Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality (Romanticism in Perspective)

Romantic Dynamics The Poetics of Physicality Mark S. Lussier General Editors: Marilyn Gaull, Professor of English, Te...

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Romantic Dynamics The Poetics of Physicality

Mark S. Lussier

General Editors: Marilyn Gaull, Professor of English, Temple University/New York University; Stephen Prickett, Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Glasgow This series aims to offer a fresh assessment of Romanticism by looking at it from a wide variety of perspectives. Both comparative and interdisciplinary, it will bring together cognate themes from architecture, art history, landscape gardening, linguistics, literature, philosophy, politics, science, social and political history and theology to deal with original, contentious or as yet unexplored aspects of Romanticism as a Europe-wide phenomenon. Titles include: Toby R. Benis ROMANTICISM ON THE ROAD The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth’s Homeless Richard Cronin (editor) 1798: THE YEAR OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS Péter Dávidházi THE ROMANTIC CULT OF SHAKESPEARE Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective Charles Donelan ROMANTICISM AND MALE FANTASY IN BYRON’S DON JUAN A Marketable Vice Tim Fulford ROMANTICISM AND MASCULINITY Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt David Jasper THE SACRED AND SECULAR CANON IN ROMANTICISM Preserving the Sacred Truths Malcolm Kelsall JEFFERSON AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM Folk, Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation Mark S. Lussier ROMANTIC DYNAMICS The Poetics of Physicality Andrew McCann CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE 1790s Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere Ashton Nichols THE REVOLUTIONARY ‘I’ Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation

10.1057/9780230597501 - Romantic Dynamics, Mark Lussier

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories

Anya Taylor BACCHUS IN ROMANTIC ENGLAND Writers and Drink, 1780–1830 Michael Wiley ROMANTIC GEOGRAPHY Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces Eric Wilson EMERSON’S SUBLIME SCIENCE John Wyatt WORDSWORTH’S POEMS OF TRAVEL, 1819–42 ‘Such Sweet Wayfaring’

Romanticism in Perspective Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71490–3 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England



Jeffrey C. Robinson RECEPTION AND POETICS IN KEATS ‘My Ended Poet’

Romantic Dynamics Mark S. Lussier Arizona State University



The Poetics of Physicality

First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–71891–7 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–22671–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lussier, Mark. Romantic dynamics : the poetics of physicality / Mark S. Lussier. p. cm. — (Romanticism in perspective) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–312–22671–3 (cloth) 1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and science—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Chaotic behavior in systems in literature. 4. Quantum theory in literature. 5. Consciousness in literature. 6. Romanticism—Great Britain. 7. Cosmology in literature. 8. Physics in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR590.L87 1999 821'.709356—dc21 99–16403 CIP © Mark S. Lussier 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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To Marcia, the bearer of jouissance




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Acknowledgements

viii

Preludium: On Synchronicity

1

1

Romantic Dynamics, or Towards a Physical Criticism

13

2

Blake’s Deep Ecology, or the Ethos of Otherness

47

3

At the Limit of Physical Theory, or Physical Dynamics in Coleridge’s Rime

64

4

Blake’s Vortex, or the Quantum Bridge in Milton

82

5

Reconstructing Byronic Time, or Temporality and Memory in The Giaour

105

The Rhythmic Universe, or Spatial Dynamics in Shelley’s Poetics

136

Methodic Sadism/Symbolic Misogyny: Romantic Responses to Sciences as Ideology

165

6 7

Notes

182

Works Cited

199

Index

214

vii



Contents

I owe thanks to many individuals and institutions past and present for enabling this work. Individuals always come first. I thank my editor, Marilyn Gaull, for support and flexibility, for humor and intensity, manifest both in the crags surrounding Grasmere and the electronic space of the web. I thank Gregory Kucich for a display of compassion when it was needed most and for the continual expression of enjoyment. I thank Leo Damrosch for including me in his NEH seminar in 1993, where this project was launched, and for intensely reading an early draft of Chapter 4. I thank Jonathan Bate for his hospitality (as guest, host and hiker), his kindness at a crucial emotional juncture, and his commentary on an earlier version of Chapter 2, which forced a crystallization of thought. I thank Jonathan Wordsworth for including me on the program at the 27th Grasmere Summer conference, where I tested the hypotheses of Chapter 3 in a tough crowd by morning and evening but lived the physical with David Chandler, Graeme Stones and Sylvia Wordsworth every afternoon. I thank Mary Lynn Johnson (now acknowledged as the ‘unnamed reader’ who accepted an earlier version of Chapter 4 for publication) for enabling a critical quantum leap by offering the most insightful and extended reader’s report I have ever encountered; I have always considered the piece co-authored. I also thank those that offered verbal and material support during my passage into the profession: David Anderson, Syndy Conger, Kevin Cope, Robert Essick, Margaret Ezell, Norman Grabo, J. Paul Hunter, Christine Iwanicki, Tom Joswick, Dan Latimer, Marjorie Levinson, Karen Mann, Paul Mann, David Stewart and Paul Youngquist. My deepest gratitude goes to Jeffrey Cox, my kindred spirit in pursuit of the jouissance at the core of Romantic engagement with the world, for years of friendship and fellowship. Institutions have played a primarily financial role in this work’s completion, and I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Arizona Humanities Council and Western Illinois University for grants supporting the research and its dissemination. Within my current institution, Arizona State University, thanks go to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (especially Dean Gary Krahenbuhl) and the Department of English (especially Nancy Gutierrez) for providing funds to travel to several conferences and for research support. I herein viii



Acknowledgements

ix

acknowledge and thank the journals Studies in Romanticism and Nineteenth-Century Contexts for publishing earlier, significantly different, versions of Chapters 2 and 4, respectively. Shifting again to the individual, I thank my research assistants – Bruce Matsunaga, Irena Praitis and Jeff Ritchie – for labor beyond the call of duty in the research and revision stages of the project. I also thank my graduate seminars in 1994, 1995 and 1997 for the relentless pursuit of every aspect of Romantic thought. As well, I thank my copy editor, Peter Andrews, for hard labor and good cheer, and my acquisition editor, Charmian Hearne, for that comforting conversation at Strawberry Hill. At a purely personal level, I thank my grandfather-in-law, George Barlow, for passing along all those books on black holes and the big bang. I thank my old friend Christof Burawa for overcoming all obstacles in the manuscript’s formatting, which saved the day (and my sanity) at project’s end. I thank my remaining family members, Ann and Crystal, for perseverance and love in a time of trauma and upheaval, and I thank Marcia, the most luminous, talented and loving person I have ever known, for everything.



Acknowledgements



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Make efforts in ways then to perceive interdependence.1

I. Play as purpose I begin with a ‘preludium’ rather than a ‘preface’ or ‘prologue’ as a gesture to William Blake’s same practice in his prophetic books and to evoke the term’s etymological richness, a provocative difference within its linguistic unconscious, in opposition to the latter terms.2 The term originates from the Latin prælud-ere, a combination of præ- (pre-) and ludere (to play); the direct translation, then, is ‘to play beforehand’ in something ‘as a prelude or preliminary action … to prepare the way before [and] to foreshadow’ (II: 2279). Yet a second connotation is equally important in regard to ‘purpose’ for the text that follows, where a prelude functions as ‘an introductory performance to some later action’ (II: 2279).3 For a work that aspires to pursue the interplay of thought across disciplinary boundaries, the term seems the most appropriate choice, for this play prior to performing a critical act should offer a foreshadowing of the type of analysis undertaken thereafter. The term has the additional advantage of avoiding, at least in part, any ‘question of the preface’ raised by Derrida. Any writer in the postmodern era has become painfully aware of the Derridean challenge to such cosmetic prefacials actually produced a posteriori.4 Although I accept this as the ground state where most textual efforts begin (or is that end?), I naively believe that by embracing ‘play’ (rather than ‘word’ or ‘figure’) as the etymological expression of my concerns, I can put into play resonances that will ripple through the following thought-experiments 1




Romantic Dynamics

and partake, in part, in the interdisciplinary free play of imagination examined. As Johan Huizinga noted in the 1930s, ‘To our way of thinking, play is the direct opposite of seriousness’ (Huizinga 5), but for Erwin Schrödinger, also writing in the 1930s, ‘play’ provides the pre-condition for the instrumental ends of ‘hard’ science: Instances of such intellectual play are games in the ordinary sense, like card games, board games, dominoes, or riddles, and I should also count among them every kind of intellectual play as well as Science; – and if not the whole of Science at any rate the advance guard of Science, by which I mean research work proper. (Schrödinger 28) Schrödinger’s analysis of the element of ‘play’, quite likely not known to literary critics, connects science to other human activities, although he does seem to trivialize his symbolic association of science and work with games and riddles. However, he does not. From the perspective of the new physics, partially inaugurated by Schrödinger and much celebrated in his ‘thought-experiment’ of the cat in the box, the play of thought is fundamental to frame hypotheses, construct experiments and interpret results: New thoughts generally arise with a play of mind, and the failure to appreciate this is actually one of the major blocks to creativity. Thought is generally considered to be a somber and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas. Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself. Play, it appears, is of the very essence of thought. (Bohm and Peat 48) Under these conditions, then, play expresses a fundamental state of being, a position in the physical sciences in accord with elements of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic system: And yet it is, surely, unequivocal that, as against the being upheld by philosophical tradition, that is, the being residing in thought and taken to be its correlate, I argue that we are played by jouissance.



2


3

This sense of experience, including work, as the play of mind and matter has a great deal to do with the concerns of this text, since the jouissance of thought has always governed my attraction to particular writers (be they poets, philosophers, or physicists). Equally, allowing an element of play into criticism recognizes a random, unaccountable interaction operative in the most ‘objective’ of ‘subjective’ acts (and vice versa), whether one describes such events as the intrusion of the unconscious via language or as the expression of neuronal cohesion gained in a random quantum fluctuation. When the random play of mind against matter, any matter, takes on meaning, finds unsought connections, and unveils the presence of acausality in comprehension, the term ‘synchronicity’ and its linguistic progeny – which have currency in both the physical and human sciences – can provide a conceptual force field among the languages of physics, poetry and psychoanalysis to suggest a wider critical paradigm, one that re-fuses fragmentation and imagines unity. In this sense, the recognition of synchronicity restores ‘a sense of wholeness, life, and creativity to the universe of physics, a sense that brings with it the return of human meaning to the cosmos itself’ (Combs and Holland xxxviii) and recognizes that ‘consciousness break[s] … causal chains’ to create ‘a universe of self-referent activity … where intentionality, volition and creativity are spawned’ (Harth 145).

II. Thought-experiment To construct a text based on synchronicity is to construct an elaborate ‘thought-experiment’ as text to explore its critical manifestations. Yet before reviewing the tradition of synchronicity, a tradition that converged in early twentieth-century physics and psychoanalysis, and explaining the role it plays in this text, it seems wise to clarify another phrase used for the duration of this text, ‘thought-experiment’. My use of the term is intentionally broad, since, to serve my purposes, it must be capable of encompassing the mental activities of both William Wordsworth and Albert Einstein, to name only two juxtapositions.5 Wordsworth, in the 1798 advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, proposed that the poems in the volume were ‘to be considered as experiments’



Thought is jouissance. What analytic discourse brings out is this fact, which was already intimated in the philosophy of being – that there is a jouissance of being. (Lacan ‘God’ 142).

4

Romantic Dynamics

The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural … For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life.6 In what some consider the inaugural text of English Romanticism, the method of construction, experiment, while seeming to arise from Baconian and Newtonian postulates, actually points forward to more distant prospects, the physics of our own day. The dynamically differing poetry in Lyrical Ballads sets in play convergent rhythmic oscillations that create a continually shifting pattern of interferences designed to reveal ‘contradiction or conflict implicit in … thought’ and to allow ‘clear concepts … to replace the confused ones that had been in use before’(Kuhn Essential 261).7 While this may sound like orthodox Romantic criticism in the Abrams mode, it is actually Thomas Kuhn’s description of the function of ‘thought-experiments’ in science. The ‘thought-experiments’ (by Piaget and Galileo) described in Kuhn’s essay seem apt descriptions of the event horizon of Lyrical Ballads, and Kuhn, like Schrödinger and Albert Einstein, recognized that poetry and physics share a core of creativity. ‘As a child, Einstein had asked himself what the world would look like if he could travel astride a speeding light beam’, and through such ‘Gedankenexperiments [thought-experiments], as [he] called them’, the adult Einstein revolutionized classical mechanics by overturning the Newtonian absolutes of space and time (Shlain 120, 123–4). Yet, as the implication of his quantum equations were extended to their logical conclusion by physicists like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, Einstein used thought-experiments in an attempt to escape the conclusion that acausality, complementarity and uncertainty define the interplay of matter and energy in time and space.8 Today, Einstein’s assertion that ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’ continues to exert a subtle but measurable influence, even through T-shirts and bumper stickers (Shlain 119). However, during the Romantic period, Einstein’s elevation of ‘imagination’ over ‘knowledge’ would have found some sympathy among scientists and strong adherents among poets. Indeed, ‘imagination’ has become, perhaps, the central reified attribute of any definition of ‘romanticism’.9



(Wordsworth: Stillinger 443), and Lyrical Ballads itself, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s discussion from Biographia Literaria makes clear, is a literary ‘experiment’ constructed on creative complementarity (Jackson 314):

5

Wordsworth, in suggesting the term ‘experiments’ for his poems and in identifying ‘pleasure’ as the bond that binds ‘the Poet and the Man of Science’, suggests ‘a profound conjunction in the work of scientist and creative writer’ (Beer 37), and Romantic criticism has only recently (within this decade) begun to position itself at this ‘conjunction’ (with notable exceptions). Mental and physical play generates pleasure, producing creative energy for poets, scientists, even literary critics, and such pleasure must be continually re-cognized. What follows this ‘Preludium’, then, is an attempt to allow an unruly, random element to play within my critical endeavors; this is, in a sense, my answer to a criticism of ‘indifference’, in Majorie Levinson’s apt phrase, withdrawn from ‘the scene of interpretation’ (272). A first step in probing this ‘conjunction’, in constructing this bridge across the abyss of ‘indifference’, requires a recognition that an acausal element can exert considerable influence and generate considerable energy in the act of criticism. Every critic, by necessity, occupies this conjunctive space and re-fuses critical indifference.10

III. On synchronicity The Oxford English Dictionary defines a ‘synchronism’ as follows: Synchronism: 1. The quality of being synchronous; coincidence or agreement in point of time; concurrence of two or more events in time; contemporary existence or occurrence. 2. Arrangement or treatment of synchronous events etc. together or in conjunction, as in history; agreement in relation to the time of the events described. 3. Recurrence at the same successive instants of time; the fact of keeping time, i.e. proceeding at the same rate and exactly together; coincidence of period, as two sets of movements, vibrations, or alterations of electrical current. (II: 3209) While addressing the coincidental nature of the phenomena, while insisting on the historical verifiability of the phenomena, while translating that phenomena into periodic, even melodic registers, the definition remains mute on just what completely constitutes a moment of synchronicity. However, the OED does draw out several elements of synchronism important for the following thought-experiments: a concern for ‘time’; a concern for ‘history’; a concern for ‘rhythmic vibrations’. However, the experience of a synchronism must




Romantic Dynamics

also be constituted in relation to an always present hermeneutic element, without which a synchronic moment loses meaning and simply slides away into the oblivion of unperceived phenomena (a spacetime of quantum wave potential unrealized because unobserved). The seemingly oxymoronical construction of synchronistic experiences attracted the attention of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, especially since his interpretation of this ‘meaningful coincidence’ supported his elaboration of the collective unconscious. Jung defined synchronicity to foreground this element: ‘An unexpected content which is directly or indirectly connected with some objective event coincides with the ordinary psychic state: this is what I call synchronicity’ (Jung 29). Of course, the types of synchronicities that Jung notes have an eerie familiarity to them, since we have all experienced meaningful coincidence crystallized of hidden variables. Indeed, psychoanalysis and physical theory share, even require, that such experiences would be ‘universal’, transcultural. My own experience involves the more complex, somewhat unseen side of synchronicity and is akin to that discussed both separately and jointly by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli’s work on quantum fields as expressions of resident forces constituting nature in uncertainties and probabilities, Jung saw, spoke to his own attempt to analyze empirically the seemingly random occurrence of meaningful juxtapositions in the field of the real, what we might call either time or history. This analysis, in turn, had a direct bearing on Jung’s chief conceptual contribution to psychoanalysis: the ‘collective unconscious’. Jung’s work on a collective unconscious as a deep structure beneath the play of surfaces, Pauli saw, spoke to his attempt to grapple with a seeming acausality as the expression of ‘quantum reality’ (Herbert Quantum xi). The collaborative conclusions reached by the physicist and the psychoanalyst suggest that synchronistic effects point to a deeper reality wherein mind and matter – always split within Enlightenment epistemologies defined by Cartesian dualism and Newtonian mechanics – find harmonious expression and experience cohesion. Interestingly, their shared experiences of synchronicity, rather than some theoretical or experimental interest, brought Jung and Pauli to the study of synchronicity, and an example from the end of Pauli’s life can help evoke a clear picture of the concept: One of the most curious of these stories about Pauli concerns the number 137. One of the great unresolved mysteries of modern



6

7

physics is the value of the fine structure constant, for while the other fundamental constants are all immensely small or enormously large, this fine structure constant 1/137 turns out to be a humansized number. This number 137 and its place in the scale of the universe particularly puzzled Pauli and continues to challenge physicists today. It was a mystery that Pauli was to take to his death, for on being admitted into the hospital, the physicist was told that he was being put in room 137. According to one version of this story, Pauli said, “I will never get out of here.” The physicist died shortly after. (Peat 22) One might say that a secondary synchronicity concludes a primary one, but Pauli recognized, after a life packed with such events, the meaningfulness of the synchronistic event. Jung, as well, provided an expansive example of the play of synchronicity in the ‘Exposition’ that begins Synchronicity: Today is Friday [1 April]. We have fish for lunch. Somebody happens to mention the custom of making an ‘April fish’ of someone. That same morning I made a note of an inscription which read: ‘Est homo totus medius piscis ab imo.’ In the afternoon a former patient of mine, whom I had not seen for months, showed me some extremely impressive pictures of fish which she had painted in the meantime. In the evening I was shown a piece of embroidery with fish-like sea-monsters in it. On the morning of April 2 another patient, whom I had not seen for many years, told me a dream in which she stood on the shore of a lake and saw a large fish that swam straight towards her and landed at her feet. I was at this time engaged on a study of the fish symbol in history. Only one of the persons mentioned here knew anything about it. (Jung 10) Jung relates the degree to which this seemingly random string of visual and verbal events impressed itself, although he does attempt to establish a cause–effect relation via the tradition of eating fish on Friday or the reoccurrence of fish as dream symbolism, yet this effort collapses in the face of the laws of probability. The confluence of Jung and Pauli itself is somewhat synchronistic, given the obvious compatibility of their ideas from what most conceive of as diametrically opposed disciplines. Roughly speaking, their




Romantic Dynamics

collaboration represents an attempt to marry psychological and physical processes within a unified, fourfold, symmetrical field of language defined by the complex interactions of polarities locked in relationships of attraction and repulsion.11 With their joint publication of The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, the psychoanalyst and the physicist announce their conviction that synchronicity ‘was a new principle of nature that would complement the approach of physics’ (Peat 25). Jung describes synchronicity in relation to his own etymological analysis of the linguistic unconscious of the term, finding the association with simple simultaneity somewhat limited: Instead of simultaneity we could also use the concept of a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something other than the probability of chance is involved. (Jung 104) ‘Simultaneity’ as a term lacks the element of recognition that generates meaning due to mutuality of physical and psychological states. ‘Synchronicity’, for Jung, ‘means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state’ (25). At the conclusion to his contribution to The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (‘The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler’), Pauli supplements Jung through the inclusion of ‘the concept of complementarity’: ‘It would be most satisfactory of all if physis and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality’ (Jung and Pauli 209–10). ‘The essence of a synchronicity’, suggests the physicist F. David Peat, ‘is that the particular pattern has a meaning or value for the individual who experiences it … A synchronicity involves strong parallels between interior and exterior events that are emphatically endowed with meaning’ (Peat 25). The physicist Fred Alan Wolf takes this attitude even further, for he argues that such ‘events are marked by their psychic component as well as their physical component’, which Western physical and metaphysical traditions ignore at their peril: Here is the crux of the matter: our Western consciousness has taken as meaningful only those events that are labeled causal. By losing track of or dismissing this other dimension of meaningfulness, we actually become unconscious of much of the universe. (Dreaming 57)



8

9

To bring the importance of the concept somewhat closer to its function in this book as a critical principle of connection, I find, for example, significance in the appearance of a joint work by Jung and Pauli on synchronicity in the year of my birth, since the interplay of the discourses of physics and psychoanalysis within poetry has been at the core of the research herein presented. Synchronous moments of recognition force a confrontation with what Fredric Jameson, in a radically different context, might call historical necessity: What happens is rather that for a fleeting instant we catch a glimpse of a unified world, of a universe in which discontinuous realities are nonetheless somehow implicated with each other and intertwined, no matter how remote they may at first have seemed; in which the reign of chance briefly refocuses into a network of cross-relationships wherever the eye can reach, contingency temporarily transmuted into necessity. (Jameson Marxism 8) Jameson’s ‘fleeting glimpse’ unveils ‘a unified world’ (something akin to David Bohm’s ‘implicate order’ model of quantum dynamics) echoing Percy Shelley’s similar position in Queen Mab, where the elimination of ideological constraints creates the pre-condition to discern how ‘discontinuous realities are somehow implicated with each other and intertwined’, therein establishing unity in the seemingly chaotic movement of historical necessity. Synchronicity finds existence outside causality, thereby resisting possible thematization inside social codes/modes of expression and occupying a space Jameson reserves for ‘History’ itself, which is defined as ‘the experience of Necessity’ through a recognition of ‘the inexorable form of events’ (Jameson Political 102). Synchronicity, like Jamesonian ‘Necessity,’ cannot be enclosed within the form of events, because its apparently random, rather than serial, character manifests itself outside of ‘real’ time. By positing a ‘real’ time (inside of quotation marks), I mean to indicate my fundamental agreement with Stephen Hawking’s recognition that real or linear time is a collective fiction operative within the field of culture. Rather, in the theoretical universe constructed within physics, ‘time is imaginary and is indistinguishable from directions in space’, and, as a result, ‘the so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations’ (Hawking Time 135, 139).




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Each chapter in this book either resulted or benefited from some synchronistic event or moment – for example, an acausal coincidence of reading materials – with such events and moments seemingly woven out of random connections of diverse threads of experience and perception, rather than emerging from a purely rational research agenda (although one was in place). Let me give an extended example that speaks to the origins of this book while exploring the appropriateness of synchronicity as a tool for critical endeavors. Following my completion of an early version of the chapter on Blake’s relationship to and new-found relevance for the new physics, I applied for and received an NEH summer seminar grant focused on ‘Blake and Rousseau: Inventing the Modern Self’ which was led by Leo Damrosch at Harvard University. As part of my application, I indicated that my outside research project for the semester was an exploration of the impact that scientific advances had on the Romantic poets generally and William Blake specifically. Upon my arrival at the Houghton Library for the first meeting of the seminar, I was quite surprised that the current exhibition concerned the development of scientific thinking during the period immediately prior to the Romantic revolt against Newtonian metaphorization. I immediately recognized that the exhibition seemed to define part of the boundary conditions for my research, and I became convinced that this exhibition had specific ‘meaning’ in relation to my activities for the summer. Once convened in an upstairs seminar room, Leo asked each of the participants to discuss their outside projects. I related my interest in Blake’s appropriation by those articulating the ‘new physics’ of relativity and quantum dynamics, and several participants provided additional materials to fuel my research. That evening, over-stimulated by this energetic exchange, I turned on the local Public Broadcasting Station in Boston to relax while dining. However, the first image to present itself to my eye was Blake’s frontispiece to Europe: a Prophecy (‘Ancient of Days’), which was being misused yet again to image the mathematical elements of cosmogenesis. Intrigued by the creative energies unleashed by this synchronistic sequence, I ranged through the Cambridge book stores the next day and found Jung’s Synchronicity and Peat’s Synchronicity in the same book store on the same shelf (even though the psychology and physics sections were on opposite sides of the store). Of course, such a sequence, part and whole, could be argued



IV. Synchronistic criticism

11

in cause–effect terms, but the impression was one of the random and acausal, rather than simple coincidence. The analysis of the apparently random appearance of acausally related phenomena within an individual’s field of perception, although initially fueled by Jung and Pauli, slowly lost its relevance as the fields of psychology and physics underwent the same type of fragmentation apparent across most disciplines in their postmodern guises, and the suggestion that synchronicity can play a crucial role in deconstructing the Enlightenment episteme, with its attendant dualisms and methodologies, has received little critical attention. Yet synchronicity has begun to play a larger role in attempts to understand the vast networks of interconnection that define existence, since synchronicities indicate a deeper structure of experience based on wholeness rather than founded upon rational dissection, a position now verifiable through Enlightenment methodology. The scientific pursuit of synchronistic occurrence, given the number of hidden variables informing any given convergence of mental and material processes, falls in the specific mathematical realms of complexity and chaos: ‘complexity is a measure of the inherent difficulty to achieve the desired understanding’ (Bar-Yam 703), with increased difficulty creating ‘a cascade of bifurcations leading to deterministic chaos’ (Kelso 19). Thus, my aim, one shared with Romantic poets and scientists, will be to resist views that Romantic responses to physical theory settled into negation. At the outset of this endeavor to imagine Romantic poetry through contemporary physics (as well as the reverse), I will assert that the application of said ‘theories’ (of physics) to said ‘texts’ (works by canonical writers now termed ‘Romantic’) herein operates between causal and acausal methods; indeed, the very genesis of this project resulted from a series of synchronicities, seemingly unrelated but having everything to do with the subject at hand. The synchronistic sequence at Harvard led to the opening chapter; a fortuitous meeting, in 1989, with Jonathan Bate (whom I did not know) led to the chapter on Blake’s ‘deep ecology’; the teaching of a graduate seminar on ‘Romantic Poetry and Contemporary Criticism’ in my first semester at Arizona State University (determined by the lack of a graduate seminar on the subject in recent years) led to the chapters on Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Byron’s The Giaour; the ‘accidental’ passage of Walter Sullivan’s book on black holes from George Barlow’s hands (my grandfather-in-law) into my own led to the chapter on Blake’s Milton, and so forth. Thus, as might be inferred from this brief




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Synchronicities give us a glimpse beyond our conventional notions of time and causality into the immense patterns of nature, the underlying dance which connects all things and the mirror which is suspended between inner and outer universes. (Peat 2) In all Romantic thought experiments, from Blake’s prophecies and Wordsworth’s lyrics to the odes of Shelley and Keats and the satires of Byron, this understanding of pattern and connection between inner and outer forces shapes what Blake terms a ‘fearful symmetry’ or what Shelley calls a ‘faultless symmetry’, which functions as the foundation for both the ‘different construction’ of Romantic poetry that follows, as well as the ‘different construction’ of materiality offered by the new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics. Mark S. Lussier Arizona State University



introduction, I suggest that critical theory can profit by adopting ‘synchronicity’ as one of its analytic tools:

Romantic Dynamics, or Towards a Physical Criticism

Buddhist thinkers … find it extremely beneficial to incorporate into their thinking the insights of various scientific fields, such as quantum mechanics and neurobiology, where there are also equally strong elements of uncertainty and essencelessness. (The Dalai Lama MindScience 26)1

I. Preludium In Romantic studies and in wider spheres of critical theory, a dynamic approach to the interpretation of poetic events has emerged in the last decade (what I term ‘physical criticism’), and this critical mode manifested itself in the interpretive communities of several canonical Romantic authors, especially Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Shelleys. In part, this examination of Romantic poetics mapped direct connections between various writers, including poets and natural philosophers, and explored the ways in which Romantic poetical practices engage, even undermine, Enlightenment thinking and its mechanical by-products, the industrial progeny of Newton and Descartes. Physical criticism, to my mind, developed from the energetic exchange between two broadly cast categories, literature and science, and, fortunately, this interdisciplinary interchange unfolds on both sides of the dividing conjunction (‘and’), although some claim otherwise. Most recently, physical criticism has explored the rhythmic and imaginative resonances between thought experiments crafted by Romantic poets and the full range of contemporary physical theory. This concern for the complementarity of poetical expression and physical process slowly spread through wider spheres of critical theory, as well as Romantic studies, with Arkady Plotnitsky’s 13



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Romantic Dynamics

Complementarity and Philip Kuberski’s Chaosmos as two obvious examples. Plotnitsky succeeds in elaborating ‘an analytic framework suited to the requirements of the humanities and social sciences, rather than those of the natural and exact sciences’ (13), and Kuberski successfully establishes a link among the disciplines in ‘the play of determinacy and indeterminacy … everywhere, from shifting patterns and molecules in our bodies to the circulation of signifiers that form the shifting patterns of human science, language, history and criticism’ (2). At the 1995 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, papers in the special session organized by Stuart Peterfreund articulated boundary conditions for extending the interchange between ‘literature and science’ within Romanticism itself.2 Yet the perception that literary criticism generally and Romantic Studies particularly remain antithetically estranged from science, both in its age and our own, persists, as does the sense that the human sciences – of which Romantic poetry is a part – can only respond with silence to scientific claims on authority founded upon ‘the principle of verification’ (Berlin 698). Let me give three quick examples as transition into a more detailed discussion of the interplay of physical theory and literary criticism in relation to William Wordsworth and William Blake. In Reading the Mind of God, the physicist James Trefil relates a conversation with his colleague E. D. Hirsch concerning the difference between their respective disciplines: This, then, is the fundamental difference between science and the humanities. In the former there is objective testing for correctness that is lacking in the latter. As I am fond of reminding my students, in science it is possible to start from reasonable premises, argue impeccably, and still make predictions that do not match the data. This is not the case in other disciplines. (Trefil 38) I suspect many share my sense that this type of ‘verifiability’ unfolds in our own classrooms, even in our own research, as hypothetical readings disintegrate when confronted with undeniable historical evidence or when critical constructions collapse for lack of direct textual support. At least, Trefil and Hirsch remain engaged in conversation, maintaining dialogic exchange, whereas the rhetorical strategies pursued by John Brockman, in The Third Culture, feel more overtly dismissive:



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Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost. (Brockman 17) Setting aside my ‘intellectual’ objections, I confess that my initial reactions to this attack on ‘their culture’ were anger, then anxiety. Anger, because Brockman’s position disregards the general interdisciplinary shift in critical studies and the specific use of scientific materials within Romantic studies in particular.3 Anxiety, because Brockman embodies the very willed ignorance he finds so reprehensible in ‘intellectuals’ and yet represents the growing dominance of narrow constructions within the sociology of knowledge in wider cultural spaces. The ‘reactionary’ tone of Brockman’s introduction echoes that sounded by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, who claim that the critical forces of postmodernism ‘represent a rejection of the strongest heritage of the Enlightenment’, where ‘irrationality is courted and proclaimed with pride’ (Gross and Levitt 3). Apparently, Gross and Levitt attempt ‘to convert friends’, and although they believe that their use of ‘the troubling term academic left’ was applied ‘with reasonable precision’ (2, 3), the application is so broad as to damn, for example, two-thirds of the professors currently working within my own College of Liberal Arts and Sciences: This category is comprised, in the main, of humanists and social scientists; rarely do working natural scientists (who may nevertheless associate themselves with liberal or leftist ideas) show up within its ranks … What defines it, as much as anything else, is a deep concern with cultural issues, and, in particular, a commitment to the idea that fundamental political change is urgently needed and can be achieved only through revolutionary processes rooted in a wholesale revision of cultural categories. (Gross and Levitt 3) My response (as opposed to my reactions), then, is one of urgency. Urgency, because this highly subjective perspective, once established at



Romantic Dynamics

Romantic Dynamics

a popular level, assures ever-greater marginalization for the humanities at the very moment, ironically, when physical and literary theory converge in the discovery of a shared universe of chaos, complementarity, indeterminacy, uncertainty and symmetry, the very boundary conditions for Romantic poetics that I find so attractive. My response shares impulses expressed, again somewhat ironically, by George Bornstein in his contribution to The Flight from Reason and Science (a collection of essays edited by Gross, Levitt and Martin W. Lewis), and the following chapters pursue my own version (or vision) of Bornstein’s ‘different construction of Romanticism’: I would like to argue not so much for calling constructions of Romanticism [as anti-scientific] ‘wrong’ but rather for recognizing that a different construction of Romanticism is possible and even defensible, one in which the Romantics object not to reason and empiricism but to their undue dominance, and seek instead a reintegrated human psyche with reason as a major but not sole part. (Gross, Levitt and Lewis 460) Bornstein immediately evokes Blake and Wordsworth to vindicate this alternative construction of Romantic relations, and my resistance to Gross, Levitt and Brockman’s positions, then, takes a form related to that briefly invoked by Bornstein via Blake and Wordsworth. My covert collaborators in this resistance will be those individuals – often practicing physicists and neuroscientists – who forge contemporary physical theories of cosmos and consciousness. Indeed, in many ways, the theme of what follows will be that current physical theory has come to embrace (perhaps unconsciously) a recognizably Romantic description of mental and physical events in spacetime (when viewed from a ‘different’ construction), and I will test this hypothesis through Blake and Wordsworth at chapter’s end, two inaugural poets rarely brought into creative conjunction. However, rather than moving directly into Blake and Wordsworth, the argument would be better served through a brief critical, cultural, intellectual and historical contextualization.

II. Romantic dynamics The term ‘dynamics’ functions in several ways but primarily as the branch of physical theory ‘concerned with the actions of forces on bodies, with particular respect to the motions produced’ (OED I: 821). However, Romantic poetry thematizes this dynamic to complexify purely



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mechanical visions of inner and outer phenomena, allowing the term to apply equally to the motion or movement of mind and matter. Within the epic efforts of Blake and Shelley, for example, the poets create biological, psychological and cultural layers of narrative reference that coalesce into the ‘superorganisms’ (Bar-Yam 699) Albion and Prometheus. Thus, the poetics of coalescence requires a ‘systems dynamic’ to achieve its visionary ends, and this poetic dynamic proposes, pursues and embodies ‘a global emergent property’ (Bar-Yam 12) called ‘symmetry’ by both Blake and Shelley. Dynamics inform, then, all interactions between specific locations in spacetime (the poets) and the world through which they moved (determined by physical laws of nature), which can potentially limit the imagination by binding it to Enlightenment epistemology and its material ideologies. As well, literature and science as dynamic systems intersect via acts of imagination in both disciplines, unveiling a shared core of creativity, the play if you will, as the dynamic undergirding emergent systems of thought and action. Suggestive insights on the dynamic relationship between literature and science in English Romanticism are dispersed throughout both its literature and criticism, yet these scattered portions have only recently converged to provide a broader interpretive context for Romantic poetics, a critical state coalescing during the last decade. Too often critical thinking on the Romantic analysis of this problematic relationship begins (and ends) with comments uttered by John Keats and Charles Lamb during the ‘immortal dinner’ at the house of the painter Benjamin Hayden (whose guests also included William Wordsworth), a lament ‘that [Newton] has destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours’ (W. Bate 270).4 The conditions behind this comment have a ‘deep’ history, extending backward to the origins of Enlightenment epistemology, and M. H. Abrams, near the conclusion of The Mirror and the Lamp, briefly sketches the immediate cultural context of this response (298–335). Keats’s anti-Newtonian musings resist the increased tendency to localize truth within ‘natural philosophy’ and to dislocate it from other cultural modes of linguistic representation, including poetry. Obviously, such a development would generate a crisis of purpose for any aspiring poet, and Keats, although a recipient of professional training in an empirical science, speaks to this crisis. In Abrams’s insightful interrogative, ‘In an age increasingly science-minded, what assurance is there that poetry will even endure?’ (Abrams 299). Although the role Keats played in critical constructions of ‘literature and science’ within English Romanticism has been initially significant,



Romantic Dynamics

Romantic Dynamics

actual poetic responses to advances in ‘mixed mathematics’, ‘natural history’, and ‘natural philosophy’ (terms then current) were always of greater complexity than simple lamentation or pure negation.5 Yet ‘Romanticism’ itself continues to be associated with anti-scientism in wider spheres of cultural authority. Gross and Levitt again provide a troubling register of this concern outside the discipline: Far more emphatic and impassioned are the great figures of Romantic individualism, including Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and, above all, Goethe. It is in literature and poetry that we first begin to encounter a reaction against Enlightenment values that reveals a specific distrust of science, as well as a strong reluctance to believe that mankind can be reformed along ‘Scientific’ lines. (Gross and Levitt 20) Readers and critics often associate William Wordsworth, in relation to his intense personification of nature and its strong ecological thrust, with a retreat from those Baconian sciences that ‘murder to dissect’ and with a return to nature (except for those inner sciences that perform self-critical acts via projection onto what William Blake named ‘this Vegetable Glass of Nature’ [E 555]).6 William Blake has also been associated with a strong anti-scientism, whether focused on Newton and matter or on Locke and mind (as in Milton or Jerusalem). Yet the disinterest of Romantic poets is not to science per se, but towards a science incapable of envisioning the type of events they perceive recurring in the mind’s engagement with, and emergence within, material reality. Fortunately, critical reductions of Romantic responses to scientific revolutions have undergone re-evaluation in the 1990s, both within and without the discipline. Certainly, those poets identified as ‘Romantic’ were, for the most part, unified in their opposition to the instrumental ends of science, its on-going association with industry and the state (part of the prescribed program for science articulated by the Royal Society and continued by the Lunar Society), but one cannot argue, in the face of contrary evidence, that ‘The Romantics rejected not merely the foundations of the science of Descartes, Harvey, and Boyle, but the foundations of science itself’ (Eichner 20). The very tropes of a wide range of the sciences continually appear in their writing, allowing the poetry to resist such generic reduction. However, the degree to which Romanticism confronts the natural philosophy of its day, even occupying imaginative spaces opened by those sciences,



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problematizes any reductive paradigm, whether classical or postmodern, which fails to acknowledge the complexity of poetic response to emergent physical theories of matter and mind at the close of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. Thus, while the most familiar Romanticism generally emerges against the background of political and social revolutions, the writers of that Romanticism equally succeed in resisting, within their poetics, the growing dominance of Newtonian and Cartesian paradigms. The poets respond with an imaginative language partially constructed from new insights in those very physical sciences, and in the process, their poetics establish rhythm as the boundary conditions for mental and material processes, a position equally present in the ‘new physics’ of our own period.7 Before pursuing a detailed mapping of the imaginative resonance between Romantic poetics and those ‘new’ sciences, some effort should be exerted to establish the state of science during the period in question, thereby providing a foundation for further speculation. Basically, during the expanse of what might be termed ‘English Romanticism’ (roughly 1750–1850), several of the physical sciences experienced revolutions analogous to the political, economic and social ones unfolding in America and France.8 In addition, the physical sciences, due in part to the accumulation of data in Baconian fashion, experienced (through specialization) a revolution in the very sociology of knowledge that Romantic poets saw as fragmentation: ‘the eighteenth century saw also the rise of new scientific investigations in fields that were now for the first time broader than those simplified aspects of nature with which physics deals’ (Randall 148).

III. Boundary conditions The boundary conditions or standard cosmological model for English Romantic scientists and poets (and against which they wrote) was that of ‘a lifeless Machine’ (Coleridge), a ‘Newtonian phantasm’ (Blake) divided into absolutes that require ‘alienation’ (Wordsworth) from self, nature and society simultaneously. One might say that the ground state of English science was the paradigm inherited from Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, John Locke and Robert Boyle, and the metaphors offered by these essentially Enlightenment thinkers were mechanical. In Robert Boyle’s terms, the cosmos was ‘a great piece of clockwork’ (in Peterfreund ‘Power’ 29). This mechanistic view shared much with Enlightenment paradigms associated with Descartes, especially in the Cartesian extension of the mechanistic metaphor to



Romantic Dynamics

Romantic Dynamics

biological systems: ‘[Descartes] was persuaded that animals lacked even conscious awareness; they were, in his image, “like the clock”’ (Stone 23). However, resistance to this view of an immutable mechanism operates at the core of Romantic science and poetry alike, with the cracks and fissures in the Newtonian and Cartesian world-view leading to a new cosmological model: In 1750 the English instrument maker Thomas Wright published a remarkable book, Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, in which he suggested that the stars lie in a flat slab, a ‘grindstone,’ of finite thickness but extending to great distances in all directions in the plane of the slab. (Weinberg First 16) Responding directly to a poor German translation of Wright’s work, Immanuel Kant, in 1755, radically expanded all conceptions of the universe against which European modes of Romanticism operated when he offered, in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, the ‘world’s first glimpse of the universe of galaxies’ (Ferris Coming 145).9 This revolutionary expansion of space, however, emerged from a journalistic irony; in 1750, Kant had read a Hamburg journal review of Wright’s New Hypothesis of the Universe, which was actually a radical misprision of Wright’s views but which allowed Kant to make ‘a cat’s leap to the universe of galaxies’ (Ferris Coming 146), one of physical theory’s more memorable synchronicities. A generation later, in 1781, the English musician, mathematician and amateur astronomer William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, and, as Ivars Peterson notes, ‘The discovery of a new planet, the first since the ancients identified and began to track the five original wanderers, created a sensation’ (Peterson 102; also see Grabo 80–8) and spawned controversy. Even the idea of ‘black holes’, one of contemporary physical theory’s most exotic concepts, found its original articulation within the context of emergent Romanticism. As Stephen Hawking observes: [T]he first person to discuss black holes was a Cambridge man called John Michell, who wrote a paper about them in 1783 … Michell reasoned that it would be possible to have a star that was sufficiently massive and sufficiently small in size that its escape velocity would be greater than the velocity of light. (Hawking Black Holes 117)



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Thus, by the close of the eighteenth century, the cosmological model against which Romantic poetics operates had begun to assume a relatively modern guise: the cosmos had expanded into multigalactic dimensions; the solar system had itself undergone spatial inflation; and the dominion of gravity extended to light itself. As well, during the later eighteenth century, scientists increasingly criticized the absolutes of the Newtonian model, especially in England itself. Even when constricting scientific perspective to a planetary scale, a revolution like that in cosmology erupted forth from the geological sciences. The cosmological expansion discerned above was paralleled, during the eighteenth century, with a correspondent expansion of geological/ historical reflection, with Georges de Buffon (Historie Naturelle, 1749) and Carolus Linnaeus (Systema Naturae, 1758) providing definitive texts for the increased scrutiny (and appreciation) of the interrelationship between the history of the earth and of man. By the closing decades of the century, German natural philosophy, through ‘the study of rocks and fossils, [had] expanded the horizon of history’ to establish geological speculation as one ‘corner-stone of Romantic Naturphilosophie’ (Rupke 241). Within the English sphere, the publication of James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth solidified the force geology exerted, ‘mark[ing] the conventional discovery of deep time in British geological thought’ (Gould 61), a concept easily transliterated into other disciplinary discourses. Drawing directly upon the dates of Wordsworth’s life, John Wyatt argues for a unified sense of revolution in both literature and geology: The passage of history, from Wordsworth’s birth before the American War of Independence to his death eighty years later, included social and technological change on a major scale. In literary history, the range of writing is awe inspiring. In terms of geology, this span of years encompasses a sequence of major shifts: from a predominance of ‘cabinet collections’ to the making of geological maps and the foundation of museums for rock and fossil specimens; from mineralogy to geology and palæontology; from purchasing collections accumulated by others to field-work carried out in person. (Wyatt 16) As Alan J. Bewell has suggested, ‘To Wordsworth’s contemporaries the relationship between reading rocks and reading revolutions would have been quite obvious’, and, in the closing decade of the century,



Romantic Dynamics

Romantic Dynamics

‘geology had assumed the status of the preeminent science of revolution’ (246). In the biological sciences, the mechanistic reading of life on earth underwent revision as scientists and poets alike perceived the limitations to imaging living systems in mechanical terms. The Baconian imperative to query nature on the rack of experimentation, with its alienating separation of subject and object and its core metaphor of torture, began to yield to a different experimental model; in The Natural History of Selborne Gilbert White ‘investigat[es] the life and conversation of animals’ (White 136) yet discovers that ‘human existence is comfortably merged in the rhythms of nature’ (Damrosch 166). However, the Cartesian error of reading life mechanically remained problematic, since ‘[it] persuaded biologists to adopt, to this day, clockwork mechanics as a model for life processes’ (Damasio 248). In Jeremy Hayward’s terms, ‘[this] mistaken metaphysics has led to alienation between thoughts and our bodies, between our bodies and the Earth, and between us and other species’ (64). With the establishment of Enlightenment epistemology, then, as William LaFleur indicates, ‘A kind of nadir was reached by Descartes and Malebranche who thought it “impossible … to be cruel to animals, since animals [were] incapable of feeling”’ (143). Romantic poets were among the first to re-fuse this alienation – separation of self and other, subject and object, individual and world – by reading nature as ‘a living entity which could be known through the imagination’, a universe of matter in harmony with the motion of thought (Piper 3). 10 This strain of thought manifested itself early in Wordsworth and Coleridge as they sought to establish ‘One galaxy of life and joy’ (Wordsworth Prelude VIII: 631) at the core of Romantic descriptions of the relationship between consciousness and cosmos.11 The very success of Enlightenment science was predicated on this radical fissure between mind and matter in pursuit of a Baconian scientific method (and the mathematical extension of this method by Newton and Leibnitz) and created – in Robert Markley’s words – a ‘crisis of representation’ across disciplines in England toward the end of the eighteenth century: Newtonianism, therefore, must be seen not simply as a form of empirical science or specialized research but as an ideological structure of belief that integrated scientific research into the political and economic operations of eighteenth-century British society.12



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‘Newtonianism’ as an ideology, with a powerful symbolism that insinuated itself into a wide range of discourses, increasingly dominated epistemologies and cosmologies, even poetics, during the eighteenth century (as discussed at length in Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Newton Demands the Muse). As Abrams observes, Coleridge well understood the danger Enlightenment science represented to Romantic poetics: ‘the threat of science to poetry lay … in the mistaken and unbounded metaphysical pretensions of atomism and mechanism’ (Abrams Mirror 310). The Romantic poets conceived an alternative cosmology, founded on principles of complementarity and uncertainty, that was fully participatory and, hopefully, able to avoid the excesses of traditionally conceived ‘experimental science’. The experimental method as the path for knowledge, Coleridge foresaw, ‘killed the living and habitable world of ordinary experience’ while closing off ‘the metaphysical world of the pre-Cartesian and preNewtonian past’ (Abrams Correspondent 170). Romantic poets found current cosmological metaphors limited and inadequate, yet they understood that past metaphorical constructions of the cosmos had been eclipsed; collectively, the poets pursued symbolic spacetime beyond both systems, pointing toward an ‘active universe’ that was participatory, relative, subjective, uncertain and, independent of consciousness, indeterminate. This is our current cosmological model as articulated by Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking or Steve Weinberg, among others.13 Romantic poets, in an effort to resist the alienation of mind and matter within Enlightenment epistemology yet preserve political liberalism, overturned mechanistic metaphors and articulated a symbolism of symmetry, of mental and material rhythmic cohesion in a universe best described as having an ‘implicate order’: the material (historical, social, anthropological and scientific) and the mental (perceptual dynamics, cultural structuration and creative events) shape a founding symmetry based in complementarity principles of mutual integrity. And in ‘any Romantic natural science’, the practitioners reject ‘mechanical metaphors in favour of organic ones’ (D. M. Knight 14). Holism, then, is a feature of Romantic theories of poetry and physics, shaping a complementarity as boundary condition for both. As the physicist David Bohm suggests: It seems clear from the [present] discussion … that the implicate order is particularly suitable for the understanding of such unbroken wholeness in flowing movement, for in the implicate order that



Romantic Dynamics

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Romantic Dynamics

Drawing upon Bohmian constructs, Mervyn Nicolson argues that ‘Romantic poetry implies a cosmology in which reality is the unfolding of a hidden (explicate) order’ (129). As well, the structure of implication and explication comes into view through ‘a dynamical science, based upon forces and the understanding of process’ within and without (D. Knight 15): The paradigm that everything is connected has ethical consequences. Nature, especially animals, cannot be unthinkingly exploited. Reality is not a pile of objects: nature demands respect in its own right. (M. Nicolson 129) Across the divide of their discontents – from Blake and Wordsworth to Mary Shelley – Romantic writers resist the divisioning of the universe offered by classical physical theory and endorsed within neoclassical aesthetic principles. Across the political spectrum, rebel and/or reactionary, Romanticism unites in assailing the ideological imperatives of Enlightenment absolutism (experimental method and symbolic mechanics) as these emerge within the cultural sphere, ‘objecting not to reason and empiricism but to their undue dominance’ (Bornstein 460) in political and social space. Thus, Romanticism, in any true sense, cannot be construed as antiscientific; rather, the English poets termed Romantic resist the representational reduction of life, to borrow a term used by both Laplace and Hutton, to a mechanism, a ‘world machine’ (Harth 119). In the process of pursuing opposition to a blindly physical and psychological mechanism, Romantic writers imaginatively cast a worldview counter to that offered by the classical physics of Newton and the Enlightenment psychology of Descartes. As Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley indirectly prophesied, the Enlightenment episteme – a valorization of ratiocination at the expense of other aspects of self and the nature against which that self figures – has created a crisis of consciousness (and conscience) at the end of the twentieth century. Cultural practices and political institutions preserve the sense that science and technology, the progeny of Enlightenment epistemic success, can provide mechanical solutions to the despoiling of the air we breathe, the ground in which we plant, or the water of which we are composed.15



totality of existence is enfolded within each region of space (and time). (Bohm Wholeness 172)14

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As Edward Profitt observed two decades ago, ‘the romantic spirit has not struggled against a fully-dimensioned science (which we seem to be approaching in the more speculative work of modern physicists, as well as in the work of scientific structuralists and phenomenologists), and not against science as science, but against an under-dimensioned science becoming a dogmatic religion’ (63). The irony of this cultural ‘belief’ is that the hard sciences themselves have been instrumental in overturning the Newtonian paradigm and healing the Cartesian fissure in favor of wholeness (relativity, quantum, chaos and complexity), which comes with a marked return of subjectivity, complementarity, indeterminacy and uncertainty. Philip Kuberski, in Chaosmos, speaks directly to this issue: Physics, the fundamental science and inspiration to the others, went through a series of crises and revolutions which have radically challenged the division between mental and physical experience, while psychoanalysis claimed that consciousness and reason are features of a wider psychic economy which includes the unconscious. Physics was in the forefront of this growing awareness of the aesthetic dimension of scientific reasoning precisely because it confronted both the most basic and the most abstract of phenomena: the nature of space, time, matter and movement. (Kuberski 21) So too Romantic poetics, equally driven to confront these same phenomena, articulates answers at the end of the eighteenth century that display considerable confluence with the physics of cosmos and consciousness at the end of the twentieth century. The sciences have come to embrace the Romantic position that dualistic, mechanistic models are hopelessly inadequate to articulate the physical theories of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Hawking or Penrose. As well, science has increasingly found a new relevance for the type of thought experiments that define Romantic poetics, as seen in the increased frequency with which scientists appropriate terms, metaphors and structural patterns to help image the latest concepts emerging in the physical sciences of our own day.

