sleep, and it is lifted” (3.3.113). By the end of the third act, the lines have transmogrified into that “painted veil, by those who were, called life” (3.4.190). The phrase, now in the past tense, substitutes a former mode of being for living, indicating that an ontological change has occurred. The sleeping mortals the Witch encounters on her travels also seem transparently swathed in the various forms that flesh can take, corporeal “woven imagery” (l. 605). I have suggested that the change from shape to swathe is significant to Shelley’s version of living form, and the textile imagery evokes not only text but tissue, derived from the same Latin root. That the Witch herself has been swathed in the metaphorical textile of flowing verse is a fact of which she seems cannily aware. Whereas liquid bodies as well as solid bodies are resolvable into definite points according to corpuscular theory, a better expression for the continuity of the material world from Shelley’s perspective is the loose flowing garment, whose dynamic or undular motion is characteristic of the textile metaphor. In “Dialogue on Continuity and Motion,” Leibniz finds a way to overcome both Cartesian dualism and ancient animism (remade as Spinozaism) by imagining a material world that is neither perfectly fluid nor perfectly solid. Instead it is conceived as flexible, in the mode of flowing textile: The division of the continuum must not be considered to be like the division of sand into grains, but like that of a sheet of paper or tunic into folds. And

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so although there occur some folds smaller than others infinite in number, a body is never thereby dissolved into points or minima. On the contrary, every liquid has some tenacity, so that although it is torn into parts, not all the parts of the parts are so torn in their turn; instead they merely take shape for some time, and are transformed; and yet in this way there is no dissolution all the way down into points, even though any point is distinguished from any other by motion. It is just as if we suppose a tunic to be scored with folds multiplied to infinity in such a way that there is no fold so small that it is not subdivided by a new fold: and yet in this way no point in the tunic will be assignable without its being moved in different directions by its neighbors, although it will not be torn apart by them. And the tunic cannot be said to be resolved all the way down into points; instead, although some folds are smaller than others to infinity, bodies are always extended and points never become parts, but always remain mere extrema.61 Earlier I proposed that Shelley’s conception of poetic language as an acorn containing all oaks differs significantly from the unfolding germ of preformationist theory, and I cite this passage as evidence that there are other ways of imagining that unfolding, according to which parts are not preformed but flexible and open to change. Less a shape than a sublime symbol, which “shape had none” (like Milton’s Death), Shelley’s Witch represents a living form of poetry that remains open to transmutative change. The grains of sand that Leibniz refers to as particle points

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differ as widely from the concept of the fold as they do from the vitalist grains of sand in Blake’s poetry. Recall that elemental kernel of Jerusalem, which is “translucent & has many Angles.” The “Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find,” like the “Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find” in Blake’s Milton, is a point from which the work of regeneration may begin (J 41; M 35). The industrious find it and wield it against the skepticism of those like Rousseau who mock the idea of vital power, reducing the grain of sand to a unit of inert material: “Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau,” Blake commanded: Mock on Mock on! tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind And the wind blows it back again And every sand becomes a Gem Reflected in the beams divine Blown back they blind the mocking Eye. [E 477] These multifaceted grains of sand, imagined as gems, are not atomistic bits of a created world like “The Atoms of Democritus / And Newton’s particles of light” (E 477). Instead, they are minute particulars with the power to regenerate the whole. If living form in Blake’s illuminated world begins with the metaphorical grain of sand, something similar commences in Shelley’s work from the symbolic center of the fold. In Prometheus Unbound, Love, even more than Asia, is the name given the animating principle that swathes the earth, folding it in “a light, a life, a power” (4.441). In the fourth act, which Desmond King-Hele refers to as “lyricized science,” a winged infant garmented in light takes the reins of the chariot of life, an image that recurs in “The Triumph of Life.”62

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“Its plumes are as feathers of sunny frost, / Its limbs gleam white, through the wind-flowing folds / Of its white robe” (PU 4.221–23). Similarly, the Moon sings of the Earth, “Thou art folded, / Thou art lying / In the light which is undying” (4.437– 38). Shelley’s Witch of Atlas wears no tunic, but she is a “lovely lady garmented in light,” who swathes herself in a ninefold “subtle veil” consisting of “fleecy mist,” “lines of light” and “star-beams” (l. 81). Similarly, as the Spirit of the Hour narrates the apocalyptic transformation of the phenomenal world in Prometheus Unbound: There was a change . . . the impalpable thin air And the all-circling sunlight were transformed, As if the sense of love dissolved in them Had folded itself round the spherèd world. [3.4.100–103; ellipsis in original] Any study of Shelley’s poetry, or the vitality characteristic of it, must be considered incomplete without inquiry into the nature of this fold in which his witch Poesy no less than the universe is folded. For like a tunic scored with folds recapitulating themselves to infinity, Shelley’s epigenesist poetics “take shape for some time, and are transformed.” This is not to say that his every poetic effusion answers (or is intended to answer) to that ideal. One would not put “The Mask of Anarchy” or The Cenci in this category, nor rate their success by these means. Yet the concept of epigenetic form that unfolds not as predesigned parts but as folds of flowing verse is integral to Shelley’s best work located at the crossroads of life science and aesthetics. Nominally, his last major work, “The Triumph of Life,” addresses the problematic of life more directly than any of his other poems. The speaker is in dialogue with Rousseau, who appears in the mangled form of a root growing out of the hill-

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side. Through death, the character of Rousseau may have extended his sphere of experience beyond the material, but he fails to produce any satisfactory answers about the nature of life. In order to help him explain the hallucinatory pageant called “Life” in the poem, the speaker turns from the philosopher to another distorted form, an unnamed cripple: “Then, what is Life?” I said . . . the cripple cast His eye upon the car which now had rolled Onward, as if that look must be the last, And answered. . . . “Happy those for whom the fold Of ” [ll. 544–48; ellipses in original] The question haunts the whole poem, the corpus of Shelley’s poetry, and Romanticism more generally. We are left wondering what exactly is meant by the “fold” in this last scrap of Shelley’s poetic career, the furrow in which we find ourselves living in dreams. Although I have seen fold misprinted oddly enough as gold (by David Perkins in English Romantic Poets and Bloom in Shelley’s Mythmaking), I believe that the image of the fold matters.63 Just as Blake’s grains of sand respond directly to Rousseau, for whom “this visible universe is matter, scattered and dead matter,” the fold at the end of “The Triumph of Life” is a riposte to the French philosopher who, having returned literally to the world of vegetation, is depicted as a (sensitive) plant.64 The speaker of “The Triumph of Life” is brimming with questions, and Rousseau feebly interrupts one of these by uttering the word, Life: Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry, Half to myself I said, “And what is this? Whose shape is that within the car? & why”

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I would have added—“is all here amiss?” But a voice answered . . . “Life” . . . I turned and knew (O Heaven have mercy on such wretchedness!) That what I thought was an old root which grew To strange distortion out of the hill side Was indeed one of that deluded crew, And that the grass which methought hung so wide And white, was but his thin discoloured hair, And that the holes it vainly sought to hide Were or had been eyes. [ll. 176–88; ellipses in original] Rousseau may speak the word Life, but despite his transformation he appears not to know what it means. He has undergone a transient modification, but his essential nature has not changed. Bloom remarks that “Rousseau has attained completely to the state of nature; grotesquely, he has become a part of what Blake calls the Vegetative universe, the state of Generation, the world in which only a vegetable is comfortably at home,”65 although this is not the vitalist vegetation or generation described in Chapter 3. Notwithstanding Rousseau’s arguably privileged position from beyond the grave, he sees not the same “living spirits . . . / The naked beauty of the soul [laid] bare” that the Witch of Atlas can discern (ll. 570–71). He answers a question the poet has not asked, with a response (“Life”) that is the real question. This may be why the poet resorts to the cripple, who at least lets him finish his question

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and who returns him rhetorically to the fold from which new life—all living forms—must begin. On the day Shelley completed “The Witch of Atlas,” Keats posted him a copy of Lamia, and scholars have not missed the close parallels between the two poems. According to Sperry, “Within Shelley’s career ‘The Witch of Atlas’ occupies the place that corresponds to Lamia in Keats’s.”66 For Bloom, “Lamia is Keats’ equivalent of The Witch of Atlas, which sets itself still more deliberately against a reductive reading.”67 Frederic S. Colwell, remarking the close analogue in tone as well as subject matter to “The Witch of Atlas,” observes that “the startling shifts in Keats[’s] tone . . . evident in the opening lines of the second part of Lamia, find a striking counterpart in Shelley’s poem.”68 Both frame the contemporary moment as one of demystification, in which demonstrative science has unwoven the rainbow, clipped the wings of angels, and “hunted from the earth / All those bright natures which adorned its prime, / And left us nothing to believe in, worth / The pains of putting into learned rhyme.” Just as Shelley’s “Witch” is set in a time before the Enlightenment tyranny of Error and Truth, Lamia recalls “a time, before the faery broods / Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods” (with an allusion to Prospero, Shakespeare’s prince of imagination and spirit, now replaced by Mammon). Like Shelley’s “lovely lady garmented in light,” the title character of Keats’s poem is a “lady bright,” who breaks free from the verse patterns of romance into a symbolic instance of living form. She may be as beautiful as Shelley’s Witch—we imagine that she is—but in the end she confronts more bluntly the monstrous results of uncontainable vitality.

5 Keats’s Principle of Monstrosity: Lamia The attempts to explain the nature of Life, which have fallen within my knowledge, presuppose the arbitrary division of all that surrounds us into things with life, and things without life—a division grounded on a mere assumption. . . . that may remind us of the twin sisters in the fable of the Lamiæ, with but one eye between them both, which each borrowed from the other as either happened to want it; but with this additional disadvantage, that in the present case it is after all but an eye of glass. —Coleridge, Theory of Life

alking in Hampstead in April 1819 just before composing Lamia, Keats ran into Coleridge and Joseph Henry Green (Keats’s anatomical demonstrator from Guy’s Hospital, who was also a friend of Coleridge’s) and became privy to the older poet’s

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thoughts on a range of topics from “Metaphysics” to “Monsters.” Although we can never know for sure whether the mythic monsters known as lamiae fell under the scrutiny of the two poets during their walk—Keats mentions the Kraken, mermaids, and ghosts among “a thousand things”—we do know that Coleridge thought of them as self-determining forms of life that challenged the physiological theory of life as organization (KL 2:88–89). Both poets were familiar with the legend of the lamiae from a number of sources, including John Lemprière’s A Classical Dictionary (1788) and Andrew Tooke’s The Pantheon (1753). Lemprière’s Dictionary, usually assumed to be the source text for Lamia, describes the lamiae as snakelike women who seduce and devour men. Tooke’s version of these “Monsters of Hell” focuses instead on their independence from physiological organization. As Tooke relates, they “had only one Eye, and one Tooth, common to them all: They kept this Tooth and Eye at home in a little Vessel, and which soever of them went abroad, she used them. They had the Faces of Women, and also the Necks and Breasts; but below they were covered with Scales, and had the Tails of Serpents.”1 At the start of his Theory of Life, Coleridge alludes to Tooke’s description of the lamiae as a symbol for the idea that life can be partitioned or segregated from a more integrated, organismic nature. As beings capable of putting on or taking off parts of their physical organization at will, the lamiae provide an inherent critique of life as merely organization, a view supported by William Lawrence in his public debate with John Abernethy, another medical friend of Coleridge’s. As Lamia explodes in all the colors of excessive vitality, refusing to be numbered in the “dull catalogue of common things” or bound by the Newtonian bars of the rainbow in Keats’s poem, she breaks free formally from the straitened pattern of neoclassical cou-

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plets and the mechanism of allegorical romance that would presume to contain her. I have suggested that the aesthetic category of monstrosity intersected with natural philosophy around the turn of the nineteenth century, transforming the idea of the monster as a static deformity or collection of poorly assembled parts into a distinctly Romantic, vitalist conception of monstrosity as too much life. Linked to process rather than product, to formative power rather than malformation, the objectified monster gave way to a monstrous vitality that was frightening in its assertion of unbounded purpose. Translated into aesthetic living form, such vitality could (and did) yield seemingly contradictory forms of monstrous beauty like Shelley’s Witch, mirrored in Hermaphroditus, and, perhaps more overtly, like Keats’s Lamia. The latter presents a parallel and striking example of Romantic monstrosity, for although she eludes any final categorization as monster (except from the point of view of her nemesis, the philosopher Apollonius), she is exceedingly beautiful and excessively vital. The poem named after her, containing Keats’s famous attack on the modern tendency to “Unweave a rainbow,” thematizes the result of incalculable, self-willed formative power.2 In this chapter I propose that the theory of self-propagating vital power that biologists were pursuing through the material forms of nature’s liveliness—and its unexpected innovations—found aesthetic expression in Keats, whose vitalist aesthetic consists, as in the case of Shelley, in a symbolic undoing of classic poetic forms. Lamia represents a central instance of Romantic monstrosity whom Keats positions explicitly against Newton’s mechanically organized rainbow as a physical phenomenon stripped of its magic. Criticism of the poem founders on the ineffability of its title character, a “living mixed metaphor,” in Garrett Stewart’s description.3 I would add

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that not only is she living and mixed (in Keats’s terms, perplexed) but that this mixing stands for a quintessentially Romantic paradox, monstrous beauty. Lamia is difficult to contain in representation, and in scrambling Newton’s rainbow she presents a correlative challenge to the biological idea that life can be parsed, mechanically or logically, through bodily organization. Ultimately Lamia forms part of the greater epic quest of the Keatsian poet, chronicled in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion (written a few months before and after Lamia, respectively), to discover what it means to “Die into life” (Hyperion, 3.130).

Unweaving the Rainbow At Benjamin Haydon’s “immortal dinner” party on December 28, 1817, Keats agreed with Charles Lamb that Newton “had destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism.” After that, we are told, they all “drank ‘Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics!’”4 To these Romantics, “Newton” was shorthand for a physical version of reality that could be broken down into parts and analyzed, reduced to the mathematical clarity of prismatic colors that could “add up” to even such a stunning natural phenomenon as the rainbow. Neither the principles of Newtonian physics nor the techniques of experimental science presented as much cause for concern among poets and vitalists (like Coleridge and his friends Green and Abernethy, for instance) as the application of those principles to living form. While Lawrence insisted that an “immaterial and spiritual being could not have been discovered amid the blood and filth of the dissecting-room,” in fiction the discovery of a power or principle of “life” was readily imagined (L 8). Allegorically this happens in Frankenstein and symbolically in

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poetry conceived as living form. From the period’s “workshop of filthy creation” (to borrow Frankenstein’s phrase for his lab; F 36), the various guises of Romantic monstrosity issued into imaginative literature. Such monstrosity, vitalist in nature, would not have been possible in the mechanistic world of Newton. When Keats toasted Newton and confusion to mathematics, moreover, Lamb’s friend William Hazlitt was present. About two weeks later (in a lecture that Keats probably attended), Hazlitt complained that “the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry” (HCW 5:9). He was concerned, above all, with how advances in scientific knowledge alter our modes of inquiry and imaginative thought. By reducing the cache of hidden knowledge, or things that had been formerly inscrutable in nature, Hazlitt believed, science alters our position vis-à-vis nature from active engagement to passive reception. “The province of the imagination is principally visionary, the unknown and undefined,” he argued; “the understanding restores things to their natural boundaries, and strips them of their fanciful pretensions” (HCW 5:9). Keats gained much from Hazlitt’s explication of Romantic aesthetics, particularly his elevation of “the internal character, the living principle” over the neoclassical ideal of beautiful proportionality (HCW 4:77). What he would have taken from Hazlitt’s lecture of January 1818 is that Newtonian science, by cataloguing the rainbow, in all its beauty, as a spectrum of light waves of different refrangibilities, divested it of its mystery and hence its vitality. In reducing nature to an assemblage of classifiable structures, in other words, experimental life science, founded on the principles of physics, scattered spirit and vital power to the

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winds, cordoning off “the poetic ground of physiology” (to borrow Lawrence’s phrase) as a mere playground for poets (L 83). Principally, the nature and definition of living form were at stake, and these were also at the heart of Keats’s poem. It would be critically misguided to assume that Lamia, ostensibly a narrative romance in heroic couplets, is outside the purview of the Romantic project of philosophical poetry or uninvolved in the same concerns as Romantic life science in its various branches from embryology to brain anatomy. Following a logic similar to Hazlitt’s, Keats explained: There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— Unweave a rainbow . . . [Lamia, 2.231–37] The holograph of Lamia reveals that Keats’s original phrase for “Unweave a rainbow” was “Destroy a rainbow,” but he crossed it out and replaced it with the more fibrous image of weaving (suited to textual as well as organic tissue).5 One can more readily destroy or blow apart a phenomenon like a rainbow if one views it as corpuscular rather than undular, accretive rather than dynamic. The accretion model of a catalogued nature, based on a natural-historical accumulation of facts, accommodated a biological definition of life as an assemblage of functions. While such a model might do for a calculating world, convinced that things could add up (mathematical refractions of light into rainbows, anatomical parts into people, selves into families and other social units, material possessions into wealth

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and happiness), such calculations are ideologically inflected. As Shelley observed in A Defence of Poetry, scientific rhetoric slips all too readily into the logic of commercial capitalism, where the calculating principle comes to take the place of the living principle: “We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practise; we have more scientific and œconomical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just description of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes” (SPP 530).6 Even Shelley’s friend Lawrence, who preferred a physical definition of life as the result of organization, admitted that living forms exhibit powers “too imperfectly known, to be submitted, with any prospect of advantage, to calculation” (L 73). To reduce the mystery of the rainbow to calculable bands of color is analogous to calculating organisms from their parts and functions. Both scientific procedures finally add up to a world that lacks “the internal character, the living principle.” Shelley’s successor Robert Browning later referred to the scientific accumulation of knowledge as “The old oftcatalogued / Repository of things that sky, wave, land, / Or show or hide, clear late, accretion-clogged.”7 In the dull catalogue of common things—a taxonomized world in which living particulars can be abstracted and universalized—information adds up to a horrific body of knowledge that is too unwieldy for its animating spirit: the epistemological inverse of Romantic monstrosity. Browning’s lines criticizing natural science were addressed to Christopher Smart, and in Jubilate Agno, as we have seen, Smart declared Newton’s explanation of the rainbow not merely unpoetic but unphilosophical: “Newton’s notion of

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colours is alogo~ ([a-logos] unphilosophical. / For the colours are spiritual” (JA B648–49). Against Newton’s definition of a the rainbow as a physical phenomenon, Smart posited an organic form of beauty in which parts not only affect but also generate one another. His self-shaping rainbow emerges like other self-standing parts of living form within his system of epigenesist poetics. So too Keats’s “rainbow-sided” protagonist, Lamia, offers a spiritualized alternative to Newton’s cleanly divided spectrum, rigidly defined by rule and line: She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue; Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d; And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries— So rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries, She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf, Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self. [1.47–56] Keats was clearly not willing to sacrifice Lamia’s dynamism to physics or to any definition of life as physical organization. She appears instead as a burst of color that cannot be contained within metered language, making it impossible for us to say that we know her woof or texture or to classify her in any catalogue of common things. As such, she stakes a position against the physical definition of the rainbow as calculable refractions of light accessible through scientific instruments. She disrupts the stripes of the prismatic color spectrum with “spots,”“freck-

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les,” and “eyes” and, as a “rainbow-sided” form of life, resists not only the science of Newtonian mechanism but also its corollary, physiological ideas of life based on structure. Of course, the Romantic critique of Newton was based on a popular understanding of the physicist, who in reality himself indulged in some sublime speculation about “a certain most subtle Spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies.” He conceived of this spirit as an “electric and elastic Spirit,” akin to the nervous, soulish power discussed in the previous chapter, and posited that “the members of animal bodies move . . . by the vibrations of this Spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain to the muscles.”8 Although Newton’s Principia is not entirely mechanistic, its reception in the eighteenth century was complex.9 Smart was not the only poet who worked to turn the Newtonian mechanical powers into vital powers—or preferred natural glass (with its synesthetic ability to candy the sun) to the mechanistic glass used in constructing the air pump and associated with experimental scientists’ efforts to draw “the life” out of living forms. He and later Romantic writers saw Newton’s rainbow as a challenge to a more dynamic nature, speaking its language of symbols. As Trevor H. Levere explains, Coleridge “saw Newton’s fragmentation of sunlight into the colors of the spectrum as totally false to the integral harmony and dynamism of light,” much as he considered any definition of life as organization to be an artificial substitute for real life.10 The prosthetic “eye of glass” to which Coleridge alludes in his description of the mythological lamiae no doubt implies a critique of life as seen through the microscopic eye. In an echo of Wordsworth’s “We murder to dissect,” these lamiae, with their exchangeable eye of glass, express the same anxiety about science’s capacity

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to destroy living form through an abstract delineation of its component parts.11 To Apollonius, Lamia’s ambassador from the world of natural philosophy, Lamia represents a “knotty problem” he spends his time trying to unravel (2.160). The poem opens in a time “before the faery broods / Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods” (1.1–2), and the frame narrative recounts how an invisible nymph managed to elude the amorous pursuit of Hermes with the help of the protagonist. Lamia first appears to Hermes as “a palpitating snake, / Bright, and cirquecouchant in a dusky brake,” and she explains that her “weird syrops” were responsible for making the nymph invisible. Lamia accordingly has the power, in exchange for a favor, to return the nymph to visibility. What she desires from Hermes is that he yield her back her “woman’s shape” and “woman’s form” in return, although we do not know how she lost that form and might consider it doubtful whether he had anything to do with her present condition. Lamia wants to become human so that she can pursue her own love interest, a youth from Corinth named Lycius of whom she has become enamored in dreams, much like Shelley’s Witch of Atlas. Once the deal is made to restore Lamia to human form, Hermes escapes into the woods with the nymph, and Lamia begins, in a painful metamorphosis, to overcome the constraints of her “serpent prison-house” (1.203). The first half of the poem concludes once she has encountered Lycius, subdued him with her powers, and accompanied him back to his palace—despite the foreboding glare of Apollonius—where they are ensconced as lovers. In the second half of the poem (which we must qualify based on its provisional status as a fragment), the tragedy unfolds. Lycius, suddenly awakened from his amorous dream of

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love by a far-sounding trumpet, responds impulsively and against the impassioned pleading of Lamia to this call to community. He determines that he will legitimize their affair, inscribing it into the system of social relations through marriage. When he goes out to gather his guests—for Lamia, being sui generis, has no parents or other family—she applies her creative powers to the palace, making it vibrant with delights for all the senses. She loads every rift with ore, and from every nook and cranny there “bursts / Forth creeping imagery” (2.139– 40). To the heap of sensual pleasures she adds her own “pervading brilliance and perfume” (2.174). After the table is loaded with gastronomical delights, Lamia’s nemesis, the philosopher Apollonius (formerly Lycius’s instructor), having shown up at the feast uninvited, sits across the table from the betrothed couple. At the climax of the poem, he pierces Lamia with a withering stare, making her blood run cold. He calls Lamia a serpent before all the guests, becoming the catalyst for a metaphorical unweaving of the rainbow. Thus categorically reduced (exposed, from Apollonius’s perspective), the title character utters a shriek and disappears. Lycius, in turn, unable to sustain his heavy loss, dies, bringing the fragment to a close as his lifeless body is wound in its marriage robes. Whereas Apollonius tends to circumscribe power within distinct formal boundaries, Lamia is Dionysian in her vitality and hence impossible to catalogue in the accretion-clogged repository of natural philosophy.12 Once Apollonius believes he has finally conquered the mystery of Lamia, he pronounces her a serpent, making sense (or so he thinks) of her monstrous beauty. Of Lycius he demands, “Shall I see thee made a serpent’s prey?” (2.298). Lycius, stunned, screams, “A Serpent!” (2.305). But Apollonius’s classification ignores the fact that even in her original form, when Lamia’s “throat was serpent,”

