Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry

Romantic Fiat Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry Eric Reid Lindstrom Copyright material from www.palgrav...

Author: Eric Lindstrom

65 downloads 1409 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Romantic Fiat Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry

Eric Reid Lindstrom

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13

Romantic Fiat

10.1057/9780230299412 - Romantic Fiat, Eric Lindstrom



This page intentionally left blank

Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry Eric Reid Lindstrom Department of English, University of Vermont, USA



Romantic Fiat

© Eric Reid Lindstrom 2011

No portion 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, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized 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. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–28236–0

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction: Fiat in Lyric

1

Part I Giving Commands and Letting Go 1

Romanticism and ‘Exaggeration of Thought’

25

2

The Command to Nature

50

3

Wordsworth’s Useless Fiat in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’

89

Part II Ontology and the Lyric 4 5

Between Cant and Anguish: Hume in Coleridge’s Imagination

115

Wordsworth and the Beautiful Day

139

Part III Blessing Cursing 6 7

Contracting Obi: Shelley’s Cosmopolitanism and the Curse of Poetry

171

Paper Money Poets

196

Coda: Nature Poets and Fiat Money

215

Notes

220

Index

257

v



Contents

Since this is a first book, it is pretty much all composed of debts and secret debt. Both on and under the surface, the largest is to Paul Fry. I’m offering a baggy, probably unneeded, footnote. David Bromwich co-advised the first iteration of this project, leaving a wonderful and unattainable model for thinking hard and writing well. Also at Yale, Christopher R. Miller stood out for seeing the potential merit of my aim at an early point, at the same time showing concretely where it might have gone. Near the end of my time in the program, Katie Trumpener’s presence was of signal importance in a broadening of scope that I hope continues. Though I never sent him anything too good, Marshall Brown as an editor has improved several of the arguments included here, as well as their expression. Similarly, I’d like to acknowledge the shaping hand of Anonymous on this project: all timely pats and blows, whenever dealt – but especially when this project was just a busy garland of intentions. A complex gratitude hence goes to the many people who have helped this book considerably with constructive disapproval. (It deserved lots and may yet despite the attempts.) Several colleagues to offer invaluable leads (and to whom I am simply grateful) are acknowledged in the notes: for his conversation over the last couple years, Brian McGrath deserves one or two more. A true friend and interlocutor not otherwise mentioned is Eric Idsvoog. Tom Hyde helped sleuth for the cover art, which led, indirectly, to the choice of the relatively unknown Turner image used on the front cover of this book, as opposed to the more ‘sublime’ picture on Genesis and Goethe’s color theory. At Vermont – a place where everyone deserves mention – I’d like to thank Todd McGowan for setting a constant example of principled enthusiasm. Our two department chairs during my time so far, Loka Losambe and Tony Magistrale, have both been stalwartly levelheaded and incredibly, continuously, supportive. My colleague in the Department of German and Russian, Dennis Mahoney, brought an exactitude as well as verve to his reading of Chapter 7. A more generous scholar cannot be imagined. Then obligations go back. At Madison, Rick Begam exemplified a voice of philosophical modernity that I hope shows too in this book. I still think of Jacques Lezra’s model in the classroom, as if to touch vi



Acknowledgments

the place where I am hooked. I remember sitting in Cyrena Pondrom’s office and talking incoherently about fiats instead of Hart Crane, or any other part of my college thesis, advised by this incredible teacher. She must have replied, roughly, ‘Sounds like something you had better work out.’ Among those who go furthest back I want to thank my parents, Esther and Steve, for providing me with a happy life; and my two sisters, Katie and Amber, for filling it so admirably in their distinctive ways. Last, this book is dedicated to Angie, Veronica, and Maren and to our life together. Though your interests suffuse this project and its fate, I won’t pretend and say your voices are directly represented here somehow – that’s why I need you. A slightly modified version of my essay ‘Wordsworth’s Choice of Fiat in “The Old Cumberland Beggar”’ (Literary Imagination 9.3 [2007], 313–33) appears here as Chapter 3. Materials from that article are reprinted by kind permission of Oxford University Press. The author is also grateful for permission to reprint from the following materials as epigraphs to various chapters: Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, edited Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and translated Edmund Jephcott. © 1944 by Social Studies Foundation, NY. New edition © S. Fisher Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 1969. English translation © 2002 Stanford University; ‘Summa Lyrica: A Primer of Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics,’ by Allen Grossman. © 1990 Western Humanities Review; In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, by Stanley Cavell. © 1988 University of Chicago Press. Von Schwelle zu Schwelle, by Paul Celan. © 1982 Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, München, in der Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH. Cover image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Angel Troubling the Pool (circa 1845). D36120, by Tate/ Digital Image © Tate, London 2009. Back cover image: ‘Division,’ 2010, Richard Galpin. Courtesy of the Artist. Artwork originally commissioned for the New York Times Magazine, April 11, 2010. www.richardgalpin.co.uk



Acknowledgments vii




For so to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. – Milton, ‘Lycidas’ ‘Every thing must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase.’ But according to Mary Shelley, at least as she reflected back on Frankenstein in 1831, ‘that beginning must be linked to something that went before.’ The world rests on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise according to Hindu theogony, since even the most original of creators cannot create substance.1 Just as the American Revolution was getting started, in the most forcible of demystifying language Tom Paine declared ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again.’2 Yet this study will argue that romanticism, heralded by many as the age of the social contract and Rights of Man, instead engages in non-contractual poetics. Based at once in enchantment and demystification, imagination and critical reason, the legacy of romanticism carries on by a series of gestures of verbal fiat. My argument in this book will in large part be an attempt to explain the two initial responses here: the one that stresses continuities of creation (even as the latter word retains something of its strong sense); and the other point of emphasis moving against a consciously willed model of the enlightenment subject. In a sense this book doubles down on what could be an unwanted stake of romanticism, at least for the current scholarly moment. It takes its course through the well-worn idea of romantic creativity seen at its most radical, often exaggerative, moments, and amplifies upon those modes of creation yet further. My conviction is that some of the same poems M. H. Abrams once influentially grouped as ‘greater romantic lyric’ can retain a disparate intellectual life without too much apology 1



Introduction: Fiat in Lyric

Romantic Fiat

for their continued relevance. I think this might become apparent simply, though not only, by considering their strange work under the name of fiat. Fiat is a term I want to insist on for a variety of reasons: it draws attention to rhetorical practices rather than to some kind of naively organicist ‘romantic’ feeling, symbol, or sheltering form; it attests to lyric’s overwhelming debts to a heterodox Bible; and it embeds the lyric in an economics of imagination that I touch on by way of this book’s final chapter. While it does trouble facile notions of the ‘secular’ (amid a raft of contemporary scholarship that does so), the upsurge of a romantic fiat is not due to any entrenched commitment to the One God of revealed religions. Eighteenth-century writings on the sublime in Britain show how, as one of its prime examples, the fiat lux (God’s ‘Let there be light!’) undergoes translation from a divine act to a human rhetorical accomplishment, becoming thereby just a matter of style to praise or mock.3 In other areas, however, what we might call a new fiatism in the very structure of language and social life becomes a kind of dominant form in the Romantic Period and, arguably, in its most important features remains so today. In philosophy (according to the acid but fair judgment of the critic William Hazlitt), a thinker as painstaking as Kant had simply declared the a priori powers of mind in his characteristic work.4 In economics, we can identify a determinate moment for the rise of the first fiat monetary system in Britain. This is the age of the Restriction Act, from 1797 to 1819/21, in which the value of paper money was solely a matter of government credit and its fictive representation: a strategy used to support the policy of debt that alone could fund war on the continent.5 The product of unprecedented events, the emergence of modern warfare in the Romantic Period at the same time creates the environment for a political life based on fiat pronouncements; for as scholars of political theology – most influentially of course Giorgio Agamben – have pointed out, it is the authority to define states of exception to the rule of contractual law (what Kant called Machtspruch in opposition to Rechtspruch)6 that defines modern sovereignty. From his central seat in the revolutionary committee for public safety, Robespierre performed this role in his fusion of virtue and terror. Hardly less dramatically to some, like Edmund Burke and William Cobbett, who deemed the paper money system a royal road to ruin, William Pitt fit the bill of a new kind of speculative managerial class in his extensions of the Restriction Act well beyond its initial passage as a temporary measure. With the addition (discussed in my final chapter) of Byron’s ‘let there be blood’ – the destructive human fiat of modern war, and a startling



2

revision of Alexander Pope’s fable of decreation in The Dunciad – this sketches an arc for romantic fiat and fiatism in revisionist theology, philosophy, economics, and politics. But what about the poetry for which romanticism is famous? The chapters of this book are concerned with reading poetry, and Romantic Fiat argues that poems traverse an unsettled aesthetic mode, not at all contained by the preserve of fiction.7 As such, poetry embodies the extravagance and uneasiness of the period’s overriding concern with more confident and instrumental fiat modes. Neither renouncing nor, indeed, ever securing its claims to fulfillment and presence, poetry challenges us with the very ontological ‘immodality’ of its being as a categorical essence. This in-between status leads to the sort of utterance I at times call a ‘useless fiat’ in romanticism, and highlights in general the unusable character of the poem, which a major twentieth-century philosopher of language, J. L. Austin, also associates with poetry for his own reasons.8 Romantic Fiat aims to show how issues associated with the verbal maneuvers of ‘let there be,’ ‘let be,’ and perhaps even those of ‘let live’ and ‘let die’ all lie near the heart of romantic literature. It is the main post-biblical body of writing to take on such questions after the Bible’s translation into vernacular English in the early sixteenth century. I demonstrate how jussive commands strikingly characterize romantic poetic activity as a mode of creative allowance, or ‘letting.’ In his Grammar of the English Language (1819/23), the imperious Cobbett bluntly concludes, ‘the matter [of the imperative mode] is hardly worth notice, except as a matter of form.’9 Besides the whole question of how much form indeed matters, Cobbett’s own mindset belies this chariness. He let no opportunity pass to rail against the London ‘Wen,’ attack Scottish enlightenment ‘feelosophy,’ and excoriate the paper money economic ‘System’ consolidated with the 1797 Restriction Act. The climax of Rural Rides (1830) occurs when Cobbett stands at the cliffs of Dover and fulminates on how undermined the place is, both on tactical and symbolic levels: Here is a hill containing probably a couple of square miles or more, hollowed like a honey-comb. Here are line upon line, trench upon trench, cavern upon cavern, bomb-proof upon bomb-proof; in short the very sight of the thing convinces you that either madness the most humiliating, or profligacy the most scandalous must have been at work here for years. The question that every man of sense asks, is: What reason had you to suppose that the French would ever come to this hill to attack it, while the rest of the country was so much



Introduction: Fiat in Lyric 3

Romantic Fiat

more easy to assail? However, let any man of good plain understanding, go and look at the works that have here been performed, and that are now all tumbling into ruin. Let him ask what this cavern was for; what that ditch was for; what this tank was for; and why all these horrible holes and hiding-places at an expense of millions upon millions? Let this scene be brought and placed under the eyes of the people of England, and let them be told that Pitt and Dundas and Perceval had these things done to prevent the country from being conquered; with voice unanimous the nation would instantly exclaim: Let the French or let the devil take us, rather than let us resort to means of defense like these. This is, perhaps, the only set of fortifications in the world ever framed for mere hiding.10 I stop quoting the passage just before Cobbett gets to ‘SHAKESPEARE.’ The jussive use of ‘let’ in this passage emphatically moves beyond oratory to something like a thunderous prose fiat. Independently of Cobbett’s prose, however, commands in English poetry are of bottomless concern. For example, to talk about ‘fiat’ poses significant questions about how to distinguish uncreated from historical – produced – phenomena. What is at risk in the urge to bless? Where do poems strike the balance (not often a moderating stance) between their verses’ pointed lack of use value and the rhetoric of sovereign command? How do poets judge between the inability of their words really to command nature – to order the wind to blow, the moon to shine, as Wordsworth does in ‘Tintern Abbey’ – and their art’s underwritten claims to legislate human perception, community, future reality? This language might be heard to request permission; or it might be thought to arrogate the right to speak and power to make things happen. The book’s chapters demonstrate how romantic writings weigh an alternative between the assertively sovereign mode of ‘let there be,’ and a quietist, ontologically charged ethic of ‘let be.’ These are competing forms of imaginative and public life, to be sure, but they share the premise of a revised imaginative fiat. Against other disciplinary realms in which fiat plays a role – and in the context of readings that place literary examples alongside fiat as it is understood in its contemporaneous economic and political, religious and philosophical, senses – poetic fiat alone enacts the necessary attitude of a ‘surmise,’ through which the subject must address things outside language by means of language. This book follows that skeptical and yet creative attitude of surmise through the models of psychic displacement essential to the study of lyric. Hence I’d argue that Milton’s image of lyric as dalliance



4

above – which is, at the very least, an unreconstructedly gendered image – also falls short of an appropriate notion of poetry. A less narrow instinct for what poetry does might be found in Walt Whitman’s elegiac ‘tally’ against the Miltonic ‘dally.’ Whitman offers a form of what one major critic and theorist of romanticism considers the ‘true mourning’ of simply enumerating loss. The word suggests a one-by-one counting, although ‘to enumerate’ may not result in a larger sum. Just after writing that ‘the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird’ (line 134) near the end of ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,’11 Whitman turns to the inset ‘carol of death’ that belies Paul de Man’s definition of lyric as necessarily a nostalgic displacement. (An explosive combination, Whitman and de Man.) If, speaking of poetry, ‘The most it can do is to allow for non-comprehension and enumerate non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non-celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say, prosaic, or, better, historical modes of language power,’12 Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln at least accords with de Man’s insistence on one way of proceeding: by enumeration. And this occurs even as the critic’s strangely incantatory finale reaches a style very near to condensed Whitman. De Man’s ‘prosaic’ mode, too, approaches a ‘Song of the bleeding throat’ (line 23). Hence if I leave the directive to ‘allow for non-comprehension’ until later – to allow for that and enumerate all the negative entailments a reader such as de Man forewarns – it is because I want such a deferral to indicate how the oblique dynamics of ‘language power’ are almost the entire subject of what follows. *** In Delirious Milton (2006), a study with implications for all modern art, Gordon Teskey argues for a shift in the idea of the modern artist from the role of a technician to that of a shaman.13 Building on Northrop Frye’s lucid and suggestive short book Creation and Recreation (1980), Teskey pursues further the idea that Milton is a ‘poet on the threshold of a post-theological world,’ and his works – against their stated purpose of adoring God and justifying his ways and plan – announce ‘the poet’s need to be a creator (not just a creature) in his own right’ (5). In this reading, the monumental success of Paradise Lost undoes itself as an act of theological service. The true subject of the epic is recursive and selfevident; it is ‘the drama of an epic being made’ (113). For that reason Milton occludes a clear view of this aim when in theological harness. Teskey argues through the course of a riveting chapter on ‘Milton and Modernity,’ that the ontological status of the art work as before all else a




Romantic Fiat

made thing, ‘is precisely what every thoroughgoing interpreter needs to forget. What the interpreter needs to forget is the standing of the work, prior to any meaning whatever – to any meaning it can have even to its author – as a thing that is made’ (48). Hegel called such repressed immediacy, a mere ‘This,’ the sensecertainty that enables everything else yet makes for ‘poorest truth.’ ‘All that it says about what it knows,’ Hegel avers in a discussion of sensecertainty that introduces but stands outside the Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing [Sache, not Ding].’14 During the course of a chapter entitled ‘Privation is Like a Face’ in The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben offers a similar point in philosophical context, by relating: ‘In the Symposium Plato tells us about the full original resonance of the word ποι′ησις [poeisis]: ‘any cause that brings into existence something that was not there before is ποι′ησις.’ ‘Every time,’ Agamben continues, ‘that something is pro-duced, that is, brought from concealment and nonbeing into the light of presence, there is ποι′ησις, pro-duction, poetry.’15 It is then precisely poetry that we forget by Teskey’s lights, in bracketing the object’s emergence from non-being. However, poetry does not so much enjoy presence, as dwell in ‘the light of presence’; Agamben therefore gives pause before endorsing anything like the ‘given’ aspect of being, however mere or ‘sheer.’16 Instead he attempts to characterize the ‘extreme destiny of ποι′ησις, by which it dispenses its power only as privation (though this privation is also, in reality, an extreme gift of poetry, the most accomplished and charged with meaning, because in it nothingness itself is called into presence)’ (64). Hence an ontological question is left to hover, around which a difficult vocabulary must form. In what sense does such pro-duction remain ‘nothingness’ even after it has been called forth? How do we imagine the ontology at issue between pro-duction and privation: what Agamben a few pages later heralds in the appeal to ‘availability-toward-nothingness’ or ‘negative presence’ (67)? Addressing a forgetfulness inherent to literary-critical method (how much we set aside before beginning!), the insight of Delirious Milton had earlier been used to connect Milton with Rainer Maria Rilke’s climactic work of poetry: When Rilke completed the Duino Elegies, one of the signal moments in modern consciousness, after ten years of labor, what he said, in exuberant letters written on February 11, 1922, to the princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis and to Lou Andreas Salomé was that the



6

completed work is and that the elegies are: ‘They are. They are.’ That was to Rilke the deepest thing the elegies do: they stand in the world and change the world by their very presence. The same awareness of being a creator in one’s own right sustains Milton’s poetic production but cannot be acknowledged consciously by him without canceling, for a moment, the hallucination that everything has been created by God. This is what drives Milton’s poetry and is its true inspiration: the repetitive canceling and restoring of the hallucination of universal createdness. (12) Whether it is called sublation or delirium, ‘repetitive canceling and restoring’ owes a debt to Hegel and the movement of Aufhebung that is all-important to the design of the Phenomenology. As he circles around the most difficult passage concerning origins (7.168–73), Teskey finds that Milton’s God does not engage in out-of-nothing creation, but that he absents himself – freely defers to the Son – to make that ‘transcendent power’ at all compatible with ‘concern for human history’ (105). In the resonant language of letting I make my subject throughout this book, in Paradise Lost ‘God creates substance by letting it go out of himself’: ‘What is voluntary for the poet, as it is for God, is a kind of release, a letting go’ (101–2). Since God is ‘uncircumscribed,’ a finite world demands the alternate and more bearable ‘goodness’ of the Son. Christ executes the creative act in Book 7, which displays the providential side effects of ex nihilo creation (intentional design), but really is a secondary moment: a new dispensation allowed and opened up within the matrix of uncreated things. This is much as Mary Shelley writes in the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein: ‘Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.’17 The beginning once again is not an origin. An afterthought even where triumphant, Christ’s logos displaces raw materiality. It is in that sense paradigmatically ‘lyrical’ by important definitions, such as when Frye winningly observes ‘the blocking point [that] makes the lyrical poem part of what biologists call a displaced activity’; while, for de Man, ‘the lyric is not a genre, but one name among several to designate the defensive motion of understanding, the possibility of a future hermeneutics’ that enables lyric and logocentric powers tout court.18 Though I should not wish to match wits over Milton, I can introduce aspects of romantic fiat by directing this revaluation to a nearby context. Book 3 is the other account of world creation in Paradise Lost. As




Romantic Fiat

opposed to Book 7, the interest here, though, lies in the poet’s relation to that astounding fact through the apprehension of his own prayerful voice. In Book 3, Milton is not yet narrating the creation as he does later, detailing a series of the Son’s productive technological acts. Book 3 starts non-productively. It is restricted to a language of ‘Hail’ and welcome that suggests Milton fully knows (to quote Anne-Lise François in a different context) how completely in its theological function the poem ought to bear in mind final things and have ‘nothing to add’ to them; the poet should offer nothing new over and above what God has, so the story goes, made once and for the best. Milton’s contribution then, too, ‘would be to say simply “amen”.’19 Nevertheless Paradise Lost is unable to rest with this gesture of ritual completion. Still relatively close to the start of his own poem, the poet conjures with first things. Milton hails the first ‘[b]right effluence’ of light just as – before? – a world has been conditioned by divine word to receive it. At this point invocation merely tests the phatic line through which epic language takes place in this religious poem. Is the communication to Light welcome? Is language working? Hail holy Light, offspring of Heav’n first-born, Or of th’Eternal, coeternal beam May I express thee unblamed? Since God is light, And never but in unapproached light Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate, Or hear’st thou rather pure ethereal stream, Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the sun, Before the heavens thou wert, and at the voice Of God, as with a mantle didst invest The rising world of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless infinite. (3.1–12)20 If the invocation’s goal is to praise the world as it has been divinely given, it asserts on behalf of the poet an intense but non-identical proximity: the material co-presence of language alongside other created things, juxtaposing hydraulic linguistic ‘express[ion]’ (line 3) beside light’s fluid ‘effluence’ (line 6). Yet God’s dwelling ‘never but in unapproached light’ (presumably at the moment of original fiat as now, since progressively ‘from eternity’) constructs the divine mode problematically at light speed. This divine condition exists as a state of matter that moves too fast ever to let the world itself catch up. Humans cannot



8

escape a continual ‘mantle’ of darkness investing experience in its wake (‘Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear’ [3.380]). In this way ‘the void and formless infinite’ submits of perpetual renegotiation by people, rather than by God. It is as though the skeptical argument David Hume was to make later, that you cannot philosophically prove the sun will rise tomorrow – Hume’s brand of ‘mitigated’ skepticism being that you cannot prove even that, although we do live on anyway according to a certain psychological realism – has already become the occult burden of Milton’s lines. The epic feels this burden in terms of sensuous perception and dearth, rather than as a mainly epistemological problem. Insofar as God’s fiat involves the full release of light to delimit the world in which we know our place from day to day, Milton’s language admits to a source of light never really received, and thus never fully successful (or exhausted, for that matter) in instrumental terms: this light ever recedes from contact with the very dimensions of human perceptibility, mortal living. Thus a thinker who is a far, far cry from Milton, the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, in all essentials sounds like him in his meditative essay, ‘Lux Lumen Splendor’: Light is not itself a luminous substance: it is the give and distance of the world, the absolute velocity of the appearing of bodies, the sculpture of their mass, the curvature and brilliance of their edges. It is this that is lux, the light that used to be called ‘absolute’ or ‘primary’: the radiant source distinguished from lumen, the secondary or incidental light in the translucency of surfaces or bits of matter, their reflections and refractions. At the very edge of bodies, lux is folded, modulated, and diffused in lumen.21 Our ‘secondary’ world exists not in the presence, but in the texture and warmth, of this light. Comparable here also to the Wordsworth of the ‘Immortality’ Ode, Nancy marks ‘the precedence of lux over lumen’ as ‘the very grounds’ for the third term of light he nominates splendor: ‘(A sort of fiat, except that nothing would be said; a click would suffice)’.22 The terms in which Delirious Milton shows most interest – human createdness by God versus our own built environments and their strongly ‘poeticized’ making – bear the further mark of a distinct language of fiat from Genesis. Fiat is peculiar as a mode of creation. While this original performative act creates the substance (allows the substance?) of everything that exists, the fiat is also rendered marginal and idiosyncratic. Fiat occupies at once the whole frame, and fills a weird niche, of all the types of creative language and its speculative discourse.




Romantic Fiat

Unlike the sovereign exception of modern political theology, the fiat, ‘let’ form of divine utterance does not so much found a set it then stands apart from; nor – so far as I understand it – does it ever ‘force’ a generic set and emerge as a radical truth event in Alain Badiou’s sense.23 Instead lyric fiat founds the order in which it later moves unassumingly, disguised by a common look or even as what appears still to be unrealized.24 If in Book 7 of Paradise Lost the creation of the material world – what we might now call the universe – gets narrated, Book 3 approaches the vexed temporality of the celebratory language of ritual citation. It occupies a position that is at once deeply subordinate to that all-encompassing fact of material existence, and in both obvious and odd ways prior to it. Anterior, one could say, since Milton’s invocation to light comes before material creation, in unironic accord with the sixday Genesis sequence that makes light without the stars. Never one to be shy in elucidating the murky and polysemous, Kenneth Burke deals with this issue through a citation in his own commentary on Genesis: ‘Rashi cites rabbinical interpretation to the effect that God created the world for the sake of the Law (the Torah). And in connection with this position,’ Burke continues, ‘(as against the notion that the Bible is attempting to say what came first in time), he notes that there were waters before the creating of heaven and earth.’25 For its richness and breadth, John Hollander’s chapter on ‘Poetic Imperatives’ in Melodious Guile offers an unbeatable introduction, whose effect for the present study would be to straighten out the potentially mystifying course by which regular poetic commands might accede to the claim of poetic fiat. In his treatment of commands, Hollander includes ‘the slightly less assertively enacting grammatical mode of what Latin grammars used to call the jussive, the let it be that X …’26 He quotes a Latin grammar to the effect ‘that whereas the imperative commands, the jussive directs’ (65). Broadly speaking this is modal speech; and such ‘[m]odals may be used’ – as is summarized in a German for Reading Knowledge grammar in common use – ‘in the general subjunctive to express imagined and hypothetical possibilities, uncertain or less-than-certain assumptions’ and finally, approaching hilarity, ‘astonishment, wishes, and politeness.’27 Yoking the quotidian specification of directions with primal utterance, Hollander devotes a space near the conclusion of his discussion to the ‘Primal Optative in our literature,’ the biblical ‘let there be’ (81). He revises the flatly discursive emphasis of the Latin jussive given in the grammar he quotes, to assume the magically loaded freight of a full performative command. I envision by this an imperative that neither weakens its impact



10

by claiming its powers only exist in literary fictions, nor diffuses that power into teacherly habits of the hypothetical lesson, in oratory or geometrical proof (‘let us proceed to X,’ ‘let us assume Y’). ‘There is in the optative mood,’ Hollander writes, ‘a sense of conjuring up, of bringing about things, which the more direct specifications of an imperative tend to demystify’ (81). Part of what I find so useful about Hollander’s chapter lies in his supple distinguishing of imperative commands from jussive direction. Because ‘let there be light’ is itself the first fiat (the fiat lux) and the prime example of a jussive in the foundational English translation of William Tyndale, it is a distinction that at times merges into near synonymity. Command and direction differ mainly through patience of tone: direction waits in the hope of securing assent and – let us say – the performance of the addressee’s own ‘free’ choice toward what has been urged: perhaps in the figure of the subjected child or interpellated student. Hence the jussive (English ‘let’) to be sure is ‘slightly less assertively enacting’ than sheer command. Commands appear without the jussive’s enabling formula and its modest, syntactically meaningless, accompaniment of words (‘let it be that X’). And in pressing its claims less monologically – introducing over the act of divine or Adamic naming an implicit verbal reliance on others for assent – the jussive form at the same time aligns with contemporary reexaminations of J. L. Austin’s performative language theory altogether. Through interventions that play highly significant roles in the recent arc of their careers, Stanley Cavell and Judith Butler each both complete and dismantle the approach of How to Do Things With Words by arguing that Austin’s ‘illocution’ (the act formally designated as the ‘performative,’ whose boundaries the philosopher at least wryly attempts to police) cannot and should not be isolated from ‘perlocutionary’ force.28 Cavell champions that latter mode as ‘passionate utterance’ – and Butler interrogates it as the public domain of an excitable speech. Austin, if only ideally, would keep separate the doing of things in words (performative illocution by itself as a formal act) and the way we affect others and are impacted by verbal acts (requiring the test of experience). In response, however, Butler and Cavell forcefully show that the second category is as ubiquitous as the first and by no compelling argument to be divorced from it. The perlocution of ‘excitable,’ ‘passionate’ utterance, is open and contaminated everywhere by transitive effects, and situated in the thick atmosphere of culture from the start: as Austin himself knew quite well when he compared his shiny new conceptual tools to ‘skids under our feet.’29 Butler’s example being ‘injurious’ hate speech, Cavell’s in




Romantic Fiat

effect emerges as a counterclaim for literary inflections of voice asserting the right to praise.30 ‘If we are formed in language, then that formative power precedes and conditions any decisions we might make about it, insulting us from the start, as it were, by its prior power.’31 ‘Passionate expression makes demands upon the singular body in a way illocutionary force (if all goes well) forgoes.’32 I should say right off that my own study does not provide an exhaustive account of romantic jussives. An endless number of ‘let’ lines and their poems go unremarked and, to a lesser extent, the chapters to follow spend precious time on poems without this technical feature. My reasons for an open-ended procedure, I think, relate to the philosophical and affective urgency of the interventions Butler and Cavell provide. Tracking the ‘let’ formula isn’t enough because the range of concerns that make a shorthand for this book’s interests – the literary, philosophical, and social valences of the English language fiat; twined ‘let there be’ and ‘let be’ modalities of lyric; jussive speech and the way it foregrounds questions about who or what directs (is it language itself? the ‘sovereign’ subject or some site of resistance to that construct?) – only gather into Romantic Fiat through our perlocutionary experiences and judgments. No technical feature captures these effects entirely. In each case, there occurs the process by which common words are felt, or not, and experientially weighed as making a claim for our active inheritance. I hope that makes clear how even this unsystematic method of identifying instances of fiat in poetry leads me to another encounter with poems like ‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Mask of Anarchy: poems that so many expert readers have already considered at length. But there are in addition times when we might judge a ‘let’ claim as salient precisely because it barely disturbs, barely prescribes any notice, and makes astonishingly little claim for plenary power in the speaker who invokes such an archaically forceful model.33 Wordsworth’s own Poems on the Naming of Places can be taken as models for how literature might fulfill such a curiously flat, failure-bound mission. None of those places retain the names honorifically attached to them by members of the Wordsworth circle around 1800; and this unemphatic but perhaps inevitable outcome from the beginning feels understood in the narratives of an ‘Emma’s Dell’ or ‘Point Rash-Judgment.’34 Thus not all examples of the poetic fiat of command are as explicit as Keats’s Hyperion, who notoriously fails in his attempt to force dawn and ‘bid the day begin’ early.35 To take an earlier example from literary history, what should one do with the final strophe of William Collins’s ‘Ode to Simplicity’ (1746)? As readers, we ourselves have to invest in



12

a ‘fiat’ in order for that power to reach our thoughts and disrupt the rhythm of a speaking voice – or rather the representation of a ‘speaking presence’ that provides the lyric’s ‘most beautiful illusion.’36 A remarkable feature of this poem is its assertion of a ‘let’ directive that barely raises itself to any salient notice, even as Collins brushes ambitions away and passively assigns work to others: Of these let others ask To aid some mighty task: I only seek to find thy temperate vale, Where oft my reed might sound To maids and shepherds round, And all thy sons, O Nature, learn my tale. (lines 49–54)37 Whether it be admitted as an appropriate part of my subject, Collins’s ‘let’ gesture makes as nuanced a claim for himself, other poets, and the reader as anything in the pages below. Yet the point worth noticing is that Collins’s is so clearly a moderating and deflationary gesture, inserted in the place where an inflationary poetics might have taken off. ‘The “Ode to Simplicity” is a modest conjuration that forswears high presuming hopes,’ writes Paul H. Fry.38 While minimally disrupting the poem, the exhortation furthermore insists that its agenda be self-disowning. In granting his unfitness for ‘some mighty task’ (typically associated with registers of Spenserian and Miltonic verse, as in the ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’), Collins draws from the language of the mighty (‘let’ this or that be carried out) used interchangeably by strong poets, demagogues, gods, and kings. Having just established that Simplicity is needed to ‘inspire the whole’ (line 45) and ‘raise the meeting soul’ (line 48) as if it were cut from the cloth of God’s tent, the concluding ‘task’ of the ‘Ode to Simplicity’ is to decline every effort in excess of that personification’s ‘temperate vale.’ The masterful self-definition of Collins’s craft as minor lyricism, however, in the final sense makes for the weirdly large ambition he nonetheless arrogates. He insists not alone on simply failing of more, but on declining the bigger assignment for Simplicity’s sake; and in the same maneuver Collins assigns, allows, or leaves, the greater toil to other poets whom by insinuation are intemperate. In his resignedly ‘slender song,’39 one might well feel this poet has seen his way through to a critique of the scarcity of the spirit and found proper restrictions on epic and fullthroated lyric. The ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ by contrast fronts the power of fiat much more directly (citing ‘that creating day’ of the




Romantic Fiat

world [line 24]), while it admits to larger ambitions that lead to a more brutally humbled non-fulfillment: ‘Where he who thinks, with rapture blind, / This hallowed work for him designed?’ (lines 53–4). After the wise care Hollander shows in finding a place for the fiat case of the imperative, ‘Poetic Imperatives’ moves us quickly past my project’s recessive area of concern in the kind of reading just outlined. Hollander takes vocational pride in elaborating how poems hold commerce with themselves. A characteristic aside raised mid-essay is that ‘the poet commands his own poetry to produce itself’ (71). To limit oneself to this autotelic practitioner’s frame, however, moots the point of taking poetic fiat ‘seriously’ in J. L. Austin’s sense – as bearing relevance outside such a ‘genuinely poetical,’ craft language (84). Perhaps even more relevant to the needs of an audience beyond Hollander’s poet-critic, the imperatives he charts remain all of the single type of openings. The chapter’s interest lies in the ‘powerful mode of imperative opening … a major long poem’ (66). For the purposes of describing effects in romantic and modern poetry, I would argue, it is another striking comment that guides better: ‘It is as if different sorts of poetic energy and skill were required to initiate a poem and to keep it going’ (69). Poets begin more than just their youth in gladness; they can grow despondent and threadbare of devices in dealing with the Beckettian question of how to go on, which they often address by giving the timing and structure of a revelation to a profoundly non-revelatory moment: just ‘allowing’ the wind to blow or the birds to sing again. Or noticing. The poetic challenge is often to notice and value these things (to feel in addition to ‘seeing’ them), without the bad faith of super-adding an argument that things furnish a human purpose. Hence many of the fiats I shall consider are written in hopes to recapture what Coleridge in Biographia Literaria praised in at least some of Wordsworth’s poems as the freshness of a first world; but in their moments of commanding and disclosing splendor, such lyrics are also about a poetic technique for desperate retrieval, the poet’s surprising urgency just to ‘keep it going.’ Milton begins Paradise Lost again with Book 3. In its theological complexity (does light have a temporal beginning or not? is it on or before Day One?), human pathos (in allusion to Milton’s blindness), and centrality to the poet’s sense of vocation, the poem here takes wing in joined humility and force, truly ‘long choosing and beginning late’ within the epic’s narrative temporality (9.26). And as Teskey points out by calling ‘absolute praise’ the ‘highest human art’ (11), Milton’s subject of praising God with ‘coeternal’ light already ensures in one sense the whole epic’s resolution. The poet is living out



14

human history’s lack of freedom in the failure of his revolutionary moment, its terror in his blindness; the conversion of those realities to praise enables everything else at which Paradise Lost succeeds. Those feats of lyric – ‘poetic’ adaptations of the organism through sublimation and displacement – ensure the coherence of the epic, to draw on a similar effect that Wai Chee Dimock suggests of Whitman.40 Yet the occasion of hailing, to invoke and adore the light, is not unaccompanied by fear of blame in Book 3. I have always found it interesting that the prose argument does not relate anything of this invocation by the poet. Its fifty-five lines go unmentioned. Why is that? Is it just a given that they should not count – and on the grounds of what convention, on the order of whose ontology? This sign of the exceptional and therefore diegetically excluded status of the prayer might strike us as a major concession, or even as a theological admission about the final impossibility of Milton’s total justifying project to subsume all things under his God. He has not managed to subsume his own language. If I can take the associative liberty, it is as though Milton were J. L. Austin as Derrida’s influentially reductive reading in Limited Inc presents him, saying as Austin was alleged to have done that the ontological core of literary voice is an etiolated thing, a phenomenon thereby to be excluded from what we conceive as the very taking place of (‘serious’) meaning. The poet’s beautiful praise and tortuous doubt seem not themselves to be members of redeemed providential history. The opening lines of Book 3 would not be a part of the retrospect on a divinely created world that Paradise Lost seeks doctrinally to celebrate. Even just by assuming its position of incommensurable gratitude for the existence of the world, poetic invocation stands exempt from that given world. It thus aligns itself to the radical, new mode of linguistic materiality, despite the context in which the language emphatically (on the thematic level) remains praise of universal createdness. Hailing the light introduces just the kind of purely linguistic addendum, poetic making, that exceeds and hence performs the incompletion of the model of divine createdness on its own. The many fragmentary temporalities and modes of lyric voice (including the figure of the poem as originally sung to music, its actual character as written discourse, and the reader’s ‘spoken’ performance of what is written, either aloud or to the inner ear – not to mention the tensing of voice and action internal to the poem’s syntax) unweave the idea that lyric exists as a metaphysical whole, or ‘ontotheology’ of Being. As creative addendum, language bears witness to itself, to the very ‘minimal ontology’ (Hent de Vries) that affirms it, too, exists and takes place on the level of a happening.41 Agamben calls




Romantic Fiat

this the ‘asemantic level’ of the ‘pure taking place’ of language.42 I am arguing that for Milton this self-divided and rebellious creation holds true as well; although the apostrophe to the fiat lux clearly demonstrates Milton’s sense that his hymn is a non-instrumental performance, a prayer that so tellingly does not make its way into the argument, perhaps any argument. Hailing and praise enact the linguistic creation through which Milton’s art becomes modern, while nonetheless insisting that the poet remain abject, blind, adoring. In that sense, the start of Book 3 rehearses upon the stranger terms of a fiat the larger point about creativity that Delirous Milton presents in full. The achieved fact of the whole, man-made epic (what we might paradoxically call the dumb fact of language, attested to in itself by language) stands outlined against the work’s pious intent to limn the creative Word. Such ‘dumb’ createdness indexes a poetic materiality exterior to the Word. *** This study’s preoccupations continue the conversation upon those aspects of Teskey’s Milton that, at least in my understanding of his book, are left unclear in the transition to the Fate of the Poet in Modernity. With a brilliance that I hope not to have slighted, Teskey nonetheless omits any nuanced gestures toward romanticism in his claim that the modern ‘artist begins to play a new and unfamiliar role, as one who mediates spiritual power, like a shaman’ (2). The opening chapters and the very end of Teskey’s book marvelously analyze several lyrics of European romantic modernity (including works by Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, and Celan), but beyond moments in which we are made tangentially aware of the ideological presence of Blake’s ‘Satanic’ Milton, the connections do not extend for some reason to British romantics. Wordsworth is discussed at relative length (35–8), with the end result that he is oddly judged too shamanistic. The Prelude is ‘resolved in the logic of shamanism, by which the poet becomes the medium for transmitting the secrets of nature’ (36). Doubtless that tone attests to a more general concern over indeed just how much can be ‘resolved’ by Wordsworth’s strand of romanticism: how much, and how readily. If one common judgment on romanticism’s position in the at once broader and more modest field of lyric studies points to a ‘Shelleyan’ habit to exaggerate the influence of poets beyond their poems’ ‘material elements,’43 a second paradigm of judgment is unsettled by Wordsworth’s habitual peacemaking in the narrative that threatens to split apart the psyches of modern artists.