IV. Science in Romantic poetics The canonical English Romantics stand unified in their opposition to the instrumental ends of Enlightenment production, the technological



Romantic Dynamics

Romantic Dynamics

by-products of the ‘industrial revolution’, but this accord sometimes cloaks their larger response to revolutions in the physical sciences underway around them.16 Periodically, we neglect Wordsworth’s application of the term ‘experiments’ to the poems appearing in Lyrical Ballads (1798), and we occasionally overlook his argument, in the 1802 ‘Preface’, that scientific and literary achievements, fuelled by imagination, complement one another.17 In most discussions of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge’s detailed reading of Newton, among other scientific texts, in the eighteen months prior to the initial drafting are rarely brought into hermeneutic play.18 Cast out of mind, in discussions of Blake’s later prophecies, is the apocalyptic conclusion to Jerusalem, where ‘Bacon & Newton & Locke’ join ‘Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer’ as bearers of ‘the Arrows of Intellect’ (E 257).19 Equally neglected in lectures on Mary Shelley’s horrific vision of science is the observation that she, in the weeks prior to the first drafting of Frankenstein, consulted Sir Humphry Davy’s A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (Crouch 35–44). As well, in most discussions of Percy Shelley’s poetry (from Queen Mab to Prometheus Unbound), the poet’s prodigious knowledge of scientific developments remains unreferenced, although, as Carl Grabo has argued, Percy believed ‘science’ to be ‘a strand of human knowledge to be woven into a synthesis with moral philosophy and metaphysics’ (viii). While the deep-seated anxiety and ambivalence expressed by Keats and imagined by Mary Shelley are sometimes presented as the Romantic response to science, especially by those outside the current of recent research, Romantic criticism has undergone physical permutations. For example, Wordsworth’s understanding and exploitation of geology defy reduction to such an oversimplified paradigm; so too, Blake’s response to a cosmology constructed within Newtonian mechanics suggests more than simple negation, and the same is true of Shelley’s weaving together, in Prometheus Unbound, of discourses across the then-emerging disciplines of the physical sciences. In the visual arts, John Constable – a landscape painter conditioned by the full expanse of natural philosophy – epitomizes the scientific ‘spirit of the age’ by identifying his aesthetic activities with the natural sciences. In his slightly earlier rainbow studies, Constable’s paintings aesthetically establish ‘no limit to the number of prismic colours’ in nature’s palette, a position shared with Newtonian optics (J. Wordsworth 68). ‘To paint [the rainbow] well’, Jonathan Wordsworth states, ‘[Constable] must understand it from every point of view, see it in scientific terms, and see it as the product of a moment of special intensity’ (68).



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Constable’s art, as Edward Profitt notes, shares with Romantic poetry ‘a sense of fidelity to things observed as well as the processes of mind that observes’ (Profitt 56), but Constable’s art, like Romantic poetics, exploits the cracks and fissures of physical theory. While Newtonian color theory provides quantitative knowledge of the inner structure of light, Constable, in his painterly effects, seeks to represent a moment of participation, ‘a moment of special intensity’. His studies evoke the lack of limitation to prismic colors in his representations of the rainbow, and one repeatedly discovers this lack of limit in Wordsworth’s poetry. Lest we forget, Constable transcribed Wordsworth’s ‘The Rainbow’ (or ‘My heart leaps up’) on the back of a pencil drawing based on Newtonian optical theory, suggesting that for Constable, Newton and Wordsworth do indeed, in Blake’s words from The Four Zoas, make ‘sweet Science’ (51: 30; E 328).20 At several points in this discussion, I have brought Blake and Wordsworth into direct interchange, two inaugural Romantic poets rarely brought into critical coincidence. The remainder of this chapter examines their work in terms of future reception and application: Wordsworth in the earth sciences and Blake in the physical sciences, with obvious overlaps. With some of the boundary conditions of the sciences as cultural and social fields established, the work of Blake and Wordsworth provides, at an incipient moment, an opportunity to analyze poetic responses to physical revolutions across the human sciences as the vanguard of resistance to Newtonian dominion. As well, the poetic spectrum represented by these inaugural poets provides the opportunity to display the dual drives of my critical method. Beginning with Wordsworth, I’ll extend discussion into contemporary geophysical theory. Then, beginning with contemporary physics (and Blake’s embedding in that discursive system), I extend discussion of contemporary physical theory backward to read Blake’s visionary poetics.

V. Wordsworth’s lyrical science In his review of the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, John Stoddart contrasts the poetics of Wordsworth and Coleridge to that offered by ‘the modern Bards of Science’, yet the phrase (‘Bard of Science’) actually fits Wordsworth, when viewed in a certain light (quoted in Jacobus 8).21 The text was forged in ‘experimentalism’ (Jacobus 7), but the frame for these ‘experiments’, as Wordsworth terms the poems in the 1798 advertisement, was constructed on principles of creative complementarity, a point Coleridge makes quite clear in Biographia Literaria.22 In



Romantic Dynamics

Romantic Dynamics

what some consider the inaugural text of English Romanticism, Wordsworth and Coleridge adopt, as Jonathan Smith observes, the Enlightenment frame for knowledge established by Bacon but have eliminated, somewhat, the Baconian directive to query nature on the rack of experiment (Smith 48–62). Smith suggests that Wordsworth felt that ‘Bacon knew what he was about’ but that the poet ‘distrusted the tradition of Baconian/Newtonian science in so far as its methodology turned both nature and the observer into a sort of machine’ (52, 61). Lyrical Ballads, as Keith G. Thomas proposes, reflects a wide-ranging debate between the poets across the disciplinary spectrum, including literature but extending to pantheistic theories of the One Life in nature, epistemological theories of the workings of mind (such as Harleyan associationism) and Lockean empiricist theory in general, possibly Kantian philosophy insofar as it was becoming known in Britain, and probably more mystical as well as more orthodox theories of religious belief. (Thomas 6–7) From these debates, Wordsworth and Coleridge construct ‘thoughtexperiments’, as Alan Bewell’s discussion of the anthropological aspects of Wordsworth’s poetics makes clear: ‘the imagination constructs scenes, situations, or modes of feeling that have the status of experiments, contributing to a general history of the imagination and charting its importance in each stage or phase of human life and development’ (Bewell 44). In the preface to the 1802 edition, Wordsworth represents poetry as the ‘science of feeling’ (J. Wordsworth 63), and he immediately becomes more ‘scientifically’ specific: If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself. (Wordsworth: Stillinger 456) For Wordsworth, once science was ‘ready to put on … a form of flesh and blood’, the poet would then ‘lend his divine spirit [of imagination] to aid the transfiguration [of cosmological paradigms]’ (456 italics



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mine). What the poet supplies – repletion of symbols, metaphors, figuration – allows the mathematically-based sciences to translate their findings into a language capable of common apprehension. As Wordsworth prophetically foresaw, ‘Poetry is the impassionated expression which is the countenance of all Science’ (456), and this is certainly reflected in contemporary physical theory, with its concern for symmetry and beauty in material complexity and with its continual citation of Romantic poetry as epigraphic presence. Yet in Wordsworth’s immediate experience with scientists, especially geologists, no clear line of demarcation had emerged between poetic and scientific acts of imagination, a case made most recently by John Wyatt: A growing self-consciousness about becoming Men of Science did not seal the geologists off from literary, theological, and more general philosophic enterprises. On the contrary, the geologists were proud of being all-round figures of literature, theology and philosophy. (Wyatt 214) Just as geologists retained an interdisciplinary view connecting their activities to literary and ‘philosophic enterprises’, so too Wordsworth’s poetics remain engaged with physical theories supporting his view of nature as an active presence in dialogue with the individual creative imagination. Wordsworth’s endeavor to present poetic forms in a style adopted ‘from the very language of men’ (Wordsworth: Stillinger 449), a style emptied of received poetical devices, actually intersects Bacon’s indictment of language as idol and follows, in some degree, the dictates for language prescribed by the Royal Academicians themselves. In his History of the Royal Academy, Thomas Sprat suggested a program of language designed to promote clear expression and easy apprehension, and he repeatedly emphasized ‘utility’ as the plumbline of good expression: [The Royal Society academicians] have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainess, as they can: and preferring the language of Artisans, Countrymen, and Merchants before that, of Wits, or Scholars. (II.xx: 113)



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Wordsworth approaches such preferences when, in representing the poems included in his revolutionary volume, he speaks of choosing ‘incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them … as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men’ (Wordsworth: Stillinger 446). However, as William Galperin notes, Wordsworth brings into linguistic play a synchronistic element, a ‘proclivity to the accidental, the transitory, the mundane and the spectacular’ (Galperin 101). Poetry bears this rhythmic burden in the sociology of semiology, transmitting the visible (registered as light, its rhythmic play within and without) into the verbal, creating an arena of participation and interaction in the process. Wordsworth sought to supply poetry [with] a scientific basis … in careful observation and exact description, which is then imaginatively transformed in an inductive manner, from particular instances to general truths; Davy contends that science utilizes this same poetic transformation of empirical data into the elegant laws of nature which in turn reinforce the beauty and harmony of the natural world. (Smith 58) Wordsworth’s vernal and intellectual energies, then, can be read as imaginative extensions of the Enlightenment enterprise (its episteme) which explores, according to Foucault, the paradoxical ‘relations of capacity and power’ (Foucault 47). However, through the poet’s creative energies, the dialogic arena wherein ‘capacity’ and ‘power’ interact becomes a dynamic system expressing ‘emergent complexity’ and ‘emergent simplicity’ simultaneously (Bar-Yam 5). Through this interactivity, the poet re-fuses ‘the clean separation of science and poetry’ and resists linguistic alienation, the ‘division of labor’ that science ‘extended to language’ across the eighteenth century (Horkheimer and Adorno 17). The instability of language combines with the fluctuations of poetic rhythm to shape a material object, the poem seething with overt energies and latent pleasures. As Smith speculates, The Romantics therefore welcomed what Foucault calls the replacement of classification by anatomy, for anatomy placed greater emphasis on the function of the living organism growing and developing over time. But the Romantics were also aware that the study of internal organs and functional systems required that organisms be dissected. (Smith 60)



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Looking toward relations consistently within his immediate gaze, Wordsworth knew from both Coleridge and Davy that most sciences were undergoing revolutions and experiencing paradigm shifts in the closing decade of the eighteenth century, as Lyrical Ballads was produced and reproduced. As Christopher Lawrence has argued, Davy’s analysis of power in relation through Romantic principles of genius brought about ‘a new order of things’ (Lawrence 227), yet the power animating the epistemic shift was most easily viewed within the geophysical sciences. Geological scrutiny of nature, immediately prior to the appearance of Wordsworth’s 1800 preface, had undergone a scientific revolution of the order the preface projects. As noted previously, geological science, by the 1790s, had achieved ‘the status of the preeminent science of revolution’ (Bewell 246), and the purpose of this emergent specialized science, as James Hutton proposed in Theory of the Earth, was to establish ‘some knowledge of order and system in the œconomy of this globe’ in order to ‘form a rational opinion with regard to the course of nature’. Hutton’s slightly later Uniformitarianism offers a theory of material change founded on uplifted terrains that function as discrete spots of time which chart the uniform development of the earth (Gould 60–8). Phrased differently, one can perceive the uniform in relation to radical disjunctures, but the price for this knowledge is the reduction of the world to a machine. As Stephen J. Gould further notes: Hutton describes the earth as a machine – a device of a particular kind. Some machines wear out as their parts fall into irreversible disrepair. But Hutton’s world machine worked in a particular way that prevented aging … Hutton’s self-renewing world machine works on an endlessly repeating, three-stage cycle. (Gould 65) Although truly revolutionary in its conceptualization of ‘deep time’ for global geological processes, Hutton’s work is equally Enlightenmentbound in its reinscription of mechanistic dynamic: ‘Deep time becomes a simple deduction from the operations of the world machine’ (Gould 66).23 This epistemic success, for the later Wordsworth, represented no revolution but only further extended the mechanical poetics of classical physics and psychology into biological systems, what Damasio terms one of ‘Descartes Errors’ (Damasio 248).24 In response to this mechanical view of geological and, eventually, biological processes, Wordsworth counters with a poetics of organicism, offering, in H. W. Piper’s words, a ‘universe [that] was a living



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… and I would stand Beneath some rock, listening to [notes] that are The ghostly language of the ancient earth, Or make their dim abode in distant winds. Thence did I drink the visionary power.26 Wordsworth’s thought-experiments often begin with the premise that ‘nature signifies’ (to borrow a phrase from Jacques Lacan), which will solicit different information than more classically defined Enlightenment experimentation into nature as it strives to bring ‘the world into subjection to man’ (Randall 143). Nature, for Wordsworth, speaks in notes (musical, metrical, mathematical), and the poet provides a rhythmic representation from this nexus of convergence between consciousness and this ‘ghostly language’ spoken in ‘articulate sounds’ capable of inaugurating ‘visionary’ connection beyond the self. Yet this language emerges from within, as in the Arab’s dream sequence opening the fifth book of The Prelude (1805), which images a sensate, semiotic synchronism as the dynamic supporting the dialogue between science (the stone) and poetry (the shell): … And, at the word, The stranger,’ said my friend continuing, ‘Stretched forth the shell toward me, with command That I should hold it to my ear. I did so And heard that instant in an unknown tongue, A loud prophetic blast of harmony, An ode in passion uttered … (89–97; 156) The ‘unknown’, yet ‘understood’, articulation (issuing forth from a shell, in a second-hand spot of time, in a section devoted to books) inaugurates visionary process via ‘harmony’ expressed in poetic terms, with rhythm becoming the vehicle to express ‘the real language of nature’ (Wordsworth: Stillinger 457) found in mental and material



entity which could be known through the imagination’ (Piper 3).25 Wordsworth posits nature as a sentient and communicative entity (recovered/un-covered) by extending ‘sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself’, as in the second book of The Prelude (1805):

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processes alike. Interestingly, the rhythmic bridge created here, within dream, flows from a shell, a simple image connecting nature (‘shell’) and observer (the ‘I’ that understands) in unresolvable ways. Yet this very irresolution functions to reinforce further interactions between physical and mental dynamics. Extending further Wordsworth’s argument for a physical yet symbolic connection between species and biosphere, translating it into contemporary geophysical terms, the poet understands that species and planet are ‘tightly coupled [in a] single and inseparable process’ (Lovelock 120).27 Wordsworth expresses a similar commitment at the foundation of his dynamic account of mental and material penetration in the 1800 preface: … man and nature [are] essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature. (Wordsworth: Stillinger 455) For Wordsworth, mind and matter are enfolded within one another and continually unfold within the field of the other. This position receives poetic rendition in ‘Home at Grasmere’: How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external world Is fitted; and how exquisitely too – Theme this but little heard of among men – The external world is fitted to the mind. (Wordsworth: Gill 198: 1005–11) Rhythmic expression brings mind and matter into conjunction, into mutual exchange, across the divide of consciousness, since they are implicated in one another. The dialogue as dynamic shaping the creative exchange between poetic forces (the poets themselves) mirrors the dialogic dynamic of mind’s exchange with nature, where the element of participation granted consciousness moves beyond a mechanistic reading of both mind and nature. As Jeffrey Baker argues, ‘The mind encounters a Newtonian universe “out there”, but brings to it an imaginative force which builds up a new creation’ (Baker 15). This position has analogies



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Romantic Dynamics

in William Blake’s poetics, as well as Bishop Berkeley’s material metaphysics. The semiosis of imaginative process, a natural force arising in cognition, encounters and converses (re-cognizes) with the semiotic dimensions of a signifying nature. In Jonathan Bate’s precise expression, ‘poetry is to be found not only in language but in nature; it is not only a means of verbal expression, it is also a means of emotional communication between man and the natural world’ (Ecology 17). Within Wordsworthian process, such dynamic interactions ground experience within even the smallest interaction between mind and matter via consciousness.28 The dynamic relationship between mental and material states, as Karl Kroeber suggests, further evokes pragmatic and ethical dimensions: [The Romantic poets] did not wish to remove poetry into an ‘aesthetic’ realm. They insisted on the practical efficacy and the practical duties of art – not just to the social but also to the natural world. Their poems repeatedly try to demonstrate that poetry cannot do well for one world without meeting its responsibilities to the other. (Kroeber 14–5) The ability to respond to a signifying nature brings with it responsibilities. At the confluence of the human and physical sciences, Wordsworth discovers an exchange of energy and information that functions as the boundary state of existence. Wordsworth saw the relationship of the sciences of man and the states of nature as complementary, a stance that converts eighteenth-century earth science into twentieth-century ecology. Such a ‘green reading of Wordsworth’ intersects that recently expressed by Jonathan Bate, in Romantic Ecology: [‘A green reading of Wordsworth’] has strong historical force, for it historicizes the idea of an ecological viewpoint – a respect for the earth and a scepticism as to the orthodoxy that economic growth and material production are the end-all and be-all of human society – [here] one finds oneself squarely in the Romantic tradition[.] (Bate 9) John G. Rudy proposes that Wordsworth’s poetry moves us away from the relational ethic in which things, beings, and ideas achieve identity through a system of signifying differences



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toward a realm of continually emergent, mutually productive unities in which all things, all forms, implode on each other or fold inward, as it were, in an eternally shifting matrix of creativity without source, center, and intention. (Rudy 29) Wordsworth further de-centers the ‘human’ from anthropocentric hegemony, certainly one plank in most Enlightenment agendas, and this aspect is a prominent feature of Lovelock’s hypothesis as well: ‘the Earth and the life it bears [are] a system’, and the ‘human’ simply participates in Gaia’s evolution as a self-sustaining ecosystem (Lovelock 31). Expressed in the language of quantum dynamics, the writers addressed throughout this text took as a given that the human element supplements natural systems with self-consciousness, with observation from a conscious node, a hidden variable in Romantic poetics fraught with implications for the role that perception plays in establishing the boundary conditions of a ‘transactional interpretation’ of a quantum universe (Wolf Quantum 266). For Wordsworth, the divide between mind and matter, mental function and sensate experience, subject and object, is eradicated in the processes of perception, an interpretation of the interplay of thought and experience also voiced by Coleridge in Chapter 12 of Biographia Literaria: Now the sum of all that is merely objective, we will henceforth call nature, confining the term to its passive and material sense, as comprising all the phenomena by which its existence is made known to us. On the other hand the sum of all that is subjective, we may comprehend in the name of the self or intelligence … During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs. (Jackson 291) For Coleridge and Wordsworth, the eradication of subject and object at the visionary moment of communication, of dynamic exchange between organism and ecosystem, is not simply pantheistic passion. Rather this refusal to acknowledge a clearly demarcated ‘inner and outer’ extends consciousness outward as well: the external world is not devoid of awareness … it is made up of numerous subjective experiences besides those of our single species



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For the best-know Lake poets, poetics must recognize a natural reality as meaningful beyond specifically human experience, yet ultimately fulfilling and including such apprehension … The paradox of poetry’s reconciliation of man and nature is thus that a poem can be at once the landscape into which a reader enters and a landmark to which he can return. (Elder 211) Coleridge’s moral in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which urges recognition of interconnection, positions consciousness on the fault line of experience, and Wordsworth, to close the penultimate book of The Prelude, envisions this ‘new world’ of complementarity as a ‘balance’ between mind and matter: Which do both give it being and maintain A balance, an ennobling interchange Of action from without and from within; The excellence, pure function, and best power Both of the object seen, and eye that sees. (Wordsworth: Stillinger 356: 370–8) Here a point of confluence has emerged between Wordsworth and Blake, who suggests a similar complementarity between outer and inner phenomena in Milton and Jerusalem, where consciousness is recognized in ecological terms. Blake offers such an extension of consciousness at the conclusion to Jerusalem, where ‘All Human Forms [are] identified even [as] Tree Metal Earth & Stone’ (99:1; E 258).

VI. Blake’s new physics While geologists and ecologists have moved increasingly toward a Wordsworthian position, theoretical physicists have accessed the work of William Blake to help image concepts and ideas resident in the new physics of quantum cosmology, partially because of Blake’s opposition



… these myriad forms of biotic experience, human and nonhuman, may collectively constitute a coherent global experience, or life, that is not without its own creativity and sentience. (Abram 89)

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to the absolutes of classical mechanics dislocated from perception. Blake’s opposition takes its most distinctive form in the justly famous portrait of Isaac Newton, which transmutes the towering figure of Newton ‘into an allegorical image of materialism’ (Vaughan 28). Newton resides on an outcrop of rock in the depths of materiality at the bottom of the Blakean sea of time and space, where the Lucasian Professor, compass in hand, imposes a rational (but radically limited) order on the world. Blake had recognized, even feared, the imaginative attraction offered by Newtonian physics, and he intuitively understood that the metaphoric success of Newtonianism was most acutely felt at the level of the ordinary, since ‘Newtonian ideology existed chiefly at a popular level’ (Hankins 9). Blake’s opposition to Newtonianism is most explicitly expressed in the oft-quoted 22 November 1802 letter to Thomas Butts: Now I a fourfold vision see And a fourfold vision is given to me Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And three fold in soft Beulahs night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep. (E 722) Blake’s response to this visionary contraction, well-documented in Donald Ault’s Visionary Physics, ‘treats Newton’s system from two directions at once – as a substitute for Imaginative organization and as material for re-creating a new Imaginative countervision’ (Ault Visionary 162). Blake, driven to resist the ascendancy of Newtonian mechanics, responds with his critique of Newton in Milton, which opposes ‘Newtonian voids’ and ‘the Newtonian phantasm’ with his ‘theory of the vortex’. Blake’s resistance pursues metaphoric directions more easily conceptualized from within the ‘new physics’, so that Blake’s symbolic victory over Newtonian paradigms was not achieved until this century with the emergence of relativistic physics and quantum mechanics. For example, consider Blake’s design for the poet Milton’s passage from ‘one infinite plane to another’. Milton steps into the vortex to descend to Felpham (where Blake composes the poem), and the imagery echoes Satan’s passage through chaos in Paradise Lost. Yet the physical



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dynamics described indicate that Milton enters something like a wormhole through which he can tunnel to escape gravitational collapse at what Blake terms ‘the limits of contraction’. With increasing frequency, physicists have turned to Blake for word and image, which renders somewhat problematic Paul Gross’s argument, in 1996, that ‘William Blake rejected all the forms of inquiry upon which modern science was built’ (Gross, Levitt and Lewis ‘Introduction’ 1). In fact, the first fruits of this project (an early version of Chapter 4) partially emerged from a seemingly simple question: why do scientists working on unified field theory continually draw upon William Blake in attempts to render their mathematical and/or experimental results verbally accessible to broader audiences? I mount a lengthier answer below. For now, I express accord with one of the early philosophical respondents to relativity and quantum dynamics, Gaston Bachelard, who suggested that scientific languages initially lacked ‘a plentiful enough supply of imagery’ to make their insights accessible and so appropriated poetry to aid in this necessary task of representation (Bachelard New 63). Perhaps several specific instances might best serve to illustrate this newfound relevance of Blake’s work for those theorists working in the hardest of sciences. During the composition of an early draft of Chapter 4, I encountered Ian Stewart and Martin Golubitsky’s Fearful Symmetry: Is God a Geometer?, whose opening chapter suggests that Blake’s image of a ‘deity, dividers in hand, measuring up the universe for the act of creation’ (here commodified as cover-art) powerfully anticipates the ‘bilateral symmetry’ manifest in the deepest and widest universal structures (Stewart and Golubitsky 2–3). The authors fail to consider the full complexity invested in the image, for the deity (visually and behaviorally associated with Urizen) actually leans out of the visioning eye of another entity, one that includes all engaged in perceptual dynamics (i.e. universal). This interpretation brings Blake into accord, somewhat, with Bishop Berkeley’s position that ‘to exist is either to be perceived or to perceive’ (Warnock 22).29 Through Heisenberg and Schrödinger, physical theorists have uncovered a participatory universe, and, from this contemporary vantage, Blake’s suggestion that ‘the Eye altering alters all’ (‘The Mental Traveller’, E 485) has achieved a measure of physical, even mathematical, verifiability within quantum dynamics. Yet Stewart and Golubitsky’s book is not the first physics text to appropriate Blake’s lines from ‘The Tyger’ as a title. More in line with Blakean irony, Anthony Zee’s Fearful Symmetry: the Search for Beauty in



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Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (Zee vii) Repeatedly, Zee appropriates Blakean images and presses them into service, but, as his transmutation of ‘The Ancient of Days’ image indicates, Zee has retained a somewhat ‘ironic’ stance in relation to Blake’s designs. Zee transmutes Blake’s image by incorporating into it Einstein’s strong opposition to quantum theory, his sense that ‘“The Good Lord does not play dice”’ (Zee 137) with the universe. Although Einstein’s mathematical computations herald Niels Bohr’s elaboration of the principle of complementarity and Werner Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty (the pillars for all subsequent high energy physics in this century), Einstein could not accept the more radical implications of his own work. Newtonian mechanics as metaphor leads to eighteenth-century notions that the universe operated like a grandly celestial clock, with the exception that, once wound by God, the universe was self-regulating according to physical laws established at the moment of cosmogenesis. Blake’s visual critique of this metaphor can be read in two famous paintings (God Punishing Adam and Elohim Creating Adam), both created in 1795. The backdrop to Adamic creation and destruction unveils Blake’s strategic stance against a ‘mathematical sublime’ (Weiskel 38) he associated with Newton and which he occasionally images through Stonehenge (whose arranged rocks [i.e. in the visual field of Jerusalem] repeatedly evokes the symbol for pi). Blake’s paintings foreground Elohim/God’s operations against Newtonian, mathematical backgrounds of ‘generation’ or ‘materiality’, consisting of perfect arcs and regularized rays of light and darkness. Such a universe, as both images make clear, operates coldly, darkly and inexplicably, but, in the Blakean view, such a cosmos can be transformed by a perceptual act (as in the last two ‘Memorable Fancies’ in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Such a strategy, in its reliance on principles of uncertainty and complementarity, augurs quantum theory, and one can again feel this



Modern Physics, which was published seven years prior to the Stewart/Golubitsky volume, evokes Blake’s opening quatrain to ‘The Tyger’ as the portal through which readers enter the text:

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Let there be an SU(5) Yang-Mills theory with all its gauge bosons, let the symmetry be broken down spontaneously, and let all but one of the remaining massless gauge bosons be sold into infrared slavery. That one last gauge boson is my favorite. Let him rush forth to illuminate all of my creations. (Zee 232) The SU(5) refers to theories of symmetric unity; the gauge bosons are elementary particles, with the ‘last gauge boson’ referring to a photon or light in its particle aspect. These brief examples of the appropriation of Blake could be augmented ad nauseam (and will be dealt with in a later chapter), but I will only cite a few of the most obvious offered by physicists as they relate to a crucial passage from ‘The Auguries of Innocence’: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour (E 490) Roger Jones, in Physics as Metaphor, cites the passage to illuminate his deliberations on the ‘rhythmic and harmonic’ (R. Jones 146, 150) in physical theory.30 Fritjof Capra, in The Tao of Physics (288), and Gary Zukov, in The Dancing Wu Li Masters (170), cite the same lines in their discussions of spacetime. John P. Briggs and F. David Peat, in Looking Glass Universe, cite the passage in relation to David Bohm’s studies of the dual aspects of light as waves and particles (112).31 The growing presence of Blake in discussions of the new physics is not lost on the scientists themselves, since it has become something of an inside joke, from the halls of the Fermi lab to the corridors of the Hale Observatory. As Dennis Overbye wryly comments, physicists frequently appropriate ‘aphorisms, old Blake and Bible quotations’ (395) in order to make better sense verbally – and sometimes even conceptually – of what they discover via the abstruse language of mathematics and through the technological engines of perception mediating experimental observations.



awareness in Zee’s use of Elohim Creating Adam, where Zee lightly suggests that God, instead of proclaiming ‘Let there be light’, actually says:

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While it would be an ultimately fruitless and ahistorical argument to propose that Blake actually anticipates the minute particulars of relativity and quantum mechanics, the point worth making is that Blake’s metaphors of cosmology do conceptually anticipate the type of symmetry (bilateral and fourfold), the type of cosmos (oscillating from big bang to big crunch) and physical events (wormholes), and the type of structuration (complementarity, uncertainty, spacetime continuum) that have emerged in the twentieth century.

VII. Towards a physical criticism For purposes of brevity, I have limited myself to discussions of Wordsworth and Blake, since they are rarely brought into critical conjunction, functioning as the poles of early Romanticism and since subsequent chapters will explore in greater depth other canonical Romantic writers. Thus far, I have attempted to imagine Romantic poetry through physical theory, where Romantic poetics takes an imagistic, imaginative leap beyond its Newtonian inheritance bequeathed by eighteenth-century writers. Of course, every indication suggests that science in its Enlightenment raiment has become entrenched within culture, either as a powerful cultural mythology or as a debilitating, controlling ideology.32 However, it is also important to note that scientists have increasingly recognized the role that metaphor plays in their own activities (Miller 219–76). As David Bohm and F. David Peat posit, in their much-read Science, Order, and Creativity, a recognition that metaphor plays a significant role in scientific activities ‘can sometimes have extraordinary power, not only to extend the thought processes of science, but also to penetrate into as yet unknown domains of reality, which are in some sense implicit in the metaphor’ (41). The theoretical position offered in their discussion intersects descriptions of Romantic poetics offered by Coleridge or Shelley. Metaphoric connection disrupts metonymic continuity; the poetic gaze crosses disciplinary boundaries, bringing divergent and convergent thinking into symbolic unity. In this way, ‘[I]ntelligence and creative perception’ forge imaginative connections that ‘give rise to new metaphors in which ideas are gathered and the similarities and differences between them are explored and unfolded’ (Bohm and Peat 54). Liliane Papin mounts a similar argument and pursues a type of criticism imagined here. As she notes, ‘Like literature[,] physics has undergone the intrusion of reentrant forms in the questioning of its own modes of



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Romantic Dynamics

representation and codes of language; in fact, it might be the field in which the deconstructive practice has been most dramatic’ (1254). Thus, science and its metaphors undergo periodic ‘deconstruction’ through the stern questioning of its paradigms, a point raised by Andrew Pickering, in Science as Practice and Culture. The essays within Pickering’s volume: convey such basic distinctions as subject:object and nature:society [to] put [them] into question … To question such taken-for-granted distinctions is by definition a trademark of ‘postmodern thought’. (Pickering 7–8) Paradigm shifts, as Thomas Kuhn implicitly suggests in Structure of Scientific Revolutions (43–51, 66–77), map the progression, finally, of metaphor itself in scientific thought and demonstrate the power that such symbolization can exert over larger spheres of culture. Given the representational dimension of scientific discourse, as David Locke has argued, such resymbolization (model-making in science) strongly resembles poetic process (metaphor-making), rendering it somewhat metaphoric and, especially in the realms of theoretical physics, poetic (Locke 9–10). Epistemic breaks in physics, especially earlier in this century, indicate that science took a road similar to that recently trod by literary criticism with the advent of deconstruction and poststructuralism; science and criticism alike confronted, after these paradigm shifts, indeterminacy and uncertainty within their fundamental ‘texts’. This suggests that science took a postmodern turn during the early twentieth century, while other layers of culture waited until the postWorld War II era to take an analogous turn.33 However, this sense of the historical moment within which postmodernity emerged is itself somewhat problematic, since recent attacks on postmodern theory by scientists have begun to undermine any sense of accomplishment emergent from it. What is somewhat clearer is that, at our historical moment, any viable criticism must operate in relation to physical theory. The diametrically opposed relationship C. P. Snow saw between the sciences and the humanities – those ‘two cultures’ evoked earlier through Trefil – has never been a viable description of discrete activities, since they share ‘the practice of hermeneutics’ (D. Locke 10).34 As a portal into the studies that follow, let me offer a few brief examples drawn from the poles of my concern (literary and physical theory and practice) that demonstrate the pragmatics of remaining open to



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The old links between philosophy and physical science, after having been temporarily frayed in many places, are being more closely renewed. The farther physical science progresses the less can it dispense with philosophical criticism. But at the same time philosophers are increasingly obliged to become intimately acquainted with the sphere of research, to which they undertake to prescribe the governing laws of knowledge. (Schrödinger 51) Schrödinger understood that the human and physical sciences converged (as the physical sciences discovered the participatory role observation played in experimental results) and rightly urged that, à la Wordsworth in reverse, philosophers follow in the revolutionary steps of physical theorists. Drawing an example from the social sciences, Jacques Lacan, in ‘The Topic of the Imaginary’, urged a similar receptivity for insights emerging beyond the disciplinary boundaries of psychology by proposing to his fellow analysts: My dear fellows, you wouldn’t believe what you owe to geology. If it weren’t for geology, how could one end up thinking that one could move, on the same level, from a recent to a [more] ancient layer? It wouldn’t be a bad thing, I note in passing, if every analyst went out and bought a small book on geology. There was once an analyst geologist, Leuba, who wrote one. I can’t recommend you to read it too highly. (cited in Margulis and Sagan 172) Lacan understood the metaphorical impact that geological thought had on his own area of knowledge, and his proposal is for his fellow analysts to bring this influence into consciousness. Lacan’s recommendation, offered within the social science of psychoanalysis, is equally valid across the humanities. A physical criticism would, by necessity, be multi-vectored and dynamic, and just as the physical sciences have drawn, directly and indirectly, on Romantic poetics to help image quantum cosmologies or neurophysiologies, so too Romantic studies must avail itself of scientific methods and metaphors to explore the



insights in other fields. Erwin C. Schrödinger suggested, at the advent of a quantum universe, that:

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varied Romantic alternatives to mechanistic and rationalistic metaphors manifest in Cartesian and Newtonian methods. The continued gravitational pull between science and literature presents critical theory with a unique opportunity to extend interdisciplinarity into a new mode of criticism, but such an expansion of critical spacetime will require a broader frame of reference. I believe Werner Heisenberg succinctly captured the complications facing a physical criticism, when he related the following recollection of Niels Bohr: ‘How can we ever hope to understand the atom?’ Heisenberg once asked Bohr, and Bohr replied, ‘I think we might be able to do so. But, in the process, we may have to learn what the word “understand” means.’ (Physics 41) Such a spirit of inquiry in the face of uncertainty must be embraced for a physical criticism to succeed in realizing the Romantic ‘ideal’ relationship between literature and science. To integrate fully insights from the full range of physical theory, criticism might have to relearn what the word ‘criticism’ means. To these exhortations I will simply add that not just geology or physics but the full range of scientific theory can offer both metaphors and methods to further exploration of the physical dynamics resident within discrete Romantic poetic events. The danger resides in ‘becoming what one beholds’ when appropriating and transmuting those methods and metaphors. Imagination can revolutionize any domain of thought, including the physical sciences. In science, Einstein’s famous Gedankenexperiments or ‘thought-experiments’ clearly confirm such an assertion, for those imaginings led to the later mathematical elaboration of a relativistic universe. This sense of the imagination as chief instrument of revolution remains deeply embedded in the strata of Romantic poetics, continuing to be regarded as its primary ideological ‘belief’. In Forest Pyle’s pithy summation, ‘the imagination is given a social and political assignment as much as a poetic or philosophical one: the imagination is the figure by which Romantic texts address the disjunction between subject and society as well as that between spirit and matter’ (1). The poetics of imagination, confronted by the machinery of Cartesian and Newtonian metaphor, responded with a universe defined by relativistic effects, quantum shifts, wormholes and force fields, a poetry that – in its highest states of energy – re-fused the split between observer and observed, subject and object, species and biosphere, consciousness and cosmos.



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To this end, then, the poetics of Romanticism always includes an element of physicality capable of restoring a spiritual dimension which, finally, functions as a primary boundary condition for the universe, an insight in harmony with the evocation of a ‘tao of physics’.35 In Einstein’s provocative phrasing: A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space … Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. (quoted in Easwaran 14) From a slightly different perspective, which functions in relation to the epigraph by the Dalai Lama, I close with a comment drawn from Eknath Easwaran’s introduction to The Dhammapada: What the Buddha is telling us is precisely parallel to what the quantum physicists say: when we examine the universe closely, it dissolves into discontinuity and a flux of fields of energy … in the Buddha’s universe the mind–matter duality is gone; these are field in consciousness. When Einstein talked about clocks slowing down in a powerful gravitational field, or when Heisenberg said we can determine either the momentum or the position of an electron but not both, most physicists felt a natural tendency to treat these as apparent aberrations, like the illusion that a stick bends when placed in a glass of water. It took decades for physicists to accept that there is no ‘real’ universe, like the real stick, to refer to without an observer. Clocks really do slow down and electrons really are indeterminable; that is the way the universe actually is. Similarly, the Buddha would say, this universe we talk of is made of mind. There is no ‘real’ world-initself apart from our perceiving it. This doesn’t make physical reality any less physical; it only reminds us that what we see in the world is shaped by the structure of consciousness. (Easwaran 65) Bridges exist between material and spiritual processes, as both ‘Western’ science and ‘Eastern’ religion have recognized, and the need to grapple with emergent physical theory, here endorsed by the Dalai Lama and Eknath Easwaran, expresses a commitment that should be imported into literary critical studies. Just as Eastern philosophy, in the Dalai



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Lama’s formulation, seeks to incorporate a knowledge of quantum dynamics into its activities, so too literary criticism must move beyond a pure critique of science as discourse and pursue the physical dimensions of its activities that reside in perceptual dynamics, textual interactions and intersections, historical and cultural processes, and the complex cerebral symphony of consciousness emerging within a vibrant and signifying nature.



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Blake’s Deep Ecology, or the Ethos of Otherness

Buddhism can be meaningful only when it is relevant to our everyday lives and to our environment. The Buddhist tradition counsels us to treasure and conserve nature, of which human beings are an active part. (Kabilsingh 144) Deep ecology recognizes that nothing short of a total revolution in consciousness will be of lasting use in preserving the life-support systems of our planet. (Seed et al. 9)

I.

Preludium

The matter motivating this chapter, which analyzes an emergent ecological criticism manifest in a wide range of disciplines through the poetry of William Blake, seems both controversial and necessary. It is controversial, in that it applies a contemporary political view to past poets and their poetry, which might seem anachronistic at best or pure projection at worst (the twin traces of contemporary desire, one might say). Yet recent research has firmly established the ecological dimension of Romantic poetics, obviating, for the most part, any controversy in such applications. It is necessary, because it directly responds to a physical crisis in which all are implicated and requires us to rethink our intellectual enterprises and institutions.1 Most Romantic poetics, which carries with it responsibilities, urges such a recognition of all human activities that impinge upon the active universe. Thus, ‘Ecological criticism’ is well adapted to approach Romantic poetic events, since all ecocriticism ‘shares the fundamental premise that 47



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human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it’ (Glotfelty and Fromm xix). Ecocriticism will not simply slip away into the forests of the night, to paraphrase Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, since the crisis with which ecological thought grapples will deepen in relation to the supposed success of what Fredric Jameson describes as ‘late capitalism’ (Postmodernism 3). Latent in ecocritical perspectives is the necessary deconstruction of the Enlightenment episteme of Cartesian dualism (in Michel Foucault’s formulation a radical dissociation of self and nature: the watcher and the watch[ed]), which Bacon inaugurated and which Newton mechanized (Foucault 32–50). As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno noted, by the time of Romanticism, ‘The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world’ (3), but Romantic responses to this epistemic success remystified the world and mind through the imaginative extension of the physical possibilities lurking beyond the farthest shores of its contemporary science. However, for such a strategic critique to succeed, it is necessary to see this philosophical move as the antithesis of the older theological episteme’s dissociation of body and soul, with its deferral of spiritual existence to a space uncircumscribed by materiality. Where the theological paradigm separates body and soul to valorize the latter, the Enlightenment paradigm separates mind and matter to valorize the former. However, both share a tendency to promulgate dualism, with its attendant alienation of self from other, and reduce ‘nature’ to the enemy of and the fuel for an anthropocentrically constructed subject. Blake implicates the English empirical tradition of natural philosophy defined by ‘Bacon, Locke & Newton’ in the establishment of Enlightenment epistemology in Western thought.2 Bacon’s method, both sadistic and misogynistic, coerces through instrumental torture a confession of facts from a traditionally engendered mother nature, with the researcher acting as grand inquisitor. The method described in Novum Organon urges that the experimenter ‘dissect her [nature] into parts’ in order to penetrate ‘her’ hidden recesses (Part 1, Section 51). The Baconian imperative, also expressed in Of the Dignity and Advancement of Knowledge and The New Atlantis, urges scientists to ‘bind her [nature] to your service and make her your slave … to conquer and subdue her’ (quoted in Sheldrake 41–3; Shepherd 20). In Blake’s view, Bacon’s epistemology is founded on death as methodology. Blake’s abhorrence of Lockean psychology resides in his recognition that it reduces all mind/matter relations into ‘likeness’, a psychology



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akin to ‘the whole Newtonian universe’ (Erdman Prophet 144), and in his determination such a psychological model ‘confine[s] the unruly and silence[s] the unreasonable’, the very elements emerging in his own poetic prophecies (Youngquist 25). Thus, as E. P. Thompson aptly states, ‘Blake had always been decisively alienated from the mechanical materialist epistemology and psychology which he saw as derived from Newton and Locke’ (193). (Blake’s hostile engagement with Newton, briefly discussed in Chapter 1, will be further elaborated in Chapter 4.) The method of Bacon, the psychology of Locke and the physics of Newton all lack an element of participation, of dialogic exchange, between cosmos and consciousness. The empirical method operates on an illusory objectivity and reduces nature to inanimate matter, allowing it to function simply as grist for the mill of the industrial revolution, as in the works of René Descartes, which will receive more scrutiny in the final chapter. The lone voice of philosophical dissent from within the empiricist enterprise was that of George Berkeley, whose suggestion that ‘Nature’ functioned as the ‘visual language of God’ retained an element of spirituality in the landscape and proposed a structure of communication as the defining aspect of that relationship.3 Indeed, with Blake, George Berkeley is among the most often cited eighteenth-century writers by those writing the new physics of quantum dynamics. As the physicist Nick Herbert points out: Many physicists have concluded that ‘observation’ is at the heart of every phenomenon. ‘No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is observed’, quips quantum theorist John Wheeler, echoing the famous idealist Bishop Berkeley’s slogan ‘Esse est percipi’ (To be is to be perceived). (Elemental 148)4 However, once the Enlightenment episteme gained ascendancy as the privileged paradigm for conceptualizing the relation of man to nature, eighteenth-century poets embraced this imaginary structure and rejected idealist positions like Berkeley’s (immortalized in Dr Johnson’s famous refutation). The poetic celebration of Newtonianism in the central decades of the eighteenth century, best emblematized by Pope’s ‘epitaph’ for Newton, gave way at the outset of Romanticism to a deep-seated suspicion of mechanistic philosophy and its accompanying subordination of nature to the service of technology (Nicolson Newton 14–37).



Blake’s Deep Ecology

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What, then, was Descartes’ error? Or better still, which error of Descartes’ do I mean to single out, unkindly and ungratefully? One might begin with a complaint, and reproach him for having persuaded biologists to adopt, to this day, clockwork mechanics as a model for life processes. (Damasio 248) Newton’s contemporary, the chemist Robert Boyle, termed the cosmos ‘a great piece of clockwork’ (quoted in Peterfreund ‘Power’ 29).5 Descartes concludes Part 5 of Discourse on the Method (his first published work) with the assertion that he has proved ‘that they [animals] have no intelligence at all, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs. In the same way, a clock, consisting only of wheels and springs, can count the hours and measure time’ (I: 141). In Christopher Stone’s estimation, ‘animal cruelty presented no problem because it raised no conceivable objection’ (23). After all, just as in the theological model animals were conceived as having no soul, so too, in the Enlightenment model, animals were thought to have no consciousness. Cartesian science denied ‘feelings’ to animals, thereby underwriting ‘cruel[ty]’ (143). As well, Jeremy Hayward has recently argued that this ‘mistaken metaphysics has led to alienation between our thoughts and our bodies, between our bodies and the Earth, and between us and other species’ (64).6 Although most of Descartes’ epistemology has been thoroughly discredited, its imagery continues to cast long shadows. In Michel Serres’s view: Mastery and possession: these are the master words launched by Descartes at the dawn of the scientific and technological age, when our Western reason went off to conquer the universe. We dominate and appropriate it: such is the shared philosophy underlying industrial enterprise as well as so-called disinterested science, which are indistinguishable in this respect. Cartesian mastery brings science’s objective violence into line, making it a well-controlled strategy. (Natural 32) Serres, advocating scepticism in response to scientific claims of authority, calls for a corrective view for all physical interactions between the



In recent years, critical thinkers in various disciplines have increasingly spoken of Descartes’ error or more accurately ‘errors’:


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… it is time for Man to change his beliefs and become what he is, another species that desires survival not at the expense of but in concert with the other organisms of the planet … Man needs a new humility, a new belief in the abilities of these species to communicate with him. He needs to be freed of his suffering from interspecies deprivation. (Lilly 205) This alienation, described in terms associated with Jacques Lacan, is a secondary narcissism that shatters the primary narcissistic unity that initially defines the relationship of self and other (Ecrits 1–7). Blake’s solution to such a dilemma is to ‘cast his Spectre/Into the Lake’ (J 37; E 184), thereby shattering this secondary, egotistical projection in an attempt to re-enter the ‘Primeval State of Man’ (J 3; E 136).7 Certainly, when Blake writes against the appearance of ‘mill[s] with complicated wheels’ (E 2) or their darker forms as ‘Satanic Mills’ (E 95) that emerge in the landscapes and cityscapes of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England (and the ideological impulses that create, sustain and reproduce them), he assumes a political position which we would now term ‘ecological’.8 Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology provides a preliminary framework for discussion of this layer of thinking in classical Romanticism, and Bate’s argument intersects those offered above: In Romantic poetics, poetry is to be found not only in language but in nature; it is not only a means of verbal expression, it is also a means of emotional communication between man and the natural world. (Romantic 17) Romantic poets address (and often lament) the loss of spiritual connection (what Bate terms, following Hazlitt, ‘emotional communication’). From the ‘Intimations’ ode to ‘Mont Blanc’, they reach poetic consensus that cultural processes cleave the initial unity of being in a vibrant and sustaining, even signifying, nature,9 and they individually propose a dialogic dynamics between mind and matter that ‘is in fact a return of what one has already received from natural phenomena’ (Kroeber 73). Romantic writers like Blake, Wordsworth, or Shelley foresaw that the Enlightenment episteme – a valorization of reason at



natural and the cultural; and the controversial marine biologist John Lilly argued in a similar vein:

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the expense of other aspects of self and the nature within which that self emerges – would likely create an ecological crisis for futurity (a crisis within which those of us living and writing at the end of the twentieth century are embedded), culminating a long historical process that anteceded both the scientific and industrial revolutions.10 The theoretical wing of physics has converged with the Romantic position that dualistic, mechanistic philosophy is hopelessly inadequate to articulate a cosmological model that includes relativistic effects and quantum dynamics.11 Science has found a new relevance for the type of thought experiments that define Romantic poetics, which helps explain why scientists, with increased frequency, have turned to literature for names, concepts and images. To this end, then, an ecological criticism can contribute to a new synthesis capable of completing the deconstruction of both the theological and Enlightenment epistemes, since they are linked in the promotion of different yet related forms of dualistic thinking, and can, potentially, bring critical theory itself out of its current wilderness of fragmentation.12 This seems to be the position taken by Karl Kroeber as well: The ecological criticism I am advocating asks that we examine poetry from a perspective that assumes the imaginative acts of cultural beings proffer valuable insights into how and why cultural and natural phenomena have interrelated and could more advantageously interrelate. This approach will help us to develop mutually enriching interconnections between humanistic and scientific modes of understanding humankind, the earth we inhabit, and their reciprocal interdependence. (Kroeber 140) However, such theoretical claims can only be sustained if they produce a viable frame of reference within which to read the text/s of the world, and I propose to test the veracity of ecocritical insights in the somewhat hostile environment of William Blake’s poetry, the Romantic poet often seen to resist science by negating nature.13

II.

Blake’s nature Where man is not nature is barren.

In casual conversation with colleagues about William Blake’s relationship to nature, the first comment generally offered is an almost ritual



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recitation of the proverb of hell cited above, and ample examples can be evoked throughout Blake’s canon to support critical reduction of Blake’s response to ‘nature’ down to this fixed point in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In the later prophecies, Blake’s problematic portrait of Vala (‘the Goddess Virgin-Mother,/She is our Mother! Nature!’ [J 18: 28–9; E 163]) reinforces the sense of Blake’s open hostility to nature, although equally problematic is the characterization’s involvement in his theory of emanations, where the feminine portion of the dyad is conceived as mat(t)er.14 Even slightly later, in Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake speaks of a ‘Vegetable Glass of Nature’ in opposition to ‘Imagination’ (E 555): This World of Imagination is Infinite & Eternal whereas the world of Generation or Vegetation is Finite & Temporal There Exist in the Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature[.] Blake suggests that the passivity of materiality requires animation by the activities of consciousness, a concept beautifully described by Nelson Hilton: ‘The mind rushes toward matter (and things that matter: the grave, gravity, mater), drawing existence in behind it’ (Literal 209). However, the danger in the prophetic works, that we might become trapped in our own mental projections, amplifies the stance taken in the ‘Ancient Poets’ section in The Marriage. Yet, in spite of considerable evidence and relative critical agreement, this persistent attitude that Blake’s hostility to nature extends throughout the canon needs to be re-examined simply because Blake’s stance to nature did not crystallize into such a single vision. Those passages cited above are somewhat misleading, having been removed from textual context and stripped of ambiguity, and a reader of Blake can find alternative images and even contradictory statements dispersed throughout the canon. For example, at the height of his involvement with the Church of the New Jerusalem, Blake responds to Swedenborg’s argument that truth confutes ‘Man’s natural and favourite Opinions’ (Divine Providence) by lashing out in the textual margins: ‘Lies & Priestcraft Truth is Nature’ (E 609). This last independent clause is further reinforced in Blake’s assertion, in a 1799 letter to a disapproving Reverend Trusler, that ‘to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself’ (E 702). For Blake, mind finds affinity with nature so long as their free play opens onto infinite perceptual possibilities for a visioning subject. Blake’s letter also asserts the dependence of reality




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upon acts of perception grounded at the location of the subject: ‘As a man is So he Sees. As the Eye is formed such are its Powers … To Me This world is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination’ (E 702). The interplay of mind and matter, with the subject as nexus (note the ‘This’ from which Blake speaks), functions as the originary point of the Blakean universe, but this perspective, which appeared somewhat ‘mad’ in Blake’s day, has recently received strong support from an unlikely ally, the theoretical physics of our own day. As John Archibald Wheeler states, ‘The universe does not exist “out there” independent of us’ (quoted by Skolimowski 69). Wheeler’s stance has strong affinities with Blake’s position, as do other positions from a wide range of the physical sciences. Both propose that consciousness or observation collapses infinite potentialities into the reality in which we live, rendering theoretically plausible the possibility that we exist in slightly different, parallel universes determined by our coalescing observations – a multiverse (rather than a uni-verse).15 For Blake, mind and matter, like word and design, operate in mutually illuminating dialogue. If, then, the relationship of mind and matter is conceived as a dialectical one, then the critical reduction of Blake’s engagement with ‘nature’ must be revisited to elaborate the physical dynamics by which this mutual dialogue unfolds. The spectrum of nature, in Blake’s own words, ranges from barrenness to truthfulness, and to unravel this knot it seems wise to analyze Blake’s relatively early descriptions and characterizations of a signifying nature in The Book of Thel, since they provide insight into Blake’s representation of an on-going communicative structure for man and nature. Thel has the additional advantage of being the illuminated book produced somewhat in concert with both The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence and of Experience, thereby supplying a historical context as cross-reference for the powerful proverb that has come to dominate critical and pedagogical approaches to Blake’s thoughts on nature.