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that throat culminated in “a woman’s mouth” (1.64, 60). She cannot be readily catalogued as a snake, for if she appears as “a palpitating snake,” she is also “like a zebra,” “like a peacock,” and “like a pard.” Critics have noticed the “incongruity of the menagerie,” as David Perkins calls it, in Lamia’s metamorphosis.13 Like Apollonius, Hermes (the mythic progenitor of medical science), as he stands before Lamia with his caducean “serpent rod,” seems convinced that she is a snake, for he addresses her as a “smooth-lipp’d serpent” (1.89, 83). His allusion to the subtle, eloquent serpent of Genesis—a biblical mythology out of sync with the classical Greek gods—might challenge his authority on this taxonomical point, but critics have nevertheless taken him at his word. “Lamia, after all, is a serpent,” Walter Jackson Bate remarks, and M. H. Abrams asserts that “Apollonius, the cold philosopher, was right. Lamia was indeed, as he said, a serpent.”14 Yet Keats intentionally depicts Lamia as a rainbow-sided phenomenon whose vitality exceeds given structures of the natural world. Like Hermaphroditus (Hermes’ son in the Greek pantheon) and Frankenstein’s ill-starred monster, Lamia is assembled from beautiful parts. She is designed to be more than beautiful, and this “moreness” is another word for the monstrous exuberance of life. “An object is monstrous if by its magnitude it nullifies the purpose that constitutes its concept,” Kant claimed, positing a power capable of outstripping the figurative telos of organized form (CJ 109). The fascination with living form at this time lay in never quite knowing what direction such organic purpose might take. The subject’s precarious position in relation to purposive power, a more precarious condition than negative capability, enabled the aesthetic reconceptualization of monstrosity as runaway vitality. As David Farrell Krell points out, Kant’s third

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critique is “the place where nature’s profusion, its excess of force, and even its sublimely dire forces, come to the fore: Kant refers in passing to one of the ‘most wondrous properties of organized creatures,’ namely, their proclivity to give birth to monsters and malformations.”15 In Kant’s “Critique of Teleological Judgment” as in Blumenbach’s treatise on the Bildungstrieb, which informed Kantian aesthetics, life tends toward monstrosity in an entelechy reaching beyond final purpose. In the end, most Romantics found the tendency toward monstrous proliferation inherent in living forms of matter preferable to the kind of monstrosity that resulted from accretionclogged bodies grown too big for their animating spirit. These were, by contrast, the horrific living dead.16

The Principle of Monstrosity The theory of life as a power independent of structure, promoted by John Hunter in the late eighteenth century, was at the source of the debate between Abernethy and Lawrence, and it found expression in Hunter’s work in a theory of monstrosity. Hunter was not the first physiologist to renounce the mechanism that dominated the study of life in the first half of the eighteenth century. But he lent the weight of vast experimental research to the idea that life is power, self-propagating power, subject to different laws from those of inanimate matter. “Hunter was the first who deduced the opinion, as a legitimate consequence of legitimate facts,” Abernethy wrote, “that life actually constructed the very means by which it carried on its various processes.”17 In Britain, Hunter’s work authorized the vitalism of a later generation of scientists, including Abernethy and Green, Thelwall and Erasmus Darwin, who all believed that organic forms were imbued with powers beyond

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sensibility and irritability. Hunter could not rest satisfied with a definition of living form that relied on the anatomical arrangement of parts and the structured relations between the functions of those parts: “Whatever Life is,” he wrote, “it most certainly does not depend upon the structure or organization” (EO 1:114). Rather, he believed that the living principle was separate from and possibly responsible for organization. He taught that “organization and life do not depend in the least on each other; . . . organization may arise out of living parts, and produce action, but . . . life can never rise out of, or depend on, organization.”18 The paradox is that the same mechanistic physiology that would reduce life to the sum of its bodily functions helped generate a counter theory of life as excess: Hunter concluded—and he was not alone—that life was the result of a supervenient, self-propagating power that could, under certain circumstances, go awry. This is not to say that Hunter completely did away with the traditional definition of monstrosity as deformity. Yet his notion of a living principle, later hotly contested by Abernethy and Lawrence with Shelley and Keats metaphorically frontrow center, allowed for a vitalist reinvention of the category of monstrosity as an extension of the living principle.19 Driving this category was Hunter’s “principle of monstrosity” (EO 1:240). Neither Wolff nor Blumenbach, or a later generation of epigenesists including Alexander von Humboldt, specified a distinct principle of monstrosity as Hunter did. For them, vis essentialis (essential power) and Bildungstrieb (formative drive) reflected nature’s unbounded fecundity and unpredictability in the production of new forms of life, but they did not label this monstrosity. Hunter remarked that a “deficiency and a mal-conformation are much more easily conceived than the formation of an additional part,” and it was on this latter, more

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unthinkable mode of monstrosity that he focused his attention (EO 1:244). Simply put, the question was, If a living principle or power could animate, even organize matter, what happened when this power asserted itself against organization and beyond the figural delimitation of the organism? Hunter began his observations on monsters with the most rudimentary form of self-organizing material: minerals that build themselves up into various shapes through crystallization. In the case of a crystal, he claimed, a structural defect either immediately before or after the process of formation had begun could cause the mineral to continue propagating itself wrongly. “Monsters in crystals may arise from . . . either a wrong arrangement of the parts of which the crystal is to be composed,” he observed, “or a defect in the formation, from the first setting out being wrong, and [the formation] going on in the same [wrong] line” (EO 1:240). Once setting off on the “wrong” foot, in other words, the mineral would persevere on the road of monstrous propagation through a repetition of its own aberrant self-production. Hunter was more ready than Blumenbach, for example, to apply the term wrong to vegetable and animal abnormalities, and he posited his principle of monstrosity as the rule of error.20 His peculiar innovation lay in associating this wrongness with a defect in process rather than product, that is, what the latter called Zeugungsart, or mode of generation. From the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, since morphology could be seen as the material result, or remainder, of formative power, monstrosity could accordingly be seen in reverse as a counterforce working against the harmonious convergence of matter. The French naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who championed the idea of living form as a principle of uniformity in multëity, called this underlying

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principle “unity of composition.”21 Like Hunter, he defined monstrosity as something gone wrong in the process of selfrepetition or “recapitulation.” He and his disciple Etienne Serres became increasingly obsessed, particularly in the 1820s and 1830s, with the early stages of embryonic development and the implications of aberrant modes of this for the transmutation of species. As in the case of earlier epigenesists, they followed the path of mutant living matter into the field of monstrosity, designated teratology after the Greek word for monster. The Romantics did not limit teratology to the science of embryology but generalized it into a philosophical law governing all natural phenomena, including organic and inorganic, organized and unorganized, matter. Aesthetically, the idea of living form hinged on the same principles as biological form such that (in Coleridge’s phrase) “the many, still seen as many, becomes one” (CCW 11.1:371). “Nature being pretty constant in the kind and number of the different parts peculiar to each species of animal, as also in the situation, formation, and construction of such parts,” Hunter wrote, “we call everything that deviates from that uniformity a ‘monster,’ whether [it occurs in] crystallization, vegetation, or animalization” (EO 1:239). For Hunter, all mineral, vegetable, and animal monsters exhibited a principle working against uniformity. Vegetables produce the greatest number of monstrosities compared to minerals and animals “because a vegetable can, and is always producing new parts” (EO 1:241). Anticipating Romantic Naturphilosophie and Goethe’s transcendental morphology, Hunter represented mineral, vegetable, and animal life as parallel processes within a single realm and suggested that vegetables, like minerals, consist “only of two parts, the old and the new; the one only a repetition of the other” (EO 1:242). A vegetable need only extend itself excessively to qualify

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as a monster. From an epigenetic perspective, therefore, vegetable matter was a frothing, uncontainable source of selfproduction forever in danger of producing new monsters. While Hunter did not explicitly develop a theory of epigenesis in the manner of Wolff, he did attribute his principle of monstrosity to self-shaping matter. The formation of a vegetable monster, he wrote, “takes its rise from a peculiar modification of matter, having a power of action within itself, capable of changing matter into its own kind, and disposing it for the increase” (EO 1:241). Through this process of converting external matter to its own ends, the vegetable “works up itself” (EO 1:243). The task of experimental science was to record what happens when formative power spills out of the formal boundaries of the organism, always dangerously perched on the edge of monstrosity. From the relatively homogenous embryonic tissues of developing plants Hunter extended his principle of monstrosity to animals, whose parts are more heterogeneous. As an example of abnormal regeneration in the animal kingdom, he took the case of “a lizard, which, having lost its tail, has the power of generating a new one . . . in such we often find a double tail, arising from the broken part” (EO 1:245). The fear was not that the animal would reproduce the missing part but that it would reproduce itself to excess—that the living principle contained in the organism would take advantage of the momentary gap in its substance and break through with a formative vengeance. In his debate with Abernethy, Lawrence observed that this “Power of reproduction—of restoring or renewing parts, that have been mutilated or entirely lost, is one of the most striking characters of organized bodies” (I 14).22 Animals, like

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plants, displayed their principle of monstrosity most overtly through regeneration. “If a natural branch decays, or is destroyed,” Hunter wrote, “two or three shall arise in its place, all of which are so many monsters” (EO 1:242). In place of the one decayed part, the creature threatens to provide a monstrous multiplicity, becoming the parent stock of “so many monsters.” Just as a missing branch opens the possibility for monstrous reproduction, certain animals, when their parts are destroyed or injured, have the capacity “to form monsters in these parts” (EO 1:245). In these cases, monsters result less from a botched arrangement of parts than from an unrestrained and misdirected biological power of increase. Most animal monstrosities occur before birth, Hunter discovered, when the animal resembles vegetable life more nearly than its own species of animal life. Sounding much like epigenesists, for whom all life forms emerged under the auspices of an organizing power, he wondered “in what respect is an animal, some time before birth, similar to a vegetable, or to the parts of animals which have the power of regeneration after birth” (EO 1:243). If the earliest forms of animal life resembled vegetable life in consisting of only two parts (the old and the new), then an animal’s monstrous productivity could also be defined as anomalous self-repetition: a problem of process not product. One German physician wrote in 1776, “The famous Dr. HUNTER, in his anatomical and physiological lectures, shews by many proofs, that utero-gestation is not done by any mechanical power.”23 Certainly, Hunter steered clear of the mechanistic theory of preformation in asserting that “the principle of life [before birth] comes much nearer to vegetation, and most probably the further back we go, this similitude is the stronger” (EO 1:243). Viewing early forms of animal life

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as analogous to, if not continuous with, vegetable life allowed him to theorize monstrosity as a principle working against unity in multëity. If monsters transgressed preestablished patterns, still more threatening was the fact that they seemed to follow their own aberrational logic, their own purpose. Blumenbach noticed that in cases “in which the Bildungstrieb follows a false direction, it nevertheless remains bound to determined rules,” leading him to conclude that the “details of a monster’s shape are true to its form” (UB 112). More than in previous generations, life scientists of the Romantic period were hesitant to subsume hybrids and varieties into the category of monstrosity. In his Anthropological Treatises, Blumenbach excluded variants from the category of the monstrous. Hermaphrodites, too, rather than being monsters were forms of “hybrid generation.”24 More interesting to him were cases in which the Bildungstrieb took off during embryogenesis into monstrosity properly so-called. Prefiguring Geoffroy’s thirty genera of monstrosities, he listed rudimentary categories of formative anomalies that could qualify as monstrous: monsters with atypically developed joints or limbs (fabrica aliena); monsters with dislocated limbs (situs mutatus), which he noted were more rare; monsters with missing joints (monstra per defectum), which he claimed were the most educational; and monsters with a greater number of body parts or pieces than is considered normal (monstra per excessum).25 He did not ascribe a specific “principle of monstrosity” to these cases, but he reasoned that in them formative power must be working against uniformity. Even those who believed that the divide between living and unliving matter was absolute (which Coleridge and other natural philosophers did not) nevertheless found the analogy between mineral and vegetable patterns of development use-

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ful for understanding morphological deviation as the result of an inherent principle or power driving the formative activity. Blumenbach distinguished his Bildungstrieb from the mechanical forces he considered responsible for the crystallization of inorganic matter, citing “uncrumbled quartz from Peru” and “the so-called silver fern” as instances of formative power in the mineral kingdom (UB 1:81–82). The year after Hunter’s death, Erasmus Darwin spoke similarly about monstrosity as formative excess. In Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794), he noted “changes produced probably by the exuberance of nourishment supplied to the fetus, as in monstrous births with additional limbs,” adding that “many of these enormities of shape are propagated, and continued as a variety at least, if not as a new species of animal.”26 Far more than an assemblage of mismatched or abnormal parts, Romantic monstrosity was defined by its capacity to turn aside unexpectedly from “normal” developmental processes and perpetuate its own brand of productivity. This mode of monstrosity formulated in the field of natural science at the end of the eighteenth century is symbolically operative in Lamia.

Gymnotus Electricus In a letter to his brother and sister-in-law of September 18, 1818, Keats recorded, “I have been reading over a part of a short poem I have composed lately call’d ‘Lamia’—and I am certain that there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way—give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation” (KL 2:189). To be sure, the central figure of Keats’s poem is “dazzling,” flashing, sparking, and burning bright. Stuart M. Sperry remarks “the fiery pangs of Lamia’s etherealization,” and Donald C. Goellnicht suggests that the “sort of

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fire” she contains may be akin to the “electric fire” or nervous energy with which human beings experience sensation.27 The kind of fire animating Lamia would have resonated in a period when electricity was figuratively, if not literally, the spark of life. “It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words,” wrote Shelley from the center of the Romantic Zeitgeist, adding that such writers “are perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age” (SPP 535). In the 1770s, when Hunter was carrying out his work on monstrosities, Franz Anton Mesmer introduced the idea of “animal magnetism” as a distinct power of organic life, and in the following decade Luigi Galvani popularized the related concept of “animal electricity” (distinct from natural electricity), spurring a wave of experimentation with related phenomena.28 By the turn of the century, Alessandro Volta had announced his invention of the electric pile as the earliest form of the battery, and Sir Humphry Davy was lecturing to an interested public about electrochemistry, electric fluid, and “electromotion.”29 The popular culture of electricity that swept Europe and America—and the hope it held out for penetration into the mystery of life—is fictionally reflected in Mary Shelley’s portrait of Frankenstein, the young chemistry student at Ingolstadt.30 Keats’s letter suggests that he, too, may have tapped into that Zeitgeist, for his brightly colored “brilliance feminine,” who “Flash’d phosphor and sharp sparks” in Lamia, suggests the same fascination with electric life (1.92, 152). Keats was steeped in the culture of science, particularly biology, and his poem is situated at the crossroads of the debate over the nature of life. Lamia’s monstrous beauty, in short, has less to do with

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traditional mythology involving serpents than with the power of vitality to communicate, and even to shock. In his debate with Lawrence over the controversial principle of life, Abernethy observed “that a subtile substance of a quickly and powerfully mobile nature, seems to pervade every thing, and appears to be the life of the world; and therefore it is probable that a similar substance pervades organized bodies, and produces similar effects in them” (EPR 51). Despite Abernethy’s disclaimer that he did not mean to affirm that electricity equals life, Lawrence took him to be saying precisely that and ridiculed what he called the “electro-chemical hypothesis of life” (L 13). Lamia, in this context, resembles her ugly if no less compelling fictional cousin produced in Frankenstein’s workshop of filthy creation. However, while the latter comes to life behind closed doors, Keats renders visible the details of Lamia’s electric animation: Her eyes in torture fix’d, and anguish drear, Hot, glaz’d, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear, Flash’d phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear. The colours all inflam’d throughout her train, She writh’d about, convuls’d with scarlet pain: A deep volcanian yellow took the place Of all her milder-mooned body’s grace; And, as the lava ravishes the mead, Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede; Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks and bars, Eclips’d her crescents, and lick’d up her stars: So that, in moments few, she was undrest Of all her sapphires, greens, and amethyst, And rubious argent: of all these bereft, Nothing but pain and ugliness were left. [1.150–64]

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As Lamia effectively dies into life—much like Apollo at the end of Hyperion—her short-circuiting colors, accompanied by “sharp sparks” and “scarlet pain,” all suggest a galvanic experiment gone awry. Lamia is singed a “deep volcanian yellow” by the excess of her own electric life, leading one to suspect that the electrochemistry somehow defeats its own purpose by giving too much life. On waking into life, Frankenstein’s creature strikes his maker as unbearably ugly just as Hermaphroditus does the Witch in “The Witch of Atlas.” Here, Lamia discovers at the core of her own being a lump of pain and ugliness. Both monstrosity and ugliness (although the latter rears its head for only the briefest moment in Lamia) involve the subject’s need to perceive the object as containable. Slavoj Zˇizˇek considers ugliness an ontological category resulting from an eruption of the real, or the raw stuff of existence, from figural containment.31 Whereas ugliness can have no truck with beauty, Romantic monstrosity of the sort Keats brings to light in Lamia can be dangerously attractive. The power driving the category of monstrosity brings sublimity in touch with the real, biologically speaking. In a notebook entry from an anatomy class at Guy’s Hospital in 1815–16, Keats recorded the contemporary obsession with animal electricity and its focus on a creature that promised to literalize the analogy between electricity and life: the gymnotus electricus, or electric eel. Wildly colored like Lamia and possessing similar “peculiar” powers (an adjective borrowed from Hunter’s account of his dissection of this animal),32 the gymnotus electricus captured the popular imagination of Regency London. For a few pence, the public could experience the electric shock of this natural historical curiosity, displayed at places like King’s Court and Covent Garden. Or for a few shillings one could avoid the shock of the eel and have a spark

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extracted from the creature by a professional. In 1778 James Perry published a verse parody of the phenomenon, The Electrical Eel; or, Gymnotus Electricus: Inscribed to the Honourable Members of the R***L S*****Y. In this work he asserted that the serpent who exerted such powers over Eve in Genesis may have been no serpent but rather a gymnotus electricus: “And if you dare your bard believe,” Perry wrote, under the pseudonym “Adam Strong, Naturalist,” “An Eel electrified dame Eve, / Nor Serpent—or a Devil.”33 The electric eel, charged with vitality as well as sexuality, posed a threat to Apollonian philosophers and other mortal men of England. Just as the “electrick fire” of the phallic eel lured Eve to “the vital Tree,” the electric power of the gymnotus electricus was attracting curious women to the contemporary “arbor vitae,” according to this authorial Adam. “What is this quick electrick fire / That raises ev’ry maid’s desire,” he demanded: “Where is there one nor longs to feel, / The vigour of th’ electrick Eel, / T’ extract the fire by touch?”34 This question begged for a negative response, for the spectacular animal seemed to hold the key to the mystery of life. Much as Frankenstein “disturbed with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame” in his desperate quest for the principle of life (F 36), real-life scientists cut into the bowels of this electrically charged gymnotus to discover its vital properties. In his report of a dissection of the electric eel published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in May 1775, Hunter credited the original discovery of animal electricity to John Walsh, a physician who performed some of the first experiments with electrical therapy in England and who provided Hunter with the eel for dissection.35 Walsh made his reputation with a related creature, the torpedo fish or electric ray, and in a letter to Benjamin Franklin of July 1, 1773,

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he described that animal’s electric power to shock and paralyze its prey. By communicating their electric charge to matter beyond the boundaries of their physical organization, these animals could assimilate matter in the form of nutrition, reshaping it to their own ends. Perhaps even more than an equivalency between electricity and life, they symbolized the power of animal vitality to exceed physical form. Having experienced the shock of the electric eel in 1783, Erasmus Darwin spoke of the gymnotus electricus in The Botanic Garden (1791) as “electric in his ire: “The dread Gymnotus with ethereal fire.— / Onward his course with waving tail he helms, / And mimic lightenings scare the watery realms.”36 In his annotations to the poem, Darwin described the electric eel in terms that evoke the mythological lamiae. Just as the legendary serpents were supposed to seduce and devour men, the gymnotus electricus took its victims by “benumbing them and then devouring them before they have time to recover, or by perfectly killing them; for the quantity of the power seem[s] to be determined by the will or age of the animal.”37 Keats’s Lamia is similarly remarkable for her will. We are told that “where she will’d, her spirit went,” and she is capable, like the gymnotus electricus, of extending her powers past the borders of her own organization (1.205). I have been arguing that a seemingly uncontainable vital power—a purposive and, what is more, formative power— motivated the category of Romantic monstrosity. Kant, although he did not attempt to identify an actual, measurable force (believing that we can only have a regulative idea of how self-organization works),38 marveled that “an organized being has within it a formative force, and a formative force that this being imparts to the kinds of matter that lack it (thereby organizing them). This force is therefore a formative force that

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propagates itself—a force that a mere ability [of one thing] to move [another] (i.e., mechanism) cannot explain” (CJ 253). Along with others sympathetic to the idea of vital, formative power, he believed that the ability of life to organize and even propagate itself could extend past the limitations of embodiment. From the perspective of aesthetic or teleological judgment, the key problem of living form lay in never quite knowing what direction that power, as it spilled out of the ontological container of the organism, would take. While the electric force of the gymnotus electricus could extend past its physical organization, however, it could not be abstracted from its source and reduced to a mechanical force. In 1820 (the same year as Lamia) Blumenbach’s student Alexander von Humboldt published the results of experiments performed on the electric eel in 1805, from which he concluded: “Gymnoti are neither charged conductors, nor batteries, nor electromotive apparatuses . . . The electric action of the fish depends entirely on its will.”39 His claim contradicted Volta’s earlier effort “to combat the pretended animal electricity of Galvani” by constructing an “artificial electric organ,” modeled on the “natural organ” of the gymnotus electricus.40 As a way to comprehend such power by mechanically reproducing it, Volta’s “electro-motive apparatus,” announced in 1800, was intended to match, or even surpass, the electric powers of the gymnotus electricus. But animal electricity was finally distinguished from mechanical power, for as Davy remarked in an early lecture on electrochemistry, “The electrical instrument is composed wholly of living matter,” and “in the case of the galvanic action of the nerves and muscles of frogs, and warm blood animals, the effect is apparently connected with some remains of vitality.”41 In an essay on the gymnotus electricus for Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1775),

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Hunter noted that the electric eel “may be considered, both anatomically and physiologically, as divided into two parts; viz. the common animal part; and a part which is superadded, viz. the peculiar organ.”42 The statement echoes his earlier description of monsters as consisting of only two parts: the old and the new, the former reproducing itself into the latter. This power of the electric animal to communicate its charge to external matter and assimilate that matter was associated with the animal’s powers of reproduction, hence the same capacity for self-formation characterizing Hunter’s own “principle of monstrosity.” The age-old concept of monstrosity obtained new life as liveliness through such experiments. The electric fluid discovered through anatomical dissection was relevant not only to this particular electric animal but in theory to human beings as well. When Keats referred to Hunter’s experiment in his medical notebook, he noted that Hunter “examined [the] Body of a Gymnotus Electricus [and] he found it provided with abundance of Nerves sufficient to account for its electric properties. From this he inferred that the Nerves were conductor[s] of electric fluid. . . . The present opinion therefore is that a fluid, like that of the electric is secreted in [the] brain which is thence communicated along the Nerves.”43 Coleridge shared Keats’s interest in these Lamia-like creatures who made explicit the analogy between electricity and life. “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798) describes an encounter with rainbow-sided creatures of the deep on the order of gymnoti electrici: Beyond the shadow of the ship I watch’d the water-snakes: They mov’d in tracks of shining white; And when they rear’d, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes.