16

I hope this book will make an embodied rejoinder to such real distrust of unearned or overkill success, especially the suspicion long held against Wordsworth and all his available resources for partaking of resolution. Placing my work along with that of several important current scholars of romanticism, this book means to counter and persuade those still repeating the morals of some former solutions allegedly provided by romantic lyric. A cliché has it that the language of the romantics – think of Coleridge in ‘Kubla Khan’ – originates by the poet’s ‘fiat,’ by which I suppose is meant an especially intense kind of expression that is fully selfcontained as if in a ‘world’ language itself has made.44 Coleridge near the end of that poem announces his conditional intent to build a ‘dome in air’ (Hebrew raquia, the ‘firmament’ that caps the world and supplants a dark and formless void) in echo of the Khan’s earlier-performed ‘decree’ to have a ‘pleasure dome’ built. As a means to assert how language applies to the world non-naturally, a rhetorical critic such as Paul de Man can think of all language as operating by fiat. A poet’s words ‘originate out of nothing, in an attempt to be the first words that will arise as if they were natural objects,’ de Man penetratingly asserts of Hölderlin.45 Stopping at de Man’s phrase, ‘originate out of nothing,’ we might notice how readily this grants fiat to the intrinsic prerogative of language. Yet in context the argument devalues that magical fulfillment of fiat-like potency, because the important thing about such divine, given language for de Man is that it fails to support either a humanistic or naturalistic attitude about what language is and does. The prized casket has been switched out in his account. It has (been?) moved from the authority of godlike utterance – limitless actualized will – to the non-cognitive grounding of ‘natural objects.’46 De Man’s privileged sense for the poetry of romanticism and after moves from creation out of nothing, then, to an epiphanic relation toward what all along remains beyond language. He grants fiat to lyric as a strange and inhuman prerogative of all language, because he realizes that every modern poem wishes instead for something else: for its own words to be ‘the first words’ of unalienated nature. For de Man, language posits a fiat, posits on fiat by its own ineluctable but hollow force (‘language power’). In a silent reversal of Genesis, he ascribes a poetics of fiat to denote the absence of providential meaning and our lack of access to the content of things in themselves. This linguistic economy necessarily ever falls short of any representational grasp, any naturalized ground or humanizing process. His perspective of course has radical implications upon what reading involves. That scene




Romantic Fiat

of reading has shed any reference from such a poetics of fiat back to the monotheistic God or to Hölderlin’s Greek gods – to a heavenly metaphysic or to any alternative and celebratory poetics of the earth. De Man ruthlessly clarifies what is an ambivalent legacy of eighteenth-century and romantic philosophy of language running from Locke, Condillac, Rousseau, and Horne Tooke to Coleridge and Percy Shelley – are words in any way ‘natural,’ grounded with other ‘things’? – by claiming that language power is fundamentally arbitrary. He does this even while the very pattern for our image of the arbitrary moves from the sovereign idea of God to the force of language itself: to grammar and syntax instead of the substantive Word of divine origin. The deep truth that Shelley evokes of Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound is henceforward radically imageless in our secular imaginings. But how secular really is that, if God in the Torah is imageless to begin with?47 From the Christian tradition, the Latin term fiat and its peculiar resonance in English as a spectrum of remissive ‘let’ statements have not garnered a great deal of critical attention.48 The main idea of this book is that a romantic practice and the spectrum of its rhetoric modify God’s fiat lux (‘let there be light’) in ways not yet accounted for by existing scholarship, including M. H. Abrams’s formative past work on romantic Natural Supernaturalism as a displacement of religion. Hence verbal forms themselves provide my starting place for departure. A characteristically romantic gesture extravagantly eludes the Greek optative and Latin subjunctive moods. Both these classical languages use ‘subordinate’ clauses that declare their own wishfulness in terms of fictional or hypothetical statements, as the narrower modal range of English cannot delimit. Wishful fictions in English appear in ordinary moods. And what makes this more than a simple technicality, the English language of everyday occurrence absorbs qualities of a literary uncanniness as a result: and, vice versa, literary ‘immodality’ bears relation to everyday meaning. We might all say ‘let us now open our books’ quite unremarkably: it is the hortatory subjunctive. But when ‘let’ is used to press claims outside mechanized routine and beyond human control (many examples for which will appear in these chapters), it escapes the Latin jussive’s ‘independent’ clause within its frame for plausible commandment.49 Just as in English there is no récit to signal narrative as such, there is no independently signaled fictive mode in the fiats of lyric. The larger context for this book’s argument involves the idea that such implausible and remissive ‘let’ statements reveal pressure points at the breakdown of routine: those within the divided self; in the makeup of poems; and in terms of value-exchange and historical events. These



18

‘let’ signatures and other moments of urgent, but not always rationally supportable, fiat-making suggestively resonate with ongoing philosophical engagement over a modernity whose crux issues – among them the fissured subject, enlightenment unreason, capitalism, consumerism, and a decisive phase in the turn toward modern credit – all take much of their ‘modern’ and even postmodern trajectory from romantic developments. (Though literature is never a mere rehearsal of these developments.) In the poems and other texts I examine, the appearance of fiat proves unjustifiable in terms of any utilitarian yield or rational ground. In the process, the lyric comes to involve conceptual trespass in and out of the counterfactual moods with the force of what nonetheless is – sense-certainty, the deictic aspect of language, ‘here,’ ‘now,’ all of which gain a kind of universality at the cost of fixed reference. Reflecting upon and in my own register extending some very recent, exciting work in romanticism and Wordsworth studies, especially Simon Jarvis’s Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (2007), Anne-Lise François’s Open Secrets (2008), and Paul H. Fry’s Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (2008), in this book that explores a range of authors I raise the idea of romantic fiat and present an argument for ontological leveling or immanence. Romantic Fiat articulates both the claims and perils of immanence in romanticism, suggesting from there the volatile premise of ongoing modernity in the everyday exercise of pervasive, imaginatively charged belief. By this process the ‘modern’ may be said to involve a submersion of fiat – the unilateral imposition of an arbitrary order through language – into all the functions of credit: the latter a key part of the multilateral and internationally buoyed system based on perceived ‘legitimacy,’ from the World Bank to the United Nations. The last turn of argument, Chapter 7, therefore treats a constellation of romantic and modern metadiscourses of value. By way of a conclusion, which also serves as a kind of valedictory ‘reintroduction,’ I read a close but not identical authority behind literary and economic fiat, finding in the promissory structure of paper money an analogy with lyric poems. Throughout, what I call a ‘useless’ fiat specifically in Chapter 3 emerges as a non-instrumental disclosure. This is not a rhetoric of divine and unilaterally arbitrary command, but of the non-human and unmade as glimpsed through a unique kind of third-person apostrophe that claims to ‘let live.’ My leading example for this effect, without which there would be no study, comes from Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey.’ It is the moment which climaxes ‘Therefore / Let the moon shine on thee in thy solitary walk’ (lines 135–6). The gesture serves as one last effort to air out the




Romantic Fiat

poet’s feelings of skepticism and separation, and to reconnect him once more to sheer ambient life through Dorothy, all too improbably. Wordsworth critics know this extended passage as the ‘turn’ or ‘address’ to Dorothy. Here the poet gives us a rhetoric that acknowledges – as if this needed to be done – the continued existence of Dorothy and the moon as physical bodies, together after the poet’s notional death and in some kind of proximity with the added elements of moon ‘shine’ and the wind’s freedom simply to ‘blow.’50 Moments such as this all but flaunt the inconsequence of lyric command on the level of a speaker’s reasoned intent. This could be like a spent politician telling another’s race to go on, blessing because what else can be done? As Stanley Cavell notes, the poet writes as though taking leave of the world. Except Wordsworth in 1798 has not yet ‘lost’ and is not at all leaving the scene of his poetic calling. It is in ‘Tintern Abbey’ precisely that he announces his arrival at poetic majority in Miltonic cadences. Nonetheless, such moments fulfill the indirect function of lyric like nothing else. They give an indexical notice just simply to the fact that things, including other people, exist in a non-trivial sense.51 The effect announces a gift of the lyric’s failure as a tissue of logic. Through extended readings of poems based in a ‘skeptical anthropology’52 that I hope my approach to ‘Tintern Abbey’ already evinces to a degree, I see a double legacy of blessing and curse in the unfinished promise to realize what Wordsworth calls ‘the very world, which is the world / Of all of us.’ Yet having a ‘world’ is decidedly not a given we all share as humans, not to mention with other modes of non-human life. In the sense Hannah Arendt often used, world is a constructed artifact of social and political life. ‘World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen,’ Martin Heidegger with more opacity writes. ‘World is the evernonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse, keep us transported into Being.’ And later, ‘[e]arth juts through the world and world grounds itself on the earth’; but the poetic work ‘lets the earth be an earth.’53 After establishing that theme of romantic fiat, poetic calling forth and letting be, in the aspect of a difficult benediction in Chapters 1 and 2, the book traces the compulsory obverse of this blessing, variously expressed by Coleridge as Wordsworth’s ‘mental bombast’ in Biographia Literaria (1817), and by Percy Shelley as his voodoo-like ‘Obi’ in Peter Bell the Third (1819): the subjects, respectively, of Chapters 4 and 6. These other writers show at least a partial intuition of what Paul Fry ascribes to Wordsworth’s sole originality, in a life’s theme even he occasionally did not recognize, or wish to own. Each later writer replies



20

with a variant of acknowledgment and doubt toward this achievement of Wordsworth: that ‘this will never do’ (as Francis Jeffrey began his notorious review of The Excursion); or ‘this is not what either poetry or philosophy is for’ (my paraphrase of what Coleridge thought); or ‘why does he get to have that relation to life’ (a more radical speculation about Shelley’s poetry, in its complex envy of Wordsworth’s seemingly totalizing economy of spirit, and no doubt a description of Coleridge on a biographical level concerning the Wordsworth household he envied). There intervenes in every case an immanent relation of curses or the ‘bad immanence’ of fears that prove self-legislating in an interestingly Kantian sense. This reaction, which demystifies the self as enthralled to aesthetic illusion or ‘Schein,’ Wordsworth actually performs upon himself in the ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ known better as ‘Peele Castle,’ as I discuss in Chapter 5, ‘Wordsworth and the Beautiful Day.’ *** A word about what one might call this book’s political aesthetics. A subtext of Romantic Fiat challenges the tradition of contract theory – ultimately a ‘liberal’ tradition – as both a narrative scene concerning the origins of society and as a central instance of how performative language works. The account I offer instead splinters away from the enlightenment discourse of explicit language and knowledge, conscious self-possession, in at least two directions. As many other recent efforts in the field have done more concertedly,54 in the process my own study revises the presumptive models of the self and willed meaning that romanticism inherits from the enlightenment, and which many students of romanticism falsely nominate as the romantic: the premise of an autonomous and expressively coherent individual subject. The acknowledgment of these two directions constitutes this book’s most systematic attempt to chart romantic political aesthetics, in what has been a vexed, often oversimplified area of concern at least since the major New Historicist surge of revisionism in the 1980s. First (after the model of James Chandler and others), portions of my argument do indeed trace the Burke–Hume line that where possible seeks to deepen the channel of habit as a matter of conservational (perhaps at times ‘conservative’) feeling. But the writers I follow can also move, sometimes within a text, in the ‘opposite’ political direction along the crude poles from right to left. This is because the moment when romanticism says so long to the Rights of Man – as Melville has Billy Budd say to a ship – also provides the opening where a radical political aesthetic can




Romantic Fiat

and must take its conditions of emergence. We see this problematic opportunity, for example, in Robespierre’s enunciation of a politics of ‘virtue and terror’; a little less controversially, one might follow it in Kant’s at times positive remit for the state exercise of Machtspruch over Rechtspruch: his theorization of the sovereign sentence (for instance, in an executive pardon) as opposed to the inflexible rule of law. This call of and for a powerfully non-liberal democratic theory is heard in the ‘late’ Derrida’s articulation of a justice beyond law, a move that has everything to do with what Derrida makes of literature. The remaining potential and challenging examples of radical ‘lost causes’ – the Terror, Heidegger’s complicit critique of modernity, failed soviet utopias, French Maoism – have informed in recent years the bracing projects of Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.55 Whatever risks they run of popularization (in the first case) and technically-dense obscurity and violent militancy (in the second), these efforts show how romantic projects lie unfinished even where they have been ostensibly defeated, discredited, and exorcised.



22

Giving Commands and Letting Go

The Imperative Mode is mentioned here merely for form’s sake. It is that state of the Verb which commands, orders, bids, calls to, or invokes: as, come hither; be good; march away; pay me. In other languages there are changes in the spelling of the Verbs to answer to this mode; but in ours there are none of these; and therefore the matter is hardly worth notice, except as a mere matter of form. IMPERATIVE MODE. Let me work, Work thou, Let him work

Let us work. Work you. Let them work. – William Cobbett, from A Grammar of the English Language (1823)



Part I




Romanticism and ‘Exaggeration of Thought’

The style of our modern poets, is that, no doubt, by which they are most easily distinguished: but their genius has also an internal character; and the peculiarities of their taste may be discovered, without the assistance of their diction. Next after great familiarity of language, there is nothing that appears to them so meritorious as perpetual exaggeration of thought. There must be nothing moderate, natural, or easy, about their sentiments. There must be a ‘qu’il mourut,’ and a ‘let there be light,’ in every line; and all their characters must be in agonies and ecstasies, from their entrance to their exit. – Francis Jeffrey, unsigned review of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1802)1 Listening to a strong critic gather up and reject a thought can disclose its appeal in a fresh way. In an aside that wants to relegate – but instead invites future work – a leading critic of modern poetry recently complained of deconstructive theory’s surreptitious embrace of ‘moral idealism,’ ‘since its newest versions are replete with the talk of “knowledge of the heart” and “the ethics of letting be.”’2 The epigraph above has that same inadvertent generativity for me. It comes from the Scottish reviewer Francis Jeffrey; and it attacks the exaggerative thinking of ‘our modern poets’ – our romantics – from the other, overactive, side of a shared topic of jussive command. No doubt beyond his own aim, Jeffrey suggests in this famous review that a common excess links the biblical ‘let there be light,’ the French order ‘let him die,’ and the deconstructive ‘letting be’ of a later theoretical moment that also comes across French. 25



1

Romantic Fiat

Written in an age when literary criticism wielded impact, Jeffrey’s act of ‘Thalabacide’ upon eventual poet laureate Robert Southey has been regarded as a definitive text of romantic-era criticism ever since. Yet to this point, commentators have neglected the review’s weird theological and political mechanics: the way a distinctive romantic poetics of ‘fiat’ displaces the bland and far more easily naturalized terms of artistic ‘creation’: a term whose clichéd use is usually attributed to romanticism, both as a literary-historical period and as a mood or ‘spirit.’ Issues of godlike command and political menace are compounded in Jeffrey’s slur, which nonetheless is ultimately taste-based, taken up in a direct line from Hugh Blair.3 When in evidence for these ‘modern’ poets’ ‘perpetual exaggeration of thought,’ Jeffrey observes that ‘There must be a “qu’il mourut,” and a “let there be light,” in every line,’ I’d argue he betrays his own formidable array of ambiguities before silencing them. In part, the idea anticipates T. S. Eliot’s judgment that long poems ought not be all dense ‘poetry’ (RS 70, 73, 75); there have to be narrative ligatures, and spaces to breathe. But if Jeffrey means to disarm romantic poetic practice by calling its style bathos (a ‘raised’ style exhibiting ‘fallen’ thought, a collapsed soufflé), the mockery is too suggestive to work. It sparks up too much interest, rather than just a stylistic pretension that had already showed itself overstressed and tired by the end of the eighteenth century. For example: since this language is neither absolute nor solitary, how should we approach the remissive mode that appears in the English language’s most radical commands? ‘Let there be light,’ the fiat lux, stands as the Hebrew Bible’s instantiation of both the creative power of words and of material things. Yet the closeness of thought to that ontological prompting is at once felt and set aside – not just by Jeffrey, but by all of us under Kant’s influential limits on apprehending the thing itself – as that which is presumed by the organizing capacities of the mind but must remain uncreated, unactualized, with regard to our concepts. Jeffrey’s use as a foil is that he suggestively locates, even crystallizes, the unusual thought pattern he of course also happens to disparage. It is surely true that ‘strange fits’ of passion color William Wordsworth’s poetry (might they also be ‘strange fiats’?); better understanding of the marginalized cognitive textures of that poetry would further endeavors to characterize a distinctively poetic thinking – ‘thinking thinking otherwise’ – taken to experimental borders.4 It is exactly that critical test of how thought happens in verse – as Simon Jarvis has brought home to us5 – which most excites readers who simply want to approach poetry at a closer level, and that by contrast eludes and exasperates final mastery.



26

What kernel of truth has Jeffrey seized on by way of his irritation? I will avoid a return to the sublime as much as possible (although that discourse certainly was a player for Jeffrey), and argue instead that he grasps the compound – perhaps incoherent – poetics of romantic fiat. He senses that issues associated with the verbal maneuvers of ‘let there be,’ ‘letting be,’ and perhaps even those of ‘let him live’ and ‘die’ all lie near the wild heart of romantic literature; and he does so even while this literature is yet emerging as the main post-biblical body of writing to take on such questions after the Bible’s translation into vernacular English. *** Under the subtitle Demystification and Enchantment, this book considers oppositional figures of critical analysis. These include the vying claims of Adorno and Heidegger as philosophical coordinates to Wordsworth’s thinking through verse; an alignment of historical thinking between Percy Shelley and late Kant; nature poetry and paper money; and, here, the commonsense Scottish enlightenment with the ‘exaggeration of thought’ alleged against romantic poetry, measured against that poetry’s relation to common language philosophy in the retrieval of the ordinary found in Stanley Cavell and J. L. Austin.6 In Chapter 4, the claim of the ordinary on romanticism will also emerge in David Hume’s challenge to recognize dailiness of belief.7 At critical moments, reconstructions of Humean empiricism too will play a role. Making fun of the romantics is often the best way to test the substance of their achievement, and because of this, lines of disdain recur throughout this book. These voices mostly are Scottish. The strictures of Jeffrey, the error-prone and quotidian imagination of Hume, the insider fun had by Peacock (not himself a Scot), and even the late, ‘Scotticized’ Byron – all have their say in tension, for the most part, with the figure and the poetry of Wordsworth. This is justly so, if only because the Scottish enlightenment’s kind of tart distaste for the formal and conceptual advent of Wordsworth’s romanticism helps show how that voice does bring an internal difference to the wide utilitarian sweep of the modern, and how romanticism might yet characterize both modern poetry’s and modernity’s unsettling defiance of the instrumental logics internal to its very structure.8 The specificity of ‘let there be’ and ‘let be’ fiat allows space for an active meeting of diverse critical and theoretical approaches, including deconstruction, ordinary language philosophy, and post-Kantian



Romanticism and ‘Exaggeration of Thought’ 27

Romantic Fiat

critical aesthetics. The subtitle also furthers a developing story about romantic studies’ positioning in the past few decades, an institutional narrative that is the work of others.9 Orrin N. C. Wang has advanced romanticism’s Fantastic Modernity as a matter of its framing the gaps between history and figure. In another essay, Wang contends for romanticism’s jointly historical and figural status, where he argues by way of summary of his book: ‘Romanticism is the trope of a fantastic modernity as well as a period term. Enlightenment modernity is that fantastic trope as well, which means that it, like all historical periods, no matter how complex or indeterminate, is also a Romantic proposition.’10 I will emphasize repeatedly that the demystification now comes first as a praxis, just as ‘the appearances’ have always experientially stood in relation to substance, which the category of appearance (or Schein) presumes. But at what cost is this skeptical priority? When will a major part of poetry’s abiding experience – extravagant, enchanted, and invariably suspect formations of unreduced ‘life’ – have all been burned through in critique? Is enchantment a renewable resource? Through the gesture in the subtitle, I am further trying to describe both the current starting position for anyone who embarks on the academic literary study of romanticism (through all the appropriate procedural rigors of the first word), and the obdurate thrill of what makes it all bearable (through the second). At minimum, one needs good faith about experiences that give demystification the materials on which to work – in the sensuous, the non-conceptual, or perhaps what is not after all free, but remains slippery to hold by our concepts: a ‘life’ not just in reserve or held in surplus.11 Rather than a precondition or an Edenic story that is back-projected, enchantment then signals an analytical remainder: whatever it is that manages occasionally to keep, even renew, its shine through abrasive contact with necessary criticism. This move, however, does not signal allegiance to the small field of books on the defibrillator-like ‘re-enchantment’ of religion or nature. My interest lies in something that remains – if it exists – rather than in a reinvestment strategy. Plenty of evidence anyway shows how modernity is filled with enchantment. Over against the theorist of ‘iron cage’ modernity, Max Weber, and his sociologist’s notion of Entzauberung (disenchantment) we must place the magic (Zauber) not just in modernity but of it. This quality survives continual unmasking.12 In ‘Toy Shop,’ Theodor Adorno posed his own version of the Wordsworthian question of what takes away life’s magic in later years, and found the ‘Disenchantment’ routinized into our very sensation, understanding its cure in our disinvesting from the commodity form.13 Marx could write to almost



28

lyrical effect of the ‘secret’ of the commodity, noting its ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’14 For every ‘baleful enchantment of the concept’ (Fredric Jameson’s phrase),15 there occur many gestures of praise and relief that aren’t mobilized to do conceptual work. Theoretically savvy books often give thanks to the sources of personal enchantment in their acknowledgments.16 There is a whole tradition of demystified critical activity that testifies to how poetry enacts its charm right before us, upon nearly depthless paper.17 It is not at all surprising that romanticism has been made a focal site of this demystification. For the past generation or two, literary study of romanticism has staked its collective worth on disabusing the enabling assumptions of the past. Coherence and autonomy of the self, language, and aesthetic form have all been deemed interested projections, made at first by the poets themselves and then in turn by their harmonizing critics. One can support this critical shift overall, yet wonder whether simply altering aspects of tone (and not pointing the arrows of culpability straight at authors) already leads on to a ‘post’ New Historicist outlook.18 New folds creep into our thought when we wonder how much our objects of study too would accord: how much poets and maybe poetry itself as a medium, as a formal-materialist practice, actually resists the ‘desire for mystification’ that is almost universally ascribed to it. Meanwhile scholars in relative safety can practice their own intractable brand of ‘mystifying criticism.’19 In this book I hope to deepen the effort to reflect critically on romanticism, by troubling the looser ‘creativity’ that romantic poetry is understood somehow to instantiate. But rather than attempt an historicist scheme, I address the period’s character through dynamics of radical poetic making. With two modes of Romantic Fiat as my organizational device, I risk the estrangement of this sponsoring term. Repeatedly weighing a dual poetics of ‘let there be’ and ‘let be,’ ‘fiat’ is at once more rhetorically accurate and mysterious than ‘creation.’ This double-focus allows us to see afresh how romantic poetry is at the center of much contemporary rethinking of the humanities. Its legacies are very much at stake, for example, in current debates about secularism, economic and alternate theories of value, sovereignty, and the environment. The main effort of this book thus brings together but does not, precisely, harmonize the two strands of a jussive mode of poetic exhortation. And in this first chapter I adduce a rather surprising model for the descriptive taxonomy of Romantic Fiat, through the criticism of Francis Jeffrey. There are several reasons for the high profile of Jeffrey’s ‘Thalabacide’ review, beyond its verve. It was the lead article in the very first issue




Romantic Fiat

of the Edinburgh Review. It proved central to Scottish, Whig enlightenment, distaste for English romanticism. And it grouped the writers Jeffrey was later to dub Lake Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and – his ostensible subject – their lapsed friend Robert Southey) as a dissenting ‘sect’ in outlook, consolidating these poets’ secular renown even as it unleashed a kind of theological scorn on them. The review shot over the head of Southey’s video-game type revenge narrative in Thalaba the Destroyer, directly to attack the ‘familiarity of language’ celebrated by Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads, and systematized in his 1800 and 1802 Preface. Making a statement whose assumptions about prescriptive merit are disturbingly clear, Jeffrey holds that ‘The love, the grief, or indignation of an enlightened and refined character, is not only expressed in a different language, but is in itself a different emotion from the love, or grief, or anger of a clown, a tradesman, or a market-wench. The things themselves are radically and obviously distinct’ (RS 72). Under the notion that this is an inherited and ‘obvious’ sort of distinction, Jeffrey presents incommensurable difference behind words of common language – love, grief, anger – as though the poets had violated a tacit agreement to apply their meaning restrictively. He thus occupies disturbingly ontological grounds to argue for hierarchies of class and taste. From our distance, Jeffrey betrays the sense that to view human experience through an ontology of any sort is to be given over to defending the politics of ‘things as they are.’20 The result is a basic ascription of poetic theodicy that, interestingly, from the opposite starting post of dislike for the Lake School comes to mirror some less often discussed aspects of M. H. Abrams’s classic account of greater romantic lyric. I have in mind the joint endeavors Abrams calls ‘theodicy of private life’ and ‘theodicy of landscape.’21 While this discussion covers what is now a very well-rehearsed lesson – anchored in The Prelude’s moving if rationalizing claim, ‘all gratulant if rightly understood’22 – here it is the very terms of theodicy for which I want to claim an undervalued point of stress. To feel on some level that whatever is, is right, demands that we honor the materiality of things as much as any sacramental vision that overrides them with providential meaning. It is this uneasy balance between opacity and narrative meaning that often receives different treatment between the genres of lyric and the long poem. As a long poem, Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants (1793), for example, must split its message in order not to falsify an impasse where religious abstraction cannot deal with the human, the historical and the particular; if not betray it, one has to let the other down. In the



30


Yet He, whose Spirit into being call’d This wondr’ous World of Waters; He who bids The wild wind lift them till they dash the clouds, And speaks to them in thunder; or whose breath, Low murmuring o’er the gently heaving tides, When the fair Moon, in summer night serene, Irradiates with long trembling lines of light Their undulating surface; that great Power, Who, governing the Planets, also knows If but a Sea-Mew falls, whose nest is hid In these incumbent cliffs; He surely means To us, his reasoning Creatures, whom He bids Acknowledge and revere his awful hand, Nothing but good: Yet Man, misguided Man, Mars the fair work that he was bid enjoy, And makes himself the evil he deplores. (Book 1, lines 19–34) The conclusion of the poem returns to this motif of natural theodicy, only to be ‘pain’d,’ or poisoned again, by human constructions: —I made my prayer In unison with murmuring waves that now Swell with dark tempests, now are mild and blue, As the bright arch above; for all to me Declare omniscient goodness; nor need I Declamatory essays to incite My wonder or my praise, when every leaf That Spring unfolds, and every simple bud, More forcibly impresses on my heart His power and wisdom—Ah! while I adore That goodness, which design’d to all that lives Some taste of happiness, my soul is pain’d By the variety of woes that Man For Man creates—his blessings often turn’d To plagues and curses[.] (Book 2, lines 401–15)23 The persistence of such a theodicy after the revolution – and dispersed throughout secular modernity – demands concurrent study with this



poem’s first book, Smith celebrates the divine fiat in contrast to human productivity:

Romantic Fiat

book’s topic of fiat. Whereas theodicy takes up a perspective finally involving the valediction to ‘let things be’ as for the best (an ‘irenic’ genre),24 the signature move of the fiat can most directly be understood as the biblically influenced command of ‘let there be,’ which is creative polemic. In Genesis, the things God has created receive the stamp of divine approval: the verbal seal that each new act, each founding form and elemental substance, ‘was good’ (Genesis 1:4, 1:10, etc.). However, in what seems to be lyric’s urge to repeat this gesture by the most indirect and practically inconsequent of means, romantic and modern poets from Wordsworth to Stanley Kunitz (‘The Knot’), Wendell Berry (Given), and John Ashbery (all over) often create anew by touching the ontological chord of what already just exists. If it is to be kept honest, that kind of project requires a dis- or unillusioned grasping of the world ‘as it is’; yet more than anything, such an approach succeeds best if it doesn’t grasp or over-realize matters, if it waits for a prayerlike disclosure simply that things exist. Arriving at his own contemporary form of wisdom literature that blends the sublime murkiness of Genesis with the torment and wonder of Job, Ashbery writes in his quarrelsomely long prose poem, ‘The System’: ‘Surely all this living that has gone on that is ours is good in some way, though we cannot tell why.’25 Noting the spent tone, somehow laced with or into a benediction, is important. Ashbery is probably not too interested in metaphysical origins; and his tack in sailing over the immanence of experience – the accumulated rhythm of ‘all this living’ – brackets the late-night question of whether there has to be a world. This lyric discourse is tinged unavoidably with mixed tones of praise and blame, though it also makes tiredness a way of accompanying persistent doubt into a neutral sort of affirmation.26 If to think shares a root with to thank, as Heidegger says in one of his notorious etymologies,27 to nominate the protraction and ‘exaggeration of thought’ as the condition of romanticism suggests a vigilant watch being kept by poets over a latent capacity of language, one which Jeffrey would not mind to see fail to come to light. Perhaps less like Wordsworth, then, and more akin to Byron’s Manfred and to Keats, Jeffrey’s sense is that because poetry belongs to a life ‘Where but to think is to be full of sorrow,’28 its labor ought not to be so endlessly cognitive. ‘Jeffrey’s main objection to Wordsworth’s poetry was to its eccentricity,’ maintains William Christie in a lucid recent essay; whereas ‘Jeffrey is determined throughout to make Wordsworth answerable to collective authority.’29 His favorable reviews even of early Keats imply Jeffrey favors some



32


*** In effect, I’ve already started to argue that what comes ‘Next after’ the admittedly famous traits of Jeffrey’s Thalaba review is of great interest. I’ve been pointing out how – though his screed contains moments of insight, all of a backhanded sort – Jeffrey is neither thoughtful nor thankful about the task of his review. Just when he would like to subordinate the poets to the structure of his essay, he names the extravagance of what he nonetheless instructively calls poetic ‘thought.’30 The neglected phrase – ‘exaggeration of thought’ – provides the focus for much of this chapter. This otherwise common, apparently casual, phrase really matters and ought to prompt a kind of meaningful work it has not received from scholarship so far. As a one-off definition of imagination by someone with contempt, I find it helpful and resonant and hope others will too. The phrase comprehends the idea found in Wordsworth’s Preface that imagination produces impressive effects from simple elements (the stylistic blend Jeffrey loathes), as well as The Prelude’s later sense of the poet building up greatest things from least suggestions (1805: XIII.98–9). And it evokes more strangely just the kind of seemingly gratuitous, non-conceptual ‘thinking’ in which a surprising number of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads engage. Even an incomplete list of such moments from the Ballads is extensive: every limb, His look and bending figure, all bespeak A man who does not move with pain, but moves With thought – (‘Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay’) A day it was when I could bear To think, and think, and think again; With so much happiness to spare, I could not feel a pain. (‘Anecdote for Fathers’)



kinds of exaggeration, if only in the unthinking sensuous and affective realm best evoked by the later Keats: that of multiplied kisses and too happy happiness.