III.

Questioning nature

nature speaks16 Published in 1789, The Book of Thel dramatizes a dialogue between consciousness and materiality, between an individual mind and a collective nature. Thel, to briefly summarize, has drifted to the margins of her abode in ‘the vales of Har’ (a place, in S. Foster Damon’s terms, of



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‘primal innocence’ [174]), where she begins to question various aspects of a sentient nature capable of responding to her queries. Thel begins her attempt to resolve the source of her lamentations, the impermanence of material existence, by asking, ‘Why fade these children of the spring?’ She interrogates a succession of natural things – a lily of the valley, a cloud, a worm, a clod of clay – and hears these various representatives of nature speak in monological terms about the joys of process and of one’s place within that process. The lily, though humble, is ‘visited from heaven’; the cloud, though ‘faded in one hour’, revels in the delights of dissemination and circulation in a natural economy; the worm and the clod, though ‘images of weakness’, ‘yet live and love’ (BT 1: 19, 3:2, 5: 6, E 3–6).17 The integrated relations of this natural discourse are given precise expression as an ethos of ‘otherness’: the cloud suggests that ‘every thing that lives,/Lives not alone. nor for itself’, and the clod proposes that ‘we live not for ourselves’ (BT 3: 26–7, 4: 10; E 5). Thel, in the poem’s closing section, is invited to put on this ethos and pass into this process of life that progresses through death: Thel entr’d in & saw the secrets of the land unknown; She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists: A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen (BT 6: 2–5; E 6) By necessity, however, Thel encounters ‘her own grave plot’, from which issues a voice that echoes her opening queries with its own questions: ‘Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?’ (BT 6:11; E 6). To be so closed requires the assumption of the ethos of interdependence, an assumption that Thel cannot undertake, and she flees ‘back unhindered till she came into the vales of Har’ (BT 6: 22; E 7). The emergence of consciousness into materiality is always an emergence into the field of the real at a specific perceptual location in spacetime, with only those willing to undertake what Blake later terms ‘selfannihilation’ capable of perceiving the splendors of a complementary, undifferentiated existence. As Harold Bloom notes in his commentary, the term ‘Thel’ has interesting and multivalent resonances, with Greek roots that equally suggest ‘will’, ‘wish’, ‘woman’, or ‘dew’ (‘Commentary’ 895). In the recent facsimile edition from Princeton, the editors (Eaves, Essick and




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Viscomi) present a range of readings that support interpreting the work as a neoplatonic drama exploring the anxieties of physical embodiment (Blake Early Illuminated Books 79–81). However, in an interesting reversal of the previously cited passage from Vision of the Last Judgment, Thel as consciousness ‘mirrors’ nature and not the reverse: Ah! Thel is like a watry bow. and like a parting cloud. Like a reflection in a glass. like shadows in the water. Like dreams of infants. like a smile upon an infants face. Like the doves voice, like transient day, like music in the air; (E 3) In a Lacanian universe, this description might be termed the ‘mirrorstage’ in the process of unfolding, where the infant Thel attempts to construct her subjectivity from the outside inside, as Blake suggests from the triadic metaphoric series, but the images conflate the human and the natural. Consciousness defines itself in relation to a native discourse of the other, but the subject assumes that discourse at the peril of individuated existence. What is quite clear, however, is that for Blake, as well as Lacan, ‘There is something real, a given’ (Lacan Seminar II 35) against which the subject defines itself.18 Blake understood quite early that nature functioned as semiotic presence, and this insight allowed him to position the imagination, rather than reason, as the interpreter and interrogator of that discourse. Imagination must supplement reason at the point of coincidence between mind and matter, acting as catalyst for the coalescence of reality; otherwise, reason alone dominates descriptions of inner and outer processes (reducing them to pure mechanism). Blake foresaw what current physical theory assumes; the instrument selected for measurement impacts the outcome of experimental results. When the mental faculties achieve dynamic harmony, the explosive moment of vision that generates creative energy as a byproduct results (an event familiar to Blake readers). Blake’s founding symmetry, then, involves a necessary dialogic exchange between mind and matter; nature, to borrow Julia Kristeva’s term, is a semiotic presence, but as such it only emerges in the complementary relations of mind’s imaginative presence. As can be gathered from this brief analysis of The Book of Thel, Blake’s depiction of a sentient, discursive nature in dialogue with a perceptually active subject does not exactly



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accord with the dismissive negation of nature discussed above. Rather it suggests that the ‘real’ only exists in the dynamic exchange itself (taking place at the locus of perception), creating in the process a force field of creative energy woven from complementary discourses.19 This position accords remarkably with those taken by ecological writers. Blake’s portrayal of an ecosystem in dynamic, discursive exchange with a discrete individual seems to approach a viewpoint espoused by David Abram: But what if the living body, when healthy, is in constant communication with the space that surrounds it? What if the senses are not passive mechanisms but active, exploratory organs evolved in the depths of a living environment? (Abram 88) Blake represents, in Thel, just such a communicative structure for the relationship of an individual and nature, and Blake, like other radical thinkers, re-defines perceptual events as dialogical phenomena, ‘not [simply] a cerebral event but a direct and reciprocal interchange between the organism and its world’ (Abram 85). Blake continues to represent this communicative structure in his most celebrated works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which follow the publication of Thel, but the dialogical imperative operative between an individual, visioning subject and a sentient, vibrant nature begins to broaden into what I have termed Blake’s ethics of otherness. In the ‘Introduction’ to Experience, the voice of the Bard cries out, ‘O Earth return!’ (E 18), a call answered in the first poem of experience, ‘Earth’s Answer’ (E 18–19). Earth’s response makes clear that her ‘Prison’d state’ results from the ‘Selfish father of men’ attaching chains of jealousy to control ‘free Love with bondage bound’. To borrow freely from several discourses, the symbolic order (phallic in structure) attempts to regulate the earth’s body to keep it from acting upon its natural desire, which is to live and love. Blake, a keen student of mythologies, read empirical philosophy as an expression of empire, a colonizing and consuming ideology that, in past manifestations, had cloven the individual from nature through symbolic intervention. For this reason, a strong, though not unproblematic, feminist strain emerges in Blake’s myth (as many before have noted), and in this poem Blake forges a link between capital exploitation of the planet and




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Ecofeminism is based on the linkage of patriarchal domination of women and of nature. Now, as women strive for freedom from domination, nature too must be saved from dominating destructive forces. Seeing the plight of women and nature as a related process, ecofeminists urge contemporary cultures to move beyond the patterns of fear, violence, and cruelty. (Deicke 166) In ‘Earth’s Reply’, Blake has broadened the dialogue with nature seen in Thel, literally taking a global view of a signifying nature. Blake also voices with increasing intensity the need to ‘move beyond the patterns of fear, violence, and cruelty’ by assuming an ethos of otherness in which ‘The most sublime act is to set another before you’ (MHH 7; E 36).20 In ‘Earth’s Answer’, Blake begins to position consciousness ‘inside a greater intelligence once known as the anima mundi, the psyche of the Earth herself that has been nurturing life in the cosmos for billions of years through its drama of heightening complexification’ (Roszak 16).

IV.

Blake’s deep ecology

As a way of closing this discussion of the implicit and explicit ways in which Blake’s work participates in a recognizable ecocritical perspective, I want to return to the problematic source of confusion about Blake’s thinking on nature, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Since one suggestive proverb has proved sufficiently strong to orient critical thinking completely on Blake’s relationship to nature, it seems the logical place to begin overturning this reductionist view. More specifically, the proverb itself (‘Where man is not nature is barren’) can be reformulated without violating its principles of articulation to highlight issues relevant to an ecological perspective. Just as ‘nature is barren’ in the absence of man, so too, by necessity of the proverb’s own symmetries, man is barren in the absence of nature. Blake’s syntax and lack of punctuation would allow other conceptual possibilities that support binding rather than separation: ‘Where man is not nature[,] is barren[ness]’. Such an inversion forges a connection between the proverb and the closing statement for The Marriage, where Blake asserts that ‘Every thing that lives is Holy’ (E 45), and can be seen as a primary articulation of ‘[a] Blakean ethic [that] would



cultural exploitation of women. Blake’s position has been extended by contemporary linkage of these matters:


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The Gaia hypothesis represents a unique moment in scientific thought: the first glimpse, from within the domain of pure and precise science, that this planet might best be described as a coherent, living entity. (Abram 75) Support for a Gaian reading of Blake’s Marriage is embedded layer upon layer throughout the work but can be quickly evoked in an examination of the frame within which ‘The Proverbs’ themselves are included. Readers enter ‘The Proverbs of Hell’ through an invitation to adopt behavioral models from nature: ‘How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,/Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five’ (E 35). While inside the proverbs, in line with generic expectations, Blake repeatedly draws examples from nature to illustrate human concerns and even corelates natural and human structures as guides for all existence. When readers leave ‘The Proverbs’, they enter Blake’s description of the process through which man and nature become severed. ‘Ancient Poets animated all sensible objects, with Gods or Geniuses’, thereby investing them with human significance founded upon identification and sympathy, but once ‘a system was formed … men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast’ (MHH 11; E 38). Entrapped in our own projections and estranged from a primary unity with nature, the human consciousness becomes alienated from self and nature and undergoes psychological fragmentation.21 In innumerable ways, Blake’s Marriage returns to the body, and this return is perfectly measured to resist the rational valorization of mind and the spiritual denigration of the body simultaneously. Blake’s arguments against those that suggest ‘man has a body distinct from his soul’ is akin to contemporary arguments that a species has no individual existence outside of the environment, since part and whole (whether a mind/body or organism/environment) are interdependent and complementary.22 In Gregory Bateson’s words, ‘The unit of survival is organism plus environment’ (483; emphasis mine). Of course, this is to be expected in a text that attempts single-handedly to overcome both Enlightenment and theological epistemic dominion, which makes all the more curious this text’s role in limiting, rather than freeing, critical thought on Blake’s attitudes toward nature.



respect otherness as part of a whole in which one participates’ (Vogt 416). This view clearly resonates with contemporary theories of the Earth:

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Blake’s readers are propelled out of The Marriage powered by ‘Energy’, which formed the imaginative core of Being for Blake, being ‘the only life’ and ‘Eternal Delight’ (MHH 4; E 34). Moving into the later epics, readers stand at the nexus of a communicative flow both symphonic and operatic, involving sublime allegorical figures representing aspects of material and mental existence as perceived from a specific spot of spacetime and brought into simultaneous presence; readers witness one conscious attempt to overcome all alienations and fragmentations and to re-enter a ‘Primeval State of Man’. In this state of ‘Art, Science, and Wisdom’ the human and the natural are hard to differentiate. Blake’s signifying nature can be immediately distinguished from then-current notions of the cosmos marked by the ascendancy of a mechanistic world-view associated with Isaac Newton. As mentioned above, Blake and Berkeley formed the first line of imaginative resistance to this world-view, and Blake, fully cognizant of the power such metaphors retain once codified as a controlling ideology, attempted to overthrow this metaphor before it solidified into another state of ideological apparatus.23 From Blake’s perspective, the mechanistic, Newtonian version of nature solidifies into a Urizenic cosmos of cause and effect, of thermodynamics and entropy, of voids and vortices. Blake opposes this fundamental alienation of mind and matter, arguing on the concluding plates of Milton that his visionary agenda promotes the liberation of mind from mechanistic philosophies: I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration: To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour; To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration; To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion’s covering (M 43: 2–6; E 142) Newtonianism, a ‘Science of Despair’ founded ‘to gratify ravenous Envy’ (M 41: 15, 17; E 142) is resisted by the ‘Laws of Eternity’: … know thou: I come to Self Annihilation Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually Annihilate himself for others good, as I for thee[.] (M 38: 35–7; E 139) This position, from Milton, intersects the ethos of otherness offered by the cloud or clod in The Book of Thel. As well, it intersects the related



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principle voiced by Albion, at the conclusion to Jerusalem, where ‘Offering of Self for Another’ (J 96: 21; E 256) becomes the mechanism through which Albion achieves his final visionary state. The imagination can shape a viable cosmological frame only by acknowledging the interpenetration of one with another and all with the world. The cosmos, for Blake, assumes an elasticity shaped by individual perception, fed by the imagination, and experienced beyond our own seemingly limited location in discrete spacetime: According to the subject of discourse & every Word & Every Character Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or Opakeness of Nervous fibres such was the variation of Time & Space Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary & they walked To & Fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly seen And seeing: according to fitness and order. (J 98: 35–40; E 258) The empathic ability to propel ourselves into the location of the other also heals the fissure between an individual, perceiving subject and its ecosphere: All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone. all Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named Jerusalem (J 99: 1–5; E 258–9) Here, at the close of his master work, Blake returns to the founding symmetry of a communicative, signifying nature in converse with man, where perceptual experience achieves ‘Planetary’ extension into the ‘real’ of spacetime itself. The ethics of otherness that leads to human interconnectedness on Plate 98 results in ecosystemic interconnectedness on Plate 99. But Blake’s attempt to unveil the insidious potential of the Enlightenment episteme at its moment of inception and replace it with an episteme of wholeness gained little attention in his own day, and what attention it did receive was usually hostile. Only at our moment




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of contemporary crisis has such an ethical stance gained widespread acceptance, even in the hard sciences from which the Enlightenment episteme emerged. However, in some critical assessments of our current ‘postmodern’ condition, the eradication of nature has reached its zenith. For Jameson, ‘The other of our society is … no longer Nature at all, as it was in precapitalist societies, but something else which we must now identify’ (Postmodernism 35). As a symptom of postmodernism, this might be an accurate statement, but Nature, as it were, has re-presented itself with a vengeance in the form of a despoiled ecological system. Bruno Latour, whom Jameson discusses (378), phrases it this way: The repressed returns, and with a vengeance … nature, over which we were supposed to gain absolute mastery, dominates us in an equally global fashion, and threatens us all. (Latour 8) This reversal presented itself at the very moment of western celebration over the collapse of socialism in 1989 (from a capitalist perspective, something of an annus mirabilis with the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the USSR): ‘While seeking to abolish man’s exploitation of man, socialism had magnified that exploitation immeasurably … By seeking to reorient man’s exploitation of man toward an exploitation of nature by man, capitalism magnified both beyond measure’ (Latour 8). The irony is embittered by the unethical double standard implied by this position. ‘The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing its peoples to abject poverty’ (9). Blake’s markedly ‘nonmodern’ stance in evoking a ‘Primeval State of Man’ intersects that taken by Latour, especially when he argues that ‘we have never been modern’: No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun. There has never been a modern world … A nonmodern is anyone who takes simultaneously into account the moderns’ Constitution [as defined by the radical separation of Nature and Society] and the population of hybrids that that Constitution rejects and allows to proliferate. (Latour 47)



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Blake, at the beginning of Jerusalem, urges that his fellow-artists and poets resist this Modern turn, since the di-vision represents a false reflection based on an ideological structure that emerges with modern science, a structure that operates through difference, that valorizes unanimity, and that suppresses and represses emergent hybrids shaped in its cracks and fissures. Blake seems to advocate, at the end of his prophetic canon, what Michel Serres terms a ‘natural contract’ to replace the social one offered by Enlightenment epistemology: From now on I mean by natural contract above all the precisely metaphysical recognition, by each collectively, that it lives and works in the same global world as all the others; not only every political collectivity joined by a social contract but also every other kind of collectivity – military, commercial, religious, industrial, and so on – joined by a legal contract, and also the collectivity of experts joined by the scientific contract. (Serres 46). This type of unification of metaphysical strains resides in Blakes reintegration of ‘Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer’, who, once reunited, conversed together in ‘Visionary forms dramatic’ (J 98: 9–28; E 257). Thus, while Blake expressed strong condemnation of the scientific throughout his canon, he closes his prophetic work with a symmetry forged in complementary creative activities pursued by scientists and poets, who form ‘an interacting ensemble within the overall matrix’ (Plotnitsky 69) and thereby provide an appropriate location within spacetime from which ‘Wisdom’ can emerge.




At the Limit of Physical Theory, or Quantum Dynamics in Coleridge’s Rime

Those who, either now or after I am dead, shall be a lamp unto themselves, relying upon themselves only and not relying upon any external help, but holding fast to the truth as their lamp, and seeking their salvation in truth alone, shall not look for assistance to any one besides themselves, it is they … who shall reach the very topmost height! But they must be anxious to learn … (The Compassionate Buddha 50) Science … means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an aim which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp. (Max Planck 83)

I. Preludium Expressing his opposition to the emergence of quantum indeterminacy within his own mathematical computations, Albert Einstein asserted that ‘God does not play dice’ (Gribben Schrödinger 3) with the universe. Through a well-known series of thought experiments directed to Niels Bohr, the ‘father’ of complementarity, Einstein sought to eliminate what has become known as quantum indeterminacy.1 However, Einstein never succeeded in overturning this probabilistic aspect seemingly fundamental to the structure of matter. In the face of experimental evidence, to borrow phrases from David Z. Albert and Jim Baggott respectively, the emergence of physicality at the smallest dimensions of matter ‘has got to be a matter of probability’ (Albert 16) and is usually ‘interpreted as a probability amplitude’ (Baggott 36). For Stephen Hawking, in A Brief History of Time, ‘it seems that the uncertainty 64



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principle is a fundamental feature of the universe we live in’ (155–6), and, as Hawking later argues, ‘God not only plays dice but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen’ (Black Holes 113). While the advent of uncertainty in the physical sciences emerged early in our century, a similar insight ‘appeared in literature before it appeared in the natural sciences’ (Hankins 8) as one potential imaginative line of thought capable of resisting the widening success of Enlightenment epistemology, the instrumental turn of science into ideology imaged as the industrial revolution in technologies of (re)production. As Arnd Bohm suggests, ‘From the vantage point of the twentieth century, we see the Romantics as the generation which first became conscious of the threat posed by progress, by machines, by the forward thrust of activity, in short by technology’ (A. Bohm 36). The undercurrent of fear, in both the first and second generations of classical Romanticism, is clear; these poets understood that an industrial, mechanistic society (re)produces industrialized, mechanized individuals to serve its instrumental ends, producing a society, in Mervyn Nicolson’s phrase, ‘organized on commercial lines’ (M. Nicolson 125). To my mind, English Romanticism offers no better evocation of the meaningful play of the random and uncertain, eclipsing the deterministic construction of the cosmos and complicating (even deconstructing) cause/effect relations, than at the heart of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where the physical conditions of Mariner and crew are determined by the roll of dice in a game between Life-in-Death and Death: The naked hulk alongside came, And the twain were casting dice; ‘The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!’ Quoth she, and whistles thrice. (53: 195–8) Generally, scholars have accepted, somewhat uncritically, Life-inDeath’s proclamation of victory, but when viewed in purely quantitative terms Death seems to be the actual winner, since this entity ‘wins’ the Ancient Mariner’s fellow sailors as a consolation prize. As well, scholars have tended to privilege other events in the poem, leaving this crucial occurrence relatively unexplored in terms of the cosmological implications of this game of chance for the poem’s events. In this scene, I argue, one can read Coleridge’s attempt to re-fuse the materialist



At the Limit of Physical Theory

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and empiricist philosophies he studied so arduously in the years immediately prior to the composition of his ‘miniature epic’, when his ‘“metaphysical” preoccupations … were the philosophies of Newton, Locke, Berkeley, and Priestley’ (Wylie 5).2 Unlike previous interpretations of the poem, then, my approach will establish this ‘game’ as a core of concern, with other elements of indeterminacy and uncertainty radiating outward from this event. After all, the ‘game’ splits the inner narrative of the Mariner, dividing the poem between the opening exploration of the expanded geographical dimensions of the earth (a new but knowable body of information) and the closing confrontation with an isolated encounter with uncertain and indeterminate aspects of reality, the apparent entry into supernatural realms of existence. Bound up in Coleridge’s grappling with rigorous elaboration of probability theory, ‘the quantifying spirit of the eighteenth century’ (Frängsmyr, Heilbron and Rider 1–23), are two specific moments of utter inexplicability that have, until quite recently, structured virtually all discussions of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: ‘the Mariner’s motive in the shooting [of the Albatross]’ and his ‘spontaneous’ blessing of the water snakes (Cavell 193). In addition, part of Coleridge’s re-fusing of the epistemic authority of ‘Newton, Locke, Berkeley, and Priestley’ is captured in the dialogic relationship between the rather rationalistic Wedding Guest and the empirically oriented Ancient Mariner. The Mariner, positioned on the ontological fault between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’, provides the raw data, in his narrative, which the Wedding Guest converts into the ‘symbolic’, as his strong reaction to narrative events indicates. Subsequently, with the inclusion of the gloss in the final version of the poem, this conversion of the imaginary into the symbolic solidifies into an ideological interpretation on the margins of the text often at odds with the poetic events themselves.3 Coleridge attempts, in The Rime, to respond to the ‘crisis of representation’ inaugurated by the emergent ideological components of Baconian and Newtonian method, seeking through a ‘reconciliation’ of scientific and philosophic modes the elaboration of a dynamic cosmology dependent on acts of observation (Markley Fallen 131–77). This attempted articulation through reconciliation animates the well-known section from The Table Talk, where Coleridge expresses a desire ‘to reduce all knowledges into harmony . . to unite the insulated fragments of truth’ (quoted by McGann ‘Meaning’ 52). Jonathan Smith makes a similar point: Yet, as is typical in Coleridge’s polar thought, the study of nature in the active, energetic sense (what he calls the science of Dynamics)



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Certainly, such dreams of a unified cosmological model for matter and mind partially emerged from Coleridge’s participation, via his deep reading in German natural philosophy, in what Frederick Burwick terms the ‘damnation of Newton’ (1–8). Trevor Levere makes a similar observation, noting that Coleridge felt that ‘the effects of Newtonian astronomy [were] “not only depressive from its monotony but revolting from its want of analogy to … all our other experiences of … Nature”’ (95). The cosmology that emerges, as described in the Mariner’s tale, displays distinct elements of acausality and indeterminacy, of uncertainty and chaos, and recent readings provide strong critical support for this position. Frances Ferguson, having observed that the ‘poem [is] filled with arbitrary events’, proposes that both gloss and subsequent criticism seek to ‘mold contradictory evidence into a cause-and-effect pattern that the main text never quite offers’ (‘Coleridge’ 63). This play of poetic event across time traces the desire of reception, a contestatory language of containment that limits imaginary space and that elides the context of Coleridge’s own reception of the mechanical construction of the universe found in his own reading within natural philosophy.

II. Coleridge’s cosmological model As might be expected from the range of his reading and his friendship with Davy, Coleridge functions as a pivotal figure for interdisciplinary explorations of literature and science in Romantic studies. The poet himself, in a 1796 letter to Thomas Poole, proposed the following areas of knowledge for anyone wishing to write an epic in the current age: I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine – then the mind of man then the minds of men – in all Travels, Voyages, and Histories. (quoted in Coburn 83) This rather daunting agenda of required reading intimates that, for Coleridge, it was not ‘a great leap from science to epic: these sciences



becomes complete only when reconciled with its ‘anion’, this Phaenomenology. It is the reconciliation of Dynamics and Phaenomenology that for Coleridge constitutes Natural Philosophy. (Smith 65)

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[“the natural sciences, specifically geology, astronomy, anatomy, and biology”] … seemed designed for literature and for the literary mind in both origin and style’ (Gaull 47). Epic synthesis on such a scale eluded Coleridge during his life, but when examining the type of reading Coleridge pursued up to the composition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner one must surely laud his energetic efforts to embody his ideal. In the years immediately prior to his creative collaboration with Wordsworth on Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge was immersed in scientific and philosophical reading related to the emergence of the Newtonian mechanical cosmology of cause/effect (structured through the absolutes of space and time) and its subsequent extension to other sciences. To give just a few specific examples, Coleridge, in the 18 months prior to the first drafting of The Rime, read Priestley’s The history and present state of discoveries relating to vision, light, and colours (1795), Newton’s Principia (1796), Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1796) (eventually rejecting the Huttonian mechanical view of geophysical process), and numerous volumes of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (beginning in 1796) (Coffman 152, 167, 179). As Kathleen Coburn emphatically stated long ago, this type of intellectual activity renders insupportable the notion ‘that Coleridge was anti-science’ (81). Rather, as Smith so eloquently phrases it, Coleridge, like other Romantic poets and thinkers, ‘wanted both science and poetry to explore an organic universe rather than a dead machine, a universe where reality is created – or at least half created – by the observing mind’ (46). To aid in such reflections, Coleridge, during this same period, pored over the sensationalist philosophy of physician David Hartley but eventually seemed to prefer The Works of George Berkeley (1795–6) to Observations on man, his frame, his duty and his expectations (1796). This swerve would certainly account for the expression of ideas compatible with the new physics of relativistic effects and quantum dynamics. Indeed, the Mariner’s tale presents a cosmos where ‘Ordinary reason and our dualistic world of sense perception are inoperative’ (Boulger 9), a cosmos where ‘collective observations (and actions) of all observers bring the entire universe into existence’ (Tipler 211).4 In a December 1796 letter to John Thelwall, Coleridge somewhat drolly embraces Berkeley’s resistant position to Newtonian absolutes, claiming that ‘I am a Berkleyan’ (cited in Warren 23). Certainly, Coleridge seems to adhere to the Berklean construct of essence via perception as a boundary state that manifests itself at several points in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.



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This last point crystallizes in greater detail in Anima Poetae (1805), where Coleridge records his search for ‘a symbolical language, for something within me’ that corresponded to those signifying processes perceived at play, from a Berklean construction, within materiality. Of course, the later Biographia Literaria clarifies this ‘something’ as the imagination. As Elliot B. Gose, Jr., indicates, ‘by “exciting our internal emotions”, the poet “acquires the right and privilege of using time and space as they exist in the imagination, obedient only to the laws which the imagination acts by”’ (Gose 7). And Coleridge, in Chapter 2 of the Biographia, actually categorizes the past scale of his experience as ‘the quantum [amount] of intellectual power bestowed on me by nature and education’ (Jackson 180). In light of such reading so complexly enfolded in a short epic effort, I share L. M. Grow’s sense that what ‘bubbled up from the well of the [poet’s] unconscious, is a metaphoric forerunner of modern quantum and field theory’ and equally see such efforts based in ‘Coleridge’s own convictions about organic unity operative both ontologically and epistemologically’ (50). The depth of the poet’s study, wherein Coleridge wrestled with the continued success of mechanical philosophies of mind and matter, suggests that critical demands for rational answers to the play of randomness, either in the Mariner’s act of destruction or contrition (through the attempted mapping of cause/effect) remain at odds with Coleridge’s elaboration of a cosmos where, to paraphrase Hawking through Lacan, the imaginary is more ‘real’ than more determined absolutes of the Newtonian system. Thus, the search for determinate answers founded upon cause/effect relations cannot succeed, since such a demand seeks to resolve a key element whose very purpose is to resist this type of resolution. This reading of the young Coleridge’s engagement with ‘natural philosophy’ and ‘mixed mathematics’ (the terms then current) suggests that the poet, rather than being ‘“seduced” by the philosophy of Newton, Locke, and Hartley’ (Wylie 7) was actually seeking a philosophical construction capable of restoring some participatory element to the interplay of mind and matter. To borrow Grow’s phrase, ‘Coleridge’s cosmogony is, in historical context, forward-looking’, anticipating the advent of uncertainty and indeterminacy that twentieth-century physics established at the foundation of matter (46). 5 Given Coleridge’s desire to resist the sacrifice of spirit on the rack of Baconian experimental method – as shaped by his reading prior to the initial composition of The Rime, the lasting relationship with Davy, and the intervening revisionary studies undertaken prior to the poem’s




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final form in Sibylline Leaves – it is perhaps inevitable to look for the emergence of the poet’s cosmological model in his most sustained epic enterprise.6 In this light, the triadic setting for Coleridge’s Rime – the reception of the text as deployed in the gloss, the framing scene of instruction in a post-Renaissance dialogue, the narrative scene of discovery in a preRenaissance voyage – matches well an attempt to refute the certitudes explicitly constructed within Newtonian and Cartesian mechanics. At the moment when Enlightenment epistemology began to solidify into an ideological apparatus operating covertly, the poet explored the play of forces that escape or resist containment within any paradigm defined by cause/effect relations. Narrative time warps linear time, thrusting its readers into a vortex of mental strife, and the ur-narrative of physical events simply cannot be contained in Newtonian mechanics. The response by the Wedding Guest (200+ years after the tale’s events) collapses the tale to a singular interpretation about the implicate order shaped by mind and matter, yet this interpretation is, itself, reinterpreted into traditional Christian terms by the marginal gloss (probably another 200+ years removed from the scene of initial reception). The textual manipulation of temporality indicates that Coleridge was interested in unbinding, at the level of narrative, what Donald Ault (in a different context related to William Blake’s The Four Zoas) terms the Newtonian narrative of absolute time, just as, at the level of ‘tale’, he had succeeded in unbinding the Newtonian absolute of space (Ault ‘Re-Visioning’ 105–10).7 Read from this perspective, as Warren Stevenson argues, ‘The Mariner’s voyage is thus not only a voyage through space but a voyage through time as well’ (55).

III. Strategies of containment in The Rime Within the tale, the event that propels the narrative from ‘real’ into ‘imaginary’ spacetime – accompanied by the emergence of forces within the environment that resist critical enclosure in cause/effect relations – is the game of dice, with the play of the random, acausal and uncertain (what might be perceived as supernatural) unfolding immediately following the game. However, in its final state, entry into the narrative moves through the added epigram from Thomas Burnet. This source is suspect, given its closing desire to ‘watch for the truth … so we can tell what is certain from what is uncertain and day from night’ (Coleridge: Jackson 46), and I join other scholars in reading this framing presence as the initial activities of the Glosser, who sounds a



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It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. (1–2; Coleridge: Jackson 47) Here the ‘human wit [of the Glosser] has … circled around a knowledge’ of acausality represented by the Mariner, even embodied in his initial act of random selection (a trace of the then emerging science of probability), ‘without ever attaining it[s]’ significance (Coleridge: Jackson 46).8 The gloss occupies a space where ‘actions have causes and consequences, parts fit into wholes, and human motives are not arbitrary’ (Lipking 78), yet such conversions, as Ferguson suggests, never fully account for textual events. In Raimonda Modiano’s phrase, ‘the incongruities between the gloss and the Mariner’s tale are much too obvious not to become suspect … Rather, [Coleridge] uses the gloss to show what can happen to a work if clarity and secure moral explanations replaced its vast nebulous universe’ (224). Of course, Burnet’s better-known work, Sacred Theory of the Earth, is referenced in Hutton’s Theory of the Earth and is one of the last scientific, geological works to privilege God as a core of concern. This fact helps explain the contradictory tension between the epigram’s recognition of ‘invisible creatures in the universe’ yet its intention to convert these unruly ‘creatures’ into certainties (Coleridge: Jackson 46).9 The epigram acknowledges that these ‘invisible’ presences cannot be enfolded into Linnean schema, which Coleridge abhorred as ‘dead arrangements’ of a flawed Baconian method (Smith 64), since the assignment of their ‘family’, their ‘ranks and relationships’, even their distinguishing characteristics, was impossible (Coleridge: Jackson 46). As for Burnet within the epigram, so too for the Glosser in the selection and use of Burnet as epigrammatic, framing presence. Both attempt to contain what resists rational enclosure by the superimposition of ‘proportion’ onto chaotic content (Newtonian outer and Cartesian inner symmetries) as the vehicle for perceiving ‘truth’ (46). Although the first act is random, no narrative event has yet been encountered (by readers) to convert it into the meaningful rather than the accidental, to posit it as a synchronicity in its broadest sense. The mesmeric power attributed to the Mariner (‘He holds him with his glittering eye/…/The Wedding Guest sat on a stone:/He cannot chose



somewhat ironic epigraphic desire with Burnet, since the very first act presented in the work is totally random:

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but hear’ [47: 17–18]), some critics suggest, begins the evocation of the supernatural within the work, but as other critics have noted, within Coleridge’s immediate public sphere, mesmerism had demonstrable scientific, albeit controversial and sensationalist, validity.10 Thus, the Ancient Mariner impresses (in the nautical sense as well) the Wedding Guest, and the subsequent narrated voyage southward, the arrival at the Antarctic, the northern passage into the placid Pacific, and the arrival at the equator and its doldrums – the events presented in the first two parts of the poem – progress with predictability. Thus far, all poetic events can be accounted for within a rational understanding of natural and psychological processes. Of course, the act not included in this list, the most analyzed event in the poem, is the slaying of the Albatross, which the Mariner accomplishes with a crossbow. The immediate reception accorded to the ‘bird of good omen’ (49), as the Glosser terms it, takes on a metaphor of Christian piety, for the sailors, that is both projective and containing: At length did cross an Albatross Through the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God’s name. (48: 63–6) The bird bears no inherent Christian, only purely zoological, significance, but the crew converts this natural presence, reading it through the filter of superstitious belief and translating it into theological terms. Man projects belief onto nature (‘As if’), a hermeneutic act subsequently endorsed by the gloss accompaniment to lines 71–4. Yet this momentary convergence of the superstitious and theological, after deviations of the weather in the opening quatrains of Part II, progresses from condemnation of the Mariner’s act to tacit collaboration (49–50: 91–106). The vacillation of the crew between these two positions unfolds specifically in relation to meteorological shifts, the physical boundary conditions onto which they project their concerns, but the weather, as twentieth-century physics proposes, functions as the paradigmatic example of chaos systems.11 As Arden Reed suggests (70–206), the weather operates as the constant symbolic presence in the text, the ground against which human activities figure. However, this physical presence resists anthropocentric projection of structures of belief



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(‘good’ versus ‘bad’ interpretations of the function of the bird in relation to the voyage). Like the first act of selection, this second act of the Mariner, an act of ‘unmotivated’ violence against a discrete creature at play within the field of nature, resists reduction to cause/effect relations, which seems to be the error committed by the crew in their alternative projections. Just as the weather acts as a chaotic system that defies predictability, so too the mind and its motives to action equally express the chaotic interactions among layers of mental process (conscious, subconscious and unconscious), an insight that binds contemporary psychoanalytic theory and neurophysiology. ‘Events in the world of neurons and thoughts’, as physicist Erich Harth argues, ‘are much less predictable than in the world of objects’ (95), yet within Coleridge’s milieu, philosophies of mind and matter, the very materials consumed by Coleridge during his intense reading prior to the original composition of The Rime, sought to establish cause/effect relations as the boundary conditions for both. Against such reductive positivism, Coleridge sought a model capable of providing ‘unity in multeity’ (Reed 150). Coleridge, through the play of the random and acausal within both nature and the Mariner, establishes an alternative universe whose boundary conditions involve uncertainty relations, to appropriate terms from Werner Heisenberg, between mind and matter. Thus, John Livingstone Lowes’s suggestion that The Rime ‘[is] a poem of the elements’ and that those elements become the ‘real protagonists’ within the poem’s cosmos is only partially valid, since this reading leaves mind and matter disconnected in their processes (69). Once the ship arrives at the equator and is stilled by the lack of wind, the crew, assuming that cause/effect relations govern the weather (death of bird leads to death of wind), hangs the Albatross around the Mariner’s neck, another reinscription of the initial Christian metaphorical frame of reference offered when the bird first appears. One might say that, in place of what we term ‘the butterfly effect’ (where weather systems are governed by random events that open onto ever-greater complexity), the crew has endorsed an ‘albatross effect’ (where weather systems respond to purely human actions). Yet, as Boulger clearly demonstrates, such ‘ordinary Logic’ breaks down, revealing that ‘the inner and spiritual condition of man’s position in the Universe’ cannot be reduced to ‘rationalism’ (14). At this point in the narrative, ‘some’ of the crew, ‘in dreams’ (Coleridge: Jackson 51: 131), found assurance that supernatural elements (in the form of ‘the spirit that plagued us so’ [51: 132]) had




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entered the poem, but this location of assurance, in dreams, is equally ungoverned by cause/effect relations, whether one reads dreams from within Freudian, Jungian, or even Lacanian psychoanalytic models. Yet the Glosser accepts this statement as fact and interprets this dreamnarrative literally (a violation of psychoanalytic praxis): A Spirit had followed them: one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Micheal Psellus, may be consulted. They were very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more. (51) Nowhere is the attempt to contain the appearance of the random and acausal aspects of natural phenomena within standard, even eclipsed, structures of knowledge more apparent in the gloss, which appeals to authority discredited by the advent of the Newtonian and Huttonian paradigms and which operates in relation to the opening epigram from Burnet. However, this projection of human structures of belief in cause/effect relations onto the manifest content of an uncertain, chaotic universe does not bring salvation to the crew, since the opening event of Part III, the game of dice, carries with it a death sentence. Part III opens with an intensification of ‘time’, but, within the narrative itself, time is defined by a highly subjective, relativistic experience rather than Newtonian absolutes: There passed a weary time. Each throat Was parched, and glazed each eye. A weary time! A weary time! (51: 143–5) Although the experience of suffering in the doldrums of chaotic weather is collective (‘We could not speak, no more than if/We had been choked with soot’ [51: 137–8]), the initial perception of ‘A something in the sky’ is the Mariner’s alone. The subsequent description of the ship of Death and Life-in-Death, following the Mariner’s act of selfvampirism (‘I bit my arm, I sucked the blood’ [51: 160]), is told from the Mariner’s point of view, which follows the collective sucking in of breath (ostensibly because ‘they’ also see the ship) and concludes with their attention to the close of day (‘We listened’ [53: 203]). Whereas the poem seems to suggest that Mariner and crew have all perceived the ship, the poem proper does not ever thoroughly valorize



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this interpretation, since we have no report of this perception in a collective pronoun, as at other crucial moments in the tale. This seems to be the point of Jerome McGann’s suggestion in his justly famous interpretation of the poem, since ‘Enlightenment readers’ will question the validity of this particular manifestation: The Enlightened mind will recognize such phenomena to be mental projections of the mariner’s delirium; indeed, he will see all the fabulous events in this way, that is, as phenomena mediated either by the mariner, or by the balladeer(s), or by some still later editor or scribe, like the writer of the gloss. (McGann Beauty 163) Sufficient study of perceptual processes had been undertaken during Coleridge’s formative years to underwrite this created ambiguity, since eighteenth-century studies of perception had already recognized the tendency of the brain to construct mirages and illusions in response to severe physical deprivation.12 As one contemporary scientist expresses the case, ‘we know it to be a fact that the physical state can affect the content of consciousness in many ways’ (Bohm Wholeness 208). Indeed, the range of Coleridge’s reading on this subject parallels, in its thoroughness, that undertaken in natural philosophy.13 The Glosser’s activities achieve the translation of perceptual uncertainties into dogmatic certitudes in this section of the poem, and the episode closes with a description of meteorological phenomena – the arrival of darkness without significant mediation – which Coleridge, apparently, drew from reports of Captain Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific (Wylie 145–50). The crew performs one final act of visual projection, as they begin to drop down in death, by casting a mesmerizing curse toward the Mariner. The Wedding Guest’s reaction to the preceding narrative events is quite logical; having just heard that the crew died, he fears that the Mariner is, himself, an apparition, as the Glosser suggests. As suggested earlier, the eradication of the crew leaves the tale positioned dangerously on the fault line between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’, which both Wedding Guest and Glosser then translate into symbolic significance. The next narrative sequence, following its disruption by the Wedding Guest (which also forces readers to negotiate a temporal rift between pre-Magellan tale and post-Renaissance reception), concentrates on a purely empirical description of the inner and outer conditions of experience. The emphasis placed on the Mariner’s isolation (‘Alone, alone, all, all, alone,/Alone on a wide, wide sea’ [Coleridge: Jackson 54: 231–2)




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begins to be converted into symbolic significance through the marginal voice of the Glosser (‘He despiseth … And envieth … In his loneliness and fixedness’ [54–5]), as the Mariner survives an additional seven days of sensory deprivation. As other critics have noted, Coleridge draws much of the literal descriptions contained in Part III from natural history and philosophy, as the living forms within the sea and upon the deck undergo putrefaction, but the most compelling aspects of this process, again drawn from Coleridge’s reading of Cook’s voyages, is the play of phosphorescence: Beyond the shadow of the ship, I watched the water-snakes; They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire. (55: 272–81) In Wylie’s estimation, the details of Coleridge’s description of this phenomenon combines information related in Cook’s voyage with that embedded in Joseph Priestley’s The history and present state of discoveries relating to vision, light, and colours (published in 1772 and read by Coleridge in 1795), in which the natural philosopher proposes that ‘the phenomenon of luminescence for organic matter … became an important manifestation of the processes of life and death’ (149). This play of luminosity, a specific natural phenomenon, allows Coleridge to re-fuse a division between the outer play of light and the Mariner’s dawning recognition of the unity of all living processes, including the human, in an implicate order: O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware (55: 282–5)



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This expression of love, which closes Part IV of the narrative, no longer solely centers on the human, embracing what critics might now term an ecological perspective, where man and other living creatures exist in harmonious, rather than hostile, relations. Coleridge’s moral imagination, then, is ‘dependent on ecological considerations at least to the extent that certain ends, purposes, and goods defined within a morality may not be attainable unless certain ecological requirements are met first’ (Johnson 240). In this spontaneous act of contrition, Coleridge climaxes a process that foreshadows ‘ecological morphology’, which ‘is broadly concerned with making connections between how organisms are constructed [or decomposed] and the ecological and evolutionary consequences of that design [for mind and matter]’ (Reilly and Wainwright 339). Indeed, the spontaneous overflow of the Mariner’s powerful feelings overthrows the mechanistic world-view and anthropocentrism in preference for a ‘deep ecology’, espousing ‘a holistic worldview’ that ‘recognizes the intrinsic values of all living beings’ and that ‘views humans as just one particular strand in the web of life’ (Capra ‘Deep’ 20).

IV. Quantum text/critical act The Mariner’s realization creates the conditions that end sleep deprivation (‘the gentle sleep from Heaven/ … slid into my soul’ [Coleridge: Jackson 55: 295–6]) and bodily distress (‘My lips were wet/ … /my body drank’ [56: 301–4). With immediate physical distress abated, although by no means ended, the poem enters territory that certainly looks and sounds supernatural, where the crew undergo a physical reanimation (‘They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose’ [57: 331]) and where the ship is propelled forward without benefit of wind (‘the ship moved on;/Yet never a breeze up blew’ [57: 345–6]), prompting another worried response from the Wedding Guest as to the physical status of the Mariner before him (‘I fear thee, ancient Mariner’ [57: 345]). Of course, this section of the poem unfolds specifically from within the Mariner’s individual perspective, with no independent confirmation of events available within the spacetime of the poem itself, an ambiguity suggesting that such events are a residual manifestation of the recently past state of physical distress. This reading gains some validity when, beginning its return to port, the ship enters something like a spatio-temporal rift whose physical impact on the Mariner suggests an altered state of consciousness:




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Then like a pawing horse let go, She made a sudden bound: It flung the blood into my head, And I fell down in a swound. How long in that same fit I lay, I have but to declare; But ere my living life returned, I heard, and in my soul discerned Two voices in the air. (58: 388–97) Given the position of this ‘swound’, the entire spiritual/elemental dialogue (58: 398–428) emerges as ‘dream discourse’, since the Mariner ‘woke’ to find that the ‘spell was snapt’ and that the ship rapidly approaches its point of departure. That something odd unfolds upon the deck receives independent confirmation in the form of three ‘outside’ observers: the Pilot, his son and the Hermit. However, they have seen the play of light but have not descried the presence of supernatural beings. That the ship, upon entering the harbor, should sink ‘like lead’ (63: 549) cannot be definitively identified as a supernatural event, since the ship has passed through rather ‘heavy weather’ and since it sinks through the agency of a whirlpool, a well-known fluid dynamic. As the poem reaches closure, the Mariner experiences his first compulsion to relate the tale, therein finding temporary (or temporal) relief from the residual physical effects of the voyage and leading to the directly related moral of the tale: He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small[.] (65: 612–15) This conclusion, now apparently offered outside the Mariner’s perspective (by the proposed balladeer), intersects other Romantic statements on the nature of the implicate order of the cosmos (Blake’s concluding statement to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that ‘Everything that lives is holy’ comes to mind). As Karl Kroeber suggests in a slightly different context, Coleridge ‘feels that freedom of individual being is to participate fulfilling[ly] in a



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dynamic unity of forces vastly greater than himself but to which he can satisfyingly belong’ (13). The Mariner discovers, in acute isolation and sensory deprivation, that cosmos and consciousness form an implicate order, an order predicated on decentering human hegemony. In The Rime as in Bohm’s quantum theory: [C]onsciousness (which we take to include thought, feeling, desire, will, etc.) is to be comprehended in terms of the implicate order, along with reality as a whole. That is to say, we are suggesting that the implicate order applies both to matter (living and non-living) and to consciousness, and that it can therefore make possible an understanding of the general relationship of these two, from which we may be able to come to some notion of a common ground of both[.] (Bohm Wholeness 196) Coleridge inscribed ambiguities within the poem (the play of a chaotic cosmos governed by elements of chance, acausality and uncertainty) that collapse into certitudes within the purview of the gloss. In turn, subsequent critical conversions of the poem’s random and uncertain events into cause/effect relations ignore the complex triangular scene of instruction and reception, ignore Coleridge’s own deep reading in emergent cosmologies and neurophysiologies, and ignore, finally, the rhetorical strategies that encourage (then resist) critical determination. For this reason, among others, McGann proposes that this critical desire ‘is what licenses [the poem’s] traditions of symbolic interpretation’ (McGann Beauty 164). Coleridge’s final version of the poem, complete with epigram and gloss, rather than encouraging a singular or definitive reading of the poem, has the effect of underwriting ‘the most diverse readings and interpretations’ (McGann Beauty 172). Coleridge’s exploitation of the desire for certitude, an imperative within Enlightenment epistemology, unveils this desire as a delusion, to borrow Ferguson’s term, since Coleridge’s revisions of the poem ‘[not] only maintain but also intensify the contradictory interpretations that the main text keeps throwing up to us’ (Ferguson 68). Part of Coleridge’s strategy for The Rime, then, operates on the understanding that a deterministic, Newtonian view of spacetime as discrete absolutes breaks down in a uni-verse that is actually a multi-verse of potentiality. In light of McGann and Ferguson’s arguments, the final text of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner functions as a quantum wave potentiality that coalesces at the moment of discrete observation. Thus,




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the fragment as deployed by Coleridge (and Schlegel) ‘is both a critique of wholes and an approach to a more comprehensive whole which would transform the reader from spectator into an active and necessary participant’ (Kuberski 41). Coleridge undertakes a re-visioning of Enlightenment determination, for he endorses Schelling’s recognition that ‘The spectator of an objective, unchanging natural world would have become an impossible myth, replaced by the participant scientist whose measurement procedures and state of motion contribute to the intrinsic properties of what he observes’ (quoted in Grow 53). The chief critical danger for interpreters of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, succumbing to the temptation to ‘murder’ the poem by insisting on cause/effect at/as the core of concern, would be to close down ‘quantum potentiality’ in favor of ‘classical determinacy’. The poem itself resists such interpretations (whether mounted internally in the immediate field of the marginal gloss or externally in critical reception extended across time); rather the work deploys a narrative strategy of liberation (versus that of containment), since the random, acausal and uncertain events described in the tale ‘places considerable constraint on a plain man’s objectivist view of the natural world’ (Polkinghorne 80). The narrative nodes of enclosure offered within the poem – the Mariner, the Wedding Guest, the Glosser, the Balladeer, even the Poet – only further destabilize critical certitude, re-emphasizing the chance element of the dice game at its core. These uncertainty relations, when filtered through the force field of past critical observations, become the very strings of a theory of cosmological structure, one that shares much with those theories now current within the new physics at the close of the twentieth century. In this sense, Coleridge’s Rime functions as quantum text, a textual universe that fragments into as many ‘worlds’ as those that observe it (Everett’s ‘many-worlds’ interpretation of quantum physics).14 The critical multi-verse that emerges through such activities reveals ‘that our sense of causality or teleonomy derives in part from the choices we make – choices that express our taste, our esthetics, our economy of thought – and these evolve with time’ (Favre et al. 115). The text attempts to contain the uncertainties and acausalities emerging from its creative core, and subsequent criticism attempts again to close off the freeplay of textual dynamics. In this way, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, developed across Coleridge’s complex history, can function as a metaphor for the desire to reduce chance and uncertainty to rational causality, perhaps the foundation of all Enlightenment enterprises. Shifting to the related linguistic realm of neurophysiological process –



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an arena equally informed by quantum dynamics – the text reflects the Mariner’s, the Wedding Guest’s and the Glosser’s tendency to ‘exert … selective power over the myriad microscopic potentialities dredged up by the chaotic dynamic’ of events (Harth 147), thereby encoding a creative loop that functions as the path of reception. The critical ‘selection’ of textual ‘chance events and their elaboration’ defines the boundary state of reception, but hermeneutic activities unfold ‘through countless creative loops’, thereby unifying the condition of Mariner and critic in/as the ‘function of consciousness’ (Harth 147).