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Within the shadow of the ship I watch’d their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black They coil’d and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire.44 The “tracks of shining white,” “elfish light,” “hoary flakes,” and “golden fire” that the Ancient Mariner perceives resemble Lamia’s “silver mail,” “golden brede,” “frecklings, streaks and bars,”“crescents, and . . . stars.” Scholars have registered a connection between Coleridge’s sea teeming with unknown, possibly monstrous life and a contemporary culture in which electromagnetism, galvanism, and oceanic electro-phosphorescence were facets of many-sided life science.45 The diversity of interpretation about precisely what kind of animation he portrays makes sense given Coleridge’s own insistence that all electric, magnetic, and chemical forces were expressions of one vital power. He summed up this view in a letter to Abernethy, warning that as long as the latter “attempted to work with one Force only (Electricity, for instance) . . . all the results would be but approximations to the Truth,” leaving him vulnerable to attacks by “Lawrence, and the Materialists.”46 The moment when the Ancient Mariner peers into the profusion of life in the waters surrounding him, prompting the reanimation of the ship and its mariners, becomes epiphanic when what he peers into is the “Truth,” the raw (and frightening) power of life: the very nature of Romantic monstrosity. Keats’s Lamia springs from this same imagined power that will not be contained by the formal telos of the beautiful or its material expression in organized life. Appropriately, her lover’s first encounter with her is described as aesthetic excess: “And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up, / Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup, / And still the cup was full” (1.251–53).

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Overrunning “the bewildering cup” of her own beautiful form in an abundance that Lycius can never fully imbibe, Lamia inverts the rules of aesthetic contemplation. She tells her lover, as if in warning, that she desires a place “Where I may all my many senses please, / And by mysterious sleights a hundred thirsts appease” (1.284–85). Instead of the five senses by which human beings register sensation, she boasts an unbounded “many.” In place of a single thirst, she has “a hundred,” which she must try to appease by “mysterious sleights” rather than by natural means since her sensibility surpasses corporeal containment. As a result, she appears monstrous in her magnitude, as Lycius’s cup runneth over in more ways than one. His palace reflects her monstrous fertility when at her touch, “each nook and niche . . . burst / Forth [with] creeping imagery” (2.137–40). This ornamental excess is, as Stewart has suggested, “the symbolic extroversion of her innate qualities in the banquet décor.”47 In her uncontainable vitality, Lamia appears as more than human—or more than her bodily organization would allow. She reassures Lycius that she does not have “Any more subtle fluid in her veins / Than throbbing blood” (1.307– 8), denying all relation to the ethereal ichor (blood) of the gods in order to present herself as thoroughly human. Yet, from a contemporary natural-philosophical perspective she denies nothing, for blood was thought to convey the mysterious principle of life. In their debate over the existence of Hunter’s vital principle, Abernethy interpreted life as “the effect of some subtle, mobile, invisible substance” pervading the body, communicating itself to matter and animating it, while Lawrence maintained that “this Hunterian theory of life . . . is no where to be found in the published writings of Mr. HUNTER; and does not even resemble the speculations on the same subject, which occur

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in the posthumous work on the Blood, Inflammation, & c. . . . on the living Principle of the Blood” (EPR 39, L 84n). He refers to the fifth section of A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-shot Wounds (1794), in which Hunter summed up thirty years of research to declare that “blood is endowed with the principle of life.”48 The idea that life resides in the blood had an extensive history dating back to the Bible, and even William Harvey despite his mechanistic bias described blood as “a kind of treasury of life,” “impregnated with spirits,” and “indeed the foundation of life, the source of all action.”49 On the same evening at Villa Diodati that Mary Shelley (then Godwin) listened to Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori debate the “principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated” (F 195), another iconic instance of literary monstrosity—the Romantic vampire—was born. And in his introduction to The Vampyre (1819), Polidori explained that according to folk tradition, “these human blood-suckers fattened—and their veins become distended to such a state of repletion, as to cause the blood to flow from all the passages of their bodies, and even from the very pores of their skins.”50 To be bursting with blood was to be bursting with life. Even in Bram Stoker’s rewriting of the Byronic vampire myth in Dracula (1897) we can recognize the origin of this monster in the vitality debates of the early nineteenth century. At one point in the novel, the character Renfield (a madman) remarks, “The doctor here will bear me out that on one occasion I tried to kill him for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood.”51 Like Frankenstein’s creature who seems to spill out from between the fissures in his skin as a monstrous surplus of the real, the Romantic vampire

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is gorged, horrifically, with life. We do not tend to put Keats’s Lamia in the same category as these archetypal monsters, but when she breaks free from Newton’s rainbow she breaks free from the Enlightenment binary of the sublime and the beautiful with all the gusto of Romantic monstrosity, a new vitalist aesthetic beyond the sublime.52

Dying into Life If life conceived as power seemed too big for material containment, it was hardly as terrifying to the Romantic mindset as the opposite: the material aggregation of parts that overwhelm the animating principle. “The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them into the internal laws of human nature,” wrote Shelley in A Defence of Poetry: “The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it” (SPP 531). To raise a monstrous assemblage of parts that lack the vital spark into living form is a process inversely and ideologically opposed to the normal course of living unto death—that is, living a life of mindless accrual (of years, experience, wealth, children, body weight, and so forth) that ends only in the despair of death as the end point of that accumulation. Whatever religious convictions people may profess, their attitude toward death reveals all. Shelley sought desperately to lift the painted veil, and he seemed to court death as a lover. He appeared all too eager (for family and friends, anyway) to discover through death the mystery of life. His friend Byron, in the character of Manfred, tells the abbot who comes to counsel and comfort him at the end of that dramatic poem, “’tis not so difficult to die” (3.4.151).

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Keats, who was more rooted in the material pains and pleasures of life or less willing to let them go, wrote despairing letters to his friend Charles Brown, expressing enough darkness and distress to suggest that he would rather not taste from the cup that would bring the “Knowledge enormous” (Hyperion, 3.113). He saw more clearly than his peers in the second generation of British Romantic poets who also died young that like his fictional alter egos, Lamia and Apollo, he was about to learn what it meant to die, perchance to die into life. In the fragmentary Fall of Hyperion (written contemporaneously with Lamia, from July through September 1819), the poet reacted to that same abyss of the unknown, the unwritten mystery of “life” to which he consigned Apollo at the end of Hyperion. If it is true, as I have argued, that Shelley’s “Witch of Atlas” offers a response to the question left unanswered at the end of “The Triumph of Life” (the haunting echo “What is Life?”), then we might consider how Lamia provides a response to a similar question raised at the end of Hyperion. When Apollo, the ascendant poet-hero of Hyperion, undergoes a metamorphosis as painful as Lamia’s, he appears “with fierce convulse” to “Die into Life.” His shriek in the final lines of the poem implies a possibility of knowledge for him, if incomprehension for us. As in the case of the Byronic vampire and Frankenstein’s creature, who prove too big for their narrative containers and thus appear more as cultural icons or myths, the Keatsian poet—a quintessential stereotype of the modern poet—suggests a vision of life lived beyond the fact of physical existence. Keats recognized his poetry as having been enriched by his medical knowledge.“I am glad at not having given away my medical Books,” he wrote in May 1818,“which I shall again look over to keep alive the little I know thitherwards. . . . An exten-

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sive knowledge is needful to thinking people—it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the Burden of the Mystery” (KL 1:277). The source for this phrase, “the Burden of the Mystery,” is Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” where the speaker describes that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul. [ll. 37–46] The condition is one that Keats clearly, on some level, desired. In a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, he allegorized life as a mansion of many apartments—a psychological space where he imagined himself situated at the point of departure from the “Chamber of Maiden Thought.” There, looking out on a series of dark unexplored passageways, he found himself in a mist: “We are now in that state—We feel the ‘burden of the Mystery’ ” (KL 1:281). In the final stage of his career, when he knew himself to be dying of tuberculosis, Keats was continually perplexed by the burden of the mystery. When he broke off Hyperion in December 1818, he did so on a darker note than Shelley, for the question was no longer “What is Life?” but what it meant, explicitly, to die into life. In The Fall of Hyperion, Keats addressed that problem from a perspective different from the one he had presented in

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Lamia, specifically through the heavy physicality of bodies barely able to sustain life. Hyperion opens, “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale / Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn” (1.1–2), and in The Fall of Hyperion the poet returns to that same lifeless vale through the wide hollows of the goddess Moneta’s brain. Moneta, who represents (among other things) the sublimity in nature, is described as a “Shade of Memory” guiding the speaker (1.282). She leads him “Onward from the antichamber of this dream,” through dark mysterious passageways that seem to branch out as if from the chamber of maiden thought (1.465). Both poems portray a fallen world in which the deposed Titans are “nerveless, listless, dead,” suffering the disease of irrelevance, having been superseded by a younger and more beautiful generation of gods (Hyperion, 1.18). In order to obtain the conference with Moneta that opens passage to this sunken vale, the speaker must drag himself up a massive staircase that seems to lead to the answers he has been seeking. “If thou canst not ascend / These steps,” he is warned by a disembodied voice, die on that marble where thou art Thy flesh, near cousin to the common dust, Will parch for lack of nutriment—thy bones Will wither in a few years, and vanish so That not the quickest eye could find a grain Of what thou now art on that pavement cold. [Fall of Hyperion, 1.107–13] These are heavy words for the poet, and they are confirmed a few lines later when he finds himself in the act of procrastination stricken with “a palsied chill” (1.122). In a world without transcendence, his pace is necessarily sluggish: “Slow,

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heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold / Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart” (1.129–31). As the speaker drags his heavy limbs forward from the architectural ruins he must scale to the shady vale into which he eventually descends, everything around him insists on stasis: No stir of life Was in this shrouded vale . . . .......................... But where the dead leaf fell there did it rest: A stream went voiceless by, still deaden’d more. [1.310–16] Like the female figures in Shelley’s poetry, Moneta is veiled, and in this vale behind the veil, so to speak, the fallen gods appear to the poet “Like sculpture builded up upon the grave / Of their own power,” their physical remainders an appalling monument to their former vitality (1.383–84). Keats’s readers will have encountered this listless condition before: in the odes, for example (“Indolence,” “Nightingale,” “Melancholy”), written, like Lamia, in the spring of 1819. But now the listlessness appears writ large, on an epic panorama that hardly augurs life beyond the material and barely grants the speaker that. Keats knew himself to be writing against death, and the despair expressed in the Hyperion poems is in part a metaphysical despair that life could amount to anything more than a mechanism of heavy limbs. In response to the question of what it means to die into life posed at the end of Hyperion, the speaker of The Fall of Hyperion confronts a potion resembling the cup of “Knowledge enormous” from which Apollo has drunk. “No Asian poppy, nor elixir fine,” he claims, “Could have so rapt unwilling life

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away” (1.47, 51). Although he struggles hard against the effects of the potion, it is in vain: “When a sense of life return’d, I started up / As if with wings” (1.58–59). Any doubts about what he has experienced are cleared up by Moneta: “Thou hast felt / What ’tis to die and live again before / Thy fated hour” (1.41– 43). This scene of dying into life offers a sequel to the experience of Apollo at the end of book 3 of Hyperion, where he likewise, “with a pang / As hot as death’s is chill, with fierce convulse / Die[d] into life” (3.128–30). If it is the case, as many readers have supposed, that Apollo dies into the poet-speaker of the second Hyperion, then he dies into a ponderous world that also lacks vitality. His quest, in consequence, is to strive “hard to escape / The numbness” (Fall of Hyperion, 1.127–28). As I have been suggesting, however, this was not the only scenario Keats imagined in response to the question of what it meant to die into life. When read not as narrative digression from the abruptly terminated Hyperion (the standard critical fate of Lamia) but as an unexpected complement to that poem, Keats’s vision of monstrous life through Lamia may provide an alternate form of prescience. After Apollo drinks from the proverbial cup at the end of Hyperion, he undergoes a transformation no less spectacular than Lamia’s. Presumably he should put on divinity with this knowledge, but instead he becomes human, just as she does. We might consider this transformation in light of the 1820 volume of poems in which Hyperion was first printed along with the fragmentary Lamia. Keats was not happy with a number changes made by his publishers, John Taylor and James Hessey, nor with the Advertisement that accompanied the volume, and in his copy of the book (now at Harvard’s Houghton Library), he wrote, “This is none of my doing—I w[as] ill at the time.”53 Keats’s friend Richard Woodhouse drafted a separate

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Advertisement for Lamia, which included an apology for the poem’s incomplete status: “The fragment remains . . . in the same state in which it was originally written; and the Author’s health is not at pres[ent] such as to enable him to make any corrections.”54 Yet the holograph of Hyperion reveals some lines excerpted, not by Keats, in the first printed edition of the poem.55 They are given below in italics: And soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush All the immortal family of his limbs Into a hue more roseate than sweet pain Gives to a ravish’d Nymph when her warm tears Gush luscious with no sob. Or more severe; More like the struggle at the gate of death, Or liker still to one who should take leave Of pale immortal death and with a pang As hot as death is chill, with fierce convulse Die into life.56 The first edition of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems condenses the second to sixth lines above to read: “All the immortal fairness of his limbs; / More like the struggle at the gate of death.”57 Keats’s manuscript indicates that he considered adding the line “Roseate and pained as any ravish’d nymph” after 3.125 (“All the immortal fairness of his limbs”).58 In the blank half-page following the end of the manuscript of Hyperion, Woodhouse penciled his own suggestion for an extension of this line as follows: “Into a hue more roseate than a Nymph’s / By a warm kiss surprized.” In the frame story of Lamia, the nymph pursued by Hermes is unable to “restrain / Her fearful sobs” (1.137–38), and Lamia herself, shortly before

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that description, “Ravish’d . . . lifted her Circean head” (1.115). While I do not wish to suggest a literal transference, such that the ravished nymph at the end of Hyperion reappears in the opening of Lamia, I would propose that considering this (excised) figure in the context of Lamia may reveal a closer connection between the two poems than we usually assume. Both offer imagined (if contrasting) responses to the persistent question of what it means to die into life. But whereas the speaker of The Fall of Hyperion dies into a world stripped of vital power, Lamia presents an alternate possibility: life, rather than physical organization, is about extravagant vitality. Just as Apollo disappears with a shriek from the end of Hyperion, Lamia disappears from the poem named after her with a “frightful scream” (2.306). As she does, she leaves Lycius behind as the poem’s material remainder, a “heavy body” that would sink naturally into the shady vale alongside the other heavy bodies of Hyperion. In the final line of Lamia, in fact, Lycius is reduced to an “it,” a “heavy body” (2.311). He is deprived of the mysterious power of life, “As were his limbs of life, from that same night” (2.308). Without Lamia’s animating presence, he fits all too easily into a Newtonian world in which heavy bodies follow the same laws as heavenly bodies in orbit. Such a system, it was thought, had no place for an intangible vital power with the capacity to animate and shape matter into living form—or for living forms made possible through the imagination. Perhaps, though, the great tragedy for the Romantics was not the reduction of the human being to a mechanism of heavy limbs, a body stripped of the living principle like Newton’s rainbow deprived of its poetry. That such a fiction would have been hard to sustain we find evidence for in the recurrence of vitalism throughout the modern era: in the nine-

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teenth century, Hans Driesch continued to speculate about the biological self-development of organisms, followed in the early twentieth century by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who popularized the idea of élan vital (vital dash, or spirit). To these later nodes in the trajectory of vitalism we might add current stem-cell research, which keeps alive the public fascination with epigenesis and the biological power of regeneration. Instead, I would suggest that the real source of despair was the fact that to imagine life as anything more—more than given forms and organizations, biological or cultural—was to risk becoming monstrous in the eyes of a calculating world. Smart early on was locked up for madness, and Blake, wavering between philosophical hope that things could change and empirical evidence that they would not, battled mind-forged manacles until he died, an old man in a tattered black coat stranded on modernism’s shore. Keats and Shelley, too, insofar as they formed part of that goblin we have been calling the Romantic Zeitgeist, haunt us still. This may be as much for their questions (“What is Life?” “What am I?” “Whose altar this?”) as for their powerful visions of a world whose apparent surfaces have been melted away.

Notes

Chapter One: Introduction 1. William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” ll. 37–46, in Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1963), 114. 2. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953); Abrams’s account of organic form is based on Coleridge, who in turn bases his on Schlegel, as noted by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate in their notes to BL. See too G. N. G. Orsini, “Coleridge and Schlegel Reconsidered,” Comparative Literature 17 (1964): 97–118, and Daniel Stempel, “Coleridge and Organic Form: The English Tradition,” Studies in Romanticism 6 (1967): 89–97. For the successive New Critical response, see William K. Wimsatt,“Organic Form: Some Questions About a Metaphor,” and Philip C. Ritterbush, “Aesthetics and Objectivity in the Study of Form in the Life Sciences,” both in Organic Form: The Life of an Idea, ed. G. S. Rousseau (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); Cleanth Brooks, Jr., “The Poem as Organism: Modern Critical Procedure,” English Institute Annual 1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941); I. A. Richards,“How Does a Poem Know When It Is Finished?” in Parts and Wholes, ed. Daniel Lerner (New York: Free Press, 1963), 163–74; and the philosophical accounts offered by Ernst Nagel, “Wholes, Sums, and Organic Unities,” Philosophical Studies 3:2 (1952): 17–32, and Sidney Zink, “The Poetic Organism,” Journal of Philosophy 42:16 (1945): 421–34. Critics have since come to recognize that the organizing metaphor of organic form—the basis of the New Criticism as a literary-critical methodology—requires further at-

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tention. Frances Ferguson remains concerned with “the artificial neatness of summing up all Romanticism under the organic metaphor which has dominated much criticism”; Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), xi. Compare her more recent thoughts on the problem in Ferguson, “Organic Form and Consciousness,” in Land, Nation and Culture, 1740–1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste, ed. Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask, and David Simpson (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 230–40; see also, Murray Krieger, “The Typological Imagination and Its Other: From Coleridge to the New Critics and Beyond,” in Krieger, A Reopening of Closure: Organicism Against Itself (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 31–56; and Mary Poovey, “The Model System of Contemporary Literature,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001): 408–39. 3. Charles I. Armstrong similarly observes, “In its tendency to overflow preconceived boundaries, we can glimpse something of the latent monstrosity of organicism”; Armstrong, Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 4. 4. As Philip C. Ritterbush points out, “In art, as in science, form must be distinguished from structure”; Ritterbush, “The Shape of Things Seen: The Interpretation of Form in Biology,” Leonardo 3 (1970): 305–17 (305). 5. Harvey’s ovum is alternately called a primordium and stands in for such diverse anatomical parts as seeds, eggs, and mammalian “conceptions.” See Elizabeth B. Gasking, Investigations into Generation, 1651–1828 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 25–28. 6. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 155. 7. Timothy Lenoir, “The Göttingen School and the Development of Transcendental Naturphilosophie in the Romantic Era,” Studies in the History of Biology 5 (1981): 111–205 (145). 8. William Harvey, The Works of William Harvey, trans. Robert Willis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 277, 335. 9. Richard P. Aulie points out that Malpighi’s dissertation, Dissertatio epistolica de formatione pulli in ovo (1673), also shows epigenetic phrasing (e.g., “an emerging manifestation of parts successively”); Aulie, “Caspar Friedrich Wolff and His ‘Theoria Generationis,’ 1759,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 16 (1961): 124–44 (131). 10. John Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy: From Descartes to Oparin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 14. 11. Marc J. Ratcliff, “Abraham Trembley’s Strategy of Generosity and the Scope of Celebrity in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Isis 95 (2004): 555–75 (568).

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12. Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth, trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 27. 13. “An Abstract of a Letter from Mr. Anthony Leeuwenhoeck of Delft about Generation by an Animalcule of the Male Seed,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 13 (1683): 347–55 (349). The most significant animalculist contemporaneous with Leeuwenhoek was the Norwegian scientist Nicolaas Hartsoeker (1626–1725). 14. François Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, trans. Betty E. Spillmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 15. Not for another 150 years would the spermatozoon be identified as such, and it would take longer than that for its correct function to be made known. 15. See George Garden, “A Discourse Concerning the Modern Theory of Generation,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 16 (1686–92): 474–83. 16. John Turbervill[e] Needham, “A Summary of Some Late Observations upon the Generation, Composition, and Decomposition of Animal and Vegetable Substances,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 45 (1748): 615–66 (657). 17. Spallanzani’s treatise criticizing Needham’s experiments appeared in translation in 1769 as Nouvelles recherches sur les découvertes microscopiques, et la génération des corps organizes, with notes and commentary by Needham. Needham made several modifications to his theory of vegetative power in these notes, but he nevertheless defended the idea of a productive force residing in matter. Writing to his friend Charles Bonnet, Spallanzani complained that Needham’s imagination had run away with him: “What confusion, what obscurity reigns in his Notes to my microscopical Observations! What monstrosities in his thoughts! What ridiculous efforts to explain the Reproduction of my Animals! I see indeed that it will be necessary in my Work to speak again of his Romance”; Spallanzani, Tracts on the Natural History of Animals and Vegetables, trans. John Graham Dalyell, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Edinburgh: printed for William Creech and Archibald Constable, 1805), 1:282. For further discussion, see Shirley A. Roe, “John Turberville Needham and the Generation of Living Organisms,” Isis 74.2 (1983): 159–84 (167). 18. Bonnet, Contemplation de La Nature, quoted in Gasking, Investigations into Generation, 117. 19. See Abraham Trembley, “Translation of a Letter from Mr. Abraham Trembley, F.R.S., to the President, with Observations upon Several Newly Discover’d Specimens of Fresh-Water Polypi,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 43 (1744–45): 169–83.