34

Romantic Fiat

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: (‘Tintern Abbey’) What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a Lover’s head— ‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried, ‘If Lucy should be dead!’ (‘Strange Fits of Passion’)31 It would be a curious exercise to compare thinking in the Ballads to the later sequence of poems this cento superficially resembles, the 1807 ‘Moods of My Own Mind’ – particularly to what is so ‘little thought’ of in the famous Daffodils poem.32 The unexpected join of ‘exaggeration’ and ‘thought,’ right where Jeffrey alleges a failure to think comprehensibly (and where he has a certain point!), locates what experts and introductory students alike often designate a romantic signature. The endurance of this characterization suggests, too, that Jeffrey’s antipathetic response to what he dubs ‘the new poetry’ informs our own need for ongoing self-reflection: the object of scrutiny in this case being a presence in the lyric, that, while always in the ‘now’ time as discourse, nonetheless remains incompatible with the idea of speaking presence (resulting in effects Jonathan Culler and Wai Chee Dimock think of as forms of non-transcendent immortality, truly deathless because not human33). This incongruence internal to poems is due to the fact that poetic writing merely represents ‘voice.’ To the extent that it occupies real time – whether in the mind or through a reader’s vocalization – and even if that reader is the author, forced like the rest of us to perform by interpreting – the poem is a linguistic fabric simultaneously doubled and divided, folded and split. In raising such discordant premises, I do not yet address poetic content or ‘themes.’ Through an insight that goes back at least to David Ferry’s study The Limits of Mortality (1959),34 in recent years commentators have increasingly noted how Wordsworth’s thinking lacks the usual, humanist or anthropocentric, conceptual interests: a notion



But then he is a horse that thinks! And when he thinks his pace is slack; (‘The Idiot Boy’)

toward which the poet’s repeated blurring of living and dying states, animate and inanimate modes of life, are felt especially to contribute. Out of a complex feeling of betrayal, Percy Shelley was to develop his own barbed version of this claim. He satirizes Wordsworth in Peter Bell the Third (1819): So in his Country’s dying face He looked—and lovely as she lay, Seeking in vain his last embrace, Wailing her own abandoned case, With hardened sneer he turned away: And coolly to his own soul said;— ‘Do you not think that we might make A poem on her when she is dead? Or, no—a thought is in my head— Her shroud for a new sheet I’ll take’[.]35 That Wordsworth is ‘unimaginative’ – as the poem says right before this passage and embodies brilliantly here with the dumb, Bottom’s dream, literalism of ‘Or no, a thought is in my head’ – strikingly does not negate his poetic originality. This book as a consequence focuses at times on satire (and even blunter name-calling) as a serious vehicle for the disclosure of originality, and not merely as the separate genre of what Jerome McGann ambiguously titles ‘romantic period verse.’36 In and beyond Wordsworth studies, some of the best criticism of late reorients even the most basic applications of thought. In a forceful and challenging essay, Rei Terada observes Hannah Arendt’s ‘mental protojudgment’ based in ‘adaptation and defiance as its modal choices.’37 David Bromwich has written of Wordsworth’s work as ‘more primary’ than that of a thinker; ‘it is a portrait of the conditions for thinking.’38 So in addition to its hostile gesture toward the operations of a distinctively poetic thought, the phrase ‘exaggeration of thought’ therefore also indicates the theoretical concerns of this book along lines established by its recurrent and peculiar moments of language: exaggeration of thought here at the beginning; let (there) be through the middle chapters; blessing cursing as we near the end. To see all challenging, materially restive efforts of thinking under the sign of supposed excesses gets at the recurrent accusation of the ‘obscurity’ of a poetic ‘system’ that comprises a central element of what was new in Wordsworth’s poetry, and constantly flagged in its early reception.39 It is also to capture an aspect




Romantic Fiat

that remains opaque in, yet is central to, an important cluster of modern philosophical writers in the post-Kantian tradition. Shared questions about the premises of experience bind this tradition however its contexts and conclusions shift. Along the same lines prompted by the ‘thoughts of a more deep seclusion’ (line 7) that Wordsworth instinctually runs toward in ‘Tintern Abbey,’ we ask, does exaggeration suppose a deeper embeddedness in, or an abandonment of, the project of critical reason?40 And is our answer to that question curiously dependent on a definition of Jeffrey’s own normative idea of what counts? The passage either places a kind of modern poetic cognition slightly beyond the critic’s range, and so – oddly for a fired-up reviewer’s first effort – suggests that he is not prepared for the thought of what we call romanticism; or, with equal eccentricity and the addition of a normative force, the phrase implies that in doing too much to reach Blair’s ‘sublime style’ the poets don’t quite think. An inadvertently profound waffling on Jeffrey’s part, the ambivalence of this accusation stands beside the questionable status of enlightenment itself as a regime of excess: it points to the unreason that may also be internal to reason, within its boundary. To take a famous instance from visual art – does the lapse of reason produce those nightmarish animals in Goya’s Capricho 43 (‘El sueño de la razón produce monstruos’), as this print is conventionally read to warn? Or, rather, do monsters belong to reason’s functional operation, emerge from inside its ‘dream’ – the enlightenment dream of reason as autonomous?41 This hard question sounds a lot like the challenges of reading the Lucy poem, ‘A slumber did my spirit seal,’ or the stakes in general of Wordsworth’s marking diseased and healthy states of association in damaged social conditions. A stark contrast could distinguish a poem like ‘The Mad Mother’ from ‘Tintern Abbey,’ the last and most austere poem of the lyric ‘I’ inserted among the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. Alternately – and conceding their difference in tone – these poems might not be so different in ‘dramatic’ motive, as the mother’s plea (‘And if from me thou will not go / But still be true ’till I am dead’ [lines 57–8]), to me suggests.42 As I will argue in Chapter 2, the forces of enthusiasm and disorientation in ‘Tintern Abbey’ might stay true to the socially heterodox test of sympathy by madness.43 Relations of poetry to philosophy overall exceed my rapid sketch; nonetheless one can hazard a word about this relation’s curious divisions of verbal tense. In his final thesis on Feuerbach, Marx famously said that the point of philosophy was not just to interpret the world,



36

but to change it. Thus, according to Adorno, philosophy’s performative dimension lies in its very failure, in the reproaches of the unchanged past: ‘Having broken its pledge to be as one with reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself.’44 In no less need of self-criticism, a quality intrinsic to art by contrast belongs to the future. Though Negative Dialectics locates the very possibility of philosophy in its living on ‘because the moment to realize it was missed,’ in a very powerful passage from his Aesthetic Theory Adorno evokes the condition of all natural beauty as if it were made under the sign of a Kantian promise – an incomplete and on its own terms unfulfillable pledge – that art must break to keep.45 My gesture at demystification and enchantment at the same time presents the language of poetic fiat as conflictive when it is achieved at all, caught permanently between curse and blessing and engaging in both practices with a single mouth. Included here for that reason are Adorno’s judgments on ‘Heidegger’s style of thinking and expression’ as a ‘jargon of authenticity’ that aims at ‘releasement’ from will and history;46 Hannah Arendt’s evaluation of ‘thoughtlessness’ and her late turn to the need to think ‘out of order’; and ordinary language philosophy in Stanley Cavell’s romantically charged work. Having thus laid out the scope and major claims to be found in the chapters ahead, in what remains of this chapter I take up issues from a closer vantage brought on by the pressures of an individual reading, as I offer an extended discussion of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written in Early Spring.’ Robert Mayo’s seminal essay on ‘The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads’ (1954) drew attention specifically to ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ as a ‘fulfillment of an already stale convention’ of 1790s periodical verse.47 My argument below is that, indeed, the poem’s ‘contrast between the peace and fullness of nature and the evil generated by and between human beings’ is not the ‘Lines’ original feature – in fact we have seen this point made with more compelling historical coordinates, and at greater length, by Charlotte Smith. The compelling interest instead attaches to Wordsworth’s drama of skepticism regarding acknowledgment of pleasure. Surely these lines represent one of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads’ least conspicuous efforts at the negativity of self-resistant thought; they also therefore comprise one of the volume’s most strikingly resilient achievements: a document concerning the cognitive resiliency of verse that – if never about fiat exactly – is everywhere about the environment and stakes of poetic thinking. I thus leave for the next chapter any more engagement with what Jeffrey thought of as




38

Romantic Fiat

the literary product of ‘exaggeration,’ the social and metaphysical fiats he distinguishes intriguingly in the act of putting down.

‘Scientist: You speak without letup of a letting-be …’ – Martin Heidegger, ‘Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking’ Poetry tends to outstrip criticism for its subtlety in enacting how pleasure plays a role in cognition. Wordsworth’s poetry in turn depicts how skepticism can arrest pleasure and (at least temporarily) check its course through the coiling, resistant circuitry of the mind. A poem that embodies the negative task of thinking, nevertheless, may not always recommend itself in a critical idiom, or through what appear to be critical methodologies. Consider a lyric that is one of romanticism’s least obvious candidates for a negative moment: I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. To her fair works did nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it griev’d my heart to think What man has made of man. Through primrose-tufts, in that sweet bower, The periwinkle trail’d its wreathes; And ’tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. The birds around me hoppd and play’d: Their thoughts I cannot measure, But the least motion which they made, It seem’d a thrill of pleasure. The budding twigs spread out their fan, To catch the breezy air;



***


If I these thoughts may not prevent, If such be of my creed the plan, Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man? (LB 76) Despite this poem’s unprestigious reputation, I’m convinced that Wordsworth constructs in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ a vulnerable poetics of that season, establishing a rigorous, yet non-dogmatic, priority of skeptical thinking. One of the most insistent questions raised by the poem is just how its ‘faith’ regards personification. Although, as Sara Guyer reminds us, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads advances ‘Wordsworth’s effort to invent a poetry written in “the real language of man,” and to eschew personification in favor of a less ostentatious or mechanical art,’48 ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ in another sense preserves, even urges, the characteristic states of mind and feeling that underlie that rhetorical trope. The effect is achieved simply by the conviction that there is such a thing as nonhuman pleasure: the poem’s speaker ‘must think’ so, do all he can either to deny or bracket his intuition. Unlike those eighteenth-century modes Wordsworth criticizes as poetic diction, this sort of ‘personification’ is at once weaker and more pervasive than the technical literary effect of fixing natural phenomena through conventional proper names (such as Collins’s ‘chaste Eve’ in the ‘Ode to Evening’; more on such fixing and freezing effects later). The ‘Lines’ thus displays two uneasily juxtaposed subjects: the ascription of positive feelings to nature, including the poet’s own awareness of the habit-formed grain of his human ‘second’ nature; and the negative sociology of ‘what man has made of man.’49 Pleasures established along the first line of thought directly tie into the ‘lament’ of the second by contrast. Interestingly, Wordsworth does not address suffering in establishing the personification to which we almost automatically assent, or relent. Pleasure alone stands at the zero-degree of the associative leap he makes. Like its season, the ‘Lines’ could be said to inhabit a crucial yet wavering moment in the transformational project of Lyrical Ballads within romantic literature, just when Wordsworth’s Jacobinism of the early nineties transitions to, or possibly relapses into, the full admission of apolitical satisfactions. Against a cooler rational backdrop that



And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there.

Romantic Fiat

seemingly precedes the poem and restricts the surplus feeling that runs through it (we can read the lyric’s striking phrase, the ‘human soul that through me ran,’ as either a river through a valley or a sword through a belly – but both estrange the character of an integral self), Wordsworth shows the warmer joy of rational endeavor in its breaking up like ice around this time. Nevertheless the poem voices Wordsworth’s so-called ‘pantheism’ not as an unexamined urging, but as an insistent remainder, or survivor, of the poet’s equally romantic habit of skeptically checking instincts that persist beyond the regimen of his doubting. The strange argument being underwritten is that to personify only pleasure at once deepens the lament for social ills and makes Wordsworth fundamentally impervious to them, since he is not bound by such ‘unnatural,’ exclusively human and synthetic, resources. Against the obnoxiousness of this position, a generous kind of skepticism keeps him bonded to the world and yet free from needing answers to the perennial questions that vex solipsists. Like those whom Stanley Cavell deems ‘creative philosophers,’ Wordsworth in this poem and many other comparable ones has something like ‘two tasks: to oppose skepticism and to oppose false answers to skepticism’; at the same time he aims to reinforce pleasure and to make difficult all false affirmations of pleasure, I’d further add. However, this is not to invoke skepticism’s most voracious strain. We are not yet dealing with the radical form of skepticism Cavell associates with the rejection of the ordinary.50 Instead I am working for the moment within a broader and somewhat loose definition: skepticism as an intellectual wariness that means we never fully give ourselves without keeping a tension in reserve; a refusal to be wholehearted. Here Wordsworth instead shows a more relaxed skepticism that accommodates complexity on the social and substantive, rather than formal, plane. He grants and celebrates thoughts of birds that he ‘cannot measure,’ as elsewhere do Nietzsche and Blake in gestures of moral transvaluation. Yet beings across kingdoms and phyla can share in an economy of pleasure that among humans remains cruel, impermeable, and very much unevenly spread. And from that come basic questions. If Wordsworth had witnessed the truth of personification as pain, would there be less ‘reason to lament / What man has made of man’? Would there in turn be more action involved in his doing all he can to reduce suffering? ‘And I must think, do all I can, / That there was pleasure there,’ Wordsworth concludes in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring.’ The recalcitrant mystery of the lyric stems from the important elided syntax in the first of these lines: ‘do all I can’ to – what? Are the missing words meant



40

to be obvious? Or on the other hand is the referent too revelatory to bear saying? Both surmises feel partly truthful. The poem omits a direct reference to Wordsworth’s ongoing skeptical cure of thinking by reorienting its grounds as a ‘doing.’ Thus rather than a decisive act, ‘doing’ is figured as another, proto-conceptual, kind of thinking: one that leads to a roundabout confirmation of autonomous pleasure in cognition and the embodiment of such pleasure in turns of measured verse. All this occurs before the poet is overcome by the sense, filling up again and spreading over the lip of what the lyric is able to voice, that a pervasive but weak mode of personification is compulsory to wellbeing, and therefore has a right to insist. ‘Do all I can’; ‘If I these thoughts may not prevent’: as markers of the poem’s skepticism, these phrases also recount the failure of its skepticism, or relinquish the attempt. They read as preemptory, maybe a little defensive. A rational check to enthusiasm is placed ahead of the poem’s occasion itself, as though Wordsworth were protesting that he has kept up with a diet – that it was even self-administered with a will, in a spirit to make the behavioral change hold. Students usually conclude that Wordsworth forces himself to find this pleasure because that is the kind of poet he wants or has to be – a ‘nature poet.’ That does seem to be his admitted ‘creed’ and ‘plan’ by the end; yet these are words given overwhelmingly negative valences by the time we get to the child-philosopher of the ‘Immortality’ Ode. Nonetheless, most readers align what ‘the speaker’ must think with what he can do in the same, basically counterfactual, effort. (‘And I must think there’s pleasure here – I’m doing all I can to think that!’) An advantage of this reading is that it fits with a broad and teachable lesson about Wordsworth’s nature poetry from the ‘Yew Tree’ lines onward. There is eventually, and everywhere, what ‘Tintern Abbey’ notoriously calls ‘Abundant recompense’ if you show enough care beyond the self to look for these powers to draw into the self’s service. But although there is a large point in all this, instead I argue something different. The poem records a gap vigorously acknowledged between the recurrent self-evidence of no ‘egotistical’ feeling, but impersonal promptings traversing ‘through’ him on the one hand, and on the other the rational urge to discredit that something extra we often feel in the mere ‘sense data’ of processing our day. There is an inevitable surplus to embodied cognition added by mere qualia – by the mere ambience that the sun shines. Or, for that matter, when the moon ‘shines,’ the wind blows, the clouds are out – giving to English lyric poets their almost-birthright of ‘small rain.’ What good is the urge to strip that and call all such minimal investments a ‘lyrical’ trope of personification? What special




Romantic Fiat

‘nature poet’ pantheism is there in affirming such repetitively minimal experience? These affective tendencies of what one might call an enlarged though weakened personification – an environment that makes some tincture inevitable even if one consciously tries to thwart pre-interpretive ‘acts’51 – are quite insistent in their purchase on reality, though they are dubbed illusory when tried before the court of reason; and they lay incommensurate claims in the guises of alternate pleasure or pain. Self-willed skepticism is recruited first by the poet into his ‘Lines.’ But it is overmatched in the end by an unwilled, more relaxed, tendency of perception that hints how weak personification is much harder to avoid than we think. This lesson is easier to absorb as its own form of hardy suspicion if, like Freud, we can go Beyond the Pleasure Principle,52 when we glimpse personification in poets who may not insist, as Wordsworth does, that all leaps of faith should be for the sake of affirming access to pleasure. Hiding its direct presentation of pain in the form of a modernist Zen koan, Wallace Stevens has imparted this notion as a relentless proof in ‘The Snow Man.’ A prequel to ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ by its season and theme, ‘The Snow Man’ articulates how it is impossible not to personify, almost as a matter of pure mental survival in the name of cognitive animation. There, famously, ‘One must have a mind of winter //… not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind.’53 A Buddhist of the fictive, as opposed to romantic ‘joy in widest commonalty spread,’ Stevens is the poet whose degree-zero of personification lies in a realization of all consciousness as suffering. ‘One must have a mind of winter’ not to hear and feel the affective tone winter sets. And yet to have this wintry mind is of course to be colored by nature already on the level of the adjective (an expressionist painterly technique on which Stevens’s mandarin ‘rose’ rabbi and ‘blue’ pigeons in Le Monacle de Mon Oncle beautifully play variations, as does all of The Man With A Blue Guitar). ‘The Snow Man’ gives an instance of the compulsory personifications embedded in lyric or in any utterance that takes its occasion in a blooded world, however day-to-day or slight, as rendered by this lyric’s propositional structure. The poem is a dehumanizing reversal of the clichéd pathetic fallacy we expect. The end of Stevens’s lyric confronts the reader, showing how it is that to strip personifying pleasures from landscape does not yield anything except another sort of poem: it won’t take us away from ‘lyrical’ forms of interpretive commitment.54 Such an effort could not disclose a more poised reason or ‘things as they are’ objectively; it does not reveal truth in the place of mere appearance. Rather, it leaves not just the human but disturbingly less: the kind of



42

radically dehumanized ethos that can only be a human product. In this light, ‘What man has made of man’ now reads as though it too were a tautological remainder of the Question of Man: a kind of subtractive unmaking. Simple depersonification – not to avoid this kind of ‘thinking’ but to presume to undo it through sophisticated critical acts – is constructed by both Stevens in his masterly poem and, less obviously, by Wordsworth in his minor effusion, as an interpretive violence that unmakes and strips healthful layers, ‘giving’ to us Lear-like ‘nothing.’ ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ caught me by surprise as a really strong poem. It counts among the most philosophically inexhaustible poems Wordsworth ever wrote, while diverting its reader through an experience of one of the few romantic texts still judged naïve. That the poet ‘may not prevent’ his thoughts implies he has tried. For Wordsworth, the defense of personification on experiential terms simply is its persistence as a habitual tendency to return or remain. The poem’s striking contribution is that it sifts the instinct toward pleasure through so much obstruction of intellect. A modest poem on its face – and from a certain vantage a mockable one – the ‘Lines’ marks a slight and routine act of suppression so drastic as to cost man the human. Wordsworth thinks through this issue using what is sometimes a bizarrely non-referential language, we might also notice. He will not admit to severing reflection from an emplaced ‘there’: the dumb, indexical, word he repeats as both the linguistic matrix and physical spot of reflection (‘That there was pleasure there’). How should we read that infelicity? Embodied through the line’s two differing types of ‘there’ – a place in which to recline and a grammatical marker of organized language – the poem refuses to pare thought down beyond an unavoidably value-added relation to things themselves. ‘There … there’ establishes something like pleasure as the very condition for our experience of space; it marks the ‘gift’ character of the Heideggerian ‘given’ (Es gibt).55 Thus Wordsworth might anticipate Emmanuel Levinas, who holds that ethical ontology actually precedes any ‘natural’ ontology.56 Yet there is also a much darker version of this idea that is important to the work of Levinas. The burden of such a possible reading is to associate Wordsworth’s ‘there was pleasure there’ with what Levinas elsewhere calls the ‘rustling … horror’ of ‘The there is’ when existence fails ethics.57 For Wordsworth a leap of personification nonetheless ‘must’ be made. It cannot not be made, unless resistance to that premise itself should be a constant demystificatory agenda. Though the poem’s rhythms of doubt and confirmation may not fully press a critique of the untruth of affirmative thinking, ‘Lines Written in




Romantic Fiat

Early Spring’ nonetheless shows how a partial agenda of demystification plays a substantive role even in the most tenderly green of romantic effusions. ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ offers little gesture of closing down questions about the conceptual reach of lyrical thought. It does not defend Wordsworth’s pantheism very strenuously. By arguing Wordsworth’s basis for personification in pleasure as ‘[a] motion and a spirit’ (‘Tintern Abbey,’ line 101), the path I follow therefore implicitly contrasts to Paul de Man’s idea that all ‘anthropomorphism’ enacts a freezing operation upon the chain of figurative substitutions. Rather than stop it short, Wordsworth’s verse proceeds according to the rhyming logic of the very ‘chain’ that binds his natural piety through the rhetorical effects of this poem: associating, or linking, and thinking (lines 5, 7).58 This rhetoric comprises Wordsworth’s pedagogy in the Lyrical Ballads, and its elaboration as verse demands constitutive recognition. Yet the recourse itself to personification – should we think of it as a blessing or a curse? A source of pleasure or lament? The poem’s ‘must’/ ‘can’ rhythm allusively links Wordsworth’s minor poem to the grand versified philosophy of Alexander Pope, whose statement of theodicy in An Essay on Man bears a comparable signature: ‘Laugh where we must, be candid where we can; / But vindicate the ways of God to Man’ (italics added).59 ‘Lament’ replaces ‘vindicate’ in Wordsworth’s handling, imparting severe doubt to any romantic ‘theodicy of landscape.’ *** In my epigraph to start the chapter, Jeffrey protests too much, of course. Mimicking romantic excess within his prose, his caricature gives a firmer outline for the period’s inchoate style than arguably had yet existed. In the wake of Lyrical Ballads, creation and critique emerge as a double event, and the basic figure of romanticism is hewed from both at a redoubled stroke. Jeffrey’s Thalaba review initiates romantic criticism in the same gesture with which it seizes on the Lakers’ ‘modern’ style. Macaulay was later to herald the critic’s own genius, while the first issue of the Edinburgh Review has been called ‘electrical’ and ‘luminary’ – the same thunder-and-lightning effects that characterize poets later in Shelley and Hazlitt’s metatheater of ‘the spirit of the age.’60 These unexpected reversals between critical and imaginative output merit close attention. Paul Fry has argued how Jeffrey’s enlightenment humanism prevents him from regarding Wordsworth’s ontological interest in the non-human, in an incisive work that shows one way for pitting the long eighteenth-century arc of Scottish commonsense thinking against



44

romanticism’s unique disclosures.61 Fry’s clearing of the way to view literature’s ‘ostensive moment’ has been essential to my own project. Yet Jeffrey’s response proves insightful in all its obtuseness. The line Jeffrey takes might show how romanticism as a whole exhibits the Ballads’ distinctive cluster of traits – ordinary language use put to extraordinary gambits of thinking – even for writers like Byron who mock the perceived union of Wordsworth and Coleridge in a Lake School ‘metaphysic.’ It makes for fascinating research to examine what Byron sometimes means by ‘thought.’ Manfred is, granted, a poem that has many clones doing the bidding of Wordsworth critique; and what I am about to point out might be intended as one of them. Yet Manfred opens with an earnest representation of Byron’s position: a stance on the scandalous nature of his very sentience. In advance of the unconscious, he figures a pre-conceptual, never quite spelled out, ‘thought’ in the place of endurance. Hence even in sleep thought cannot be shut off. Especially in ‘slumber’ it cannot be resisted: MAN. The lamp must be replenish’d, but even then It will not burn so long as I must watch: My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep, But a continuance of enduring thought, Which then I can resist not.62 Here ontic disclosure of mere being is the antithesis of restful. Wakefulness of mind, even in sleep, becomes a Jeffreyan prolongation or grinding out of content-free ‘thought,’ reflection undetermined by any object. But by pointing out ‘exaggeration of thought’ as romantic poetry’s telling ‘internal’ characteristic, Jeffrey inadvertently gives the romantics more fruitful ground than he takes, I am suggesting. If the aim were to belittle Southey and drown the Lake School in wider contempt, other completions of the phrase to assert tonal exaggeration without mental drama would have served that aim much better. The remark as written veers off from taste criticism altogether, into an exhilarating and modern range of speculation that just as rapidly incorporates the uncanniness of moments including this one in Byron, as it ever reduces or exposes such moments. Percy Shelley appears to have grasped the same quality in Wordsworth, when in Peter Bell the Third he voiced the exceptional idea – a fulfillment of T. S. Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in advance of Eliot’s whole royalist theory of literary history – that Wordsworth woke ‘a sort of thought in sense,’ once having shaped language as God




Romantic Fiat

had shaped clay into the individual human form (SPP 351). Jeffrey’s point by way of criticism, and Shelley’s in an act of complexly bitter homage, is that Wordsworth in particular does not delimit thinking to a merely humanistic scope in the domains of reflection, information, or mastery of problem solving.63 The amazing effect of Jeffrey’s critical language is that it presumes a standard of reference for a term (so far as I can tell) that he in this moment invents: the term I adapt as Romantic Fiat. As crucial for my purposes, from the outset he descries different moods and registers of fiat(s). The multiplicity of this insight becomes potentially volatile, and undermines a reading of the singular fiat creation in Genesis, which by definition is arrogated to serve divine origin alone. From Jeffrey’s remark we move readily toward fiat-like notions that supply arbitrary power without divinity as their premise: Hazlitt’s ‘right royal’ of literary aesthetics, for example; or Shelley’s notoriously ‘unacknowledged’ legislation; Kant’s Machtspruch. Kant’s application of this ‘sovereign sentence’ – found in his post-critical writings such as Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Right and ‘On the Failure of all Philosophical Attempts at Theodicy’ – is governed by the same ‘constitutive criteria’ of success as the priestly author’s fiat lux. A ‘sovereign sentence,’ however, is a distinct extra-juridical category meant to allow the king to administer a justice free of normal legal review (Rechtspruch). Peter Fenves notes the difficulty of finding equivalents for Machtspruch in other modern languages, before he offers that ‘a better interpretation of the word is fatum (“what has been said”) and fiat.’64 If Southey and other writers do in fact fill their poetry with a multiplicity of fiats on social and metaphysical levels, ‘“a qu’il mourut,” and a “let there be light,”’ it is Jeffrey who superimposes a distinct rubric of fiat as a way to ascribe voice per se to romantic poetry. In doing so, he taps an evaluative language typical of the eighteenth century from Boileau’s translation of the sublime ‘let there be light,’ and Pope’s satire deploying the fanciful topos of decreation in The Dunciad, in which universal Darkness is ‘let’ fall and covers all. But these texts never themselves bring the fiat into Jeffrey’s, and the romantics’, more pervasive ‘common light,’ in which the reference is not so much a matter of divine diktat, as an enactment of whatever material change is produced by the gloss, or afterthought, of constructing experience necessarily undertaken. Jeffrey picks out this mode or ‘style’ of utterance as a signature move in romantic poetry, and gives it an independent name and thereafter rhetorical life. His argument, moreover, is not the obvious one that poets in these examples dare to presume too much (the mythic



46

hubris of Faust or Icarus), but that the moments of extended high-pitch just last too long, and are too many to be enjoyed by readers assuming that role in any normal sense.65 Trying to hold on to his disguise at ‘a pitch almost unpleasant,’ Frank Churchill has this spirit and rhetoric down just right from the Jeffreyan point of view, in the Box Hill scene of Austen’s Emma: ‘“Let every body on the Hill hear me if they can. Let my accents swell to Mickleham on one side, and Dorking on the other. I saw you first in February.”’66 Frank’s few lines are already more than we can take. Like the unsustainability of romantic fiat for Jeffrey, what matters to the framework of this chapter is the elaborately anti-communicative ruse of such a performance – and it owes much to the sociable turn found in Jeffrey’s closest philosophical model, Hume, at the end of Book 1 of his Treatise of Human Nature. Where fiat by definition before the romantics involves an ex nihilo creativity, romantic fiat differs at the outset by its far greater concern for the troubled continuities that are disarticulated in Hume’s writings on the self and causation: the bridges in poems on the syntactical and argumentative levels; the challenge to grasp origins in the middle of life as an ontological problem confronting experience, and – shifting inherited conventions of poetic form – the apostrophic invocation as a tactic for continuing more than an epic formula of getting started. In an effort to move past the naïvely Wordsworthian ‘picture of the mind’ he had used in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein was to address thinking in terms of the self-addressed question, ‘“The certainty that I shall be able to go on after I have had this experience – seen the formula, for instance, – is simply based on induction.” What does this mean?’67 Go on. From Homer to Milton, invocations clear spaces to begin; but in romanticism even the most radical invocations implicitly frame terms for proceeding through an interminable middle. In Jeffrey’s passage the Scottish enlightenment reviewer comes up against the blockage of his own double take on romanticism. This is revealed, at once, as imaginative openness to and temperamental restrictions on literature’s mental activity. We plunge unexpectedly into a realm linking the ‘modern’ style of romantic poets with twentiethcentury ordinary language philosophy: Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell, and the romantics – brought together at least negatively through a critic who would have been this association’s vigorous anti-prophet, Francis Jeffrey.68 A full reply to Jeffrey’s ‘exaggeration of thought’ sends us on philosophical ventures, reopening questions about what it means to do, think, and know in a specific poetic material form like that presented in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring.’ Responses might owe a lot to Austin’s




Romantic Fiat

dealing with the aptly named Mr. Wisdom in ‘Other Minds,’ or Cavell in his brisk treatment of Professor Mates in ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’ A recent effort in this enviable line, Michael Wood’s Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, demonstrates the fresh potential of these distinct grounds of literary thinking.69 There are locations of experience, performances of knowledge and its self-confounding limits, that we can only or least paradigmatically attain in literature, whose aesthetic positioning within an instrumentally ‘useless’ praxis means at the same time that literary provocation can never be used up. *** Featured also in Jane Austen’s free indirect style, the repetition in which there ‘must be nothing moderate,’ ‘there must be a “qu’il mourut,”’ gets at a dynamic integral to styles of romantic poetry, which evade constative language in favor of an insistent mode and variant moods of address. A numinous quality of British romanticism might be construed unmysteriously as the function of English grammar – or rather English’s lack of grammatical differentiations – in areas where imagined subjunctive possibility, the weaker optative wish, and outright command all coexist in assertions that allow each parsing. The verb anchoring the English Bible’s ur-command of ‘let there be light’ sets the model for this enriching uncertainty. Lassen in German perhaps compares best. Heidegger’s privileged site of ‘releasement,’ ‘letting’ and ‘letting be,’ stands at the limits of any possible thinking of Being, and in fact may obscure those limitations. The enlargement of lassen into a concept of Gelassenheit as the essence of thinking – which Fry nominates before me as a topos of ‘literary letting-be’70 – develops a ‘let’ speech event based on associations of relinquishment of the will and retirement from history. Heidegger’s key text on this subject, ‘The Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking,’ meditates on Galassenheit as ‘releasement.’ Releasement allows letting go of the will, and the letting in of a non-representational basis of thought. The teacher in this ‘Conversation’ insists on moving beyond active and passive distinctions. Yet there persists a markedly ‘enchanted region’ of thinking in the Zen sway of Heidegger on ‘let.’ He intends a sense of openness for Galessenheit, of waiting and wakefulness. But it is hard not to judge negatively his silence toward history, seemingly under the care of these same states; hard not to sense his occlusion of reference as an abyss. And of course this proves incalculably more troubling for a work composed in 1944–5. The ‘let (there) be’ of English provocatively



48

runs an aligned risk of quietism, to be sure.71 When Wordsworth lets the Cumberland Beggar live and die in the presence of nature, this carries the uncomfortable peace of a benediction upon a being pawned in security for human nature. However, that moment also registers with the jarring power of a rhetoric imposed without being justified; and the marked force, not preserved in Heidegger’s language as I read it, better responds to his own call for a finite thinking wielded ‘against itself.’72 In this primarily ethical sense, the English ‘let’ often may be felt to deepen a Heideggerian poetics by making apparent its lack of a public test,73 in foregrounding confrontations with the historical and interpretive violence he never acknowledged through his own later ‘turn’ (the Kehre) toward thinking poetically. It is not just – or first, in Jeffrey’s history as a reviewer – the overwrought romantic ‘I’ that falls beneath his scrutiny. To streamline the whole copula of ‘I think’ into an efficient delivery of content, and not an end in itself, is his larger project in repeated criticism of Wordsworth. Reflecting on thinking is an activity that arguably would never take place in a perfect, full-employment, humanist milieu. To address this faculty at all tests phatic, and not operationally communicative, lines – something literally signaled by Heidegger’s repeated questions about our ‘thought.’ Are we there yet? Is it on? The model of What Is Called Thinking? is pedagogically rich, much as (in my reading) the lyrics of Lyrical Ballads are pedagogically rich; but Heidegger situates language in a black hole of philosophical and ethical densities.74 After the verse-like turn in his thought, the post-war Kehre, Heidegger’s philosophy comprises a test of poetic lines that never emerges out of the language to offer instruction; its teaching is to be always still on the way to language. So inevitably with ‘have we arrived yet’ at thought, we should ask, ‘what could it mean to get out’?