Blake’s Vortex, or The Quantum Bridge in Milton

What is now proved was once, only imagin’d.1

I. Preludium The verbal and visual works of William Blake have, in recent decades, acquired a new relevance for those writers seeking to popularize the emergent fields of relativistic physics and quantum mechanics, as briefly discussed in Chapter 1 (pp. 36–41). This situation seems somewhat ironic, in that Blake has often been considered the Romantic poet most opposed to science, especially empirical and material paradigms associated with Newtonian dynamics. As Paul Gross recently proposed, ‘William Blake rejected all the forms of inquiry upon which modern science was built’ (Gross, Levitt and Lewis ‘Introduction’ 1). Although this is an overstatement, it does intersect early critical constructions of Blake’s relationship to science. For example, Douglas Bush proposes that ‘Within a century [of Newton’s “deification”] William Blake assailed, as a great evil triumvirate, Bacon, Newton, and Locke’ (53). As well, Marjorie Hope Nicolson argued that ‘[Newton] would have been puzzled and perplexed by the adulation of the poets in the period of his deification; perhaps the one poetic response which would have seemed to him justified was that of William Blake, who presided over his damnation’ (Newton 5). The paradigm or episteme offered by Newtonian mechanics, however, slowly insinuated itself in increasingly wider strata of eighteenth-century culture, finally intruding into metaphoric expression with James Thomson, and by the mideighteenth century the late Lucasian professor was royally and loyally celebrated by a large number of professional and occasional poets.2 Of course, Blake’s work has often been read as reaction against the sym82



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bolic, rather than philosophic, dominance of Newton, yet the experimental horizons of Newton’s method – celestial mechanics and optics – equally define the experiential horizons of Blake’s cosmos, as described in a range of works but most acutely in Milton. This nexus of theoretical and historical concerns needs greater attention and suggests, to me, the following procedure for inquiry: first, explore Blake’s relevance for the new physics and the new cosmology, by augmenting earlier discussion of Blakean images appropriated by cosmologists and high energy physicists; second, test this relevance against more exotic images in Blake’s illuminated prophecy Milton, an intense work that grapples with the symbolic ascension of Newtonian concepts; third, pursue a more energetic engagement of Blake’s poetry with theoretical physics and critical theory, somewhat in the spirit of that mode of physical criticism pursued by Liliane Papin and Arkady Plotnitsky. For Papin, ‘linguistics, literary criticism, literature, and physics are meeting at a crossroads, whereas they have been following parallel paths’ (1264), and Plotnitsky, in Complementarity, evocatively discusses the theoretical convergence of ideas in Bohr, Bataille and Blake only in passing (28–30). 3 My aspiration for this chapter is to stand at the intersection proposed by Papin and to pursue at greater length the path hinted at by Plotnitsky. Of course, the tactics used by Papin and Plotnitsky, the critical deployment of theoretical concepts issuing forth from the new physics within literary analysis, are actually not new to Blake studies. In fact, given Blake’s rather eccentric imagery, his critics have been among the first to confront and deconstruct the notion that Blake was, among the Romantics, the most vigorous in his opposition to matters scientific. To fully engage the thought experiments embedded in Blake’s visionary physics, critics like Donald Ault, Stuart Peterfreund, Mark Greenberg and Bryce Christensen have argued that Blake’s reaction to scientific revolutions associated with Newtonian paradigms cannot be read as simple negation, and they have drawn on twentieth-century physics to help conceptualize certain Blakean processes and relations.4 Actually, my own entry into the poet’s energetic deconstruction of the ‘Newtonian Phantasm’ (M 40: 11; E 141) was inaugurated ‘accidentally’ while re-reading Blake’s Milton for revisionary purposes and reading Walter Sullivan’s Black Holes for purely visionary reasons. While undertaken for divergent purposes, the reading/s quickly converged. Apparently, Blake’s visionary thrust leads inward while the endeavors of cosmologists lead outward, yet any careful reading in either field immediately encounters the paradox inherent in visionary



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poetics and theoretical physics; the inner leads to the outer and vice versa. To complicate matters, I began to note with increased frequency the appearance of Blake’s poetry and visual images in works seeking to popularize the new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics, and this relevance, I suggest, can be discerned in Blake’s narrative exploration of three interrelated concepts: the theory of the vortex, the marriage of time and space, and the annihilation of dynamic contraries. The description of physical dynamics that follows flows from these points of coincidence, yet before plunging into Milton it might be best to examine Blake’s presence in the new physics to contextualize my reading of that illuminated prophecy. The current cultural connections between Blake and the new physics are mapped out at the close of Chapter 1, and the focus here will tighten to Blake’s imaginative overcoming of the mechanical operations of Newtonian cosmology and Cartesian/Lockean psychology. The poem, at the outset, denigrates ‘Mathematical Proportion’ and embraces ‘Living Proportion’ (M 4: 27; E 99), then plunges its readers into the wake of John Milton’s (the poem’s protagonist) passage from eternity to materiality via a vortex that bridges ‘Eternity’ and ‘Generation’. Given the vortical dynamism of the vehicle, one can easily understand why one physicist describes Blake’s paintings as looking ‘like people being thrown into black holes’ (Overbye 118). I share this sense that a contemporary physical concept like ‘black hole’ can be successfully applied to the work of William Blake, especially since the object itself was conceptualized in 1783, well before Blake wrote this particular poem. However, the notion of a black hole would be better matched, or attached, to Urizen; within this poem, Milton averts gravitational collapse into selfhood (the black hole of negation) during his descent to the lawn of Felpham, tunneling through an energy conduit that functions as a wormhole or quantum bridge between planes of existence. Typically, Blake forces a visual confrontation with this concept through the first plate of Milton. The title page of Milton presents the poet in the process of entering a vortex that defines the plate’s background, with the dynamic properties of vortical phenomena generating enormous energy by its circular flow around the center of the plate. Like the grave in other Blake designs, the yawning, cavernous vortex beckons beyond the foreground figure, and the poet’s right hand cleaves his own name (as title), allowing its heavier half (ton) to begin its vortical rotation prior to slipping beyond its event-horizon.5 The vortical imagery functions as the background against which figuration unfolds and is offered as



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the portal through which readers enter the work (Mitchell Composite 69–77). Given that the scene seen will not make a narrative appearance until Plate 15, Blake’s title design enacts at the textual level something described in the poem itself. The design trans-shifts narrative content, forging through the visual field a bridge between two separate moments of reading (which is only recognized from an experienced, that is concluded, stage of reading). The vortex has other strange permutations that open onto physical descriptions of gravitational collapse and quantum tunneling, but it primarily functions in the poem as transportation for Milton from his place in ‘Eternity’ to Blake’s place in ‘Generation’. Stated directly, Blake’s poem narrates the poet Milton’s passage between two relatively flat sheets of spacetime through the agency of a vortex, which functions like a quantum bridge or wormhole that bores through the black hole of collapsed self-consciousness, and his emergence into materiality to enact self-annihilation.

II. From eternity to here Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead (MHH 7: 2; E 35) Although the plot of Milton defies facile summation, a few words on the poem’s lines of force might be in order. Blake verbally and visually divides the poem into two books, yet critics often discuss the poem’s tripartite narrative movement: the Bard’s song, Milton’s solitary descent, and Ololon’s multitudinous descent.6 At the foundation of textual construction, Blake offers the bilateral symmetry of word/image, and at the structural level, he further offers a second such symmetry, Books I and II; however, these bilateral symmetries are broken at a higher level of complexity, within the trilateral construction of narrative. The Bard’s song in eternity concerns the familial clash among the sons of Los – Palamabron, Rintrah and Satan – with the last seeking to erase difference to bring all others under his control. Milton, following this song, gives shelter to the Bard in his bosom when he realizes that the song is primarily aimed at him. He and his works have symbolically reified the negation represented by Satan, his highest artistic characterization. Once Milton comprehends that ‘I in my Selfhood am that Satan; I am that Evil One!/He is my spectre!’ (M 14: 30–1; E 108), he acts to re-absorb this mental projection through an act of self-annihilation, entering generation at Blake’s lawn in Felpham in the process. This act redeems his emanation Ololon,



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who simultaneously (although subsequently in a linear reading of the poem) begins her descent, and she is often read as Milton’s textual productions and/or his wives and daughters. Thus, she functions broadly as the feminine principle placed under erasure by Milton in his art and life. Milton descends directly into the narratorial ‘I’ of the poem, Blake himself, and is followed by Ololon’s descent to the vales of Felpham, where Blake composed at least part of the poem.7 This synopsis hints at the convoluted and complex structure of events, but the physical process that facilitates action is the vortex, and, hopefully, in examining the role this process plays within the plot, the degree to which Blake anticipates scientific revolutions in cosmology and high energy physics becomes somewhat clearer. The dynamo that drives the action of the poem, the ‘vortex’, unfolds in an elaborate passage which Donald Ault describes as ‘one of the most compelling and complex in all literature’ (Visionary 154): The nature of infinity is this: That every thing has its Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro Eternity. Has passd that Vortex, he percieves it roll backward behind His path, into a globe itself infolding; like a sun: Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty, While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth Or like a human form, a friend with whom he livd benevolent. As the eye of man views both the east & west encompassing Its vortex; and the north & south, with all their starry host; Also the rising sun & setting moon he views surrounding His corn-fields and his valleys of five hundred acres square. Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent To the weak traveller confin’d beneath the moony shade. Thus is the heaven a vortex passd already, and the earth A vortex not yet pass’d by the traveller thro’ Eternity. (M 15: 21–35; E 109) This description of vortical processes defines the boundary conditions within which to read Blake’s spatial and temporal configuration of existence, and the vortex expands when moving towards eternity but contracts when approaching materiality or generation. The vortex provides two-way transportation to and from eternity, with a limit of contraction established within generation.8 In his commentary to the Erdman edition, Bloom suggests that ‘The vortex is the



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eddy or whirlpool of eternal consciousness, whose center is the object eternal consciousness intends’ (‘Commentary’ 915), which underscores Blake’s emphasis on ‘the eye of man’. Certainly, the focus on individual consciousness implicates the vortex in perceptual dynamics, a position explored at great length by Kay Parkhurst Easson and Roger Easson in ‘The Geography of the Journey’(Blake Milton 140–58). Through acts of imagination, the plane of earth can be rendered ‘infinite’, but only if the individual perceiver can cleanse ‘the doors of perception’ (MHH 14; 39). Thus, one reading of the vortex passage leads inward into perceptual events in generation designed to open onto eternity, what neuroscience describes as a ‘cerebral dynamics’ (Harth 145), which Blake establishes as the link between consciousness to cosmos. However, the poem equally concerns the passage from eternity. This downward spiral into time and space traces the process through which ‘eternal consciousness’ becomes embodied and describes the physical solidification of the node of consciousness ‘into the globed universe of Newtonian observation’ (Bloom 915). However, within Blakean cosmology, ‘eternal consciousness’ always runs the risk of collapsing into a singularity under the gravitational influence of selfhood. Blake’s elaboration of vortical operations in other works discursively extends the nature of the risk that selfhood represents to consciousness, complicating in interesting and provocative ways the dynamics explored in Milton. For example, in The Four Zoas (the textual unconscious for the completed epics Milton and Jerusalem), Urizen breaks symmetry with eternity to pursue individuality, his passage (modeled on Satan’s track through chaos) ‘Creating many a Vortex fixing many a Science in the deep’ (FZ 72: 13; E 349). Bloom comments that ‘The Vortex … is a mental system or way of looking at things. Here, a Newtonian way of observing the chaos of Urizenic space’ (958), but this does not fully confront the implications of Urizen’s mighty acts of creation in ‘Night the Sixth’. My own reading intersects that offered by Donald Ault, where Urizen’s solitary departure from eternity leads to uncharted regions of spacetime: ‘The journey [Urizen] undertakes from this point forward is his own turf, and the cycle he enacts is cosmological, not organic, in the process giving himself over to the cycles of the Abyss’ (Narrative 226–7). Urizen creates vortices in his wake (as imaged on Plate 23 of The Book of Urizen), confirming Blake’s statement in Milton ‘That every thing has its/Own vortex’ (M 15: 21–2; E 109), but these vortices express the rational portions of intellect, thereby providing the paradigm within which knowledge will be constricted. Yet the presence of the vortices



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in ‘every thing’ (even in ‘Science’) equally suggests that another individual vortex of vision can travel in the opposite direction, towards eternity. In its widest context, the vortex or whirlpool images the fusion of time and space, identity and universality, annihilation and apocalypse. In the apocalyptic ‘Night the Ninth’, the vortexes that ceased operation for Urizen in ‘Night the Sixth’ ‘begin to operate’ (FZ 119: 24; E 388), subsequently becoming, in the image of the whirlwind, the dynamic undergirding Blake’s last judgment. This judgment, for Blake, is a mental event capable of transforming one’s view of the cosmos, hence one’s cosmos: ‘What are all the Gifts of the Spirit but Mental Gifts whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual’ (E 562). However, this is the ending, rather than the beginning, to Milton’s vortical passage in the work at hand. The eternal (in this case, Milton) falls ‘Precipitant loud thundring into the Sea of Time and Space (M 15: 46) and must resist total collapse into ‘Opacity’ (M 13: 21; E 107). Blake names this location ‘Satan’, a term indicative of one possible state of eternal consciousness in generation, and, in the Bard’s song, this singular state is given voice: ‘… I am God alone/There is no other! let all obey my principles of moral individuality’ (M 9: 25–6; E 103). Singularity banishes alterity (‘no other’) in preference for an illusory objectivity of self (‘individuality’). Thus, this state of opacity, in many ways, functions as a conceptual black hole, where (in the words of Stephen Hawking) the individual enters a ‘region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape’ (Time 89). This dynamic also operates in the parallel narrative universe of Jerusalem, where Chapter 2 opens with Albion in dialogue with his Spectre, who narrates a track similar to that taken by Satan in Milton: ‘… he is the Great Selfhood Satan: Worshipd as God by the Mighty Ones of the Earth Having a white Dot calld a Center from which branches out A Circle in continuing gyrations (J 29: 17–20; E 175) The circle, with selfhood functioning as center, implies wheels within wheels and the destiny to pursue the same dull round of existence, and the adoption of the spectrous selfhood of ‘Rational Power’ (J 29: 5; E 175) leads to gravitational collapse into ‘a white Dot’ of ‘Opacity’. Thus, the circle, in its repetitive revolutions, is opposed to the spiral



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rotation of the vortex; the latter gathers and traverses spacetime, while the former simply re-inscribes identity in time and space. For Blake, whether one arrives at the limit of opacity (Satan) or contraction (Adam) depends on the choice of the actively perceiving subject, which links one’s location in spacetime to one’s conscious construction of it. Blake, on Plate 30, inscribes a precise map for this process, an overview of Milton’s journey into the spacetime continuum defined by the fourfold symmetry of the zoas. This stance and its map relate Blakean dynamics to those governing quantum mechanics, since the selection of boundary conditions determines the state of the universe as experienced by the individual. As Wolf explains, ‘no clear dividing line exists between ourselves and the reality we observe to exist outside of ourselves. Instead, reality depends upon our choices of what and how we choose to observe’ (Quantum 128). Milton’s track leads to generation and limitation; the vortical movement flows from cosmos to consciousness. The vortex, a tunnel from eternity to the ‘infinite plane’ of generation and back, emanates exotic imagery, where the planes in question might be described as Milton’s and Blake’s locations in space separated by time but bridged by quantum consciousness (Zohar 76–86). Interestingly, quantum cosmology can and does posit a parallel description of certain physical events; as Paul Davies and John Gribbin observe, ‘Such a connection between different parts of the same spacetime is officially known to relativists as a wormhole’ (275). Wormholes, first postulated by Roger Penrose (whose calculations intersected prior work by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen), tunnel through ‘the contorted space-time geometry of black holes’, forging connections ‘to other universes’ or emerging ‘into our own universe at some other time and place’ (Sullivan 197). Great accord exists between Blakean dynamics and current physical descriptions of wormholes; both ‘connect our universe with a region of space and time that looks very much like a region of the universe outside a black hole, another part of our universe’ (Shipman 129). Such events occur in large and small scales as well; Gribbin argues that ‘At the quantum level, space-time itself may be very complex topographically, with “wormholes” and “bridges” connecting different regions of space-time’ (Schrödinger 261), and Kip Thorne extends this argument: ‘the laws of quantum dynamics demand that exceedingly tiny wormholes of this type exist’ (55). Stephen Hawking’s language comes, perhaps, closest to an unintended literal description of the physical dynamics narrated in Milton, where Milton ‘may be able to avoid hitting a singularity and instead fall



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through a “wormhole” and come out in another region of the universe’ (Time 89). In Black Holes and Warped Spacetime, William J. Kaufmann’s discussion and diagrams of the physical dynamics of wormholes can help visualize the physical processes described by Blake in the function of the vortex (100–3). In Kaufmann’s first representation, the wormhole connects two sheets of relativistic space, and in his map of the Einstein–Rosen Bridge alternative, a wormhole connects two sheets of a folded spacetime continuum. Finally, the third alternative connects the same sheet of space at different points in time. Such representations of wormhole scenarios actually fit well with the physical dynamics undergirding Blake’s thinking. This tunneling phenomenon, also ‘a wellknown quantum process by which the wave functions that represented particles, or whole systems – or the universe – could melt through classically impregnable barriers’ (Overbye 365), fits the physical phenomena orchestrated in Milton. This frame encompasses physical operations at work in large and small measures alike, allowing both Blake and physicists to bring them into dynamic exchange as psyche (quantum mental process) collides with phenomena (classical and postmodern dynamics) to construct the universe. In this case, Blake’s vortex allows Milton to enter ‘the Sea of Time and Space’ and to further enter Blake’s consciousness: I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star, Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift; And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enterd there (M 15: 47–9; E 110) Normally, physical law disallows literal convergence between past and present persons and events, in that the boundaries of time and space are seen as ‘impregnable barriers’ in classical physics. However, as Ronald Grimes noted, Blake’s poem indicates that ‘the assimilation of Milton and then Los to Blake himself’ recognizes that ‘a figure from the past, a poetic character, and a man of the present are not sealed off from one another in visionary perception’ (61). Such visionary perception has achieved a degree of mathematical verifiability in theoretical physics, with descriptions of quantum dynamics often sounding eerily close to Blake’s own. Indeed, within current quantum cosmology, such relations remain theoretical constructs but exist, nonetheless, as mathematical possibili-



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ties. In Wolf’s terms, ‘The relentless quantum shows that the past as well as the future, is created. There is no past. There is no future. We create both, continuously and in unpredictable ways’ (Quantum 215). Kip Thorne, perhaps one of the most sophisticated of physical theorists, offers this explanation: ‘By traversing the wormhole in one direction … one might go backward in our Universe’s time, while traversing in the opposite direction … one would go forward’ (55). Thus, Milton and Blake as complementary ‘events’ positioned in spacetime (in both Blake’s and Thorne’s views) can be brought into dynamic conjunction, since they exist in a continuum of consciousness. This juxtaposition requires the individual to sacrifice the certitudes of identity, to transcend the mechanics of mentality: ‘Complementarity entails a radical critique or deconstruction of classical concepts, models, and frameworks, or the entire processes and technologies of measurement and observation, and finally, while not their wholesale replacement, a redefinition and redelimitation of their functioning’ (Plotnitsky 118). As noted above, Blake clearly intended the vortex as mode of conveyance to operate perceptually, yet the images suggest a correspondence or complementarity between perceptual and physical processes. Blake’s position, then, synthesizes the seemingly uncomplementary systems of Newton and Descartes, as Donald Ault has observed: In forging this imaginative synthesis of different aspects of the void, absolute space, Newtonian attraction, and its imaginative consistency with a reversal of the ancient doctrine that nature flees a vacuum (by making the ‘fleeing’ a literal drawing together and contracting away from the framework of the void), Blake displays once again his extraordinary grasp of the intuitive nature of physical concepts. (Physics 156) Blake’s ‘science’, in Milton, resists the either/or postulates of Newtonian and Cartesian paradigms to offer a synthesis, and this synthesis takes the imagistic shape of the ‘new physics’.9 Blake presents a cosmology of contraction and expansion, where one must tunnel through density in moving from one ‘infinite’ plane to another while avoiding collapse into singularity. The dual drives of the vortex, to and from eternity, also resist resolution, since they are co-present, but only one can be accessed in ‘normal’ versus ‘imaginary’ spacetime. Such a structure operates on complementary dynamics, much like Blake’s contraries,



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that intersect quantum processes, especially the interpretation offered by Niels Bohr.10 Blake’s poem attempts to map the interplay of mind and matter without referencing Newtonian celestial mechanics or Cartesian epistemology, and, in the process, he pursues a line of thought that conceptually anticipates relativity and quantum mechanics.

III. Engendering time and space Eternity is in love with the productions of time. (MHH 7: 10; E 36) Following Milton’s explosive departure from eternity via the vortex, he enters time and space, confronting, in the process, one of the more confusing aspects of Blake’s visionary cosmology, for Blake engenders time and space: ‘Los is by mortals nam’d Time Enitharmon is nam’d Space’ (M 24: 68; 121). Los and Enitharmon (zoa and emanation) are husband and wife, and they exist in parallel with Milton and his emanation Ololon. This formulation, quoting Ronald L. Grimes slightly out of context, provides ‘a point of coincidence between space and time’ as Blake struggles toward a field theory capable of ‘reuniting space and time, masculine and feminine, individual and society, and finally, poetry and painting’ (81). Di-vision of space and time (a trace by-product of fallen or “single” vision) imposes a perceptual unity founded upon bilateral symmetry expressed as contraries. In his ‘marriage’ of time and space, Blake reunites what Newtonian physics separated, anticipating conceptual advances associated with relativity, in which estranged time and space achieve reintegration. According to Hawking, ‘time is imaginary and is indistinguishable from directions in space’ (Time 135), and after the experimental confirmation of relativity, in A. Zee’s words, ‘time [is] married to space, and space to time … as spacetime’ (Zee 70). Milton contains Blake’s most vigorous attempts to recuperate time and space within mind and matter, where outer and inner experience frame, through complementary relations, a grand unified theory founded upon symmetry. As mentioned earlier, Blake’s suspicion of ‘Mathematical Proportion’ propels him toward an alternative mode of (ac)counting for time, and this reformation pursues what Blake, early in the poem, terms ‘Living Proportion’. The sons of Los (progeny of time) create a structure for experience following any departure from



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eternity, and, as sons of Blake’s figure for eternal imagination, their constructions are skillfully wrought. ‘Some sons of Los surround the Passions with porches of iron & silver/Creating forms & beauty around the dark regions of sorrow’ (M 28: 1–2; E 125), with these activities providing an element of Wordsworthian ‘abundant recompense’ for entry into generation. Indeed, the sons’ activities provide a framework from which to begin an alternate expansion back to eternity: But others of the Sons of Los build Moments & Minutes & Hours And Days & Months & Years & Ages & Periods; wondrous buildings And every Moment has a Couch of gold for soft repose (M 28: 44–6; E 126) While this strategy of containment participates in standard measures, Blake immediately, through a parenthetical intrusion, alters any simple reading of the smallest increment by relating it to the body’s inner registers of time: ‘(A Moment equals a pulsation of the artery)’ (M 28: 47; E 126). What follows the parenthetical imaginatively recasts units of time in relation to symbolic registers: And every Minute has an azure Tent with silken Veils. And every Hour has a bright golden Gate carved with skill. And every Day & Night, has Walls of brass & Gates of adamant (M 28: 49–51; E 126) Blake extends this catalogue to ‘Ages & Periods’, and his method operates through the expansion of individual terms appearing on Plate 28 (44–5) into full lines that force readers to experience their expansion in narrative time. This strategy, in keeping with Blake’s attempt to pursue ‘Living Proportion’, promotes a relativistic approach to time experienced in the process of imaginative creation: Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years. For in this Period the Poets Work is Done: and all the Great Events in Time start forth & are concievd in such a Period Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery (M 28: 62–29:3; E 127)



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The smallest, unmeasured period of time expands to 6000 years and encloses the traditional period of Christian cosmology, a typically ironic Blakean reading of such institutionally based clock-time. Rather, the true measure of eternity falls between the generational measures of time offered by the sons of Los, since their recuperation of time functions as the boundary conditions allowing imaginative activity to begin its movement back to eternity (what contracts also expands). Thus, while the arrow of time offered by the sons of Los and Blake’s own bodily measure seem at odds on first reading, they actually form yet another pair of complementary processes that unify the individual’s experience of the contraction and expansion of time itself. Having expanded ‘a Moment, a Pulsation of the Artery’ into ‘Six Thousand Years’, Blake’s poem moves against the productions of time as well, especially as instrumentation functions to define the contours of space: Such are the Spaces called Earth & such its dimensions: As to that false appearance which appears to the reasoned As of a Globe rolling thro Voidness, it is a delusion of Ulro (M 29: 14–6; E 127) Blake’s deconstruction of Newton’s ‘Void’ pursues a line of inquiry now quite familiar to physicists involved in instrumental measurement of quantum processes (namely, that the instruments employed effect the outcome or result), and he immediately proceeds to discredit the very instruments of sensation:11 The Microscope knows not of this nor the Telescope. they alter The ratio of the Spectators Organs but leave Objects untouchd 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: The red Globule is the unwearied Sun by Los created To measure Time and Space to mortal Men. (M 29: 17–24; E 127) Several aspects of the dynamics enfolded in this discussion intersect contemporary physical theories, and Blake’s recognition that the very selection of instrumentation impacts the outcome of experimental



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results has relevance for quantum dynamics. Basically, quantum events, following Schrödinger’s wave equation, exist in ‘a superposition of possible states’, and when a scientist ‘performs a measurement, the wave function “collapses”’ through this discrete act of observation (Crease 132). Davies and Gribbin, analyzing this phenomenon, conclude that ‘the Universe [i]s a vast network of interacting particles, and each linkage binds the participating particles into a single quantum system. In some sense the entire Universe can be regarded as a single quantum system’ (224). However, due to Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations, the selection of an instrument to perform measurements impacts the information that emerges from experimentation. As the physicist Michael Murphy phrases it, ‘In this sense, a particular state of consciousness is like a particular scientific instrument – e.g. a telescope or microscope – because it gives us access to things beyond the range of our ordinary senses’ (quoted in Herbert Elemental 223). As in his pursuit of ‘Living Proportion’ for the measure of time, Blake offers a relativized and quantized reading of space, highlighted by his clever opposition of ‘Globule’ to ‘Globe’. The range of Blake’s critique, encompassing Newtonian experimentation and human physiology, connects the micro- and macroscopic, where ‘every Space’ at the macroscopic level pulsates with visionary potential and where ‘every Space’ at the microscopic level ‘opens/Into Eternity’ (as might be expected from Blake’s earlier temporal description of the ‘space’ between pulsations of the artery). For Blake, the body consummates the relationship of space and time, and the body expresses this marriage rhythmically in the fluctuations of the circulatory system. Just as Blake renovated time by relating it to the pulsations of an artery, so too Blake now renovates space in much the same way, relating it to the corpuscular. The body, rather than inert machinery, becomes the measure of time and space, of eternity and infinity. The machines of perception, microscope and telescope, only alter the nature of the organ and leave untouched the object, but for Blake, mind’s movement animates and structures the universe. This postulate forms a constant state in Blake’s thinking. In Milton, he implicates the ‘eye of man’ in the vortex passage; in ‘The Mental Traveller’, he posits that ‘the Eye altering alters all’ (62; E 485); and, in ‘A Vision of the Last Judgment’, he argues that ‘Mental Things are alone Real’ (E 565).12 This radical view of subject/object relations eliminates ‘disinterest’ as a viable, even privileged, position of observation, and overthrows Newtonian causality. For Blake, ‘every Natural Effect’ sprung from ‘a Spiritual Cause, and Not/A Natural’ (M 26: 44–5; E 124)



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cause (that is, from acausal events and connections outside the scope either tele- or micro-) of ‘pure’ reason.13 The relationship of mind and matter – like that of time and space, Milton and Ololon, or Los and Enitharmon – is a dynamic and complementary one. This extension of Blake’s theory of contraries from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to higher levels of perceptual information would again seem to intersect concepts pursued in quantum mechanics. In The Marriage, Blake characterizes this complementarity in human terms, as the prolific and devourer: Thus one portion of being, is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring: to the devourer it seems as if the producer was in chains, but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole. But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea recieved the excess of his delights. (MHH 16; 40) As Plotnitsky has argued, ‘Blake’s notion of contrariety developed [in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell] is close to [Bohr’s] complementarity insofar as the latter entails the necessity of operating with conflicting modes of description’ (28–9). Such complementarity, then, intersects the quantum mechanical description of the interplay of mind and matter, in the view of Wolf: Thus it is that mind and matter cannot be truly separated. Mind is the outcry of indeterminism. It is the hope of matter. The function of matter is to interact with, and thereby correlate (thus building new structures), the universe – indeed build the universe itself. The function of mind is to tear down those very same structures, to analyze and decode nature’s secrets, to inspect and create or recreate new structures. The universe is to be created. Mind is the creator. (Star 66) The theoretical argument for mind/matter interpenetration, a mainstay within most Romantic poetics, has also moved to the foreground of attempts to quantize brain functions. As Roger Penrose argues, ‘We must not look simply to the quantum effects of single particles, atoms, or even small molecules, but to the effects of quantum systems that retain their manifest quantum nature at a much larger scale’, especially within the brain itself (Shadows 351). In the visionary scheme pursued in Milton, the individual perceiving subject proceeds ‘in fury of Poetic



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Inspiration,/To build the Universe stupendous: Mental forms Creating’ (M 30: 19–20; E 129). For Blake, participation alone provides the foundation for a viable cosmology, a position often associated with the physicist John Wheeler: ‘The precise nature of reality’, Wheeler claims, ‘has to await the participation of a conscious observer. In this way, mind can be made responsible for the retroactive creation of reality – even a reality that existed before there were people’ (Davies God 110–11).14 Wheeler is also associated with the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation of quantum physics, and I will return, in my conclusion, to its relevance for Blake’s cosmos. The focus on individual observation points to the last complementary relation, pair annihilation, in need of exploration in Milton.

IV. Annihilation and emanation The most sublime act is to set another before you. (MHH 7: 17; E 36) While the vortex transports Milton from eternity into the spacetime of generation, the reason for Milton’s departure returns this essay to one of the chief problematics of Blake’s prophetic works, his theory of emanations. Emanations participate in the operation of contraries, which developed across a wide expanse of works and which open onto principles of complementarity. Yet the relation of zoa and emanation also provides the location (and occasion) from which to begin feminist critiques of the apparent residual phallic privileging latent in Blake’s later prophecies.15 Considering this set of relations as they reproduce themselves at succeeding layers of Milton, I propose to read them literally, in keeping with my literal reading of Blake’s marriage of Los and Enitharmon as Blake’s attempt to represent space and time in a unified frame of reference. Once Milton recognized his culpability in the entrenchment of a materialist/empiricist view of cosmos and consciousness, he is compelled to leave eternity and seek generation as the plane at which to eradicate the spectrous elements of selfhood and redeem his emanation: I will arise and look forth for the morning of the grave. I will go down to the sepulcher to see if morning breaks! I will go down to self annihilation and eternal death, Lest the Last Judgment come & find me unannihilate And I be siez’d & giv’n into the hands of my own Selfhood (M 14: 20–4; E 108)



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With these words, Milton begins his trek across the chaos dividing eternity from generation through the agency of the vortex, and his motivation resides in his attempt to ‘annihilate’ the Satanic spectre of ‘selfhood’ in order to achieve a prepatory state for a final annihilation at ‘the Last Judgment’. As Blake intimates in Jerusalem (in a mirrored writing sequence), casting the spectre ‘back into the lake’ overcomes selfhood and makes mutual annihilation possible. The process of self-annihilation is revealed following the Bard’s song, but the motive for this action is only revealed, to readers and to Blake, near the end of the work: I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Savior To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration (M 41: 2–7; E 142) In this powerful passage, ‘Self-annihilation’ and ‘Inspiration’ oppose ‘Rational Demonstration’, which leads to the dominance of ‘Memory’. The epistemological line defined by rational proof begins with Baconian ‘scientific’ methods that split into Lockean empiricism and Newtonian materialism (both positivist in nature). Yet the aesthetic therein established denigrates the ‘Imagination’ (as in the poetic celebration of formalism emphasized by Augustan poets like Pope or Thomson), where methodology becomes the harness that yokes inspiration and imagination to ‘the horses of instruction’ (MHH 9: 44; 37). Newtonian symmetry, then, reduces visionary freeplay to a fixed point perspective but at the cost of denying the integral role played by an observer’s energy in the determination of reality. Of course, the irony is apparent; Newtonian physical description ‘forgets’ that it begins in a description of reality from a particular point of view, resulting in cultural structuration that Blake terms ‘Single vision & Newtons sleep’ (E 722).16 In Blake’s view, Milton’s celebration of this epistemology in the figure of Satan in Paradise Lost requires overturning, since it participates in the entrenchment of the ‘Newtonian Phantasm’ as the plumbline of existence. Such an epistemology valorizes the selfhood at the expense of interconnective consciousness, and Blake shrewdly allows Milton himself to return and overturn this contracted state of



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being. Milton, then, comes to redeem his emanation, with the end result of their dual drive for unification inaugurating a last judgment of the type described previously. In physical terms, Milton and Ololon exist as identity in time (poet) extended in space (works). They are interconnected and act in consort; they are complementary entities in Blakean spacetime, and their relationship might best be described as a pair of virtual particles (i.e. an electron and a positron), whose material manifestations often result in mutual annihilation. Like virtual particles, zoa and emanation enjoy a discrete existence only so long as they maintain the illusion that they are not related. Ololon expresses this recognition during her terminal confrontation with Milton in generation: Hence arose all our terrors in Eternity! & now remembrance Returns upon us! are we Contraries O Milton, Thou & I O Immortal! how were we led to War the Wars of Death Is this the Void Outside of Existence, which if enterd into Becomes a Womb? & is this the Death Couch of Albion Thou goest to Eternal Death & all must go with thee So saying, the Virgin divided Six-fold & with a shriek Dolorous that ran thro all Creation a Double Six-fold Wonder! (M 41: 34–42: 4; E 143) Ololon now understands what Milton had previously explained in his confrontation with his spectre, Satan, and the dynamics between the gendered pairs in Milton represent a significant modification of the theory of contraries introduced earlier in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: There is a Negation, & there is a Contrary The Negation must be destroyd to redeem the Contraries The Negation is the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in Man This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off & annihilated always To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-examination. (M 40: 32–7; E 142) On the title page of ‘Book the Second’, Blake, in mirrored writing, had already offered a graphic refinement to contrariety: ‘Contraries are Positives/A Negation is not a Contrary’ (M 30; E 129). On that same



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page, in the opening lines of ‘Book the Second’, Blake proposes that ‘There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True/This place is called Beulah’ (M 30: 1–2; E 129). In the spatial geography of Blake’s cosmos, Beulah is positioned between Eternity and Generation, functioning as a staging place for descent and a resting place following ascent. One might say that Beulah functions as the realm of potentiality or probability, but this wave of potential, once observed from the plane of generation, collapses into difference and division. Milton and Ololon, like Los and Enitharmon, are a pair in generation but are one in eternity, and the passage back to eternal climes requires an act of annihilation that essentially amounts to embracing complementarity. Thus, Blake seems to place at the foundation of difference an operative ‘death drive’ that intersects once again physical descriptions resident in quantum electrodynamics. Such processes involve ‘pair creation’ and ‘pair annihilation’ as these relate to the appearance of particles in spacetime. Blake’s description of pair processes intersects the physical phenomenon of ‘correlation’, where, according to Wolf, ‘we know something about the particles as a pair, but nothing about them individually’ (Quantum 156, 159). In Star Wave, Wolf explores the inner aspect of this external phenomenon in language quite close to that offered by Blake in Milton: The fact that each electron possesses an identical electrical charge is, I believe, simultaneously a cry for annihilation and an assertion of identity. This annihilation occurs when an electron recombines with a positron – the antimatter partner in the process of matter creation… Our death is linked to the quantum electrodynamical process of pair annihilation. (140, 142)17 Milton and Ololon, dynamic contraries, self-annihilate in a process akin to the quantum transformation of matter back to energy through an operative death drive that leads to subsequent explosive creation on a different plane of existence – Blake’s own.

V. The jouissance of energy Energy is Eternal Delight (MHH 4; E 34) Blake, albeit prior to any formal articulation of a big bang theory of cosmogenesis, found the conceptualization of an oscillating universe



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quite attractive, as have a number of theoretical physicists.18 Generally, Blake’s myth of being oscillates between the poles of mind and matter, generating energy in the process, and Blake’s oscillating imagery explores both the embodiment of energy in matter and the annihilation of matter to release latent energy. Of course, Blake offers this oscillation as the climax to his last prophetic work, Jerusalem: Of Death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent varying According to the subject of discourse & every Word & Every Character Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or Opakeness of Nervous fibres such was the variation of Time & Space Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary & they walked To & fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly seen And seeing: according to fitness and order. (J 98: 34–40; E 258) The language of Jerusalem intersects the dynamics described in Milton (with its emphasis on ‘Expansion or Contraction’, ‘Translucence or Opakeness’, ‘variations of Time & Space’, and ‘the Organs of Perception’), and Blake’s imagery, driven to resist the emergent Newtonian paradigm, traverses conceptual areas that only make sense when read in light of ideas currently defining the ‘new physics’. Of course, as the appropriation of Blake by those writing the new physics indicates, his mental energy to resist the ascendance of Newtonian paradigms can help illuminate some of the weirder concepts issuing forth from quantum cosmology and electrodynamics. As Paul Davies suggests in a slightly different context, these new insights ‘demand a completely new vocabulary’ (Davies Cosmic 159). Blake’s visionary physics provides symbolic language ready-made for appropriation by physical theorists seeking to supplement classical descriptions of physical phenomena, once the broader implications of quantum dynamics received wide cultural circulation. As Arthur I. Miller proposes, ‘when scientists hold a theory, they hold a particular mode of imagery as well’ (312), and Einstein, Bohr and other twentieth-century physicists continually acknowledged the role that imagination plays in framing hypotheses (thought-experiments) and representing the results of experimentation and calculation (black holes or wormholes). Given its radical championing of the imagination and its productions, Blakean process can elucidate contemporary physics just as



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I had come to suspect, and now felt compelled to acknowledge, that science and the physical world were products of human imagining – that we were not the cool observers of that world, but its passionate creators. We were all poets and the world was our metaphor. (Jones 3) Blake’s critique of causality and objectivity evinces this same awareness that subject and object cannot be easily separated because mind and matter define complementarity, with each functioning as boundary for the other, yet both accounts are required to frame a ‘holistic’ interpretation. This type of creative exchange between subject and object, mind and matter, time and space has always been a mainstay of Blake’s poetic projects and Blakean criticism, and Blake maps, in Milton, the processes through which energy becomes matter and processes by which matter is re-converted to energy, framing a perfect (although fearful) symmetry. As Morton D. Paley (24–86) observed, energy is the standard within Blake’s system from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell forward, and this energy, according to Martin Price, is unleashed from Blake’s place in generation in discrete acts of destruction and creation: the infinite can only shatter with its breath those mechanical representations of life that men devoutly compose. The spiritual music is nothing less than the whirlwind [a vortical process], the destruction of worldly order in the name of energy that cannot be ordered unless it orders itself. (261–2) Blake describes a process whereby perceptual acts participate in building the universe, a position with strong analogies in contemporary physical theory. The laws of nature, of physics, and of poetry, then, are Written within & without in woven letters: & the Writing Is the Divine Revelation in the Literral expression (M 42: 13–4; E 143)



contemporary physics can elucidate Blake’s works. As the physicist Roger Jones confesses:

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This ‘Divine Revelation’ of ‘the Litteral Expression’ suggests that readers must take seriously Blake’s descriptions, since they clearly resonate with physical descriptions emerging from the new physics. Certainly, Milton must be read, finally, in relation to Blake’s extended attempt to unify the four mythic forces, the four zoas, as manifest within and without individual nodes of consciousness. The widest expanse of Blake’s poetry concerns the initial descent of energy into matter following the breaking of symmetry in eternity where the four zoas reside in states of mutual exchange. Blake, driven to restore unity and evoke a ‘last judgment’, inscribes the fourfold symmetry at physical and psychological levels, which helps often perplexed readers make sense of abstract mental functions and specific spots in spacetime moving into textual coincidence (e.g. Blake’s London as Golgonooza, the City of Eternal Art). The argument for inner and outer symmetry, which stabilizes the system yet provides imaginative freeplay (since it is dynamic), approaches the widest horizons of Blake’s thought and again connects his insight to those emerging in the rapidly collapsing fields of inner and outer physics. Modern physics, too, dreams of a final theory that would unify its four forces (gravitation, electromagnetism, weak nuclear and strong nuclear), but gravity resists unification as vigorously as Blake’s unruly Urizen resists a return to symmetry in eternity. In Blake’s visionary scheme, to appropriate Steven Weinberg’s words, ‘matter has lost its central role. This role has been usurped by principles of symmetry, some of them hidden from view in the present state of the universe’ (Dreams 3). Contemporary physics seeks this unification at higher and higher energy states and pushed further back in time towards the opening nanoseconds of the big bang itself, an imaginative endeavor analogous to the expansion proposed in Jerusalem. Blake opens the work with the suggestion that ‘The Primeval State of Man, was Wisdom, Art, and Science’ (J 3; E 146), and he concludes with harmonious dialogue established between science and imagination: ‘And Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer … conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic’ (J 98: 9, 98: 28; E 257). I would like to close this discussion with an imaginative, speculative juxtaposition of Blakean and scientific languages to re-read Milton, in the process complicating my radically reduced ‘plot’ summary offered above. The nodes of consciousness/existence called ‘Milton’ and ‘Blake’ are walled off from one another, being situated in different spaces separated by time. Blake, through the exertion of mental energy in reading or receiving Milton, attempts to liberate Miltonic expression from its



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slavish dependence on Newtonian narrativity through acts of imagination which re-frame (and re-form) Milton’s energies in the context of Blakean theories of the vortex, time and space, and contraries, thereby forging cohesion from chaos. Blake strategically allows Milton to traverse the chaos between their relative spacetime locations through a quantum tunnel, which allows the poet to avoid collapse into the singularity of selfhood, becoming merely a white dot of opacity. At Milton’s moment of recognition in Eternity, usually defined by the conclusion to the Bard’s song, Blake’s mental energy collapses the qwiff (quantum wave function) as a result of his act of observation, his ‘particular’ reading of Milton’s work. Milton’s eternal existence is partially defined by his physical existence, and ‘Milton’ and ‘Ololon’ (mind and matter, time and space) exist as virtual particles that are intimately connected, manifesting different spin (one masculine, one feminine); they mutually recognize their ‘fall’ from symmetry, away from complementarity, and into bilaterality division, and they desire, like all virtual particle pairs, mutual annihilation to transmute matter back to energy in its eternal state. Thus, Milton and Ololon simultaneously tunnel through the gravitational chaos of ‘the Newtonian Phantasm’, striving for physical annihilation, attempting to avoid gravitational collapse into a singularity at the ‘limits of contraction’. Once both arrive on the lawns of Felpham, at the discrete spot of spacetime defined by William Blake’s act of observation, they self-annihilate and consummate their physical existence, with the poetic ‘I’ basking in the energetic and creative fusion. The poetic I/eye launches a critique and unveils the limitations of Newtonian mechanics, precisely because such a paradigm and the universe therein represented provide no viable support for the physical dynamics of mind/matter interpenetration, a boundary state of the poem itself. Blake, energized by this dynamic exchange, moves to create an alternate cosmology that would provide for such dynamics in physical and psychological terms, with his descriptions pointing forward toward relativistic physics and quantum mechanics, since any return to the old dualism defined by Newtonian physics and Cartesian/Lockean psychology leads to singularity and selfhood. I believe this description fits well with the poem’s dynamics, its energies, and I have never re-read Milton without finding, finally, that my energies are supplemented rather than depleted, a state that contradicts the advent of entropy implied by the laws of thermodynamics.



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Reconstructing Byronic Time, or Temporality and Memory in The Giaour

‘Once your mind is dominated by anger’, [the Dalai Lama] notes, ‘it becomes almost mad. You cannot make right decisions, and you cannot see reality’. (The Dalai Lama Policy 33) In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and the physical sides of our nature, time occupies the key position. (Sir Arthur Eddington 1) The ‘now’ of the poem is not an actual now, but the ideal ‘now’, the duration of acquired wisdom. (Paul De Man 206)

I. Preludium John Bender and David Wellbery, in their introductory comment to Chronotypes, propose that ‘[t]ime belongs to a handful of categories (like form, symbol, cause) that prompt universal concern’: Time touches every dimension of our being, every object of our attention – including our attention itself. It permeates simple everyday experience no less than the most abstractly theoretical speculation. Time therefore can belong to no single field of study. (Bender and Wellbery 1) The authors, arguing that the shift to a ‘temporalization of experience’ marks the emergence of modernity, endorse Reinhart Koselleck’s locat105



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ing of this shift within ‘the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (1). If the hypothesis offered has critical validity, then one could expect to discern these ‘new’ tracks of time in one of time’s best containers, poetry, and since time is bound to narrative space, both within literary and physical description, then one should be able to identify the emergence of a new temporal sensibility in poetic narrative. The appearance of Bender and Wellbery’s critical compilation, as they note, is itself ‘symptomatic of a general turbulence of thought now manifesting itself in many areas of intellectual endeavor’ (2). In the estimation of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, a concern for time ‘has penetrated not only biology, geology, and the social sciences’, but has acquired a new urgency in the fields ‘of engineering, of applied chemistry, where it was first formulated, [to] spread to the whole of physics, from elementary particles to cosmology’ (Order 215, 231). While discussions of temporality feature prominently in a number of disciplinary discourses, within contemporary physical theory (especially physics) theories of time have assumed a certain hegemony. As Roger Penrose intimates, ‘It is only consciousness that seems to need time to flow, so we should not be surprised if the relationship between consciousness and time is strange’ (Shadows 384). However, perhaps the most overt force fueling the new-found relevance of time to the populace at large, as well as within discrete scientific disciplines, is the current Lucasian Professor Stephen W. Hawking, whose A Brief History of Time became a runaway bestseller, prompting one publisher to comment that the book was the least read, most sold book in modern publishing history.1 In spite of the book’s obvious difficulties, Hawking’s anatomization of three arrows of time has relevance for Romanticism generally and for the formal and narrative experiments pursued in Lord Byron’s first ‘oriental tale’, The Giaour, specifically. By Byron’s time, scientific attacks on one pole of Newton’s absolutes, time, were well underway, since the transmission of knowledge via light was, itself, finite. Indeed, the Danish philosopher Ole Christian Roemer determined the speed of light 11 years before the appearance of the Principia (Hawking Time 19–20), an insight whose implications were only slowly recognized across the eighteenth century. The exploration of thermodynamics was continued beyond Newton’s Principia by Georges de Buffon, ‘an early champion of deep time’ who worshipped Newton and who performed thermodynamic experiments throughout the 1770s to ascertain the age of the Earth (Ferris Coming 246; Prigogine and Stengers Order 67–8).2



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In the twentieth century, Hawking, Penrose, Weinberg and others have pursued the implications of relativity’s unification of space and time, and Hawking’s descriptive homology of chronology can help elucidate Romantic explorations of time generally and the relativistic treatment of time that emerges in The Giaour specifically: There are at least three arrows of time. First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Then, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future. Finally, there is the cosmological arrow of time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting. (Hawking Time 144) The universal scale inflated immeasurably once light was understood to travel at a fixed speed across vast cosmic distances before arriving at the Earth. Certainly, the cosmological arrow of time, during the Romantic period, had been extended outward and backward within the fields of astronomy and geology (through the work of Herschel and Hutton, respectively), with astrophysics and geophysics coming to address the parameters and mediate the implications of ‘deep time’. However, in relation to Hawking’s second mode of time, the ‘subjective sense of the direction of time, the psychological arrow of time’ (Hawking Time 147) has long been viewed as one of the primary attributes of Romantic poetry’s exploration of mind/matter relations. In his essay for Chronotypes, Dominick Lacapra explores tensions between the constructions of temporality in germinal works by M. H. Abrams and Paul De Man that intersect many of the concerns raised below: The crucial point on which I have insisted is that temporality is best seen as an intricate process of repetition with change – at times traumatically disruptive change that may nonetheless involve the return of the repressed. This process is oversimplified when it is resolved into an option between continuity and discontinuity, ‘symbolic’ unity and ‘allegorical’ disjunction. (Lacapra 147) In several ways, Byron’s tale thematizes this ‘intricate process of repetition’ and formalizes the ‘option between continuity and discontinuity’;



Reconstructing Byronic Time

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the display of time in The Giaour aptly deploys ‘a more complex mode of “temporality” that cannot be decisively reduced to the binary opposition between the synchronic and the diachronic or its multiple analogues – a mode of temporality involving complex relations between repetition and change over time’ (Lacapra 136). Indeed, Byron’s method of exploring the empire of time in The Giaour begins with the chronological binaries of synchronism and diachronism, but these binaries exist as the characters of the Giaour and Hassan, the former locked in a closed loop of time (‘It was Eternity to Thought’) and the latter equally ‘fixed’ within clock-time (‘“I’ve’ scaped a bloodier hour than this”’).3 The clash between Hassan and the Giaour, as one of my graduate students observed, presents two chronotypes in conflict, and this type of ‘opposition between chronos or rectilinear time and kairos or sempiternal time’ has received extended analysis by Paul Ricouer, upon whose work I will draw (Time II: 166).4 In pursuing Byron’s fragmentation of temporality through its forms, its symbols and its causes, one must overcome Euclidean time frames and enter the ‘space’ of imaginary time, chrontypology in its relativistic guise (Hawking Time 134). However, Byron linguistically layers registers of time throughout the text. Therefore, the task of reconstructing Byronic time in poetic narrative through this complex work, given its varied temporal signifiers, will require minute analysis, and I will move through the text diachronically to emphasize the play of its synchronic effects, sharing with Gleckner the intuition that ‘The tension between the horizontality toward which each segment of the narrative tends and the co-instantaneous thrust of the poet’s generalizations, interpretations, and analogies is what gives the poem its peculiar effect and interest’ (Gleckner 117).