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20. George-Louis Leclerc, Count de Buffon, Natural History, Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, &c., trans. James Smith Barr, 10 vols. (London, 1792), 2:302ff. 21. Gasking, Investigations into Generation, 84. 22. Erasmus Darwin, Phylotologia; or, The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1800), in Romanticism and Science, 1773–1833, ed. Tim Fulford, 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 2002), 4:86–89ff. 23. As William Cecil Dampier remarks, “The year 1757 marks ‘the dividing line between modern physiology and all that went before’, because in that year was published the first volume of the Elementa Physiologiae of Albrecht von Haller”; Dampier, A History of Science and Its Relations with Philosophy and Religion, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 187. Haller first defined sensibility in 1739 and then, more influentially, in De partibus corporis humani sensibilibus et irritabilibus (1753). 24. J. F. Blumenbach, The Institutions of Physiology, trans. John Elliotson, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Benjamin Warner, 1817), 16. 25. Haller, “De partibus corporis,” quoted in Shirley A. Roe, “Anatomia animata: The Newtonian Physiology of Albrecht von Haller,” in Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences: Essays in Honor of I. Bernard Cohen, ed. Everett Mendelsohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 273– 300 (289). In the “General Scholium” of his Principia, Newton offered the rationale for this approach: “I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phænomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phænomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy”; Isaac Newton, The Principia, trans. Andrew Motte (Amherst: Prometheus, 1995), 442–43. 26. J. F. Blumenbach, The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. Thomas Bendyshe (London: Elibron Classics, 1865), 194. 27. Technically, the term biology did not come into use until 1802, when Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus published his Biologie oder Philosophie der Lebenden Natur. For a related argument about the changing methodology around the mid-eighteenth century, see Virginia P. Dawson, “The Limits of Observation and the Hypotheses of Georges Louis Buffon and Charles Bonnet,” in Beyond History of Science: Essays in Honor of Robert E. Schofield, ed. Elizabeth Garber (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1990), 107–25. With reference to Buffon, John Bender claims that “while moving toward the positions of absolute opposition they occupy today, both [fiction writers and scientists] . . . defined the most accurate representations of reality as those that contextualized empirical, sense-based ‘facts’ by arraying them in prob-

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able explanatory networks”; Bender, “Enlightenment Fiction and the Scientific Hypothesis,” Representations 61 (1998): 6–28 (20). 28. Timothy Lenoir considers these decades a period of “teleomechanism”; Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in NineteenthCentury German Biology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982), 25. See also his “Göttingen School,” 123–28. 29. Haller, notes to Herman Boerhaave’s lectures (Praelectiones academicae), quoted in Shirley A. Roe, Matter, Life, and Generation: EighteenthCentury Embryology and the Haller-Wolff Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 24. 30. Joan Steigerwald, “Instruments of Judgment: Inscribing Organic Processes in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33 (2002): 79–131. Reinhard Mocek makes the point that for Wolff, it matters not whether the vis essentialis is material or immaterial; what counts is its function (Wirkung). See Mocek, “Caspar Friedrich Wolffs Epigenesis-Konzept—ein Problem im Wandel der Zeit,” Biologisches Zentralblatt 114 (1995): 179–90 (186). 31. Ignatius Born, Zwote Abhandlung über die Nutritionskraft welche von der kayserlichen Academie der Wissenschaften in St. Petersburg den Preis geheilt haben ([Saint Petersburg, 1789]), 54, translation mine. In claiming this power could be called either vis essentialis or nisus formativus, Born failed to recognize a fundamental difference between the rhetorical constructs of Wolff and Blumenbach of which they themselves had become aware. Unlike Wolff’s, but like Blumenbach’s, Born’s juices were “not only nutritive, but also [constituted] a creative, formative power” (61). Steigerwald cites Wolff speaking similarly on the vis essentialis: “One could thus have omitted it, and ascribed the movement of the juices to other causes, as one wanted; or one could have accepted no cause for it, and left the movement unexplained; still this movement of the juices would not itself be denied; and the manner of the production and formation of parts, as the main point of a theory of generation, would then always remain the same”; Steigerwald, “Instruments of Judgment,” 87. 32. Blumenbach first identified this drive in his 1779–80 Handbuch der Naturgeschichte. He then expanded his essay “On the Formative Force and Its Influence on Generation and Reproduction” (1780), published in the Göttingischen Magazin, into Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte (1781). 33. “No one has done more by way of proving this theory of epigenesis than Privy Councilor Blumenbach,” Kant wrote, “and by way of establishing correct [echt] principles for applying it, which he did in part by avoiding

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too rash a use of it” (CJ 311). In a letter of August 5, 1790, written shortly after the publication of his third critique, Kant thanked Blumenbach for his treatise on the Bildungstrieb: “I have learned a great deal from your writings. Indeed, in your new work, you unite two principles—the physical-mechanistic and the sheerly teleological mode of explanation of organized nature. These are modes which one would not have thought capable of being united. In this you have quite closely approached the idea with which I have been chiefly occupied—but an idea that required such confirmation [as you provide] through facts”; quoted in Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 231. Timothy Lenoir also discusses this letter as support for his theory of “teleomechanism” as a forerunner to Romantic idealism; Lenoir, “Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biology,” Isis 71 (1980): 77–108 (88–89). Likewise, Blumenbach adapts Kant’s formulation of the organism as an entity whose parts are both its end and its means, as well as his ideas about combining mechanistic and teleological perspectives, in later editions of his On the Formative Power and Handbook of Natural History. 34. See Friedrick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 523–24; and Joan Steigerwald, “Epistemologies of Rupture: The Problem of Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy,” Studies in Romanticism 41 (2002): 545–84. 35. “The world system is a kind of organization, which has formed itself from a common centre. . . . The general formative drive [Bildungstrieb] in nature loses itself in an infinitude, which even the prepared eye is unable to measure. The perpetual and fixed passage of nature to organization betrays clearly enough a lively drive which, as it were wrestling with the raw matter, now winning, now losing, breaks through it now in free forms, now in limited”; quoted from Schelling, “Allgemeine Übersicht der neuesten philosophischen Litteratur” (1797), in Sue R. Morgan, “Schelling and the Origins of His Naturphilosophie,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 25–37 (31). 36. Lenoir, “Göttingen School,” 123–28. See also Joan Steigerwald, “Goethe’s Morphology: Urphänomene and Aesthetic Appraisal,” Journal of the History of Biology 35 (2002): 291–328; Dorothea Kuhn, “Goethe’s Relationship to the Theories of Development of His Time,” in Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, ed. Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987), 3–15; Adolph Portmann, “Goethe and the Concept of Metamorphosis,” in Goethe and the Sciences, 133–45; “Goethe and the Kantian Philosophy,” in Rousseau-Kant-Goethe, trans. James Gutmann,

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Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947); and Philip C. Ritterbush, The Art of Organic Forms (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968), 1–22. 37. “It is no exaggeration to say that Bildung, the education of humanity, was the central goal, the highest aspiration, of the early romantics,” Frederick C. Beiser noted: “The importance, and indeed urgency, of Bildung in the early romantic agenda is comprehensible only in its social and political context”; Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 88. Pfau, in his unpublished manuscript “Parables of Life: The Concept of ‘Bildung’ and the Transformation of Knowledge,” investigates the conceptual infrastructure of Bildung. 38. The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–71), 1:294–95. 39. Michel Foucault notes that up to the end of the eighteenth century, “life does not exist: only living beings”; Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), 161. 40. Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 37. 41. See note 33 above. 42. Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp” (l. 26); Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), 6.134–35. 43. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge formulated his idea of imagination in terms of the Einbildungskraft described by Johann Gebhard Ehrenreich Maas, a mental power analogous to the formative powers in nature; see Maas, Versuch über die Einbildungskraft (Halle, 1797). 44. Henrich Steffens, “Über die Beudeutung eines freien Vereins für Wissenschaft und Kunst, 1817,” in Alt und New (1821), quoted in Dietrich von Engelhardt, “Historical Consciousness in the German Romantic Naturforschung,” trans. Christine Salazar, in Romanticism and the Sciences, 55–68 (59). 45. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 46. There is trouble with this term. See, e.g., Slavoj Zˇizˇek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (1997): 28–51. 47. M. Azim Surani, “Reprogramming of Genome Function Through Epigenetic Inheritance,” Nature 414 (2001): 122–28. 48. Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 149.

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49. For the classic articulation of this paradigm shift in relation to the Romantic poets, see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971). 50. See Jane Maienschein, Whose View of Life? Embryos, Cloning and Stem Cells (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 51. Another way to frame this shift, as Kant saw it, was from natural historical description (Naturbeschreibung) to the history of nature (Naturgeschichte), as founded on the work of Buffon. See John Lyon and Philip R. Sloan, From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from Buffon and His Critics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 1–32. 52. As in the Kantian judgment of nature, which assumed an as-if regulative principle of purpose, aesthetic judgment demanded the discernment of a living power or principle able to produce fluid unity ab intra. 53. Charles A. Corr, “Christian Wolff’s Treatment of Scientific Discovery,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 10.3 (1972): 323–34 (324–25). 54. “This one universal method is called, of course, the scientific method,” Richard J. Blackwell remarks; “the persistent desire of the seventeenth-century rationalists to have one ubiquitous method for the discovery of all certitude continues unabated in the mind of Christian Wolff ”; Blackwell, “The Structure of Wolffian Philosophy,” Modern Schoolman 38 (1961): 203–18 (218). See also Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 256–96; and John V. Burns, Dynamism in the Cosmology of Christian Wolff: A Study in PreCritical Rationalism (New York: Exposition Press, 1966). 55. Christian Wolff, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, trans. Richard J. Blackwell (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 40. 56. On eighteenth-century classification systems, see Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); James L. Larson, Reason and Experience: The Representation of Natural Order in the Work of Carl von Linné (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); and Frans Antonie Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: The Spreading of Their Ideas in Systematic Botany, 1735–1789 (Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1971). 57. He made an exception for René Descartes, whose physiomechanical theory of generation, however, was later proven incorrect. 58. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner, 6 vols. (Paderborn: Schöingh, 1988), 190; Novalis, Werke, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Munich: Beck, 1981), 2:338, translations mine. 59. Collected Letters of Coleridge, ed. Griggs, 1:625–26.

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60. Helmut Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 47. 61. Ibid., 23, 9. 62. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 191. 63. Ibid. 64. Justus von Liebig pronounced Naturphilosophie “the pestilence and black death of the century” in “Über das studium der Naturwissenschaften und über der Zustand der Chemie in Preussen” (1840). Starting in the 1840s, Naturphilosophie came to be dismissed as a sort of pseudoscience by the new breed of professional scientists, who, as Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine put it,“used history to promote their own ideology and to discredit Romanticism in the sciences. We may well suspect that both the stereotype of the Romantic sciences as speculative, fantastic, mystical and illdisciplined, and their alleged defeat by the empirical natural sciences, are polemical constructs rather than the fruits of unbiased historical research”; Cunningham and Jardine, “Introduction,” Romanticism and the Sciences, 7–8. Beiser adds neo-Kantianism and positivism to the professionalism of the sciences as reasons for Naturphilosophie’s downfall; Beiser, German Idealism, 22. 65. Marjorie Levinson surveys diverse approaches within the “new formalism” in “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 558–69. 66. These parts were not conceived precisely as building blocks, for though specialized they were also likened to simple, monocellular organisms. Still, the cell theory shifts the emphasis on form from force back to structure, where it had been in the earlier study of comparative anatomy and where Charles Darwin’s science of morphology would take it. 67. One year earlier, in his Contributions to Phytogenesis, Schleiden had proposed that all plants are composed of cells as the elementary particle of life; Schwann extended the idea of the cell to animal tissues, hence to all of organic nature. 68. Later, in the first half of the twentieth century, there was a resurgence of vitalism when Henri Bergson developed the concept of élan vital and Hans Driesch, a biologist who demonstrated regeneration in sea urchin embryos, revived interest in the phenomenon of epigenesis. As Donna Jeane Haraway noted, debates between mechanists and vitalists recurred until the metaphor of mechanism was overturned in the first third of the twentieth century: “relativity theory and then quantum mechanics broke the axis of the machine analogy”; Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of

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Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 24. 69. Wolff, though he observed actual cellular division under the microscope, interpreted this in terms of vessels (Gefässe) and blisters or vesicles (Bläschen) formed by the vis essentialis. 70. Von Baer, quoted in Maienschein, Whose View of Life, 32. 71. What Harvey meant by an egg, which he also referred to as a “primordium,” remains unclear. The embryonic mass he observed in female deer and called “ovum” was not the same thing as the cell observed by Von Baer. “An egg is,” Harvey wrote, “a conception exposed beyond the body of the parent, whence the embryo is produced; a conception is an egg remaining within the body of the parent until the foetus has acquired the requisite perfection; in everything else they agree; they are both alike primordially vegetables, potentially they are animals”; Works of William Harvey, 462–63. See also Gasking, Investigations into Generation, 28. 72. Like cells, disciplines come about through segmentation and specialization, demarcated by membranes of difference. Laura Otis has shown how the concept of the membrane became a powerful metaphor for partitions dividing all levels of society, ultimately hardening into “the division between the humanities and the natural sciences as another boundary arbitrarily drawn”; Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 2. 73. Rudolf Virchow, Heilkräfte des Organismus (Berlin: Carl Habel, 1875), 24, 19, translations mine. 74. Ibid., 18. 75. This quotation is from the first printed version of the lecture “On Poesy and Art,” as reproduced in John Shawcross’s edition of Biographia Literaria and Coleridge’s Aesthetical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 2:262. In the Princeton edition of the Collected Works, the lecture (CCW 5.2:217–25) is reduced to Coleridge’s original notes, omitting cancellations and hence this quotation. 76. Franco Moretti, “Graphs, Maps, Trees,” New Left Review 24 (2003): 67–93. 77. Ibid., 90. 78. Ibid., 86n. Cf. his Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory (London: Verso, 2005), 25n, a shorter version of the note. Although Moretti has been mocked by the press for advocating that literary critics count rather than read books, he, sharper than his would-be redactors and detractors, acknowledges the need “to abandon the quantitative uni-

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verse, and turn to morphology: evoke form, to explain figures” (84–86). See Emily Eakin, “Studying Literature by the Numbers,” New York Times, January 10, 2004. 79. Cognitive scientists now argue that analogy works similarly to metaphor at the center of human cognition; see Douglas R. Hofstadter,“Epilogue: Analogy as the Core of Cognition,” in The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, ed. Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 499–538, and other essays therein, including “Metaphor Is Like Analogy” by Dedre Gentner et al., 199– 254. On the creative role of analogy in science, see Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard, “The Analogical Scientist,” in their Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 185–209. 80. Xavier Bichat, Physiological Researches on Life and Death, trans. F. Gold (1800; Boston: Richardson and Lord, 1827), 80. 81. Johachim Dietrich Brandis, Versuch über der Lebenskraft (Hanover, 1795), 11, translation mine. 82. See Dahlia Porter, “Scientific Analogy and Literary Taxonomy in Darwin’s Loves of the Plants,” European Romantic Review 18.2 (2007): 213–21. 83. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 55. 84. Ibid. 85. Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 7. See also his “Between Mechanism and Romantic Naturphilosophie: Vitalizing Nature and Naturalizing Historical Discourse in the Late Enlightenment,” in Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century, ed. John Bender and Michael Marrinan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 153–74 (157). Early hints of this argument also occur in his “Bildung, Urtyp and Polarity: Goethe and Eighteenth-Century Physiology,” Goethe Yearbook 3 (1986): 139–48. 86. Reill, Vitalizing Nature, 8. 87. I draw here in part on Harold Bloom’s wise, daring, and somewhat out-of-vogue argument that powerful reading is misreading; see his The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) and A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 88. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2. 89. Geoffroy’s main opponent in the early evolution debates was Georges Cuvier, whose fierce denunciation of the idea of the transmutation of species discouraged naturalists from speculating openly about evolution

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up through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Among those who made a case for evolution was Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who was familiar with the evolutionary thinking of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, citing him in The Temple of Nature (1803), a long poem that traces the evolution of life from microorganisms to civil society. Darwin anticipated the work of Geoffroy’s colleague Lamarck, who is remembered mainly for his theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics but who also supported the idea of a formative power capable of organizing an embryo. Later the Victorian biologist Herbert Spencer preempted Charles Darwin, extending the theory of evolution to psychology and social philosophy, though Darwin later overshadowed him by articulating the theory of natural selection. On the eighteenth-century background of evolution, see Peter Bowler, “The Changing Meaning of ‘Evolution,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 95–114; and Forerunners of Darwin: 1745–1859, ed. Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Straus, Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959); and Richards, Meaning of Evolution. 90. Reill, Vitalizing Nature, 8. See also Lenoir’s categorization of “teleomechanism” in Strategy of Life. 91. Elsewhere he considers analogy in relation to symbol: “Hard to express that sense of the analogy or likeness of a Thing which enables a Symbol to represent it, so that we think of the Thing itself ”; The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Colburn, 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 2002), 2:2274. 92. I am grateful to Jeff Dolven for conversation leading to this realization. 93. Accomplished studies of the influence of science on poetry in this time period include Douglas Bush, Science and English Poetry: A Historical Sketch, 1590–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950); Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Science and Imagination (Ithaca: Great Seal, 1956); and William Powell Jones, The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). Related studies of the Romantic poets include: on Coleridge, Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); on Blake, Donald D. Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), and Stuart Peterfreund, William Blake in a Newtonian World: Essays on Literature as Art and Science (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998); on Shelley, Carl Grabo, A Newton Among Poets: Shelley’s Use of Science in “Prometheus Unbound” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

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1930), and Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005); on Keats, Donald C. Goellnicht, The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), and Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). See too Noah Heringman, ed., Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). 94. “What, then, is Bildung?” asks Antoine Berman: “Through Bildung an individual, a people, a nation, but also a language, a literature, a work of art in general are formed and thus acquire a form, a Bild. Bildung is always a movement toward a form, one’s own form—which is to say that, in the beginning, every being is deprived of its form”; Berman, The Experience of the “Foreign”: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (Ithaca: State University of New York Press), 43–44. 95. Peter Hanns Reill, “Bildung, Urtyp and Polarity,” 143. 96. Thomas Pfau, “Of Ends and Endings: Teleological and Variational Modes of Romantic Narrative,” European Romantic Review 18:2 (2007): 231–41. 97. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 5–6. I believe the Bildungsroman has its parallels in poetry, though less in terms of narrative than a particular form of Bildung I am calling epigenesist poetics. 98. On Wolff’s unpublished Theoria Monstrorum, see Michael Hagner, “Enlightened Monsters,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 175–217; and Roe, Matter, Life, and Generation, 124ff. On Blumenbach’s fascination with the topic, see Lenoir, “Göttingen School,” 133. 99. J. J. Holmes, observing “the general fact that life processes are automatically regulatory,” argues: “These formative achievements of equilibrating behavior are so widespread and extensive that . . . [n]o theory of development can have any claim to adequacy which fails to account for them. In fact, a true theory of development must be primarily a theory of regulation”; Holmes, Organic Form and Related Biological Problems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), 4.

Chapter Two: Smart’s Powers 1. Smart was admitted against his will to Saint Luke’s Hospital for the insane in May 1757 and released a year later. In 1759 he was confined to Potter’s private madhouse in Bethnal Green, where he was allowed to garden and tutored Potter’s children in Latin and Greek. For details of how Smart

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was “rescued” from this second confinement by his friend John Sherratt in 1762, see Chris Mounsey, Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 239–47. Smart never chose to publish the manuscript of Jubilate Agno, nor did its remains appear in print until 1939, when the religious poet William Force Stead discovered it in the library of a friend and put it in chronological order (to the best of his abilities), titling it Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam (later Latinized and abbreviated by W. H. Bond). Even at the high tide of modernism, critics were confused by the poem’s unconventional form, which seemed to defy classification. One contemporary critic called it “decidedly difficult to describe as a whole . . . a kind of diary, or register of thoughts and fancies during some years in more than one asylum”; Edmund Blunden, “An Eighteenth-Century Psalmist: Poet’s Song from Bedlam,” Times Literary Supplement (February 25, 1939): 122. The poem has variously been read as a calendar, a logbook, a journal, and a wacky scratchpad for Smart’s later religious poetry—in short, as anything but a poem. Sophia B. Blaydes, e.g., reads Jubilate Agno as having “deteriorated from an artistic and religious work into a mere calendar”; Blaydes, Christopher Smart as a Poet of His Time: A Re-Appraisal (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), 103. Arthur Sherbo views it as a calendar; Sherbo, “The Dating and Order of the Fragments of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno,” Harvard Library Bulletin 10 (1956): 201–7. For W. K. Wimsatt, it is an “antiphonal logbook”; “Imitation as Freedom,” in Wimsatt, Day of the Leopards: Essays in Defense of Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 127. Christopher Devlin considers it a “private spiritual diary,” which “after several hundred lines . . . appears to degenerate into a meaningless list of oddities”; Devlin, Poor Kit Smart (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961), 100, 17. Robert A. Brittain calls it a “diary or commonplace book”; Brittain, Poems by Christopher Smart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 275. For Robert P. Fitzgerald, the For versicles constitute “a journal” reflecting “a habit of meditation upon Biblical verses”; Fitzgerald, “The Form of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno,” Studies in English Literature 8 (1968): 487–99 (493). Yet, as I shall argue, Jubilate Agno is a complex system and a poetic example of organic form as this concept was being developed in the arena of natural philosophy. 2. See Christopher Smart, Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam, ed. William Force Stead (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939); Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, ed. W. H. Bond, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1954); and JA. I prefer Bond’s placement of the Let and For versicles on opposite pages, but Williamson’s is the most thoroughly annotated edition, which I use here for that reason. She follows Bond’s arrangement of the fragments (A, B, C, and

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D) of the holograph, although she combines Bond’s B1 and B2 into a single unit (B). Two features of Jubilate Agno to keep in mind are that two of the four fragments (A and D) contain only Let lines, while the second half of Fragment B (ll. 296–768) contains merely For lines. 3. Harriet Guest, A Form of Sound Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 144. 4. In De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (1753), Smart’s friend Bishop Robert Lowth outlined an antiphonal pattern of answering halves in lines of biblical poetry (particularly the Psalms), which he called parallel members (parallelismus membrorum), showing how these could relate semantically or stylistically. Before his study, there had been little understanding of the nature of biblical poetry, which uses neither meter nor rhyme. Nor in fact, were people aware of its existence. On the different types of parallelism characterizing biblical verse, see Robert Alter, “The Characteristics of Ancient Hebrew Poetry,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 611–24. In her introduction to Jubilate Agno, Williamson argues that Smart’s For versicles are based on the antiphonal pattern of Hebrew verse as expounded by Lowth and that they were intended to “supply comment—moral, doctrinal, biographical, prophetic—on the LET verses, and at the same time to follow each other consecutively, thus producing a complex structure of vertical and horizontal relationships” (JA xxvi). When Bond announced his discovery of the antiphonal relation of the Let and For versicles in Jubilate Agno, he observed that “the interplay and alternation of phrases beginning with these words run all through the liturgy”; Bond,“Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno,” Harvard Library Bulletin 4 (1950): 39–52 (45). 5. Devlin, Poor Kit Smart, 128. 6. Noel Chevalier, “A Blessed Conveyancer of Letters: Christopher Smart, Author and Editor of Miscellanies in Jubilate Agno,” English Studies in Canada 21 (1995): 393–406 (402). 7. Mounsey, Clown of God, 14. 8. Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 403–15. 9. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). See Joel B. Green, “What Does It Mean to Be Human? Another Chapter in the Ongoing Interaction of Science and Scripture,” in From Cells to Souls—and Beyond: Changing Portraits of Human Nature, ed. Malcom Jeeves (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 179–98 (196). 10. Alan Liu also remarks that Smart’s Let phrases tend to assume “as

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much authority as the fiat, ‘Let there be light’”; Liu, “Christopher Smart’s ‘Uncommunicated Letters’: Translation and the Ethics of Literary History,” Boundary 2 14.1–2 (1985–86): 115–46 (123). 11. “What we have in the central portion of Jubilate Agno (1.160–295),” according to Williamson, “is rather a collection of notes from which Smart’s Principia might have evolved if he had had the inclination and the perseverance to develop them”; Karina Williamson, “Smart’s Principia: Science and Anti-Science in Jubilate Agno,” Review of English Studies 30.120 (1979): 409– 22 (419). 12. Geoffrey Hartman, The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 322. 13. See Clement Hawes, “Smart’s Bawdy Politic: Masculinity and the Second Age of Horn in Jubilate Agno,” Criticism 37.3 (1995): 413–42; Lance Bertelsen, “Journalism, Carnival, and Jubilate Agno,” ELH 59 (1992): 357–84. 14. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 148. 15. Ibid. 16. A rough definition would explain the pluripotent stem cell, derived from the earliest stages of a developing embryo, as capable of generating selfperpetuating lines of cellular tissue from different specialized cell types of the body, including muscle, nerve, heart, and blood; the totipotent stem cell can generate the entire organism from itself. 17. John Aikin, An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (Warrington, England, 1777), 10–11. 18. “Beneath the animal’s outer covering lurks an area of mystery; under the hair, feathers or shell, there lie the secret and confusing world of organs and the machinery of the entrails,” François Jacob writes: “In a plant, in contrast, nothing is concealed”; Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, trans. Betty E. Spillmann (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 45. 19. Hartman, Fate of Reading, 98. 20. Erasmus Darwin outlines the Linnaean system in his preface to The Loves of Plants (1789), the second part of The Botanic Garden. 21. James L. Larson, Reason and Experience: The Representation of Natural Order in the Work of Carl von Linné (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 151. 22. See n. 16 above. 23. The Platonic background for Christianity can be discerned throughout Jubilate Agno. For early church fathers, the ancient concept of soul came much closer to vital power; see Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How it Changed the World (New York: Free Press, 2004), 18.