2

During a moment of explanatory transit in his book A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing, Paul H. Fry makes an arresting comment. Pointing to two of this book’s major exhibits – ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’ – Fry observes how ‘Wordsworth puts his most disarming form of apostrophe, the one in which nature is told to do … what it would have done anyway, to an unusual purpose which gains its effect precisely from the appearance of having told things to go ahead and be themselves.’1 From the canonical precedents of Wordsworth to Jane Taylor’s 1806 lyrics for the poem ‘The Star,’ which we all know popularly as ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star,’ a grouping of major poems from the British romantic period relies on delivering such commands to nature to obtain their full effects.2 These poems and effects constitute the subject of this chapter, which sustains a particular focus on how ‘Tintern Abbey’ responds to what one important feminist critic has called ‘the uncontrollability of real things.’3 An obvious question follows. How does that independent Real sort with the poetry whose vocal register moves toward, or upon the premises of, command? Or can it? One forgets that the descriptive opening of ‘The Star’ actually sets an imperative mood. Taylor puts weight on the Kantian ‘how I wonder’ of human understanding, on the very drama that there is wonder ‘Though I know not what you are’ (line 19), rather than on the shining object the poem bespeaks. The lyric also affords us the chance to wonder what the children really are who sing or listen. Perhaps it is another surprising candidate for attention; but ‘The Star’ is downright apocalyptic in its imagery of common night: When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, 50



The Command to Nature

The Command to Nature 51

In Taylor’s lyric we have a parallel to Blake’s ‘Tyger’ and Wordsworth’s Lucy poems. Next to Kant’s famous evocation of the starry heavens (‘Two things fill the mind with ever new increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’4), what ‘The Star’ offers in the mode of sublime affirmation is no doubt attractively modest: the command to ‘twinkle’ – to shine only waveringly – represents a minimalist case of fiat-like imperative. Yet what Freud later deems ‘omnipotence of thought’ is surely already here under cover.5 Such verbal performances attest to poetry’s surviving link to bardic ritual; they resituate the effects of what Paul de Man called ‘language power’ in the wonder of a pre-rational, ‘magical’ thinking either confined to the anthropological other or to the time of childhood. Mentioned briefly in my introduction, Hyperion’s command for Keats presents the antitype of this model of a ‘command to nature’ to do what it always does. He orders the sun to rise early, and in pressing this ‘unnatural’ claim, he forfeits any right to even the tautological office of a sun god: ‘The sacred seasons might not be disturb’d.’6 In the midst of a paradigm shift of the gods in Keats’s poems, myth only pretends control over the sheer process that it ritualizes redundantly; Hyperion glosses the sunrise, but cannot control it. However, the season’s resistance to command still does not prevent Keats from returning to a different version of the maneuver of jussive direction – this time channeled through his Muse – in Book 3: Flush every thing that hath a vermeil hue, Let the rose glow intense and warm the air, And let the clouds of even and of morn Float in voluptuous fleeces o’er the hills; Let the red wine within the goblet boil, Cold as a bubbling well; let faint-lipped shells, On sands, or in great deeps, vermilion turn Through all their labyrinths; and let the maid Blush keenly, as with some warm kiss surpris’d. (Book 3, lines 14–22)7 Thus, although it risks being what Keats himself would call a ‘smokeable’ practice on at least two counts8 – it defies comprehension rationally, and is readily mocked – the specific form of romantic fiat that involves giving commands to nature is a surprisingly common event in romantic literature.



Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. (lines 5–8)

52

Romantic Fiat

Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath-flowers! Richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue ocean! * [L]et the light at least Find a free entrance to their languid orbs. And let him, where and when he will, sit down Beneath the trees, or on a grassy bank Of highway side, and with the little birds Share his chance-gathered meal; and, finally, As in the eye of Nature he has lived, So in the eye of Nature let him die! * Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain winds be free To blow against thee[.] * Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song! And let the young Lambs bound As to the tabor’s sound! We in thought will join your throng, Ye that pipe and ye that play, Ye that through your hearts to-day Feel the gladness of the May! * Roll on, vain days! full reckless may ye flow, Since Time hath reft whate’er my soul enjoy’d, And with the ills of eld my earlier years alloy’d.



Fiats occur in a wide array of uncommonly good poems. Ranging from Jeffrey’s ‘“qu’il mourut”’ to God’s fiat of ‘let there be light,’ a lineup of well-known passages from romantic poetry emerges from these moments of extravagant command:


Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean––roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin––his control Stops with the shore[.] * Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Awkwardness for all these examples lies in the fact that the command (tracked here as in the main argument through Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Byron) exhorts nature to go on with continuous processes. In the lines gathered, the sun and moon are encouraged to shine and to reflect light, the wind pressed to blow, the waves pressured to roll. At the same time, along with this spell-like intensity of exhortation, comes the feeling of release or what Heidegger more peculiarly called ‘releasement’ (Gelassenheit). Laid out in advance of me by Geoffrey Hartman’s formulation ‘Wordsworth before Heidegger,’9 there is a difference on the most basic level between the technological regime involving ‘command of nature’ – the practice of domination called in ecological design theory ‘defuturing’ – and the lyric occasion of giving ‘commands to nature.’10 The latter is a language event that by contrast to a regime of instrumental domination, openly flaunts its lack of causational power. Nonetheless one still feels some work is being done by this poetics of a releasement that flouts imperatives to produce. We can sense a pent-up tension has been decisively let go, and that this ‘letting go’ emerges as an alternative to the inherited pressures of a willfully positing, ‘let there be,’ aspiration held in the command of or over nature. What commentators since Käte Hamburger call the distinctively ‘lyric’ moment of such a practice displays a certain psychic, even physiological, structure:11 a repeated pause, up-turn, and rhetorically emphatic descent and emotive spreading found alike in ‘Roll on,’ ‘Ah! Slowly sink,’ or in the particular kind of magical ‘Therefore’ used by Wordsworth.12 Goethe’s lyric poem ‘To the Moon’ (‘An de Mond’), the



*

Romantic Fiat

longer version of which offers an important early occasion for the motif, contains the lines ‘Flow on, flow on, dear stream / Never shall I be happy’ (‘Fließe, fließe, lieber Fluß / Nimmer werd ich froh’, lines 13–14).13 Autonomous and non-human process is allowed to carry on doing its inevitable thing, in juxtaposition to human vagaries or to the acknowledged permanence of melancholy. The commands tell nature to do what it already does irrespective of poets; only in the most reckless of these passages – Shelley’s ‘Make me thy lyre,’ ‘Be thou me,’ from the climax of ‘Ode to the West Wind’ – does a voice make explicit its reciprocal demand. Wordsworth’s ‘Old Cumberland Beggar,’ ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘Immortality’ Ode, Coleridge’s ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,’ and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: the other poems I quote imagine impersonal continuities that endure beyond the writers’ direct role. The coordination of voice, reference, and a natural object to occasion the poetry has been disarticulated, any human ontology subject to inadequation or ghosted – at once conjured as and revealed to be Derrida’s spectral ‘hauntology.’14 Lyric voice anticipates its future in scenes where the poet no longer has a place, but over which he or she may yet have a say. Contrasting itself, then, the command to nature works as an appeal. Imperatives never cover their occasion in exile and doubt, nor perhaps are they meant to. They offer less a controlling gesture than strange acknowledgment. They mark ambiguously deadened states of recovery: the snap back into ambient life from the alternately harrowing, or simply distracted, absorption that so often belongs to what readers since John Stuart Mill have thought of as romantic ‘crisis’ poetry.

Stands Though one feels the weight of two-plus centuries’ criticism in just coming out with it, this chapter provides a new approach to Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,’ the most hotly contested and symptomatically read of all romantic works. Like the poem, the chapter moves through several overlapping stages of argumentation. I evoke the poem’s occasion of return to the site of Tintern, as many scholars have already done. The abbey and its environs are a site – in an overwhelming tradition of commentary – of problematically oozy tides, nearby iron works, and repeated picturesque consumption whose effects all depend on where you are standing.15 But ‘Tintern Abbey’ elicits more than just the picturesque determination of a place to stand and construct views. The poem’s heralded subject-formation is shaped from within an historical topos of continuity



54

and destruction, resonances of which extend in both directions far into time. In a powerful but largely unspoken way, I argue, the poem revisits the Reformation motto famously attributed to Martin Luther, ‘Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.’16 Within the horizon of any possible reading, the abbey remains a scene of culturally overlaid natural beauty as well as the mystifying overlay itself always signaled by the concept ‘nature.’ Without cutting this knot free (that is, without offering the impossible), my argument goes to the idea that an equally urgent part of the poem’s 1798 scene may be too obvious still, and overlooked. The poem’s topographical locale features in the late eighteenth-century tourist industry and is enmeshed in the naturalized discourse of the picturesque, to be sure. But there is something more to reconsider, which might be called the constitutively destructive past of Tintern’s natural history. I lunge across time to call it that, and borrow the translated title of a collection of lectures and essays by W. G. Sebald, On The Natural History of Destruction (2003). This book fills the void of description concerning a topic in no apparent way connected to Wordsworth, the effects of Royal Air Force bombing over Germany during World War Two. Not unlike the first wave of New Historicist critics of ‘Tintern Abbey’ in the face of the poem’s wartime displacements, the German-born Sebald notices documentary silence among writers of his generation. ‘[W]hen we turn to take a retrospective view, particularly of the years 1930 to 1950,’ he states, ‘we are always looking and looking away at the same time.’17 Sebald’s Zürich lectures on ‘Air War and Literature’ evoke the ruin and regeneration of natural phenomena (including ‘social life, that other natural phenomenon’) in a way that might prompt comparison to the occluded history of romantic ‘nature’ lyric: At the end of the war, some of the bomb sites of Cologne had already been transformed by the dense green vegetation growing over them – the roads made their way through this new landscape like ‘peaceful deep-set country lanes.’ In contrast to the effect of the catastrophes insidiously creeping up on us today, nature’s ability to regenerate did not seem to have been impaired by the firestorms. In fact, many trees and bushes, particularly chestnuts and lilacs, had a second flowering in Hamburg in the autumn of 1943, a few months after the great fire.18 In a manner that is now all-too legible to those following hurricanes and oil blowouts in the news, Sebald distinguishes ‘catastrophes’ that




Romantic Fiat

do and do not impair non-human nature, or draw nature after them ‘insidiously.’ His Natural History records the re-greening of Hamburg as unexpectedly ‘new landscape.’ That process intimates how a landscape poem records pressures of human life that are not its subject, nor share in its apparent mood. The site of Tintern Abbey (poem and place) bears marks through its picturesque beauty of unhealed, politically inspired dispossession and iconoclasm. In one sense my point in this chapter is basic, and can be phrased as a question that anticipates the Prelude’s own earliest and all but performatively unanswered question – ‘Was it for this?’19 In The Prelude, this question stands on one side of a stupendous ledger, with the whole poem eventually on the other side.20 It is an incredibly asymmetrical balance sheet that exhibits the debt on which Wordsworth is anxiously working, if he imagines himself as doing anything of value in writing that unpublished, preparatory epic. On a different level here I ask, why is this the ground from which Wordsworth’s allegedly transcendental and individual subject emerges? How does the poem establish – how is it anxiously grounded in its turn by – what David Bromwich searchingly has called its subject in the very preconditions for thinking? How might the poem’s anchorage in a material site resonant psychically with the politics of dispossession charge our volatile understanding of the way Wordsworth revisits (repeats? perfects?) England’s own closest historical parallel to the shock of Reformation violence?21 Until recently, commentaries mostly have assumed that Wordsworth aligns himself against ‘monkish’ rites in the poem, and – to put things oversimply – that he is ‘for’ the Reformation. In this common view, Wordsworth sees the rise of Protestantism as an historical forerunner to his own inward, increasingly ahistorical, turn. Even were this true, however, that model needs a good deal of complicating. An interesting connection typically left undrawn associates picturesque locations with the Reformation past from which the romanticera landscape had historically emerged – out of whose ruin the future iterations of ‘nature’ grew.22 Beyond faith in ‘inner light,’ what should we make of Reformation’s equally direct effect in England of the seizure of common lands for the crown and gentry? It begins the enclosures Wordsworth and John Clare feared in their time. The man who popularized picturesque tourism himself, William Gilpin, cites Protestant bishop and martyr Hugh Latimer to this effect, in a note to his Life of Bernard Gilpin (1753; part of a series of Lives of Reformers that supplement his famous sightseeing tour).23 In the context of the Lyrical Ballads, allegations that poetry displaces history



56

must face the poem’s actual, repeated concern for the sufferers of historical displacement. The least one can say to mitigate Wordsworth’s displacement of history in ‘Tintern Abbey’ is to note how all the earlier ’98 ballads, and maybe the background of that poem itself, treat those same historical issues with explicit force. New Historicist accounts of ‘Tintern Abbey’ have been strangely slow to observe its hardly buried archaeology in the Reformation destruction of the abbeys.24 Henry VIII sent his agents to Tintern in 1536. Its possession then passed to the Earl of Worcester. Soon after, the roof was disassembled commercially for its lead: the cause ever since of the abbey’s instantly recognized, pollarded, silhouette.25 As opposed to mere faith in the individual, disruptive historical group experience is the sympathetic focus of the ’98 and (especially) 1800 conservationist Lyrical Ballads. Similarly, while leading a revival of Wordsworth criticism in the last few years, Simon Jarvis has revised this assumption about the poet’s consistency with regard to naturally-supernatural Protestantism, by recovering Wordsworth’s celebratory identification with a medieval religiosity that is of course fully Catholic.26 This approach, foregrounding both historical and conceptual violence, nevertheless demands careful muting, which I try to offer in subsequent portions throughout the reading of ‘Tintern Abbey.’ The achievement of Wordsworth in tone characteristically declines confrontation with apocalypse: to repeat a point on which Geoffrey Hartman has always – and equally unapocalyptically – insisted.27 Something critics have long regarded as the distinctive phenomenology of Wordsworth’s thinking emerges from even those accounts of the poem that stress most its undertones of guilt and the obscure feeling, at moments, which hints at a violent post-traumatic immersion in an impersonal body.28 The whole poem suffuses deixis with subjectivity; it is an ode on the premise of a linguistic phenomenology that one can only stand ‘here.’ Yet the Reformation or Lutheran ‘stand’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’ comes not by way of violent self-assertion, since Wordsworth’s deictic (‘here,’ ‘now’) poetics is ‘demonstrative’ after a different fashion than the boldness of Luther. As opposed to his thunderbolt brand of confidence in answer, for Wordsworth answering the call is not at all a confident reflex. It involves a precarious attentiveness to what J. L. Austin might call poetry’s ‘etiolated’ speech situation: the deictic ‘here’ (‘on this’), the immediacy of which in space, and place – and whose dislocations in time – condition lyric’s peculiarly fungible speaking ‘I’; alongside the complexity of Wordsworth’s resulting ‘stand’ or odal resolution, whether to conclude the poem or just live on from the crisis it registers. Paul Fry interestingly




Romantic Fiat

has called the ‘Immortality’ Ode Wordsworth’s stand (or is it his last charge to recover lost ground?). In the irenic wish to discover a rhetorically lateral exit, an aspiration in which Wordsworth resembles Erasmus (Luther’s opponent in famous debates), the Ode’s underlying terrain is established here in the refusal to attempt overthrow.29 In ‘Tintern Abbey,’ a stand occurs in the poem’s first doubtful backup construction, as part of an ‘if … then’ conditional (starting on the last foot of line 49) that lays by for the contingencies to unfold in future time: And now, with gleams of half-extinguish’d thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills. (lines 59–68) Two qualifications short of any emphatic content to knowledge, ‘And so I dare to hope’ is the poem’s most definitive credo.30 Wordsworth plans for both the doubts and the inevitabilities of those ‘future years’: doubts that any apocalyptic imagination by contrast forecloses. ‘While here I stand’ (italics added) appears to grant a provisional rhythm in context, and allows the vulnerability brought by an awareness of the co-presence of other modes of life: factors continually worked into the standing loom of a ‘self.’ The relative adverb opens up the subject; it also has the effect of a concession toward any pretense of universalizing abstraction. Kant would never say, ‘while I behold the starry heavens above me I can feel the moral law within,’ for it suggests that moral law is summoned in contiguity with, and only so long as, the reflection on semblance might be prolonged in experience or writing. Roughly the same distance at which it stands from Luther, ‘Tintern Abbey’ rests close to the Heideggerian poetics of the ‘stand’ from ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’ There Heidegger quizzes us with his formulation: ‘In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. “To set” means here: to bring to a stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being.’31



58


Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the mystery of the rock’s clumsy yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. (42) The artwork does not ‘portray’ anything. It allows an ambient context to shine forth more vividly, disclosed in itself. As opposed to Luther’s credo-like stand on affirmed principles of grace over works, a ‘stand’ for the Heidegger of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ addresses the way in which a seemingly inscrutable, wrought object amplifies perception of everything else around its gnomic presence. Like Tintern Abbey yet more hieratic, Heidegger’s Greek temple provides a cliché in ruin through which one faces the challenge of reorienting critical and creative activity. As another perspective on the poem’s unsettling ‘picture of the mind’ (line 61), I draw from Hannah Arendt’s arguments in the Thinking volume of The Life of the Mind (1978). Without aiming to do so, this study strikingly frames reconsideration of several of the most challenging elements in Wordsworth’s poem: its non-doctrinally materialist attitude about spiritual concerns (the interest in scenic ‘impress[ion]’ [line 5]); to find the ‘soul’ in our suspended ‘blood’ (lines 44, 46); its distance from an historical pressure the poem also makes obscurely central (as in the dated title, echoing Bastille Day); and its concern for the human future of ‘half-extinguish’d thought’ like the thinking of other men in dark times. Discovering the review of Western philosophy found in this, Arendt’s last and unfinished, project, frankly transformed my relation to ‘Tintern Abbey’ – and by means one might conclude no longer possible to voice academically. (My encounter with the book was delayed due to awkwardness with the title: Arendt anticipates this reaction on the opening page.) Together, ‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Life of the Mind address what Arendt deems ‘out of order’ and beside itself (‘two-in-one’) in the essential character of thinking: the conversation within that splits thinking from living selves; the solitude in which we are not alone but by ourselves. In the conclusion of the volume,



His next example soon to follow is a ‘building, a Greek temple, [which] portrays nothing. It simply stands there’ (41):

Romantic Fiat

‘Where Are We When We Think?,’ Arendt sums up her ideas by saying: ‘First, thinking is always out of order, interrupts all ordinary activities and is interrupted by them.’32 In a prior section she maintains how ‘[a]nalogies, metaphors, and emblems’ – the tools of thinking that actualize process of mind in language – ‘are the threads by which the mind holds on to the world even when, absentmindedly, it has lost direct contact with it’ (LM 109). Arendt’s evocative description might be compared not only to Wordsworthian ‘more deep seclusion’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’ (line 7), but with Coleridge too, in several of his major lyrics of the late 1790s that deal in original ways with the poetics of intense thinking and its necessary consequence in near-total distraction toward everything else. In an unpublished talk I once heard, Susan Stewart remarked on the extraordinary knowledge claims of Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’ Ode, and the storm ‘that long has raved unnoticed.’33 What can be known without passing the threshold of our noticing? Alternately, how can the poem mark intervals of distraction that are not possible to attribute to ‘the speaker’ and its personified consciousness? In other words – what is it that imaginative literature uniquely can know?34 This peculiar kind of marked obliviousness was on evidence a formative state for Coleridge; it also appears in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’s pivotal blessing ‘unaware,’ like one of Wordsworth’s all-important yet ‘nameless, unremembered acts’ (line 34) that fill up the supportive reserve of memory in ‘Tintern Abbey.’35 Arendt does not approach the issue of diseased association in Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, then, but the affirmative withdrawal of thinking by definition from all service; she points out that we really do have to ‘stop’ to think. The argument calls for a poetics of distraction to create space for thought. For Arendt, this effect appeals to another type of stand, the medieval ‘standing now’ or nunc stans: we call it [nunc stans] the region of the spirit, but it is perhaps rather the path paved by thinking, the small inconspicuous track of nontime beaten by the activity of thought within the time-space given to natal and mortal men. (LM 210) Belonging thus to a ‘non-time,’ Arendt confirms that the inherent retirement of thought eventuates precisely in forms of non-actualization. Suspended duties occur not only, but especially, in the midst of a life otherwise committed to urgent and topical engagement with the historical present.



60


Francis Jeffrey’s claim against romantic ‘exaggeration of thought’ raises one important context not yet dwelled upon. The Thalaba review creates a platform on which to malign ‘the new poetry’ alongside dissenting religion.36 That association (purposefully delayed in my analysis) is in fact the most ready import of the phrase in the review’s own presentation. It is as if – with their scantly absorbed ‘German’ philosophy, certainly in all the poems published by 1802 – the poets bore direct analogy to the shock of Reformation in Geneva and (what would be) Germany,37 as well making contemporary the threat from that epoch, one almost three centuries absorbed into the ‘past’ of literary and social history. That he takes the Reformation for his deep historical coordinates brings into focus the Whig historicism wholly characteristic of Jeffrey.38 Henry VIII’s Anglican state church did not signal full break; and in just that way Jeffrey mobilizes a tirelessly British idea of moderation against foreign revolutions therefore construed as ‘total’ (a feeling, and a polemic, akin to Burke’s). The opening of his Thalaba review mounts journalism upon the notion of biblical Higher Criticism.39 The review offers the comparatist spirit and deep time of eighteenth-century historical readings of the Bible: Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to question; and that many profess to be entirely devoted to it, who have no good works to produce in support of their pretensions. The catholic poetical church, too, has worked but few miracles since the first ages of its establishment; and has been more prolific, for a long time, of Doctors, than of Saints: it has had its corruptions and reformations also, and has given birth to an infinite variety of heresies and errors, the followers of which have hated and persecuted each other as cordially as other bigots. (RS 68) It is an odd performance with a clear argument: that the days of revelation are over alike in religion and poetry. To produce ‘good works’ in this sense of culture demands an acknowledgment of secular belatedness. For Jeffrey, this lack of primary inspiration is the very basis for engaging in the civil, and in that way ‘common,’ production of sense. His lexicon is regulated by ‘standards’ and ‘authority,’ albeit loosely, even when he pokes at the many holes in the conceptual fabric of the powers-that-be. With its own assured style, the language of reviewing here offsets some



Orientations

Romantic Fiat

of the dullness of what this all concedes on poetry’s behalf. Even for an Edinburgh Reviewer, Jeffrey’s insouciance toward not only theological orthodoxy, but the political order, takes gumption. That being said, he attacks ‘corruptions and reformation’ as ‘an infinite variety of heresies’ that figure worse possibilities than the existing order. Jeffrey draws on the enlightenment case for religious toleration (he goes after ‘bigots’), but he does so idiosyncratically for his own ends. The review ascribes persecuting hatred to Dissent, not to the critic’s own ‘inquisitorial office’: The author who is now before us [ostensibly Southey], belongs to a sect of poets, that has established itself in this country within these ten or twelve years, and is looked upon, we believe, as one of its chief champions and apostles. The peculiar doctrines of this sect, it would not, perhaps, be very easy to explain; but that they are dissenters from the established systems in poetry and criticism, is admitted, and proved indeed, by the whole tenor of their compositions. Though they lay claim, we believe, to a creed and a revelation of their own, there can be little doubt, that their doctrines are of German origin, and have been derived from some of the great modern reformers of that country. Some of their leading principles, indeed, are probably of an earlier date, and seem to have been borrowed from the great apostle of Geneva. As Mr Southey is the first author, of this persuasion, that has yet been brought before us for judgment, we cannot discharge our inquisitorial office conscientiously, without premising a few words upon the nature and tendency of the tenets he has helped to promulgate. (RS 68–9) Two decades later, William Hazlitt adopts the same tactic in his essay ‘On the Living Poets’: ‘They founded the new school on a principle of sheer humanity … these sweeping reformers and dictators.’40 Hazlitt’s contrarianism locates the arbitrary power also found in radical opposition. He cites the poets as ‘reformers and dictators.’ More univocal, Jeffrey pursues a comparatively wooden religious allegory, in which the poets satirically are accused of what Luther championed in fierce earnestness: contempt for the standard of good works; or ‘dissociation of personal identity from the world of work.’41 In his important essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757), David Hume had left unquestioned the governing ideal of a standard, even though he conceded that any individual choice to embody it would be open to debate. Brandishing the accomplishments of Hume’s culture, the Thalaba review defends lawful ‘standards,’ while dissent and enthusiasm are quashed. (The vehemence might be compared to Hume’s out



62

of character urge to burn books at the end of the First Enquiry.) But ironically, Jeffrey’s accusations of exaggerated thought find a colleague in Kant himself as the voice of everything philosophical and German. Kant’s remarks against Schwärmerei in ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ (1786) understand this term as zealotry in philosophy and religion.42 By bringing down the censoring state to curtail reason’s public use, marginal fanaticism imperils the regulated exercise of liberties within limits, there Kant maintains. The Schwarm will ‘ruin it for everyone,’ as the parental warning runs. The argument hearkens back to Kant’s youthful satire, Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766), and alludes to the acrimonious ‘pantheism controversy’ of the 1780s, in which allegations of Spinozism flew about – the buzzword for calling out fellow thinkers as atheists. Kant’s text in turn has received gestures of disavowal from some of today’s best philosophically minded literary scholars, firm in their own post-enlightenment ‘orientation to difference.’43 In this way, the notion of a figurative ‘stand’ is both drawn out and fundamentally challenged by the status of reflection as a means to establish what Kant called ‘orientation.’ The other way of seeing Arendt’s two-in-one is as a perennially distracted, self-communing – and male – prerogative: one which does not so much alternate with the world as negatively impact it or fail to render it due acknowledgment. The philosophical heritage of such a view draws from Kant’s figurative orientation of the self by way of the sun, and presents the conceptual hub of a view of life that – to draw from the American poet Elizabeth Bishop – sees ‘one of it’ and ‘one of me,’ as we are told in her ‘Crusoe in England.’44 Offering schematic criticism of Kant’s ‘Orientation’ essay at the start of her significant recent collection, Impersonality, Sharon Cameron advances the aesthetic of anti-reflective and decentering critique that we find also in Bishop’s early poem ‘The Gentleman of Shalott.’ With overtly gendered binaries from the famous poem of Tennyson in mind – her relation to him part necessarily indebted comic performance, and part a cultured anger – Bishop’s poem is an elaborate joke on the predicament involved in the husbandry of static reflection. She tidies up an experience that begins rather like Ishmael and Queequeg in the ecstatic morning scene beneath the counterpane in Moby Dick (he wakes to wonder, ‘which limb is mine?’). However, the poem evokes instead the bodily disorientation of a single man; Bishop reports as he tries to keep ordered the awkward dignity of consciousness, wondering: ‘Which eye’s his eye? / Which limb lies / next the mirror?’ (lines 1–3). This constant reflective mediation the poem calls his ‘economical design. / If the glass slips / he’s in a fix––’ (lines 32–4). Nevertheless it is another poet well known to Bishop




Romantic Fiat

who had perfected the seriocomic vision of idealistic male distraction. In Marriage, Marianne Moore actually clips from the overreaching language of the romantics, from Godwin to Hazlitt on Burke, and in the process sets the edges of a kind of outsider romanticism critique. The poem charges masculine idealism with bungling desire: Unnerved by the nightingale and dazzled by the apple, impelled by the ‘illusion of a fire effectual to extinguish fire,’ compared with which the shining of the earth is but deformity––a fire ‘as high as deep as bright as broad as long as life itself,’ he stumbles over marriage, ‘a very trivial object indeed’ to have destroyed the attitude in which he stood–– the ease of a philosopher unfathered by a woman.45 The satire here on male imaginative and philosophical ‘creation’ is broad, yet not less sharp: a man ‘unnerved,’ ‘dazzled,’ and ‘impelled’ by illusions, nonetheless finds ‘the shining of the earth’ deformed. Marriage is an incidental trip-up that occurs below, with his gaze sucked into the ludicrously mesmerizing fire, ‘high … deep … bright … broad … long.’ The male is hypnotized by his own imaginative sublime and, even if ‘he’ does not taste it first, is all the more entranced by the promise of the apple than ‘woman’ can be said to have been.46 A great modernist collage, Marriage becomes even more apt and relentlessly enlightening in comparison to foundational texts of romantic subjectivity. Place Fichte within Moore’s scope, for instance: Attend to yourself; turn your gaze from everything surrounding you and look within yourself: this is the first demand philosophy makes upon anyone who studies it. Here you will not be concerned with anything that lies outside of you, but only with yourself.47 You can just hear Moore’s poem undressing the originator of such a project. He is part butterfly and part steamroller.48 The artist’s protective



64

self-interest, which Moore’s own stance in the reviews around Marriage had supported in practical terms for women writers, in men reveals itself as reckless idealism bound for pratfalls or worse, if we see Fichtean thought in the line that Marriage submits to answerable responses. All those gathered swatches of detail that comprise the texture, at once historical and intimate, of Moore’s poetry could just as easily have drawn other accumulative ironies within range: that Kant the lifelong bachelor now has his tomb visited by newlywed Russians in Kaliningrad, for example.49 Male idealism stumbles into its ill-matched marriage with an actuality filled with uncontrollably ‘real’ persons and things. Marriage and ‘The Gentleman of Shalott’ convincingly imply there are figures in the poet-philosopher tradition who provoke satire from a gender perspective. In romantic studies, I would relate these gender coordinates to an extravagant lyric poetics distinctive of the visionary mode in proximity to nature. As the result of its genre, not gender, William Godwin’s novel Fleetwood (1805) arrives at some intriguing observations at a helpful distance from such lyrical enthusiasm. Godwin identifies with this ‘daydream’ of a command, even as his novel about The New Man of Feeling risks underrating its complex function as something more than the adolescent phase in a review of changing eighteenth-century taste. Lyric is but one discursive fashion among many in this historical novel; and at that the first in the plot. Godwin’s depiction of the nature-poet type (‘He was contemplative, absent, enthusiastical, a worshiper of nature’50), suggests Fleetwood’s tangled relation to poetic inheritance, placing him within a set of expectations about landscape and Bildung that Godwin – as much as Wordsworth for different purposes – wants both to invoke and revise. ‘Worshiper of nature’ surely indicates ‘Tintern Abbey’ at the front of the novel’s agenda. Fleetwood’s early life in Wales sketches again the Wordsworthian autobiographical narrative of ‘Tintern Abbey.’ For that reason I include it at length: Often I reposed by the side of a cataract, and was insensibly lulled into slumber by the monotony of its dashing. While thus amused, I acquired a habit of being absent in mind from the scene which was before my senses. I devoured at first with greedy appetite the objects which presented themselves; but by perseverance they faded on my eye and my ear, and I sunk into a sweet insensibility to the impressions of external nature. The state thus produced was sometimes that which we perhaps most exactly understand by the term reverie, when the mind has neither action nor distinct ideas, but is swallowed up in a living death, which, at the same time that it is indolent and inert, is not destitute of a certain




Romantic Fiat

voluptuousness. At other seasons the abstraction of my mind was of a more busy and definite sort. I was engaged in imaginary scenes, constructed visionary plans, and found all nature subservient to my command. I had a wife and children, was the occupier of palaces, or the ruler of nations. There is this difference between the visions of the night, and the dreams, the waking dreams I mean, of the day: the former are often painful, the latter are perhaps always grateful and soothing. With the visions of the night there is ordinarily mixed a depressing sense of impotence; things without it are too strong for us: in those of the day we are all-powerful; obstacles no sooner present themselves than they are conquered; or, if it is otherwise, we willfully protract our struggle, that we may prolong our pleasure, and enhance our triumph. In the dream of the night, our powers are blunted, and we are but half ourselves: the day-dream on the contrary is the triumph of man; our invention in full complacency is pure; and, if there is any mixture of imbecility or folly in the fable, it is a mixture to which the dreamer at the moment scarcely adverts. The tendency, therefore, of this species of dreaming, when frequently indulged, is to inspire a certain propensity to despotism, and to render him who admits it impatient of opposition, and prepared to feel every cross accident, as a usurpation upon his rights, and a blot upon his greatness. This effect of my early habits I fully experienced, and it determined the colour of my riper years.51 Based on a difference between lack of command and illusion of control, the distinction between nighttime dreaming and ‘waking dreams’ here is prescient of De Quincey, who shades over Wordsworth to produce darker romanticism. As a reworking of ‘Tintern Abbey,’ this scene in Fleetwood blurs the contrasting phases of natural impression and the later mansion of the mind; they are composed here into a kind of alternate simultaneity within reverie. Like Jeffrey’s resonant phrase ‘exaggeration of thought,’ this important long passage has the curious effect of unleashing original and conventional vocabularies indiscriminately. Godwin raises the terms of several uncanny aspects of romantic lyric not often seen before Wordsworth’s 1798 and 1800 Lyrical Ballads. My list includes ‘slumber’ induced by monotony, absentmindedness, physiological inertia, spleen, and the lyric poet’s propensity to shape fantasies of ‘despotism.’52 Yet as the novel’s language rapidly moves by under its narrative momentum, in the same passage Godwin insinuates that his hero’s lyrical mode taps stock conventions of youthful wish. Once Fleetwood passes on from this year of magical thinking, in other



66

words, he passes out of the lyric. This is phase one of a narrative that goes on to address the hero’s evolving sensibility in what is already a past historical frame. In a study, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, that has underwritten a great deal of commentary on the ballads since, Mary Jacobus judges ‘Tintern Abbey’ the effort most prepared-for by literary tradition.53 The remark rhymes aspects of both Jeffrey’s remarks and Fleetwood. Beyond its sheer position in the genre of the topographical poem, the conventionalism of ‘Tintern Abbey’ is patent in the use of apostrophe to evoke a picturesque locale: for example, ‘How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, / O sylvan Wye!’ (lines 55–6). But more strange and unnerving – I shall argue – is the poem’s turn to something like that apostrophic mode not to project upon nature with beautified ideas, but to disclose what is just there below the threshold of observation. In the declaration ‘Therefore let the moon / Shine on thee’ (lines 134–5), one senses the risk of the poet’s edging too much into a language of despotic command that takes psychological rather than political invasion for its content. But also one can sense the redundant, by all accounts given, presence of other earthly bodies: the moon that actually ‘shines’ in reflecting; the poet’s wish to overcome a skeptical relation to ‘other minds’; the subjunctive and violable connection to Dorothy as the human being not only dearest but nearest to him. These elements function together so that, at the end of the poem, Wordsworth can simply rewrite the Lutheran affirmation as ‘We stood together’ (line 152). ‘Therefore,’ the curiously logical spring of assertion in the command to the moon, releases this magical thought after a full stop midline. Whatever its unsettling position toward Dorothy Wordsworth as a person, then, the effect William produces in the address to Dorothy is the opposite of wishful fantasy, I will persist in arguing below, since it is meant to honor something real and continuous. The lyric pulses in and out of its most concentrated thinking. Yet since that intensified ‘inward’ poetics has all along been open to view as distraction from everything else – as a poetics of spacing out – ‘Tintern Abbey’ offers an intriguing concession here at the last moment, when the poem snaps back into a regard for earth rather than world, the continuities not of landscape but of an impersonal, and elemental, environment. At the same time this relinquishment, bound up in Wordsworth’s jussive poetics of conceding power, makes for the very enlargement of his strangest and most distinctive powers. In this spirit one might create an alternate title by which to approach romanticism’s best-known crisis lyric. On a par with some of Coleridge’s titles like ‘Fears in Solitude’ and ‘Religious Musings,’




68

Romantic Fiat

‘Tintern Abbey’ evokes a position we could rename ‘Enthusiasm and Disorientation.’