II. Out of the years of fame For several reasons, The Giaour functions as an ideal text within which to test the hypotheses presented in Bender and Wellbery’s collection and to meld their concerns with descriptions of time emerging within contemporary physical theory. Byron’s life spans precisely the period Koselleck identifies for the emergence of the new paradigm, the temporalization of experience, with The Giaour sitting squarely in the center of Koselleck’s temporal range. The intentional fractures of form – which clearly function to create temporal rifts through spatial fissures – force a confrontation with complex layers of spatio-temporal representation. This fact is compounded further by the work’s appearance in



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a unique and important place in the Byron canon because … it is highly unsettled and unplanned, developed over months into poetic form by chance under a variety of intense pressures and conditions. Thus it contains and exposes quite vividly the many turns of Byron’s thought at this time[.] (‘Social’ 890) During this phase of his career, Byron was a ‘force’ within historical time, where force is defined, following Jerome Christensen, as ‘an effect of that social field, to be referred to a grammar that itself has no referent’ (4). Thus, while I can find considerable critical accord with Watkins, I cannot recognize a poem as ‘unsettled and unplanned [when it was] developed over months into poetic form’, nor with a reading of the form as resulting from ‘chance’, at least in the sense Watkins suggests.5 The coincidence of Byron’s life and poetry, as Northrop Frye observed, complicates most of Byron’s work, but especially during the period of The Giaour’s appearance: To read Byron’s poetry is to hear all about Byron’s marital difficulties, flirtations, love for Augusta, friendships, travels, and political and social views … He proves what many critics declare to be impossible, that a poem can make its primary impact as a historical and biographical document. (Frye 53) From this coincidence of history and biography emerges the persona of the ‘“Pilgrim of Eternity”, the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’ (Evans 347), who primarily explores expanded temporality (‘Eternity’) over spatiality (‘Infinity’) while positioned at their confluence in consciousness. Such a persona provides tacit support for ‘an epistemic or paradigmatic shift’ within chronotypology, for the construct spatializes identity in temporal terms, thereby functioning to ‘temporalize experience’ by extending it to the edge of time itself. Byron’s interest in temporality emerges early in his work and remains a constant throughout his corpus, from the 1809 publication of Hours of Idleness (emphasis mine) through the ‘wretched gift of



print at the peak of Byron’s years of fame, thereby offering a textual crystallization of Byron’s early interest in temporality. The poem, as Daniel P. Watkins recognizes, occupies:

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Eternity’ given to ‘Prometheus’ (ll. 24–5) to the multivalent explorations of time in Don Juan (‘Now, like Friar Bacon’s Brazen Head, I’ve spoken, “Time is, Time was, Time’s past”’ [230: II, ccxvii: 5–6]).6 Even the last poem Byron penned, ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’, (‘Tis time this heart should be unmoved/Since others it hath ceased to move’ [23.1–2]) evinces the poet’s complex temporal concerns: the poem opens with ‘time’ and ‘days’ as concerns but shifts to a specifically spatial concern, the space of the grave that concludes the poem and closes the poet’s poetic career: Seek out – less often sought than found – A soldier’s grave, for thee the best; Then look around, and choose thy ground, And take thy Rest. (24.37–40) Embedded in war and revolution in Greece, feeling his ‘youth’ (33) spent and his future uncertain, Byron spatializes temporality across the expanse of the poem. The poem opens with ‘time’ and ‘days’ as registers of mind’s movement through matter but shifts, across the expanse of the poem, to a specifically spatial concern, the graven space where the motion of mind and body ends. The final poem, then, captures in miniature the general spatialization of temporality often embodied in Byron’s poetry. Byron’s interactions with and within temporality come as no surprise to Byron scholars. Indeed, of all the canonized Romantic poets, Byron’s explorations and expressions of the effects of a life lived in time (the spatialization of temporality in his various ‘pilgrims of eternity’) has remained a steady state of concern in Byron studies. Notable scholarship has augmented the work of R. A. Foakes, who argued that a crucial structural principle of Don Juan, like much other Romantic poetry, was ‘the image of life as a journey in time’ (50).7 To map fully temporal flow in Byron’s poetry, a critic must inevitably complicate categories of absolute space and time articulated in Newtonian dynamics, since Byron exploits the relativistic effects of experiential versus essential space. Expressed in physical terms, a pilgrim of eternity acknowledges relativistic effects, where ‘space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality’ (Prigogine and Stengers Order 230). Such an approach, then, should shed some critical light on the fluid flow of temporality across the divides of Byron’s spatially fragmented poetic narrative.



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Unlike the young Coleridge or his contemporary Percy Shelley, Byron seemed little moved by the ‘minute particulars’ of scientific inquiry, although he certainly read widely, if not deeply, in German natural philosophy and metaphysics. Yet Byron’s deployment of physical concepts, like the gradual heat death of the entire planet found in ‘Darkness’, indicates some rudimentary understanding of deep time and entropic process operative on a universal scale: … The World was void, The populous and the powerful was a lump, Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless – A lump of death – a chaos of hard clay, The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, The Moon, their mistress, had expired before; The winds were withered in the stagnant air, And the clouds perished; Darkness had no need Of aid from them – She was the Universe. (21–2: 69–82) I concur, in part, with George Ridenour’s reading of the poem, which argues that ‘[t]he most striking thing about “Darkness”, considered as an apocalypse, is that it is scrupulously naturalistic’ (69). Indeed, Byron’s poem describes a completely natural process; it envisions a planetary state where ‘energy is dissipated as heat’, which leads to further ‘disorder in the universe’ and ends in ‘heat death’, a term long associated with thermodynamics (Hawking Time 147).8 As most physical theorists have noted, the entropic principle within thermodynamics is intimately entwined with time; indeed, entropy often functions on a cosmic scale as the classical arrow of time itself.9 In Byron’s poem, the natural registers of time – the seasons, the tides, the daily, monthly and annual cycles of Sun and Moon – have achieved stasis, leaving the ‘Universe’ enclosed in darkness. While ‘Darkness’ explores the first and third arrows of time identified by Hawking, The Giaour undertakes an exploration of all three, with special emphasis maintained on the psychological arrow of time.

III. The form/s of time in The Giaour Byron expressed little admiration, either at the time or later in life, for those oriental tales that solidified his status as the most famous writer




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of his age, that fueled his ‘years of fame’, and The Giaour, his first completed tale, was no exception. The advertisement for The Giaour presents it as ‘disjointed fragments’ and Byron, in a letter to Thomas Moore, further denigrates it as ‘foolish fragments’, although, of all the tales, Byron (somewhat uncharacteristically) expended considerable energy revising and amplifying this one through several editions.10 The text of the poem (as Gleckner and McGann discuss) doubled its size between the first and last editions, growing from 685 to over 1330 lines (Gleckner 97–117; McGann Dust 141–64). I endorse Gleckner’s critical view of the poem as an ‘experiment’, since the poem functions as an elaborate thought-experiment that, through formal and narrative technique, undermines the Newtonian narrative of ‘absolute time’. In other words, the spatialization of temporality at work in The Giaour takes an imaginative leap toward the theory of relativity, since the poem exists in an enclosed spacetime continuum where an observer’s position in space determines the experience of time. For the poem’s participants, individual motion and collective interaction determine ‘the rate at which time passes’; for the Giaour and Hassan, in words borrowed from John D. Barrow and Joseph Silk, ‘time is really passing at different rates in different [narrative] environments’ (185). This particular oriental tale presents English Romanticism’s best exploration of the relativistic registers of experiential time (with the possible exception being The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – see Chapter 3). Byron heightens awareness of the boundary conditions within form, theme and narrative technique, providing a complex linguistic context within which to read the effects of a ‘wound that Time can never heal’ (106: 921). Through textual deconstruction of narrative time as fragmentation of poetic form, Byron – in ways that intersect the triangulation of time Coleridge established for his own fragmentary Rime of the Ancient Mariner – creates the conditions that collapse ‘real’ into ‘imaginary’ time.11 Even further, this disconnection of the Giaour from time through entrapment in memory splits off his universe from that of others, leaving him enfolded within an eddy of spacetime even illuminated by its own sun, Leila. 12 The Giaour exists in a parallel universe that only occasionally intersects clock-time: Though in Time’s record nearly nought, It was eternity to Thought! (91: 271–2)



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Psychological images, among which we must include all events and structures of the future and the past, do not inhibit but rather make possible the understanding of the temporalities of life and of nonliving matter … carefully argued views of time and mind cannot remain in conflict with each other because that would imply inconsistency in nature. (Fraser 4) Of course, the perception that the Giaour is walled off from cultural reality through enclosure within memory resists more historically oriented readings, like that offered by Daniel P. Watkins: The understanding that the Giaour represents a living portion of a specific social reality, and that he does not in any way stand apart from the world he inhabits, illuminates other important aspects of the narrative, particularly the love relationship between Leila and the Giaour. (‘Social’ 880) Recognizing the necessity of contextualizing the poem within a specific history, within its historical and biographical time, I agree that this particular tale’s events provide ‘surprisingly comprehensive symbolic formulations of the world as Byron saw it’ (Watkins 873). However, I also believe it necessary to theorize Byron’s multi-dimensional evocation of time within its formal and thematic dimensions. Hence, I remain unconvinced that the poem primarily functions as ‘displacement’, since the fragmentation of temporality within the form matches the fragmented sense of time in experience, and the poem’s primary function forces an awareness of temporal multiplicity, the boundary condition of anyone within or without the poem’s event horizon. The fragmentation, then, resists a process solidified during the eighteenth century, when ‘Clockwork redefined time, trapped and reduced the hitherto seamless universe into units which could be separately controlled and costed’ (Rose 73). Therefore, I cannot agree, in whole, with a reading of the work as a ‘drama of displacement’, for the ‘actual human issues [of time] with which poetry is concerned are [not] resituated in a variety of idealized localities’ (McGann Ideology 1).



Byron’s insight that ‘absolute’ time actually functions in relativistic registers within experience anticipates current physical theory, seemingly embodying J. T. Fraser’s contention that

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Rather, the actual human experience of time enfolded within the poem’s fragmented body transcends absolute time within Newtonian narrative (sequential or linear unfolding). This move unbinds the ‘thermodynamic’ and ‘cosmological’ arrows of time, allowing an intensification of ‘psychological time’ and invoking the relevance of relativistic time within lived experience. As McGann has observed, the source for the poem’s fragmented body – probably Samuel Rogers’s The Voyage of Columbus – traverses textual territory ‘sudden in its transitions, and full of historical allusions’ which left ‘much to be imagined by the reader’ (McGann Dust 142). Byron’s fissuring of the poetic narrative creates textual holes, holes that readers convert into wholes through the act of reading, but this fragmentation does more than lend a ‘kind of cultural authenticity to the events of the story’ (McGann Dust 142). Rather, the crucial fragmentation of form, with its incumbent proliferation of perspectives, destabilizes what Ricoeur names ‘mimesis 2’ or ‘emplotment’, the narrative continuum that stabilizes the full spectrum of narrative mimesis (I: 53). In several senses, Ricouer’s second mimetic mode functions in a way similar to the function performed by classical physics in relation to relativity and quantum mechanics. ‘At the microscopic level, the laws of classical mechanics have been replaced by those of quantum mechanics. Likewise, at the level of the universe, relativistic physics has displaced Newtonian physics. Classical physics nevertheless remains the natural reference point’ (Prigogine and Stengers Order 66). Byron’s ‘highlighting of the dynamic of emplotment’ through disruption of time’s arrows within narrative allows him to position the ‘problem of the relation between time and narrative’ (Ricoeur I: 53) at the bedrock of the tale. Thus, the fragmentation itself functions as the initial construct for an assault on a rectilinear narrative, leading some critics to characterize the ‘final state of the poem [as] “confusion”’ (McGann, Dust, quoting Kroeber, 143).13 However, my own sense of the poem embraces that offered by Scott Simpson, for it is probably the best text within which to read a broader Romantic concern for fragmentation itself as the boundary condition uniting inner and outer phenomena.14 The jump-cut effect of reading The Giaour, shifting from one spacetime coordinate to another in a fluid yet fissured fashion, heightens the tension between a present concern (the opening meditation on the status of Greece), a past sequence of events (those offered in the tale) and an unknowable future (the moment of Greek freedom). And as seen earlier, Blake pursues a similar dynamic in Milton, by integrating Milton and Los with himself as poetic character.



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While the fragmentation of form in The Giaour most overtly conveys chronological disruption, Byron embedded a concern for time at several other levels of the work. Retaining the focus on form, the poem opens in a poetic present, where a narrator, contemplating the tomb of Themistocles, asks: ‘When shall such Hero live again?’ (85: 6). This query emphasizes the distance between past and present states and, as the opening question uttered by a ‘ballad-singer’ (McGann Dust 143), provides the occasion for a deeper consideration of the present status of Greece through comparison with its past state (‘’Tis Greece, but living Greece no more!’ [87: 91]). In the past, Greece ‘[w]as Freedom’s home’ and a haven for ‘the unforgotten brave’ (87: 105, 103), but it has devolved into a land of ‘craven crouching slave[s]’, a state created by ‘Self-abasement’ which ‘paved the way/To villain-bonds and despot sway’ (87–8: 108, 141). Having established the notion that ‘the past and present somehow have become disconnected’ (Watkins ‘Social’ 876), the first shift in narrative time occurs with the movement into the voice of the Muslim Fisherman, a tale that unfolds in four parts (ll. 180–287). Of more significance to the present discussion, each section analyzes some aspect of time, although the ‘stanzas’ or ‘fragments’ intersect and interfere with one another. Initially, the fisherman ‘reads’ the features of the Giaour’s face, perceiving a crucial aspect of his character and distinguishing between two types of time: I know thee not, I loathe thy race, But in thy lineaments I trace What Time shall strengthen, not efface: (89: 191–3) What the present moment writes on the Giaour’s countenance will only be strengthened with time – an inversion of the folk wisdom that ‘time heals all wounds’ – for the Giaour’s ‘passionate intensity and aloneness defy even time’ (Watkins ‘Social’ 879). Through this recognition, the fisherman draws a boundary between himself and the Giaour, between his own ‘thermodynamic time’ and the Giaour’s ‘psychological time’ (Hawking Time 144). Byron reinforces the perceived gap between temporal registers when the image of the Giaour in motion solidifies in the memory of the observer, being recorded as ‘timeless flight’ (89: 215), both fixed and in motion. Byron augments the impact of this frozen image formally and




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A moment checked his wheeling steed, A moment breathed him from his speed, A moment on his stirrup stood – Why looks he o’er the olive wood? ………. To-night, set Rhamazani’s sun; To-night, the Bairam feats’s begun; To-night – but who and what art thou Of foreign garb and fearful brow? (89: 218–20; 90: 228–30) Both sequences break off into dashes, which are immediately followed by questions concerning motive and identity. The sequences themselves open with different, yet discrete, measures of time, and both disrupt reading time, forcing an accommodation to the incantational and repetitive aspects of the anaphoric trope, which illuminates one way in which Byron creates in the poem ‘an infectious and mesmeric’ effect (McGann Dust 151). As well, the nature of anaphoric construction allows the poet to exploit more intensely the general relativity of its formal structure, since poetical lines operate on relativistic principles. The first sequence, due to diction alone, demands that the lines be envisioned simultaneously, with each line recording a different visual element of the same ‘moment’ caught in memory. A discrete instant of time has been ‘checked’, and the following question cannot be answered until later in the narrative. The space between the sequences situates the fisherman’s narrative geographically; crescent, mosque and musket function as metonymies for an ‘oriental’ space, thereby thematically introducing the nature of the next temporal shift. The second sequence places its emphasis on a broader measure of time, ‘Tonight’. This specific time of day is, in the sequence, positioned within a time of year, which is itself tied to the Moslem calendar. This sequence, then, intimates a slightly different orientation to the fisherman’s arrow of psychological time, one bound up with his ‘Moslem’s zeal’ (90: 227). The sequence is again broken by an interrogative, a demand from within religious psychological time for an account of an infidel’s presence in the holiest season in the Moslem calendar, Ramadan.



thematically through two anaphoric sequences, with the lines heightening the tensions of time and the attention paid to them by direct contrast to the ‘timeless’ element articulated by the fisherman:

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The second anaphoric sequence concludes the second part of the fisherman’s account of the Giaour’s passage, and the next section begins where the first sequence, via the dash, ends: ‘He stood’ (90: 234). The frozen image shifts into motion; the poem re-establishes its linear movement, and over the next 42 lines the Giaour passes beyond clock-time, his world collapsing into a singular ‘moment’ containing within it ‘the grief of years’ (91: 266). The fisherman’s description in this section has shifted to convey the Giaour’s immediate actions and contains an analysis of the play of emotions on the Giaour’s features: ‘Twas but a moment that he stood, Then sped as if by Death pursued; But in that instant o’er his soul Winters of Memory seemed to roll, And gather in that drop of time A life of pain, an age of crime. (90: 259–64) This ‘moment’ or ‘instant’ is contrasted to the seasons, which are then interrelated to mental functions, a tacit recognition that the former is arbitrary (agreed upon within the field of culture) while the latter exists as a boundary condition to existence. Memory collapses past and present into a future perpetuity; the flow of temporality constricts to a ‘drop of time’ from which will flow ‘an age of crime’. Once enclosed within memory, the Giaour, in the interpretation of the fisherman, moves psychologically beyond the bounds of space and time: Though in Time’s record nearly nought, It was Eternity to Thought! For infinite as boundless space The thought that Conscience must embrace, Which in itself can comprehend Woe without name, or hope, or end. (91: 271–6) In the speaker’s estimation, he witnesses the Giaour’s mental conversion of the smallest increment of time into an ‘Eternity’, contracting temporality to the endless replaying of this moment by, paradoxically, expanding this ‘moment’ to eternity. Strikingly, as might be predicted within a




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relativistic frame of reference, this dynamic expansion unfolds through spatialization (‘infinite as boundless space’). At this narrative moment, ‘[s]pace and time are dynamic qualities’ that effect, and are affected ‘by[,] everything that happens in the universe’ (Hawking Time 33). One might say that the Giaour has lost the ‘primary’ function of memory, what cognitive scientists term ‘timing the mind’. As J. L. Jackson elaborates, ‘Timing [the] mind enables you to stay in tune with an intrinsically temporal world’, and the Giaour, in transmuting ‘Time’s record’ into an ‘Eternity to Thought’, loses this ability and the ‘means of representing time explicitly’ (Jackson 46). For the Giaour, ‘time as an experience [of continual flow], that is, time itself, has nothing to do with past, present, and future’ (Wolf Star 20). The mental space of the Giaour, thoroughly temporalized or attuned to a solitary moment, collapses into a black hole of self-consciousness (a dynamic in symbolic accord with the Urizenic state in Blake’s myth). While most Romantic poetics ‘explore the transition from selfconsciousness to imagination,’ as Geoffrey Hartman observes, the temporal focus in The Giaour describes a counter-movement as a state of imagination collapses into that state of debilitating self-consciousness animating much of early Byronism (Hartman 53). The closing section of the fisherman’s narrative highlights the difference between himself as observer and the Giaour as object of speculation. For the fisherman, ‘The hour is past’ (91: 277) while for the Giaour the moment will extend itself interminably, with the viewer and viewed telling time differently across their cultural, and now psychological, divide. However, in pondering ‘that hour’ (91: 279), the narrative voice meditates upon subsequent poetic events, when Hassan’s ‘palace’ will become ‘a tomb’ (91: 281). At this point, in relation to the narrative itself, a problem emerges in Byron’s modulations of time; if the fisherman relates this passage, then he cannot know subsequent events, and if he knows subsequent events, then he cannot be narrating his initial view of the Giaour. The continued function of the ballad singer resolves this interpretive dilemma. As McGann persuasively argues, ‘The Giaour really has only one narrator, the ballad singer, who assumes different roles at different moments’ (Dust 144); in this function, the ballad singer seems close to Blake’s Bard, from the ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Experience, ‘Who Present, Past, & Future sees’ (E 18: 2). Here the ballad singer enfolds one element of subsequent events into the portion allotted to the fisherman, and that enfoldment provides narrative transition across the jump-cut into the future state of Hassan’s kingdom, following his death at the hands of the Giaour



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IV. Narrative quantum leaps Without this point of narratological interweaving, the leap from the fisherman’s first glimpse of the Giaour to the subsequent frame of reference – ‘Hassan’s hall’ (91: 289) following, as an effect, the actions as yet unnarrated – would likely be too distant for most readers to negotiate, at least on a first reading of the poem. One could argue that, from a cosmological frame of temporality, this fragment takes a quantum leap to the farthest future enfolded within The Giaour (or perhaps coincident with the Giaour’s monastery days): The steed is vanished from the stall; No serf is seen in Hassan’s hall; The lonely Spider’s thin gray pall Waves slowly widening o’er the wall; The Bat builds in his Haram bower And in the fortress of his power The Owl usurps the beacon-tower The wild-dog howls o’er the fountain’s brim, With baffled thirst, and famine, grim; For the stream has shrunk from its marble bed, Where the weeds and the desolate dust are spread. (91: 288–98) The ballad singer, through a catalogue of natural activities, presents the effects of thermodynamic time upon a temporary, because human, social and political structure all too quickly devoured by natural processes once the unifying human element, Hassan, has been eliminated. While spinning webs and building nests could be seen as relatively short increments of natural time, the shrinking of the stream, the growth of weeds and the accumulation of dust all suggest a more distant temporal prospect. The interlude, positioned within the poem’s futurity, provides a mechanism to expound on the transitory nature of temporal existence, and the passage temporally transshifts to Hassan’s ‘Childhood’ then drifts forward through his ‘Youth’ and finally to his death ‘on the



(which will not occur for another 350+ lines). The ballad singer violates chronological integrity but in doing so unveils his presence at the intersection of time and narrative.

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mountain side’ (91: 308; 92: 316, 347). This meditation, a mediation structured upon the tension between thermodynamic ‘decay’ and biographical remembrance, culminates by sounding a familiar poetic theme from both Thomas Gray (‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’) and Samuel Johnson (‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’): Alike must Wealth and Poverty Pass heedless and unheeded by, For Courtesy and Pity died With Hassan on the mountain side. His roof, that refuge unto men, Is Desolation’s hungry den. (92: 344–49) All experience the ravages of ‘thermodynamic’ time, and all succumb to death in spite of social caste, economic circumstance, or political power. From within the perspective of psychological time, ‘death’ functions as the distant boundary condition, the sole absolute value within human experience, and intersects thermodynamic time – the ‘scientific underwriting of the familiar experience that’, in John D. Barrow’s wry expression, ‘things tend to go from bad to worse’ – where heat-death awaits all things, including consciousness dispersed in material existence (Artful Universe 69). Once again the ballad singer, in the closing lines of the interlude, interweaves a specific narrative event yet to occur (‘his turban was cleft by the infidel’s sabre’ [92: 351]) as transition, having just voiced a distant future that results from more immediate events yet to be articulated. The clash between the Giaour and Hassan must await a passage across the shortest textual fragments in the poem (both totaling a scant 36 lines), but these two segments, which apparently relate the death of Leila, cast the longest narrative shadows. The poem again shifts to the perspective of the Moslem fisherman, and while the scene can function as ‘a flashback to the Emir’s disposal of the corpse of Leila, whom he has killed because of her love for the Giaour’ (in relation to the prior fragment – the interlude meditation on Hassan’s ruined hall), it cannot function as a flashback to the opening fisherman’s account of the Giaour (Gordon: McConnell ‘Editor’s Note’ 92). Perhaps most significantly, these lines hold none of the previous temporal markers; however, the poem shifts into ‘the present tense to guarantee immediacy’ (Seed 21).



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Any statement about absolute spatio-temporal location, either within narrative time or its textual fragmentation, is pure conjecture, but this event forms the gravitational core for all narrative events. Suggestive hints provide uncertain plot information, with the fisherman noting that they ‘gently bear … some precious weight’ (93: 360, 362), a suggestion amplified by Hassan’s subsequent broken phrase: ‘Yet ‘tis the longest voyage, I trow,/That one of – ‘ (93: 373). The final comment concerning the event, uttered from within the fisherman’s perspective, follows the brief dialogic exchange with Hassan: Sullen it plunged, and slowly sank, The calm wave rippled to the bank; I watched it as it sank, methought Some motion from the current caught Bestirred it more, – ‘twas but the beam That checkered o’er the living stream. (93: 374–9) The three pieces of evidence offered here – the inference of the fisherman, the almost admission of Hassan, the observation of motion by the fisherman – create insurmountable difficulties for those seeking determinate resolution, for these ambiguities establish the narrative’s principle of uncertainty. The principle establishes the event-horizon of the poem, an appropriate operation for the passage of a discrete event into psychological fixation, within the Giaour, and into a temporal past, within Hassan. Leila’s only physical presence in the poem – if such it can be termed – is cloaked and indirect, and ‘Byron here doubly distances information from the reader’, in Seed’s estimation, ‘since everything at this point is being filtered through the fisherman’ (21). The temporal figures for chronos and kairos as chronotopoi, Hassan and the Giaour, orbit this event: Beloved by two men, Leila stands at the center of the action. She is deliberately associated with the natural paradise of the landscape (473–518) and represents that perfection toward which both Hassan and the Giaour are impelled. (McGann Dust 156). Leila’s death becomes ‘the ultimate focus of all the narrative segments, a kind of core to the plot towards which all partial accounts gesture’




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(Seed 25). This event orients all other physical and discursive actions. Thus, although relatively small in space, the narrative of Leila’s execution forms a gravitational core of density that affects all temporal registers before and after, and the narrative principle of uncertainty places the actual time and circumstances of her death beyond the boundaries of narrative, creating a textual hole of indeterminacy. This fragment closes with an acknowledgement, via the fisherman’s meditation on his participation in this singular event, that knowledge ‘vanish[es] from view’, lost in ‘the living stream’ of time and known only ‘to Genii of the deep’ trembling in their ‘coral caves’ (93: 380, 379, 385–6). Leila’s actual tale begins and ends in silence, culminating a pattern that associates Leila with inexpressibility: Leila’s inexpressible beauty becomes the trigger for an act with unspeakable consequences, and even when the Giaour himself speaks, an area of narrative is reserved for concealment. (Seed 22). Although Leila is silenced by the acts of those attempting to write her master narrative, the Giaour and Hassan, her virtual tale exerts the most force within the poem, drawing the Giaour and Hassan into inevitable collision, like particles of matter and antimatter driven toward mutual annihilation.15 Preceding the fragments relating Leila’s death, the poem emphasizes the impact of the Giaour’s inward collapse through guilt and remorse. Following these fragments, the narrative shifts to Hassan, until the clash with the Giaour brings them into spacetime coincidence. As the poem jumps from an event outside narrative to the next two, interrelated fragments, it also leaps forward to a temporal location more proximate to the poem’s ‘present’. The ballad singer, through the introduction of an epic simile, compares Leila to the ‘blue-winged butterfly of Kashmeer, the most rare and beautiful of the species’ (Byron’s Note [Byron: McConnell 93]). The poem’s linear movement is halted, but the interlude verbally connects Leila (‘As … The insectqueen’ [93: 388–9]), who is now in the narrative past and beyond time in death, and the next narrative sequence, the advent of clock-time in the figure of Hassan (‘A weary chase and wasted hour’ [93: 393]). The tyranny of clock-time, imaged as an ‘hour’, begins to exert greater narrative force, with beauty brought under its sway, caught within ‘infant’s play, and man’s caprice’ (94: 403).16 ‘Beauty’ can and will be ‘blighted in an hour’ (94: 414), and the poem constantly associates the



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bearer of blight, Hassan, with this artificially constructed unit of time, the hour. The second fragment in this narrative unit addresses ‘Mind’, which ‘like the Scorpion girt by fire’ when it ‘broods o’er guilty woes’, ‘cures all pain’ by driving its venomous sting into its own ‘desparate brain’ (94: 423–32), and the progression across the 17 lines of this metaphor parallels that of ‘Darkness’. The circle or boundary of events shrinks into entropic death: flames narrow; livable space collapses; the ‘soul expire[s]’: So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven, Unfit for earth, undoomed for Heaven, Darkness above, despair beneath, Around it flame, within it death. (94: 435–8) The boundary condition of external existence, death, is internalized by the guilty mind. To borrow Kristeva’s apt description, the Giaour’s mind becomes ‘a living death’; his rhythm becomes ‘slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow’ (Kristeva Black Sun 4). The mind collapses into itself, and under the pressure of this collapse, a new star is born, for, as intimated previously, the darkness is illuminated by Leila. Once again, the ballad singer verbally interweaves the poem’s fragments, connecting the ‘dark in soul’ and the mind’s ‘darkness’ to the subsequent shift into the perspective of ‘Black Hassan’ (94: 433, 437, 439). The poem makes a quantum leap from a textual ‘present’ to Hassan’s flight from the harem, since ‘The unwonted chase each hour employs’ (94: 441) has lost its allure because ‘Leila there no longer dwell[s]’ (95: 445). The ballad singer again gathers uncertain elements in the sub-narrative of Leila’s capture and execution, acknowledging ‘That [the] tale can only Hassan tell’ (95: 446): Strange rumors in our city say Upon the eve she fled away When Ramadan’s last sun set And flashing from each Minaret Millions of lamps proclaimed the feast Of Bairam through the boundless East. (95: 447–52)




Romantic Dynamics

The Moslem calendar’s holiest season, Ramadan, provides temporal reference for the Moslem fisherman’s first description of the Giaour, requiring that the fragments be coincident in spacetime, thereby forming a crucial textual synchronicity. Leila’s escape from the harem on the eve of Ramadan to rendezvous with ‘the faithless Giaour’ is the ‘tale [Hassan’s] Nubians tell,/Who did not watch their charge too well’ (95: 458, 465–6). The balladeer connects this gossip to other ‘tales’ circulating in the city: But others say, that on that night, By pale Phingari’s trembling light, The Giaour upon his jet-black steed Was seen, but seen alone to speed With bloody spur along the shore, Nor maid nor page behind him bore. (95: 467–72) Encountering these tales from within and without Hassan’s sphere of knowledge and power forces a preliminary suturing between the moment when the Giaour emerges into the event-horizon of poetic emplotment, the death of Leila in the brief two-fragment narrative sequence, and the information now made available for the first time. This enforced mental activity intensifies the ambiguity established in the two-fragment sequence, thereby reinforcing the narrative principle of uncertainty as the net effect emerging from poetic events. The poem’s linear thrust is immediately disrupted, with the next fragment moving into Hassan’s consciousness, but that consciousness is engaged in its own recollections of a past where Leila’s presence brought illumination: But Soul beamed forth in every spark That darted from beneath the lid, Bright as the jewel of Giamschid. Yea, Soul and should our prophet say That form was nought but breathing clay, By Alla! I would answer nay[.] (95: 477–82) Leila’s luminous beauty tempts this devout Muslim to an act of heresy, since Hassan cannot believe she lacked soul, an exclusionary act poten-



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tially separating him from ‘his Houris’, the female spirits that entertain the blessed in ‘Paradise’.17 The remainder of Hassan’s meditation on Leila supplies particular information about her physical beauty, in the process conveying her nationality and her status as slave, but the images Hassan selects verbally gesture to Leila’s death by drowning: her hair now ‘roll[s] its folds below’; she is compared to a bird that ‘walks the water’ and to a Swan that ‘spurns the wave with wings of pride’ when steps trod ‘the banks that bound her tide’ (96: 497, 504, 508–10).18 This image pattern operates covertly to solidify, somewhat, the circumstances of Leila’s death, but this is done within memory and through metaphor, two relatively unstable locations within which to establish certitude. Hassan’s internal monologue, with its unintended revelation of aspects of character on the part of the speaker, points forward to Robert Browning’s use of it to explore ‘spatial and temporal continuities’, with ‘My Last Duchess’ serving best the immediate context (Martin ‘Inside’ 59). The monologic effect, as Loy D. Martin has subsequently noted, ‘creates a poetic moment for a certain subject and for a certain duration that is viewed internally and that is indefinitely continuous with an implied extratextual past and future of unmarked extent’ (Browning 89). The next narrative jump re-establishes linear narrative movement, while maintaining the focus on Hassan. The speaker, quite likely ‘The Tartar’ that will transmit the knowledge of Hassan’s death to his mother several fragments in the narrative future, relates Hassan’s ‘journey … to woo a bride’ (96: 519; 97: 533) and enacts a significant forward temporal shift over prior fragments (with the exception of the dirge lamenting his fallen state). The next fragment, only 12 lines long, shifts to an unspecified ‘Here’, which exists outside of Moslem authority, allowing ‘the loitering merchant Greek’ to protect his ‘secret hoard’ while draining a bowl of ‘forbidden wine’ (97: 541, 544, 547). However, as readers enter the next fragment, this ‘unspecified “here”’ is converted into the scene of immediate action, the ‘gap’ wherein Byron’s opposed chronotypes will clash. Following a narrative leap back to Hassan’s train, Byron modulates chronological registers to foreground the coming clash between chronos and kairos. First, this occurs in a tension between clock-time and seasonal cycles: And theirs may be a feast to-night, Shall tempt them down ere morrow’s light;




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Beneath, a river’s wintry stream Has shrunk before the summer beam[.]

The clock-bound mentality of the troop (‘to-night’ and ‘[to]morrow’) reflects their master’s obsession with clock-time, but this sense of time, in the next two lines, conflicts with the cyclic temporality of the seasons. The dangerous pass – itself a product of ‘time, or mountain lightning’ (97: 563) – becomes the space of physical conflict, with their peaceful passage shattered by gunfire: ‘Scarce had they time to check the rein’ (98: 575). Their plight prompts Hassan to comment that he had ‘“scaped a bloodier hour than this”’ (98: 596), and once he recognizes the Giaour he exclaims, ‘’Tis he! well met in any hour’ (99: 618). The ballad singer offers an epic simile to image the battle between the Giaour and Hassan, which again references the metaphoric pattern of flow ‘[a]s rolls the river into Ocean’ (99: 620). Both the oceanic tides and the river’s current are subject to an unseen force, gravity, capable of operating at a distance, rendering the epic simile an apt symbol for the force exerted by Leila upon the Giaour and Hassan. The image, as W. Paul Elledge has discussed, typifies Byron’s general metaphorical use of nature, which displays ‘a realistic, scientific bent’ (44), and, as McGann argues, ‘Nature caught by such a radical duality is the proper image of man’s essential life’ (Dust 161). The ‘opposing motion’ (99: 622) of two elemental chronotypes creates temporal turbulence only resolved with Hassan’s death, and, as the fragment-sequence of their battle concludes, poetic-space brings the Giaour’s voice, for the first time, into the narrative. The clash between the Giaour (locked within psychological time) and Hassan (locked in clock-time [specifically the ‘hour’]) dramatizes the temporal tensions unleashed in the work, with kairos (the Giaour) conquering chronos (Hassan); the Giaour ‘watched [his] time’ for the sole purpose of crafting ‘the hour that sealed [Hassan’s] fate’ (100: 685, 672).19 Byron draws attention to a ‘natural’ temporality with the next fragment, which shifts to Hassan’s mother as she awaits the arrival of her son on the eve following the clash in the pass (or past). Her misgivings grow in relation to natural signifiers of time’s passage: She saw the dews of eve besprinkling The pasture green beneath her eye,



(97: 555–8)


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She saw the planets faintly twinkling: ‘’Tis twilight – sure his train is nigh.’

The presence of dew and the appearance of planets trace her increasing anxiety, and with the arrival of ‘The Tartar’ (quite likely the narrator for one fragment of the battle, a necessary survivor capable of assuring the continuity of narration itself), her worst fears are confirmed, for death is the ‘fearful bride [her] Son hath wed’ (101: 718). The next narrative jump continues the progressive linear movement through the Turkish fisherman’s contrast between the fates of Hassan and the Giaour, with the majority of the section given to ‘a meditation on the afterlife, first as the pious Hassan will encounter it, then, anticipating the end, as the Giaour eventually should’ (Butler ‘Orientalism’ 90). The segment firmly establishes the temporal tension between Hassan’s immediate passage into the care of the Houris, his arrival into Paradise as ‘immortal bower’ (101: 746) and the Giaour’s projected passage through a life of torment and unrest: But first, on earth as Vampire sent, Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent: Then ghastly haunt thy native place, And suck the blood of all thy race; There from thy daughter, sister, wife, At midnight drain the stream of life[.] (102: 755–60) The curse, which Marilyn Butler functionally positions as ‘the centrepiece of the poem’, can only, ultimately, comment upon what has already been seen in the opening scene (‘Byron’ 73). In this sense, as Seed proposes, ‘the pronouncement of a curse is virtually indistinguishable from its prediction’ (20). The invective positions the Giaour out of clock-time but trapped in ‘the stream of life’, a state analogous to a vampire ‘doomed to wander between life and death’ (Seed 20). The fisherman’s diagnostic curse here operates in relation to that previously offered and will be partially fulfilled in the next fragment. Jumping forward across ‘many a year’, the fisherman recollects having ‘Once [seen] that face’ and having noted it inscribed ‘with inward pain’ (103: 789, 793, 794); the first prognostication, which predicted a torment that ‘Time shall strengthen, not efface’ (89: 193), has



(100: 691–4)

Romantic Dynamics

come to pass: ‘It breathed the same dark spirit now’ (103: 796). Partial confirmation of the second curse (life-in-death) will occur, once the narrative again returns to the Giaour’s perspective, near the poem’s conclusion.20 With Hassan eliminated, the Giaour has completed his collapse into psychological time: guilt and remorse form the eventhorizon of his collapsed mental space, and Leila has been ignited as the dark sun illuminating that space. Indeed, as the Giaour himself phrases it, ‘And now I go’ to the last part of the poem ‘but go alone’ (100: 688).

V. Beyond theological time With the most distant voice of the fisherman in this fragment (measured in relation to his prior verbal appearances), the poem completes its analysis of the Giaour from within a Moslem perspective, with the vitriolic and ‘fanatical[ly] intense’ denouncement operating in relation to the havoc wrecked upon Hassan’s hall (previously seen in its future state), a recognition of the play of relativistic effects manifest in ‘the ambivalences of human consciousness’ (Butler ‘Orientalism’ 91). Yet the rhetoric of temporality embedded within Islamic consciousness, a rhetoric that has impacted all prior narrative fragments, shares much with the Christian perspective with which the poem closes, for the Giaour’s temporal condition now stands outside both theological temporalities offered within the poem. The movement from the Islamic to the Christian analysis of the Giaour’s condition, then, continues Byron’s relentless focus on time, even establishing a fixed temporal point for closure: ‘Tis twice three years at summer’s tide Since first among our freres he came (103: 798) The double emphasis of ‘twice’ strikes the chime of thermodynamic time, the gradual dissipation of energy, as the poem makes a final leap to the end of the Giaour’s life. As well, ‘summer’s tide’, although a different chronotype, must be read through the force field of the poem’s imagistic connection of flowing water and temporal existence. The Giaour enters, in his withdrawal to a monastery, a physical circumstance that matches his condition of psychological isolation, and the report of his behavior, a reading of the Giaour’s exterior by one of



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Much in his visions mutters he Of maiden whelmed beneath the sea; Of sabres clashing, foemen flying, Wrongs avenged, and Moslem dying. On cliff he hath been known to stand And rave as to some bloody hand Fresh severed from its parent limb, Invisible to all but him, Which beckons onward to his grave, And lures to leap into the wave. (103: 822–31) The Giaour endlessly reflects (upon) the events in the past, caught in a closed loop of what psychologists term ‘episodic memory’, which helps to establish psychologically ‘the route by which we have arrived at what we are … so that we can explain ourselves’ (Dennett 278). Of course, this fragment’s perspective, that of an unnamed monk lacking the discerning eye of the next narratorial perspective, concentrated solely on a report of his actions, an appropriate subject for a monk clearly on the margins of monastical power; he describes and judges but does not analyze, thereby unveiling his biases. The emphasis placed upon discernment and the ability to read through surface effects to their buried causes occupies the next fragment, where another monk analyzes the mesmeric qualities of the Giaour’s gaze. He ‘glares beneath his dusky cowl’, the cowl a frame for ‘The flash of that dilating eye’; his eye ‘Reveals too much of times gone by’, and his ‘glance’ can transfix the ‘gazer’ (104: 833–5, 837). From within the Christian perspective, the metaphoric comparison to ‘the gazing snake’ capable of mesmerizing birds suggests his antithetical presence in the religious context of a monastery, where his ‘glance’ infects those that encounter him: When met alone would fain retire, As if that eye and bitter smile Transferred to others fear and guile[.] (104: 848–50)



the monks, reinforces the perspective that the infidel remains caught in a closed loop of time. He seems scarred by ‘some dark deed’ and is haunted by the past:

Romantic Dynamics

The mesmeric gaze further reinforces this work’s relationship to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which should come as no surprise, for in an 18 October 1815 letter to Coleridge, Byron proposed that ‘there are few things in our tongue beyond [the “Antient Mariner”]’ (Quennell 317).21 The next stanza moves into another ‘voice’, quite likely ‘the half affrighted Friar’ from the previous fragment (104: 846), with Byron continually interweaving fragments to forge narrative transition, but, unlike the Moslem sections of the poem, the temporal shifts from one fragment to another are severely reduced. Across the stanza divide, the emphasis on seeing and being continues, but the speaker here addresses the effects of the Giaour’s gaze when it is encountered: ‘With dread beheld, with gloom beholding’ (105: 885). Unlike the prior description, which primarily concerned itself with an objective analysis of the power of the gaze from without, this focus, occurring within quotation marks, offers a subjective experience of the gaze, further identifying the speaker with the fearful Friar. The monologue even includes a direct address to an implied listener or viewer to emphasize immediacy, one that concretizes the subversive aspects of the Giaour’s ‘gaze’: See – by the half-illumined wall His hood fly back, his dark hair fall, That pale brow wildly wreathing round, As if the Gorgon there had bound The sablest of the serpent-braid That o’er her fearful forehead strayed[.] (105: 893–8) The allusion to Greek mythology covertly connects to the opening lament for Greece while embodying the danger inherit in the Giaour’s gaze, and the subjective experience of that gaze achieves added gravity in relation to the prior fragment’s more objective description of the Giaour’s ocular power.22 Of course, given the subjective voice, the speaker supplements his description, at its end, with a purely projective insight, exclaiming that ‘Such looks are not of earth nor heaven!’ (105: 915). The poem moves into its most ‘present’ persona with a two-fragment interlude, prior to the return to the Giaour’s perspective, which analyzes the role that the collapse of love into hate played in creating



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‘The wound that Time can never heal’ (106: 921). The collapse of love into hate creates the conditions for temporal fragmentation, for once both objects of desire (love and hate) disappear from cosmological time they can only be resurrected in psychological time, with the self losing its ability to enter the fluid progression of time, hence losing as well its ability to locate (it)self in spacetime. Under these conditions, the self atrophies, entering the vampiric state prophesied by the Tartar, and the second fragment within this interlude abounds with images of decay: It is as if the dead could feel The icy worm around them steal, And shudder, as the reptiles creep To revel o’er their rotting sleep[.] (106: 945–6) Within this chronotype, one can perceive a primary Romantic interpretation of existential categorization, for life has deadened, with death functioning as the image of life enclosed within grief, pain and desolation. ‘Mind’, for the Giaour, becomes ‘the dreary void’, a ‘leafless desert’ (106: 958–9). The poem closes with a series of interlocking fragments that comprise the Giaour’s confession, which was the last section Byron added to the poem, and as Seed suggests: After all the partial views and calculatedly limited segments of description, it makes a fitting culmination to Byron’s poem … It marks, in other words, a narratorial climax rather than a climax of plot, since the central figure now steps into the foreground. (Seed 23) While one might expect any textual principle of uncertainty to collapse once the Giaour speaks, this is not the case, since his narrative comes ‘several years after the crucial events which have reduced the Giaour’s subsequent life to an extended state of limbo’ (Seed 23). This uncertainty or ambiguity involves, within the Giaour’s narrative, what Ricouer describes as ‘a partial overlapping between memory and the historical past… halfway between private time and public time’ (Ricouer III: 114), and, while he terms this ‘anonymous time’, physicists and neuroscientists would described it as psychological and/or imaginary time.




Romantic Dynamics

The temporal tensions previously analyzed in relation to a series of Moslem speakers re-emerge, this time from within the Giaour’s own perspective. The Giaour immediately draws a distinction between his confessor’s sense of time and his own: ‘Father! thy days have passed in peace … from youth to age’ (107: 971, 976). Unlike the aged Friar, who experienced life in its linear guise, the Giaour has become enclosed in memory’s time: My days, though few, have passed below In much of Joy, but more of Woe; Yet still in hours of love and strife, I’ve ‘scaped the weariness of Life[.] (107: 982–5) His escape from ‘the weariness of life’ (its life-in-death aspect) took the form of love and strife, Leila and Hassan, and, once these were removed from temporality, he begins a passage through ‘dull, unvaring days’ enclosed within ‘memory [which] now is but the tomb’ within which ‘[his] spirit shrunk’ (107: 992, 1000, 1004). The Giaour’s own self-diagnosis partially confirms statements offered by those ‘locked’ within Islamic and Christian theological frames, for he clearly recognizes his alienation from their respective visions of ‘eternities’. Quoting G. Wilson Knight slightly out of context, the Giaour ‘is torn between history and tragic insight, mankind and lonely self-conflict, time and eternity’ (52). In language quite close to that offered upon two prior occasions by the Moslem fisherman, the Giaour, following his recitation of his love for Leila, reveals that it was her death that marked its presence on his countenance: She died – I dare not tell thee how; But look – ‘tis written on my brow! There read of Cain the curse and crime, In characters unworn by Time; Still, ere thou dost condemn me, pause; Not mine the act, though I the cause. (109: 1056–61) His reticence to describe Leila’s death forecloses any attempt to resolve completely the text’s principle of uncertainty, with her very presence



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disappearing into a hole in narrativity even within the Giaour’s ‘privileged’ narrative perspective. Near the end of his unrepentant, parallel narrative of his clash with Hassan, the speaker verbally acknowledges both his participation in Hassan’s entry into Paradise and his own scorn for ‘The late repentance of that hour’ (109: 1095). His retelling of the narrative takes the form of a loop, an individual attempt to construct a master narrative to make sense of events, and, to borrow Lacapra’s words, the Giaour ‘act[s] out a repetition compulsion, and, as seemingly authentic temporality, it is recurrently contrasted with the mystified phantasm of symbolic unity and totalization’ (Lacapra 132). The Giaour makes this symbolic ‘phantasm of symbolic unity and totalization’ the subject of narrative as he approaches death. The next fragment details the process through which Leila became the dense core fueling the collapse of psychological time, and the tragedy of the Giaour can be felt in the degree to which he compulsively retells this tale, thereby unveiling his entrapment within a closed loop of memory:23 She was a form of Life and Light, That, seen, became a part of sight; And rose, where’er I turned mine eye, The Morning-star of Memory! (110: 1127–30) The Giaour establishes Leila as the inner light of his self-enclosed world, the gravitational force at the core of psychological and narrative time: ‘She was my Life’s unerring Light That quenched – what beam shall break my night? (110: 1145–6) His solution, of course, is to reignite her illuminance within, fixing psychological time, with his features becoming the physical text in which to read temporal estrangement. The imagery, begun slightly earlier than the quote, is both subtle and amazing. Light functions as the vehicle for the transmutation of outer to inner phenomena, with light and mind, through Byron’s concisely realized eight-line progression, renewing their long-standing entwinement.24




Romantic Dynamics

Although Leila literally sleeps beneath the water’s waves, she now assumes the ambiguous, symbolic form of a ‘wandering wave’ (110: 1123), light in its wave aspect.25 Her physical presence ‘was a form of Life and Light’, and this light, once ‘seen, became a part of sight’ (110: 1127–8). The first half of the transmutation is achieved through realistic, even scientific, description where waves of light, the very forms of life, pass through the eye to inscribe themselves within memory. However, the Giaour, across the next two lines, reiterates temporal collapse, where the inner image of a past person (and cluster of events) determines outer reality in perpetuity. When Leila’s outer image now ‘rose, wher’er I turned mine eye’ (110: 1129), the Giaour, by entering ‘a metatemporal, stationary state’ (De Man 181), reduces all phenomena to a cluster of memories, where Leila can only exist as ‘The Morningstar of Memory’ (110: 1130). Once the Giaour enters the sphere of attraction exerted by this lightbending life-contracting force, ‘present joy’ and ‘future hope’ (111: 1150) are transmuted into ‘Eternity to Thought’ (91: 272), all futurity as past moment. Temporality and spatiality alike, within the poem’s relativistic effects, are implicated in the Giaour’s collapse: ‘Alike all time, abhorred all place, Shuddering I shrank from Nature’s face’ (112: 1196–7) His monologue has allowed him to perceive his past collapse into psychological time, which sacrificed cosmological spacetime, but this insight occurs under the sway of thermodynamic time, as death approaches. This insight, in the next stanza, leads to the memory of a fellow countryman from ‘earlier days, and calmer hours [who] prophesied my doom’ (112: 1218, 1228). The prophetic form addresses matters across time, but the nature of the form functions through synchronic, rather than diachronic, emplotment. This prophecy joins those uttered from within the Moslem perspective; all have been realized, but this is the only one of which the Giaour has knowledge. His ‘Remembrance’ of ‘Those accents’ allows him to ‘hear their truth’ (112: 1232, 1233, 1236). Just as entropic process moves toward stasis, in death, the Giaour has a vision which demonstrates his self-described reduction of outer phenomena by his inner light:



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(113: 1272–6) In his vision, the Giaour explodes outward and upward, ‘fleeting towards [his] final goal’ of embracing Leila in a physical form of light, ‘the star’, but his energy gives out. However, in this last vision, the light that was Leila, that burned within, has now been returned to the cosmos, a process of transference recognized by the Giaour in his last extended image, one inevitably bound up with flow: ‘They told me wild waves rolled above/The face I view’ (114: 1306–7). What was below is now above. What was within is now without once more.



I saw her; yes, she lived again; And shining in her white symar As through yon pale gray cloud the star Which now I gaze on, as on her[.]