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24. To borrow another poet’s words, see Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet “Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life” and Prometheus Unbound, 3.3.113. 25. Guest, Form of Sound Words, 174. 26. I am referencing Sigmund Freud’s well-known concept of polymorphous perversity, according to which all parts of the body (beyond the genitalia) are open to pleasure; see The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 15:209. 27. Jakob Behmen [Böhme], Signatura Rerum; or, The Signature of all Things, trans. John Ellistone (London, 1651), 77. 28. Cited in Harry Austryn Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 1:218. 29. Other critics have noticed the relation between Smart’s images of impression, punching, and molding and Lockean psychology; e.g., Edward Joseph Katz, “‘Action and Speaking Are One’: A Logological Reading of Smart’s Prophetic Rhetoric,” and Betty Rizzo, “Christopher Smart’s Poetics,” both in Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, ed. Clement Hawes (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 47–66 (60), 121–34 (123). 30. Technically, the terms natura naturata and natura naturans existed prior to, but were given widespread currency by, Spinoza in his Ethics (Part 1, scholium 29). 31. For related discussion, see Marcus Walsh,“A Very Peculiar Practice: Christopher Smart and the Poetic Language of ‘Early Romanticism,’” in Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 151–65 (157–58) and Allan J. Gedalof, “Smart’s Poetics in Jubilate Agno,” English Studies in Canada 5 (1979): 262–74 (262–64). Gedalof relates the typecasting image to the philosophy of George Berkeley (1685–1753), specifically the latter’s concept of how ideas are imprinted on the mind through the senses. 32. Jones adds, “Fragment C contains 162 plants commonly found in herbals or gardening dictionaries, and Fragment D a miscellaneous array of 237 natural objects,” and points out that this “scientific allusion . . . must have reached enormous proportions in the 475 ‘Let’ lines that have been lost”; William Powell Jones, The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 167. 33. Christopher Smart, The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 4:3.

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34. See the discussion of Schiller in the Introduction to this book. 35. Moira Dearnley, The Poetry of Christopher Smart (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 163–64. 36. Hartman, Fate of Reading, 91. 37. David B. Ricks, “A Note on Smart’s Jubilate Agno,” English Language Notes 27.4 (1990): 53–56 (54). 38. Lines 41–42, quoted in Dearnley, Poetry of Christopher Smart, 165. 39. For a history of this invention, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 40. Robert D. Saltz, “Reason in Madness: Christopher Smart’s Poetic Development,” Southern Humanities Review 4.1 (1970): 57–68 (66). 41. Paul Miner, “Blake’s London: Times and Spaces,” Studies in Romanticism 41 (2002): 279–316 (292). 42. Thomas Hankins traces the history of this instrument, which he believes to have been actually constructed, in “The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis-Bertrand Castel; or, The Instrument That Wasn’t,” Osiris 9 (1994): 141– 56. The provenance of this instrument has occasioned some debate. 43. Christopher Smart, “A Letter from Mrs. Mary Midnight to the Royal Society, Containing Some New and Curious Improvements upon the Cat Organ,” The Midwife; or, The Old Woman’s Magazine, 3 vols. (15 December, 1750; London: 1750–53), 1:98–102 (98–99). 44. Ibid., 103. 45. Robert Boyle, The Philosophical Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle Esq; Abridg’d, Methodiz’d, and Dispos’d Under the General Heads of Physics, Statics, Pneumatics, Natural-History, Chymistry, and Medicine, ed. Peter Shaw, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London, 1738), 3:77. 46. Reil, Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (Rhapsodies on the Application of Psychic Curative Methods for Spirit Disorders; 1803), quoted in Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 271. 47. Boyle, Philosophical Works, 3:82–83. 48. A notable exception is Thomas S. Hall, Ideas of Life and Matter: Studies in the History of General Physiology 600 B.C.–1900 A.D., 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). 49. Friedrich Schiller, Philosophy of Physiology in Medicine, Psychology and Literature, trans. Kenneth Dewhurst and Nigel Reeves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 149–75 (160). 50. Boyle, Philosophical Works, 2:139.

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51. Marjorie Hope Nicolson discusses Smart’s concept of “ocular harmony” in Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s “Opticks” and the Eighteenth Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 85–87. 52. Quoted in Maarten Franssen, “The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis Bertrand Castel: The Science and Aesthetics of an Eighteenth-Century Cause Célèbre,” Tractrix 3 (1991): 15–77 (21). 53. Franssen, “Ocular Harpsichord,” 26. 54. Hankins, “Ocular Harpsichord,” 143. 55. Specifically, classical physics. Smart’s view of the rainbow would find support in quantum mechanics, as Arkady Plotnitsky points out (in relation to Keats, however); Plotnitsky, “Conclusion: Without Absolutes,” in Idealism Without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004), 241–51 (249); see also his “‘In Principle Observable’: Werner Heisenberg’s Discovery of Quantum Mechanics and Romantic Imagination,” Parallax 10.3 (2004): 20–35. 56. So too, e.g., in Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” when the poet stumbles on a field of daffodils and declares: “Ten thousand saw I at a glance, / Tossing their heads in sprightly dance” (ll. 11–12). 57. John Birch, author of An Essay on the Application of Medical Electricity (1802) and surgeon at Saint Thomas’s Hospital in London, had a separate unit constructed for electrical therapy. See G. D. Schott, “William Blake’s Milton, John Birch’s ‘Electrical Magic,’ and the ‘Falling Star,’” Lancet 362 (2003): 2114–16. Blake commented that “Electricity is the wonderful cause” of his wife’s recovery in his letter to William Hayley of October 23, 1804 (E 756). 58. In 1748 the British physician Henry Baker made a case for the medicinal use of electricity as practiced elsewhere in Europe; “A Letter from Mr. Henry Baker F.R.S., to the President, Concerning Several Medical Experiments of Electricity,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 45 (1748): 270–75. 59. Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 26. 60. Boyle, Philosophical Works, 2:703. 61. As Chevalier has noticed, “Smart produced the text of a poem in an environment free of the limits of conventional publishing. In this, Jubilate Agno most resembles William Blake’s Illuminated Books, in which ‘The Author and Printer’ are represented as the same person on all the title pages”; Chevalier, “Blessed Conveyancer of Letters,” 400. And the fact that Jubilate

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Agno resists all teleological apprehension has been widely observed. Mark W. Booth remarks, “The mode of mind dominant in this poetry relies little on continuity through time, to the frustration of the linear apprehension generally hoped for by readers”; Booth, “Song Form and the Mind in Christopher Smart’s Later Poetry,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 15 (1986): 211–25 (211). Clement Hawes suggests that the poem’s resistance to teleology reflects “Smart’s recreation of the non-linear rhetorical techniques found everywhere in the matrix of enthusiastic rhetoric”; Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 166. 62. Jubilate Agno is the only major poem by Christopher Smart not published during his lifetime and the only one for which an autograph manuscript remains. 63. John Hollander, “Blake and the Metrical Contract,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965): 293–310.

Chapter Three: Blake’s Living Form 1. Blake’s deliberate confusion of the Zoas, whose identity can be as slippery as their names (Tharmas, Urizen, Luvah, Los), is part of the point: the falseness of individuation. This is complicated by the fact that each Zoa divides further into gendered halves (Enion, Ahania, Vala, and Enitharmon). 2. See G. S. Rousseau, “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility,” in Studies in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 3, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Lade (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 137–57. As Nelson Hilton points out, “A vision of solid fibres reflects a solidified perception, blind to the ‘spirits’ and the ‘Spiritual Cause’ (M 26.44) that determine life”; Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 100. 3. A more rigorous examination of Blake’s vocabulary of petrification, which in the context of geology also meant fossilization, remains to be made. A good place to begin is the first volume of Buffon’s Natural History (translated by William Smellie in 1781), containing “The History of the Earth” and “Proofs of the Theory of the Earth,” and Georges Cuvier’s Essay on the Theory of the Earth, translated into English in 1813. Noah Heringman surveys more demonstrable connections between Blake and his friend George Cum-

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berland, a celebrated geologist, as well as to other sources such as Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1795), and Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1789–91) in “Blake, Geology, and Primordial Substance,” in his Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004), 94–160. Abraham Rees’s Cyclopædia, for which Blake engraved seven images (not having to do with science), also contains a section on geology. 4. Jean Paul Richter, Vorschule der Ästhetik (School for Aesthetics), ed. Norbert Miller (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), 46, translations mine. Paradoxically, with respect to Blake, Richter adopted the penname “Jean” after Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 5. By this point in the eighteenth century, the term regeneration had replaced reproduction for the biological activity of producing new organic parts to replace those that had been severed or destroyed, such as a lizard’s tail. 6. I use Paul’s phrase for political powers (“the powers that be are ordained of God”; Romans 13:1); although he was not one of Blake’s favorite biblical writers, the sentiment suits. 7. The phrase is from Morris Eaves, “Blake and the Artistic Machine: An Essay in Decorum and Technology,” PMLA 92.5 (1977): 903–27. It is salutary to keep in mind W. J. T. Mitchell’s suggestion that with regard to “filthy lucre,” “Blake didn’t see himself ‘above’ this filth, only as more clear-sighted and explicit about it”; Mitchell, “Chaosthetics: Blake’s Sense of Form,” Huntington Library Quarterly 58.3–4 (1995): 441–58 (446). 8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic, 1979), 273. 9. Richter speaks, again, as part of the contemporary Zeitgeist when he remarks that “there are beautiful inner wonders whose life the poet may not dissect with the physiological anatomical knife, even if he could”; Richter, Vorschule der Ästhetik, 45. 10. Most critics recognize the central role of Blake’s reader in shaping the form of Jerusalem. Kay Parkhurst Easson writes that Jerusalem “entices the reader’s enthusiastic involvement with the book, and in so doing initiates the transmutation of his vision from reasoned analysis to imaginative participation”; Easson, “Blake and the Art of the Book,” in Blake in His Time, ed. Robert N. Essick and Donald Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978): 35–52 (37). Thomas R. Frosch argues that “Blake’s poems describe a reality that . . . can also have no single representation—no single myth; instead, we must keep creating and responding to it in new visions”; Frosch, The Awakening of Albion: The Renovation of the Body in the Poetry of William Blake (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 183. Roger Easson sug-

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gests that “Jerusalem mirrors the state of the reader”; Easson, “William Blake and His Reader in Jerusalem,” in Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on “The Four Zoas,” “Milton,” “Jerusalem,” ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 309–27 (314). Anne K. Mellor claims that the “liberated imagination” of the reader “can sketch any line it chooses around the dynamic pulsations of Energy. . . us[ing] reason to clarify and organize its ever new images”; Mellor, Blake’s Human Form Divine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 327. Stuart Curran remarks that for the reader “to attempt to define the whole from the parts is to engage in a dynamic of mental expansion unique even in the history of that most comprehensive form, the epic”; Curran, “The Structures of Jerusalem,” in Blake’s Sublime Allegory, 329–46 (346). 11. See Bindman’s introduction to Jerusalem, J, 297. 12. W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). See Northrop Frye,“Poetry and Design in William Blake,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 10 (1951): 35–42; and Jean Hagstrum, William Blake, Poet and Painter: An Introduction to the Illuminated Verse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 13. He remarks that “one is tempted to take refuge in a paradox and propose that the form of the poem is some species of ‘antiform,’ and that this structure is a denial of our usual ideas of structure”; Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art, 165. 14. In 1791 Blake engraved several plates for Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden. He satirized John Hunter as “Jack Tearguts” in “An Island on the Moon” (1784) and studied anatomy with Hunter’s older brother, William, at the Royal Academy. See Jane M. Oppenheimer, “A Note on William Blake and John Hunter,” Journal of the History of Medicine 1.1 (1946), 41–45; and David Charles Leonard, “Erasmus Darwin and William Blake,” EighteenthCentury Life 4 (1978): 79–81. On Hunter in the context of contemporary life science, see François Duchesneau, “Vitalism in Late Eighteenth-Century Physiology: The Cases of Barthez, Blumenbach and John Hunter,” in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 259–95. 15. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, quoted in Romanticism and Science, 1773–1883, ed. Tim Fulford, 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 2002), 5:24. For Darwin, the “spirit of animation” had four modes of action through four different faculties of the animal sensorium, namely irritability, sensibility, voluntarity, and associability in their inactive state, and irritation, sensation, volition, and association in their active. John Hunter,

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A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation and Gunshot Wounds, quoted in Romanticism and Science, 1773–1833, 5:11. 16. See Erasmus Darwin, Phylotologia; or, The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening, in Romanticism and Science, 1773–1883, 4:83. 17. Readers have long sought the “organising principle” of Jerusalem, as Henry Summerfield phrases it, and in the broader context of Romantic organicism the term is apt, for it suggests an analogy to vital power; see Summerfield, A Guide to the Books of William Blake for Innocent and Experienced Readers (Gerrards Cross, England: Colin Smythe, 1998), 678. 18. Morris Eaves, William Blake’s Theory of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 31. 19. Witnessing the self-generation of Urizen at the start of Milton, Los “became what he beheld” (M 2). 20. To take one example from the poem, in plate 78 a disgruntled (to my mind) bird-headed man sits on a rock above text that describes the apocalyptic ravening of sleeping humanity by “The Spectres of Albion’s Twelve Sons” and the heroic response of Los. No one quite knows what to make of this image, or whether it is silly or scary. For Joseph Wicksteed, this “composite figure part human, part bird, probably represents LOS, the Timespirit, in a mood of profoundly conflicting emotions”; Wicksteed, William Blake’s “Jerusalem” (London: Trianon Press for the William Blake Trust, 1953), 226. For Henry Lesnick, the figure represents “Hand, who by synecdoche represents all of the spectrous sons” of Albion; Lesnick, “Narrative Structure and the Antithetical Vision of Jerusalem,” in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 391–412 (400). S. Foster Damon views the figure as a personification of Egypt, sitting upon the shore of the Sea of Time and Space; Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1958), 473. For John Adlard, “There seems little doubt that the head of the man sitting gloomily on a rock in Jerusalem, Plate 78, is the eagle-head of St. John”; Adlard, The Sports of Cruelty: Fairies, Folk-Songs, Charms and Other Country Matters in the Work of William Blake (London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1972), 121. Judith Ott discusses it as “part of a visual tradition traceable to ancient Egyptian sarcophagi reliefs . . . it signifies grief ”; Ott, “The Bird-Man of William Blake’s Jerusalem,” Blake Newsletter 10.2 (1976): 48–51 (49). Given that the figure has no obvious relation to the text, critics are left to take stabs in the dark in the sometimes exasperating, sometimes exciting quest for meaning. 21. On Blake’s conception of soul, see Nancy Moore Goslee, “‘Soul’ in

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Blake’s Writing: Redeeming the World,” Wordsworth Circle 33 (2002): 18–23, and her “‘Soul-Shudd’ring Vacuum’: Space for Subjects in Later Blake,” European Romantic Review 15.3 (2004): 391–407; cf. Stephen C. Behrendt, “‘The Soul of Sweet Delight’: Blake and the Sensual Soul,” European Romantic Review 15.3 (2004): 409–23. 22. Curran, “Structures of Jerusalem,” 330. 23. Robert N. Essick,“Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 251–71 (260). 24. See Joan Steigerwald, “Goethe’s Morphology: Urphänomene and Aesthetic Appraisal,” Journal of the History of Biology 35.2 (2002): 291–328. 25. In this context, we might consider Janet Warner’s claim that “Eternal Form,” rather than “Fallen Form,” is what Blake sought to illuminate as “the essential human form of the natural world”; Warner, Blake and the Language of Art (Kingston, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), 33, emphasis mine. 26. Wolff ’s colleague at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, Peter Simon Pallas (who joined the faculty in 1767), also focused on the concept of Zeugungsart to demonstrate the continuity between plants and animals in his Charakteristik der Thierpflanzen [Animal-Plants] worin von den Gattungen derselben allgemeine Entwürfe, und von denen dazu gehörigen Arten kurtze Beschreibungen gegeben werden; nebst den vornehmsten Synonymen der Schriftsteller (Nuremberg, 1787), 46–48. 27. Schelling, Proteus of Nature (first published in his Zeitschrift für speculative Physik), quoted in Sue R. Morgan, “Schelling and His Naturphilosophie,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 25–37 (34). 28. Ibid., 35. 29. Ibid. 30. J. F. Blumenbach, Handbuch der Naturgeschichte, 9th ed. (Göttingen: Heinrich Kieterich, 1814), §19; translations mine. 31. Darwin, Phylotologia, quoted in Romanticism and Science, 1773– 1833, 4:84. 32. See chap. 2, n. 26, for Freud’s concept of polymorphous perversity. Echoing Freud’s view of culture, Herbert Marcuse observes, “The societal organization of the sex instinct taboos as perversions practically all its manifestations which do not serve or prepare for the procreative function. Without the most severe restrictions, they would counteract the sublimation on which the growth of culture depends”; Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Beacon, 1966), 49.

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33. Wicksteed, William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” 219. 34. Damon, William Blake, 473. 35. Ibid., 471; David V. Erdman, ed., The Illuminated Blake (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1974), 326; Minna Doskow, William Blake’s “Jerusalem”: Structure and Meaning in Poetry and Picture (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 99; Laurence Binyon, The Engraved Designs of William Blake (New York: Da Capo, 1967), 133; Wicksteed, William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” 197–98. 36. In the sixth emblem of The Gates of Paradise, a series distilled from a large group of designs in Blake’s notebook, a winged human infant breaks out of an egg and the caption states: “At length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell.” 37. See the Introduction and chap. 2, n. 16. 38. Trembley made the regenerative powers of the polyp known to René Réaumur, who demonstrated them to the French Académie des Sciences, and the report of the experiments flew back across the English Channel. Within two years Henry Baker had published An Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Polype (1743), which Trembley followed with his own Mémoires, pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce, à bras en forme de cornes (1744). The president of the English Royal Society himself was forced to the radical admission that plants and animals might share the same essential nature. For a detailed account of Trembley’s experiments with the polyp, see John R. Baker, Abraham Trembley of Geneva: Scientist and Philosopher, 1710–1748 (London: Edward Arnold, 1952). See too, Marc J. Ratcliff, “Abraham Trembley’s Strategy of Generosity and the Scope of Celebrity in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Isis 95 (2004): 555–75. 39. Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968): 1:241. Others have noticed the self-generating polyp as a recurring image in Jerusalem, and a frightening one. Mellor calls it “Blake’s culminating image of the fallen physical world” and notes that “its menacing and proliferating tentacles and its poison combined to make it an appropriate image of the endlessly multiplying, self-devouring, vegetated world”; Mellor, Blake’s Human Form Divine, 316. Paul Miner finds in it evidence that Blake “always carried within him a kind of pathological cognizance of the world of gestation”; Miner, “The Polyp as a Symbol in the Poetry of William Blake,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 2.1 (1960): 198–205 (205). On Blake’s complex relation to Newtonian science, see Donald D. Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s “Opticks” and the Eighteenth-Century Poets (Princeton:

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Princeton University Press, 1946); and Stuart Peterfreund, William Blake in a Newtonian World: Essays on Literature as Art and Science (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). 40. Aristotle’s work on animal generation included observations on lizard-tail regeneration, and Melchisedech Thevenot demonstrated the phenomenon at the Paris Academy of Sciences in June and July 1686. In a brief dissertation of 1688, Claude Perrault ascribed this instance of animal regeneration to preformed germs containing replacement parts, and in 1712 René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur presented his work on crayfish claw–regeneration at the Paris Academy, also explaining the biological phenomenon of regeneration through the theory of preformation. See Charles E. Dinsmore, “Urodele Limb and Tail Regeneration in Early Biological Thought: An Essay on Scientific Controversy and Social Change,” International Journal of Developmental Biology 40 (1996): 621–27 (621). 41. Aram Vartanian, “Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie, and EighteenthCentury French Materialism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 11.3 (1950): 259– 86 (260, 274). 42. Denis Diderot, Le Rêve d’Alembert: La Suite d’un entretien entre M. d’Alembert et M. Diderot, ed. Colas Duflo (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 101–2ff. 43. S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, rev. ed. (Hanover: University Press of New England for Brown University Press, 1988), 67. 44. Karl Kroeber, “Delivering Jerusalem,” in Blake’s Sublime Allegory, 347–67 (354, 363). 45. G. S. Rousseau, “Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightenment England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 3.1 (1969): 108–35 (109). 46. F. W. J. Schelling, Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, quoted in Joan Steigerwald, “Epistemologies of Rupture: The Problem of Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy,” Studies in Romanticism 41 (2002): 545–84 (556). 47. Stefari Engelstein, “The Regenerative Geography of the Text in William Blake,” Modern Language Studies 30.2 (2000): 61–86 (79). 48. Northrop Frye contends that Jerusalem is patterned on four stages of biblical history; Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947). Edward J. Rose proposes a fourfold pattern of natural temporality based on the seasons; Rose, “The Structure of Blake’s Jerusalem,” Bucknell Review 11:3 (1963): 35–54. Joanne Witke patterns it on the four Gospels and their imagined audiences; Witke, “Jerusalem: A Synoptic Poem,” Comparative Literature 22 (1970): 265–78. Mellor reads the poem according to four aspects of the human form in Blake’s Human Form Divine.