[M]odern philosophy, starting with Hegel, has succumbed to the strange illusion that man in distinction from other things, has created himself. Obviously, self-presentation and the sheer thereness of existence are not the same. – Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 37 In The Life of the Mind and elsewhere, Hannah Arendt defines the thinker’s stance as an odd type of insubordination when viewed against all rushed patterns of social agreement concerning the product of thought. Among this chapter’s many investments, I want to suggest that the Thinking section of The Life of the Mind might help romantic studies approach its near-obsession with political tests of commitment. The Life of the Mind confronts this politicized hue and cry, and appears to mute the edge that Arendt nevertheless keeps sharp by way by her career’s total example. Her work may help us to revisit the allegations against Wordsworth’s inward turn. My own provisional conclusion would be that she clears space for a universal prerogative for thinking, without thereby necessitating that we clear the Wordsworth biography of a trend toward increasing conservative reaction. Thinking does not use any Wordsworth poems (it often cites W. H. Auden, the embodiment of a very different heritage of defending poetry in society and conceding it ‘makes nothing happen’). Yet Arendt champions the intervals of distraction and retirement as elemental to the faculty of thought in every sense, including in its socially propaedeutic role, a relation to the social realm of ‘boundary situations’ mirroring those often found in Wordsworth’s ‘marginal’ subjects (LM 192).54 Not surprisingly for a student of Heidegger and reader of Kant, hers is a strong brief for the freedom of poetic thinking as of first importance. Arendt’s project is fundamentally aligned by a comparison between thought as a faculty with the immanence of life itself. Both have what Kant in his moral theory calls ‘dignity’ – they are ends in themselves – as opposed to what he calls ‘market value’ and ‘fancy value.’ Singled out with the art of friendship, thinking and life stand apart from what Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb considers Arendt’s all-absorbing gift for making finer and finer analytical distinctions.55



‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Life of the Mind

In a connected account of the poem related to Arendt’s understanding of the gap between truth and meaning in this section of The Life of the Mind, I want to understand the development of ‘Tintern Abbey’ as at once unitary and radically split. The poem enacts a double and triple thick, redundant, type of poetic insurance. This ‘policy’ operates on the level of Wordsworth’s structured rational argumentation, which I place in the poem’s transitional logic indicated by the use of ‘Therefore’ and conditional ‘if … then’ movements. The ‘policy’ of ‘Tintern Abbey’ needs to be read against core moments that are strictly events in experience, and so prove unjustifiable – just as in the poet’s language the performative resolutions are held to be self-sufficient (‘And so I dare to hope’: a claim that cannot be rendered true or false, but like ‘vain belief’ can be shown to end unhappily). A substratum of the lyric that underlies the poem’s rationalization includes the ‘little, nameless, unremembered, acts,’ alongside impasses of belief to which an answer could only be performatively rendered, part of a poetry that spends and renews itself by the same method Arendt ascribes to thinking. Finally, in the twist of argument that gives the chapter its title and central image of romantic poetic fiat, to culminate I take up Wordsworth’s unusual prophetic voice near the end of ‘Tintern Abbey’ in the address to Dorothy,56 seeing it as a command to nature to do what in fact nature does anyway (but which it is not guaranteed to go on doing forever). What effects attend that moment? What kinds of ‘recompense’ can this ritual mode of address gain for a person? And what work could such a gesture have – belying at once impotence and a certain excess – in completing the work of the poem? The improvised genres of Wordsworthian ‘crisis lyric’ and Coleridgean ‘conversation poem’ do, as several critics have observed, deeply influence and resemble one another.57 Yet for starters we might see how the gesture I call ‘useless fiat’ in the next chapter readily contrasts to Coleridge, whose approach to natural beauty had crystallized a year before in 1797 with ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ and its very different command to nature to be on its best behavior. To read Coleridge invoking how the sun might shine for a friend – setting slowly, burning the clouds ‘richlier,’ and finally kindling the ocean – bears an irreducible, though on first account slight, difference from Wordsworth’s injunction that the moon shine on and the wind just blow. *** ‘Nothing perhaps is more surprising in this world of ours than the almost infinite diversity of its appearances,’ writes Hannah Arendt, ‘the sheer




Romantic Fiat

entertainment value of its views, sounds, and smells, something that is hardly ever mentioned by thinkers and philosophers’ (LM 20). Though this work has occasioned confusion, or even disturbed readers who seek a culmination to her life’s work in the active trajectory begun with The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and sustained through the Eichmann controversy, The Life of the Mind (1978) bears irreplaceable witness to its author’s powers and interests; and, given my interests, it can be applied in order to frame ‘Tintern Abbey’ as a philosophical meditation on what is also Arendt’s basic premise: ‘the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence’ (LM 4). As much as the ‘Immortality’ Ode could be seen to do later in the poet’s career, Arendt’s Thinking engages ‘this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere.’ For this interval she highlights emphatically that ‘Being and Appearing coincide’ (LM 19). Thus she insists first on suspending the traditional hierarchy governing the modes of being and appearance. Thought, Arendt asserts, ‘does not ask what something is or whether it exists at all – its existence is always taken for granted – but what it means for it to be’ (LM 57). In a late attempt at what Descartes had famously called ‘first philosophy,’ Arendt’s approach instead deploys phenomenological assumptions, and takes for granted that we are always in the midst of existence. Yet this ‘given’ quality also heralds and is destabilized by a literary voice in philosophical thinking. One includes not just the major influence from her teacher Heidegger here, but the eerie concern of philosophy to interrogate the original Cartesian plane of questions: asking ‘what I formerly believed I was’ while actually exploring the conditions in which it might meaningfully be said that an ‘I’ does and does not exist. Such a tradition is traceable from an original component of Descartes through Wordsworth and Emerson, and found in our day in Stanley Cavell’s magnificent essay on Descartes, Emerson and Poe, ‘Being Odd, Getting Even.’58 In examining the Meditations on First Philosophy after Cavell’s reengagement over the skeptical threat to being, we freshly see how odd and imaginatively compelling was the essential need of Descartes. His project aims not at securing true knowledge in the tamer, largely eighteenth-century epistemological sense (the failure of which yields the mitigated skepticism thought typical of Hume), but upon outright affirming the fact and quality of being. How do I affirm that I exist? To hear any voice ask this question registers uncannily in a manner one might already be tempted to call ‘lyric.’ Is that something one needs to prove? This is not epistemology as we usually think of it, but a desire to know one’s existence under the feeling thereby betrayed that one doesn’t



70

(or perhaps that one does not yet, or does not anymore). Descartes wants to confirm that he is, and decides instead that foundational grounds appear only upon the absolute knowledge of how he thinkingly frames the proposition. As Hume scholars now sometimes talk of a ‘realism of appearances,’ a non-dualistic path out of Descartes might be called ‘realism of illusions’ (the illusion is ‘true,’ is there, and is comprehensible more or less as habitual experience).59 Oddly enough, it is this minimalist approach that directly yields the famous grandiloquence of ‘I think therefore I am’: a statement for which in the actual context of the second meditation, as Cavell notes, we just have the ‘proposition, “I am, I exist”’ – and at that in inverted commas to suggest either a practice of Derridean citation against the very self to be proved, or an appeal to extrinsic authority. The cogito’s syntax is mere apposition. To set the table for ensuing sections provisioned with answers in the Meditations, Descartes asks, ‘Up to the present, then, what did I think I was?’60 His technique to guard against ‘a deceptive memory’ offers the wild concession that ‘nothing ever existed,’ or that nothing is possible to doubt has any reality.61 ‘[O]nce in a lifetime, everything should be completely overturned and I should begin again,’ Descartes opens the first meditation. His leveling gesture all but requires a new fiat to initiate a new beginning in the midst of life. Descartes creates need for a skeptical fiat that serves to ‘let’ reality back into full consideration. And he invokes the fanciful conceit for the moment – closing his eyes, staying by his stove with some wax in a warm shed – that he can block out the inevitably global environment that impinges on all acts of thought, infiltrating narrowly conscious intent. Summoning conditions as close as possible to homeostasis, the philosopher then looks out, as from the inside of mind rigged up like a camera obscura. Descartes needs to hold to his fiction of deliberately narrowing the aperture of sense, to promote that ‘letting in’ afterward with the clearance of one sufficiently investigated idea at a time. This is an epistemology of the bottleneck, the checkpoint. Of course there is a major difference between Descartes’s rationalism and the way I have described The Life of the Mind; and it lies in his theologically inspired hunger to get beyond the appearances that Arendt raises to full equity with privileged Being. Descartes, not Hegel as in the section epigraph I have quoted, then, provides earliest grounds for a possible ‘romantic ideology’ by his foundational technique of shutting out the ambient world. In this ‘I’ who sees through the appearances and holds that kind of project to be the valid foundational moment, one can rightly place the ‘erasures and displacements’ written about so influentially twenty-five years ago by Jerome McGann: maneuvers that




Romantic Fiat

seek to consolidate and harmonize a monolithic ‘abbey of the mind.’62 Yet which philosophy is better summoned to frame Wordsworth? To the line of criticism that asserts Wordsworth’s ‘beauteous forms’ (line 22) involve the forced conversion of impressions into ideas, mere appearances into the worked truth of being, Arendt would avail us of a different approach. She asserts the priority and ‘primacy of appearance’ over ‘the age old theoretical supremacy of Being and Truth’ (LM 23–5). Her use of ‘the Swiss zoologist and biologist Adolph Portmann’ reverses the assumption that an organism’s outer display serves only the functionalist ends of protecting inner organs and attracting to ensure the species: ‘From a different and, as it were, more innocent view-point, it rather looks as though, on the contrary, the inner, non-appearing organs exist only in order to bring forth and maintain the appearances’ (LM 27).63 An interesting revaluation to set between the two ‘Lines’ poems I have read so far (‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ and ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’) from here suggests that the young green ‘tufts’ (line 9), ‘wreathes’ (line 10), and ‘budding twigs’ (line 17) of the more modest poem are not referenced necessarily to be turned into a deeper moral as that lyric and the collection advance. They have full ‘primacy’ on their own. And they are as much the reality modeled by, not the raw materials of, what Wordsworth there calls his vocational ‘creed’ and ‘plan’ (line 22) to situate natural beauty in terms of social orientation. To be sure, we are still free to conclude that ‘Tintern Abbey’ slouches back from this intriguingly minoritarian stance to the older cliché of overwhelming depths. Nevertheless I think we do better in observing how those ‘beauteous forms’ in themselves remain descriptions of a surface that in Wordsworth’s best poetry almost always has no Cartesian ghost underneath. Besides the drive to make a conventional assumption, there is simply no reason to think ‘forms’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’ refer to a dualistic Cartesian spirit, the Platonic sense of forms, or to an ‘inner’ component truer than phenomenal manifestation. ‘Tintern Abbey’ anticipates the account of Frankenstein’s creature in this way, who – having been born into the experimental condition of adult infancy – only gradually can learn to observe ‘the forms that surrounded me, and to perceive the boundaries’:64 things as they appear. Famously, to dissect ‘the beauteous forms of things’ (line 27) involves murder in ‘The Tables Turned.’65 It is a Cartesian murder not merely because of the allusion to certain books the Matthew character might be reading,66 but in the sense that even the poem’s repeated readers often forget or ‘displace’ how Wordsworth makes the worse act instrumental. ‘Our meddling intellect’ (line 26) murders to dissect. Not only has it been assigned the strongest metaphor possible to



72

describe the rage to analyze; Wordsworth is saying that in order to get to a practice in itself vexed, we do murder most foul. As readers we show ourselves complicit in the plotting of ‘murder’; we either glance over the word and gloss it quickly (no good Samaritan or jurist, and a silent party to the act), or else we renew the vicious circle of ‘meddling’ by interpreting the poem as I have just done. A case for saving and, indeed, celebrating the appearances thus can be carried through Wordsworth’s part of the Lyrical Ballads on to ‘Tintern Abbey’ as the finale of such an enterprise, not its rescission. While our inability as readers to evade both active and passive accomplice status demonstrates how inwardly barbed is even that affirmative claim. Over the length of ‘Tintern Abbey,’ Arendt’s pointed criticism of Descartes suggests a logic in which the poem also entangles us up. She quotes a major phenomenological thinker: What Merleau-Ponty had to say against Descartes is brilliantly right: ‘To reduce perception to the thought of perceiving … is to take out an insurance against doubt whose premiums are more onerous than the loss for which it is to indemnify us: for it is to … move to a type of certitude that will never restore to us the ‘there is’ of the world.’ (LM 49)67 Descartes fears ‘loss’ of knowledge and is willing to pay the ‘premiums’ in burdening access to an everyday sensuous world. Just as empiricism later concedes direct experiential knowledge in favor of the mediation of sense impressions or sensory data, the allegation here is that Descartes loses ‘the world’ of perception in his need to secure a meta-order confirmation of thinking. Inviting comparison to Wordsworth for me is Merleau-Ponty’s insight about the ‘Scandal of Skepticism’68 – the idea that proof of an external world cannot be had, that any constructed ‘certitude’ about a world of objects comes with its price. But mainly it is his language of insurance altogether that suggestively plays with ‘Tintern Abbey.’ The Fenwick note to the ‘Immortality’ Ode remains the go-to text about Wordsworth’s need, when a boy, for reassurance that there was a world outside him (‘I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence’).69 Lionel Trilling’s comment that Wordsworth ‘was haunted by the mysterious fact that he existed’ also should be remembered here.70 But in advance of the Ode’s overt concerns with those ‘Fallings from us, vanishings’ (lines 147) that bespeak exactly the warning of Merleau-Ponty and Arendt through him (‘a type of certitude that will never restore to us … ’ [italics added; see the use of ‘bring back’ in line 181 of the Ode]), ‘Tintern Abbey’ takes




Romantic Fiat

out the ‘insurance against doubt’ that is rightly said to lead to this situation. In that sense one might find curious the absence of full-scale readings of ‘Tintern Abbey’ in the best philosophically inflected accounts of the poet. Through a drastic foreshortening of apocalyptic knowledge that constitutes his own kind of ‘timeless’ lyric moment, Luther would know now that he is saved; Descartes secures the foundations of knowledge by his present affirmation that he thinks (does that mean, Cavell asks, that his proof requires affirmation in every instant?); Wordsworth, likewise, both obtains the explanatory power of his major lyrics and encounters their greatest existential predicament in terms of how convictions apply with ongoing time. Does his belief in ‘abundant recompense’ for past loss (a finite and, on account of its doubts, a moving claim) also apply to a future that his pretended command over has now emptied of reality? In their core projects, I am arguing, Luther and Descartes are strong poets according to Sharon Cameron’s notion of Lyric Time – thinkers who in their rage deny and short-circuit temporal process, levying spatial form out of temporal desperation. It is Wordsworth, by contrast, who actually may not be such a poet. At once bootstrapping up its confidence and conceding great doubts, the poem’s turns embody this skeptical problem with time, and they have a curious effect. Wordsworth after 1800 himself placed in a note to ‘Tintern Abbey’ the idea that it was most ode-like in ‘the transitions’: most ambitious and (psycho)logically extended, one presumes, in some sense of ‘the impassioned music of the versification.’ Kenneth Johnston observes sharply how ‘Tintern Abbey’ might have ended in several places: ‘[proximity to failure] is a risk that at every moment threatens to end the poem.’71 (This is an interesting idea in terms of compositional history, since unlike the ‘Immortality’ Ode and Wordsworth’s general practice he claims to have written down ‘Tintern Abbey’ in one uninterrupted stretch.) What are those moments? And what happens there? Stuart Curran sees the major transition in line 112 (‘Nor perchance,’ after a full period stop mid-line) as the formal start of an epode, the shift from autobiographical reflection and address to the river, instead to addressing Dorothy.72 Johnston follows openings of verse paragraphs: ‘If this be but a vain belief,’ ‘Not for this faint I, nor mourn nor murmur,’ ‘Nor perchance, / If I were not thus taught,’ ‘Nor, perchance, / If I should be where I no more can hear / Thy voice,’ ‘Nor wilt thou then forget.’ It is precisely the dubiety of thought and belief, of education and of faith, that underscores ‘Tintern Abbey’s’ natural religion.73



74

Over the reigning critical presumptions about harmony of a few decades ago, one welcomes the turn of emphasis toward ‘dubiety.’ This perspective on ‘Tintern Abbey’ as a poem six times halted (by Johnston’s count) and constantly in danger of simply ending also confirms the longstanding philosophical challenge to such an application, the merger of being and thought. What happens when thinking subsides? This is where Cavell takes up: ‘Descartes establishes to his satisfaction that I exist only while, or if and only if, I think … Emerson goes the whole way with Descartes’s insight – that I exist only if I think – but he thereupon denies that I (mostly) do think.’74 Wordsworth’s undersong of deictic markers throughout the beginning of the poem – instances of mental regard, space and localized conjunctions of time (for example, ‘again’ [line 2], ‘once again’ [line 4], ‘Here’ [line 10], ‘Once again’ [line 14], ‘While’ [line 47]) – assume an important role in that effort toward continuity through forms of consciousness. They serve as breathings of thought (in time), or (in space) as the constantly renewed scanning of the eyes to maintain the field of vision. Rather than preceding it, the lyric ‘I’ is constituted in the same extended gesture as the poem’s temporal experience. This deictic poetics marks signal events of vocation for Wordsworth. It centers his calling both at the start of The Prelude – where he imagines a choice of dwelling as the same as the initiation of the poem – and in Home at Grasmere, the long draft ending the prospectus to The Recluse. By contrast, an odd spirit of alienation from any ‘here’ may be seen to unmoor ‘calling’ in the fragments written in Germany, including ‘Was it for this?,’ ‘The Boy of Winander,’ and the Lucy poems. A desubjectivized ‘I’ enters into tension with a here and a now, and suggests possible links to Agamben’s reorientation of linguistic theory using the ideas of Emile Benveniste, or de Man on the ego-idealist Fichte himself.75 Like the modal categories of here and now, the ‘I’ proves ‘indexical’ in nature. It is meaningful and performative, but in no sense ‘true.’ (Nor ‘false,’ need I say.) Arendt in this connection displays attitudes that evoke the performative language theory of J. L. Austin. Citing Aristotle On Interpretation, she relates: ‘But “not every logos is revealing (apophanantikos), only those in which true speech or false speech (aletheuein or pseudesthai) holds sway. This is not always the case; for example, a prayer is a logos [it is significant] but neither true nor false”’ (LM 58). And prayer is the significant, neither true nor falsifiable speech on which ‘Tintern Abbey’ ends. Is the ‘prayer’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’ a gesture that merely asks for the state of mind that prayerful readiness in itself creates?76 Or is it, rather, a command to God that just extends the fantasy of omnipotence? In his doctoral treatise,




76

Romantic Fiat

[Prayer] addresses itself to the divinity and influences it; it consists of physical actions from which results are expected. But at the same time, every prayer is always to some extent a Credo. Even where constant use has emptied it of meaning, it still gives expression to a minimum of religious ideas and feelings. In prayer the faithful both act and think.77 Building off Kenneth Johnston’s remarks, my concern is to see just how rhetorically constructive Wordsworth makes his acknowledgment of doubt: and, from there, to insist on how eloquent but unsteadily sustaining those doubts remain. The poem’s very structures of support bridge out – lacking completion on the other side – upon these forces of skepticism, through syntactical chains in which the feeling of having further resources is elicited by concessions about proximate failure. We are right to find a salutary ‘dubiety,’ that is; but we are wrong if we imply this isn’t the very means on which Wordsworth relies to maneuver his way through the poem, at every point raising the stakes of what it would mean to conclude successfully. The potential halts access his resources, the reserve clauses of ‘Tintern Abbey’ that are held in advance of future loss and lay by answers against each destructive contingency. It is this demand that readers sympathetic to the poem may still find obnoxious. By my own ear, there are several points when ‘Tintern Abbey’ could have stopped and still been coherent. It would have made a resonant documentation of the power of place had it ended very early before ‘Nor less’ (line 35) or ‘If this’ (a late caesura in line 49). The poem might have been a testament unifying past and present, with little mind paid to projective future cares, had it stopped at the first ‘Therefore’ (line 102), ‘Nor perchance’ (line 111), or even the second ‘Therefore’ (line 134). The two ‘therefores’ are especially interesting. They do not gain their ‘transitional’ force from being placed at the head of verse paragraphs. To stop at either of these moments would leave the existential, logically unjustified, assertion that ‘little nameless unremembered acts’ (line 34) have born their fruit and preserved the poet; and anyway he ‘would believe’ (line 87) that they do so going forward. The crucial resolve of the lines, ‘[O]ther gifts / Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, / Abundant recompense’ (lines 86–8), offers a willed affirmation that tries to press beyond the malin génie problem of ‘vain belief’ (line 50). Belief cannot be ‘vain’ in the sense of true or false; it cannot



On Prayer (1909), Marcel Mauss saw even individual, Protestant prayer fundamentally as social action:

be dislodged as belief, only relinquished. A ‘vain belief’ may be one not likely to reach fulfillment, but then fulfillment would obviate the need for belief at all. This hint that he could be argued out of belief suggests Wordsworth aims at something more for which belief is a means. In a very different connection that informs the archive of his work on the Liverpool slaving industry and the slave ship Zong, Ian Baucom raises the economies of finance capital, credit, and insurance as central to the eighteenth and ‘long twentieth’ centuries.78 Baucom’s rich network of interrelations draws from a notion of the barred subject ($) that Slavoj Žižek has described as a ‘void of absolute negativity’ that ‘emerges when “something is exchanged for nothing.”’79 ‘Tintern Abbey’ too trades on a kind of insurance policy; and perhaps its central preoccupation among critics is whether this is or is not what Žižek proclaims anaeconomical sacrifice. Two subsequent pulses of ‘therefore’ construction give backup arguments, contingency plans.80 Or better, they treat as a firm outcome the relationships in a fabric of thinking that, by contrast, only responds to hypothetical fears. (‘If this / Be but a vain belief,’ Wordsworth counters, I have the solid fact of past experiences to give me bearings outside the whole matter of believing, although ‘I cannot paint’ [line 75] exactly what that looked like.) This character of the syntax in the total poem complicates whatever might stir us above in truncated versions. ‘Therefore’ at the start of a sentence provides the effect of an especially solid momentum. And unlike Descartes’s ‘therefore’ (donc, in French) – a word positioned to bear weight at the middle of the syllogism-type formulation, ‘je pense, donc je suis,’ a chunky word that one trips over and kicks like Doctor Johnson’s stone – the English propels us quite heedless of whether its logic is fully established. The first ‘Therefore’ hinges us past the poem’s exordium; and though one wonders how exactly it is that all the sublimity gone before becomes the efficient cause for such a conclusion (since all these conditions hold, ‘Therefore I am still … ’? or is it more generous and loose than that? but then what does it actually mean?), the passage nonetheless makes basic sense in that Wordsworth reaches moral resolve from gleaning imaginative truth from darkening conditions: And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air,




Romantic Fiat

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear,—both that they half create, And what perceive[.] (lines 93–107) Even here the half-and-half blend of creation and perception implies a strictly intentional ‘therefore’ must have a fictional component. When this mode of causal structuration appears again, it revolves quite explicitly around a magical turn of thought that no longer falls in the speaker’s realm of command at all: Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee[.] (lines 119–37) A Miltonic state of mind is signaled by resistance to sneers of selfish men. Yet the narrative consequentiality of this great passage is totally opaque. A ‘prayer’ in form, it is not acting logically ‘to justify’ the ways of anything.



78

Poetic insurance secures a deep and intricate network of supports to protect habits and feelings that otherwise would have to stand alone; while at the same time the transitions in the poem (conjuring logic with a suasive rhythm) leave ‘therefore’ as ‘Tintern Abbey’s’ least protected, most magical, gesture of thinking. Instead of tightly closing a rationally conducted proof or making the case for a vote, it is as if this word in ‘Tintern Abbey’ instead tells us the minimal conditions for praise or prayer. Having reached its conclusion long before, ‘therefore’ lets loose with something held back but already long in existence. An end as opposed to the poem’s starting place, it blazons a world worth Wordsworth’s engagement. I agree with Heidi Thomson when she finds that ‘the poem affirms the continuous necessity for a web of interlocution between Wordsworth and his sister to substantiate the myth of memory’ in the address to Dorothy, and that ‘“Tintern Abbey” is a poem about the necessity of a shared experience with a beloved person.’81 But I think I have found in Arendt’s writing another step that is even less dispensable than the regard for Dorothy as a cherished person, since for The Life of the Mind it is not just the quality of memory and love that must be shared, but the phenomenon of having a world at all. Even value-free appearances require ‘a plurality of spectators’ (LM 21). ‘Plurality is the law of the earth.’ David Bromwich concludes about Arendt in conjunction with Wordsworth: ‘“For the confirmation of my identity,” wrote Hannah Arendt of a way of thought that survives the most leveling oppression, “I depend entirely on other people.”’ A poet speaking only to himself ‘remains always equivocal,’ while only plurality ‘restores the identity which makes [him] speak with the single voice of one unexchangeable person.’82 Just as the ‘I’ is called into being through its prior scene of interpellation as a ‘you,’ having a self requires there be others. Just to note the mere appearances implies our own appearing, or what Arendt calls ‘self-presentation’ in the passage I cited at the head of this section. To complement Cavell’s work on avoidance of knowledge, our visibility to one another is the precondition of our vision: Dead matter, natural and artificial, changing and unchanging, depends in its being, that is, in its appearingness, on the presence of living creatures. Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not suppose a spectator. In other words, nothing, that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is meant to be perceived by somebody. Not Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth. (LM 19)




Romantic Fiat

‘Tintern Abbey’ hangs on a family moment, it is true. But the importance of the turn to Dorothy is to see all existence as coexistence. So late that the poem has to catch up to its own solace, or to pretend that this addendum is rather the inherent climax, the lyric finds that human appearances require acknowledgment not as quality assurance, but altogether in order to exist. Rather than giving an ever-increasing place to individual consciousness, the prayer is a strikingly late gesture to maintain something irreducibly social.83 Certainly William Wordsworth takes this lesson of radical coexistence from Dorothy at least as much as he shares it with her; ‘he makes himself necessary to Dorothy without being asked to, under a pretense of showing why she is necessary to him.’84

The anthropology of crisis lyric ‘the disenchantment of nature is at the same time a rationalization of reason.’85 When earlier I compared Godwin’s Fleetwood to ‘Tintern Abbey,’ the intention was not only to locate the nature-poet phase in that historical novel of sensibility. That idea features explicitly in the plot. Nor was it just to show the novel’s insight into the poetics of daydreams, commands, and reverie fostered in the presence of sublime and beautiful nature. On one level, Godwin wants nothing more than to invoke a stereotype: that young poets inhabit a distracted innocence malignly spoiled when they go up to university and grow up; that the lyric mindset is unprepared for the ordeals of historical fiction (or even frat-boy socialization, as in the example of the poor poetaster Withers). But the force of the juxtaposition also runs powerfully the other way, it seems to me, in the sense that Fleetwood’s own narrative preoccupations can be taken to constitute a kind of work done in some measure upon Wordsworth. Godwin’s plots trace and retrace ruptured seams in history and are driven by the psyches of hysterics. They dwell upon a kind of historical trauma that most readers assume Wordsworth either did not know, or – if in fact he ‘did something’ in France – that he was somehow able to write his way through after the fact. Might Fleetwood intend this global effect of Godwin’s shelf of hysterical/historical novels as a means to contextualize similar indigestible experience in ‘Tintern Abbey’? I’m not sure Fleetwood furthers that surmise; but the remark has a lateral suggestiveness that, like much analysis that rereads the poetry M. H. Abrams named ‘greater romantic lyric,’ punctures its sublimations and composure as exclusively literary history. The Godwinian historical



80

novel – as its best recent critics, including Katie Trumpener, have borne out86 – develops a layered and discontinuous form of the case study. Due to its very plurality of subjects, the Lyrical Ballads collection as a whole does not suit this form of narrative, except in a few ballads’ advance parody of neurosis. Two examples are the caricature of the landowning neurotic in ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill,’ and the prurient, spying sailor in ‘The Thorn.’ If anything, however, the impetus of the case study is what actually can be claimed with specificity of ‘Tintern Abbey.’ Its autobiographical concern with overcoming difficulty to shape a pressure-forged narrative about the self continues themes from the other blank verse poem included by Wordsworth in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, the Yew Tree ‘Lines’ that admonish a ‘lost Man’ (line 44). In hindsight, we forget how threateningly close to a figure of Wordsworth and Coleridge this was, before they surfaced from relative anonymity. Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1919) carries the subtitle Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Is not that juxtaposition exactly the image Wordsworth’s ballad experiments ask us to bring to mind? The few blank-verse reflections do not stand outside this association of ‘metrical arrangement’ with ‘men in a state of vivid sensation.’87 Instead they frame Miltonic high argument in enlightenment dialectics. Wordsworth confronts both industrialized ‘savage torpor’ and, back home in the Quantocks or Lake District, la pensée sauvage of the last stages of English folk culture. Association of ‘ideas in a state of excitement’ is a program for poetry that assumes rather odd torsions of emphasis concerning the lives of others sometimes: for example, when the Preface argues that victims have more ‘freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering’ than the ‘mechanical’ writer – one of the more compellingly weird statements in all Wordsworth’s aesthetics.88 That project offers a gauge of unmoored subjectivity, however, in the embedded experimental relation toward what Laura Quinney calls ‘the self-disenchanted self.’89 The third section of Totem and Taboo discusses ‘Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts’ as a vestige of thinking from so-called ethnographic cultures. In a maneuver I have found awkwardly too easy a way to understand this book’s subject of extravagant commands, Freud associates the wish fulfillments of bourgeois modern children with the social role assumed by ancient religion. Godwin at least had upgraded the phase to adolescence. Across current anthropological writing, the vestigial magic that Freud noted as still in modernity has been more vigorously ‘accompanied by theoretical statements reflect[ing] on the ways in which magic belongs




Romantic Fiat

to modernity,’ inhabits it as a supplement, and even (as is the case in Michael Taussig’s bold interpretation) is enabled most fully by a cultural and interpretive framework beginning in modern skepticism.90 And yet the methodologically ‘skeptical’ literary study of romanticism has not often moved alongside ethnographic work on symbols and religion.91 When it comes to identifying the leading schools of academic interpretation (not just rogues), the anthropological fieldworker’s sense that modernity and magic, demystification and enchantment or reenchantment, are to this day indissociable – that these sedimentations of meaning are always being turned over despite our long-term rational projects – is largely missing from twentieth-century romantic studies in its sweep toward increasing levels of critical exposure. There has been enough work to do just in jarring the foundational alignments. Published in 1965, M. H. Abrams’s influential notion of ‘greater romantic lyric’ was mapped over Wordsworth and Coleridge’s spiritualized landscape poetry of the mid-to-late 1790s. Yet this new ‘Romantic genre’ for Abrams was all along understood as an installment of literary history. ‘The crucial event in the development of the most distinctive of the Romantic lyric forms,’ Abrams concludes, ‘occurred when John Denham climbed Cooper’s Hill and undertook to describe, in balanced couplets, the landscape before his eyes, and to embellish the description with incidental reminiscence and meditation.’92 Helpful in narrating a textual event in literary-historical evolution, this founding gesture nonetheless installs balance and closure from the beginning, built into lyrics nonetheless written out of eruptive forces of psychic and historical questioning. Abrams offers a ‘type’ for his subgenre and – because its order is a retrospective map, a sort of recipe – because it has already been done he more or less knows where it will end: In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, facing up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation.93 Harold Bloom at about this moment began calling the same poems ‘Wordsworthian crisis lyric.’ His psychoanalytically charged method accomplished by the sheer force of that name what is, looking back, an odd overlay with Abrams. Where the tradition of ‘greater’ lyric indicates not only canonized excellence (as in the Pindaric heritage celebrating winners through



82

the ‘greater’ ode), but also a broad, slow, and ocean current-like effect of continuity, the Bloomian style is dramatically discontinuous. What counts as a strong poem for Bloom – the romantic ‘internalized’ quest plot – is all eerie showdowns, apostate turns, and highly dramatized tropological pivots. Bloom reads in a vertiginous way that unsteadies the balancing of inner with outer dynamics. At the same time, the agenda to move beyond formalism on his terms serves both to preempt and prompt the demystifying critique of later romantic ideology: a coinage for which Jerome McGann in turn risks unreflective enlightenment bias.94 More volatile in their relation to enlightenment historicism, some quite interesting treatments of Wordsworth lately are again conjuring with an anthropology freed from notions of hierarchical progress. I think in a seriocomic register of Paul Muldoon’s book-length poem Madoc (1991), and admiringly of Charles Rzepka’s essay on sacrificial ciphers in Michael, Simon Jarvis’s extended reappraisal of idolatry, ideology, and sacrifice, and J. H. Prynne’s new study (Field Notes) of Wordsworthian anthropology through the lyrics of his 1803 Scottish highland tour.95 That there is no exit from the strife of demystification and enchantment is apparent in the varied anthropological tradition that includes Freud, Max Weber’s idea of modern disenchantment (Entzauberung – the breaking of the magic spell), and Michael Taussig’s imbricated dealings with skepticism and contemporary performance of faith. It also informs ethical questions, just where this section’s epigraph incisively marks. In ‘Tintern Abbey,’ these discursive strands combine to make the language of rhetoric and rationalization a performance of magic simultaneously logical in structure, and pre-logical in affect. Wordsworth’s insupportably fruitful syntax of ‘therefore’ emerges from grounds that cannot be rationally effected. The command to nature in the address to Dorothy responds to Coleridge’s own generically similar command in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’: Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath-flowers! Richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue ocean! (lines 32–7)96 Coleridge’s July 17, 1797 letter to Robert Southey, in which the initial version of poem was composed, even ends with an echo of God’s pronouncement on the ‘good’ of his creation: ‘I wrote these lines,




Romantic Fiat

with which I am pleased.’97 Yet for all the therapeutic aid Coleridge imaginatively provides for his distressed city-friend Charles Lamb (‘my gentle-hearted Charles’ [lines 28, 75], ‘many a year, / In the great City pent’ [lines 29–30]), we also sense that Coleridge’s commands function to optimize a picturesque daytrip. In contrast to Wordsworth’s obscure adjuration to the winds, the point of the command in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ is precisely that it attains an optimal function. The vocative is not unconditioned. A similar indication of their functional role, Coleridge’s directions to nature take place before he pronounces on the arrival of blessings in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.’ The imaginative projection of natural beauty helps bring about the conditions for benediction, allowing us to put emphasis in contrast on the command to nature’s position oddly after the claim to have secured blessing in ‘Tintern Abbey.’ To put it in an almost silly way, the difference of placement is that between ‘please’ (Coleridge) and (Wordsworth’s) ‘thank you.’ Articulated near the end of the effort to uphold a moral, Coleridge’s poem hinges on a fiction of ‘promised good’ (line 65) that powerfully mobilizes the character of its interpretation throughout under the global logic of the promise: and sometimes ’Tis well to be bereft of promised good, That we can lift the soul and contemplate With lively joy the joys we cannot share. (lines 64–67) To what origin do we source this promise – a dynamic within, or outside of, the poem? What is its past basis? From the start of ‘The Lime-Tree Bower,’ the elaborate construction of a future-perfect and yet utterly conditional promise does the work of contracting terms with nature, while undermining any sort of present enjoyment. Hence ‘promised good’ for Coleridge holds out not so much the content of any one vision of nature, as the very structure of proceeding by its formal premise. This logic shapes the poem through the insistent assumption that having claimed loss and abandonment requires one to concede presence had been there, that something was to be lost – instead of radical lack: Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost Beauties and feelings, such as would have been Most sweet to my remembrance even when age Had dimmed my eyes to blindness! (lines 1–5)



84

This overarching notion of natural beauty as an uncompleted promise suggestively links with Theodor Adorno’s concept of natural beauty as a necessarily broken promise in Aesthetic Theory: ‘Art is not nature, a belief that idealism hoped to inculcate,’ Adorno asserts, ‘but art does want to keep nature’s promise. It is capable of this only by breaking that promise; by taking it back to itself.’ He continues: ‘art is inspired by negativity, specifically by the deficiency of natural beauty, in the sense that so long as nature appears defined only through its antithesis to society, it is not yet what it appears to be. What nature strives for in vain, artworks fulfill: They open their eyes.’98 Utter reliance on past experience out of mind (‘little, nameless, unremembered acts’) as opposed to Coleridge’s relation to nature as an articulable promise, is a curious feat of ‘Tintern Abbey.’ We can see this divergence in the effort at prayer that at once makes Wordsworth’s lyric more assured as prophecy than anything in Coleridge, and also aligns it with an uncanny tautological poetics. The blessings of ‘Tintern Abbey’ have already been gathered; after the ‘turn,’ he only repeats this with the addendum of offering his superfluous will. Language here risks solecism, as Coleridge’s aesthetically functional, psychologically therapeutic, effort in ‘This Lime-Tree Power My Prison’ does not. It is just that risk, however, that might be said to distinguish Wordsworth by the same method in which Ian Balfour characterizes romantic-Hebrew prophecy: The testimony to the descent of the prophetic spirit constitutes a far stronger claim to authority than does the invocation of a muse, however Hebraicized, however divine. The invocation of a prophetic muse, moreover, is far more formulaic and conventional in poetic discourse than is the testimony to being overtaken by it. This latter stance appears in the Romantics – by contrast to the ‘pre-Romantic’ poets – as a more radical return to the line of Hebrew prophecy, often more radical even than Milton’s.99 In his note to ‘The Thorn’ (1800), Wordsworth reinforces his association between tautology in prophetic speech and this poem about a garrulous, repetitive sailor and a distraught mother named Martha Ray. He quotes at length from the book of Judges: There are also various other reasons why repetition and apparent tautology are frequently beauties of the highest kind. Among the chief of these reasons is the interest which the mind attaches to words, not only as symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient,




Romantic Fiat

which are of themselves part of the passion. And further, from a spirit of fondness, exultation, and gratitude, the mind luxuriates in the repetition of words which appear successfully to communicate its feelings. The truth of these remarks might be shewn by innumerable passages from the Bible and from the impassioned poetry of every nation. Awake, awake Deborah: awake, awake utter a song: Arise Barak, and lead thy captivity captive, thou Son Abinoam. At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed there he fell down dead. Why is his Chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the Wheels of his Chariot? Judges––Chap 5th Verses 12th 27th and part of 28th––See also the whole of that tumultuous and wonderful poem–– –– –– 100 In moving from a defense of the way extreme psychic states shape the repetitive language of both the narrator and Martha, Wordsworth concludes by quoting the prophetess Deborah. In Wordsworth’s Reading, Duncan Wu reports the use of Robert Lowth’s translation, particularly to approve ‘the utmost elegance in the repetitions.’101 For historical and thematic reasons, the poet’s quotation of Deborah makes a compelling selection. One of the original Israelite freedom fighters or Nebiim, she represents leadership in a time of pastoral war against cities – as Weber in his study of Ancient Judaism noted long ago.102 Invoked to help prop up ‘The Thorn’ as well as much else in the larger ambition of Lyrical Ballads, the force of tautology nonetheless shifts from the militancy of the Song of Deborah, toward another and characteristically stranger mood of Wordsworthian disclosure: a redoubled verbal and thingly passion, which emerges as quietist benediction in ‘Tintern Abbey.’ The address to Dorothy invokes to disarm another fiercely militarist model from the Hebrew Bible; this time it is the tribal warrior Joshua: On the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the Israelites, Joshua spoke to the Lord; and he said in the sight of Israel, ‘Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.’ And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar?