The Rhythmic Universe, or Spatial Dynamics in Shelley’s Poetics The dimensions of the universe correspond to the spiral of our understanding. (Skolimowski 78) The plurality of worlds – the indefinite immensity of the universe – is a most awful subject of contemplation. (P. Shelley Trumpet 339) From Moses to Einstein, the history of light is also the history of space. (Zajonc 97)

I. Preludium Certainly, the hypothesis of a ‘temporalization of experience’ posited by Bender and Wellbery and discussed in relation to Byron’s The Giaour has been confirmed. The evidence suggests that chronotypology, at least as represented by the modulating registers of time in Byron’s poem, underwent a revolution across the divide of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the periodic range for English Romanticism. However, the relativistic principles embedded within this ‘new’ form for time demand that, necessarily, ‘new’ views of space would accompany any chronotypological paradigm shift. Romantic poetry would manifest ‘a spatiality of thought’, in Gaston Bachelard’s phrase, that would complement the ‘temporalization of experience’ (Bachelard Poetics 212),1 for Romantic poetics, like contemporary physical theory, marries time and space (e.g. the relationship of Los and Enitharmon in Milton). As the century turned, the spatial dimension of Romantic poetics underwent a period of inflation that matched the extension of space offered in Kant’s postulation of a universe of galaxies and the more limited expansion of the solar system by Herschel’s discovery of a new planet, Uranus. As Ivors Leclerc notes, ‘By the nineteenth century, the phrase “a spatial extent” came to make sense … In fact, the adjective “spatial”, according to the OED, was of mid-nineteenth-century origin’ (209). 136



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And the mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first; Bend, as they journey with projectile force, In bright ellipses, their reluctant course, Orbs wheel in orbs, round centres centres roll, And form, self-balanced, one revolving Whole.2 The discoveries of Herschel and the summaries of Darwin, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, provide a spatial foundation for English Romantic poetics, with Darwin’s influence rippling widely through both generations of classical Romanticism.3 In subsequent thoughtexperiments within Romantic poetry and prose, the emergent theory of cosmogenesis – in which the universe began in the explosive expansion of gravitational mass – assumes a decidedly modern guise. However, typically in much Romantic poetry, what expands also contracts, as discussed previously in relation to Blake’s theory of the vortex (Chapter 4). A later section of Darwin’s poem explores this collapse (IV: 373–80), and his note to the passage, in Carl Grabo’s words, ‘is a surmise uncannily shrewd’ in light of current theories of cosmonemesis: Thus all the suns, and the planets, which circle round them, may again sink into one central chaos; and may again by explosions produce a new world; which in process of time may resemble the present one[.] (Grabo 44) This description of universe dynamics – beginning in explosive expansion but progressing, under the influence of gravity, toward a subsequent collapse – fits current physical models remarkably well (see Gribbin Big Bang), but this imaginative leap to a universe that originates and terminates in infinite density, that oscillates between ‘big bang’ and ‘big crunch’, was already derivable from the Newtonian account: ‘After all, even Newton’s traditional theory describing gravitational forces allowed one to predict a point of infinite density’ (Barrow and Silk 31).



Herschel’s subsequent celestial observations are succinctly captured in a well-known passage from Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden, which provides a convenient encapsulation of the cosmological space in which Romantic poetics initially operated:

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The Romantic construction of expanded space, with its proliferation of galaxies, nebulae, stars and planets, rarely receives extended commentary as physical theory, an attribute shared with Romanticism’s elaboration of time’s relativistic aspects.4 Like time, space often operates in the background of Romantic poetics: it is assumed as a boundary condition for experience prior to critical acts of direct analysis. Of course, the Romantics themselves seem completely attuned to inherent complexities in configurations of time and space. As Charles Lamb observed: ‘Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing puzzles me less, as I never think about them’ (quoted in Davies Edge 45). Within human perceptual experience, ‘Space and time are simply there, – an arena in which the world plays out its endless drama – permanent, dependable, and immutable’ (Davies Edge 45). This sense of space forms a symbolic legacy bequeathed by Newton’s ‘well-known scholium on absolute space and time which he included in the Principia’ (Westfall 166). Herschel and Darwin’s cosmological models, although elaborations of the Newtonian world-view, also foreshadow the erosion of Newtonianism, which increasingly assumed ideological status during the eighteenth century and thereafter functioned, to appropriate Shelley’s language, as ‘the boundaries of our knowledge’ (Shelley: Clark ‘Refutation of Deism’ 132).5 For several reasons, the poetry and poetics of Percy Bysshe Shelley are an appropriate location within which to explore an emergent ‘spatiality of thought’ in Romantic poetics. First, of all the canonical Romantic poets, Shelley was, perhaps, the best read in current scientific theories, a point argued by both Desmond King-Hele and Carl Grabo.6 Second, Shelley’s attempt to map the cosmos poetically forms a steady state of concern throughout his work, and as early as Queen Mab (admittedly a work of youthful enthusiasm), Shelley proposes that cosmos and consciousness form an ‘unbounded frame [of] perfect symmetry’ manifest as the interrelations of ‘Space, matter, time, and mind’.7 Third, Shelley’s poetry often ‘lyricized science’, a symbolic codification of physical theory allowing him to use ‘scientific theory as the basis for an imaginative leap’ beyond current physical paradigms (King-Hele Shelley 155, 166). Fourth, once a theoretical poetics postulates the relative and interpenetrating operations of mind and matter in spacetime as its boundary condition, as Shelley’s does, then it no longer operates exclusively as a poetics but becomes a physical theory. The poet’s pragmatic imitation of ‘scientific pattern[s]’ underwrites the theoretical assimilation of them, and, in the theoretical space opened therein, poets become ‘practitioner[s]’ who ‘make independent contributions to knowledge’ (Morris 202).



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In Plotnitsky’s assessment, given the many analogues with physical theory incorporated into his work, Shelley’s poetics of ‘complementarity’, which embodies classical dualities only to suspend ‘causal dynamics’, offers ‘extraordinarily rich metaphorical models for exploring such complementary economies’ (‘Quantum’ 265), a position in accord with Bachelard’s reading of Shelley. This view of Shelleyean poetical dynamics intersects that taken by Michel Serres in Hermes: In Serres’s view ‘criticism is a generalized physics’, and whether knowledge is written in philosophical, literary, or scientific language it nevertheless articulates a common set of problems that transcend academic disciplines and artificial boundaries. (Hermes ‘Introduction’ xi) Shelley’s poetics of physicality bridges these boundaries by insisting on the interpenetration and interaction between cosmos and consciousness, which renders his poetics a theory of ‘generalized physics’, a physical model founded upon an implicate order. In this theoretical construct Shelley joins other Romantic writers in attempting to establish ‘a conception of the universe in which the human spirit counted for as much in the ontological scheme as did inanimate nature’ (Levin 168), and the Romantic interactive theory of mind and matter clearly intersects several exotic concepts currently at play within physical theory.8 This theoretical position, now popularized by David Bohm among others, treats ‘the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole’ (Wholeness ix), and through his theoretical poetics Shelley, like Bohm’s theoretical physics, ‘arrive[s] at a conception of Nature inexpressibly more magnificent, simple and true, than accord[s with] the ordinary system’, since such ‘contemplation of the Universe [is a] comprehensive and synthetical view’ (Shelley: Clark ‘Science of Metaphysics’ 183). Rhythm provides the point of connection between consciousness and cosmos in Shelley’s poetry, with the poet positing that all physical phenomena manifest themselves rhythmically: ‘The laws of motion and the properties of matter suffice to account for every phenomenon, or combination of phenomena exhibited in the Universe’ (Shelley: Clark ‘Refutation of Deism’ 133). Rhythm as a path to critical knowledge has been too long absent from discussions of the theoria and praxis of Romantic poetics, with rhythmic analysis likely the victim of its association with earlier forms



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of formalism. However, Shelley’s practice certainly seems to conform to Amittai F. Aviram’s theory that ‘in poetry, music, and dance, the physical sensation of rhythm is an insistent manifestation of the physical world’ (20). Consider Shelley’s own argument in The Defense of Poetry, which is remarkably close to Aviram’s: In the youth of the world men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions as in all others, a certain rhythm or order. (Shelley: Reiman and Powers 481) It seems likely that ‘The Romantics, in short, seem to be nearly obsessed with the music of poetry’ precisely because their poetics propose that ‘Rhythm in poetry is to the body and to physical reality as images and ideas in poetry are to social, language-mediated constructs’ (Aviram 69, 239). Rhythm within and without forms complex patterns, best seen as waves of information, which interfere and interact. For Shelley, the interpenetration of mind and matter is achieved through wave dynamics, an elaborate extension of the physical principle of the complementarity of light. Shelley knew this principle and the debates surrounding the dual nature of light, as an unused note to Queen Mab makes clear: ‘Light consists either of vibrations propagated through a subtle medium, or of numerous minute particles repelled in all directions from the luminous body’ (Shelley: Clark 338). Shelley’s statement is quite conversant with then-current thinking on wave dynamics and the paradox of light’s dual nature, and, in the period of Shelley’s short life, such debates dominated physical theory, perhaps best evoked in the memorable exchange between Thomas Young and Henry Brougham.9 However, the emergence of the concept of complementarity from the core of this debate was not fully accomplished until Niels Bohr attempted ‘to repackage complementary wave and particles descriptions in a single, all-encompassing theory’ (Baggott 86). The elaboration of the Newtonian optical theory of light concluded the seventeenth century, and, during the late eighteenth century, physical experimentation shifted to the exploration of electric and magnetic properties, with Charles August Coulomb providing a mathematical foundation for those properties in 1785. The year of the French Revolution, 1789, Luigi Galvani ‘accidentally’ demonstrated that ‘nerves and muscles are controlled by electrical impulses’ (Zee 57), and the century closed with Alessandro Volta’s development of an electrical



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battery, which had as an unforeseen consequence the separation of ‘biology from physics’ (Zee 57). This would necessarily be a problematic divide for any physical theory, like that offered by Shelley, founded on the given that mind and matter interpenetrate, sharing a rhythmic element through which both assume material form. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the evidence itself seemed to defy attempts to think holistically about such matters, when the demand was for a definitive answer to the question, ‘Is light a wave or particle?’ In 1800 and 1802, Thomas Young published pioneering revaluations of the problem that, first, championed the wave theory and that, second, articulated a rudimentary formulation of the principle of interference. However, Young’s theory generated vehement opposition from Henry Brougham, ‘one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review and later Lord Chancellor of England’ (Achinstein 19). The investigation of this duality (often at the center of nineteenthcentury science) ultimately resulted in a unification of natural forces and the complementarities of quantum physics.10 As King-Hele notes, ‘both the wave and corpuscular theories of light had their inherents’, but it was ‘Young’s experiments of the interference’ that successfully established ‘wave theory [as] valid’ (King-Hele Shelley 157).11 As well, wave theory intersected descriptions of matter within other disciplines, such as chemistry, as in Sir Humphry Davy’s argument that the motion of matter ‘if it exist, must be a vibratory and undulatory motion’ (Grabo 115). This perspective has obvious implications for physiology as well, given the body’s biochemical and electrical composition, and ‘physiological rhythms themselves can also act to perturb rhythms’ (Glass and Mackney 6) within surrounding systems. Shelley, like other physical theorists, used ‘the opposite concepts of particle and wave’ to frame his analysis of mind and matter, with such investigations and conceptualizations uniting ‘to produce wave mechanics’ in his poetry and complementarity in his poetics (Wilkins 341). Since Shelley established poetic praxis on physical theoria, my critical enterprise begins with a brief examination of Shelley’s scientific knowledge, but from the critical perspective of contemporary physical theory. These concerns are clarified in brief examinations of Queen Mab and Alastor, works that establish, respectively, wave dynamics at the core of matter in the cosmos and at the core of mind in consciousness. Such wave dynamics, operative across the spectrum of Shelley’s poetry, ‘interfere and interact’ with great intensity in Prometheus Unbound, whose ‘Specific complementaries form … an interacting ensemble within the overall matrix [that] can be understood only in terms of



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effects without classical causes’ (Plotnitsky Complementarity 69). Thus, the task of exploring the ‘spatiality of thought’ in Shelley’s poetry in relation to his knowledge of science must unfold within his ‘telling rhythm’, the variegated rhythmic frames that inform his poetical metaphysics of physical waves.

II. Shelley’s cosmological model In the prefatory comments to his study of Shelley’s knowledge and use of scientific concepts, Grabo suggests that ‘the task might have been better done by one who, interested in poetry and philosophy, was also versed in the history of science’ (Grabo viii). Such critical humility seems increasingly rare, and while assuming part of this ‘task’, I cannot pretend to hold the breadth of knowledge implied in Grabo’s statement. Rather, I would undertake an examination of Shelley’s ideas about physical phenomena as expressed poetically, which suggests, to me, that his images, his imagination, are better read from within current physical models, although the imagery flows directly from the most advanced physical models of his own day. My focus on the image, imagery and imagination as the ground of my examination admittedly reflects some influence of Bachelard who argues that ‘the poetic image, as a mathematician would say, presents us with a sort of differential of this evolution [of language]. A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language’ (Bachelard, Poetics xxiii). I endorse this perspective without reservation. As Mary McAllester Jones has discussed, Bachelard rarely lingered over particular poets, but ‘one of the few poets that he does linger over is Shelley’ (155). There are good reasons, then, to bring Grabo and Bachelard into critical coincidence: by supplementing Grabo with recent assessments of Shelley’s use of physical theory and by pursuing Bachelard’s enthusiastic focus on the image in relation to modern physical theory, a unique prospect onto Shelley’s poetics becomes possible. Shelley’s best poetry describes a universal cohesion created through waves, a vast network of matter woven from energy, and the particular individual, in this case Shelley as poet, functions as the discrete particle, the complementary node of consciousness that interacts with the waves of the world at the boundaries of knowledge, an interference within and without through which ‘rhythm or order’ emerges. Of course, Grabo’s book itself assumes a task resident in a passing comment offered during the 1925 Lowell Lectures by Alfred North Whitehead: ‘If Shelley had been born a hundred years later, the twenti-



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eth century would have seen a Newton among chemists’ (Whitehead 84). Clearly, as Grabo’s concise mapping of the poet’s scientific interests indicates, physical experiment and theoretical speculation were ‘early passion[s]’ for Shelley that connect later poetical experiment and critical concerns in ‘highly imaginative, even credulous ways’ (Grabo 7), resulting in a poetry ‘much enriched by the infusion of scientific imagery’ (King-Hele ‘Shelley and Science’ 253). However, in response to Whitehead’s prophetic statement (spoken so long ago), I would rather keep Shelley initially positioned within the sciences of his day, which then allows an appreciation for the poetry’s unique ability to function as physical theory and to achieve, through its imagery, an imaginative leap forward into relativistic effects within a quantum universe. I suspect this might also help explain the uncharacteristic attention paid to Shelley by Bachelard, whose academic interests were in the history of science. In recent years critics have sought to illuminate the suggestive hints offered by Whitehead and to extend Grabo’s pioneering effort. In part, the specific reading of Shelley’s poetics of science participates in more general efforts to examine the critical given that Romantic thought and expression uniformly and univocally oppose matters scientific. For Mervyn Nicolson, this re-evaluation establishes that ‘Romanticism, as a profound rethinking of reality, anticipates changes in society and cosmology that are still unfolding’; in the case of Shelley, he rejects the dominant theoretical paradigm, object cosmology (‘the idea that reality = quantifiable material objects in space’), since it ‘vitiated poetry’ and thereby became ‘inadequate as a model of reality’ (123, 126). As Nicolson subsequently argues, ‘the Romantics anticipate revisions in cosmology that science has been for some time unfolding. Indeed, a number of modern scientific ideas are illuminating for our understanding of the poets, especially Shelley’ (126). At the cosmological scale, then, Shelley (like Blake) opposes the deterministic absolutes of Newtonianism and the positivistic aspects of Enlightenment epistemology,12 but, at the textual scale, Shelley attempts to extend poetically physical theory beyond classical mechanics. Not surprisingly, given his wide interdisciplinary and imaginative reading, Shelley’s poetry explores a full range of physical phenomena in authoritative terms, whether speculating in prose about the nature of physical systems or imaginatively transforming those physical systems in poetry. For example, in the 1972 September 1 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, F. H. Ludlam (a meteorologist by training) sought to settle ‘conflicting views’ of the accuracy of Shelley’s descrip-



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As a concise statement of the form and nature of the travelling thunderstorm, one of Nature’s most complicated and still imperfectly understood phenomena, Shelley’s description is unrivalled in English literature, even, until very recently, in scientific accounts. (Ludlam 1016) Shelley’s heavy weather corresponds to current physical theory; the poetry embraces the inherent complexity of meteorology, adapts this chaotic presence into a principle of uncertainty at the foundation of his cosmology, and adopts, therein, acausality as a fundamental principle at the core of his poetics of physicality. Turning more specifically to Shelley’s model of cosmogenesis, his theoretical insights flow, in part, from Spinoza, as seen in an 1811 letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg: I will answer in the words of Spinoza – ‘An infinite number of atoms had been [floating] from all eternity, till at last one of them fortuitously diverged from its track which dragging with it another formed the principle of Gravitation & in consequence the universe’ – What cause produced this change, this chance? (Letters I:44–5) As Jerrold E. Hogle astutely observes, ‘The “unknown cause” may perhaps be the process of the perceived universe itself, “the existing power of existence”, or at most an “animative intellect” developing “in a constant rotation of change” through and within a semi-Lucretian “mass of organized animations”’ (34). ‘The plurality of worlds’ (Shelley: Clark 339) that defines Shelley’s immediate cosmos results from a ‘chance’ or random occurrence. For Shelley, a ‘fortuitously diverged’ atom in the ground state of ‘an infinite number of atoms’ has as a ‘consequence[,] the universe’ (Letters I:44). Shelley’s imaginative recasting of Newton through Spinoza, with its placement of ‘chance’ as a boundary condition at the moment of cosmogenesis, augers current quantum cosmologies. For Shelley, the compression of infinite atoms by gravitational force evokes a random event, a description made more relevant when read in light of the new physics. As Paul Davies and John Gribbin propose,



tion of meteorological phenomena by re-examining ‘the first line and second stanza of the “Ode to the West Wind”’ (1015). His analysis confirms that:

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‘the fluctuating quantum energy of the vacuum is actually ghost particles which appear, interact and vanish … the same restless vacuum activity goes on all around us’ (142). When this notion of quantum fluxion is applied to the boundary conditions of the universe, the language that describes such physical events resonates harmoniously with Shelley’s own imagery: [O]ne of the most dramatic implications of the idea of inflation … is that the whole Universe may have appeared out of literally nothing at all, created as a quantum fluctuation in the same way that quantum uncertainty allows a virtual pair of particles to appear and to exist[.] (Gribbin Big Bang 372) Shelley’s universe emerges from an acausal principle, therein establishing an indeterminacy or uncertainty within the foundation of matter, and this conceptualization seems to derive from his knowledge of what we now term the wave-particle duality. Wave theory, with its vibrations and rhythmic oscillations, offers poetic analogues exploited by Shelley, for the paradox within the dual nature of light forced an entirely new way of thinking. This was observed by Bachelard, as Jones has discussed: Wave theory, with … ‘the dualism of waves and particles’, breaks with habits of thinking and makes us ‘unlearn’ our notions of objects and their reality, by bringing us ‘psychological benefit’ by disrupting our preconceptions of the permanence, place, and identity of objects. (M. M. Jones 167) A principle of uncertainty inevitably accompanies the principle of complementarity, as Jones observes, since ‘wave theory also complicates the relationship of subject and object’ (167). As Shelley argues in ‘A Refutation of Deism’, ‘Light, electricity, and magnetism are fluids not surpassed by thought itself in tenuity and activity’ (Shelley: Clark 133). Since waves are generated within the mind and throughout materiality and since these waves interact, the Cartesian division between subject and object, further formalized by Newtonian optics, no longer proved a viable theory capable of describing the physical dynamics of a chaotic universe begun in a random fluxion of ghost particles before time and space existed.



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Even further, given the dual nature of light and the physical dynamics of perception, a unified wave/particle theory provides Shelley with a cluster of principles upon which to erect a poetics of physicality: the individual functions as the particle or atom; the full range of waves generated without (e.g. light, sound, electromagnetism) interact with the waves within the body (e.g. brain waves, cardial pulsation, respiration). As Plotnitsky’s evocation of a ‘quantum mechanical Shelley’ suggests, the adoption of wave/particle mechanics as primary poetic dynamic allows Shelley to approach what Danah Zohar now terms ‘a quantum self’: Through the process of quantum memory, each of us carries within himself, woven into the fabric of his soul, all the intimate relationships he has ever had, just as each of us weaves into his being all of his other interactions with the outside world. Intimate relationship itself is accounted for in quantum terms by the overlapping of one person’s wave function with that of another. The quality and dynamics of that relationship, however, depend on the many variables that can affect any wave system. (Zohar 137) Just such an intimate relationship unfolds in the dynamics of literary reception, where rhythms of thought (wave expressions) inscribed within any discrete work (e.g. rhythm, rhyme, symmetries) require reader interaction, with interference between wave potentialities generating ‘meaning’ at a specific point in spacetime. In this way, poetry becomes, for Shelley, a bridge between mind and matter, consciousness and cosmos, because both express themselves as complex wave patterns that interact and interfere to shape inner and outer reality. When mental cohesion occurs, the brain functions somewhat analogously to what is described as a ‘Bose–Einstein condensation’, where ‘many quantum particles may find themselves moving in concert described by precisely the same possibility wave’ (Herbert Elemental 265). The poem becomes, in this view, a quantum system defined by wave potentials that collapse through interference, the record generated when an observer’s own wave aspects interact to produce an interpretation.

III. Waves without and within The physical poetics of rhythmic waves ripple through Shelley’s notes to Queen Mab, but, as his slightly earlier letters indicate, such matters



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were already on his mind. Shelley seemed to consider Queen Mab ‘a youthful indiscretion better forgotten’ (Grabo 14), yet the poem, nonetheless, often offers amazing syntheses of physical theory in poetic form. The imagery constructs a universe where, according to Stuart Curran, the ‘Conservation of energy is a historical and spiritual truth, as well as a physical law’ (Curran 15), with Shelley’s ‘versified science’ attempting to map ‘the whole universe’ (King-Hele Shelley 32, 31), from macrocosmic to microscopic dimensions. The work, then, seems an appropriate place to begin an exploration of Shelley’s physical theory. In particular, the passage that follows Mab’s indictment of religion as mental projection (48–9: VI.121–45) and precedes her vindication of necessity as ‘all-sufficing Power’ (50–1: VI.197–238) bears scrutiny; within its ‘infinite orbs of mingling light’ (49: VI.146), Shelley describes universal dynamics in terms that intersect current descriptions of a quantum cosmological model: Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light, Of which yon earth is one, is wide diffused A spirit of activity and life, That knows no term, cessation, or decay; That fades not when the lamp of earthly life, Extinguished in the dampness of the grave[.] (49: VI.146–51) Formally, this section presents a linear expansion and contraction, built from linguistic duration, which visually reproduces a wave pattern, a visual shaping scattered intermittently throughout the poem. As well, this aspect of form intersects imagistic modulation, resulting in ‘modulations of meaning’ (Reiman 533) that grant the poem a certain indeterminacy. The shortest line, arguably, is the most dense, with the highly compact, four-syllable term ‘activity’ (ac-ti-vi-ty) providing a linguistic fulcrum upon which the passage pivots.13 The narratological progression within this section begins at the cosmological scale, then rapidly contracts through human dimensions to the microscopic, establishing, in the process, light as wave dynamic shared between mind and matter. Shelley achieves this through skillful infusion of luminous imagery. The orbs that form the universe, including the earth, are manifest as ‘mingling light … wide diffused’ (49: VI.146–7), with activity issuing forth from the etymological unconscious of the term that connects physical



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and spiritual possibilities.14 The activity of light equally operates within, as ‘mingling’ waves achieve a particulate or ‘atomic’ state (Curran 15) and without, as the coalescence of physical and spiritual in individual consciousness. Although a well-established principle of religious doctrine, this notion of an inner light with a physical presence, as Shelley knew, had viable, albeit imaginative, applications within available contemporary physical theories yet could equally draw upon a long tradition of cultural association (Zajonc 1–37). These formal and narratological features intersect thematic concerns, for the same short line positions ‘spirit’ at the core of ‘activity and life’, with light imaging interconnection. From the cosmological to the anthropological, light binds and bridges celestial, individual bodies, functioning as the active principle in Shelley’s interactive model of cosmos and consciousness. The inner waves of light called consciousness – unlike ‘the lamp of earthly life’ which is ‘Extinguished’ with death and the triumph of the thermodynamic process – know ‘no term, cessation, or decay’. Following death, energy, according to the principle of the ‘conservation of energy’ (Curran 15) at the core of the work, awaits transmutation, since the boundary state of existence remains ‘active, steadfast, and eternal’ (VI: 156). To ground the play of energy between cosmos and consciousness imagistically, Shelley turns to the meteorology of ‘whirlwind’ and ‘tempest’ (49: VI.157), two dynamic aspects of a complex system that operates through a wide range of wave dynamics. As Arden Reed proposes, ‘The weather’s eccentric and centrifugal nature makes it a difficult topic to circumscribe’, and Shelley’s ‘rhetoric of meteorology’ here serves both as transition between the macro- and microscopic description and as example of the relativistic sense of space offered in the poem (75, 77). As well, Shelley imagistically establishes a dynamics of ‘change’ as the ground state for the ‘eternal universe’: And in the storm of change, that ceaselessly Rolls round the eternal universe, and shakes Its undecaying battlement, presides, Apportioning with irresistable law The place each spring of its machine shall fill; So that when waves on waves tumultuous leap Confusion to the clouds, and fiercely driven Heaven’s lightnings scorch the up-rooted ocean-fords, Whilst, to the eye of shipwrecked mariner,



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Lone sitting on the bare and shuddering rock, All seems unlinked contingency and chance[.]

Judged from a global perspective (that is from within the storm’s event horizon), weather systems manifest ‘irresistable law’, where the apparent ‘confusion’ of this turbulence actually cloaks a complex order built ‘waves on waves’. The dynamics themselves express complex orders, while the limited, human, perspective sees only ‘confusion’, the seemingly natural result of apparent ‘contingency and chance’. As argued earlier in the poem, the widened perceptual space of the ‘imagination’s flight’ provides a prospect onto ‘eternal nature’s law’, with the ‘circling systems’ forming ‘a wilderness of harmony’ (23: II.72–8). This last oxymoronical construction (‘wilderness of harmony’) implies that order, enfolded within chaos, simply needs unfolding from the proper theoretical perspective. Even at the microscopic level of ‘the smallest particle’, the ‘irresistable law’ of the ‘unbounded universe’ within and without is activity (27–8: II.232, 255), with wave interference between mind and matter, in a certain sense, producing consciousness. This theoretical stance allows Shelley to argue that mind and matter share consciousness, for even particles ‘Think, feel, and live like man’ (27: II.234): No atom of this turbulence fulfills A vague and unnecessitated task, Or acts but as it must and ought to act. Even the minutest molecule of light, That in an April sunbeam’s fleeting glow Fulfills its destined, though invisible work, The universal Spirit guides[.] (49: VI.171–7) Shelley’s note to this passage cites Holbach’s Système de la nature to establish the ‘operation of Necessity in the realms of physical nature and social interaction’ (Reiman 49), but the focus on ‘the minutest molecule of light’ maintains symbolic continuity between the macroscopic ‘mingling[s]’ of light and the microscopic play of ‘waves on waves’. This ‘wavering light’ without illuminates ‘the darkness of our prison’ within, with Shelley’s wave theory of light functioning as the medium of interconnection.



(49: VI.160–70)

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Shelley attempts, through the interactive cosmological model presented in Queen Mab, to articulate a preliminary GUT or grand unified theory, forging ‘in a highly imaginative combination of astronomy, chemistry, meteorology, light, magnetism, fire, heat, and electricity[,] … a unifying hypothesis that all are modifications of one and the same principle’ (Bell 41). Wave dynamics serves as the active principle that weaves together inner and outer experience into a unified, interactive whole that opens onto ‘infinity within/Infinity without’ (52: VII.21–2). To leap toward the ‘futurity’ with which the poem concludes, this model of interactive waves is given a beautiful image that positions waves precisely at the boundary between mind and matter: O human Spirit! spur thee to the goal Where virtue fixes universal peace, And midst the ebb and flow of human things, Show somewhat stable, somewhat certain still, A lighthouse o’er the wild of dreary waves. (59: VIII.53–7) Wave patterns within (lighthouse) and without (ocean) meet on the surface of stability we call human life. Given the presence of waves within the brain and within atomic processes, Shelley’s adoption of it provides a theoretical unification of enfolding/unfolding within material and mental process. At macroscopic scales, ‘the entire universe in space and time is enfolded within each region’, and this physical process, at microscopic scales, equally describes the way ‘one thought enfolds another’, the way ‘a train of thought is actually a process of enfoldment of a succession of implications’ (Bohm and Peat 179, 185). While some of Shelley’s physical theorizing breaks down in relation to current models, this aspect of his cosmological model shares much with current quantum models: ‘That is to say, we are suggesting that the implicate order applies both to matter (living and non-living) and to consciousness’ (Bohm Wholeness 196).15 Somewhat inevitably, once the poem takes as its setting and its subject ‘interplanetary, and eventually interstellar, space’ (King-Hele Shelley 32), where ‘spirit’ or energy stands above form or matter (‘Below lay stretched the universe’ [II: 71]), the poetic flow moves downward through a multilayered materiality to discover, ultimately, spirit at the ‘minutest’ level of matter and mind. In his second large work, Alastor, Shelley explores the counter-current; the poem begins within a discrete



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frame of reference, the Poet[ic] consciousness, progresses through this observer’s widening engagements with materiality, and drifts, finally, towards the boundaries of material existence, death. Such a move – the exploration of physical and spiritual boundary conditions through a poem whose narrative thrust is dominated by thermodynamics – might seem contradictory, yet it actually makes sound theoretical sense. As Jean Charon notes, ‘All events which happen in our ordinary space, the space of matter, obey a famous principle called the “second principle of thermodynamics”’ (32), and Shelley’s recognition of the principle accords with the range of his reading. This principle provides the poem with a wide range of dynamic possibilities, and the evocation of water further cements imagistic continuity in the continual performance of the poetics of physical waves. The poet recognizes this rhythmic connection, seeing in a ‘rivulet/Wanton and wild’ an image of life, with physical and mental experience felt and expressed as ‘dazzling waves’ (82: 494–5). In Alastor, Shelley pursues a spatiality of thought and experience that compares favorably with the temporal experimentation of Byron’s The Giaour. Within the opening sections of the work, Shelley obviously spatializes the poet’s pursuit of natural and cultural knowledge – where knowledge is imaged as an ‘ever widening infinity’ that accumulates in spatial ‘planes’ (Gibson 547) – with these planes spanning the full range of Shelley’s scientific reading. Initially, the poet tracks ‘Nature’s most secret steps’ through the emerging, revolutionary insights of geological processes: … where’er The red volcano overcanopies Its field of snow and pinnacles of ice With burning smoke, or where the secret caves Rugged and dark, winding among the springs Of fire and poison, inaccessible To avarice and pride, their starry domes Of diamonds and gold expand above Numberless and immeasurable halls, Frequent with crystal column, and clear shines Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite. (72–3: 82–94) Other critics have noted Shelley’s appropriation of language from Southey that, ultimately, actually points to Miltonic influence (Reiman



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72), but the specific deployment of geological terms, in this passage, exemplifies Shelley’s tendency to adopt a ‘rhetoric of science’ (W. P. Jones 1) to ‘lyricize’ and therein physically theorize the interactions of consciousness and cosmos.16 Of course, this type of investigation into physical forces within the earth complements the exploration of related processes within the ‘natural’ philosophies of cosmology and biology, even ecology: Nor had the scene of ampler majesty That gems or gold, the varying roof of heaven And the green earth lost in his heart its claim To love and wonder; he would linger long In lonesome vales, making the wild his home, Until the doves and squirrels would partake From his innocuous hand his bloodless food, Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks, And the wild antelope, that starts whene’er The dry leaf rustles in the brake, suspend Her timid steps to gaze upon a form More graceful than her own. (73: 95–105) The pursuit of knowledge in its physical aspects, as Shelley’s evocation of vegetarianism in line 101 indicates, should bring human physiology into alignment with natural processes (see Shelley: Clark 81–97), and this pursuit, as the passage as a whole makes clear, imaginatively spatializes the physical movement of the poet across the surface of the earth in a spacetime continuum. His knowledge, through spatialization, is particularized as actual (versus intellectual) experience. This same spatialization, present in the poet’s pursuit of cultural knowledge, is imaged as a physical passage across the geographical planes of cultural expression. The poet’s ‘wandering step’ and ‘high thoughts’ (73: 107–8), physical and mental exertions, form interlocking activities that allow him to ground general knowledge in specific experience. The poet’s spatial sojourn to ‘the sites of great civilizations of the past’ (Reiman 73) unfolds in receding chronological order, with the poet’s knowledge tied to material artifacts spatially dispersed within specific temporal frames of reference.17 Significantly, it is precisely the poet’s understanding that physical and cultural knowledge emerge in a unified spatio-temporal field, which ‘flashed like strong



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inspiration’, which inaugurates recognition of ‘the thrilling secrets of the birth of time’ (73: 127–8). The ‘thrilling secret’, put simply, is the interrelation of time and space, which define a spacetime continuum that functions relative to the observer.18 Following the ‘Arab maiden’ section, which depressingly suggests that the formation of human sympathy is not necessarily an outcome of physical and cultural study (and which, potentially, can impede its formation), the Poet ‘wanders on’ in ‘joy and exultation’ (74: 140, 144) until he slumbers beside ‘a sparkling rivulet’ (74: 148). The phrase, ‘sparkling rivulet’, brings the poles of Shelley’s physical poetics (light and fluid waves) into view, an imagistic presence that intersects the lighthouse image near the end of Queen Mab. Having spatialized thought horizontally as layers of physical and cultural knowledge across space, the poet lapses into sleep, withdrawing into a psychological space outside cosmological time. The combined form of wave dynamics (light and water), discussed previously in both poetry and prose, again assumes a position as the boundary of interpenetration, but this time seen within human psychological process. When the poet dreams, he exists, in a certain sense, outside the spacetime continuum, and in this particular case, the dream work undertaken could be seen as an attempt to explore ‘dreaming [a]s the bridge between brain and psyche’ (Wolf Dreaming 105), between the physical and spiritual aspects of being. Just as wave dynamics bridge mind and matter, so too the physical and spiritual elements of being rhythmically interconnect through wave dynamics, with the very ‘voice’ of the ‘veiled maiden’ being expressed as interacting waves: Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought; its music long, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues. (74: 153–7) Her ‘voice’, like his, is musical, metrical, ‘woven sounds of streams and breezes’, and the merging of their rhythms forms a ‘web’ of luminous connections. In the passage, which images forth the only moment of connection between the poet and another (albeit purely imaginary) human being, wave dynamics dominate. The imagery, built ‘waves on waves’ (sound, water, wind, light), forms patterns of interference; fluid



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waves and light waves shape the warp and woof, respectively, of interconnection – a rhythmic harmony manifest as music and poetry, rhythmic modes of expression. These various waves ripple through the dream-imagery, although they undergo diverse transmutations. An inner light ignites within ‘her frame/A permeating fire’ (74: 163), and her ‘strange symphony’ (74: 167) becomes, in a splendid anaphoric sequence (74: 168–70), the rhythm of her circulatory system, as her body’s rhythm sings the themes of ‘knowledge and truth and virtue’ (74: 158). The dream concludes when ‘a dark flood’ overwhelms this vision as dreamless sleep briefly returns, an appropriate image for closure given the prior wave symbolism and the impending journey to come. Once the poet awakens, the connection forged in the imaginary space of dream distorts prior connections achieved through physical and cultural knowledge, creating dissonance which converts those inner ‘shifting hues’ into an image of separation from ‘the hues of heaven’ (75: 197). The poet’s interior space extends outward to the boundaries of human knowledge and experience, death, which renders this poet spatially fixed in a way analogous to the Giaour’s temporal fixation. As Tilottama Rajan suggests, the poet has ‘mistake[n] inner vision (or imagination) for external vision (or perception)’ (79), which results in the disruption of the two-way flow of information as waves; the poet has forgotten that ‘the act of perception was a cooperation of inner and outer lights’ and confuses imaginary projection with what ‘already existed outside’ consciousness (Rajan 79). ‘[T]his wave-like movement’, as Jerrold E. Hogle suggests, images the ‘projection outward of thought’s interpretive processes’, allowing the poem to posit a physical conception of consciousness based on wave dynamics, which then becomes the vehicle for Shelley’s ‘critique of his predecessors’ (61). The remainder of the poem spatializes human emotional experience in ways similar to the opening section’s spatialization of knowledge. The poet attempts to reconnect with the ‘veiled maiden’ by questing beyond ‘the dark gate of death’ (75: 211), which the poet sees as the only other location where this connection might be possible. In other words, to borrow Bachelard’s terms slightly out of context, the poet, ‘when confronted with [a disparity between] outside and inside, think[s] in terms of being and non-being’ which, as a consequence, ‘confers spatiality upon thought’ (Poetics 212). The poet’s exteriorized imaginary intrudes on the previously incorporated real, thereby precluding any possibility of physical embodiment (which further reifies the newly perceived gap between the poet and materiality). Following



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the dream, the poem embarks on a journey through what Gibson terms ‘allegories of death and life’ (559), but these are continually interconnected through a proliferation of wave imagery. Shelley’s commitment to this imagery of wave dynamics helps strengthen the links between material and mental processes in the poem, while maintaining imagistic continuity, a well-recognized trait for Shelley’s poetics.19 The poet’s passage advances toward death, with ‘wave running on wave’ (78: 327), and vortical dynamics abound, with ‘whirlwind’ and ‘whirlpool’ (78: 320, 328) framing the poet’s progress. The poet’s ‘little shallop’ (78: 299), as the physical journey nears its end, is caught between ‘the whirlpools and the waves’ (79: 355) yet flows into a winding cavern, as the boat traverses the ‘calm’ formed by interference patterns, ‘the smooth spot/Of glassy quiet mid those battling tides’ (80: 392–3). Even the somewhat inevitable image of narcissism, the ‘liquid mirror’ into which the poet gazes, is woven ‘of most translucent wave’ (81: 462, 458). The poet’s gaze predictably beholds its ‘own wan light’ (81: 470), and, ‘Obediant to the light/That shone within his soul’ (82: 492–3), the poet simply observes, without interaction, these dynamics, since he (something of a Urizenic figure) is now enclosed in an internal space of his own construction. The imaginary, the image of perfection, exerts sufficient attraction on the poet that conscious interaction with external reality slips beyond the event horizon of the dream-image. As the poet approaches nearer to death, he follows the upward flow of a rivulet become torrent, and, although alienated from physical wave dynamics, the poet’s ‘stream of thought’ (85: 644) rhythmically begins to ‘beat in mystic sympathy/With nature’s ebb and flow’ (85: 652–3). His light spent, his pulse stilled, the poet re-emerges, at the moment of death, from his own self-enclosure ‘to mingle’ ‘with many-voiced waves’ (86: 649, 650), achieving a state of rhythmic cohesion with the ‘veiled maiden’ at last.20 In certain ways, the complementary explorations of physical waves from the perspective of cosmos (Queen Mab) and consciousness (Alastor) are reiterated with greater density in Mont Blanc, where Shelley’s poetic intensity unfolds the dynamic, even essential, tension between materiality and mentality, and again positions the principle of rhythmic cohesion at the foundation of his unified wave theory: The ever-lasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves … from secret spring



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The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters – with a sound but half its own.

The universal and individual oscillate rhythmically, and the dialogic thrust of the poem demonstrates imagistically its theoretical/poetic argument that reality is ‘an unremitting interchange/With the clear universe of things around’ (90: 39–40). However, for Shelley, the dialogic exchange is governed, through necessity, by a principle of uncertainty (93: 139–41), since complementarity as condition functions ‘correlative [to] uncertainty relations’ (Plotnitsky Complementarity 69). Patterns of interference form through the necessary interaction of waves within and without, and this interaction blurs the distinction between subjective and objective, returning a radical equality to all physicality. Michel Serres, in a slightly different context, describes the situation this way: There is no more separation between subject, on the one hand, and the object, on the other … Nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal, or the order of the world … Knowledge is at most the reversal of drifting, that strange conversion of times, always paid for by additional drift; but this is complexity itself, which was once called being. (Hermes 83) The erosion of such distinctions figures prominently in Prometheus Unbound (as well as other Romantic epics, although the work’s status as dramatic epic further enhances its dynamic qualities), which synthesizes the physical theory available to Shelley into a poetic description of universal dynamics and the role consciousness plays in influencing those dynamics through discrete acts of perceptual and expressive interaction.

IV. ‘not one, but both’ The physical operations of light and water, wave dynamics, provided Shelley with the perfect symbolism of symmetry through which to unify physical and mental function and proved a fortuitous choice in light of later directions pursued by physical theorists. The individual, previously imaged as an atom of conscious interaction, represents all potentialities when incomprehensible ‘collection[s] of waves combine and construc-



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tively interfere’ within the charged field of cosmic/conscious interaction (Baggott 26), and it is precisely this ‘level of reality at which [Prometheus Unbound] is enacted’ (Wasserman 384). In light of my prior arguments and in the face of poetic evidence, the titan Prometheus images forth ‘the One Mind [as manifest in] that unitary mode of Being that appears in thought-constituted existence’, although this limits the poem’s ‘domain’ less than Wasserman suggests (386). The reason for this delimitation? The mode of being described by Wasserman necessarily connects with non- ‘thought-constituted existence’, as the lyric fourth act, with its leap ‘beyond the present limits of scientific knowledge’ (Hogle 193), amply demonstrates. The poem closes with the unity of mind and matter expressed in images of implication and complexity that become ‘a polyphonic hymn in which different voices are part of a single harmony’ (Rajan 93). The mode of consciousness required to apprehend this unification might best be termed a ‘quantum self’:21 a selfrecognition ‘that the universe on the most fundamental level is an undissectable whole’ and that ‘holism [i]s an inescapable condition of our physical existence’ (Kafatos and Nadeau 113). This description matches Prometheus quite well. When the titan re-calls his curse (extracted from the phantasm of Jupiter), the universe shifts with his altered perspective (a non-local effect characteristic of the behavior of discrete particles in quantum systems), bringing in its wake a new paradigm defined by complex complementarities (two of which will be explored below). Once Prometheus perceives the tyranny of his previous observations (the curse’s wish for pain and suffering ‘through boundless space and time’ [144: I.301]), he both creates and comes to embody another view (the ‘wish [that] no living thing … suffer pain’ [144: I.305]), one based on the ‘apprehension of the single significant whole as it is disclosed in physical theory’ (Kafatos and Nadeau 179). Of course, as Shelley suggests in the poem’s preface, the poet is another such quantum self. Since the physical flow of information unfolds continually and multi-directionally, the poet exists at the nexus of creative exchange, consciousness functioning to organize the dialogic flow of competing waves of information through patterns of interference. Only in this way can poets be both ‘creators … and creations of their age’ (Shelley: Reiman and Powers 135): A Poet is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the nature of others, and of such external influences as excite and sustain these powers; he is not one, but both. (Shelley: Reiman and Powers 135)



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From the preface to Prometheus, this statement succinctly captures the complementary dynamics of existence explored through Mab and Alastor. Through interacting waves, ‘physical rhythm undermines the distinctions and definitions of reality as we ordinar[il]y live them’, and the rhythmic coincidence ‘brings self and other, present and past, together, and thus insures the continuity of tradition’ within individual expression (Aviram 234). Shelley positions the poet at the nexus of interfering patterns of material waves, a creator and creation of these interactions. In this stance Shelley assumes a position later taken by Niels Bohr, who argued ‘that undivided wholeness implies that no categorical distinction can be made between the dynamics of human consciousness and those of the entire cosmos’ (Kafatos and Nadeau 178). In Prometheus Unbound, the dialogic exchange between Prometheus and aspects of mind and matter are multivectored, yet the theoretical spirit that will later animate The Defense of Poetry is only marginally present in the preface, which begins with a brief discussion on the use of classical sources (Shelley adopting ‘a certain arbitrary discretion’ [Shelley: Reiman and Powers 132]), the selection of character (Prometheus over Satan as ‘more poetical’ [133]), and the type of imagery used to embody the implicate operations of universe (drawn from ‘the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed’ [133]).22 This leads to a discussion of past poets and poetry, with Shelley moving with relative rapidity to the brief discussion of the function of the poet. It is not the dynamic clash between poetic and Platonic knowledge, the thorough transmutation of Hellenic dramatic art, nor the Baconian and empirical aspects contained within Prometheus that requires a ‘more select classes of poetical readers’ (135). Rather, the way these aspects are enfolded within one another at the work’s core requires unfolding by an interactive reader – one, in other words, willing to operate beyond a mechanical world-view of absolutes and within principles of relativity and uncertainty established when brainwaves and textual waves interact to create textual ‘meaning’. The text forces upon readers the assumption that ‘human consciousness infolds within itself the fundamental logical principle of the conscious universe’ (Kafatos and Nadeau 179) and plunges readers into dialogic exchange with a signifying universe generating waves of information that achieve rhythmic cohesion within and without. As most commentators have noted, any systematic approach to Prometheus must immediately confront the full range of Shelley’s scientific theory, which is embedded deeply and broadly throughout



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the work, but I will focus on two passages from the final act in order to analyze the degree to which Shelley succeeds in articulating a unified field theory for the physics of mental and material processes: the brief collective ‘Chorus of Spirits and Hours’ (198: IV.129–34) and Panthea’s elaborate ‘Embleming’ of the implicate relationship of ‘Heaven and Earth united now’ (202: IV.273). The tightened focus on these passages brings Shelley’s imagery of wave dynamics back into view, and, when juxtaposed, the passages provide an imagistic vehicle allowing the shared expressions of the spirits of time and space to be manifest as a ‘certain rhythm or order’ shared with individual consciousness. Act 4 opens with the voice of unseen spirits describing the dawn, while Panthea and Ione slowly awaken to the new paradigm emanating from the cave of Prometheus and Asia. Promethean mind, through a random and acausal re-calling, is ‘restored to profound and fundamental forces’ (M. M. Jones 171); the Asian energy of love embodies those forces, and like the second half of a particle pair she simultaneously experiences the Promethean renunciation.23 Attraction (Prometheus/Asia relation) overcomes repulsion (Prometheus/Jupiter relation) as boundary conditions shift toward symmetries and complementarities. In the choral wherein the hours and spirits (clearly time and mind in the context of Panthea’s description) ‘like the clouds and sunbeams unite’ (196: IV.79), Shelley returns specifically to wave mechanics discussed in relation to prior works: photo- and hydrodynamics: Then weave the web of the mystic measure; From the depths of the sky and the ends of the Earth Come, swift Spirits of might and of pleasure, Fill the dance and the music of mirth, As the waves of a thousand streams rush by To an Ocean of splendour and harmony. (198: IV.129–34) The passage echoes an earlier one offered by a chorus of ‘Spirits of the human mind’ (197: IV.81). Time and mind interact within space (‘depths’ and ‘ends’), their interference manifesting a rhythmic ‘measure’ that expresses the jouissance (‘of might and of pleasure’) within being reflected in the rhythmic presence of spirit shared by all matter, with the seemingly chaotic interaction of ‘waves’ opening onto ‘splendour and harmony’. In a different but relevant context, Serres suggests: ‘what was supposed to interfere begins constructing; obstacles



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combine to organize; noise becomes dialect’ (Hermes 80). The interference, woven from waves generated within and without, shapes the individual, and in turn the role of consciousness (observation) generates cosmos. Clearly, Shelley’s theoretical model has features in common with Bohm’s implicate order, and this connection can best be observed in Panthea’s elaborate image of the ‘multitudinous orb’. For those critics concerned with the extent of his scientific knowledge, this passage has been the best place to test hypotheses relating to the broadest aspects of Shelley’s poetical and physical theories, for, in King-Hele’s apt phrasing, the passage attempts ‘to summarize in one figure the ultimate constituents of matter, the spirit and method of science, and a microcosm of the earth’ (King-Hele Shelley 189): A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres, Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass Flow, as through empty space, music and light: Ten thousand orbs involving and involved, Purple and azure, white and green and golden, Sphere within sphere, and every space between Peopled with unimaginable shapes Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep Yet each intertranspicuous, and they whirl Over each other with a thousand motions Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning And with the force of self-destroying swiftness, Intensely, slowly, solemnly roll on – Kindling with mingled sounds, and many tones, Intelligible words and music wild. – (201: IV.238–52) Shelley carefully crafts a theory of implicate order built up layer by layer, an order ‘involving and involved’ (201: IV.241) and expressed through the ‘flow’ of fluid dynamics, a boundary condition shared with ‘empty space, music and light’ (201: IV.240). These orbs, then, complement those discussed in Queen Mab, even down to the reappearance of the verb ‘mingle’. The mechanics of moving bodies and the energy states of electricity combine in ‘the dance of matter, incessant in motion’ (Grabo 142). As mentioned previously, given Shelley’s attraction to ‘the notion that liveliness extended to the smallest particles’ (King-Hele Shelley 190), a



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We may take the many thousand spheres or the ten thousand orbs as individual atoms, each consisting of a series of concentric electron shells (sphere within sphere) with the outermost shells of neighboring atoms often interlinked (involved). Stray electrons (unimaginable shapes) drift through the space between the atoms. On changing their energy-levels the electrons give rise to a flow of radiation, the music and light of line 3. Whole atoms are constantly changing position (they whirl over each other), while at the same time rotating (upon a thousand sightless axles spinning). Looked at from outside the entire process can be recognized as vibration (the force of self-destroying swiftness). (Shelley 190). As King-Hele hastens to add, ‘Shelley did not foresee this interpretation’ (Shelley 190), but the description, drawn from the most advanced scientific treatises of the day, nonetheless weaves together the many threads of Shelley’s model for interactive relations between mind and matter, consciousness and cosmos. Indeed, language similar to Shelley’s description of the orb often emerges as the foundation of current descriptions of quantum dynamics, with the electron, in more mystical strains of physical theory, functioning as the bearer of spirit in the motion of matter.24 Within Shelley’s physical theory, perhaps as a residual trace of an earlier commitment to Spinoza, ‘every point locally expresses the global law’ of rhythm as the dynamics undergirding inner and outer symmetries and their complex interactions (Prigogine and Stengers ‘Postface’ 140).25 In his analysis, Thomas A. Reisner notes that ‘the passage, with its strange intermixture of concrete detail and allegoric abstraction, marks one of those moments when the customary distinction between subject and object ceases to be felt, and the two coalesce in the unity of the symbol’ (52). The image itself probably owes more to Euler’s astronomical commentaries or Laplace’s celestial mechanics than to ‘Miltonic and scriptural sources’ (Reisner 54), for Shelley’s intuitive comprehension of the coming quandaries of quantum cosmology propels Prometheus Unbound into a unique category within English literary tradition – a beautiful, poetic expression of a valid, physical



certain affinity between his imagery and current physical theory could be expected. To this end, King-Hele’s interpretation of the passage in ‘the modern idiom’ of particle physics intersects my own and will be quoted at length:

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theory on par with Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. Of course, some critics still find obscurity in the poem’s imagery, especially the work’s unique combination of poetical, mythological and physical concepts, but this obscurity, as King-Hele concludes, seems ‘the result of a struggle to communicate ideas which [were then] beyond the resources of language’ (Shelley 208) as ‘the most scientifically-minded poet of the age’ (Bush 111) sought to elaborate a new symbolic language that would unify macro- and microscopic events, that would dis-cover symmetrical laws to govern both inner and outer processes. ‘Rhythm’, for Shelley, ‘is thus at once physical and mental, affirming a nonlinguistic continuum of body and mind’ (Aviram 43).