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49. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art, 171. Henry Lesnick suggests an alternate structural pattern, such that the “major division in the narrative occurs between the first eighty-eight plates, in which the primary focus is on the fallen condition, and the last twelve, which describe the restoration of man”; Lesnick, “Narrative Structure,” 292. Karl Kiralis also deviates from the idea of the fourfold structure, suggesting that the story of Albion’s “awaking to Eternal Life” (J 4–12) is patterned on three stages of human life: childhood, adulthood, and old age; Kiralis, “The Theme and Structure of William Blake’s Jerusalem,” in The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto (London: Gollancz, 1957), 139–62. Morton Paley proposes that “there is a story in Jerusalem, consisting of many episodes, but this diachronic aspect of the work is for the most part subordinated to its synchronic aspect: the interrelationship of themes as manifested in its ‘spatial form’”; Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s “Jerusalem” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 303. In R. Paul Yoder’s words,“The majority of critics today read the poem with the assumption that its parts do not cohere linearly or chronologically and that it is a fool’s errand to search for a narrative in Jerusalem,” though he himself proceeds to do just this in “What Happens When: Narrative and the Changing Sequence of Plates in Blake’s Jerusalem, Chapter 2,” Studies in Romanticism 41 (2002): 259–79 (259). 50. Milton, “Lycidas,” ll. 126–27, in John Milton: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 51. “Freedom in this sense is not, as it is for the liberal tradition, a negative matter of freedom from external restraint (that is, the kind of freedom recognized and validated by the market),” he adds; “This is a creative, affirmative, positive freedom, the freedom of a life of creative power”; Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 266. 52. Mellor argues that the figures in the final version of the plate represent a platonic union of Vala and Jerusalem, representing physical and spiritual aspects of the female form; see Mellor, Blake’s Human Form Divine, 302. For John E. Grant, by contrast, they represent Vala and Albion; see Grant, “Two Flowers in the Garden of Experience,” in William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Providence: Brown University Press, 1969): 333–67 (354–65). These are two examples taken at random from either side of the debate. 53. See, e.g., Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 54. Blake’s attitude toward women founders on ambivalence: he recognized the power structures limiting and subordinating women, though his

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representations of women in his illuminated work may be seen to perpetuate the same stereotypes he seeks to undermine. 55. In this, Blake presages Michel Foucault, who in discussing the surveillance of sexuality in the nineteenth century noted, “Breaking the rules of marriage or seeking strange pleasures brought an equal measure of condemnation”; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 38. Sigmund Freud wrote similarly that “heterosexual genital love, which has remained exempt from outlawry, is itself restricted by further limitations, in the shape of insistence upon legitimacy and monogamy”; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 60. 56. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 258. 57. Carmen S. Kreiter, “Evolution and William Blake,” Studies in Romanticism 3 (1964–65): 110–18 (117). 58. William Harvey, The Works of William Harvey, trans. Robert Willis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 374. 59. Shirley A. Roe, Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth-Century Embryology and the Haller-Wolff Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 36. See too her “Anatomia animata: The Newtonian Physiology of Albrecht von Haller,” in Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences: Essays in Honor of I. Bernard Cohen, ed. Everett Mendelsohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 273–300 (286). 60. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art, 143. 61. Elizabeth B. Gasking, Investigations into Generation, 1651–1828 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 101. 62. Leo Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 63. Rousseau, Emile, 273. 64. Neither Wicksteed, who labels the image “Albion Awakes” (Blake’s Jerusalem, 243), nor Damon, who calls it “The resurrection of Man” (William Blake, 474), doubts that the figure in plate 95 is Albion. But many (see, e.g., Doskow, Blake’s Jerusalem, 162) consider him indistinguishable from Los by the end of the poem. 65. Hagstrum, William Blake, Poet and Painter, 118. 66. “Artistic ideas,” as Tristanne J. Connolly points out, “just like human beings, can be imprisoned by bodies which obscure rather than show forth their eternal forms”; Connolly, William Blake and the Body (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 121. 67. Johachim Dietrich Brandis, Versuch über der Lebenskraft (Hanover, 1795), 1, translation mine.

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Chapter Four: Shelley’s Vitalist “Witch” 1. Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 107. 2. Friedrich Schiller, Medicine, Psychology and Literature, ed. Kenneth Dewhurst and Nigel Reeves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 157. 3. John Thelwall, An Essay, Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality; Read at the Theatre, Guy’s Hospital, January 26, 1793; In Which Several of the Opinions of John Hunter Are Examined and Controverted (London, 1793), 15. Writing to request a copy of Thelwall’s book, Coleridge quoted lines 44–47 of “The Eolian Harp” (“And what if all of animated Nature / Be but organic harps diversely fram’d / That tremble into thought as o’er them sweeps / Plastic & vast &c—”), suggesting a connection between animal vitality and the “one Life” animating nature (CCW 1:294–95). 4. Lawrence’s second book, Natural History of Man (1819), containing pre-Darwinian evolution theory, was denounced as atheist and associated with French materialism (hence potentially revolutionary). In order to continue his position at the Royal College of Surgeons he was forced to repudiate it. See Kentwood D. Wells, “Sir William Lawrence (1783–1867): A Study of Pre-Darwinian Ideas on Heredity and Variation,” Journal of the History of Biology 4.2 (1971): 319–61; and Peter G. Mudford, “William Lawrence and The Natural History of Man,” Journal of the History of Ideas 29.3 (1968): 430–36. 5. Such language harks back to the Platonic world of powers (logos), but it was also in line with contemporary biological thought, and the two were not mutually exclusive. 6. Coleridge’s elevation of symbol over allegory has been productive of critical debate, beginning with Paul de Man’s claim that Coleridge privileges the symbol as “a mere reflection of a more original unity that does not exist in the material world”; de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 192. For a helpful analysis of the issues at stake in the symbol-allegory distinction, see Thomas McFarland, “Involute and Symbol in the Romantic Imagination,” in Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam’s Dream, ed. J. Robert Barth and John L. Mahoney (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 29–57. 7. Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” l. 94; unless otherwise indicated, all references to Shelley’s poetry, cited by line number parenthetically in the text, derive from SPP. All prose references to SPP refer to page number.

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8. Carl Grabo argues that the poem “reconciles science and metaphysics with an exactness and fullness not hitherto known”; Grabo, The Meaning of “The Witch of Atlas” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 18. Harold Bloom considers it “the central document in [his] argument, more so than ‘Prometheus’ or ‘The Triumph of Life’”; Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 165. Although Sharon Ruston demonstrates convincingly that Shelley’s poetry “can be placed among the many contemporary attempts to give a more specific definition to the word ‘life,’” she does not discuss this poem, which I take to be his most sustained aesthetic engagement with the problem of life; Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 121. 9. Jeffrey Wattles gestures toward something similar when he writes, “Phenomenology has begun the careful description of a layer of life that underlies our cognitive achievements. Consciousness can only achieve its awareness of things, meanings, values, and persons through the spontaneities of a deeper level of life. Let us here accept the term ‘ontopoetic’ for this primordial constitutive level”; Wattles, “Towards a Phenomenology of Courageous Willing,” in Phenomenology of Life: Meeting the Challenges of the Present-Day World, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Netherlands: Springer, 2005): 81–95 (92). See too Hans Jonas’s definition of a primordial level of life in “Life, Death, and the Body in a Theory of Being,” Review of Metaphysics 19 (1965): 3–23, and The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). In Life: The Phenomenology of Life as a Starting Point for Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka articulates a concept of the “ontopoiesis” of life with origins in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. To foreground the philosophical strangeness of this term, which we have not yet mastered, I will use the more archaic ontopoietic, rather than ontopoetic. 10. William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 1:137. 11. On Shelley’s attendance at John Abernethy’s lectures, see Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1858), 2:552–53. 12. In a letter of July 1811, Shelley wrote: “I still remain firm in my resolve to study surgery—you will see that I shall” (LPS 1:1231). 13. Carl Grabo: “Prometheus Unbound”: An Interpretation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935); Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Edward Earle, 1818), 1:393, 401. On the “spirit of animation,” see chap. 3, n. 15, above. 14. F xv–xxxiii; Ruston, Shelley and Vitality.

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15. Lawrence dedicated his Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man to Blumenbach, theorist of the Bildungstrieb. 16. Elsewhere Coleridge gives us a picture of what it might be like for words to shape themselves epigenetically in the manner of microscopic organisms: “There is a sort of minim immortal among the animalcula infusoria which has not naturally either birth, or death, absolute beginning, or absolute end, for at a certain period a small point appears on its back, which depends and lengthens till the creature divides into two, and the same process recommences in each of the halves now become integral. This may be a fanciful, but it is by no means a bad emblem of the formation of words, and may facilitate the conception, how immense a nomenclature may be organized from a few simple sounds” (CCW 7.1:83). 17. As Kathleeen Coburn notes, Schelling makes use of the same distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans in a book annotated by Coleridge, Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (CCW 5.2:220n). 18. Samuel Johnson, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 437–39. 19. Stuart M. Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 147. 20. Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, 159. 21. Jerrold E. Hogle, “Metaphor and Metamorphosis in Shelley’s ‘The Witch of Atlas,’” Studies in Romanticism 19 (1980): 327–53 (330). See also his Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 22. Stuart M. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 147. 23. Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, 181. 24. David Perkins, The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 119, 128. 25. J. C. Reil, Über die Erkenntniss und Cur der Fieber, quoted in Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 262. 26. Whereas Aristotle considered the heart the seat of the soul, Plato placed the soul in the brain. The latter suggests that spirit (pneuma) breathed in through the air travels through the body from the lungs to the heart and from there through the arteries to the brain, at which point it directs the nerves and muscles. 27. G. S. Rousseau, “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility,” in Studies in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 3, ed. R. F. Bris-

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senden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 137–57 (147). See also Edwin Clarke, “The Doctrine of the Hollow Nerve in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Medicine, Science, and Culture: Historical Essays in Honor of Owsei Temkin, ed. Lloyd G. Stevenson and Robert P. Multhauf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 123–41. 28. See Patricia S. Churchland, “Self-Representation in Nervous Systems,” in The Self: From Soul to Brain, ed. Joseph LeDoux, Jacek Debiec, and Henry Moss (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 2003), 31–38. Hegel described psychic illness similarly; see Dietrich von Engelhardt, “Hegel’s Philosophical Understanding of Illness,” in Hegel and the Sciences, ed. Robert S. Cohen, and Marx W. Wartofsky (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984), 123–41 (132). 29. Ultimately, Kant distinguished between brain anatomy, related to the external senses, and subjective knowing, or soulish experience as an object of inner sense. For him, the soul could not be made tangible in spatial categories, and his Afterword to the 1795 edition of Soemmerring’s Organ der Seele suggests that while he did consider, at least momentarily, the sensorium commune in terms of Soemmerring’s waters, he was more critical of the book than the latter had expected; see Manfred Wenzel,“Introduction,” UOS 79–81. 30. Richard Cronin,“Shelley’s Witch of Atlas,” Keats-Shelley Journal 26 (1977): 88–100 (100). 31. The polyp’s powers of regeneration were due to the fact that it is “almost entirely made up of fluid, far more than jelly,” Soemmerring pointed out, and in its embryonic form the human being resembles the polyp insofar as it consists of such homogenous fluid. This fluid, he believed, contains our soul and serves as its organ (UOS 205–6). 32. John N. Findlay, “The Hegelian Treatment of Biology and Life,” in Hegel and the Sciences, 87–100 (90–91). 33. Paul-Joseph Barthez, Nouveaux élémens de la science de l’homme, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Goujon et Brunot, 1806), 1:20, translations mine. 34. Ruston, Shelley and Vitality, 114. 35. William Wordsworth, Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, 1977), 1:315. The phrase “living Boat” is from line 78 of “Peter Bell.” 36. Ibid., 1:316, 320. 37. Ibid., 1:319–20. 38. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab (London: P. B. Shelley, 1813), 166 (this note is not in SPP). 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 160. 41. Ibid. 42. As Robert Mitchell remarks, “Shelley was committed to a gradual

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process of nonviolent political reform, rather than revolution”; Mitchell, Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (New York: Routledge, 2007), 166. 43. See Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 27. 44. Michael O’Neill, “Fictions, Visionary Rhyme and Human Interest: A Reading of Shelley’s ‘The Witch of Atlas,’” Keats-Shelley Review 2 (1987): 105–33 (129). 45. Ebenezer Sibly, The Key to Physic (1794), quoted in Romanticism and Science, 1773–1833, ed. Timothy Fulford, 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 2002), 5:213. 46. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 33. 47. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, ed. M. J. Petry, 3 vols. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970) 1:241. 48. See note 3, above. 49. Martin Wallen, City of Health, Fields of Disease: Revolutions in the Poetry, Medicine, and Philosophy of Romanticism (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004), 151. 50. Schelling, Ages of the World, 96. 51. Grabo, Meaning of “The Witch of Atlas,” 60. 52. Bloom refers specifically to Spenser’s Fairie Queene (3.8.5–9) in Shelley’s Mythmaking, 197–99. 53. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 153–54. 54. David Rubin, “A Study of Antinomies in Shelley’s’ The Witch of Atlas,” Studies in Romanticism 8.4 (1969): 216–28 (223). 55. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 152. 56. Diane Long Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 250–51. 57. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1951), 59. 58. The phenomenon fascinated natural historians and biologists, particularly those influenced by John Brown’s theory of excitability, which held that every living creature was allotted a certain portion of this quality or principle of life, and as the excitability varied, so varied the “life” (the more intense the excitability, the more vivacious the animal); John Brown, The Elements of Medicine, ed. Thomas Beddoes, 2 vols. (London, 1795). Erasmus Darwin refers to Brown’s theory of excitability, using the sensitive plant as evidence that the “fibres of the vegetable world, as well as those of the animal, are excitable into a variety of motions by irritations of external ob-

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jects”; Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols. (London, 1794), 1:101. 59. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts: A Facsimile Edition, with Full Transcriptions and Scholarly Apparatus, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 22 vols. (New York: Garland, 1986–), 5:92. 60. Pierre Hadot discusses the historical complexity of this image in The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). He reveals that nature, rather than being the veil, is often depicted as veiled, in thought ranging from Heraclitus to Heidegger. According to the Romantic version of nature, as articulated by Goethe and Schelling (and that we see also in Shelley’s “Witch of Atlas” and Keats’s Fall of Hyperion), the veil is necessary to human comprehension of the sublimity hidden in nature. 61. G. W. Leibniz, The Labyrinth of the Continuum, trans. Richard T. W. Arthur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 185. 62. Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 2nd ed. (Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971), 155. 63. There is no evidence for such a variant. This is one of the cleanest sections of a poem notable for its heavy revision; see Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, 1:270–71. 64. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic, 1979), 273. 65. Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, 255. 66. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse, 143. 67. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 390. 68. Frederic S. Colwell, “Shelley’s ‘Witch of Atlas’ and the Mythic Geography of the Nile,” ELH 45 (1978): 69–92 (72).

Chapter Five: Keats’s Principle of Monstrosity 1. Andrew Tooke, The Pantheon: Representing the Fabulous Histories of the Heathen Gods, and Most Illustrious Heroes, in a Short, Plain, and Familiar Method by Way of Dialogue: For the Use of Schools (London, 1753), 272. John Lemprière’s lamiae were “monsters of Africa, who had the face and breast of a woman, and the rest of their body like that of a serpent. They allured strangers to come to them, that they might devour them”; Lemprière, A Classical Dictionary: Containing a Copious Account of All the Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors, with the Value of Coins, Weights, and Measures

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Used Among the Greeks and Romans, and a Chronological Table (London: Routledge, 1800), 310. 2. The phrase is from Lamia, 2.237; I follow critical convention in italicizing Lamia, though the poem first appeared in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). This and all further references to Keats’s poetry cited parenthetically by line number in the text are from John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 3. Garrett Stewart, “Lamia and the Language of Metamorphosis,” Studies in Romanticism 15.1 (1976): 3–41 (10). 4. The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–63), 2:173. 5. John Keats, Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 215. 6. Robert Kaufman discusses Shelley’s use of the vocabulary of political economy, particularly calculation, in “Legislators of the Post-Everything World: Shelley’s Defence of Adorno,” ELH 63.3 (1996): 707–33. 7. Robert Browning, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day, in Robert Browning’s Poetry, ed. James F. Loucks (New York: Norton, 1979), 427–28. 8. Isaac Newton, The Principia, trans. Andrew Motte (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1995), 443. 9. On Newton’s influence on eighteenth-century poets, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s “Opticks” and the Eighteenth-Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), and William Powell Jones, The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (London: Paul, 1966). By the end of the century, as Richard Yeo points out, “the increasing specialization of all scientific activity strained the capacity of Newtonianism as a unitary category”; Yeo, “Natural Philosophy (Science),” in The Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 321. 10. Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 149. See too Julia L. Epstein and Mark L. Greenberg, “Decomposing Newton’s Rainbow,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45.1 (1984), 115–40; M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 307–9. 11. William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” l. 28, in Wordsworth, Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1977), 1:357. 12. The dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian ten-

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dencies had been articulated before Nietzsche, the former stressing the classical idea of beauty as a balance of parts and proportion and the latter emphasizing excess and the destruction of formal boundaries. For Nietzsche, Apollonianism was associated with classicism and Dionysianism with Romanticism; see his The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872). As Adrian del Caro points out, “Dionysian” became the code word for a kind of vitality that stood in relation to classicism as content to form; del Caro, “Dionysian Classicism, or Nietzsche’s Appropriation of Aesthetic Form,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50.4 (1989): 589–605 (604). 13. David Perkins, The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 267; see also Garrett Stewart, cited in note 3 above. 14. Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 548; Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 307. 15. David Farrell Krell, Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 13. 16. John Abernethy, The Hunterian Oration for the Year 1819 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819), 42. 17. As Ross Wilson points out with respect to Shelley, “Life passed under oppressive conditions is envisaged as a kind of death, as death-in-life”; Wilson, “Poetry as Reanimation in Shelley,” in The Meaning of “Life” in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, ed. Ross Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2009). Hermione de Almeida, in her reading of the Hyperion poems in terms of Romantic evolution theory, sees the Titans’“fall from power” as simultaneously a fall from “life intensity”; de Almeida, “Prophetic Extinction and the Misbegotten Dream in Keats,” in The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 165–82 (165). 18. John Hunter, A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-shot Wounds (1794; Philadelphia: James Webster, 1817), 63. 19. Many of Hunter’s monstrosities are now specimens in the Hunterian Collection at the Royal College of Surgeons, London. For further discussion, see Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 3–27. 20. For a comparative analysis of the living principle in relation to form building in Blumenbach and Hunter, see François Duchesneau, “Vitalism in Late Eighteenth-Century Physiology: The Cases of Barthez, Blumenbach and John Hunter,” in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985): 259–95. The difference between the development of

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organic forms and inorganic forms such as crystals is that units of the latter arrange themselves according to mutual attractions and repulsions based on a relatively simple equation (or set of equations), whereas organic forms work toward individuation, that is, the expression of organic unity, through “a much more complicated system of simultaneous systems”; C. H. Waddington, “The Character of Biological Form,” in Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art, ed. Lancelot Law Whyte (New York: American Elsevier, 1968), 43–52 (45). 21. The epigenesist Geoffroy worked out his theory of development against his former collaborator Georges Cuvier, a paleontologist who stuck to the preformationist belief that all creatures were intended for a specific role in creation. On their rivalry and gradual disassociation based on their differing methodologies, see Evelleen Richards, “A Political Anatomy of Monsters, Hopeful and Otherwise: Teratogeny, Transcendentalism, and Evolutionary Theorizing,” Isis 85 (1994): 377–411; Hervé Le Guyader, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1772–1844: A Visionary Naturalist, trans. Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 22. Scientists are currently exploring the possibilities of regenerative medicine in relation to humans; see Nicholas Wade, “Regrow Your Own: Salamanders Can Do It. Why Not Humans?” New York Times, April 11, 2006. 23. Gumperz Levison, An Essay on the Blood; in Which, the Objections to Mr. Hunter’s Opinion Concerning the Blood, Are Examined and Removed (London, 1776), 25–42 (34). Hunter himself wrote: “In treating of any animal body I shall always consider its operations, or the causes of all its effects, as arising from the principle of life, and lay it down as a rule that no chemical or mechanical property can be the first cause of any of the effects in the machine. . . . The living principle, however, in itself is not in the least mechanical, neither does it arise from, nor is it in the least connected with, any mechanical principle”; Hunter, The Works of John Hunter, F.R.S., ed. James F. Palmer, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1835–37), 1:219. 24. J. F. Blumenbach, The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. Thomas Bendyshe (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865), 195. 25. J. F. Blumenbach, Handbuch der Naturgeschichte, 9th ed. (Göttingen: Heinrich Dieterich, 1814), 22; translations mine. 26. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols. (London, 1794), 1:501.

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27. Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 303; Donald C. Goellnicht, The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), 153. 28. Luigi Galvani, Commentary on the Effects of Electricity on Muscular Motion (1791), trans. Margaret Glover Foley, ed. I. Bernard Cohen (Norwalk, Conn.: Burndy Library, 1953), 59–88. 29. See Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 188–235; J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995), 287–336; Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels (Cambridge: Icon, 2002); and Frank A. Pattie, Mesmer and Animal Magnetism: A Chapter in the History of Medicine (Hamilton, N.Y.: Edmonston, 1994). 30. On the relation between electricity and life in Frankenstein, see Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fictions, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1988); Samuel Holmes Vasbinder, Scientific Attitudes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1984), 89–114; Sharon Ruston, “Resurrecting Frankenstein,” Keats-Shelley Review 19 (2005): 97–116; and Marilyn Butler, “Introduction,” Frankenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), xv–xxxiii 31. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World: An Essay by Slavoj Zˇ izˇek with the Text of Schelling’s “Die Weltalter,” trans. Judith Norman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 23. On Zˇizˇek’s concept of ugliness in relation to Frankenstein, see my “Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein,” ELH 67.2 (2000): 565–87. 32. John Hunter, “An Account of the Gymnotus Electricus,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 65 (1775): 395–407 (395). 33. James Perry, The Electrical Eel; or, Gymnotus Electricus: Inscribed to the Honourable members of the R***L S*****Y, by Adam Strong, Naturalist (London, 1778), 6. 34. Ibid., 3–6, 14. 35. Walsh renamed the legendary torpedo “the Electric Ray” and argued that it acted like a set of Leyden jars, which generated electricity through a pair of specialized electrical organs, each divided into columns of tiny spaces filled with fluid; Fara, Entertainment for Angels, 140–41. 36. Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1791) quoted in Romanticism and Science, 1773–1833, ed. Tim Fulford, 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 2002), 1:253. 37. Ibid., 1:255.