86


In the difference between staying diurnal time to kill your enemies, and the address to Dorothy’s weirdly authoritarian blessing on sheer process, one marks the distinctive register of Wordsworth’s prophetic awareness. I will not try to answer the obvious question about this mode of address – where did he get it? Instead I only gesture at the day-to-day, prophetic language of repetition found in the most famous of Dorothy Wordsworth’s later journal entries. Another image of early spring: I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them.104 One could argue Dorothy’s lines should precisely not be forced into an actualized interpretive scheme, such as the famous lyric William wrote from their prompt. The stark beauty of her prophetic mode – ‘The wind that blew upon them over the Lake,’ ‘This wind blew directly over the lake to them’ – ‘works’ as a non-fructifying spot of time that summons powers of repetition in a manner that rewards comparison to Deborah.105 After a comfortable dinner shared among the group, the entry ends, in an amazing line for which few anthologists of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals ever make room: ‘NB [nota bene] deer in Gowbarrow park like to skeletons.’ *** I’ve basically thrown the kitchen sink at ‘Tintern Abbey’ in this chapter. But there is reason for that multiplicity of approach; demands on reading introduced by lyric tradition on the one hand and historical pressures on the other, along with philosophy, anthropology, and psychoanalysis are all laid down with an imbricated pattern. For this poem at least, an argument framed through one of these perspectives alone is incomplete and, in a sense therefore, false – certainly until it takes



The sun stopped in midheaven, and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. There has been no day like it before or since, when the Lord heeded a human voice; for the Lord fought for Israel. (Joshua 10:12–15)103

Romantic Fiat

the corresponding measure of shifts across the adjacent terrain. It is a rare poem such as ‘Tintern Abbey’ that can instance so much about the modern subject and its uneasy adaptations within the discursive constellations of emergent modern life: a rare poem that shows in itself how these fields are not just related, but mutually constituting. In a wonderful chapter that begins by recovering the psychological and even ethical dimensions of ‘the subject’s lack of power’ in relation to the Other (94) – Barbara Johnson uses the thinking of D. W. Winnicott to explore what he calls ‘transitional objects.’106 For Winnicott, such transitional objects, ‘say a smelly blanket with a frayed edge’ (95), ‘operate like … a third that makes it possible to experience the world, a third composed of the interaction itself’ (105). Transitional objects serve a ‘between’ phase of development that negotiates the internal and external, the subject and all those other ‘things’ whose existence is independent (96). On a number of counts, Johnson’s chapter and the approach of Winnicott it recounts would offer a plausible – maybe definitive? – model upon which to read the prayerful command to nature in ‘Tintern Abbey’: a text that Johnson, however, does not mention. In a less inflected way, there are repeated motifs of omnipotence and powerlessness, exaggeration and denial, that link Johnson’s reading of how successfully ‘Using People’ can lead to an analytical breakthrough and finally might result in the ethical recognition of finitude, the finitude not only of subject and object in their endless pairing, but additionally, of other people. In a more inflected register, her essay might allow us to hear the admission (the relinquishment of the denial) of a ‘fantasy of omnipotence’ on Wordsworth’s part (101), after which the world that survives, the nature that has indeed been ‘impaired,’ declares itself finally real. This dynamic would make the subject more real and concrete too, delivered to the truth at last of what Margaret Homans, in the essay on Frankenstein I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, called ‘the uncontrollability of real things.’ Excised from ‘I Wandered lonely as a Cloud’ as it is from most anthologies of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal, the deer that have survived the winter kill in Gowbarrow Park might attest to a similar process, this time beyond language: to have not been ‘destroyed by destruction.’



88

Wordsworth’s Useless Fiat in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’

The frequently cited irrationality of sacrifice is no more than an expression of the fact that the praxis of sacrifice outlasted its logical necessity, which was replaced by particular interests. This split between the rational and the irrational aspects of sacrifice gave cunning a point at which to take hold. Demythologization always takes the form of the irresistible revelation of the futility and the superfluity of sacrifices. – Horkheimer and Adorno (1944)1 When either a very young man or increasingly old one, William Wordsworth was plenty capable of deploying the hortatory subjunctive we think of in common association with propositioning orators. ‘But let me ask you seriously,’ he boldly addressed the Bishop of Llandaff,2 ‘from the mode in which these distinctions are originally conferred, is it not almost necessary that, far from being the rewards of services rendered to the state, they should usually be the recompense of an industrious sacrifice of the general welfare to the particular aggrandizement of that power by which they are bestowed?’ Quoting Llandaff’s own prior judicial decisions back at him, Wordsworth could turn round with the sentence: ‘“Let it never be forgotten by ourselves and let us impress the observation upon the hearts of our children that we are in possession of both (liberty and equality), of as much of both, as can be consistent with the end for which civil society was introduced among mankind.”’3 Then again, writing five decades later in opposition to the Kendal and Windermere Railway, Wordsworth could be glib in disposing of the

89



3

90

Romantic Fiat

Let them consent to a Ten Hours’ Bill, with little or, if possible, no diminution of wages, and the necessaries of life being more easily procured, the mind would develope itself accordingly, and each individual would be at more liberty to make at his own cost excursions in any direction which might be inviting to him. There would then be no need for their masters sending them in droves scores of miles from their homes and families to the borders of Windermere, or anywhere else.4 It’s not the simple jussive form of these directives that supplies my interest in this book, and what I call poetic or any other kind of fiat. But the conventional political staging – that kind of rhetoric as opposed to poetry’s intense and ‘immodal’ figures of voice – is nonetheless helpful to see, since it imparts relief by contrast to the uncanny kinds of fiat-like force in poems.5 *** One such poem – the foundational text for a certain major strain of Wordsworth commentary, old and new – is ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’ which offers a unique testament concerning the role of the human imagination in public life. As this poem develops, a challenge to the idea of meaningful artistic intervention increasingly advances the work’s practical claims. Though Wordsworth judged it overtly pressing enough to send (among the rest of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads) with a long letter to Charles James Fox, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ was also genially criticized by Charles Lamb from what is seemingly an opposite perspective, in which the poet’s difficult subjectivity blocks any sense of immediate social impact. Lamb evokes a nuanced crystallization of the poem where ‘the mind knowingly passes a fiction upon herself,’ both projecting upon the beggar and detecting that substitution of self for another in turn. While, in Lamb’s view, Wordsworth still does not concede to ‘part with the wish’ of a sympathetic connection and that yearning’s possible mystification into empathy.6 In addition to pointing out the poem’s ‘too direct’ quality as others have done, Lamb thus draws attention to Wordsworth’s self-awareness and the meaningful role of obfuscation in this poem, an important compounding of traits whose results I hope to explore further.



working conditions (and therefore vacation terms) of people he wished to keep out of the Lake District:

Wordsworth’s Useless Fiat in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ 91

But deem not this Man useless—Statesmen! ye Who have a broom still ready in your hands To rid the world of nuisances; ye proud, Heart-swoln, while in your pride ye contemplate Your talents, power, or wisdom, deem him not A burthen of the earth! (lines 67–73) to a rhetoric of far more ambiguous authority and consequence: Let him be free of mountain solitudes; And have around him, whether heard or not, The pleasant melody of woodland birds. Few are his pleasures: if his eyes have now Been doomed so long to settle upon earth That not without some effort they behold The countenance of the horizontal sun, Rising or setting, let the light at least Find a free entrance to their languid orbs[.] (lines 183–91)7 In its middle section, the poem rises to address statesmen on the policy question of mendicity, but at poem’s end we find Wordsworth uttering insupportable commands to nature itself: dictates that he himself acknowledges often have no audience to hear them (like the birds, ‘whether heard or not’), and no recourse by which they might be performed. He imagines letting light into the beggar’s eyes like a morning’s raising of the curtains. Following my discussion in Chapter 2, these are commands, moreover, that Wordsworth places on nature to do what it does already – blow, shine, and sing (in the inevitable personification) – for which even success so termed would reveal the poet’s rhetoric as superfluous. Given this basic arc, the marvel of the poem is that not only its aesthetic qualities, but its ongoing social commitment and perceptiveness, too, increase along with the apparent inutility of its artistic manner. Like Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which I quote as an epigraph on just this conjoined issue of the persistence of sacrifice and the problematic ‘uselessness’ of ritual in modernity, ‘The Old Cumberland



‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ blurs the division between a political advocacy that makes sense within conventional limits, and an imaginative sponsorship that defies instrumental meaning. Wordsworth gradually transports readers from the relatively direct oratorical style of

Romantic Fiat

Beggar’ emerges as Wordsworth’s most sustained critique of what is lost in an instrumental attitude about experience.8 While proposed amendments to the Poor Law circulated under great debate from the 1790s until their ultimate passage in 1834, the poem itself drastically reorients what counts as positive value with anything like rational or systematic self-evidence – hearkening as it does so to a rational necessity revealed as itself already untrue. A ‘natural’ human self-sufficiency – not, certainly at the start of the poem, to be easily understood, and one that still troubles many readers upon finishing it – is proffered against the human calculus of the utilitarians. Yet Wordsworth’s poem, as recent discussions by Alex J. Dick, David Chandler, and Philip Connell particularly help us to see, is not unlocked fully merely by calling it anti-utilitarian.9 If Adam Smith, Malthus, and Bentham are among the primary figures invoked by such a term, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ actually conforms to utilitarian notions more than we might expect; but, as importantly for my interests here, Wordsworth aims real criticism at a larger – and in his time yet mainly unself-critical – habit of thought, in which political economy plays just a part. This attitude links Wordsworth to Adorno more than to anyone in between, as both ‘reject the illusion that “the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real”.’10 As a conjoined effect of this refusal to view the beggar’s worth as an ‘implement’ (line 86), I’d also like to argue that the poem takes up a striking position as a literary performative. Here Wordsworth would proleptically yoke J. L. Austin to the instrumental thinkers. By redrawing the interest of the performative as fundamentally a matter of social context and consent (rather than just a rhetorical act’s isolated success or misfiring, imaging context to be important, but taking it for granted), Wordsworth anticipates Derrida’s reply to Austin championing the iterations of writing – and hence of literature, poetry – in speech act theory. Forces marginal to Austin’s carefully circumscribed theory (what he points out as ‘the total speech situation,’ only to keep at bay) preoccupy the literary performative. Wordsworth, in this sense aligned with Derrida’s famous essay ‘Signature Event Context,’ makes a strong claim for a specifically textual value in making it possible to save a role for indirect aesthetic agency in the public world of ‘speech’ events. Well before Derrida, Wordsworth in this poem both accommodates, then rebuts, the sense in which a literary performative is ‘hollow and void’ when compared to overt legislation in a world supposedly beyond the fictive or aesthetic. Just as the beggar cannot be ‘divorced from good,’ and exists in a habitual social network that defines his value more than just instrumentally (or even plain mentally), Wordsworth intuits a kind



92


All institutes for ever blotted out That legalized exclusion, empty pomp Abolished, sensual state and cruel power, Whether by edict of the one or few[.] (1805 Prelude, 9.527–30) Wordsworth places his emphasis not on the immediate form of speech, the paperwork of an exact wording, but on the drama of language’s contestable surround: what linguistic and social forms must exclude or take for granted. In a peculiar choice that centers my interest in the poem, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ retrieves aesthetic agency by placing its antiinstrumental argument in a precarious spot, and then raising the stakes readers must arbitrate from this position. In opposing edicts, that is to say, the poem does not seem to oppose authoritative language altogether. Wordsworth ultimately counters the legislative edict with his own poetic fiat: it is a movement that slowly gains emphasis, and finally becomes visible in his climactic ‘letting’ of the light. And while this is not such a surprising gesture in a romantic poem, ‘particularly within the romantic aesthetic which regards the poet as a second creator and cosmogenic creation as an obvious analogy for poetic creation,’ as Angela Esterhammer notes,12 Wordsworth’s individual form of the god-like trope of ‘let there be’ intriguingly places emphasis on the fiat’s useless character. The poem increasingly tests the border between actionable and seemingly ineffectual strategies of intervention. In the end it sides with the latter, ritual form of perception, as the best means to conserve the beggar’s being – against any administration of this figure through a disruptive, because externally forced, change. Although the poem does record a series of communal acts that first make a comprehensible impact, Wordsworth deliberately leads us to the brink of a strictly ‘useless’ advocacy. So to repeat my main point: Wordsworth elevates the rhetorical pitch to suggest the greatest power in the function of least immediate effect. Long seen as a poem that tests the ability of literature to intervene in public life,13 ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ is at once Wordsworth’s most and least purposive of works, his most and least direct attempt to gauge how poetry has an impact on human behavior through actual legislation. It begins with excessive didacticism,



of gestalt shift in legislative politics of modern poetry. Moments in the revolutionary narrative of The Prelude (but not always its total pattern, bent toward the poet’s realization that he is ‘lord and master’11) lend support to his revisionary view of how an ‘edict’ should work:

Romantic Fiat

only to end in a countervailing excess of hermetic reserve. The critical question about this poem for a long while has been: does that clear arc necessarily reflect displacement? That he manages this shift through a continuous language seems another of the poem’s marvels. Words first used as oratory become obscure with repetition. The evolving sense of ‘pass’ shows Wordsworth’s transition from actionable human decisions to the borders of a power that can only be maintained counter-rationally by fiat. The old man, on what the head note calls his ‘stated round,’ is repeatedly passed by those already slowed down enough to acknowledge him: a ‘sauntering Horseman’ (line 26), the ‘post-boy’ who ‘passes gently by, without a curse,’ although his wheels had been rattling to ‘o’ertake’ him on the lane (lines 42, 37); the woman who ‘tends / The toll-gate’ lets him ‘pass’ in multiple senses, as the beggar himself moves on and is allowed to proceed without paying the regular toll (lines 33, 36). He is not forced to duplicate his own circulation in money’s, in order to preserve belonging in the community. And though left unspoken in this exact language, of course the statesmen are to consider the passage of laws regarding this way of life. But when ‘pass’ returns later, toward the end of the poem, its resonance at once reverses the previous meaning, and gives the act of passing ambiguous functional authority. ‘Then let him pass, a blessing on his head!’ (line 162) still denotes a feasible practical action, but now the perspective has switched to imply that we are stationary, the old man moving. Then let him pass; it is now his turn. The repetition of this phrase, however, urges us ever more closely to assume a power that no one can claim, as the emphasis the next time round falls on a more and more estranged use of ‘let’ (line 171). Similarly, Wordsworth’s ‘Discharged Soldier’ manages to imply God’s oversight upon that other, younger and even more disjointed, man of the road:14 Solemn and sublime He might have seemed, but that in all he said There was a strange half-absence and a tone Of weakness and indifference, as of one Remembering the importance of his theme But feeling it no longer. We advanced Slowly, and ere we to the wood were come Discourse had ceased. Together on we passed In silence through the shades, gloomy and dark; Then, turning up along an open field, We gained the cottage. At the door I knocked,



94

Calling aloud, ‘My friend, here is a man By sickness overcome. Beneath your roof This night let him find rest, and give him food If food he need, for he is faint and tired.’ Assured that now my comrade would repose In comfort, I entreated that henceforth He would not linger in the public ways, But ask for timely furtherance, and help Such as his state required. At this reproof, With the same ghastly mildness in his look, He said, ‘My trust is in the God of Heaven, And in the eye of him that passes me.’ (1805 Prelude, 4.473–95) Whose eye ‘passes’ the soldier? Here, as in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’ Wordsworth strikes a point of balance midway between the solicitous help of passersby and the surpassing ‘eye’ of God alone: ‘the peace of God, which passeth all understanding’ (Philippians 4:7). With didactic advice to statesmen as one type of command and a deliberately unsteady echo of God’s benediction as another, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ emerges as a poem about exhortation as it verges toward arbitrary power. It invests in fiat as a peculiarly stressed theme, and then imagines an alternative to political and economic fiatism by rejecting a mimesis of these other discursive modes for the imagination’s.

The fiat and ‘useless fiat’: ‘let (there) be’ As a performative whose intent by definition is wholly accomplished, the fiat marks the place where command and performative creation meet. Most commonly a noun, the term evolves from an unusual verb – the passive of ‘to make’ – and develops upon the formula of ‘let it be done’ or ‘let there be.’ Where it enters anything like common use, though, the fiat designates a singular occurrence, the command at the start of everything: God’s ‘let there be light,’ and the linguistic model as well as the material world this moment instantiates. Divided by translation, the English version of the fiat stands at a certain remove from its original in Genesis. Carrying the scholarly language of the Bible into the living vernacular at great personal risk, when William Tyndale first translated the Hebrew Bible into English in 1530, he made a common but deeply resourceful verb choice, ‘to let,’ in translation of the ‘fiat’ of the Latin Vulgate and the Hebrew approximating ‘let there be,’ ‘y’hi.’15




Romantic Fiat

For where the Hebrew verb is reserved for this special case of the creation of celestial phenomena, and the Latin ‘fiat’ compresses the meaning of ‘let there be’ into one efficient unit, the English jussive by contrast proves eloquent through grammatical inefficiency. The ‘let there be’ of English includes curious usages whose meanings remain hard to police. How do we imagine a solitary, omnipotent God who ‘lets’ the world into being by passive making? Does not the term already imply either an internal division of God’s powers (and hence fall into a no longer unified being, Blake’s position on Genesis in Urizen), or else a pre-existing recognition of other forces, other beings, whose pressures toward world creation are now being ‘let’ through? How do we fit with divine intention a term like ‘there,’ which seems only to bear phatic meaning, a grammatical necessity that from any other point of view is ‘meaningless’? Hence, in an historical profile I will argue also characterizes its intensive literary quality in Tyndale’s and later hands, the English language fiat resonates as it evades representational content. In effect, the English fiat of ‘let there be …’ has from the beginning destabilized the intent of the priestly author in Genesis, to achieve through words ‘a kind of performativity that operates in the utter absence of society or convention, relying solely on the intentionality of the Elohim’s utterance’ (Fiat, 700). Though neither the Hebrew nor Latin words themselves evoke contradictory qualities, in English the fiat implies in its own formulation the impossibility of such an aim. ‘Let there be’ reflects language unimaginable without conventions or recognized otherness. And to hazard this much is at least already partly to amend existing accounts of biblical fiat and romanticism. While in Esterhammer’s concise presentation, priestly fiat sheds the need for ‘acknowledgement by a community’ – and therefore escapes the Jawhist or ‘J’ creation story and its emphasis on social, institutional prohibition – the adaptive language of fiat in British romanticism consistently refuses this difference. In ‘Kubla Khan,’ for example, the most obvious romantic poem to display ambitions of fiat, the metaphysical ‘dome in air’ and man-built, ‘stately pleasure-dome’ merge in an unstable fusion of the Bible’s two types of performative language: the first creation that seemingly has no context, and another that is tacitly all about the human enforcement of a tyrant’s ‘decree.’ Following both these accounts, Coleridge’s own (merely conditional) revival of creation is vexed with questions about which one it resembles. The poet seeks an enlarged scope of imaginative power while he also relates the warning – ‘beware!’ ‘Let there be’ announces an originary moment in the aesthetics of perception. Post-foundational at its very beginning with regard to



96

creation, the ‘let’ statement breaks from communicative utility into ‘the literary’ as such. ‘Let’ is straightforward and common in its diction, yet at the same time conceptually strenuous and even bottomless. Not only does ‘let there be’ change utterly when invoked without ‘there,’ when the phrase modulates into Hamlet’s passive or quietist ‘let be’; the verb ‘let’ itself urges a surmise that is not present with nearly the same vividness in other languages. In English at least, God’s performative is not purely active but remissive in its authority. Divine creation out of nothing is recounted in English through a word that itself lets fluid chaos back in. Insofar as the partitioning of order from chaos proves linguistically overdetermined, it may also be thought substantively incomplete. Although in Genesis the ‘P’ author’s narrative emphasis on order runs in the opposite direction, to ‘let there be light’ works more like loosing a floodgate than like building or even ordering something built. ‘Let’ suggests power in release, rather than constructive upraising. The term also may imply acceptance of a just nascent reality, ceasing to hinder a force that has powerfully taken hold. At Jabbok ford, Jacob wrestles with God for his blessing as Israel, until he forces the cry ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking. But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me”’ (Genesis 32:26). When Moses orders pharaoh to ‘let my people go’ (Exodus 8:1), he admits the dictatorial rule of Egypt to permit life. Yet there is a flash here already of the higher power to which a pharaoh’s commandments are just a pretense: the power of Moses’s God, and the wall of sea to be let down on pharaoh’s army once that plea on behalf of the Israelite slaves has not been honored in action. God’s creation of the material world through language marks the limit-case of what critics of romanticism later would deem the egotistical sublime. But even at its lonely metaphysical start in Genesis, the fiat implies alterity in being. Biblical exegesis often turns to anthropology to invoke the competition of different ancient near-eastern gods. For language to function in itself, however, it requires the acknowledgment of others, even before we are cued to any comparative religious history in these lingering personifications. Regardless of whether God is using the ‘royal’ we in what Thomas Hobbes once called ‘the fiat, or let us make man,’ mental habits that have internalized the fact of other persons are set into the structural warp of language, and stipulate actors in what has become already a human environment of speech – human well before Adam and Eve. These shadow presences may be those of subordinates, rather than holdovers from a suppressed world of parallel gods and kings. ‘Let there be light’ and ‘let us make man’ are statements that imply instrumental agents to execute orders (linguistic forces if




Romantic Fiat

not persons), constituents who hear and validate what is said. The language of fiat apparently sublimates into myth the process that grants such arbitrary language its hold on reality to begin with. They make perfect God’s order as consensus, placing an unspoken assumption of obedience at the strongest extreme of command. At this far horizon of divine omnipotence, intent and effect should forever be the same. ‘Let’ nevertheless implies it is not God’s inherent power, but a constant demand on others for social consent, which in fact preserves the order’s radical effect. As a unique instance of creative command through literature, the fiat proves so strong that it stands apart from the theory of performative language, to which it otherwise belongs. Both subject and object positions of a fiat resist normative ascription. While true performative language thrives on a contextually clear first- and second-person relationship, as in Austin’s chosen examples of ‘I promise you’ or ‘I sentence you,’ the speaking position of a fiat proves curiously impersonal or third-person. Again, a crucial shift occurs in the atmosphere of socialized language, rather than through instrumental intention and denotation. The knowledge behind God’s fiat is not so much impersonal as it is non- or even inhuman. It is not initially difficult to be told that as a prime agent God has called into being the light; but the more ‘let there be light’ is considered, the more this authorization seems to emanate from a place in consciousness that becomes strictly impossible, unthinkable, or self-undoing. In this sense, Felicia Hemans seems to capture an insight concerning human and divine creator both, in her famous lines from ‘Properzia Rossi’: It comes,—the power / Within me born, flows back’ (lines 25–6).16 As the commentator who most fully triangulates performatives of the Bible with British and European romanticism, Esterhammer charts two kinds of romantic performative through the dual creations of Genesis. She names them ‘phenomenological’ and ‘sociopolitical’ moments: the first is meant to describe metaphysical fiat in Genesis 1, the second the prohibitions of Yahweh in the Garden of Eden.17 From the outset, each of these troubles the idea of fiat as an ex nihilo (‘out of nothing’) creation. The Hebrew Bible’s opening words (‘Bereshith …’) are better understood as something like ‘In the beginning of God’s creating’ (as if this were an historical reign: the Hebrew verb for God’s creating is a singular divine usage, but there’s nothing verbally unique about divine beginning); and in the second creation story Adam is fashioned from clay. The moment an English version enters into consideration on its own, ‘let’ only cancels further the purely ex nihilo function. In



98

what remains of this chapter, insofar as I mean by ‘useless’ fiat a radical creative speech act which nonetheless is not ex nihilo – a flouting of top-down ambitions that becomes peculiarly salient among British romantics – the pattern of useless fiat begins in force with the Bible’s own secondary implications. Tyndale’s English Bible offers no pat contrast to the ‘useless’ fiat, but instead lays the ground for that complex speech act’s future instantiation. A notorious episode in that future history involves performative language theory at the interface of stereotypically British and European, analytic and continental, philosophy. ‘Let’ as a template for the fiat tends to flow back and override its own distinctions, and so fails simply to ‘do’ what it ‘says.’ (That is, it fails to take effect in a simple way; or it fails altogether.) In the spirit of this ambiguous and yet all-important distinction, J. L. Austin can concede on the level of style that his project may be impossible to complete, to seal off as a coherent system, and to police – even while he still pursues careful structure and methodology. Austin writes in one of the most disarming passages of How to Do Things With Words: So far then we have merely felt the firm ground of prejudice slide away beneath our feet. But now how, as philosophers, are we to proceed? One thing we might go on to do, of course, is to take it all back: another would be to bog, by logical stages, down. But all this must take time.18 Does Austin mean it will take time to dispel these other, false ways of proceeding? Or does the truth align with the joke he definitely springs: that even to develop his inevitably failed argument will take time? No matter what path we take, the anomalous and excluded quality of the fiat within the performative system redoubles what would have been the act’s removal anyway, on literary grounds. For Austin in an influential passage declares: [A] performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow and void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner to any and every utterance – a sea-change in special circumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special ways – intelligibly – used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use – ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from consideration. (Austin, 22; original emphases)




Romantic Fiat

The category of ‘serious’ language use at first curtails the implications of ‘peculiar’ literary utterance. The difference between those categories is ‘intelligible,’ Austin insists. And yet Austin’s unusually fretting and rolling syntax (‘special ways – … – ways … All this’) begins to suggest a force exceeding his balance. Meanwhile the diction (‘in a peculiar way hollow and void,’ ‘parasitic,’ ‘etiolations’) sets the literary not merely apart, but in abject relation to a presumably full, earnest practice of language. By the end of How to Do Things With Words the exception of literary language has become the condition of the performative writ large, and not an exemption at all. This is the moment when subsequent theory (including the literary side of Austin himself) intervenes. In ‘Signature Event Context’ (1977), Derrida forcefully reintegrates the banished part of Austin’s speech act theory: I would therefore pose the following question: is this general possibility necessarily one of a failure or trap into which language may fall or lose itself as in an abyss situated outside of or in front of itself? What is the status of this parasitism? In other words, does the quality of risk admitted by Austin surround language like a ditch or external place of perdition which speech could never hope to leave, but which it can escape by remaining ‘at home,’ by and in itself, in the shelter of its essence or telos? Or, on the contrary, is this risk rather its internal and positive condition of possibility? Is that outside its inside, the very force and law of its emergence?19 In a sharp local argument that is surprisingly inhospitable toward Austin’s larger body of work, Derrida starts from the notion that if Austin had successfully accounted for such abjection, his theory would no longer be governed by its enabling oppositional logic. Would the performative then cease altogether to be a theory? Or become ungovernable, anarchic, as praxis? Like the Cumberland Beggar, writing in this account becomes a kind of ‘inverse scapegoat’ (Cleanth Brooks’s phrase) that keeps the risk of otherness at the center of the exchange system of meaning: the literary condition that may ‘surround’ Austin’s serious language is, rather, ‘its internal condition,’ ‘that outside its inside, the very force and law of its emergence.’ Far from a suspension of reference or praxis, Literature is defined as that strange modern institution in which everything can be said, for Derrida. So a different way to put his claim points out how to invoke ‘literature’ is simply to mark how all language at once is singular and iterable, universalized and ‘special.’ For every act of language and literature we need to assess ‘the total



100

speech act in the total speech situation’; and that, according to Austin himself, ‘is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating’ (Austin, 148).20 That ‘only’ surely is another instance of dry humor: since Austin’s subject is the contractual power of sometimes all too fictive words, he summons a kind of linguistic leviathan impossible to cut down to manageable size. Austin’s revised goal proposes the whole of speech, in which the ‘word’ focus of How to Do Things takes on an equal part of the surrounding and interruptive world. Typically performative language is enabled by its contexts, and the social conventions needed to give sense to an utterance are bracketed away from the speech act itself. The act either succeeds or it ‘misfires,’ but the wider values of any conventional social setting are negotiated well before that event. Here I pursue a creative command not sheltered at its inception from worldly tensions. That disavowed ‘performative’ reincorporates what Austin’s intended subject of non-corruptible, non-literary language excludes. I intend ‘useless fiat’ as an inroad toward this question for poetry; and Wordsworth is its poet.

‘Let be’ and laissez-faire, fiat and political economy At issue here is Wordsworth’s image of origination: it emerges in the fiat or ‘word-wish,’ as Geoffrey Hartman was first to identify. This fiat occurs as Wordsworth’s own ‘let there be’ in the place of the Bible’s ‘let there be light.’ Nonetheless, Hartman and Paul de Man may be misled by their own original brilliance in seeing romantic fiat ‘in the power to begin, to posit a beginning.’21 For unlike all other, prior modes of fiat as I understand them, Wordsworth’s defies the injunction of fiat precisely to begin, to create from nothing. While an autobiography of the human ‘soul’ clearly must be made from ‘general habits and desires,’ it also, for Wordsworth, requires that we see ‘no beginning’ of the production of thought: Hard task to analyse a soul, in which Not only general habits and desires, But each most obvious and particular thought— Not in a mystical and idle sense, But in the words of reason deeply weighed— Hath no beginning. (1805, 2.231–6) While Austin’s borderless subject becomes apparent only through concessions, Wordsworth’s interest in The Prelude addresses the full scope of language in ‘the very world, which is the world / Of all of us, the




Romantic Fiat

place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all!’ (1850, 11.142–4). Wordsworth urges a special claim by ‘words / Which speak of nothing more than what we are.’ He finds his vocation not in myth, but in common language through the ‘simple produce of the common day.’22 But to enjoin what is both total and irreducible upon readers (and not least to claim it for oneself, as an ‘empire, a possession’ – 1805, 5.553) always risks special pleading, in the presumption of the very right of this poet’s profound mode of staying unremarkable.23 At its most dubious, his project assumes a specious freedom in the poet’s exemption from being finite, or partially inflected. The privilege to own commonness may indicate too much power. Depending on their point of view, critics have either affirmed this kind of inclusive voice as the humanism of Wordsworth – and in the process stopped reading just where tensions confirm self-support – or they have regarded the poet’s talent for such ‘wise passiveness’ as a manipulated balance we should employ history to upset. But does not Wordsworth himself abandon whatever indemnity his view of ‘the very world,’ as an immanent frame, provides? Again and again Wordsworth’s poetry puts equanimity at risk. Through a style both of exhortation and risk, Wordsworth repeatedly uses ‘let’ constructions to bless the beggar and rhetorically to animate the conditions of the beggar’s continued existence, under threat by contemporary legislation.24 In the culminating section of the poem (lines 162–90) – after six imperatives of the sort like ‘let him pass’ (twice), ‘let him prompt,’ ‘let him breathe,’ ‘let his blood / Struggle,’ ‘let him be free’ – Wordsworth concludes with two ‘let’ statements that show how this commonplace rhetoric advances to a peculiarly heightened station in the poem. As in Tyndale’s original English translation of Jerome’s ‘fiat lux’ into the populist language of the Bible, Wordsworth’s ‘let’ approaches the rarified claim of God’s fiat. But in doing so he tacitly modifies what such an authority can and ought to claim. Wordsworth’s fiat knowingly falls short of efficient instrumentality. It is deliberately ineffectual. He blesses and tries to protect what already exists, but volunteers and even flaunts the idea that its object cannot be verbally summoned. He blesses the unmade – that which, at least for any point of view admissible to human conception, is without beginning or end. The sequence of lets emphatically ends where biblical creation starts: with associations of light, life, and death, and on language’s ability to bestow and bless these experiences. [L]et the light at least Find a free entrance to their languid orbs.