V. Shelley’s rhythmic Defense As King-Hele has argued, Shelley sought ‘a poetry that “comprehends all science”’ (‘Shelley and Science’ 263), and the poetics that emerges certainly seems to succeed in its attempt to unveil, in White’s phrase, science’s ‘dependency upon the poetic genius’ (H. White 327). Shelley was, of course, in good company in this perception, since contemporary physical theory has repeatedly recognized the role that imagination (via the presence and function of a discrete observer) plays in framing hypotheses, constructing experiments and interpreting results (Preludium 136–142). Shelley’s Defense of Poetry, although a direct response to Peacock’s ‘Four Ages of Poetry’, also attempts a reorientation of physical theory that critiques the ‘Enlightenment’s misguided conception of scientific progress’ and therein forcing an ‘acknowledge[ment of] imagination’s role in synthesizing knowledge and feeling’ (H. White 325). For Shelley, ‘imagination is responsible for empirical knowledge regarding nature and existence’, and Liliane Papin, having analyzed the role and function of metaphor in the physical and human sciences, concludes similarly that ‘metaphorical play is of prime importance in scientific work’ (Papin 1260). Such re-cognition only becomes a necessity ‘in an age when the wealth of scientific discovery caused men to mistake knowledge for progress’ (H. White 325). Shelley’s position certainly supports this reading, seeking to demonstrate that poets in any age can ‘arrive imaginatively at a scientific explanation’ and through such imaginative achievement can ‘create[s] anew the universe’ (Reiman 505). In the parallel elaboration of wave theory within the physical sciences of Young, Faraday and Maxwell and within Shelley’s poetics of physicality, one can find the type of symbolic continuity



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that should be provided for mutual illumination across the disciplinary divides between physics and poetry. This sensitivity to the rhythmic, oscillating aspects of matter (which for Shelley would include mind) emerges at several points in The Defense of Poetry, where ‘natural objects’ and their ‘mimetic representation[s]’ manifest a ‘certain rhythm or order’ (Reiman 481). Imagery functions as the vehicle of this ‘harmonious and rhythmical’ aspect of materiality, so that rhythm provides the means through which poetry ‘reproduces all that it represents’ (Reiman 487). This rhythmic presence, shared by cosmos and consciousness alike, allows Shelley to argue that: [Poetry] is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. (Reiman 503) This certainly echoes Wordsworth’s stance on science as expressed in the prefaces to Lyrical Ballads, and Shelley’s focus on ‘rhythm’ most distinguishes his thinking from Wordsworth’s experimental poetics. This passage leads to one of Shelley’s most crucial images of mind, an image drawn from physical theory, specifically from thermodynamics: ‘the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness’ (Reiman 504). The ‘invisible influence’ of imagination, arising naturally, halts the symbolic advent of entropy, causing it to flare with a ‘transitory brightness’ that interacts with the One Mind. For Shelley, the mind’s stimulation generates wave patterns: the poet functions as ‘an atom to a Universe’, with the poem’s enfolded rhythmic patterns capable of unifying ‘all irreconcilable things’ (Reiman 505). All ‘things’ of matter or mind, in Shelley’s physical model, are manifest as ‘oscillating field waves of rhythm’, and when pursued to the smallest increments of discernment, all things ‘dissolve into pure rhythm’, resolve into ‘relationship and pattern of vibration’ (Nicolson ‘New’ 127). The movement of mind is expressed as wave patterns; these patterns, in turn, are enfolded within the poetic line, quatrain, stanza or act, and Shelley positions this rhythmic manifestation at the foundation of all intellectual creative activities: All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the per-



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manent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical and contain in themselves the elements of verse, being the echo of the eternal music. (Reiman 484) The vessel of poetry captures the rhythm of thought in relation to the rhythm of the age, since all have a material base founded on rhythmic symmetries. ‘Rhythm itself’, then, ‘can be thought of as a local manifestation of the infinitude of physical reality in general’ (Aviram 228), with waves of information regarding the poet, the poem and the culture interfering with the rhythmic aspects of the reader, whose interactions with the text partake of the energies inscribed within it and which is ‘experienced through the body in rhythm’ (Aviram 245).



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Methodic Sadism/Symbolic Misogyny: Romantic Responses to Science as Ideology

I. Preludium While some might find the intellectual parameters of this chapter somewhat obvious – that science and sexuality have an intimate historical relationship, a relationship severely critiqued within Romantic thought – the critical exploration of such relations within Romantic studies is a relatively recent development. Such concerns have emerged through the interdisciplinary application of physical theory to literary processes, resulting in what I earlier termed a physical criticism (Chapter 1, 41–46), and this book has attempted a concentrated application of this critical principle. However, my collision of Romantic poetics, theory and practice, with twentieth-century physical theory has been somewhat restricted to the most exotic scientific theory associated with quantum physics and cosmology. This approach has, perhaps, unwittingly reified the repression of the feminine by a masculinist canon and science alike. Perhaps the best place to begin (as Byron might say) is at the beginning, the title of the chapter. Hopefully, the pre-colon portion of my title brings into view the more perverse sexual dimensions residing within the methods and metaphors animating the ‘natural philosophy’ to which Romantic writers responded. My verbal association of scientific method and sexual sadism, as most might recognize, recalls those imperatives for the empirical enterprise offered by Francis Bacon and René Descartes, two founding fathers of European Enlightenment epistemology. My evocation of a scientific symbolism expressed as gendered misogyny also recalls Bacon and Descartes but as well brings such tropes closer to the age of classical Romanticism, the period of Linnaean classification that immediately preceded it.1 165



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Any full exploration of the initial construction of the methods and metaphors within Enlightenment epistemology and the full spectrum of Romantic response to such constructs would require a book of its own, but this expression attempts to frame Romanticism’s response to the ideological dimension of science through two writers rarely brought into critical coincidence, William Blake and Mary Shelley. I admit to seeing Blake’s Urizen and Shelley’s Frankenstein as the first and last readings offered within classical Romanticism to the emergence of science as an ideology in its own right. However, for such an unusual textual juxtaposition to make sense, a brief consideration of the boundary conditions inherited by Blake and Shelley is necessary.

II. Symbolizing scientific method When Francis Bacon articulated his scientific method, both the sadistic and misogynistic elements of that method were clearly displayed. The natural philosopher extracts from a traditionally engendered mother nature a confession of facts, an utterance coerced through instrumental experimentation; science must query nature on the rack of experiment, with the researcher functioning as grand inquisitor. This pursuit, as the Novum Organon suggests, does not seek articulated abstractions; rather scientific method must ‘dissect her [nature] into parts’ to penetrate ‘her’ hidden recesses (Section 51). In the Novum, as well as Of the Dignity and Advancement of Knowledge and The New Atlantis, the Baconian imperative advocates torture and rape as the means to refine human knowledge and establish man’s mastery over nature. Natural philosophers should ‘bind her [nature] to your service and make her your slave … to conquer and subdue her’. The instrumental intrusion of technological intellect reveals ‘secrets still locked in Nature’s bosom’, allowing the scientist ‘to penetrate further … to find a way into her inner chambers’ (quoted in Shepherd 20). The symbolic dimension of the method, drawn directly from then-contemporary techniques for interrogating and torturing witches, proposes that ‘[nature] exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art [here read mechanical technology] than when left to herself’ (quoted in Sheldrake 41, 43). Several ironies reside in the methods and aims articulated by Bacon. First, although he was an occasional practitioner of the elder science of alchemy, the symbolism of the method placed under erasure the gendered balance within alchemy itself. As the biochemist Linda Shepherd notes in her examination of the erased ‘feminine face of science’:



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[A]lchemical texts picture the union of the Masculine and Feminine as representative of all other opposites … Although women were not [exactly] accorded equal status, the alchemist’s ideal of the hermaphrodite [at least] included the Feminine. The fundamental images of alchemy were coition, the conjunction of mind and matter, and the merging of male and female. (Shepherd 30–1) I will return to the status of the hermaphroditic in subsequent discussion of eighteenth-century botanical classification. At the moment, I must note that Bacon’s justification for the eradication of the feminine points to a second irony, for he argues that his method will return humanity to a privileged place of dominion underwritten by God: Only let the human race recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest; the exercise thereof will be governed by sound reason and true religion. (Sheldrake 41) As the biologist Rupert Sheldrake observes, Bacon attempts to anticipate and refute contemporary arguments, which saw such ‘ambitions [as] satanic’, by imaging ‘the technological mastery of nature [as] a recovery of power given by God to man, rather than something new’ (41). Of course, the founding irony is that Bacon justifies the method leading to the ‘new’ Enlightenment episteme by evocation of the ‘old’ theological episteme that it will supersede. Bacon’s younger contemporary, René Descartes, completely eradicates the feminine principle in nature – the other against which the method is deployed – through mechanization, thereby reducing the nature that Bacon tortured for factual information to ‘a machine governed by exact mathematical law’ (Shepherd 20). As well, Descartes’ mechanistic model eclipsed the medieval view of the cosmos as an organic, living entity, freeing experimenters to ‘dissect the machine’ and its discrete members. Worse still, Descartes applied his mechanical view to biological systems, a metaphoric extension, as noted earlier, that the neurologist Antonio Damasio considers the fundamental error of the Cartesian divide between mind and matter, which ‘persuaded biologists to adopt, to this day, clockwork mechanics as a model for life processes’ (248). For example, animals, as part of the mechanistic natural order, lack consciousness or intelligence within Cartesian method and, therefore, could experience no pain.



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[proves] that they [animals] have no intelligence at all, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs. In the same way[,] a clock, consisting only of wheels and springs, can count the hours and measure time[.] (I: 141) For both Bacon and Descartes, the comparativist dimension of the method sought to bring into view aspects of the human through contradistinction from animals. Given his focus on the soul at this point in his description of method, yet another irony comes into view, for in denying animals souls, Descartes ignored the Latin source of the term ‘animal’, which is derived from ‘anima’ or ‘soul’. As Christopher Stone observes, since ‘animals lacked even conscious awareness … animal cruelty presented no problem because it raised no conceivable objection’ (Stone 23). Returning briefly to Part V of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, both simian imitative behavior and avian linguistic production are discussed, then dismissed, as purely mechanical in nature. However, Descartes also analyzes the biomechanical operations of the heart by briefly discussing William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis (which proposed the cardiovascular theory of circulation), and when he returns his attention to Harvey’s theory – ten years later in the unpublished Description of the Human Body – the lack of conscience itself becomes sound empirical method. Descartes, in support of one aspect of Harvey’s hypothesis, suggests the following, chilling, experiment (which must be quoted at length): [Harvey] could have supported this last point by a very striking experiment. If you slice off the pointed end of the heart in a live dog, and insert a finger into one of the cavities, you will feel unmistakably that every time the heart gets shorter it presses the finger, and every time it gets longer it stops pressing it … If you cut off the pointed end of the heart in a young rabbit which is still alive, you will be able to see by inspection that the cavities become slightly wider, and emit blood, when the heart hardens; and even when they emit only very small drops of blood, because very little blood remains in the animal’s body, they still continue to retain the same width. (I: 317–18)



This stance provides the conclusion to Part V of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (his first published work), which:

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The ‘hardened heart’ herein ascribed to the rabbit or dog has been transferred to the human experimenter that could witness the gradual death of another creature, which (in my own biased view) eliminates any ‘dignity’ for this mode for the advancement of knowledge. Indeed, such studies of animal nature – what we would term zoology – can only be undertaken through the elimination of an animating spirit from fellow-creatures, which allowed experimental torture by clearing human conscience, a stance at the core of both Blake and Shelley’s critiques of Enlightenment epistemology.

III. From animal to botanical Baconian and Cartesian methods solidify during the seventeenth century, providing an engendered context for the emergence of a masculine science founded on torture, cruelty and rape. Within the specific intellectual sphere of England, this methodological legacy assumes a decidedly misogynistic countenance with the founding of the Royal Society. This ‘modern’ ‘male priesthood of science’ (Shepherd 19) literalizes the symbolic language of Bacon and Descartes: for Henry Oldenberg (the first secretary of the Royal Society), the raison d’ étre of their activities was ‘to raise a Masculine Philosophy … whereby the Mind of Man may be ennobled with the knowledge of Solid Truths’, and to achieve this abstract solidification of truth required, in the words of Joseph Glanvill (one of the Society’s strongest supporters), the annihilation of ‘The Woman in us, [which] still prosecutes a deceit, like that begun in the Garden; and our Understandings are wedded to an Eve, as fatal as the Mother of our miseries’ (Shepherd 19). Following the Newtonian synthesis at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the explicit aspects of a sadistic method articulated within a misogynistic symbolism become implicit, forming what Fredric Jameson terms an ‘ideologeme’, a ‘pseudoidea’ that provides insight into one ideological feature of science’s ‘political unconscious’ (Jameson Political 87). As seen in its initial period of refinement during the seventeenth century, the methodology of science, in its comparativist dimension, was directed against animals, with the advancement of knowledge unfolding within the zoological sphere. Yet, this focus on the animal, during the eighteenth century, was subsequently relocated to the botanical sciences, and as Londa Schiebinger’s recent study makes clear, one of the best places to view the gendered political unconscious of science was in botany generally and botanical classification specifically:




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It is possible to distinguish two levels in the sexual politics of early modern botany – the implicit use of gender to structure botanical taxonomy and the explicit use of human sexual metaphors to introduce notions of plant reproduction into botanical literature. (Schiebinger 13) At the heart of such classification and its controversies stands Carl Linnaeus, whose taxonomies, founded upon sexual difference, ‘imported into botany traditional notions of sexual hierarchy’ (Schiebinger 13). Of course, I assume that most scholars are fully aware that, within either the zoological or biological sciences, the vast majority of practicing scientists were males. Such sexual hierarchy, as it reflects cultural categories and reinscribes male dominion, emerges within a variety of structural levels. To cite a few obvious examples, Linnaean botanical classification arbitrarily begins with the identification of stamen (the male part) to establish class and extends to the pistil (the female part) to establish order, yet within Linnaeus’ taxonomical imagination, class (the masculine) stands above order (the feminine), a clear importation of culturally conditioned sexual hierarchy into the taxonomical enterprise. In actuality, as any observant biologist from either the early seventeenth or the late twentieth century knows, most flowering botanical species are, in fact, hermaphroditic, with an individual flower exhibiting both male and female reproductive organs. That such hybridity remained beyond the masculine scientific mind to conceptualize can be read in the application of the term asexual to this hermaphroditic sexual process, suggesting that heterosexuality functions as the normative mode within Linnaean schema. An even more overt trace of the normative status accorded to the heterosexual emerges in Linnaeus’ descriptive ‘Keys to the Sexual System’, where plant sexuality takes place ‘almost exclusively within the bonds of marriage’ (Schiebinger 25). Unlike in France, where his sexual classification met with strong resistance from Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (Director of the Jardin du Roi), the Linnaean system gained immediate, although not uncontested, acceptance in England near the dawn of English Romanticism. Although the use of sexuality as the privileged plumbline for botanical classification was problematic empirical practice, in that it was both abstract and less apparent than other modes of classification, the major objections to it within the English intellectual sphere focused on the sexually explicit



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language itself. For example, William Smellie (chief compiler of the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica), faulted the sexual system for eliding a huge range of facts, but his language is telling: he blasts the ‘alluring seductions’ of Linnaeus’ analogical reasoning; he denied that most species (both botanical and zoological) enjoyed ‘all the endearments of love’; he criticized the undergirding sexual metaphor itself as ‘beyond all decent limits’; and he objects that such language was more appropriate to an ‘obscene romance-writer’ than for the concise expression of a practicing scientist (Schiebinger 29–30). Of course, the most instrumental figure in popularizing Linnaeus was Erasmus Darwin, the same figure named as an intellectual foe in Shelley’s 1817 ‘Preface’ to Frankenstein. Although most modern readers find the salacious poetic presentation of the sexual system – in The Botanical Garden or The Loves of the Plants – somewhat overblown, Darwin, nonetheless, succeeded in his stated purpose to conjoin ‘imagination under the banner of science’ (Botanic Garden V). As Desmond King-Hele has argued, ‘the various poetic syntheses offered by Darwin exerted considerable philosophical influence across the historical term of English Romanticism’ (Darwin 275). Indeed, given the anonymous appearance of The Loves of the Plants in 1789, the year of revolution, several direct connections can be made between Darwin and both William Blake and Mary Shelley. The book was published by Joseph Johnson, who had printed works by Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Blake, as an occasional member of the Johnson reading circle, encountered Darwin’s celebration of scientific knowledge, and Blake’s close friend Henry Fuseli also produced several illustrations for Botanic Garden. The connections to Mary Shelley obviously flow through both parents, and Mary was certainly aware of the poetic attack on Darwin’s sexual system mounted by the Reverend Richard Polwhele, whose The Unsex’d Females specifically focused on Wollstonecraft as an exemplar of licentious love by associating her with plants and by further imaging in vegetative symbolism her affairs with Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay. Polwhele, who found Wollstonecraft’s early death ‘a just end to a dissolute life’ (Schiebinger 35), was not alone in his moral outrage, but such attacks were, finally, an impossible rearguard action, for the political and scientific revolutions so much discussed in relation to Romantic thought were accompanied by ‘the revolution in sexuality and gender’ (Schiebinger 12).




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As Jonathan Smith’s recent study notes, Romantic writers were at the vanguard of attempts to slow the success of Baconian induction, and first generation writers, more versed in scientific knowledge than most critics acknowledge, sought to heal the Cartesian fissure between mind and matter, thereby restoring a participatory element to consciousness in the determination of the cosmos. However, one must also acknowledge that even Wordsworthian celebrations of a vibrant, responsive nature remain gendered, and any reading of a poem like ‘Nutting’ can find a residual trace of the sadistic and misogynistic. Such consideration must remain for a future enterprise, since the focus here will remain on Blake and Shelley, whose works define the broad resistance of the former and the specific resistance, through Frankenstein, of the latter. Prior to his inclusion in the Johnson reading circle, Blake was a member of the Reverend Mathew’s reading group, and he satirizes, in An Island in the Moon (written in 1784–5 and revised in 1787–8), both the individuals and institutions that helped promote scientific progress in England. Blake’s Island provides a boisterous response to natural philosophy, which was both playful and comic, and the form itself complicates through parody David Hume’s dialogic mode by wedding it to Swiftean satire. His characterizations also target some of the more famous natural philosophers of the day: ‘Inflammable Gass’ certainly criticizes the Royal Society luminary Joseph Priestley (the discoverer of oxygen), and Obtuse Angle quite likely satirizes the Platonist Thomas Taylor. As well as satirizing other members of the Mathew circle, the work also humorously hammers a significant number of influential writers instrumental in defining Enlightenment epistemology, including Locke, Newton, Hume and Voltaire. Yet Blake left the Island manuscript in an unpublished state, and in his first major publication, ‘There Is No Natural Religion’, Blake takes direct aim at the ideological dimension of natural philosophy, inaugurating a life-long critique of a narrowly construed science. Blake provides, in the work’s conclusion, his justification for such spirited (and spiritual) opposition: ‘If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic and Experimental would soon be at the ration of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again’ (E 3). Down the road of enlightenment epistomology resides intellectual entropy and imaginative heat death.



IV. Blake’s multi-vectored response

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Blake’s stance continued to darken toward the tragic, but remnants of his initial satiric reaction to scientism and deism appear throughout the deconstruction of reason in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790). Of course, as most Blake critics recognize, this resistant reading of rationalism textually co-exists with a host of other philosophical, theological, literary and aesthetic concerns, but the relentless attack on epistemic dualism, the legacy of Cartesian di-vision, forms the gravitational core of the work. In the ‘Song of Liberty’ that concludes The Marriage the mythological construction of reason as agent of outer suppression and inner repression (those traits that coalesce into the character Urizen) first appears in the Blake canon. This ‘starry king’, following the impregnation of the ‘Eternal Female’ (later named Enitharmon) and birth of the ‘New born terror’ (later named Orc), flies into a jealous rage and hurls the child westward, across the Atlantic, toward America (the originary location from which springs revolutionary fervor in Blake’s age). As might be predicted, ‘A Song of Liberty’ unveils Blake’s mythopoeic imagination at its incipient moment, and this ur-myth has received numerous, often conflicting interpretations. In the context of the concern at hand, a short reading of the passage would be that reason (masculine) penetrates nature (feminine) to establish dominion, creating the preconditions for necessary rebellion (offspring) against reductive, constrictive and intrusive methods of ideological control. In 1794, the ur-myth crystallized in the stunning illuminated prophecy The Book of Urizen. Generally, criticism associates Urizen, only one of Blake’s four zoas, with reason, which Blake sees functioning as the horizon of knowledge in his age (the ratio mentioned in ‘There Is No Natural Religion’ and The Marriage). Blake structures the work into nine chapters, appropriating his symbolism from biological descriptions of a nine-month gestational cycle, but Urizen develops backward, proceeding from old age to infancy: Times on times he divided & measur’d Space by space in his ninefold darkness … For he strove in battles dire In unseen conflicts with shapes Bred from his forsaken wilderness, Of beast, bird, fish, serpent & element Combustion, blast, vapour, and cloud. (E 70)




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As Kay and Roger Easson observed, ‘Blake seems to anticipate the theory that ontogeny, the individual’s life history, recapitulates phylogeny, the history of the species’ (Blake: Easson U 72), but for Urizen the mammalian form (‘beast’) comes first rather than last. The gestational symbolism of Urizen points to Blake’s own somewhat problematic treatment of the feminine, although the descent into matter and the body (materiality as mater) generally functions as a fortunate fall, providing a point in time and space from which to stage an energetic return to eternity. As well, the recognition of the phallic nature of the Enlightenment agenda stands at the core of Blake’s critique of motive and method in scientific enterprises, astutely linking the unspoken law of the phallus in the political unconscious of culture to individual drives seeking absolute dominion. The book opens with Urizen shattering symmetry (a boundary condition in Blake’s mythopoeic representation of the process of consciousness emerging into history) in an attempt to establish himself as sole horizon: Let each chuse one habitation His ancient infinite mansion One command, one joy, one desire, One curse, one weight, one measure, One King, one God, one Law. (E 72) With symmetry broken, eternity falls, and the universe receives and reflects ‘projections of the [Urizenic] mind’s dynamic’ (Youngquist 88). As a result, all become Urizen. Subsequent narrative events trace the emergence of the Urizenic world, including the appearance of sexual differentiation – ‘All Eternity shudderd at sight/Of the first female now separate’ – an event apparently requiring a veil to cloak/clothe the separation: ‘With infinite labours the Eternals/A woof wove, and called it Science’ (E 78, emphasis mine). In the book of error called Urizen, Blake extends his critique of reason as privileged phallic principle inscribed within the symbolic order of culture by providing tropes drawn from physiological descriptions of biological development. Further still, the effects of broken symmetry inaugurated by this masculine patriarch’s desire for dominion results in sexual differentiation, the inscription of gender in individual consciousness, and Blake implicates ‘Science’ in the preservation of the phallus, identifying it as an insidious strategy of containment that



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bears/bares Urizenic ideology. Blake’s resistance continues to intensify, as the description of Milton in Chapter 4 discusses. In the final epic, Jerusalem (1804) – which begins with an address ‘To the Deists’, associates deism and druidism, and posits the ‘abrogation of Experimental Theory’ (E 200–1) – Blake represents reason in its current countenance as a narcissistic spectre created by his unholy trinity of Enlightenment epistemology: ‘I am God O Son of Men! I am your Rational Power!/Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke!’ (E 203). Against such restrictive views, Blake begins to image a new science predicated on the dynamic interchange between mind and matter. At the confluence, between the pulsations of an artery, creativity meets physicality, their mingling erupting forth in language clearly describing basic relativistic features that restore a participatory element to consciousness in the determination of the cosmos: Contract or Expand Space at will: or if we raise ourselves Upon the chariots of morning: Contracting or Expanding Time For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the rational Power (E 205) Blake, in Mark Greenberg’s view, perceived the separation of science from art, rather than science per se, as the problematic aspect of the ‘age of reason’ (SECC 116). A number of historians of science locate the emergence of disciplinary discrimination within the periodic range of Romanticism (Hankins 15–17). Even as science separated from art, the very volume of knowledge promoted fragmentation into specializations, yet this fragmenting itself only quickened science’s solidification as an ideology across the nineteenth century. Blake also feared the growing relationship between the experimental sciences and technological industries (opposing stances by the Lunar Society, whose members included James Watt and Erasmus Darwin), for he foresaw that a technological, industrialized society would forge ‘Sexual Machine[s]’ (E 187) to undertake its labors.2 Such are the dire results when art and science separate, where a lack of conscience reifies division: ‘These Principles could never be found out by the Study of Nature with Con or Innate Science’ (E 635). Blake, as Greenberg argues, ‘equates [“ConScience”] with consciousness’ (SECC 116), and as Blake urges, ‘The Man who says that we have No Innate ideas must be a Fool & Knave.




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V. Romanticism’s final gambit As many critics have noted, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has cast the longest shadows across contemporary culture, in part because it provides a critique of the scientist shaped by the methodological dictates of Bacon and Descartes. The protean power of the novel and its varied others – including plays, serial novels, films, even video games – suggest that Shelley succeeded in capturing a core of cultural dis-ease that eclipsed even the energetic exertions of Blake’s genius. In Theodore Ziolkowski’s phrase, the novel displays ‘for the first time that ambivalence toward scientific knowledge that we have come to regard as characteristically modern’ (48). Mary Shelley had ample opportunity to examine the attraction of scientific paradigms and practices closely, since her husband Percy read widely and deeply in the subject (Chapter 6). The evolution in electrical theory reflected in Percy’s work, especially the final acts of Prometheus Unbound, equally emerges in Mary’s novel, although most would agree that descriptions of instrumentation allow little certainty beyond encoding electromagnetism within the work’s ‘metaphoric matrix’ (Ketterer 55).3 In the 1831 ‘Introduction’, Mary Shelley tersely traces the genesis of the work in conversations with Byron and P. Shelley regarding ‘the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated’.4 Their conversations, apparently, drifted through the best and worst of physical theory: They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin, (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him) who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth. (M. Shelley 22)



Having No Con-Science’ (E 637). Viewed in this light, the lack of ‘ConScience’ exhibited by Baconian and Cartesian methodology separates consciousness from material process, rendering them ‘Fools & Knaves’ and creating ‘Science [a]s the Tree of Death’ (E 271).

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Note that Shelley addresses the rather informal public space of science as ideology, which existed primarily at the level of lived experience, but the penetration of the language of industry into the sphere of scientific speculation indicates that the complicity Blake feared between science and industry (‘a creature might be manufactured’) had occurred. As Maurice Hindle reminds Shelley’s readers, the novel’s cultural context was an exciting period which saw not only a mushroom growth in scientific experimentation and discovery, but at the same time a general desire by an increasingly powerful and commercially minded middle class to hear what the new science, and especially chemistry, had to say to them about their new world. (Hindle 30) Science mechanized creativity in troubling ways: ‘the working of some powerful engine … mock[s] the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world’, creating revulsion in ‘the artist’ who rushes ‘away from his odious handywork’ (M. Shelley 23). Victor’s split reactions, then, show at the individual level the tragic results when science and art separate, with the scientist subsumed by the method and its symbolism. For this reason, unlike Victor, Mary can ‘bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper’, since it preserves ‘the truth of the elementary principles of human nature’ (24). The truth of Victor’s nature, his alliance with forces of mechanical reproduction, comes fully into view in Ingoldstadt, where Waldman, in Chapter 5, rekindles Victor’s scientific imagination. Finding the recapitulation of chemical history stimulating but limited, Victor’s enthrallment begins with Waldman’s elaboration of method and its embedded will to power: But, these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its shadows. (50–1, emphasis mine)




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Every element explored in the opening section of this chapter returns to view. The instrumental application of intellect via experiment (‘microscope or crucible’) creates ‘miracles’ (the construction of science’s claim to the status of religion/ideology within cultural discourse). The masculine hands wielding these instruments penetrate an engendered nature, allowing science to assume the place in the sky reserved, under the theological episteme, for the gods. The passage evokes Harvey’s cardiovascular theory of circulation (discussed by Descartes) as well as Priestley’s discovery of oxygen (satirized in Blake’s Island in the Moon). The net result, however, is reducible to the exercise of raw power usually reserved for nature herself (the ability to re-create artificially meteorological and geological phenomena). The passage actually gains in power when augmented by Victor’s reaction to this lecture, which he voices in the next paragraph. He feels the lecture in his ‘soul’: As he went on, I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being: chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. (51, emphasis mine) The lecture fissures Victor, and he verbally converts himself into a ‘desiring machine’ (‘the mechanism of my being’), becoming in the process a parody of that musical instrument most privileged in English Romanticism, an eolian harp excited into mental motion by the inspiriting breath of scientific prowess. As the passage ends, Victor enters an almost Urizenic state, with all potentialities collapsed into a fixed idea. Precisely to what end this scientific pursuit points emerges during Victor’s private conversation with Waldman, who argues like a good Baconian that ‘the labours of men of genius’ would turn ‘to the solid advantage of mankind’ (51), bringing to light the Baconian imperative that humanity achieve dominion over nature. Victor’s pursuit to widen human knowledge and establish human hegemony over nature arises within the methods he employs, which are purely Baconian and Cartesian: I pursued nature into her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate lifeless clay … The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my



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As Blake observed, this empirical obsession establishes ‘Science [a]s a Tree of Death’, and the obvious answer to Victor’s seemingly rhetorical question (‘Who shall conceive the horror of my secret toil[?]’) would be Bacon (who urged the violent penetration of an engendered nature) and Descartes (who promoted experimentation on living creatures to advance knowledge). This insight, as many critics have discussed, renders the use of the term ‘conceive’ grimly ironic, since Victor excluded the feminine from the reproductive process. Victor the ‘mechanism’ – the ‘Sexual Machine’ of Blake or the ‘Desiring Machine’, of Deleuze and Guattari – pursues his ‘occupation’ fired by the zeal to complete his ‘work’, and, even when he expresses qualms for the methods he employs, uttered a scant three paragraphs later, his argument rests on strictly human concerns: A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. (M. Shelley 57) Victor mouths the platitudes of Enlightenment ‘disinterest’, endorsing it ex post facto as the boundary condition for the emergence of human knowledge, yet offers no statement of conscience, since the Baconian/Cartesian methods encourage irresponsibility. Phrased in slightly different terms, the price of Victor’s disinterest, which supposedly transcends ‘passion’ and ‘desire’, is the collapse of his ability to respond, most overtly observed in his failure to heed the appellation of his hideous progeny. Victor can only respond to his own narcissistic, spectrous desires, a reading that underwrites studies which see creator and creation as doppelgangers or mirrored selves. Yet the ‘calm and peaceful mind’ and its ‘tranquility’ actually cloak the impassioned desire at the dark core of Enlightenment epistemology, which strives to achieve a pure objectivity from which to construct certitude in response to a chaotic universe. From this vantage, the language Victor uses to describe his scientific ends clearly intersects the language offered by Oldenberg and Glanvill, who sought to erect a



materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion. (M. Shelley 56)

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masculine science by eradicating the feminine within, which is usually associated with ‘passion or transitory desire’ (M. Shelley 57). Victor’s second act of creation, to create a mate for the monster (in Chapter 20), enacts in a more material and graphic way the symbolic violence against the feminine resident in the first creative act. Having decided to honor the creature’s ‘reasonable’ request for a mate, Victor contemplates the ethics of this act as the project nears completion, and he expresses qualms for humanity as race, although this time his thoughts turn to the preservation of the species. Certainly, one can feel the context of Erasmus Darwin’s preliminary thoughts of evolutionary process through sexual selection and reproduction: [Y]et one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. (M. Shelley 140) Victor’s speculations, perhaps laudable when viewed from an evolutionary sense of species preservation, remain mired in narcissism, since he expresses his ‘true’ concern – how his/story will view his accomplishments – a few lines later: ‘I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as a pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race’ (141). First, it should be observed that the creature honored his word to remain hidden and perform no subsequent acts of violence once Victor committed to undertake this secondary act of creation (the feminine is always secondary at a variety of levels in the novel, as other critics have argued). Thus, Victor’s evolutionary anxiety lacks any factual basis, other than as an expression of his anxiety for position in the master narrative of human evolution. Second, his agreement to create a mate for the creature represents Victor’s only explicit act undertaken to satisfy someone else’s desire. The anxiety itself creates the mental conditions allowing Victor to perform an overt act of misogyny: ‘I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged’ (141). Victor rhetorically ignores the fact of sexual difference, seeing only another that replicates the male monster, and his use of the depersonalized term ‘thing’ for the female creature (as opposed to his language in creating the primary male) provides a linguistic clue to the latent



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misogyny of both his enterprise and that undertaken by a masculine science that has systematically eradicated its feminine face. Mary Shelley achieves, in Mary A. Favret’s words, a linguistic effect that ‘moves the gothic novel into the realm of scientific method and discourse, then makes those methods and that discourse horrifying’ (57). Thus, my reading (which converges with Favret’s) diverges from those, like Ziolkowski’s, which argue that ‘Mary Shelley tells the story of a brilliant young scientist Victor Frankenstein, who succeeds in fulfilling the Romantic dream of creating life from inert matter’ (40). Such a dream, as both Blake and Shelley understood, lurks in the political unconscious of Enlightenment epistemology (its methods and symbolism), and its emergence as reigning ideology, rather than within the Romantic unconscious. At the material level, the very form of the novel is Romantic, in Charles Schug’s terms, because ‘it depends upon its effect on the establishment of an essentially non-logical continuity built up gradually one step upon the other’ (619). The novel’s ‘nonlogical’ evocation ‘of rhythmical being and becoming is organic and creative in nature’ (Schug 619) which connects with the play of the rhythmic in Percy Shelley’s Prometheus and Defense and with Coleridge’s similar deployment of non-linear and non-local effects in The Rime. The science of this Romantic narrative, then, resists the overdetermination of scientific discourse; rather the work promotes ‘a godlike science’ (Brooks 594) which turns away from the scientific discourse of torture and violation and embraces ‘the creation of selfknowledge and human community from compassionating words’ (McInerney 473).




Preludium: on synchronicity 1. Tsongkapa 111. 2. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 22nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Subsequent references will appear parenthetically and by volume and page number, e.g. (II: 2322). 3. A ‘preface’, on the other hand, promises a ‘saying beforehand’ but finds its ontology in Christian liturgies and only secondarily functions as ‘the introduction to a literary work’ (II: 2276), while the roots of ‘prologue’, as might be expected, emphasize ‘a preliminary discourse’ and a ‘spoken introduction to a dramatic performance’ (II: 2322). While the latter term has an appropriate applicability for a book about drama, a ‘prelude’ speaks more precisely to my vision of purpose and end. 4. Derrida (1–27) and Spivak (‘Translator’s Preface’ ix–xx): ‘“book” in other words, is always already “text,” constituted by the play of identity and difference’ (xii). 5. Both Wordsworth’s and Einstein’s thought experiments (although poetic and mathematical, respectively) operate through the imaginary, rather than the real, and share several features, as described by Thomas Kuhn in ‘A Function for Thought Experiments’: ‘On this analysis, the function of the thought experiment is to assist in the elimination of prior confusion by forcing the scientist to recognize contradictions that had been inherent in his way of thinking from the start … thought experiments assist scientists in arriving at laws and theories different from the ones they had held before’ (Essential 242). 6. While accepting Wordsworth’s designation of the work as an ‘experiment’, Coleridge proceeds to take issue with the future laureate’s desire to transmute, in the subsequent prefaces, this dynamic play of complementary poetic diction into the imagined singularity of ‘real life’ (Coleridge: Jackson 314). 7. Kuhn further observes that ‘the category “thought experiment” is in any case too broad and vague for epitome’ (241), and I suggest that the practice defies categorization precisely because thinkers across all disciplines employ such creative acts to achieve their ends. 8. On the Einstein–Bohr debate, Gribbin 178–83. Within the current cosmological paradigm, ‘we still acknowledge four basic constructs of reality: space, time, energy, and matter. Space and time constitute the gridwork within which we conduct our lives, while inside their frame, energy, matter, and various combinations thereof create our world of appearances. These four elemental constructs form a mandala of totality. All perception created in the dream room of our minds are constructed from these four building blocks’ (Shlain 26). 9. Terms like ‘Romantic’ and ‘Romantic period’, I realize, are hopelessly problematic, but I also recognize their utility; such terms exist at the nexus of 182



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critical lines of force, are somewhat difficult to define, yet clearly oscillate within a spectrum of signifying activities. When pressed for a position, I seek greater inclusion (as opposed to wider exclusion) and adhere to the notion of a long Romantic century (1750–1850) for pragmatic reasons. The necessity of exploring different yet related disciplines (implied in interdisciplinarity) reveals that the stratified epistemic breaks in cultural tectonics occur at different times across the disciplines. To use an example close at hand, the advent of indeterminacy and uncertainty in physics, experienced in the first twenty years of this century, does not erupt forth in philosophy until post-World War II. 10. In my case, my lack of indifference can be traced in my commitment to ‘epigraphemes’ drawn from Buddhism generally and the Dalai Lama particularly. 11. For a more detailed discussion of the fourfold confluence, please see Jung (89–103) and Peat (17–26).

1 Romantic dynamics 1. A short version of this chapter was read at the 1995 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. 2. As well, in other sessions, the list of physical, scientific terms and concepts put into play has been impressively inclusive, and I offer the following partial list – since I could not be everywhere at once – derived from concurrent sessions and plenaries: black hole, chaos, complementarity, curved spacetime geometry, dark matter, fixed quantum, force field, fractals, gaiasophy, global warming, green house effect, hyperspace, quantum leap, quantum uncertainty, spacetime, and unified field theory. The preceding statement was folded into my presentation, and perhaps most interestingly, of the 17 items listed only one was offered in the session designated as ‘literature and science’. 3. Such interdisciplinary engagement between science and literature has produced an impressive range of work in the last decade, including: Ludmilla Jordanova, ed., Languages of Nature (1986); George Levine, ed., One Culture (1987); Stuart Peterfreund, ed., Literature and Science (1990); N. Katherine Hayles, ed., Chaos and Order (1991); and Mark Greenberg, ed., Literature and Technology (1992). More specifically within Romantic studies, see Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds, Romanticism and the Sciences (1990). 4. As Abrams notes, in The Mirror and the Lamp, this comment echoed another, offered one week earlier, where Keats, in a review of a Shakespearean performance, exclaimed ‘the rainbow is robbed of its mystery’ (303). The re-occurrence would not likely qualify as a full-blown synchronicity, since this lament was itself embedded in a wide range of texts from the period (303–12). 5. ‘Mixed mathematics included astronomy, optics, statics, hydraulics, gnomonics (concerned with sundials), geography, horology (concerned with clocks), navigation, surveying, and fortification … Our modern sciences of zoology, botany, geology, and meteorology were all subsumed (at least in part)



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7.

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10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

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Notes under natural history … What we call science today was more commonly called natural philosophy during the Enlightenment’ (Hankins 11). I will use standard abbreviations for Blake’s works to aid in identification of texts: BT = The Book of Thel; J = Jerusalem; MHH = The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; M = Milton; and SIE = Songs of Innocence and Experience. An ‘E’ will always designate the Erdman edition. Aidan Day’s ‘Introduction’ to Romanticism provides a condensation of the salient features of Romanticism, one plank of which includes ‘the inspirational role of the French Revolution in Romantic ideology and on a democratic or progressively rebellious impulse at the heart of that ideology’ (4). See Hall (295–304, 328–66). My chronological construction does not coincide with that offered by M. H. Abrams, who believes it ‘ultimately misleading to put Blake and Shelley, instead of Wordsworth and Coleridge, at the intellectual center of English romanticism’ (Mirror 313). However, given the relationship of several aspects of natural philosophy to industrialization, I have adopted the dates argued by Raymond Williams: ‘Of the slower, wider, less observable changes that we call the Industrial Revolution, the landmarks are less obvious; but the lifetime of Blake, 1757–1827, is, in general, the decisive period’ (31). As Ferris notes, the further irony is that the printer went bankrupt, denying Kant’s mental leap wide circulation. At the turn of the century, Kant’s countryman, the poet/scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, would later launch a frontal assault on Newton’s theory of color, pursuing ‘his belief that scientific inquiries are directly relevant to aesthetic and epistemological issues’ (Burwick 2). See Abrams (Mirror 156–225). As H. W. Piper notes, this strain of thought extended back to Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe, which ‘joins Mind and Nature both together’ (Piper 46). Markley ‘Order’ 142; Fallen Languages (1–33). Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (1–92); Hawking, A Brief History of Time (53–79, 115–41); and Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (211–40). For further reference, see Bohm, ‘Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order’ (33–45) and ‘Imagination, Fancy, Insight, and Reason in the Process of Thought’ (51–68). Against this optimistic positivism stands a Romantic tradition founded on ‘a respect for the earth and a scepticism as to the orthodoxy that economic growth and material production’ can be maintained indefinitely (J. Bate Romantic Ecology 9). Mark Greenberg has noted the irony, that ‘the young romantics attacked the Industrial Revolution from a medium created and supported by the very system they abhorred’ (‘Romantic Technology’ 156). Criticism has begun to correct this blind-spot, especially Alan Bewell’s Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, Jonathan Smith’s Fact and Feeling and John Wyatt’s Wordsworth and the Geologists. Of course, notably exceptions exist. For example, Marilyn Gaull, in ‘Coleridge and the Kingdoms of the World’, explores Coleridge’s exploration and deployment of ‘the natural sciences, specifically geology,



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25. 26. 27.

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astronomy, anatomy, and biology as they were known in the last decade of the eighteenth century in Great Britain’ (47). George Bornstein points precisely to this unification in ‘Constructing Literature’. See Greenberg, ‘Blake’s “Science”’ (115–30). See Hayden, Romantic Reviewers (78–9). While accepting Wordsworth’s designation of the work as an ‘experiment’, Coleridge proceeds to take issue with the future laureate’s desire to transmute, in the subsequent prefaces, this dynamic play of complementary poetic diction into the singularity of ‘real life’ (Coleridge: Jackson 314). In 1799, William ‘Strata’ Smith published his influential Principles of Biologic Succession, which reads layered geological features as though they were pages in a book (hence his nickname ‘Strata’), yet his text also enfolds these features within biological processes, a step taken by Wordsworth in his ‘experiments’. Wyatt confronts the difficulties of attributing a specific geological position to the early Wordsworth, who was as influenced by Thomas Burnet (1635–1715) as he was by contemporary geological debate (Wyatt 17–70). Theresa M. Kelley, in Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, also discusses Wordsworth’s use of geological structuration and description in his Guide to the Lake District. See Abrams Mirror (156–225). 82: 306–11. Cited from Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850. Of course, the mythic context identifies Gaia or Gaea as the Hellenic personification of ‘the deep-breasted earth’ (New Larousse 87), the primary agent springing from primordial chaos. As David Bohm proposes, ‘the relationships constituting the fundamental law are between the enfolded structures that interweave and inter-penetrate each other, throughout the whole of space, rather than between the abstracted and separated forms that are manifest to the senses (and to our instruments)’ (Bohm, Wholeness 185). And as seen later, Percy Shelley extends this preliminary position and unifies mental and material movement through wave dynamics resonating in harmony at the atomic scale. This position resembles that taken by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Berkeley’s position, I note in passing, points to the work of Merleau-Ponty (in The Visible and the Invisible or Phenomenology of Perception) and of Jacques Lacan (in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis). As well, it should be further noted that Berkeley, perhaps more often than Blake, appears in discussions of quantum dynamics. I should note in passing that he also cites the 22 November 1802 letter to Butts as one of his inaugural epigrams. To close off this exercise in allusion, I direct readers to the following, although others could be included: Davies, Mind of God (96); Shlain, Art and Physics (9, 84–6, 94–6, 353, 402, 428); Jaki, Road of Science and the Ways of God (297); and Pagels, Cosmic Code (310). The notion of science as ideology has received considerable attention within Marxian criticism. For exemplary discussions of this issue, see: Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (127–188), and Aronowitz, ‘The Production of Scientific Knowledge’ (519–37).



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33. This perspective is offered by Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism, when he argues that ‘canonization and academic institutionalization of the modern movement generally … can be traced to the late 1950s. This is surely one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself’ (4). 34. A related argument is mounted by George Levine in One Culture (3–18). 35. In a typical synchronicity for the compositional process of this book, Fritjof Capra arrived in Tempe (spring 1995) to deliver a lecture commemorating the twenty-year anniversary of the publication of The Tao of Physics. Interestingly, in relation to several chapters in this book, Capra’s talk sought to supplement his influential work. Put simply, the collision between Western physics and Eastern religion analyzed therein found considerable confluence yet lacked a rigorous presentation of ecological concerns.

2 Blake’s deep ecology 1. The need for a reorientation of our individual thinking and institutional practices is suggested by Aronowitz in Science and Power: ‘Social ecology argues that science and technology, by virtue of their subordination to the interest of the domination of nature, share responsibility with state and capitalist corporations for the “death of nature”, a metaphor that describes the increasing danger to life wrought by scientifically based technology’ (18). The point, simply put, is that the very institutions from within which we write are implicated in the processes against which we write. 2. I will use standard abbreviations for Blake’s works to aid in identification of texts: BT = The Book of Thel; J = Jerusalem; MHH = The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; M = Milton; and SIE = Songs of Innocence and of Experience. An ‘E’ will always designate the Erdman edition. For example, this parenthetical reference would be (M 43: 6; E 142). 3. A New Theory of Vision and Other Writings (179–95). In this summational section to his ‘Principles of Human Knowledge’, Berkeley’s stance is quite close to Blake’s proverb from The Marriage: ‘if by nature is meant only the visible series of effects, or sensations imprinted on our minds according to certain fixed and general laws: then it is plain, that nature taken in this sense cannot produce any thing at all’ (191). Blake and Berkeley do differ, as Blake’s annotations to Sirius indicate, specifically in the temporal/spatial location from which otherness itself speaks. 4. Herbert cites Berkeley five times in the text and cites Blake twice. 5. Boyle’s role in establishing the modernist assumptions associated with science can be explored in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaeffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Equally informative is Bruno Latour’s analysis of this work in the opening pages of We Have Never Been Modern (15–48). 6. Descartes’ chilling description of his experimental confirmation of William Harvey’s proposed cardiovascular theory of circulation suggests the radical degree of alienation it encourages between consciousness as rational empiricism and the ‘objects’ of its study. 7. It should be noted that those words from Plate 37 are in mirrored writing, further suggesting a certain confluence between Blakean practice and



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Lacanian analysis. The terms from Plate 3 firmly fix what one might call the boundary conditions of this ‘State’ to be ‘Wisdom, Art, and Science’. Blake’s use of the term ‘Satanic Mills’ in Milton, as David V. Erdman suggests, has political motives, since Blake sees industry and technology, at the close of the century, as ‘mills that produce dark metal, iron and steel, for diabolic purposes’ (Prophet 396). Bate’s high moral argument comes through quite clearly: ‘A green reading of Wordsworth is a prime example: it has strong historical force, for if one historicizes the idea of an ecological viewpoint – a respect for the earth and a scepticism as to orthodoxy that economic growth and material production are the be-all and end-all of human society – one finds oneself squarely in the Romantic tradition; and it has strong contemporary force in that it brings Romanticism to bear on what are likely to be some of the most pressing political issues of the coming decade’ (9). This historical process, in Lynn White’s estimation, ‘is far older than the socalled Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and the so-called Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. These terms are in fact outmoded and obscure the true nature of what they try to describe – significant stages in two long and separate developments’ (6). This might be the case, since the coming of relativity and quantum, as Hayward discusses, has called into question the positivist assumptions that help frame the Enlightenment episteme itself: ‘The work of relativity and quantum theory offers us the possibility of reexamining and overcoming our deeply held convictions that space and time are empty and rectilinear … The recent work on chaos and complexity allows us to see through our unconscious conviction – that order cannot arise naturally in complex systems and can only be maintained by struggle’ (72). To this end, ecocriticism shares a range of critical reorientations underway in other discursive systems. For example, the physicists David Bohm and F. David Peat, in Science, Order, and Creativity, identify a similar fragmentation as one defining residual effect of the older, somewhat discredited Enlightenment episteme addressed by Foucault: ‘Fragmentation therefore arises when an attempt is made to impose divisions in an arbitrary fashion, without any regard for a wider context, even to the point of ignoring essential connections to the rest of the world’ (15). The ethical parameters of an ecocritical agenda would include the following, as drawn loosely from Padmasiri de Silva (18–19): 1. a concept of the value of life; 2. a concept of radical reciprocity; 3. a commitment to the future survival and development of humanity; and 4. the primacy of value over technology. This position, read from within a psychoanalytic perspective, can actually be argued as a sophisticated, almost postmodern, acknowledgement of the phallocratic construction of subjectivity within the cultural field. Thus, mat(t)er exists as a prelingual or semiotic state, in Kristeva’s terms, and the feminine, as such, is simply barred from discourse, in Lacan’s terms (Kristeva Revolution 133–48). This is technically called ‘the many-worlds’ hypothesis first associated with Hugh Everett III, Wheeler’s former student. Several good discussions of the ‘many worlds interpretation’ can be cited, and the most accessible for nonspecialists is Wolf’s Parallel Universes (25–46).



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16. O. Mannoni’s full statement is ‘From the symbolism of the nomenclature to the symbolism of the whole form nature speaks.’ This comment was directed to Lacan during discussion of the role and function of nature, and Lacan responded by confirming his sense that ‘There is something real’ to this discourse at the subjective margins of alterity (Seminar II 34–5). For related interest, see Feminine Sexuality (81–5, 138–46). 17. Bate discusses such ‘natural economies’ in relation to Blake’s contemporary Erasmus Darwin, among others, in Romantic Ecology (38–61). 18. It is precisely for this reason that David Aers suggests that Blake held ‘a far more sophisticated concept of nature than was common among the English romantics’ (12). 19. Hilton explores the scientific connection of the weaving image in ‘The Sweet Science of Atmospheres in The Four Zoas’ (80–6). This metaphor continues to have imaginative appeal within contemporary physics, as in Jastrow’s The Enchanted Loom. 20. I have analyzed this ethical stance as Blake’s muse in ‘Eternal Dictates: the “Other” of Blakean Inspiration’ (99–112). 21. While I have no space to discuss it here, the visual framing of the proverbs just as clearly partakes of this attempt to unveil alienation and fragmentation in an attempt to revolutionize perception’s interplay with the cosmos. See engraving details on either side of the subtitle ‘Proverbs of Hell’ (Plate 7), and the two-island sequence that follows ‘Enough! or Too much’ (Plates 10–11) (Blake: Eaves, Essick and Viscomi). 22. This extends into Blake’s thinking on aesthetics as well. Blake’s ‘On Homer’s Poetry’ suggests an all-pervasive unity as the ideal toward which to strive: ‘But when a Work has Unity it is as much in a Part as in the Whole’ (E 269). 23. The closing language of this sentence draws heavily upon the materialist critique of science mounted by Louis Althusser in two works: Lenin and Philosophy and Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. Blake would agree with Althusser that ‘Ideology has a material existence’ (Lenin 165), especially the Newtonianism of his own day. However, Blake would likely oppose Althusser’s later assertion that ‘The primary function of philosophy is to draw a line of demarcation between the ideological of the ideologies on the one hand, and the scientific of the sciences on the other’ (Philosophy 83). From our location within ‘late capitalism’, such distinctions seem insupportable, since science, during what Jameson suggests is the period of emergent postmodernity, has established itself as a controlling ideology, having crafted for itself ‘a virtually unmediated relationship’ to economic resources of the state and multinational corporations (Postmodernism 5). This ideological presence is discussed, as referenced above, by Robert Markley (‘Representing Order’ 142–3).