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38. Kant always remained skeptical of moving from the idea of purposive origin to “determinate explanations and actual causal mechanisms that might, in principle, displace the purposive conception of organisms from which we must admittedly begin,” as Marjorie Grene and David Depew write in The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 122. 39. Alexander von Humboldt, “An Account of the Electrical Eels, and of the Method of Catching Them in South America by Means of Wild Horses,” Edinburgh Philosophical Journal 2 (1820): 242–49 (245). Abernethy also noted: “Mr. Hunter also shews us that there are animals, as for instance the torpedo and gymnotus, which have organs liberally supplied with nerves, forming an electric battery which they can charge at will” (EPR 47). For a discussion of Humboldt in relation to Keats, see Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 72. 40. Alessandro Volta, “On the Electricity Excited by the Mere Contact of Conducting Substances of Different Kinds” (1800), quoted in Romanticism and Science, 1:258. 41. Humphry Davy, The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, 9 vols. (London: Smith, Elder: 1839–40), 2:224–25. 42. John Hunter, “An Account of the Gymnotus Electricus,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 65 (1775): 395–407 (395). 43. John Keats, Anatomical and Physiological Note Book, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (New York: Haskell House, 1970), 58. 44. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” ll. 264–73, in Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1963), 21. 45. See Charles J. Rzepka, “Re-Collecting Spontaneous Overflows,” Romantic Circles Praxis (April 1998): www.rc.edu/praxis/passions/rzepka/rzp .html (20–22). 46. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letter to John Abernethy, January 12, 1818, in Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1971), 4:809. 47. Stewart, “Lamia and the Language of Metamorphosis,” 31. 48. Hunter, Treatise on the Blood, 61. 49. The Works of William Harvey, trans. Robert Willis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 47. Helpful studies of the history of this idea include Thomas S. Hall, Ideas of Life and Matter: Studies in the History of General Physiology, 600 B.C.–1900 A.D. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 1:241–49, and Owsei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 153–64.

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Notes to Pages 237–44

50. John William Polidori, The Vampyre (1819; Oxford: Woodstock, 1990), xx. Polidori cites an extensive note from Robert Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), as a source for the vampire legend. 51. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maurice Hindle (New York: Penguin, 1993), 301. 52. An exception is Frederick B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1981). 53. To his friends, Keats referred to the book manuscript as “my or rather Taylor’s manuscript” (KL 2:286); for his complaint about the Advertisement to the volume and other unauthorized changes, see KL 2:294–95. 54. The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers and More Letters and Poems of the Keats Circle, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 1:116. 55. Stillinger notes that Keats’s friend Richard Woodhouse insisted that the surviving holograph was not a revised or second draft, but “the original & only copy . . . composed & written down at once as it now stands”; Leigh Hunt considered it “the original manuscript,” and Stillinger suggests that “probably we should accept Woodhouse’s and Hunt’s terms”; John Keats, Manuscript Poems in the British Library: Facsimiles of the Hyperion Holograph and George Keats’s Notebook of Holographs and Transcripts, ed. Jack Stillinger (New York: Garland, 1988), xi. 56. Keats, Manuscript Poems, 55. 57. Keats’s original phrase, “family of his limbs,” was one Mary Shelley also liked and used in her fiction, suggesting that the editorial change indeed may have been misguided. 58. Keats, Manuscript Poems, 182.

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abernethy, John, 235; debates with Lawrence on vitalism, 161–62, 190, 209–10, 211, 220, 221, 224, 229, 236 Abrams, M. H., 4, 219 aesthetic education, 25–29, 112, 159, 168 aesthetics: and nature, 40, 212; and political organizations, 28; and science, 3, 5, 212; vital power of, 5, 220 Aiken, John, An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry, 63 allegory: in Frankenstein, 211; mechanical nature of, 33–34, 163, 164, 165–66; in poetry as living form, 211–12; symbol vs., 33–34, 157–58, 165–66; in “Witch,” 158, 164, 169 Almeida, Hermione de, 156 alphabets, in Jubilate Agno: 50, 62–78, 104; A (alpha), 66, 68–69; Alphabet 1, 65–69, 67, 70–74, 77;

Alphabet 2, 67, 69, 72–75; Alphabet 3, 68, 70–74; B (bey), 69; C (ke), 69; El (God), 74–75, 76; H (spirit), 70–72; and numerology, 73; U (unity), 72; W (logos/ World), 72–73; X (infinity), 73 analogy, 42–45 androgyny, 195 animalcules, 11–12, 13, 14, 18 animal life, pulsating point in, 144–46 animal magnetism, 162, 190, 228–35 animal power, in Jubilate Agno, 63, 70, 78–89, 83, 87; “brisking,” 80, 81; and character, 78; “Clapperclaw,” 80, 81; creature creaturata, 91; and divine attributes, 88; dog, 88–89; and electricity, 102–3; John Bull, 70, 85–86, 87, 88–89; mouse, 84–85, 104; My Cat Jeoffry, 56, 69, 79–81, 84–85, 87, 88, 91–92, 95, 102, 104; in praise of Creation, 78; “punching,” 80; vivifying spirit of, 93

288 animals, monstrous. See monstrosity animism, 7, 201 aphids, parthenogenesis in, 13, 14 Apollonius, 210, 217, 218, 219, 231, 281–82n12 Aristotle, 5, 144; on animal generation, 32, 272n40; on the heart as seat of the soul, 277n26; and theory of epigenesis, 7, 8, 32 ars inveniendi, hidden truth as object of, 31 art: authentic, 4–5; limitations of, 194; nature as model for, 5, 25; obscured ideas of, 274n66; vitality of, 32 assimilation, 4 associability, 268n15 atom: and Adam, 55; in Jubilate Agno, 54–56 autopoiesis, 78, 149, 159 Bacon, Francis, 126 Baer, Karl Ernst von, 37 Baker, Henry, 265n58, 271n38 Barthez, Paul-Joseph, New Elements of the Science of Man, 175 Basire, James, 110 Bate, Walter Jackson, 219 beauty: and El (God), 75; and harmony, 98; judgment of, 30, 173; line of, 74; and monstrosity, 48, 193–95, 210–11, 219, 228, 230, 235; as multëity in Unity, 3, 23–25, 35, 74; and poetry, 164; and proportion, 212, 282n12; and truth, 35 Bergson, Henri, 246, 255n68 Berkeley, George, 263n31 Bichat, Xavier, 36, 42 Bildung, meanings of term, 22, 46, 253n37

Index Bildungsroman, 46 Bildungstrieb (formative drive): Blumenbach’s theory of, 16, 17, 20–21, 24, 48, 110–11, 153, 220, 226, 227; and Hunter’s experiments, 110; influence on other writers, 21, 24, 25, 110–11, 173, 220; and monstrosity, 48, 110–11, 220, 221, 226; and similar terms, 2, 16, 21, 22, 46 Bindman, David, 109 Binyon, Laurence, 121 biology, 29; molecular, 37–38; use of term, 250n27 Birch, John, “Electrical Magic,” 101 Blake, Catherine, 101 Blake, William, 104–5; ambivalence toward women, 273–74n54; America, 123, 129; binary thinking of, 123; The Book of Ahania, 148; The Book of Los, 148; The Book of Thel, 141; collected oeuvre of, 153–54; on dead matter, 128–29, 142; formal divisions eliminated by, 114–22, 139, 184; The Gates of Paradise, 121, 140; on human form divine, 150, 153; illuminated works of, 109–10, 111–12, 117, 121–22, 123, 129, 265n61, 267n3, 268n14, 269n20; on imagination, 108, 115, 131, 132, 153; “An Island on the Moon,” 268n14; Jerusalem (see Jerusalem); languages mastered by, 111; on Living Form, 106–7, 109, 110, 111, 112, 132, 135–36, 153, 154, 206; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 111, 121, 125, 148; on materialism, 136–37; Milton, 106–7, 121, 124, 129, 130, 131, 132, 140, 148,

Index 149–50, 203; personal life of, 123; on “Poetic Genius,” 150, 153; on regeneration, 107–8, 119, 125, 126, 131, 137–39, 168; and J.-J. Rousseau, 109, 131, 203, 205–6; and Second Age, 146; Urizen (see First Book of Urizen); A Vision of the Last Judgment, 140; “What is Man,” 140 Bloom, Harold: The Anxiety of Influence, 257n87; on Lamia, 207; A Map of Misreading, 257n87; Shelley’s Mythmaking, 168, 169, 205, 206; on Spenser’s Fairie Queen, 192 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich: Anthropological Treatises, 226–27; and electric eel, 233; Handbuch der Naturgeschichte, 251n32; on monstrosity, 48, 110–11, 220, 221, 226–27; On the Bildungstrieb, 16, 17, 20–21, 24, 48, 110–11, 153, 220, 226, 227; on regeneration, 119, 141; and theory of epigenesis, 251–52n33 Boerhaave, Herman, 18 Böhme, Jakob, 77 Bond, W. H., 50, 51, 60, 261n4 Bonnet, Charles, 12–13, 14, 250n27 Born, Ignatius, 20 Boyle, Robert, 53, 90–91, 93, 97 brain: anatomy of, 278n29; function of, 157, 172 Brandis, Joachim Dietrich, 42, 153 Brewer, John, 61 Brown, Charles, 239 Brown, John, 279–80n58 Browning, Robert, 214 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de: and hypothesis,

289 250n27; on Kraft (internal mold), 22; Natural History, 31; organic-particle theory of generation, 14–16, 93, 164 Butler, Marilyn, 161 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 160, 237, 238, 239 Cadell, Thomas, 111 Carwardine, Rev. Thomas, 105 Castel, Louis Bertrand, 98–99 cell theory, 28, 35, 36–39, 146–47 Chevalier, Noel, 52 Chimaericus Cantabrigiensis (pseud.), 98 Cleveland, William Fitzroy, Duke of, 86 clones, 29 cohesion, attraction of, 57 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 42, 211; on allegory, 163; Biographia Literaria, 4–5, 157; “The Eolian Harp,” 191; and his cat, 102; on imagination, 4, 157; and Keats, 208–9; on living form, 4–5, 25, 61, 118, 157, 165, 223, 226; on monsters, 209, 234–35; on Natur-geist, 165, 168; on Newton’s prisms, 216; On the Principles of Genial Criticism, 23; on poetry, 164; “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” 234–35; The Statesman’s Manual, 33–34; Theory of Life, 22, 23, 43, 45, 157, 208, 209; on unity in multëity, 23–25, 33–34, 39, 157; on words and things, 32, 199, 277n16 Colwell, Frederic S., 207 contractibility, 21 corpuscular theory, 55, 201

290 Cowper, William, 105 Creation: and animal power, 78; Christian view of, 7, 8, 46, 56, 68, 122, 137, 141, 174; continuous, 137; freedom of, 273n51; generation vs., 161; and preformationism, 8–9, 56, 283n21; in Prometheus Unbound, 182; Schelling on, 191; Smart on, 62; in Urizen, 141, 144, 147, 180–81 Crichton, Alexander, 111 Cronin, Richard, 173 Curran, Stuart, 113, 168 Cuvier, Georges, 257–58n89, 283n21 Damon, S. Foster, 120, 128 Dampier, William Cecil, 250n23 Damrosch, Leo, 148 Darwin, Charles: 44, 45, 255n66; On the Origin of Species, 258n89 Darwin, Erasmus, 15, 44, 99, 164, 220; The Botanic Garden, 42, 161, 232, 268n14; and J. Brown’s theory of excitability, 279–80n58; The Temple of Nature, 258n89; Zoonomia, 110, 119, 161, 227 Davy, Sir Humphry, 228, 233 Dearnley, Moira, 80–81 death: decomposition in, 17; and fossilization, 266n3; into life, 229–30, 238–46, 282n17; opacity and, 130, 131; ossification and petrification, 107, 118, 121, 168; propagation of dead matter, 128–29, 142; and spermatic worms, 141; stasis as, 48 de Man, Paul, 33, 34, 275n6 Democritus, 36, 203 Descartes, René, 52, 171, 201, 254n57

Index Diderot, Denis, 99; Le Rêve d’Alembert, 127 differentiation, 48 Dionysian classicism, 281–82n12 Doskow, Minna, 121 Driesch, Hans, 246, 255n68 dualism, 171, 201 Eagleton, Terry, 26 Eaves, Morris, 111 egg, mammalian, discovery of, 37 electrical therapy, 231 electric eel (gymnotus electricus), 230–35 electricity: animal, 102, 162, 228–35; and Frankenstein, 228, 231; and Lamia, 228–30; Leyden jar in, 103; and life, 102–3, 160, 190–92; public fascination with, 101–3, 228, 230; and vital power, 17, 235 electric pile, 228 electrochemistry, 190, 228, 229, 233 electromagnetism, 191–92, 235 electrophysiology, 190 emboîtement (encasement), 11–12 embryogenesis, 29, 37, 144, 146, 148–49, 226 emergence, 22 Engelstein, Stefari, 132 Enlightenment: Error and Truth in, 207; and literary history, 40; and mechanical powers, 52–53, 99; and physiology, 52; and poetry, 84; and preformation theory, 6, 10, 14, 18, 53, 56; and science, 52–53, 70, 99, 108, 148; sublime and beautiful in, 238; and taxonomy, 14, 148 entelechy, 22, 59 ephemerids, 197–98

Index epiblast, 149 epigenesis, 7–23; and aesthetic education, 112; animal-plants in, 119; Aristotle’s theory of, 7, 8; Blake’s expression of in Jerusalem, 108–9, 112, 115–17, 123–24, 129, 131, 132, 152, 153; Blumenbach’s theory of, 251–52n33; continuity in, 115–16, 137; and embryogenesis, 29; evidence for, 18–21; and Lamia, 210; in literary form, 33; as organicist model, 32, 225; parallels in Jubilate Agno, 51; poetics of, 84, 104; and preformationism, 7, 30, 46; and self-determination, 26–27, 224; and Urizen, 147; and “Witch,” 158, 164, 168, 204; C. F. Wolff ’s theory of, 18–21, 224 Erdman, David, 121 Essick, Robert N., 113–14 evolution, 44; and preformationism, 8–9 Examiner, 4 excitability, J. Brown’s theory of, 279–80n58 Finch, Henrietta, 86 Finlay, John N., 174 First Book of Urizen (Blake), 106, 143–52; Creation in, 141, 144, 147, 180–81; dystopian vision of, 144; embryogenesis in, 144, 146, 148; and epigenesis, 147; Los in, 124, 130, 147, 149, 150–51; prehistory of, 144; punctum sanguineum in, 144–46, 147, 149–50, 151; on regeneration, 143–46, 148–49; structure of, 144; and unified field theory, 148, 152; Urizen in, 124, 144, 145, 147–49, 151, 176, 181; Zoas in, 107

291 form: dynamism of, 44; emergence and maintenance of, 5, 22–23; mechanical vs. living, 61, 165; Platonic, 77; polypoid character of, 25–26; vitality of, 5, 165 formative force: as Bildungstrieb, 20–21, 161; as generation, 17–18, 144, 161; as nisus formativus (formative force), 17, 20, 21; vs. preformation theory, 13, 18; self-willed (monstrosity), 210, 232–33; and Urbild, 21–22; as vegetative principle, 186–88 Foucault, Michel, 274n55 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (M. Shelley), 199; and Abernethy-Lawrence debates, 161–62; about the principle of life, 160–61, 162, 192–93, 211, 231; author’s husband as Victor Frankenstein in, 160, 192; and beauty/monstrosity, 219, 229, 230, 237; and electricity, 228, 231; and myth, 239 Franklin, Benjamin, 101, 103, 231 Franssen, Maarten, 99 French Revolution, 137 Freud, Sigmund: on monogamy, 274n55; on polymorphous perversity, 263n26, 270n32 Frye, Northrop, 110, 144 Galvani, Luigi, 190, 228, 233 galvanism, 101 Gasking, Elizabeth B., 146 generation, 3–4; abnormal (monstrous), 6, 123, 224–26; of animal-plants, 119–22; Aristotle on, 32, 272n40; Blake’s system of, 109–24, 132, 141–43; Buffon’s

292 generation (continued) organic-particle theory of, 14–16, 93, 164; creation vs., 161; pluripotency vs. totipotency, 28, 62, 126; preformation (see preformationism); regeneration (see regeneration); self-generation, 5, 8, 16, 29, 173, 224–26, 233, 262n16; spontaneous, 10; and vitalism, 7, 12, 14, 56; vital powers of, 12–22, 144, 161; C. F. Wolff ’s theory of (see Theory of Generation); Zeugungsart, 222, 270n26 Genesis, 46, 56, 122, 137, 174 genetics, 35 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Etienne, 44–45, 222, 226 germ: definition of, 13; in preformationism, 11, 202; Shelley on, 164, 168, 170 Gnosticism, 122 Godwin, Mary. See Shelley, Mary Goellnicht, Donald C., 227–28 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 35–36, 115, 223; Elective Affinities, 42–43; and Urbild, 21–22 Grabo, Carl H., 158, 192; “Prometheus Unbound”: An Interpretation, 161 gravitation, 17, 42, 57 Gray, Thomas, “The Bard,” 92 Green, Joseph Henry, 208, 211, 220 Guest, Harriet, 51, 73 Hagstrum, Jean, 110, 150 Haller, Albrecht von, 11, 16–17, 127, 146; Elementa Physiologiae, 250n23; C. F. Wolff ’s dispute with, 18–19, 147 Hankins, Thomas, 99 Hartman, Geoffrey, 60, 63, 81

Index Harvey, William, 52, 237; On Animal Generation, 7, 8, 9, 144–45 Hatsell, Henry, 71–72 Haydon, Benjamin, 211 Hayley, William, 105, 128 Hazlitt, William, 4, 212, 213; The Spirit of the Age, 40 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 21; The Phenomenology of Spirit, 119, 174–75; Philosophy of Nature, 119, 174–75; “Physics of Individuality,” 191 Heidegger, Martin, 276n9, 280n60 Heraclitus, 175, 280n60 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, On Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul, 156 heredity, discovery of, 37 Hessey, James, 243 Hitchener, Elizabeth, 186 Hoeveler, Diane Long, 195 Hogarth, William, Analysis of Beauty, 74 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, 188 Hogle, Jerrold, 168 Hollander, John, 105 homology, 44–45 homunculus, 13 Hope, Anne Vane, 73 Humboldt, Alexander von, 221, 233 Hunt, Leigh, 125 Hunt, Robert, 125 Hunter, John, 227, 236–37; on the electric eel, 230, 234; on living principle, 161, 162, 220–22; on monstrosity, 110, 220–22, 223–26, 228, 234; on regeneration, 119, 224, 225; A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-shot Wounds, 110, 156, 173, 237

Index Husserl, Edmund, 276n9 hydra (arm-polyp). See polyp imagination: and Blake, 108, 115, 131, 132, 153; and Coleridge, 4, 157; and Hazlitt, 212 individuation, 44, 48, 266n1 Industrial Revolution, 137 inorganic matter, 226–27 irritability, 16, 17, 21, 145, 268n15 Jacob, François, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, 11 Jerusalem (Blake), 47, 105, 106–54; Albion in, 106–7, 108, 110, 113, 118, 124–29, 133, 141, 142, 143, 144, 151–52; Blake’s autobiographical notes in, 134–35; Blake’s marginalia in, 110; Britannia in, 113, 126; Enitharmon in, 113; epigenesis in, 108–9, 112, 115–17, 123–24, 129, 131, 132, 152, 153; family structure in, 124; generation in, 109–24, 132, 141–43; Hand the Devourer in, 124–25; human-vegetable in, 114–15, 122, 124–30, 137, 147; human-worm in, 141–42; illuminated manuscript of, 109–10, 116–17, 122, 123, 129, 130, 137, 150, 151–52; interiorization in, 129–30; Jerusalem in, 113, 122, 128; on living form, 106, 109, 110, 112, 203; Los in, 107–8, 112, 118, 124, 130, 136, 141–42, 143, 151, 152; monstrosity in, 125; open to a multiplicity of readings, 112, 153–54; “Perceptive (sexual) Organs” in, 139–41, 143; Polypus in, 124–33, 271n39; as redemptive work, 123, 131; on regeneration, 107–8, 119,

293 120, 123, 124–29, 131–32, 133–44, 148, 151–52, 203; on slavery, 136–37; structural patterns in, 133–36, 152, 153; title page of, 113–15, 121; Trinity figures in, 125–26; and Urizen, 124, 143–44; Vala in, 141; visual elements of, 112–14, 121–22, 150; Zoas in, 133 John, Gospel of, 68 John, Saint, 66 Johnson, Samuel, 166 Jones, William Powell, 79 Jubilate Agno (Smart), 46–47, 49– 105, 110; alphabetic units (letters) in (see alphabets, in Jubilate Agno); animal power in, 63, 70, 78–89, 83, 87; assemblages of, 50–51; attraction in, 54, 57–59; center in, 58–59; centripetal and centrifugal forces in, 54, 59; elasticity in, 54, 57; Fragment B, 52– 54, 62, 67, 76, 79; Fragment C, 62; Hydrostatics, 95–96, 101, 104; instruments in, 83, 103–4; Let and For versicles, 50–51, 76, 87, 104, 105, 259–60n1; matter in, 54–56, 57, 59, 68, 101; and mechanical powers, 52–62, 101, 149; motion in, 54, 56–60, 101; My Cat Jeoffry, 56, 69, 79–81, 87, 88, 91–92, 95, 102, 104; and numerology, 73; and organicism, 52; parallels with epigenesis in, 51; pneumatics (air power) in, 60, 89–105, 142–43, 216; power of the wedge in, 58; rainbows in, 87, 97–100, 104, 214–15; resistance in, 54, 56, 59–60; self-standing parts of, 52; shears in, 60–61, 70; Smart’s purpose in, 50; writing of, 49–50

294 Kabbalah, 122 Kant, Immanuel: on aesthetic education, 25–26; Critique of Judgment, 1, 5, 22, 24; “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” 220; on monstrosity, 47–48, 194, 219–20; on organic purpose, 21, 24; on the production of sound, 99, 173; on teleological power, 18, 22, 173 Keats, John, 1, 70; and Coleridge, 208–9; The Fall of Hyperion, 211, 239, 240–43, 245; Hyperion, 211, 230, 239, 240–45; illness and death of, 240; Lamia (see Lamia); medical knowledge of, 239–40; odes by, 242 knowledge: common, 31; hidden, 31, 212; probable, 31; scientific, 212, 214; subjective, 278n29 Kreiter, Carmen S., 144 Krell, David Farrell, 219–20 Kroeber, Karl, 129 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 44 Lamb, Charles, 211 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, Man: A Machine, 127 Lamia (Keats), 47, 208–46; compared with other works, 207; dying into life, 229–30, 238–46; and electric eel (gymnotus electricus), 230–35; legend of, 208, 209, 217–19; monstrosity in, 210–11, 218–19, 221, 227, 228, 235–36; rainbow in, 209, 210, 211–20, 238; source text for, 209; theme of self-willed formative power, 210; writing of, 239, 243, 244