102

And let him, where and when he will, sit down Beneath the trees, or on a grassy bank Of highway side, and with the little birds Share his chance-gathered meal; and, finally, As in the eye of Nature he has lived, So in the eye of Nature let him die! (lines 190–7; original emphases) The beggar in his exceptional status plays a constitutive role in any vision of Wordsworthian mere being (‘bare life’) or political community (the possible ‘good’ life). Despite his outsider status (Derrida’s ‘outside’ as ‘inside, the very force and law of its emergence’), that importantly dual nature more than anything makes the Cumberland Beggar evocative of Agamben’s ‘homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed.’25 Yet Wordsworth discovered this language, in opposition to the theory of his own day, from lasting personal feeling. The Fenwick note observes the beggar as exerting ‘great benefit to [Wordsworth’s] own heart when [he] was a child.’26 The poem also meets the charge of history by prosecuting a social issue directly, that of ‘The class of Beggars.’27 It is a claim carried through the poem from the prefatory note. The historical setting reaches its climax in the poem’s first exhortation: ‘But deem not this Man useless.—Statesmen!’ (67).28 As David Bromwich has written, ‘[s]omething about the reductive universalism of political economy, it seems, was threatening to sweep away a practice of charity which he remembered from childhood.’29 And we may wonder, taking Bromwich’s cue, was it also threatening to sweep away Wordsworth’s sense of his own being, his own nature? The Prelude and ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse place repeated emphasis on the poet’s defense of a ‘uselessness’ in his own calling: ‘I deem not profitless those fleeting moods’; ‘A poet only to myself, to men / Useless’; ‘Be not this labor useless’ (1805 Prelude, 2.331; 10.199–200; ‘Prospectus,’ line 99). The ‘let’ of ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ rejects the paradigmatic efficacy of the fiat. And, marking Wordsworth’s stake in the period’s discourse of utilitarian political economy, it rejects all standard claims to producing a calculable result in goods. An exchange system of good, rather than goods, in this case prefers habit to innovation. In an essay titled ‘Poverty, Charity, Poetry: The Unproductive Labors of the “The Old Cumberland Beggar,”’30 Alex J. Dick anticipates the double interest of my engagement with Wordsworth’s fiat in this poem. Dick considers the beggar’s example in terms both performative and obsessed with utility. With great scholarly energies, he charts the utilitarians in their larger historical place within that long eighteenth-century




Romantic Fiat

discourse – from Adam Smith to its climax in Bentham and Malthus, and on to the famous Wordsworthian return of the heart in J. S. Mill. Searching ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ for a ‘theory of charity’ – though in the end he will judge Wordsworth’s poem ‘decidedly unsystematic’ – Dick finds in Smith a laissez-faire viewpoint that approaches in economic language what I am calling the ‘let be’ of religious and poetic utterance (367, 391). Smith too was compelled to see the likeness of beggars in the materially unproductive role of the sovereign, but also in professionals like churchmen, lawyers, musicians, and – alas – academics and poets. Dick’s summary cuts through: ‘[t]he point is clear enough: you can’t wear language; you can’t eat poems’ (376). What Wordsworth can do is stated with the drama of high theoretical stakes, but proves for all that no more clear: Wordsworth’s poem is actually about the way the emerging social sciences, and especially political economy, sought to avoid the implications of unproductivity by positing and elaborating the network of desires and dependences which define ‘real’ exchange in order to make that general social productivity more efficient, but refused to recognize the inherent unproductivity of that construction. (Dick, 372) Dick’s claim embodies again the form of revision adduced here from Adorno, Agamben, and Derrida, in which emergent systematic knowledge (enlightenment, the performative) includes only to repress its marginalized constituents. All those areas that raise the problem of ‘unproductivity’ are not resolved so as to net gain in a truly inclusive system; they are simply resolved out of the computation. The passage suggests how Wordsworth’s poem works along an internal theoretical border, gesturing to the blind spots of a broad discursive change, while never quite claiming the right royal of having the aesthetic stand apart. The poem’s own excesses mark it, too, as implicated. The notorious ‘eye of Nature’ that concludes the poem in this sense implies the eye of a peculiarly epistemic kind of storm. Given his authorities, Dick surprisingly does not mention Bentham’s panopticon, made famous by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. In an absorbing way for someone who approaches ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ as poetry, whatever else, that omission represents a surprising turn at the close of ‘Poverty, Charity, Poetry.’ Eschewing social determinants, the essay concludes by stressing the gift of loss in forging community through irreducibly poetic acts. The hard task of sheer



104

observational criticism is indeed just what the poem demands, and not a general theory of charity. But such poetic evaluation – or even an explorative movement toward it – is not the main work of Dick’s substantive essay. After fully elaborating the niche that we might expect Wordsworth coherently to occupy given some of his other poems, the trends among his historical critics, and the social context of this poem within a broad stretch of utilitarian thought, Dick turns after all to give final word to the texture of the poem’s singularity. Perhaps inevitably, this is to arrive at an outlet for which the reading has not made way. And that such a move takes place even in the best commentary on ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’ stresses how difficult it proves to find critical language that experientially – and not just discursively – engages the poem, while still responding to its major conceptual challenges. Talking about fiat of course encounters a similar problem, as a means to interact with literature philosophically and also gauge weight and resonance of literary language. What little concern for the relatively peculiar, technical sense of a romantic fiat there has so far been (as distinct from poetry of a more generally visionary character) emerges in the discussion of lyric poems that directly invoke a biblical model, and which often display their religious ambition and indebtedness overtly. Thus Esterhammer’s reading of Coleridge’s ‘Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni,’ or Hartman’s characterization of Wordsworth ‘Blessing the Torrent’ in ‘To the Torrent at the Devil’s Bridge, North Wales, 1824,’ map exemplary readings of the linguistic limits of romantic transcendentalism.31 While, to be sure, Coleridge’s evocation of the primary imagination as the finite mind’s echo of God’s infinite ‘I AM’ marks the rarified domain of a romantic fiat, if anything can. But if prompted to view ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ on the same blueprint, Wordsworth’s naturalistic and didactic style through much of the poem – its lack of the usual afflatus to signal approach to divinity – makes reference back to these strong readings of typical visionary poems to limited avail. The contrast between this poem and ‘Kubla Khan’ leaves the idea of Wordsworth ‘echoing’ divine fiat simply without meaning. Here the jolt to biblical assumptions is so strong that it instead turns round toward a confrontation with the Genesis ur-text: like the stunning moment in Empson when he accuses Wordsworth of reversing his guns.32 Coleridge himself managed an attractively unambitious version of the primary imagination when, in Book 7 of the Biographia he likened the imagination to the grace we gain by letting go, in the common way we recollect a name. But in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’ instead of release, the same letting go actually escalates rhetorical concentration.




106

Romantic Fiat

Experiencing a world they did not make, ordinary people are said – or may themselves resolve – to ‘let’ events just happen. Probably an accommodation has struggled to take place, and here the individual’s use of ‘to let’ signals the end of resistance against that encroaching reality. As we say, ‘just let it go.’ The OED offers ‘to be weary,’ ‘to let go through weariness, to neglect’ as primary senses of the verb (related to the Latin lassus and also the German lassen, of paramount importance to Heidegger throughout Being and Time). As part of the process of ‘worlding’ or dwelling in the world where we are thrown, the gesture involves granting permission to something that appears inevitable. To ‘let’ the impending event occur simulates, maybe at the last possible moment, the exercise of real power over occurrences that prove beyond human control. As in Freud’s study of trauma as a psychological outlet, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this kind of permission sustains a fiction of consciousness as defense. Linked to the fiat and its definitional paradox as the passive of ‘to make,’ the ‘letting go’ made willful in Freud’s account of child’s play at the same time supplies tragedy with its public art of sacrifice. Yet as opposed to Freud’s account of an always prior trauma, Wordsworth’s ‘let’ is trying to forestall, and possibly reverse, the moment past which imaginative sponsorship serves merely to repeat nostalgia. Imagining a figure of utmost exposure in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’ Wordsworth suggests terms for the beggar’s worth, and even a sense of his impersonal endurance and power, by stringing ‘let’ statements upon the old man’s marginal rounds: Then let him pass, a blessing on his head! And while in that vast solitude to which The tide of things has borne him, he appears To breathe and live but for himself alone, Unblamed, uninjured, let him bear about The good which the benignant law of Heaven Has hung around him: and, while life is his, Still let him prompt the unlettered villagers To tender offices and pensive thoughts. —Then let him pass, a blessing on his head! And, long as he can wander, let him breathe The freshness of the valleys; let his blood Struggle with frosty air and winter snows; And let the chartered wind that sweeps the heath



Useless fiat


‘Let’ here balances between an order and permission, intervention and acceptance. Blood, and especially ‘chartered wind,’ proceed beyond the control of human imperatives. But ‘the unlettered villagers’ may learn prompting toward ‘human interest.’ Letting the beggar ‘pass’ presents an extreme variation of this split between the actionable and the inevitable. As opposed to locking him up in a ‘HOUSE, misnamed of INDUSTRY’ (in the next line, 179), the villagers may let the old man ‘pass’ and circulate as ‘long as he can wander.’ Yet in only the smallest meaningful way can they ‘let him pass’ in that phrase’s later and perhaps mainly American sense, by letting the beggar pass on: by giving an order as to how he dies. Many commentators sense an almost relished violence in this poem. Anticipating later critics who are less open and generous about their reservations, Cleanth Brooks remarks that ‘to modern ears Wordsworth’s own attitude toward the beggar may seem somewhat heartless’ (Brooks, 373). But readers may sense, too, that this pitiless quality is part of Wordsworth’s complex intent, an aesthetic that engages both negative and compulsory aspects of arbitrary power.33 Wordsworth’s tone risks taking upon itself control over punishing acts of nature. ‘Marginals’ elsewhere in his work – the returned soldier on Salisbury Plain, the female vagrant, and later the Solitary in The Excursion – develop the ideas of a Godwinian social outlook (called ‘necessitarian’) that contextualizes the responsibility for the outsider’s being in terms of the governing society that creates the ills it punishes. ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’ however, stands apart even from this line of figures. In his case, Wordsworth does not understand the beggar’s state as a bad social symptom. Quite the opposite; associating severity here with nature, he opposes the reform, and ostensibly the ‘improvement,’ of the mendicant type. Wordsworth inherits a troubling consequence from this. The social injustice indicted in other poems where a figure’s humanity is marginalized is not identified the same way here. Injustice threatens to change, not produce, the Cumberland Beggar. This ‘problem poem’ envisions a sometimesdisturbing conception of final authority. And it may startle readers to feel Wordsworth himself fills the space. If this were a formalist poem built by an author imagined to be its god (its wholly active aesthetic maker), the repetition and force of the beggar’s suffering would suggest a kind of Baudelairean, ironic, exuberance.



Beat his grey locks against his withered face. Reverence the hope whose vital anxiousness Gives the last human interest to his heart. (lines 162–78)

Romantic Fiat

In fact the poem’s quality of moral imagination depends on Wordsworth’s ability to persuade us that the wear and tear the beggar takes, as he is ‘beat’ on by constantly abrading nature, is in fact an occasion fit for blessing and not curse, and is not punitive after all. Given an opacity of being in which we are permitted to see just one redeeming trait, that he is not ‘Divorced from good,’ Wordsworth describes the old beggar’s mute being and, extraordinarily, the poem offers this unremitting sentence as its premise: And while in that vast solitude to which The tide of things has borne him, he appears To breathe and live but for himself alone, Unblamed, uninjured, let him bear about The good which the benignant law of Heaven Has hung around him[.] (lines 163–8) An impersonal mood that is disciplined out of all ready kinds of human pity, and is not sympathy, ensures the old man’s goodness. Though a ‘benignant law of Heaven’ ensures the beggar’s living ‘uninjured’ and ‘[u]nblamed,’ the beggar may also be felt as protected by ominous means, as in the special preserve of security God orders for the outlaw Cain. He will wander, suffer physically, remind those whom he encounters negatively of norms they cherish – he will die – but the utmost proscription guards against killing this man and his way of life. ‘Nature’ does that. We are encouraged to locate blessing in an unpredictable course that is impersonal, uprooted, and contingent, yet nonetheless somehow cannot go wrong unless it is artificially subverted. Circulating along with the detritus of the ‘life of things’ in ‘Tintern Abbey,’ here we have the ‘tide of things.’ (This image is particularly striking, because its watery randomness undoes much of the effort of describing the beggar’s anchored rounds.) The beggar’s sheer presence, and the notion that his being is held to some account, even if in a barely human state of perseverance, is inscrutable and a given, bestowed by what another line calls ‘the spirit and the pulse of good.’ Clearly Wordsworth does not oppose all values tendentiously protected. Against the statesmen, the poem chooses one kind of blind faith over another, circular benign ‘things’ against the economic supplantation by a prescribed order of value – money, or market worth – which adds to the ontology of ‘thingness’ a fetishized difference. An otherwise defenseless choice of life falls back upon its mere historical situatedness, finding in the sheer



108

otherness of the old man the kind of aura and mana that Benjamin and Adorno identify with nature’s ability to provoke aesthetic response. But as the poem’s political critics have not always brought fully to mind, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ is not primarily a formal object, but an effort of political suasion meant for ‘Statesmen,’ the Members of Parliament or (in an alternate meaning of the word) local freeholders whom it addresses. It’s as if the poem’s genealogy lay not in the ancient music of lyric poets, but with the alternate tradition of poetry as premodern legislation. This means that the work’s function, to represent the beggar’s type, precedes all other determining choices – including any outlet this one old man might find. Nor is the beggar a novelistic character, for whom endowed subjectivity would become a sort of liberal right; the only thing unalienable to this character is his being. Carrying his type, the old man’s triumph is to make it to death ‘in the eye of Nature’ outside the workhouse. And so the beggar’s endlessly prosecuted suffering actually comes to be an imaginary index of Wordsworth’s political success. The ‘eye of Nature,’ which in this poem (as in Emerson’s Nature) has long been a prime target of criticism, contrasts not with the beggar’s total freedom from observation, but to the immediate alternative of watchful workhouse surveillance – a contrast within which this excessive personification no longer appears at all silly. As long as the old man exists in his continuous state, and remains to endure, a larger injustice to his life has been prevented.34 Here, having invested so much into the ineffectuality of ‘let,’ I must add that it is this remissive grammar that defines the scope of possible action for the ‘poorest poor’ who aid the beggar (line 147) and for the statesmen the poem addresses. Rather than annul his course of life, by taking remedial action, people may continue to ‘let him pass,’ ‘Still let him prompt,’ and keep him in an environment that lets ‘him breathe / The freshness of the valleys.’ All these are exhortations that hope to maintain practical consequences over behavior. Yet I suspect disquieted readers of the poem will retain their objections despite this appeal from its political genre. Surely David Simpson is right in calling Wordsworth’s materialism overdetermined.35 Wordsworth’s fiat in this poem is justified politically, yet it moves exhortation away from any directly instrumental rhetoric. A kind of anti-utilitarian remainder left by this real, active utility of ‘let’ emerges especially as the poem’s final moment blesses experiences that no human protection can orchestrate, and moves from securing the beggar’s right to ‘breathe / The freshness of the valleys’ – a claim that is feasible simply by keeping him outdoors – to sponsoring sheer taking of breath. ‘Let the light at least / Find free entrance to [his] languid orbs’ supposes the poet can create or permit the




Romantic Fiat

light to reach a human eye regardless of its environment. Of course, since light supplies the most cherished condition of all life, not just human life, or that specifically of a mendicant, this ineffectually creative moment must be seen – through all its uselessness – as standing for the ultimate terms Wordsworth wishes most to preserve through his verbal act. This stands as Wordsworth’s rejoinder to the original biblical fiat of ‘let there be light.’ And in it, the poem glosses the Bible by regulating perception, securing the ‘free’ path of the old man’s narrowed, but still constitutive, impressions, rather than by claiming to constitute material nature as such. It is here that we find the most obvious promptings to read Wordsworth upon but past Esterhammer’s sound model: Wordsworth does not merely write a poem that fuses ‘phenomenological’ and ‘sociopolitical’ performative outlooks. He redirects this aesthetic and political fusion toward the model of the fiat itself, thereby implying that even its metaphysical autonomy is subject to ever-renewed constructions. Wordsworth’s poem draws out even in the Bible a sense of this remissive perceptual authority from the beginning of the fiat’s career in Genesis 1; ‘let’ complicates any purely active or foundational quality in Genesis from the start. An underside of the perfected fiat, a useless fiat that worries the very conditions of consensual power takes its lineage in the English Bible, made available by Tyndale’s populist translation before all else. As the result of its volatility, what I would claim as the knowing exposure or vulnerability of its assertions, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ represents a kind of achievement for Wordsworth whose balance was not kept. Brooks observes that ‘I know an aged man constrained to dwell’ (1846), a late poem on the same topic, lacks all those qualities of ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ that make it at once so under- and overwrought – as well as such a ‘success’ (Brooks, 380). ‘On the Power of Sound’ (1828) retraces much of the same biblical modeling behind what that poem famously calls ‘images of voice’ (line 34), only to deface what I am calling the ‘useless’ fiat in favor of the traditional air of chauvinist command: A Voice to Light gave Being; To Time, and Man his earth-born chronicler; A Voice shall finish doubt and dim foreseeing, And sweep away life’s visionary stir[.] (lines 209–12)36 But for a culturally charged moment in the 1790s, Wordsworth’s strength lay instead in an intuitively generous display of attributes, even in these his most prayer-like poems.



110

What is gained by the ineffectual gesture of a ‘useless fiat’ here? Associative habits that unconsciously form the repository of an agency that appears lost in the poem retrieve human agency on another level, communal rather than willfully individual. The ‘let’ supposes a voice that proves larger than any mobilization of language by an individual. A performative language of power takes its context in such habits. Wordsworth lends his voice to the sense that just power proves benign, and will not be tyranny, but instead a part of the dialectic between what he calls ‘liberty and power’ in The Prelude (1805, 11.183). Because it merely ritualizes a set of forces judged already to exist, power rightly exercised and situated behaves like a ritual or blessing, and not like a radical creative utterance (such as an edict, which, in this case, confronts the old man with a modification felt to be a curse). This benign authority puts a seal on the process that made way for it, authorized it, gave it meaning and, finally, gave it the fiction of a consensus on which this kind of statement still uneasily depends. The preservation of that uneasiness, attested to by the many readers who are angered or unhinged by the poem, should be counted part of its achievement. In readings of ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ over a long period of time, such provocation has not yet settled into a resolved outline, but remains dynamically suspended. It marks, as the poems says, a ‘vital anxiousness.’ Wordsworth’s stance in his choice of a useless fiat in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ challenges existing power, while at the same time it recognizes that power as such cannot be dismissed, and could not be legislated away. Its pleasures and responsibilities in some form must always be affirmed, and the impetus behind that compulsory affirmation becomes the means by which an authority possible for us to assent to can be imagined. The problem with arbitrary power of a conventional sort is that it lacks this responsive human context, which the 1850 Prelude in its Burkean vein calls ‘the frame of social being’ (6.427). Like the rigid adherent to Searle’s or Austin’s performative language theory, the pretender to an effectual fiat is forced to construct, out of nothing, the verbal act’s own conventions and claims. And he must do so even as he imposes the performed utterance within that very set of habits and conventions. Utility places windows in an unframed house. It short-circuits what Hannah Arendt has called ‘the eagerness to liberate and to build a new house where freedom can dwell.’37 Against the strange character of a useless fiat, which focuses on context even before it secures anything like a representational meaning, the powers of a fiat in instrumental speech act theory must presume to conjure and dissolve




Romantic Fiat

habits. Only then may the statesmen ‘posit’ and begin; or the philosopher clear a space for pure intentionality; or the God of Genesis 1 fashion a physical world by metaphysical actions, without any reliance on human institutions deemed later in (merely narrative?) time. Each of these myths of origin begins deracinated, not truly from a blank slate; and if at all anew, because its object is human the creation moves arrestingly top-down. Human subjects cannot be stopped for repair – not entirely stopped: and the same applies, for Wordsworth, with the human subject of history. Utility considered in this way either plays at its power, or by necessity it takes for granted the contexts that are themselves required first to impart meaning. Because a ‘useless fiat’ is not concerned to make sense, in either of the ways that statement might apply, it is able to confront and test the formation of sense in terms of enlightenment ambitions and their systematic scope. In this distinctly critical aesthetic, which – as The Dialectic of Enlightenment advises – has us re-engaging literary anthropology by way of thinking about its otherwise bracketed aspects of thought – Wordsworth in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ by stages constructs a space free of direct instrumentality. He preserves, at the same time, a unique sense in which such space is never reserved from social being. Even the paradoxical gestures at the poem’s end make no claim for shelter in the formalist aesthetic usually linked to paradox. If ‘[d]emythologization always takes the form of the irresistible revelation of the futility and the superfluity of sacrifices,’ ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ does not univocally inhabit its role in that historical logic. Guarding the beggar’s ‘uselessness’ – to the point even of mystifying his obscure being – the poem at the same time strips Genesis of what before had been its impenetrably bright finish. Wordsworth instead grounds the fiat as one would ground a plane: he takes it down from the sky, casting its social and metaphysical consequences as an immanent double stake. Yet he does not, cannot, ground his own fiatism in the philosophical sense, since the change his poetry introduces both to the Bible and to political oratory shakes the coherence of any conceptual foothold.



112

Part II

The value of the poem for the reader of the poem flows from the acknowledgment which it enforces that something not the self is. The act of reading begins (?) with this ontological assertion. – Allen Grossman, ‘The Ontological Affirmation,’ from Summa Lyrica



Ontology and the Lyric




Between Cant and Anguish: Hume in Coleridge’s Imagination

Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of EXISTENCE, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast thou ever said to thyself thoughtfully, IT IS! heedless in that moment, whether it were a man before thee, or a flower, or a grain of sand? Without reference, in short, to this or that particular mode or form of existence? If thou hast indeed attained to this, thou wilt have felt the presence of a mystery, which must have fixed thy spirit in awe and wonder. The very words, There is nothing! or, There was a time, when there was nothing! are self-contradictory. There is that within us which repels the proposition with as full and instantaneous light, as if it bore evidence against the fact in the right of its own eternity. NOT TO BE, then, is impossible: TO BE, incomprehensible. – Coleridge, The Friend If we can even speak of such things, is the ‘ontology’ of a lyric poem something like its ethical occasion? Or is it an image that enforces a closed spatial form and repeats a parable for what we overweeningly think a poem must be? Does it matter what we take for that emblem? A shard or an urn? A toy or a tree? Allen Grossman’s affirmation – in which the ontological character of lyric poetry holds from the stunning fact that others exist in tension with the subject – runs up from the other direction against Virginia Jackson’s judgment that the genre itself is projected by a history of interpretation-as-ontology. For Jackson, this is the largely twentieth-century discipline of ‘lyric reading,’ in whose name we make violent appropriations just in categorizing certain things as ‘poems.’1 115



4

Romantic Fiat

Stimulated by what I take to be a very serious disagreement between these two points of view (though I tend toward the former view that lyric’s ontology honors something), in this chapter I want rather to address the associative dimensions of romantic poetry. Since I am convinced that this topic’s standard reference back to David Hartley is a dead end, my subject instead is Coleridge’s relation to David Hume. The argument I pursue is meant to help at least obliquely address questions that persist in romantic studies, because they are so fundamental to its coherence. How did the later, New Critical, valence of Coleridgean imagination struggle to differentiate itself from Hume’s proof of our mere but ubiquitous association? How does the romantic or any secular, modern symbol lift off from the level field of sheer metonymy; visionary stratification rise again from the mundane soil of Hume’s contiguity? Then last, what might Coleridge’s knowing but persistently enchanted ‘romantic’ agenda have to do with a modern episteme of belief? While the account in this chapter includes a fairly wide array of contemporary theoretical voices – Gilles Deleuze, for one – it equally could have engaged others, given a slightly different focus or shape. When Foucault starts The Order of Things with the shattering laughter of Borgesian taxonomy,2 he makes his own text in addition to his recounting of Borges into a literary event with massive reverberations. In that moment, insight and bewilderment jump together and show where the constitutive rout of poetic associations, and also all everyday order, go back to Hume. *** David Hume’s ‘essays constitute the most thorough job of deconstruction in modern intellectual history.’3 Why is it, Peter Thorslev then asks, that ‘deconstructionists have so neglected Hume’? Are his explosions of cherished truths paradoxically too foundational? Is the writing simply too clear? With the secular, demystificatory aspects of that lineage in mind, commentators have distanced the philosophy of Hume from the romantic writer he can most fruitfully, if strangely, be paired with in my view: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Back in 1950, Basil Willey caught well the spirit of Coleridge’s relation to Hume with the remark: Coleridge, accepting Hume’s view of faith but inverting its sense, had shown that faith was indeed incapable of rational ‘proof’, but that on that very account it was unassailable by the ‘mere’ reason; a faith which rested on demonstration would be either compulsory



116

Hume in Coleridge’s Imagination 117

Adumbrating while not admitting to the performative dimension of faith (its meaning, not truth), this is an excellent summary given Coleridge’s motivations. He wants to affirm that faith lies beyond the power of reason to debunk, but from there tries to overturn the point gained by and so often unilaterally emphasized of Hume – that reason thereby cannot ground faith. Romantic studies have gathered impetus lately for these kinds of philosophical considerations, just as scholars of Coleridge have reopened his philosophy to the contested status of major terms like reason. This movement, it seems to me, should provoke us to new understandings of Hume and (pun intended) to reassemble a model that may not be either a humanism or anti-humanism, exactly, but a perpetual dislocation of both outlooks worth calling the ‘Humean.’5 Coleridge chides skeptical ‘mere’ reason and seeks to trump it with an enlarged condition of that faculty. Where he succeeds, he does so by making the subjectively felt needs for God and certainty points of strength, a priori conditions for the very possibility of experience: generically Kantian tactics. But Willey’s remark, as Coleridge surely did too, also moves beyond Kant toward the later maneuvers of those who wanted more grounds for embellishment, more affect in their systems than the critical philosophy affords. Kant’s achievement – a formalism more than anything we might call ‘transcendental’ in substance – is fundamentally a study in the limitations that bound positive claims. But if there is an assumption here already in need of scrutiny, it is that Hume does not see belief in its own right as performatively enabling. Coleridge might well have used Hume’s thought as a firewall between belief and the demystifications of reason. And he might have done so not against, but in the name of, the developments emerging through the 1790s as English and German romanticisms. Formative discussion of Hume’s role in this regard begins with Isaiah Berlin’s essay, ‘Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism.’ ‘It is,’ Berlin concludes, ‘a strange paradox that has thus made Hume one of the patron saints of German fideism and irrationalism.’6 There persists an assumption that Hume not only directs skepticism toward faith (he obviously does, as he did toward all notions beyond true but nearly meaningless analytical proof), but that he also denies faith’s constitutive character, in ‘realizing’ the power of belief in action. This emphasis is totally misplaced, yet



or mechanical, or would be exposed to disproof by other demonstrations. Faith, like Imagination, is alive and creative, ever realizing its own objects.4

Romantic Fiat

instructively common, reflecting the near-consensus even among literary commentators not to grant – and certainly not to extend – Hume’s image-laden and creative project of redefining our knowledge as always enabled by beliefs: by self-blinding maneuvers, associative habits, and cultural practices. Elaborating the larger philosophical context of the last chapter, with fiat down from the heavens but ‘ungrounded,’ my purpose here will be to establish Hume’s relevance in the imagery of romantic imagination, before I finally suggest his relevance to the status of the ‘ordinary’ in modern belief. Having found Hume surprisingly near to himself on the level of exemplary figures, it is for that reason, I’ll argue, that Coleridge repudiates the kind of belief located not in religion but in the everyday. *** Partly due to his own way of living that philosophy by urbane selfmoderation, we have yet to inherit in its undomesticated form Hume’s notion that belief displaces knowledge and imagination enables belief. If, according to Rei Terada, reanimating efforts of idealism posit a dead world,7 a compensatory virtue in Hume’s nuanced empiricism has not been fully acknowledged. As one of his available legacies, the recurrent gesture at a fluid, constitutively ‘fictive world’8 has instead been exchanged for a high and dry place in foundations of academic philosophy – though his thought positions imaginative, even literary, invention in the ‘compulsory’ fashioning of experience. A little fancifully and against the grain, Hume could be positioned within romantic studies much as early modernism used the Imagist of a similar-sounding name, T. E. Hulme. Here the directive to the romantics would be what a similarly portly figure, Wallace Stevens, enjoins readers in his poem ‘Parochial Theme’: ‘Piece the world together, boys, but not with your hands.’9 One just has to look for the brio of Hume’s skepticism to descry something like a supreme fiction. What I’ve said already is close to Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of Hume in his partly forgotten, formative early study Empiricism and Subjectivity. Deleuze understands Hume to recast knowledge as a mode of ‘legitimate belief,’ thereby changing the risk of thinking from error to illusion.10 Benefiting from these early writings of Deleuze on Hume, in his most dynamic incarnation Hume becomes the modern philosopher of belief, since he gives to what Deleuze calls ‘laicized’ or ‘legitimate’ belief the privilege formerly held by object knowledge. In what his translator calls the ‘Deleuze-Hume’ thread in Empiricism and Subjectivity (9),



118

there is almost no unique preserve of transcendence as such, since in the associations of this very world he gives us an empiricism raised ‘to a higher power’ (37). However, this ‘transcendental empiricism’ does flatten models of interiority based on inside/outside and presence/absence distinctions.11 Even Hume’s self-acknowledged ‘abstruse philosophy’ describes an ‘internal fabric’ of ideas (my italics), purposefully relinquishing the fantasy of unclothed depths.12 For Deleuze, ‘Hume raises unexpected questions that seem nevertheless familiar’ and might also feel familiar to those who have foraged through Coleridge’s Notebooks: ‘To establish possession of an abandoned city, does a javelin thrown against the door suffice, or must the door be touched by a finger? To what extent can we be owners of the seas? Why is the ground more important than the surface in a juridical system, whereas in painting, the paint is more important than the canvas?’ (Pure Immanence, 36). Deleuze-Hume evokes a world whose complexity remains unreduced while its spatial form becomes all surface; ‘depth’ itself, as Deleuze in his study of Leibniz explains, is best thought a ‘pleat’ (le pli) or surface in a fold. From the vantage of this reimagined associationism (the analytical version of which Tim Milnes tracks to forking new ‘foundationalist’ and ‘postmodernist’ conclusions),13 Hume’s legacy looks quite different from any prior recounting. His imperiled knowledge leaves too much work, not too little, to be done constitutively by beliefs. Coleridge’s main problem with Hume may lie not in his impoverishment of belief at all, but in the spread of desubjectivized belief to unwilled and everyday. Is Hume then paradoxically the visionary of receptive belief? And Coleridge the steward of retrenched knowledge, who holds that active will matters more?14 ‘Association’ seems broadly to connote both the mechanical French and Scottish materialisms that English romantics fought, by individualized measures, against (atomizing ‘associationism’), and the name of romantic poetry’s own embedded practice even when it is most autonomous and ambitious.15 Willey’s sense of a grand pivot upon the threshold of Hume – according to the logic of pervasive but ungrounded belief – suggests a closer, more fraught, and inadvertently productive relation between these writers than romantic studies before the last few years has acknowledged. One can now stress Coleridge and Hume’s productive friction with a variety of intentions.16 In this chapter I explore how Coleridge redeploys Humean images of imagination, to suggest how their figures of the imagination emerge with noticeably kindred styles of making sense. This affinity runs against the stated intent of Coleridge’s announced philosophical project, of course, even




Romantic Fiat

as it flows with a more Humean sense of an environing current external to will. As biographer Richard Holmes first pointed out in a note, Coleridge’s quotidian passage on the imagination in Biographia Chapter 7 betrays an intriguing likeness to Hume’s water imagery in A Treatise of Human Nature.17 Drawing from an essay by Cairns Craig that reflects on this note and finds in it Coleridge’s ‘Humean Anguish,’ later on I will situate Coleridge’s submerged parallel with Hume in contrast (on the one hand) to the radical underselling of Kant in that revisionary approach, and (on the other) to a reply that means to protect Coleridge by altogether denying the connection. Without claiming this surprising affinity as any kind of victory for rival academics, one can see an interstitial quality – a version of what Seamus Perry has called the ‘division’ of his subject’s omnivorously replicating, living thought – as itself the interest. Coleridge fell between discursive communities in his time. And his attractively muddled contemporaneity to us lies in remaining caught, or homeless, in some sense. If Kant offered a formalist scheme for philosophy, at least in the critical project he did not resolve, or ever fully address, the negative conditions of experience that occasion much ‘philosophical’ effort: problems of human anguish (Craig’s oftenrepeated word, also present in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), dejection (Coleridge’s in the ‘Dejection’ Ode), or melancholy and delirium (those of Hume). Hume made available a model to Coleridge on several fronts, to guide and moderate his ‘abstruse research’ (‘Dejection,’ CP, 308).18 As a man of letters, a social and sociable theorist – and perhaps most of all as a productive survivor of a habit for bottomless doubt, Hume shares with Coleridge the disposition to privilege thought’s substantive content and its role in mediating value. But as opposed to Milnes, I do not place this argument in the traditional post-Humean split in analytical philosophy between ‘fact’ and ‘value,’ since to do so both over-resolves the nature of this presumed division, and proves needlessly reductive of Hume’s own model and its preference of happiness over conceptual truth as an aim. In what follows, I show the congruence of Hume and Coleridge’s sensory figures of imagination, stressing how the force of recent commentary has leveled, or rendered nearly indistinct, a gap in the standards of judging immanence and transcendence that had before separated these thinkers so widely. To borrow a wise notion variously attained by Terada, Paul Hamilton, and Stuart Peterfreund, the resourcefully empirical side of Coleridge’s imagination may in the end reveal only his discontent with immanence – much as I argue his knowing incomprehension of Wordsworth also does.19 Yet Coleridge’s underlying



120


*** Briefly to end the opening phase of this chapter, I’d like to try out an ontological approach to juxtapose Coleridge with Hume. I want to suggest that their most fundamental opposition really has to do with the question about how to take the sheer ‘given’ fact of existence. On these terms, Hume’s ultimate difference from Coleridge precedes epistemology altogether. Near the end of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume claims: ‘Whatever is may not be. No negation of a fact can involve contradiction. The non-existence of any being, without exception, is as clear and distinct an idea as its existence’ (164). In the passage from The Friend above, it is as though Coleridge replied to this proposition in extremis. Must anything exist? Or, like Descartes, can we assume the questioning thinker? ‘It might well be that there had to be something,’ the philosopher Bede Rundle has argued, ‘even though there is no being of which one could say that it had to be.’20 With this defense of a minimalist unconditioned existence – ‘whether it were a man before thee, or a flower, or a grain of sand? Without reference, in short, to this or that particular mode of existence’ – Coleridge crosses over into a poetic language beyond the subject, engaging for something like the Kantian thing-in-itself; while in this moment he also tempts comparison to what in contemporary theory has variously been called ‘the Open,’ ‘bare’ and ‘creaturely life’: the uncanny and indistinct border zone between the non-human and the human in which no ontological borders offer protection. However, the great passage from The Friend does not end in such uncanny minimalism (the mere but not trivial confirmation that a world exists, that there are things that are), but in the claim of a restive force that Coleridge embodies through his subjectivity (willing rhetorical strategies that predicate being in certain ways). Coleridge cannot accede to the logical point that whatever is may not be, because the very basis for his asking the question presumes experience of himself. Shaping the ‘very words,’ as he remarks – bringing to mind the ‘proposition’ – from this lyric vantage point of utterance he views not only the world’s but (more to the point) language’s and the subject’s non-existence as ‘impossible.’ These preconditions are unthinkable not to affirm from within



Humean lineage needs some discussion nevertheless – demands a context to better reflect exciting work being done on his own vast and various achievement, and also on Hume’s untimely place in romantic philosophical aesthetics.