3 At the limit of physical theory 1. This debate, which Wolf terms, ‘the strangest debate in the history of the understanding of the world’, found Bohr representing ‘the discontinuists’ and Einstein representing ‘the continuists’ (Quantum 117). John Gribbin’s In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat (64–75, 173–85) and Karl R. Popper’s Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics (7–23) also discuss this debate.



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2. This foursome is quite interesting – the first pair (Newton and Locke) proposed relatively mechanical operation for matter and mind, respectively, while the last pair (Berkeley and Priestley) promulgated a communicative structure between matter and mind – and traces Coleridge’s intellectual tendency to read on both sides of the di-vision of the cosmos in an attempt to forge a ‘unity of nature’ (that is, between mind and matter) through a description of spacetime in the relativistic field of the imagination (Lawrence 213). 3. The terms ‘real’, ‘symbolic’ and ‘imaginary’ are drawn from Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (279–80). As Ellie RaglandSullivan describes Lacan’s three orders: ‘In a narrow and technical sense, the Imaginary order is the domain of the imago and relationship interaction. The Symbolic is the sphere of culture and language; and the Real is that which is concrete and already “full” – the world of objects and experiences’ (130–1). 4. Tipler’s sentence initiates a brief description of Berkeley’s continued relevance for physical theory (212–14). 5. Grow offers, slightly deeper in the essay, a necessary boundary limiting such application of new to old: ‘In applying the findings of quantum theoreticians to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, even as loosely as an illustrative purpose permits, we are conscious of utilizing discoveries from the microworld of subatomic physics in the larger world of the mariner’ (51). 6. Detailed discussions of the relationship between Coleridge and Davy abound: see Levere (85–101), Lawrence (213–40) and Jonathan Smith (77–91). 7. As Ault suggests, ‘The implicit goal of Newtonian narrative is imaginative death through positive affirmation’ (‘Re-Visioning’ 107). 8. See Osler, ‘Certainty, Scepticism, and Scientific Optimism’ (3–28), and Korshin, ‘Probability and Character in the Eighteenth Century’ (63–78). 9. Coleridge knew Burnet’s Telluris theoria sacra, which was cited in Biographia Literaria in 1816 (Coffman 37–8). 10. As Ian Wylie has noted in relation to this mesmeric effect, ‘In the last decades of the eighteenth century Dr. Anton Mesmer became very wealthy and created much controversy in the capital cities of Europe … From the late 1770s Mesmer’s magnetic seances, often conducted with dozens of people at a time, were a fashionable part of life in Paris and London’ (130–1). 11. For this reason, James Gleick opens Chaos with a discussion of Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist who first perceived that meteorological phenomena opened, through ‘pure randomness’, into ‘infinite complexity’ (22, 31). David Ruelle, in Chance and Chaos also discusses meteorological events in relation to chaos theory and emergent complexity (73–6). 12. Wylie (127–57). Coleridge would have derived considerable insight into perceptual processes through German Naturphilosophie generally and Schelling specifically, as intimated in Morgan’s ‘Schelling and the Origins of His Naturphilosophie’ (25–37), and would have profited immensely, as Levere argues, from ‘the company and library of Dr. Thomas Beddoes, friend and correspondent of several members of the scientifically vigorous Lunar Society of Birmingham’ (‘Coleridge and the Sciences’ 296).



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13. The titles catalogued in Ralph Coffman’s Coleridge’s Library are too numerous to list, but in the years either immediately prior to the drafting of The Rime or the appearance of the poem in its final form, Coleridge read on varied subjects, including human and animal physiology, phrenology, insanity, neurochemistry, comparative anatomy and microscopy to name only a few strands of knowledge. 14. Frank J. Tipler’s discussion of this theoretical postulate relates well to Coleridge’s textual dynamics: ‘The remarkable thing about the ManyWorlds Interpretation is that, once we assume all objects without exception are described by quantum mechanics – human beings included – then the mathematics of quantum mechanics forces us to accept the Many-Worlds Interpretation’ (169).

4 Blake’s vortex 1. Continuing reference will be to The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, David V. Erdman, ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982), and I will employ the following abbreviations for titles to Blake’s works: Milton = M; The Four Zoas = FZ; Jerusalem = J; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell = MHH; The Book of Urizen = BU. The reference of the current citation would read (MHH 8: 33; E36). 2. The poetic celebration of Newtonian paradigms during the eighteenth century has been deftly summarized by Nicolson, although I believe she, among others, has overstated the case of Blake’s apparent hostility to Newton. For a more systematic consideration of Blake in relation to Newton within Blake studies specifically, readers should consult Nurmi (‘Negative Sources in Blake’ 303–18) and Bronowski, William Blake at the Age of Revolution. 3. Blake’s articulation of the contraries intersects Bataille’s ‘general economy’ and Bohr’s ‘complementarity’ in its dynamism. Blake’s contraries do not resolve; they do not come to synthesis; they exist in an ‘eternal’ state of energetic exchange. 4. Of those critics cited, Greenberg and Peterfreund have been most active in re-assessing Blake’s relationship to ‘science’. Greenberg, in ‘Blake’s “Science”’, traces in exemplary fashion what Blake might have meant when, in The Four Zoas, he evokes the notion of a ‘sweet Science’; Greenberg’s etymological approach is the most detailed consideration of the concept and Blake’s deployment of the term. Peterfreund contemplates Blake in relation to contemporary scientific ideas and Blake’s critique of Newtonian rhetoric in at least four germinal essays: ‘Blake on Space, Time, and the Role of the Artist’; ‘Blake and Newton: Argument as Art, Argument as Science’; ‘Blake, Priestley, and the Gnostic Moment’; and ‘Power Tropes: “The Tyger” as Enacted Critique of Newtonian Metonymic Logic and Natural Theology’. For a more specific meditation on the epistemological context within which Blake’s vortex operates, consult Christensen’s ‘The Apple in the Vortex: Newton, Blake and Descartes’. 5. See Vogler, ‘Re: Naming MIL/TON’. 6. Susan C. Fox discusses the twofold structure in a concentrated fashion that bears on the experience of reading herein explored in ‘The Structure of a



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Moment: Parallelism in the Two Books of Blake’s Milton’. Mitchell outlines a three-phase narrative movement in ‘Blake’s Radical Comedy: Dramatic Structure as Meaning in Milton’. Finally, following repeated readings, one arrives at a place described by Roger R. Easson in relation to Jerusalem, where the Blakean narrative before us includes ‘authorial intrusion, dramatic narration, visionary narration, and visionary definition’ (312). ‘The poem was partly written at Felpham; it was continued in London; the title page was etched in 1804’ (Damon 276). The most detailed study of the intellectual, historical and textual contexts of the vortex remains that done by Hilton (Literal Imagination 205–30). More recently, Minahen, in Vortex/t positioned Blake, via his poetics of turbulence, in an epistemological line extending from the pre-Socratics to Mallarmé. These thinkers, like Blake, deploy the concept as ‘a mystical symbolic convergence of earthly rectilinearity and heaven curvilinearity’ (3). The Miltonic vortex, Minahen argues, ‘is thus a dialectically ambivalent symbol, effecting, on the positive side, a spiro-helical contact between heaven and hell, eternity and death, imagination and reason, truth and illusion, but at the expense of a negative vortical reversion’ (92). Blake’s name for what I’ve just described, as Greenberg argues, is ‘sweet Science’ (FZ 51: 30 & 139: 10; E328 & 392), and Greenberg’s description of the linguistic levels of Blake’s enterprise intersect my own: ‘The context provides the thrust of Blake’s meaning. Blake’s new union, “sweet Science”, performs what it points to; it effects what it signifies. It functions simultaneously as linguistic artifact and as sign pointing both to itself and beyond itself … In Blake’s “sweet Science”, the adjective in part provides the context. It extends the noun, joining with it in a linguistic icon of the “commingling” of intellectual war in eternity, Blake’s final vision of true knowledge in which minds gird themselves with the “golden armour of science”’ (127). Bohr’s interpretation has come to be known as the Copenhagen Interpretation: ‘According to Bohr, complementarity is an inevitable consequence of the quantum postulate, which introduces an essential discontinuity or, as Bohr also calls it, individuality in processes at the subatomic level, or rather our representation of such processes’ (Plotnitsky 65). Blake’s exploration of the interaction of ‘Spectator’ and universe reflects his ‘holistic’ approach to cosmology, and his attempts to read the entire cosmos as if it were a ‘quantum system’ intersect insights proposed by high particle physics. For example, a similar mode of quantum symmetry characterizes the interactions between zoas and emanations in the larger myth. Blake, along with Bishop Berkeley, was acutely aware of operating in the context of Newton’s optical studies, and, for both, the first vortex to present itself in generation is the cone of vision. While falling specifically beyond the purview of this study, more needs to be done on the conceptual intersections and oppositions in Blake and Berkeley’s positions. Indeed, most of Berkeley’s texts, centered on vision, are cast in Newton’s shadow and written in relation to his defenders, since the Newtonian approach promulgated old and created new errors. In Warnock’s estimation, ‘it seemed to Berkeley that men’s minds had become clogged and burdened with new and old errors; that, in every inquiry and all branches of science, progress



Notes

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

Notes was obstructed by a mass of mistakes and complications’ (16). The thrust of Berkeley’s thought, as he himself acknowledges, ‘led [him] into some notions so far out of the common road that it had been improper to address them to one of a narrow and contracted genius’ (9). While some phenomenologists (Merleau-Ponty) and semiologists (Eco) acknowledge Berkeley’s contribution to developments in their fields, Berkeley, like Blake, is often quoted in the texts of twentieth-century physicists. See Briggs and Peat (112) and Davies and Gribbin (70–1, 91). In the twentieth century, the breakdown in causality suggested by Blake shaped the ‘crisis’ in modern physics, which had to confront ‘indeterminacy’ at the sub-atomic level of existence. ‘According to quantum mechanics’, states Popper, ‘there are elementary physical processes which are not further analyzable in terms of causal chains, but which consist of so-called “quantum jumps”; and a quantum jump is supposed to be an absolutely unpredictable event which is controlled neither by causal laws nor by the coincidence of causal laws, but by probabilistic laws alone’ (Open Universe 125). Blake’s recognition of the illusory division between subject and object has equally been one cause of schism in the new physics. Again quoting Popper, ‘It is often asserted that, in view of the situation in quantum theory, object and subject can no longer be sharply separated. To use Heitler’s words, the “separation of the world into an ‘objective outside reality’, and ‘us’, the self-conscious onlookers, can no longer be maintained”’ (Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics 119). Donald Ault discusses this type of retroactive dynamic at work in The Four Zoas, where Blake’s narrative strategy of ‘retroactive transformation’ subverts Newtonian narrative. The results are always the same: ‘details that are the consequences of a linear narrative chain turn out not only to establish the preconditions of a prior event in the chain but actually to subvert the event per se’ (‘Re-Visioning’ 115). For example, Brenda Webster indicts Blake on these grounds in Blake’s Prophetic Psychology (203–97). Not all of Blake’s imaginative moves against Newtonian concepts have been confirmed by twentieth-century science. For example, in one of Blake’s last letters, dated 12 April 1827, he laments ‘that a great majority of Englishmen are fond of the Indefinite which they measure by Newton’s Doctrine of the Fluxion of an Atom, A Thing that does Not Exist’ (Keynes Letters 168). For a more complicated (yet accessible) analysis of quantum electrodynamics, see Feynman (77–123). As Sullivan suggests, ‘While few now question the Big Bang, the idea of an oscillating universe that repeatedly expands, collapses to great density, then explodes again has for many a special attraction’ (216–17). Here Sullivan speaks to consensus that inflation and explosive expansion drove the early universe, and recent observational results suggest that the universe might indeed have the critical density to collapse. In this case, the big bang event would be followed (in the extremely distant future) by a big crunch as universal gravitation slowed expansion and, ultimately, contracted spacetime. In Hawking’s view, this structure for cosmogenesis was implied by Einstein: ‘Einstein’s general theory of relativity, on its own, predicted that space-time began at the big bang singularity and would come to an end either at the



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big crunch singularity (if the whole universe recollapsed), or at a singularity inside a black hole (if a local region, such as a star, were to collapse)’ (Time 115). For more in-depth discussions, please see: Barrow and Silk (30–156); Gribbin (Big Bang 117–247); Silk (Big Bang 61–126); Steigman (‘The Big Bang, the Universe, and Everything’); and Weinberg, First Three Minutes (11–43, 133–49). As these texts indicate, the matter is, as yet, indeterminate.

5 Reconstructing Byronic time 1. Of course, Hawking’s personal intellectual brilliance is magnified by his dire physical condition, which contributed to the popularity of the book, with the reading public receiving vicarious connection and social currency when the book is prominently displayed on a coffee table. Hawking is a personality, a star, existing in an on-going ‘cult of personality’, and so Hawking is, socially, in approximately the same position as was Lord Byron during his years of fame. 2. Shortly following the end of the Romantic period, as defined by Wordsworth’s death in 1850, ‘A proper theory of the propagation of light’ was provided when ‘James Clark Maxwell succeeded in unifying the partial theories that up to then had been used to describe the forces of electricity and magnetism’ (Hawking Time 19). 3. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Poetry, Frank D. McConnell, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). Subsequent references will be to this text and will appear parenthetically by page and line numbering. Thus, for this quote the citation would be (98: 596). 4. I acknowledge Michelle Briseno for noting this aspect of the poem. 5. However, the idea that chance or acausality plays a role within textual construction does have some relevance, since the poem has positioned a principle of uncertainty – the circumstances of Leila’s death – at the crux of time and narrative but veils that uncertainty through fragmentation of form and proliferation of narrative perspective. 6. Operating within Ricouer’s categories, Byron’s narrative techniques in Don Juan can be aligned with that of Marcel Proust (II: 130–52). 7. Bernard J. Gallagher also notes that ‘The journey, of course, is one of the dominant tropes of British Romantic poets. In fact, it often served them as a metaphor either for self-discovery or the discovery of truth’ (89). 8. Jonathan Bate’s recent discussion of this work further indicates that the poem operates against an even more physical force. Inhospitable weather the year of the poem’s composition, 1816, offered ‘the worst summer ever recorded’, leading ‘to failed harvests’, and in ‘the popular imagination was frequently associated with the unusual visibility of sun spots’ (‘Living with the Weather’ 434–4). 9. ‘Entropy is a measure of the amount of disorder in a system, which, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, always tends to increase with time … Time is revealed again as a polarizing separating metaphor, which divides the unified cosmos into initial creation and final destruction phases. Time appears as a kind of gap in the primal chaotic experience which somehow gives us the opportunity to apprehend and appreciate the diversity within the unity’ (R. Jones 98–9).



Notes

Notes

10. In his 3 December 1813 letter to Moore, Byron reiterates his distance from the ‘fragment’, calling it one of his ‘horrid mysteries’ (Gordon: Quennell 203). 11. McGann also suggests a connection between Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Byron’s The Giaour at the formal level of poetic fragmentation, a reading that emphasizes Byron’s creation of an imaginary ‘fictitious editor’ (142). 12. As Julia Kristeva notes, ‘As the time in which we live is the time of our discourse, the alien, retarded, or vanishing speech of melancholy people leads them to live within a skewed time sense. It does not pass by, the before/after notion does not rule’ (Black Sun 60). That the Giaour’s universe is illuminated by the erased object of his desire, Leila, intimates Byron’s astute ‘diagnosis’ of the Giaour’s condition, and the element, time, that bears the burden of that condition. 13. David Seed deftly summarizes those critics who judge the work by dismissing it (‘“Disjointed Fragments”’ 14–15). 14. ‘But The Giaour is an extremely lively example for demonstrating Romantic fragmentation, with its radical dislocations amid killings, dismemberment, vampirism, and chase scenes. Because it presents itself as a work that requires assembly, it offers a stimulating hermeneutic challenge for those willing and able to tackle it’ (Simpkins 91). 15. Byron, slightly later in the poem, expresses the nature of this attraction. ‘When grappling in the fight’ Hassan and the Giaour ‘fold/Those arms that ne’er shall lose their hold’, since ‘True foes, once met, are joined till death!’ (99: 651–4). Physical theory, as well as psychological theory, has discussed the presence of a ‘death-drive’ inherent in matter. ‘Our death is linked to the quantum electrodynamical process of pair annihilation’ (Wolf Star 142). 16. The temporal progression offered within the line parallels that offered in the previous interlude, which reconstructs within a distant futurity Hassan’s temporal movement from infancy through youth to adulthood and death. 17. Quite cleverly, Byron linguistically exploits the mythic image of eternal pleasure, in the figures of the female Houris, with the increment of time to which Hassan is most attached, the hour. 18. It is also in this section, as several critics have noted, that the poem establishes the parallel development between Leila’s slavery and the servitude of the Greek state that opens the poem. This reading establishes an allegorical dimension to the poem related to the historical and political boundaries Byron establishes in the advertisement. Greece (Leila) is caught between two powers, one West (the Giaour) and one East (Hassan), as several critics (most notably Watkins, McGann and Butler) have discussed. The work’s setting is connected to a specific spacetime coordinate: ‘shortly after the Russian invasion of Greece (1770), and precisely at the moment of Hassan Ghazi’s campaign to “re-establish order in the Morea”’ (Watkins ‘Social’ 875). Leila is a subject Circassian, a ‘people [who] became Moslem in the seventeenth century … under pressure of the Turkish authority which then ruled their country’; ‘She seeks freedom from bondage with Hassan, and if she is destroyed as a result, her will to action still remains a moral lesson to the enervated Greeks’ (McGann Dust 156). Hence, ‘Leila stands for the body of the defeated people, the Greeks’ (Butler ‘Byron’ 75).



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19. As noted above by Fraser, temporal tension between chronos and kairos ‘cannot remain in conflict with each other’, for such temporal rifts ‘would imply inconsistency in nature’ (Fraser 24). 20. The Giaour’s temporal condition has aligned itself with that of the Ancient Mariner, further confirming McGann’s (and my own) sense of connection, and, like the Mariner, the Giaour, following those actions that isolate him, is compelled, in his confession, to retell his tale. 21. While the focus here is on the eye, it should be noted that the Giaour’s ‘fix[ed]’ smile, like his eye, halts time, ‘once more as if for ever’; thus, although ‘Time hath not yet the features fixed’, the self beneath those features, ‘A noble soul, and lineage’ (as a ‘close observer can espy’ [104: 868–9]), is imaged, in keeping with the multivalent presence of fragmentation, as a ruined dwelling blasted by war and the ravages of time. 22. To this end, Byron’s diatic deployment of an initial ‘objective’ analysis of the gaze followed by a more ‘subjective’ experience of the gaze has a distinctly postmodern feel to it, for it intersects contemporary discussions of the gaze: ‘The gaze is, so to speak, a point at which the very frame … is already inscribed in the “content” of the [word] picture viewed’ (Zizek 125). Also see Lacan (Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 67–119). 23. This ‘closed’ loop operates analogously to Blake’s collapse of consciousness into ‘opacity’ and in contradistinction to what Erich Harth identifies as ‘the creative loop’ (xxi–xxii). 24. Arthur Zajonc, in Catching the Light, offers a concise, interdisciplinary discussion of this wide-ranging cultural motif. 25. As John D. Barrow acknowledges, ‘Ever since Newton’s day it has been known that light rays exhibit an unusual form of “schizophrenia”. Under some circumstances they behave as though they are tiny particles, while under others they act as though they are waves’ (World 132).

6 The rythmic universe 1. This certainly seems the case for geological explorations discussed previously, where the discovery of ‘deep time’ occurs through the analysis of objects suspended in space: fossils, bones and rocks distributed in discrete and descending layers that offer a spatially suspended record within which to read ‘deeper times’. 2. Quoted in Grabo (43). Notably, Darwin, in his note to the passage, seems to have made an imaginative leap into relativistic cosmology, when he interprets Herschel’s cosmos as ‘moving round some centre, which may be an opake mass of matter’ (43). This suggestion compares favorably with blackhole theory, which was inaugurated during the Romantic period by John Michell, and recent speculation concerning a dark or missing matter. As John Gribbin observes, ‘astronomers have known for decades that there must be much more material around in the form of dark matter … hiding in the depths of space’, and further notes that ‘the search for the missing mass … is only just beginning’ (Omega Point 4–5). 3. For a detailed discussion, see King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets. His straightforward analysis supports his conclusion that ‘Darwin exercised quite an important influence over Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge,



Notes

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Notes Shelley and Keats, and many lesser poets, such as Campbell, Anna Seward, and Mary Tighe’ (275). Thomas McFarland indicates that the spatial expansion and its scientific language can even function as critical tropes: ‘When Bloom sees only strong poets wrestling for imaginative space, it is as though he would limit the starry heavens to double stars of the first magnitude. But there are stars of differing intensity and size, and there are planets and moons; and what look like stars sometimes turn out to be whole galaxies, which again take different shapes: pinwheels, blobs, rings – there is even one identified as the “sombrero” galaxy. There are in addition quasars and pulsars and black holes’ (41). For a thorough discussion of Newtonianism as ideology, see Markley (Fallen Languages 1–33, 131–215), and Hankins (1–13, 46–80). As King-Hele observes, ‘Shelley’s nearest rivals [in scientific knowledge] are probably Tennyson and Coleridge, whose Ancient Mariner has many tacit references to scientific theory and practice: even the myth of the star within the nether tip of the crescent moon was based on Herschel’s observations of points of light on the dark part of the surface, really “bright spots” on the moon shining by earthlight’ (Shelley 167). Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers, eds, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). Subsequent references to Shelley’s poetry, unless otherwise noted, will be to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text. Generally, I will refer to title within my prose and cite the page, the section/part, and line/s. For example, the parenthetical reference for this sentence, then, would be as follows: (27: III.238–40; 59: VIII.50). ‘The interactive mind’, Henryk Skolimowski says, ‘is the expression of the total of the sensitivities that went into its making. These sensitivities are filters through which the mind views and receives reality. Mind is within reality and, at the same time, of the reality that surrounds it. Like the light within, it illuminates reality; by illuminating, it articulates; by articulating, it co-creates’ (90). Peter Achinstein provides a detailed account of this exchange and its implication for physical theory in the nineteenth century in Particles and Waves (69–116). ‘In the nineteenth century, first Thomas Young demonstrated the wave character of light; then Faraday’s brilliant experimental researches revealed the interlocking nature of electricity and magnetism; finally, the theoretical genius of Maxwell produced an understanding of the electromagnetic field whose oscillations were identifiable with Young’s light waves … The resulting wave/particle dilemma was resolved by Dirac in 1928 when he invented quantum field theory, a formalism which succeeds in combining waves and particles without a trace of paradox’ (Polkinghorne 2). Related fields of study, those concerned with electrical and magnetic force, also had breakthroughs. In 1820 (the year Prometheus Unbound was published) Ampère articulated his theory of electromagnetism, and the following year (when Shelley composed his Defense of Poetry) Faraday, born one year before Shelley and a student of Davy, introduced the concept of ‘lines of force’ and ‘force field’ into theoretical physics. As James Clerk Maxwell later recognized, these advances (especially Faraday’s) required a totally new



196

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

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‘symbolism’ (Zee 59, 62), and Shelley was precisely in the process of elaborating that new symbolism. As Karl Kroeber argues, ‘the primal paradox in the life and thought of Percy Shelley is that, although steeped in the ethos of the Enlightenment, he came to perceive Enlightenment thinking as delusional, especially in its definitions of humankind’s appropriate relations to the natural world’ (120). Shelley’s opening allusion to Archimedes (‘Give me somewhere to stand, and I will move the earth’) enables this ‘activity’, which bridges mind and matter, to also function as the lever in the formal and thematic modulations of light. The first two definitions for the term are: ‘to mix (things together or one thing with another) so that they become physically united’, and ‘to bring together, intersperse, or associate (material or immaterial things, persons, etc. with or among others), to unite or join’ (OED 1802: 468–9). Shelley uses light waves to interweave physicality and spirituality. I acknowledge that Bohm’s work is often associated with a certain mystical strain of theoretical physics, like the work of several theorists to come, but this ‘mystical’ aspect of particle physics is precisely the arena within which Shelley elaborates his physical theory. Shelley, in Jones’s view, is positioned well after science as rhetorical and poetic trope emerges (213–33), and his reaction to that ‘new’ science of Newtonian cast, based on current physical theory, unbinds its absolutes. Like direction and progression in Prometheus Unbound, which is also partially set in the Indian Caucasus, the poet’s journey in Alastor moves eastward, like the direction of revolution in Blake’s orc cycle. Equally, this progression matches the physical direction of the earth’s revolution on its axis, and the cultural direction of the English empirical gaze. In his ‘Essay on a Future State’, Shelley postulates that ‘thought’ consists in ‘the relation between certain parts of that infinitely varied mass of which the rest of the universe is composed’, suggesting that all things ‘exist only relatively’ (Shelley: Clark 177). ‘An attentive reading of Shelley’s poetry will demonstrate the fact that repetition of imagery was a common characteristic of his writing. The repetition occurs not merely from one poem to another but within the same poem, the image often appearing later with a word of explanation which shows the metaphor intended. This imaginative tenacity is not, of course, an indication of paucity of thought but of vividness and conviction as to the correct poetic figure’ (Gibson 560). It is one of the sadder synchronicities of Romanticism that Shelley’s own death so closely parallels the poem’s dynamics. The types of dialogue Shelley explores in Queen Mab, Alastor and Prometheus Unbound operate precisely as ‘quantum systems’, thematically and formally pursuing ‘creative self-discovery through a dialogue with their environment’ (Zohar 194). Synthesizing considerable research in biology, physiology, psychology and sub-atomic physics, Zohar argues that ‘the first substantive evidence that there is at least a channel of communication between the world of quantum systems and our perception of everyday reality was found nearly half a century ago’ (78), although Shelley’s theoretical postulation of this relation would be slightly earlier.



Notes

Notes

22. As Bachelard terms it, ‘every image is an operation, an operation of the human mind; the image has a spiritual, inner principle, even thought it is thought to be the mere reflection of the external world’ (L’Air et les songs 170). The inner principle, within Shelley’s unified poetic and physical theory, is rhythmic. 23. M. H. Abrams, in his description of Asia as ‘anti-type’ (following Shelley’s lead as expressed in Essay on Love) and his elaboration of her function as ‘universally integrative and life-restoring’, intersects my reading of Prometheus and Asia as a particle pair, in ways similar to the relationship between Los and Enitharmon previously discussed (Natural Supernaturalism 301). 24. As Jean Charon argues, electrons ‘exchange this information [on negative entropy] at a distance with other electrons’ and feel ‘the electro-static influence of another electron whatever the distance between them’, rendering it ‘a veritable micro-universe’ (Spirit 66). 25. This general shift ‘from a Newtonian to a Leibnitzian’ (Prigogine and Stengers ‘Postface’ 140) perspective during the earlier nineteenth century and Shelley’s exploration of the tensions of wave/particle duality and other types of waves dynamics produce a poetics of physicality where acts of consciousness are in continuous dialogue with reality. They form an implicate order, being enfolded within one another, and they require generative unfolding.

7 Methodic sadism/symbolic misogyny 1. I follow Raymond Williams’s identification of the period of Blake’s life (1757–1827) as the crucial period for Romantic development. ‘Of the slower, wider, less observable changes that we call the Industrial Revolution, the landmarks are less obvious; but the lifetime of William Blake, 1757 to 1827, is, in general, the decisive period’ (31). 2. Blake seems to anticipate, both in his schizophrenic myth and his postulation of capitalism’s (re)production of ‘Sexual Machines’, positions argued by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1–50). 3. Ketterer provides a pithy summation of advances in electromagnetic theory during Shelley’s life: ‘Between the invention of the Leaden bottle (1745–46) and Faraday’s electromagnetic rotation theory (1831, the year in which the revised Frankenstein appeared) that provided the basis of the dynamo together with the motor and electrical industry, Franklin proved that lightning is electricity by experimenting with kites (1760), Galvani observed “animal electricity” (1786), Count Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) created the “Voltaic Pile”, the first battery (1800), and Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829) gave his acclaimed lecture “On the chemical effects of electricity” (1806)’ (56). 4. Some have argued that Shelley’s conversations concerning Davy and electromagnetism were with Polidori (see Crouch 35–44).



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Works Cited

Abram, David, 57 Abrams, M. H., 17, 23, 183n4, 184n8, 198n23 academic left, 15 acausality, see uncertainty principle ‘active’/participatory universe, 23, 33–6, 38 in Blake, 48–9, 56–7, 95–6, 102 vs Enlightenment episteme, 22, 48, 49–52 see also ecology; perception Adorno, Theodor W., 48 alchemy, 166–7 Althusser, Louis, 185n32, 188n23 animals, as clockwork (Descartes), 20, 22, 50, 167–9 annihilation, pair, 97–100, 194n15 Aronowitz, Stanley, 185n32, 186n1 Ault, Donald, 86, 87 on Blake/Newton, 37, 70, 83, 91, 192n14 Aviram, Amittai F., 140 Bachelard, Gaston, 38, 142, 143, 145, 154, 198n22 Bacon, Francis, 19, 48, 49 and Blake, 48, 82, 98 and Frankenstein, 178, 179 method, 22, 48, 165, 166, 167, 179 and Wordsworth, 18, 28 Baker, Jeffrey, 33 ballad singer, in Byron’s Giaour, 118–19, 120, 122, 123, 126 Barrow, John D., 112, 120, 192n18, 195n25 Bate, Jonathan, 11, 34, 51, 187n9 Bateson, Gregory, 59 Beddoes, Thomas, 189n12 Bender, John, 105–6, 108, 136 Berkeley, George, 34, 38, 49, 60, 191n12 and Coleridge, 66, 68 Beulah, in Blake, 100

Bewell, Alan J., 21–2, 28 big bang, 103, 137, 145, 192n18 big crunch, 137, 192n18 biology, and Romantics, 22 black holes, 20, 89, 101, 195n2 and Blake, 84, 88 Blake, William, ch 2, ch 4, 17, 18, 19, 26, 172–6 and Erasmus Darwin, 171 and nature/ecology, 34, 36, 51–63 and new physics, 36–41, 82, 83–5, 88, 89–97, 101–4 and Newton, 18, 26, 37, 60, 82–3, 190n2, 191n12 works: Book of Thel, 54–7, 58, 60; Book of Urizen, 87, 166, 173–5; Four Zoas, 87, 192n14; Island in the Moon, 172, 178; Jerusalem, 26, 36, 61, 63, 88, 98, 101, 103, 175; Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 53, 57, 58–60, 78, 96, 173; Milton, 36, 37–8, 60, 84–90, 91–100, 101, 102–4; Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 57, 118 Bloom, Harold, 55, 86–7 Bohm, Arnd, 65 Bohm, David, 40, 41, 187n12 on implicate order, 9, 23–4, 79: in Shelley, 139, 160, 185n28 Bohr, Niels, 44, 92, 96, 101, 140, 158 and Einstein, 4, 39, 64 Bornstein, George, 16 Bose–Einstein condensation, 146 botany, and gender/sexuality, 169–71 Boulger, James, 73 Boyle, Robert, 19, 50, 186n5 Briggs, John P., 40, 191n12 Brockman, John, 14–15 Bronowski, Jacob, 190n2 Brougham, Henry, 140, 141 Browning, Robert, 125 Buddhism, 45, 47 214



Index

Buffon, Georges de, 21, 106, 170 Burnet, Thomas, 70, 71, 185n24 Bush, Douglas, 82 Byron, ch 5, 109–11, 176 Giaour, 106, 107–9, 111–35: and Coleridge’s Rime, 112, 130, 194n11, 195n20 capitalism, and ecology, 62 Capra, Fritjof, 40, 186n35 chance, see uncertainty principle chaos theory, 11, 72 Charon, Jean, 151, 198n24 Christensen, Bryce J., 83 clock-time (chronos), 113 in Byron’s Giaour, 108, 122–3, 125–6 clockwork, as biological model, 19–20, 50, 167–8 ‘closed’ loops, 133, 195n23 Coburn, Kathleen, 68 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ch 3, 18, 19, 189n6 cosmology, 22, 23, 35–6, 67–70 study/reading, 26, 65–70, 75, 79, 196n6 works: Biographia Literaria, 4, 27, 35, 69; Lyrical Ballads, 4, 27–8; Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 36, 65–6, 68, 70–81, 181, 189n5; and Byron’s Giaour, 112, 130, 194n11, 195n20 complementarity, 8, 91, 140, 191n10 and contrariety: in Blake, 96, 97, 100, 190n3 in Shelley, 139, 141–2, 155–6 and uncertainty, 145, 156 complexity, 11, 189n11 consciousness and conscience: in Blake, 175–6 and cosmos, 172: in Blake, 87; in Coleridge, 22, 79; in Shelley, 138, 139, 152; in Wordsworth, 22 Constable, John, 26–7 contraries, in Blake, 96, 97, 100, 190n3 Cook, James (Captain), 75, 76 Copenhagen Interpretation, 191n10

215

cosmogenesis, 137, 144, see also big bang cosmological (space)time, 107 in Byron’s Giaour, 114, 134 cosmology Coleridge, 67–70 Shelley, 138, 142–6 of Romantics, 19–25, 136–8 cosmonemesis, 137, 192n18 Coulomb, Charles August, 140 Cunningham, Andrew, 183n3 Curran, Stuart, 147 Dalai Lama, 13, 45–6, 105 Damasio, Antonio R., 31, 50, 167 Damrosch, Leo, 10 Darwin, Erasmus, 171, 175 cosmology, 137, 138 and Mary Shelley, 171, 176, 180 Davies, Paul, 89, 95, 101, 144–5, 191n12 Davy, Sir Humphry, 26, 30, 31, 141, 198n3 and Coleridge, 69, 189n6 Day, Aidan, 184n7 De Silva, Padmasiri, 187n13 ‘death-drive’, 194n15 deep ecology, see ecology deep time, 21, 31, 107, 111 Deleuze, Gilles, 179, 198n2 Derrida, Jacques, 1 Descartes, Ren‚, 19–20, 22, 50, 165, 167–9, 186n6 and Frankenstein, 178, 179 Dirac, Paul, 196n10 Easson, Kay Parkhurst, 87, 174 Easson, Roger R., 87, 174, 190n6 Easwaran, Eknath, 45 ecocriticism, 47–8, 51–2, 187n12/13 ecofeminism, 58 ecology, 47 in Blake, 36, 51–63 in Coleridge’s Rime, 77 and Wordsworth, 18, 22, 31–2, 34–5, 172, 187n9 Einstein, Albert, 45, 192n18 and indeterminacy, 4, 39, 64 thought-experiments, 3, 4, 44, 101



Index

Index

Einstein–Bohr debate, 182n8 Einstein–Rosen Bridge alternative, 90 electricity, 140–1 and Shelleys, 176, 196n11 Elledge, W. Paul, 126 emanations, in Blake, 97–100 empiricism, 48–9 emplotment (Ricoeur), 114 energy, in Blake, 100–4 Enitharmon, and Los, 92, 97, 100, 198n23 Enlightenment, 19–20, 22, 24–5, 31, 48–50, see also Bacon; Descartes; experimental methods; Newton; Newtonianism entropy, 111 Erdman, David V., 187n8 Everett, Hugh (III), 80, 187n15 experimental methods of Enlightenment, 22, 23, 28, 48, 166, 167–9 in Frankenstein, 178, 179 Faraday, Michael, 162, 196n10/11, 198n3 Favret, Mary A., 181 feminine principle, see gender/sexuality Ferguson, Frances, 67, 71, 79 Foakes, R. A., 110 Foucault, Michel, 30, 48, 187n12 Fox, Susan C., 190n4 fragmentation, 52 in Byron’s Giaour, 114–15, 131 Franklin, Benjamin, 198n3 Fraser, J. T., 113 Frye, Northrop, 109 Fuseli, Henry, 171 Gaia hypothesis, 35, 59, 185n27 Gallagher, Bernard J., 193n7 Galperin, William H., 30 Galvani, Luigi, 140, 198n3 Gaull, Marilyn, 184n18 Gedankenexperiments, see thoughtexperiments gender/sexuality and Blake, 57–8, 174–5 and science, 166–7, 169–71

see also mysogyny geology, 21–2, 31, 43 and Shelley, 151, 152 and Wordsworth, 26, 29, 31, 185n24 Glanvill, Joseph, 169, 179–80 Gleckner, Robert F., 108, 112 Gleick, James, 189n11 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 18, 184n9 Golubitsky, Martin, 38 Gose, Elliot B., Jr, 69 Gould, Stephen J., 31 Grabo, Carl, 26, 137, 138, 142–3 Gray, Thomas, 120 Greece, in Byron’s Giaour, 194n18 Greenberg, Mark, 83, 175, 183n3, 184n16, 191n9 Gribbin, John, 89, 95, 144–5, 182n8, 191n12, 195n2 on big bang, 137, 145, 192n18 Grimes, Ronald L., 90, 92 Gross, Paul R., 15, 18, 38, 82 Grow, L. M., 69 Guattari, Felix, 179, 198n2 Halley, Edmund, 19 Hankins, Thomas L., 196n5 Harth, Erich, 73, 195n23 Hartley, David, 68 Hartman, Geoffrey, 118 Harvey, William, 168, 178 Hassan (in Byron’s Giaour), as chronotype, 108, 122–3, 126 Hawking, Stephen W., 23, 64–5, 89–90, 192n18 on black holes, 20, 88 on (space)time, 9, 92, 106, 107 Hayden, Benjamin, 17 Hayles, N. Katherine, 183n3 Hayward, Jeremy, 22, 50, 187n11 heat death, 111 Heisenberg, Werner, 4, 38, 39, 44, 45, 95 Herbert, Nick, 49 hermaphroditism, 167, 170 Herschel, William, 20, 107, 136–7, 138, 196n6 Hilton, Nelson, 53, 188n19, 191n8



216

Hindle, Maurice, 177 Hirsch, E. D., 14 Hogle, Jerrold E., 144, 154 Holbach, Paul, 149 Horkheimer, Max, 48 Huizinga, Johan, 2 Hume, David, and Blake, 172 Hutton, James, 21, 31, 68, 71, 107 imagination, 4–5, 44, 69, 98, 101–2, see also thought-experiments indeterminacy, quantum indeterminacy, 64, see also uncertainty principle industry/Industrial Revolution, 18, 49, 50, 51, 65, 184n16 instrumentation, and experimental outcome, 56, 94–5 Jackson, J. L., 118 Jameson, Frederic, 9, 48, 62, 169, 186n33, 188n23 Jardine, Nicholas, 183n3 Jastrow, Robert, 188n19 Johnson, Joseph, 171 Johnson, Samuel, 120 Jones, Mary McAllester, 142, 145 Jones, Roger, 40, 102 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 183n3 jouissance, 2–3 of energy, in Blake, 100–4 journeys, in poetry, 110 Jung, Carl Gustav, 6, 7–8 kairos vs chronos, in Byron’s Giaour, 108, 125–6 Kant, Immanuel, 20, 136 Kaufmann, William J., 90 Keats, John, 17, 26 Kelley, Theresa M., 185n24 Ketterer, David, 198n3 King-Hele, Desmond, 141, 171, 195n3 on Shelley, 138, 160–1, 162, 196n6 Knight, G. Wilson, 132 Koselleck, Reinhart, 105–6, 108 Kristeva, Julia, 123, 194n12 Kroeber, Karl, 34, 52, 78–9, 197n12 Kuberski, Philip, 14, 25 Kuhn, Thomas, 4, 42, 182n5

217

Lacan, Jacques, 2–3, 43, 51, 185n29, 188n16, 189n3 Lacapra, Dominick, 107, 133 Lafleur, William A., 22 Lamb, Charles, 17, 138 language, and Wordsworth, 29–30 Latour, Bruno, 62, 186n5 Lawrence, Christopher, 31 Leaden bottle, 198n3 Leclerc, Ivors, 136 Levere, Trevor H., 67 Levine, George, 183n3 Levinson, Majorie, 5 Levitt, Norman, 15, 18 light, theories wave, 141, 147–8, 196n10: and Shelley, 149–50, 153–4, 155–6 wave-particle, 148, 195n25, 196n10: and Shelley, 140, 145–6, 163 Lilly, John C., 51 Linnaeus, Carl, classification, 21, 71, 170–1 literature, and science, 13–16, 17–19, 28–9, 41–6 ‘Living Proportion’, in Blake, 92–4 Locke, David, 42 Locke, John, 19, 66 and Blake, 18, 48–9, 82, 98, 172 loops, memory, 129, 133, 195n23 Lorenz, Edward, 189n11 Los, and Enitharmon, 92, 97, 100, 198n23 Lovelock, James, 35 Lowes, John Livingstone, 73 Lucretius, 162 Ludlam, F. H., 143–4 Lunar Society, 18, 175 magnetism, 140, 196n11 Malebranche, Nicolas, 22 Mannoni, O., 188n16 many-worlds theory (parallel universes), 54, 80, 97 Markley, Robert, 22, 188n23, 196n5 Martin, Loy D., 125 Mathew, Reverend A. S., 172 Maxwell, James Clark, 162, 193n2, 196n10/11



Index

Index

McFarland, Thomas, 196n4 McGann, Jerome on Byron, 112, 114, 118, 126, 194n11, 195n20 on Coleridge, 75, 79, 194n11, 195n20 measurement, instrumental, effect on outcome, 56, 94–5 memory, in Byron’s Giaour, 117–18, 129, 133 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 185n29, 191n12 mesmerism, 72, 129–30 meteorology, see weather Michell, John, 20, 195n2 Miller, Arthur I., 101 Milton, and Ololon (in Milton), 85–6, 92, 99, 100, 104 mimesis2 (Ricoeur), 114 Minahen, Charles D., 191n8 mind, and matter, 22, 96, 139 in Blake, 54, 96, 101 in Coleridge, 69 in Shelley, 140, 141 in Wordsworth, 33 Mitchell, W. J. T., 190n6 mixed mathematics, 18, 183n5 modernism/modernity, 62–3, 186n5 Modiano, Raimonda, 71 Murphy, Michael, 95 mysogyny of Baconian method, 48, 166 in Frankenstein, 178, 179, 180–1 of Royal Society, 169 natural history, 18, 183n5 natural philosophy, 18, 21, 183n5 and Coleridge, 67, 69, 75, 189n12 see also experimental methods nature, see ecology neurophysiology, in Coleridge’s Rime, 75, 80–1 Newton, Isaac, 19, 48 and absolute time, 70, 106, 112, 138 and Blake, 18, 26, 37, 60, 82–3, 190n2, 191n12 and Coleridge, 66, 68, 79 and gravity/big bang, 137

mechanical cosmology, 39, 68 optics, 17, 26, 27, 145 Newtonianism, as ideology, 22–3, 37, 41, 60, 138 poetic celebration, 49, 82 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 23, 82 Nicolson, Mervyn, 24, 65, 143 Nurmi, Martin K., 190n2 Oldenberg, Henry, 169, 179–80 Ololon, see Milton Overbye, Dennis, 40 pair annihilation, 97–100, 194n15 Paley, Morton D., 102 Papin, Liliane, 41–2, 83, 162 parallel universes (many-worlds theory), 54, 80, 97 particle pairs, 99, 100, 159, 198n23 annihilation, 97–100, 194n15 particle physics, in Shelley, 160–1 Pauli, Wolfgang, 6–8 Peat, F. David, 8, 40, 41, 187n12, 191n12 Penrose, Roger, 23, 89, 96, 106, 107 perception, 35–6, 45–6, 75, 182n8 and Berkeley, 38, 49 in Blake, 36, 38, 39, 89, 102 Peterfreund, Stuart, 14, 83, 183n3 Peterson, Ivars, 20 phallus, in Blake, 174–5 phosphorescence, in Coleridge’s Rime, 76 physiology, 141, 152, see also neurophysiology Pickering, Andrew, 42 Piper, H. W., 31–2 play, 1–3, 5 Plotnitsky, Arkady, 13–14, 83, 96, 139, 146 Polwhele, Richard, 171 Pope, Alexander, 49 Popper, Karl R., 192n13 postmodernism, 15, 42, 62 prefaces, 182n3 preludia, 1 Price, Martin, 102 Priestley, Joseph, 172, 178 and Coleridge, 66, 68, 76



218

Prigogine, Ilya, 106 probability theory, and Coleridge, 66 Profitt, Edward, 25, 27 prologues, 182n3 psychoanalysis, and geology, 43 psychological time, 107 in Byron’s Giaour, 114, 115, 123, 126, 131–4 Pyle, Forest, 44 quantum indeterminacy, 64, see also uncertainty principle quantum jumps, 192n13 quantum self, 146, 157–8 quantum theory, 52 and Blake, 36–41, 88, 89–97, 101–4 and Coleridge, 69, 77–81, 189n5 Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, 189n3 Rajan, Tilottama, 154 Reed, Arden, 72, 148 Reisner, Thomas A., 161 relativity, 52, see also time rhythm, 139–40, 181 in Shelley, 139–40, 141, 162, 163, 164, 198n22 Ricouer, Paul, 108, 114, 131 Ridenour, George M., 111 Roemer, Ole Christian, 106 Rogers, Samuel, 114 Romanticism, defined, 182n9, 184n7, 198n1 Royal Society, 18, 29, 169 Rudy, John G., 34–5 Ruelle, David, 189n11 sadism, of Baconian method, 48, 166 Satan, in Blake, 88, 89 ‘Satanic Mills’, 51, 187n8 Schaeffer, Simon, 186n5 Schelling, Friedrich, 80, 189n12 Schiebunger, Londa, 169–70 Schrödinger, Erwin C., 2, 38, 43, 95 Schug, Charles, 181 science as ideology, see Newtonianism and literature, see literature Seed, David, 127, 131

219

selfhood/self-annihilation, in Blake’s Milton, 84, 85, 87, 97–9 Serres, Michel, 50, 63, 139, 156, 159–60 ‘Sexual Machines’ (Blake), 175, 179 sexuality, see gender/sexuality Shapin, Steven, 186n5 Sheldrake, Rupert, 167 Shelley, Mary, 171 Frankenstein, 26, 166, 176–81 Shelley, Percy, ch 6, 17 scientific knowledge, 26, 138, 142–6 works: Alastor, 141, 150–5, 197n21; Defense of Poetry, 158, 162, 163–4, 181; Mont Blanc, 155–6; Prometheus Unbound, 141–2, 157–62, 176, 181; Queen Mab, 9, 138, 141, 146–50, 153, 155, 160, 197n21 see also wave dynamics Shepherd, Linda Jean, 166–7 Silk, Joseph, 112, 192n18 Simpson, Scott, 114 simultaneity, 8 Skolimowski, Henryk, 136, 196n8 Smellie, William, 171 Smith, Jonathan, 28, 30, 66–7, 68, 172 Smith, William ‘Strata’, 185n23 Snow, C. P., 42 socialism, and exploitation, 62 Southey, Robert, and Shelley, 151–2 space, 136–8 in Blake’s Milton, 95 in Shelley’s Alastor, 151 spacetime, 89–91, 92, 107, 136 in Blake’s Milton, 92–7 in Byron’s Giaour, 110, 118 in Shelley’s Alastor, 152–3 Spinoza, Benedict de, 144, 161 Sprat, Thomas, 29 Steigman, Gary, 192n18 Stengers, Isabelle, 106 Stevenson, Warren, 70 Stewart, Ian, 38 Stoddart, John, 27 Stone, Christopher, 50, 168 Sullivan, Walter, 83, 192n18



Index

Index

Swedenborg, Emanuel, 53 ‘sweet Science’, 190n4, 191n9 symmetry, 17 synchronicity, 3, 5–9 and criticism, 10–12 Taylor, Thomas, 172 technology, see industry/Industrial Revolution thermodynamic time, 106, 107, 111 in Byron’s Giaour, 114, 115, 119, 128, 134 Thomas, Keith G., 28 Thompson, E. P., 49 Thomson, James, 82 Thorne, Kip, 89, 91 thought-experiments, 3–5, 28, 32, 44, 101, 112, see also imagination time, 105–7 absolute, 70, 106, 112, 138 in Byron, 109–11: Giaour, 107–9, 111–35, 136 deep, 21, 31, 107, 111 Hawking on, 9, 92, 106, 107 and space, see spacetime Tipler, Frank J., 190n14 Trefil, James, 14 uncertainty principle, 4, 64–5, 192n13, see also indeterminacy in Byron’s Giaour, 121, 122 in Coleridge’s Rime, 65–6 and Shelley, 144, 145, 156 Urizen, 38, 84, 87, 103, 173–4 Volta, Alessandro, 140–1, 198n3 vortexes, in Blake, 84–5, 86–9, 90, 91–2, 190n4, 191n12 Warnock, G. J., 191n12 Wasserman, Earl R., 157 Watkins, Daniel P., 109, 113 wave dynamics: in Shelley, 140, 145–6, 155–7, 163, 185n28;

Alastor, 141, 153–4; Prometheus Unbound, 141–2, 160–1; Queen Mab, 141, 146–50 wave equation (Schrödinger), 95 wave/wave-particle theories, see light weather and chaos, 72 in Coleridge’s Rime, 72–3 in Shelley, 144, 148–9 weaving, image, 188n19 Weinberg, Steven, 23, 103, 107, 192n18 Wellbery, David E., 105–6, 108, 136 Wheeler, John, 49, 54, 97 White, Gilbert, 22 White, Harry, 162 Whitehead, Alfred North, 142–3 Williams, Raymond, 184n8, 198n1 Wolf, Fred Alan, 8, 89, 91, 96, 100, 187n15 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 171 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 26 Wordsworth, William and ecology, 18, 22, 31–2, 34–5, 172, 187n9 and geology, 26, 29, 31, 185n24 and science, 18, 19, 27–36, 163 and thought-experiments, 3–4, 5, 28, 32 works: Lyrical Ballads, 3–4, 27–8, 30, 163; Prelude, 32, 36 wormholes, 89–90, 101 Wright, Thomas, 20 Wyatt, John, 21, 29, 185n24 Wylie, Ian, 76, 189n10 Young, Thomas, 140, 141, 162 Zee, Anthony, 38–9, 40, 92 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 176, 181 zoas, in Blake, 97, 99, 103 Zohar, Danah, 146, 197n21 Zukov, Gary, 40



220

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Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics and Politics (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

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