Index language: alphabetic unit (letter) in Jubilate Agno (see alphabets, in Jubilate Agno); “dead,” 69; elisions in, 69–70; and emergent nature, 78; of flowers, 64; metaphorical power of, 82, 164, 187; morphemes, 62, 104; new forms generated in, 69, 104, 164; phonemes, 62, 104; and print culture, 78; pronunciation of, 69–70, 75; quantifiable (preformed), 82, 88; reinventing, 81; self-organizing, 47; simultaneous, 68; of the soul, 200–201; speech reflective of character, 77–78; structure of, 66; and symbol, 158, 165, 216; vitality in, 159–60; and the Word, 68, 73 Larson, James, 64 Lawrence, William: and Coleridge, 235; debates with Abernethy on vitalism, 161–62, 190, 209–10, 211, 220, 221, 224, 229, 236; on life as organization, 157, 214; Natural History of Man, 275n4; on the “poetic ground of physiology,” 13, 213; on vital power, 199 Lebenskraft (vital power), 2, 16, 18, 21, 22, 39, 42, 153 Leeuwenhoek, Antoni van, 11, 126 Leibniz, G. W., 30; “Dialogue on Continuity and Motion,” 201–2 Lemprière, John, A Classical Dictionary, 209 Lenoir, Timothy, 8, 252n33 Lesnick, Henry, 273n49 Levere, Trevor H., 24, 216 life: counter theory of, 221; electrochemical hypothesis of, 190, 229; as excess, 221; as excitability,

Index 279n58; fluidity of, 176, 236–37; fortuitous developmental chance in, 31; as mansion of many apartments, 240; miracle of, 160; mystery of, 1, 36, 38, 156, 167, 182, 183, 205, 212, 236, 238, 239–40; new forms of, 221; ontopoiesis of, 158, 165, 276n9; as organization, 157, 209, 213, 214, 216–17, 221; and power, 2–3, 5, 16, 18–21, 55, 157, 165, 170, 174, 199, 220–22; regulatory processes of, 259n99; as self, 40, 48; selfrenewing, 159, 220–22, 233; separated into parts, 209, 211, 214; soul as principle of, 8, 156, 188; unique properties of, 4; vacuums bereft of, 90; vitality of, 4–5, 209–10 life science, principle of analogy in, 42 lightning, and voice of God, 103 Linnaeus, Carolus, 14, 31, 51, 63–64, 114 literary history, and Zeitgeist, 40–41 literature: narrative form in, 163–66; quantitative approach to, 41; and science, 44 Locke, John, 75, 78, 126, 143 love, power of, 203 Lowth, Bishop Robert, De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, 261n4 Lucretius, 175 Makdisi, Saree, 137 Malebranche, Nicolas, 186; Search After Truth, 11 Malpighi, Marcello, 9, 11 Marcuse, Herbert, 270n32

295 materialism, 136–37, 157, 175, 179, 275n4 matter: dead, 128–29, 142; inorganic, 226–27; in Jubilate Agno, 54–56, 57, 59, 68, 101; repulsion of, 191 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de, 15, 164 mechanical powers, 52–62, 101, 149, 182, 233 mechanism, 225, 255n68 medicine, healing power in, 38–39 Medicus, On the Lebenskraft, 16 Medwin, Charles, 160 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 190, 228 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 121 Midnight, Mary (pseud.), 92 Milton, John, 56, 202; “Lycidas,” 136; Paradise Lost, 166, 181 mimesis, 165 mind: biological power of, 198; creative power of, 156; human, 169–70 mineral kingdom, 226–27 Mitchell, W. J. T., 110, 133, 145 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord, 258n89 monstrosity, 5–6, 105; as aberration from standard patterns, 6, 48, 221, 222, 223–24; and beauty, 48, 193–95, 210–11, 219, 228, 230, 235; Blumenbach on, 48, 110–11, 220, 221, 226–27; Coleridge on, 209, 234–35; of electric eel, 230–35; evil as manifest in, 6; of Frankenstein (see Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus); Hunter’s theories of, 110, 220–22, 223–26, 228, 234; and hybrids, 226; Kant’s definition of, 47–48, 194, 219–20; in Keats’s Lamia, 210–11, 218–19;

296 monstrosity (continued) of organicism, 248n3; peculiar organ of, 234; power of, 230; principle of, 220–27, 234; as process vs. product, 194, 222, 225; science of, 44; transmutation of species, 223, 257–58n89; and ugliness, 230; uncontainable vitality of, 5–6, 123, 210, 219–20, 227, 230, 232, 236; of vampires, 237–38, 239; in “Witch,” 192–95, 210, 221, 230; C. F. Wolff on, 48 Moretti, Franco, 41, 46 morphogenesis, 7 Mounsey, Chris, 53 Müller-Sievers, Helmut, 32–33 multëity, unity in. See unity in multëity multëity in Unity, beauty as, 3, 23–25, 35, 74 multiculturalism, 27 natural history, and natural philosophy, 16, 29–30, 34–35, 63, 132 natura naturans (emergent nature), 164–65, 182 natura naturata (nature natured, i.e., created), 165, 182, 263n30, 277n17 nature: and aesthetics, 40, 212; analogy in study of, 43; animating spirit of, 118–19, 165; becoming, 182; bond of soul and, 164–65; classification of, 9–10, 14, 31, 51, 62, 63–64, 88, 114, 126, 148, 212–14; and God, 182; hidden things in, 212, 280n60; history of, 254n51; inherent powers of, 183; as model for art, 5, 25; paradigm shift from God to, 29;

Index passive reception of, 212; “petrified,” 118; philosophy of, 101; positive and negative principles in, 191–92; powers of, 161; transmutation of species, 223, 257–58n89; unpredictability of, 221; veiled, 280n60; water in, 174 Naturphilosophie, 34–35, 45, 77, 117, 255n64 Needham, John Turberville, 12, 13, 14, 18, 161 neoplatonism, 77 nervous system, function of, 156 neurology, 173 Newbury, John, 61 Newton, Isaac, 15; on the attraction of gravitation, 17, 57, 59; critics of, 108–9, 126, 143, 147–48, 212, 214–16; on inertia, 57; influence of, 281n9; on laws of planetary motion, 54–55, 171; Opticks, 97–99, 139–40, 203, 209, 210, 211–12, 214–15, 216, 245; on physical forces, 52–53, 54, 106, 126, 147, 211–12, 215–16; Principia, 53–54, 56, 58, 62, 216, 250n25; Smart’s issues with principles of, 98, 99; and unified field theory, 148 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 282n12 Novalis, 32 Oken, Lorenz, 45 ontogenesis, 44, 46, 149 ontopoiesis, 158, 159, 164, 165, 195, 276n9 organicism: and Blake’s illuminated work, 111, 117; epigenesis as model of, 32, 225; idealist model of, 6; interdisciplinary

Index field of, 3, 159; in Jubilate Agno, 52; monstrosity of, 248n3; Shelley’s presumed mockery of, 187–88; symbol as living form in, 157–58; use of term, 269n17 organic-particle theory, 14–16 Otis, Laura, 256n72 Ovid, 120 Paley, Morton, 273n49 Pallas, Peter Simon, 270n26 parthenogenesis, in aphids, 13, 14 Paul, Saint, 267n6 penetrating powers, 14–15 Perkins, David, 169, 205, 219 Perry, James, The Electric Eel, 231 Pfau, Thomas, 46 phenomenology, 276n9 Philo, 77, 78 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 231, 233 phosphorescence, 102 pineal gland, 171 Plato: on the soul, 277n26; Symposium, 195 pluripotency, 28, 62, 126 pneumatics: and barometer, 94, 96–97; cat sounds, 92–93; and electricity, 101–3; and Hydrostatics, 95–96, 104; instruments of sound, 90, 91–93, 95, 98–99, 103–4; in Jubilate Agno, 60, 89–105, 142–43, 216; and prisms (rainbows), 97–100; and Smart’s hostility toward glass, 97–98, 99; and study of air, 53, 93–94, 97, 102; and sympathy, 95; and thermometer, 94; thunder and lightning, 103; vacuum, 90–91, 97; vital principle in, 93

297 poetry: and beauty, 164; biblical, 261n4; empty spaces in, 97; and epigenesis, 84, 104; eternal truth in, 23–24; as living form, 4, 35, 107, 163–65, 166, 211–12; living language of, 10, 39, 199–200; metaphorical language as symbol in, 158, 159, 164; mythmaking, 168; natural history applied to, 63; nature of life revealed in, 50; parallelism in, 261n4; pentameter, 82; quantifiable, 82; self-shaping, 51, 62; Shelley on, 10, 40, 159–60, 163–64, 186, 187, 202, 214, 238; structure in, 62, 63; symbolic power within, 164, 188, 199 Polidori, John, 160; The Vampire, 237–38 polyp: classification of, 14, 126; regeneration by, 13–14, 18, 25, 111, 112, 119, 126, 158, 278n31 positivism, 255n64 Potter, George, madhouse of, 50 power: of creation, 273n51; denial of, 182; essential, 19, 20, 221; fearsomeness of, 2–3; formative, 13, 17, 18, 20, 22, 144, 188, 210; genial, 170; of God, 54–55; of imagination, 115; as Kraft, 16, 19, 22, 39; and life, 2–3, 5, 16, 18–21, 55, 157, 165, 170, 174, 199, 220–22; logocentric, 68; of love, 203; mechanical, 52–62, 101, 149, 182, 233; purposive, 24, 219; reworking of, 159, 161; self-propagating, 210; of the soul, 199, 216; structure as byproduct of, 19; teleological, 18, 21, 22, 173 preexistence, 11

298 preformationism, 8–12; and allegory, 33; and animalculism, 18; in Blake’s work, 122–23, 138, 141; challenges to theory of, 12–14, 18, 20, 30, 46; definition of, 7, 8–9; and emboîtement, 11–12; Enlightenment theory of, 6, 10, 14, 18, 53, 56; and evolution, 8–9; homunculus in, 13; mechanistic theory of, 225; natura naturata, 165, 182; in orthodox Christianity, 175–76; ovist theory of, 9, 11, 12, 140, 144; spermist theory of, 11–12, 140–41, 142; tests of, 14–16; unfolding germ of, 11, 202; C. F. Wolff ’s view of, 146–47 primordium, 248n5, 256n71 Prometheus Unbound (P. Shelley), 161, 166, 167, 170, 177, 181, 182, 183, 184, 189–90, 201, 203, 204; allegory in, 166; animating principle in, 203; author’s introduction to, 184; on Creation, 182; “liquid joy of life” in, 189–90; on omnipotence, 181; transformation in, 201, 204; vitalism reflected in, 161, 204; and “Witch,” 167, 170, 177, 183, 189 punctum sanguineum (point of blood), 144–46, 147, 149–50, 151 quantum mechanics, 255n68, 265n55 rainbows: in Jubilate Agno, 87, 97–100, 104, 214–15; in Lamia, 209, 210, 211–20, 238; prisms analyzed in Newton’s Opticks, 97–99, 203, 209, 210, 211–12, 214, 216, 245; and quantum mechanics, 265n55; self-shaping, 215

Index Raine, Kathleen, 126 rapport (Verwandschaft), 43–44 Ratcliff, Marc J., 10 Réaumur, René-Antoine Ferchault de, 271n38, 272n40 Redfield, Marc, 28 Redi, Francesco, 10 Rees, Abraham, Cyclopædia, 267n3 regeneration: abnormal, in animal kingdom, 224–26; Blumenbach on, 119, 141; as challenge to preformation theory, 13–14; Hunter on, 119, 224, 225; in Jerusalem, 107–8, 119, 120, 123, 124–29, 131–32, 133–44, 148, 151–52, 203; in Lamia, 210; by polyp, 13–14, 18, 25, 111, 112, 119, 126, 158, 278n31; and “secret quality of air,” 93; as Shelley’s living form, 164–65, 168; in Urizen, 143–46, 148–49; use of term, 25, 267n5 regenerative medicine, 283n22 Reil, Johann Christian, 93, 170 Reill, Peter Hanns, 43, 45, 46 relativity, theory of, 255n68 reproduction, 3–4; embryogenesis, 29, 37, 144, 146, 148–49, 226; exudation or emanation, 122; parthenogenesis, 13, 14; sexual, 122, 123, 134, 137–38; viviparous vs. oviparous, 7 Reveley, Henry, 185 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 240 Richards, Robert J., 44 Richter, Jean Paul, 107 Ricks, David B., 84 Roe, Shirley A., 145 Romanticism: attempts to discredit, 255n64; and Bildung, 253n37; cell theory vs., 36–39; and Dionysian-

Index ism, 282n12; early, period of, 158, 476; life and, 159, 160, 205; life science of, 115, 130; unifying principle of, 36; Zeitgeist of, 39–41, 42–45, 112, 154, 228, 246 Rousseau, G. S., 132, 171 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 99, 109, 131, 150, 203, 204–6 Royal Society: and electric eel, 231, 233; on regeneration, 271n38 Rubin, David, 194 Ruston, Sharon, Shelley and Vitality, 177, 182, 276n8 Saltz, Robert D., 91 Schelling, F. W. J., 21, 190–91; on the animating spirit of nature, 117–19, 165; creation story of, 191; First Outline of a System of Natural Philosophy, 132 Schiller, Friedrich, 42; Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 24–28, 112; on living form, 112; Philosophy of Physiology, 95, 156 Schlegel, Friedrich, 32, 61 Schleiden, Mattias, 36 Schwann, Theodor, Microscopical Researches, 36, 38, 130 science: accumulation of knowledge in, 212, 214; and aesthetics, 3, 5, 212; arbitrary boundaries within, 256n72, 281n9; and capitalism, 214; experimental, 211, 212, 216, 228; hypothesis in, 250nn25,27; mystery eliminated by, 212–13; on reproduction, 3–4; and structure, 108; and truth, 52 scientific method, 254n54 Scofield, John, 128

299 self-generation: evolution of the concept, 29; and monstrosity, 224–26, 233; neurological processes of, 173; from nonliving matter, 8; and organic-particle theory, 16; of stem cells, 262n16 sensibility, 16, 17, 21, 268n15 Serres, Etienne, 223 sex: and monogamy, 274n55; procreative function of, 122, 123, 134, 137–38, 270n32 Shakespeare, William, 207 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein (see Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus); and her husband’s work, 162, 163, 166, 237; on narrative as literary form, 163, 165–66 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 23–24; Alastor, 166, 170, 201; Bloom on, 168, 169, 205, 206; The Cenci, 204; A Defence of Poetry, 10, 40, 159–60, 163–64, 186, 187, 202, 214, 238; on dying into life, 240, 282n17; on “electric life,” 228; “Epipsychidion,” 201; “germ” described by, 164, 168, 170; on the human mind, 169–70; “Letter to Maria Gisborne,” 185; on living form, 164–65; “The Mask of Anarchy,” 204; as model for Frankenstein, 160, 192; “Mont Blanc,” 169; on narrative as literary form, 163–64, 166; The Necessity of Atheism, 181–82; “On Life,” 155, 175; poetic influences on, 161, 178; Posthumous Poems, 166; Prometheus Unbound (see Prometheus Unbound); “Queen Mab,” 155, 181, 200–201; “The

300 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (continued) Sensitive Plant,” 197–98; “To Wordsworth,” 178; “The Triumph of Life,” 2, 155, 157, 203–6, 239; on vegetative principle, 186–88; and vital power, 155–58, 165, 221; “The Witch of Atlas” (see “Witch of Atlas”) singularization, 191 Smart, Christopher: Christ, and first name of, 68, 73, 131; Collection of Pretty Poems for the Amusement of Children Three Feet High, 79, 81; confined to madhouse, 50, 61, 105; deconstruction of science by, 52; on earning of parts, 57–58; and Grub Street, 61, 128; Jack as nickname of, 81–82; Jubilate Agno (see Jubilate Agno); and print culture, 61–62; pseudonyms used by, 92, 98; references to the Creation, 62; Seatonian prize won by, 88; on selforganizing language, 47 society: aesthetic education in, 25–29; as living form, 27; mechanistic, 26, 27; self-determination in, 26–27; state of freedom in, 27 Soemmerring, Samuel Thomas, On the Organ of the Soul, 172–73, 174, 188 soul: animal/sensitive, 171; animation of, 2, 8; attempts to define, 170, 172, 175; bond of nature and, 164–65; in cerebral humidity, 172; and Christian belief system, 171, 175; as fluid, 174; immortality of, 198–99; language of, 200–201; location of, 277n26; nervous system as locus of, 156, 170, 171–72;

Index power of, 199, 216; principle of life as, 8, 156, 188; rational aspect of, 171; Soemmerring on, 172–73, 174, 188; as transmutative force, 156; as unifying principle, 38; vegetative/nutritive aspect of, 171; as vital power, 156–57, 170, 175 Spallanzani, Lazzaro, 12 Spencer, Herbert, 44 Spenser, Edmund, The Fairie Queene, 57, 192 spermatic worms and spermatozoa, 11, 141 Sperry, Stuart M., 169, 194, 227 Spinoza, Baruch, 78 Spinozaism, 201 spirit: animating, 1, 216; Geist, 21; in Jubilate Agno, 70–72; life divested of, 212–13; pneuma, 277n26; Spiritus, 39, 70 stasis: as death, 48; and inertia, 57; ultimate tendency toward, 60, 62 Stead, W. F., 50, 60 Steffens, Heinrich, 25 Steigerwald, Joan, 20 Stewart, Garrett, 210, 236 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 237 Streben (striving or yearning), 57–58 symbol: allegory vs., 33–34, 157–58, 165–66; and language, 158, 165, 216; power of, 188, 199; in “Witch” (see “Witch of Atlas”) sympathy: defined, 58; Smart’s application of the concept, 95 Taylor, John, 243 teleological power, 18, 21, 22, 173 teratology, 44, 223

Index Thelwall, John, 157, 220; An Essay Toward a Definition of Animal Vitality, 156 Theory of Generation (C. F. Wolff), 31–32, 134; and cell theory, 37, 146–47; and epigenesis theory, 18, 20, 30, 104, 111, 224; on fructification, 138–39; on “hidden truth,” 31; impact of, 18, 19, 115–16; on life as independent of structure, 18– 20, 50, 52, 172; on self-generation, 52, 109; vis essentialis in, 19, 20, 21, 51–52, 172, 188, 221 Thevenot, Melchisedech, 272n40 Thomson, James, The Seasons, 63 Tooke, Andrew, The Pantheon, 209 Torricelli, Evangelista, 97 totipotency, 28, 62, 64, 126 transcendental physiology, 172, 173 transcendental self, unity of, 173 transmutation of species, 223, 257–58n89 Trembley, Abraham, 13, 18, 126 Treviranus, Gottfried Reinhold, Biologie oder Philosophie der Lebenden Natur, 250n27 Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa, 276n9 unfolding, mechanical process of, 145 unified field theory, 148, 152 unity, 4, 40, 45; multëity in (see multëity in Unity, beauty as) unity in multëity, 33–35, 39–40; in composition, 222–23; life as, 23–25, 72–73, 157; monstrosity vs., 226; in society, 25–29; as symbol, 33–34, 173, 192. See also multëity in Unity, beauty as Urbild (original image), concept of, 21–22

301 vampires, 237–38, 239 Vartanian, Aram, 127 vegetation: Blake’s blurring of human and, 109, 115–22, 131, 206; deviation of, as monstrosity, 223–24, 225–26; growth, 4, 8, 18, 20; in preformation theory, 175–76; vegetative power, 186–88, 249n17 Victorian culture, 40 Virchow, Rudolph, 38–39 Virgil, 70 vis conservatrix (life-preserving power), 161 vis essentialis (essential power): function of, 19, 51–52, 251n30; as nisus formativus (formative force), 20, 21, 22, 251n31; use of term, 2, 19, 20, 21, 22; C. F. Wolff’s theory of, 19, 20, 21, 48, 51–52, 172, 188, 221 vis fabricatrix (life-creating power), 161 vis inertiae (force of inertia), 56–57, 59 vis vitae (vital power), 2, 170 vis viva (life force), 16 vitalism: Abernethy-Lawrence debates on, 161–62, 190, 209–10, 211, 220, 221, 224, 229, 236; and Bildungstrieb, 16; consciousness at the center of, 156; evolution of the theory, 17, 39, 45, 53, 156, 220–21; and generation, 7, 12, 14, 56; Smart’s Christian brand of, 53, 75 vitality: in aesthetics, 4–5, 32; of blood, 173–74; “Dionysian” as code word for, 282n12; and electricity, 101–3; of form, 5, 165;

302 vitality (continued) in language, 159–60; and mystery, eliminated by science, 212–13; uncontainable, monstrosity as, 5–6, 123, 209–10, 219–20, 227, 230, 232, 236 vital power, 3, 22, 110; cell theory vs., 38–39; and electricity, 17, 235; of gravitation, 17, 42; as living form, 16–17, 153, 161; mysterious, 53, 156; self-generating, 5, 12, 18, 39, 210; Shelley on, 155–58, 165, 221; and the soul, 156–57, 170, 175 Volta, Alessandro, 190, 228, 233 Voltaire, 99, 131, 203 voluntarity, 268n15 Wallen, Martin, 191 Walsh, John, 231 Wattles, Jeffrey, 276n9 Wicksteed, Joseph, 120, 121 Williamson, Karina, 50–51, 88, 101 Willis, Thomas, De Cerebri Anatome, 171 “Witch of Atlas” (P. Shelley), 47, 155–207; and allegory, 158, 164, 169; birth of Witch in, 169, 174; boat as symbol in, 158, 159, 167, 177–89, 195, 196, 197; comparisons with other works, 167, 170, 171, 207, 217, 219; critical analyses of, 168, 169, 174, 194; first appearance of, 166; the Fold in, 199–207; generative processes within, 168, 183, 189; hermaphrodite as symbol in, 158, 159, 167, 177, 189–95, 196, 197– 99, 210, 219, 230; living waters in, 185–86; manuscript page of, 196;

Index monstrosity in, 192–95, 210, 221, 230; on the nature of poetry, 177–79; ontopoiesis in, 159, 165; prefatory stanzas to, 80, 167, 179–80, 199; sequence of events in, 167; symbolic centers in, 158, 176, 177; and transcendental physiology, 173; and “The Triumph of Life,” 239, 246; Witch as symbol in, 158–59, 167–70, 171, 173–77, 180, 188, 194, 195, 201, 202, 204, 210; writing of, 166–67, 207 Wolff, Caspar Friedrich: and cell theory, 37, 146–47; on generation (see Theory of Generation); Haller’s dispute with, 18–19, 147; and Jerusalem, 109, 111, 114, 115–16, 130, 134; on organized bodies, 109; on monstrosity, 48 Wolff, Christian, 30–31 Woodhouse, Richard, 243–44 Wordsworth, William, 24, 188, 216; “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” 265n56; Lyrical Ballads, 159; “Peter Bell,” 178–79; “Tintern Abbey,” 1–2, 240 Zeitgeist, 34, 35–48; analogy in, 42–45; of electricity, 228; and literary history, 40–41; of living form, 38; of outmoded history of ideas, 44; of Romanticism, 39–41, 42–45, 112, 154, 228, 246; unity implied in, 40 Zeugungsart (mode of generation), 115, 222, 270n26 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, 230 zygote, development of, 3