Romantic Fiat

the scene where language takes place. Coleridge necessarily gives a kind of passionately first-person rejoinder to the refusal to distinguish being from non-being philosophically: ‘There is that within us which repels the proposition with as full and instantaneous light, as if it bore evidence against the fact in the right of its own eternity.’ He offers sublime defensiveness, even though the passage declares itself affirmation. From this intensely lyric perspective of his philosophical prose, Coleridge attains the later hermetic sublimities of a Bloomian touchstone: of Walt Whitman in Song of Myself (‘Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, / If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me’); or Stevens in The Auroras of Autumn (‘This is nothing until in a single man contained’).21 Urgently subjective utterance wins out against any traditional idea of divine fiat creation – and for Coleridge the believer, this is strange enough – since an implication of the denial that ‘There is nothing! Or, There was a time, when there was nothing’ is to oppose not only Hume’s statement that whatever is may not be, but to deny that in its origin the world could ever have sprung ex nihilo from God’s Word: in that scene, the creative word itself would have had to witness the nothingness it self-evidently repels.

Coleridge’s dejection/inhuman confidence In the word’s Latin sense of what is ‘spread through’ and ‘remains,’ the immanent viewpoint of Coleridge’s denial of nothingness suggests – against the radical Gnostic model of absence and fullness – a chaos that precedes shaping by association.22 In an essay titled ‘Coleridge, Hume and the Chains of Romantic Imagination,’ Cairns Craig offers to retouch dramatically the picture of Coleridge’s philosophy.23 Taking up the conclusion, from J. Hutchison Stirling, that ‘Kant has not answered Hume,’24 for Craig Coleridge’s imagination encounters a Humean ‘double bind’: ‘the anguish of the desire for certainty that is subverted by the very power, the power of the imagination, that could be its only source’ (‘Chains,’ 34–5). The narrative here is self-frustrating, as imagination incites hunger for a certainty it nonetheless cannot fulfill. Made tantalizing either by inherent limits or by instinctive skepticism, a promise of happy fusion looks merely taunting. We know Coleridge was not one to manage such temptation very parsimoniously in life or art. His powers lie often in not respecting this and similar prudential tradeoffs, and in crossing lines any sane equilibrium would establish. What Stanley Cavell calls Kant’s ‘philosophical settlement’ exchanges pure being lost for gained knowledge.25 This schema defines the skeptical



122

boundaries of Kant’s thought, in which the ontic presence of things-inthemselves is sacrificed as a knowable part of experience, to secure the claim for knowledge on this side of that magical line. But for Coleridge – unwilling to stop at the numinous or non-conceptual boundary around things – demands for certainty typically yield unhappy idealism about origins. ‘The desire for certainty that is subverted by the very power …’: where Kant’s thinking finds in this maxim a self-critical strength that beholds reason in its element, setting the limit that constructively designates where imagination falls short, Craig – like Coleridge though for very different reasons – instead maintains that is not enough, emphasizing romantic philosophy’s human needs and branding it through the inevitable pun Coleridge’s ‘Humean anguish’ (‘Chains,’ 35). The revisionary argument that an empiricist, Scottish enlightenment thinker haunts an English romantic has undeniable power; but soon there are questions. Is there anguish internal to Hume’s work, that of an otherwise notoriously poised thinker bent on what Anne-Lise François calls (in passing) ‘the resolutely antitragic traditions of Humean skepticism’?26 Or is it a vexation only registered by others through Hume’s legacy? Further, and as any summary of Coleridge’s German-influenced idealism might quickly point out, this new description of Hume already sounds a lot like plain old Kant.27 The well-known analytic of the sublime already threatens not so much to resolve that dissonance, as to register its very magnitude to the mind’s credit. At least one historian of philosophy already notes that Humean imagination ‘is simply the Kantian understanding in disguise’ (Prolegomena, 139).28 Yet the telling difference lies in their characteristic affect when pushing philosophy to its internal limits. For while the former reflects anguish in Coleridge’s response, the latter returns a sublime drama of reserve strength – in mental, if never quite human, confidence. Famously, Kant’s analytic of the mathematical sublime in the Critique of Judgment affirms a ‘supersensible faculty’ in the ‘claim for absolute totality’ that subverts imagination: thus ‘the sublime is that, the mere ability to think which, shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense’ (CJ, 109–10).29 Notoriously waking Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumber,’ Hume sets before the Prolegomena and Critique of Pure Reason the project of saving valid knowledge by defining its tenable and untenable outer edges (Prolegomena, 1). Yet this, in the objective genitive, is simultaneously the limit of Kant’s skepticism. It is the ‘unthinkability of despair’ for Kant, despite such a subversion of knowledge (as Adorno would express it), which always places him so far apart from everyone else following their own prompt of desire in excess.30




Romantic Fiat

So tellingly unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge seldom found in loss the occasion to celebrate compensatory resources. In this sense, despite all protests of intention, the author of the ‘Dejection’ Ode voiced needs that were more likely to be met in Hume than by almost any other philosopher. The well-known conclusion of Book 1 of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature encounters a despair for which mind has no antidote: ‘Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me?’ (Treatise, 269). As he poses a way out of this floored moment, Hume cures his philosophical despondency simply by waiting and observing its claims to adjourn. He finds not an upward, but a lateral, exit. Through what is more a paradigm shift than an act of overcoming, Hume is able to let go and (like Keats in ‘Ode to Psyche’) to allow something else to be let in. This is an intelligence set to use precisely to escape its own willfulness as cognition: one Coleridge also will praise in his less famous descriptions of imagination. Hume’s salvific moment comes as quotidian and receptive: Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. Then after a relapse into this heat (in which Hume anticipates the fiery end of the otherwise sober first Enquiry, and zealously considers burning his papers), he writes: ‘I may, nay I must yield to the current of nature, in submitting to my senses and understanding; and in this blind submission I shew most perfectly my sceptical disposition and principles’ (Treatise, 269). The obvious and perhaps helpful thing to say here is that Hume looks basically like Wordsworth. In a gentle guise, nature helps him.31 Protean as this is, Coleridge encounters at least two problems in ever ridding himself of Humean skepticism. Craig aptly calls it a ‘doublebind,’ since not only recurrent doubt about the structure of the world, its beings, and their powers and influences, but the solution to doubt through grace of ‘nature’ become the signature marks of a Humean disposition. Directed at once toward frustrations and the terms of any possible adaptation, slipping this bind is not done easily. (And if done, it is in the perverse effort, precisely, of not letting things be easy!) If Kant in his characteristic stance simply lacks any of the real dejection behind doubting



124

‘anguish,’ how would Coleridge surmount his own impasse (‘Dejection’s’ ‘we receive but what we give,’ and we are numb) using Kantian terms? The model of sociability offered in the Treatise anticipates Coleridge’s own generic diversity as a ‘man of letters’; and yet the difference between Hume’s low-tension reflexes in the main sinews of his thought – ‘it happens,’ ‘nature’ – appears in stark contrast to the same terms radicalized and made tense in, say, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Kant’s Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics deploys water imagery to argue that Hume’s skepticism does not go far enough: but these Prolegomena may persuade that it is a perfectly new science, of which no one has ever even thought, the very idea of which was unknown, and for which nothing hitherto accomplished can be of the smallest use, except it be the suggestion of Hume’s doubts. Yet even he did not suspect such a formal science but ran his ship ashore, for safety’s sake, landing on skepticism, there to let it lie and rot; whereas my object is rather to give it a pilot, who, by means of safe astronomical principles drawn from a knowledge of the globe, and provided with a complete chart and compass, may steer the ship safely, whither he listeth. (34) Skepticism – taken a step beyond, piloted expertly – will convert into something like its opposite. The image makes an argument; it dictates a sharp reverse of field like a magnetic reversal. One is surprised that ‘suspect’ here means to aspire beyond safety, not to doubt. Because of these twisted metaphors, when we find Coleridge stranded mid-ocean in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and ‘the very deep did rot’ (CP, 150, 171), we cannot really say how a philosophical mapping of the poem works. Is he recording that ‘Humean’ safety doesn’t pay? Or is he marking the extravagance, or (as Cavell implies) the human insufficiency of Kant’s ‘chart’? Stranded not on shore but in open sea, the mariner discovers an impasse related to Hume’s quest for happiness while placing it upon a Kantian, philosophically formalist, grid. Coleridge is caught at sea without orientation or plot. In another way of looking at The Rime, though, its very unmooring from plotted coordinates becomes a signal marking of the importance of Hume’s model. Whether we read the poem as a critique of destructive enlightenment or as a complex reinforcement of a progressive animus against superstition, one of the most basic and, I think, indelible qualities in The Rime is its dogged insistence on engaging various Humean dislocations. These seem unavoidably basic: our presence in a world




Romantic Fiat

of resemblance and contiguity without clear causes (as Hume would say, no ‘necessary connections’); the twinned feelings of loneliness and near-constant association in experience (atomism and relation); questions about how to read cause and effect or its absence in epistemological terms; and the magical thinking unavoidable even in the most bare rundown of the poem’s events; the social dilemma of how to strike up relationships with other creatures across unthinkable separation. These all present characteristic Humean insights, in a way that enhances them by stripping the veneer, the buffering layer, that Hume affords through the almost unflinching tranquillity of his habits. Although it may have been the last of his intentions, Coleridge might be said to render Hume’s skepticism as an adventurous poetry. In this area, Frances Ferguson’s 1977 essay, ‘Coleridge and the Deluded Reader,’ provides a lasting insight into the poem’s fundamental insistence on the thinnest ‘construction of causes.’32 The task of reading vexed causality within the poem – born of but not explained by its eventful casualties including the albatross, the 200 men, the pilot’s boy, the wedding guest ‘one of three’ – for Ferguson is a necessary fiction we always engage in over the retrojection of meaning. It comes as a surprise to finish again Ferguson’s wonderful essay, and never see her analysis fixed to Hume by name.

Void fiat and the momentum of imagination It may be that one reason why Ferguson does not refer to Hume relates to her observance of ‘tolerance’ as an important principle in Coleridge’s mindset for philosophical reading. Though the Notebooks establish the need to test opposed talents as a marker of judgment (‘Hume of Milton & Shakespeare / &c’ [N, 1 1255]), he never even provisionally tolerated Hume. Prepared for by vituperation in The Friend ([1809–10], I. 174, 234, 461, 499),33 Coleridge leveled his main charges with Biographia Literaria in 1817: The process, by which Hume degraded the notion of cause and effect into a blind product of delusion and habit, into the mere sensation of preceding life (nisus vitalis) associated with images of the memory; this same process must be repeated to the equal degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology.34 Hume’s comments on ‘animal nisus’ are offered as the original if inaccurate source of ‘our idea of power’ (Enquiries, 67). In a resonant if somewhat opaque way, he calls nisus a ‘strong endeavor’ of ‘resistance’ against other physical bodies.



126

One can see right off that Coleridge’s retort enacts no rational countering, but a simpler insistence on what he demands of his philosophical investments. Another marginal entry on Kant’s First Critique captures this idea in its best light as ‘Struggles felt, not arguments objected.’35 Biographia’s chapter on the imagination is particularly open about not only what ‘the transcendental philosophy demands,’ but that its approach should take the form of a demand at all (BL, I: 299). William Hazlitt’s essay ‘Coleridge’s Literary Life’ similarly asserts there is no argument to the rejection of Hume, but an emotional ‘necessity’ settled beforehand, masking a circular logic dictated by personal urgency. Behind this, Hazlitt sees further avid mystification of a questionable principle informing Kant’s work in the critical project: his turn to new and self-evident categories for truth – cant, as Hazlitt or Byron might have said of the twelve categories – when faced with what appear to be impassable barriers that defy the existing language of the senses. Byron we know requires philosophers to explain their explanations; for Hazlitt, Kant ‘coolly refers the whole to a new class of ideas, and the operation of some unknown faculty, which he has invented for the purpose, and which he assures you must exist, ––because there is no other proof of it.’36 Combativeness hedges about all these thinkers on the pre-conceptual level of their investments. To me, it is then quite surprising to find Coleridge expressing an affectless center for his idealism, at the heart of his famous definition of the imagination in the Biographia Literaria. In what remains a stimulating work, in his Scepticism and Poetry (1937)37 D. G. James remarked on a curious willingness for Coleridge to admit that primary imagination – ‘the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM,’ a mantra-like equation – applies to the world as ‘essentially fixed and dead’ (BL, I: 304). By contrast, Chapter 13 makes clear that Coleridge’s concept of secondary imagination ‘is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.’ A dead ontology is thus never really animated in Coleridgean theory, only supplemented by an echoing, recombinative (and more consciously active) aesthetic through a subjectivity at one or more removes from the creative ‘prehension’ James isolates. During the course of a bracing discussion of James, Coleridge, Hume, and others in A Common Sky, A. D. Nuttall is right to situate this account of poetic imagination as curiously free from aesthetic objects; it is ‘a poetic of percept as opposed to a poetic of literary construct’ (123). Concessions about the ‘infinite I AM’ seem willingly to let go of everything meaningfully personal or even interior about affect, suggesting that a Deleuzian ‘nonaffective affect’ is already there in the otherwise highly resistant environment of the Biographia, and further opening (even) Coleridge to the fine summary that Rei Terada makes of her argument




Romantic Fiat

in Feeling in Theory: ‘I have argued that while emotions are real experiences, the expression that supposedly conveys them and the subject that supposedly expresses them are unnecessary angels parasitical on the phenomenon of emotion; that, rather, the domain of emotion is at once interpretive and nonsubjective.’38 The letter from a friend already positions Coleridge’s summary of imagination as a let-down. Yet Coleridge builds up Chapter 13 toward an even more significant anticlimax in terms of its content. He holds that though the primary imagination is God’s will (the divine fiat and its reverberation), such a fiat has no role in proclaiming the subjectivity that must be invoked to back-project meaning. Coleridge retained a peculiar unwillingness to take Kant at his word in the Critique of Pure Reason, and instead maintained in Chapter 9 of Biographia: ‘In spite therefore of his own declarations, I could never believe, it was possible for him to have meant no more by his Noumenon, or THING IN ITSELF, than his mere words express’ (BL, I: 155). Coleridge’s Milton criticism offers a glimpse into another high-stakes version of this affective challenge. For while he thinks it crucial to define religion as ‘the will in the reason, and love in the will,’ he also attempts to preserve stylistic decorum and even faith itself by resisting the lure to depict any passion in representations of the Godhead. Milton is honored for having God speak in Paradise Lost through already extant biblical language: he ‘confines the poetic passion in God’s speeches to the language of scripture; and once only allows the passio vero, or quasihumana to appear.’ Praise goes to Milton’s ingenious slip off from impropriety, and his disciplining of anthropomorphism out of his theological verse; but at the same time, this risks equating God merely to voided affect. Milton ‘ventures upon no poetic diction, no amplification, no pathos, no affection. It is truly the Voice or the Word of the Lord coming to, and acting on, the subject Chaos.’39 By contrast, Biographia Chapter 13’s attempt to evoke imaginative splendor appears to respect the shape of the Kantian bargain, while deciding to invert its terms. Coleridge evokes noumena (as Kant declines to do), and instead relinquishes what Kant wins – a meaningfully a priori philosophical formalism. Primary imagination conditions the state of things as such (according to James, it delimits, names, and so in a perceptual way ‘creates’ objects by shaping the conditions in which they are seen as such [82]), but it cannot construct a ‘vital’ meaning. (We lack outside perspective for naming the ‘universe,’ as Borges cites Hume to express.) Any human soulfulness exists for Coleridge as an additive, needed because he intuits the lacking vital interest. Kant’s solution to skepticism thus ultimately becomes in Coleridge’s thought



128

a sterile or constrictive rule that itself requires a further solution: he constantly troubles over the difference between the affectless noumenal role of the unconditioned, and very personal mediation (‘the will in the reason, and the love in the will’) of the task of philosophy to express something like unconditional love. In this sense, The Rime’s much-battered moral, ‘He prayeth well, who loveth well / Both man and bird and beast,’ followed by ‘He prayeth best who loveth best / All things both great and small’ (CP, 166, 186) – the moral that Coleridge wants to render inoperative in his response to Anna Barbauld, who doesn’t think it enough – is not just a tacked-on gesture of natural piety. It has fine-edged implications about the selfdivided human act of prayer, and the redundant but also therefore exclusionary power of love. Where the pre-reformation mariner can pray to raise someone’s position between purgatory and heaven, love comes less readily to the guilty, divided spirit. Which is well, which is best? Cause and effect relations put the originary force behind the first term in a series, while means to an end – a different metaphor to live by – puts teleological focus instead on the second. Intensity of being in Chapter 13 of the Biographia comes at the total loss of intelligible knowledge. This complete reversal of Kant suggests further surprises in store if we let the associations run their course. Among recent critics, in a fluid rebuttal to those who have criticized Coleridge for his failure to integrate life or finish work, Seamus Perry offers the ‘muddle’ as a positive emblem of his subject; he prizes above all in Coleridge’s work ‘the scrupulous energy of its inconsequence.’40 Observing the materialist image of an ‘aftercolor,’ Terada writes of Coleridge’s experiments with the systematically unusable and therefore unpoliced zone of his ‘phenomenophilia’: it’s easy to underestimate [Coleridge’s] affection for the tiny perceptual modulations that indicate the awakening of imagination. Imagination is as easy as squinting. Bringing a book close to his eye (N 1681), putting on green spectacles and then removing them (‘O what a lovely purple when you pull them off’ [N 1974]), are fundamental aesthetic acts whose uses are familiar to visual artists.41 They are also ‘fundamental aesthetic acts’ to philosophers advancing the Treatise’s ‘experimental method.’ The use of such quotidian trials was a prime strategy of Hume, who volunteers color (the idea that we can still have an idea of ‘one particular’ missing ‘shade of blue’) as the ‘one contradictory phenomenon, which may prove that it




Romantic Fiat

is not absolutely impossible for ideas to arise, independent of their correspondent impressions’ (Enquiries, 20–1). Another color, Hume’s simple ‘idea of red, which we form in the dark,’ binds up the divided experience of consciousness through reference back to the same simple impression ‘which strikes our eyes in sun-shine’ (Treatise, 3). However, Terada’s patient logging of Coleridge’s observations of phenomenality must also stand beside a repeated tone of contempt for this minimalism as all-too atomized and Humean. A Christmas Day, 1804, notebook entry attacks the discourse on simple impressions and ideas as the ‘talk of one moment of Hume; of our whole being [as] an aggregate of successive single sensations. Who ever felt a single sensation?’ (N II 2370). ‘The pretended single sensation,’ Coleridge goes on in the same entry, ‘is it any thing more than the Light-point in every picture … And what is a moment? Succession with interspace? Absurdity! It is evidently only the Licht-punct [punkt], the Sparkle in the indivisible undivided Duration.’ There are significant and fairly rigorous differences between the two approaches here. Nonetheless, in place of the visionary gaze or incredulous stare, that both Hume and Coleridge at times squint to provide the experimental occasion of their philosophy seems the best justification to examine their texts together. Despite the rancor Coleridge harbored throughout his life over Hume’s alleged atheism, at key moments in their work Hume and Coleridge similarly describe imaginative activity. They agree in calling the imaginative act a momentous pause following a leap. Coleridge in the Biographia Chapter 7 terms it the ‘alternate pulses of active and passive motion,’ poles held together by an ‘intermediate faculty’ behind them which binds active with passive (BL, I: 124). While Hume writes: ‘the imagination, when set into any train of thinking, is apt to continue, even when its object fails it, and like a galley put in motion by the oars, carries on its course without any new impulse’ (Treatise, 198). Imagination is revealed in the coasting of a galley after the repeated action of oars (when the leaping oars have stopped, imagination begins for Hume), or in the inferred, orchestrating instinct that Coleridge observes in a water-boatman advancing its way against the current. Perhaps against his larger doctrinal interests, in relating the image of the ‘small water-insect’ from Biographia Chapter 7, Coleridge asks readers to share his experimental thoughts: Let us consider, what we do when we leap. We first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to light on the spot, which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his



130

mind while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinquespotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. (In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION.) (BL, I: 124–5) Imagination for both Hume and Coleridge is present in the inertia of activity, the momentum, experienced in the complex but unthinking coordination of pause. The state evoked suggests a kind of provisional release, which also spontaneously becomes a way to move forward. The imaginative gesture involves the successful glide of a continuous motion over disruption. For Hume this counters the pretensions of knowledge claims, but is still an altogether constitutive practice: the tendency of habit to glide on to become a functioning practice of belief. By contrast, for Coleridge imagination is a resistant and even courageous act. It proves signal that each invokes the medium of water. The image surrounds imagination with a whole environment of fluid resistance as a constant, pulsing gradient of opposition, rather than a single opposition to be met on a distinct occasion and decisively overcome. Though it leaps temporarily against the forces of the current and gravity, the water-boatman insect need not be taken, as Coleridge’s theology might prompt, for a natural symbol meant to indicate supernatural powers. Is the boatman’s movement a symbol meant to resemble human powers; or is it contiguous, functioning as a metonymy? In any case, it is important that the ‘oars’ of the water-boatmen are part of its adaptive body. Coleridge’s idea of falling by gravity is willfully strange as an opposing construction, since he attributes falling to will, not law or necessity: ‘by another act, voluntary in part, we yield.’ To gravity? The vivacity – a Humean word – of Coleridge’s depiction of nature itself in this passage works against a view of the insect that indicates higher analogical powers.




Romantic Fiat

Coleridge offers three examples of imagination in this section, which he also calls ‘the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking’: a person’s internal experience of his mind while ‘composing,’ his attempt to ‘recollect a name,’ and the ‘small water-insect on the surface of rivulets.’ Much like Hume’s distinction between the ‘abstruse’ and ‘vulgar’ philosophy, the insect is offered as more common, or more easily noted for ‘most of my readers,’ than are the intellectualized human examples. Yet the distinction between what is possible to bugs and what is possible to humans here I don’t take to be of a genetic character, as in Lovejoy’s great chain of being. The leaping cannot escape gravitational force, or the current that environs it with both support and resistance; but in the short run, through applied energy, living beings through work can enjoy the subjective experience of defiance of lowness. Nonetheless, Hume’s outlook is the encompassing ground to Coleridgean figure; Hume’s figurative sense-making becomes associated with the gravity into which Coleridge’s water-boatman leaps, habituated to its fall as an adaptive organism, and with Coleridge counting on its fall to model the event, or what I am tempted to call the complex physiological maneuver, of imagination. What is this if not nisus vitalis? Next to Hume, this equally Deleuzian leap is that of a surfer or skier. It is a resistant display that proceeds by both applied force and a timely habit of letting go, and takes for its principle the larger surround of bodies in give and take. Though the context of Hume’s boat with oars implies a similar frictional grade against which the figure of imagination moves, instructively, the section on imagination in Hume’s Treatise (Book 1, part IV, section II: ‘Of skepticism with regard to the senses’) speaks without personification about the ocean’s resistance. Hume takes this challenge for granted. That is why galleys have oars; and, as elsewhere the Treatise disturbingly states, that is why captains have galleys filled with slaves and subalterns. Human sociality characterizes Hume’s use of the murkiest term in his repertoire, the power of causation. And here he can sound almost like Hegel: ‘A master is such-a-one as by his situation, arising either from force or agreement, has a power of directing in certain particulars the actions of another, whom we call a servant’ (Treatise, 12). It is cultural usage in these passages from the Treatise – what people have made of their habits for boats and imagination and slaves – that supplies all the interest. So far as he invokes nature only to leave it placidly unmarked within ‘human nature’ (we have factored the current in already; we have moved on), Humean imagination works over a mere backdrop of environing, non-human, nature. Termed ‘the current of nature,’ but described rather as a benefit of cultural production,



132

an ease of reference to social practice takes over and mollifies the alleged pyrrhonism of Hume’s doubt: ‘I may, nay I must yield to the current of nature, in submitting to my senses and understanding; and in this blind submission I shew most perfectly my skeptical disposition and principles’ (Treatise, 269). Whereas Coleridge is always at his most precarious in referencing nature, Hume’s sense of nature proves neutral if not benign. Within the frictional gradient there is room for his view of cultural history as broadly progressive: we have learned to multiply work; a galley gets farther ahead than a water-insect. By the same token, though, Hume’s boat loses Coleridge’s pleasurable sense of jumping in the current or riding a wave, as well as what we might intuit of Coleridge’s dialectical sense in his feel for an inherent pressure that environments exert upon the position of the subject. That Hume’s imagination can accommodate even Coleridge’s unguarded, doubtful moments supports a philosophy not of cause but of endless relation.

Ontology, possibility, and belief On his way to ‘negative capability’ in the December 1817 letter, Keats dashes off the sketch of Coleridge as one who cannot abide ‘being in uncertainties’: ‘—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of the mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.’42 Besides the letter’s influential contrast of Coleridge with Shakespeare, and perhaps philosophy with drama, the famous aside has a less often marked religious valence. It is delivered not only after Keats’s discussion of King Lear and Kean (or before that, in a letter crowded with many associational topics, the acquittal of radicals Wooler and Hone), but a more proximate reference to returning ‘from the Christmas pantomime.’ In Keats’s unproblematically mixed mind, in other words, part of what Coleridge seems irritably ‘reaching after fact & reason about’ is not just secular aesthetics, but supernatural advent. As I have argued at times about Hume, compared to Coleridge this has the striking effect of making Keats in his absence of piety a more stalwart defender of faith. If ‘negative capability’ and the pantomime strangely set Keats along an aesthetic road like that later trod in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ (‘But there was no information, and so we continued …’),43 it is Coleridge who still wants fact and reason in more than such meager negative allowance. Absence of fact and reason are said to be lamented yet again, not the removal of paths




Romantic Fiat

for belief. We are likely also to remember Geoffrey Hartman’s great principle of Wordsworth’s poetry, the via naturaliter negativa, given this language. Here contempt for such a ‘naturally negative way’ nearly bridges Coleridgean mockery of Wordsworth’s child philosopher in the ‘Immortality’ Ode, with an unreadiness to receive the full ‘mystery’ of baby Jesus at Christmas. Grabbing onto the Ode’s ‘best philosopher’ passage for some irritated and conscious analytical reaching, in Chapter 23 of the Biographia Coleridge maintains: Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects the epithets ‘deaf and silent,’ with an apostrophized eye: or (if we are to refer it to the preceding word, philosopher) the faulty and equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of making a ‘master brood o’er a slave,’ or the day brood at all; we will merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that age a philosopher? In what sense does he read ‘the eternal deep’? In what sense is he declared to be ‘for ever haunted’ by the Supreme Being? or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a mighty prophet, a blessed seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or by any form or modification of consciousness? These would be tidings indeed; but such as would pre-suppose an immediate revelation to the inspired communicator, and require miracles to authenticate his inspiration. (BL, II: 138) Maybe such a comment is designed to preserve Christ’s miraculous birth as a truly singular case. The tone of this criticism, however, to me aligns more closely with Hume’s distrust of all miracles. Withholding from him the category ‘Man of Achievement’ (LJK, 43), as a literary review of what Coleridge did achieve in 1817, it is hard not to find Keats so qualified in his esteem precisely because of just such a passage. Wordsworth’s ‘burden of the mystery’ had come farther than that, as Keats would write the next May (LJK, 95). Yet there is also something here about what I have been calling a new development of and in romantic fiat: the repeatedly weighed contrast in Coleridge between an absolutely posited (ex nihilo) and more common-language, continuous, and remissive mode of fiat. We have drawn the distinction already between Chapter 7’s integration of the power of will with a somatic letting go, and Chapter 13’s ‘infinite I AM.’ The fundamental contrast lies between the active and unconditional ‘let there be’ of a metaphysical God, and a more fluid, self-doubting and in the end social poetics, in which radical creation nonetheless involves letting things be. Insofar as such a romantic ‘useless fiat’ proffers continuity



134

creation in the place of out-of-nothing generativity, even its foundational and most ambitious statements displace concern for romantic origins. Coleridge’s primary imagination comes closer to evoking a divine metaphysical absolute than anything else in his work or, for that matter, in the productions of the whole period. Yet here too – here especially – the positing of an ‘infinite I AM’ (echoing the God of Exodus and his bullying or obfuscating, not revelatory, ‘I am that I am’ [Exodus 3:14]) replaces the traditional fiat with a statement whose whole mission is to realize that something is. For Coleridge this involves the subsidiary realization that God exists and that a self exists dignified by the will; but that need not be the case. The point (the yield of the Biographia’s entire buildup to the let-down chapter on imagination) is to frame that tautological realization in a non-trivial sense. Yet that things just are gets us to the basis of Coleridge’s discontent with inclusive minimalism, in terms of legible cognitive content or of human affect. It thus becomes important to notice where Coleridge gives a Khan-like willed command, ‘let there be,’ and where he more appropriately is said to ‘let be’ or ‘let go’ – or admit that his water-boatman must do so. Just as is alleged by Keats’s letter, his strictures on Wordsworth’s philosopher-child claim at once ‘not to stop’ on preliminary issues and actually get caught up; to ‘let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude,’ but also to infer from the start that such an appearance has been ‘caught from the Penetralium.’ Where it had been easy enough for Keats to say Coleridge ‘lets go’ what he momentarily had seized, my point is that he significantly does not quite say this in writing ‘lets go by.’ It is as if Coleridge has just been lapped or scored on. Perhaps this is a theory of reading more than of literary creation; then Coleridge has failed to notice or value some insight another has caught. Yet if not? Can Coleridge really ‘let go by’ and catch these apparitions of ‘half knowledge’? Keats’s language offers just such a challenging hybrid conception: Coleridge somehow misses and catches the opportunity; and while he successfully intuits the image glimpsed from the penetralium, he still misidentifies and undervalues its possibility. How close to the ‘not reaching’ at all Keats evokes so positively! With its concern for the poet’s capacity to bear ‘being in uncertainties’ – a way to mark where ontology carries or is disburdened from theories of knowledge – Keats’s letter also helps open a passage between these two areas of philosophy. I have said that Coleridge’s problem lies in the everyday, the ordinariness of belief after Hume. The same distaste for an enlarged theory of the ordinary lingers in Biographia’s processing of Wordsworth’s lyric ontology. Coleridge rejects Wordsworth’s ‘common language’ poetry as ‘mental bombast,’ the ‘disproportion of thought to




Romantic Fiat

the circumstance’ (BL, II: 136). That the Ode rests its philosophy on a ‘child of that age’ (BL, II: 138) for Coleridge might as well be the extension of the merits of consciousness to ‘a bee, or a dog, or a field of corn; or even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it’ (BL, II: 140). Coleridge alternately objects to the weird way of Wordsworth to imbue the everyday with glory (though the Ode never says the child thinks philosophically, just that ‘truths do rest’ on children) and to the leveling of consciousness to a non-human or non-cognitive ground. (The difference between these options rehearses that between personification and naturalization in de Man, and is all treated wisely in Paul Fry’s Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are.) The thought about Wordsworth is directly connected in Biographia to the ‘all-to-nothing-crushing Kant.’ Over and over, Biographia submits Kant and Wordsworth alike to Coleridge’s inability to accept the non-conceptual givenness of Kantian ‘things in themselves.’ *** Though the ‘history of perception theory from Descartes to Kant’ follows ‘a move from ontological talk of the being of objects in the mind’, to the epistemic notion of the ‘being of being known,’44 the always potentially mystifying aspects of invoking ontology should not blind us to a recent theoretical re-emergence of ontological concerns. ‘The Open’ of Agamben and Eric Santner represents one area of compelling revival. A recent trio of studies on messianism and the political theology of Saint Paul, by Taubes, Agamben, and Badiou, forever skirt the ontological threshold and its penetralium. For Coleridge pace Kant, the debate is about what to demand of the minimal experience of a self. And beyond subjectivity, what are the necessary conditions of beings in a world, the being of the world? Coleridge is ambivalent about the role of the former in the First Critique. But the ambivalence is not about what he thinks when he refuses to believe that Kant’s confused pre-cognitive manifold can really be confused; it is about whether Coleridge can keep on idolizing Kant without condescending to his actual structure of thinking. Questions about the latter topic – the necessary conditions of there being a world at all – take us on a broader philosophical ambit of contemporary theory. Agamben disagrees with Leibniz about whether it is true that all possibles must exist, when he holds in The Time That Remains: Leibniz defines the relation between possibility and reality as follows: omne possibile exigit existere, every possibility demands [esige] to exist,



136

to become real. Despite an unconditional respect for Leibniz, I do not think that this formulation is correct. In order to define what is truly an exigency, we should invert the formulation and write: omne existens exigit possibilitatem suam, each existent demands [esige] its proper possibility, it demands that it become possible.45 The stance of Leibniz, however, was also Spinoza’s view, since ‘the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things, and vice versa,’ in The Ethics, and there is but one substance.46 Spinoza confidently holds what Coleridge in his linguistic theory would like to believe, but never can take peace in or pleasure from. Replaying Coleridge’s inability to believe Kant’s word about just how absent of meaning the noumenal must be (if ever possible to access, its knowability has been sacrificed), Leibniz and Agamben differ sharply on the question of whether ontology has any significance that is not violent retrojection by an entirely self-positing fiat or force. Agamben goes so far as to name retrojection as that of which ontology purely consists, through the hindsight by means of which ‘each existent demands’ after the fact to be made possible; modern theodicy continues, that is as much as to say, through a world ontologically rationalized. Less jarred by the fact that the world is a proposition, Wittgenstein to open the Tractatus claims that ‘The world is everything that is the case,’47 and Cavell draws further attention to his primary fascination with the fact that a world is: The world arises at the beginning of the Tractatus, before, as it were, there is time for logic and language to arise: ‘The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’ Do we ask: What was there before the world? Heidegger’s question, ‘Why there is something rather than nothing?’ which Wittgenstein is said to have found meaningful … seems to assume the world is things. As the Tractatus is drawing to a close, Wittgenstein remarks: ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.’ I would like to say that if the world is the totality not of things but of facts, what there is before the world (what the world is instead of) is not nothing but is the something of chaos.48 This is also the wonderful ontological burden of Coleridge’s outcry in The Friend. He wants his inability to frame language outside a world – another definition of immanence – to stand in the place of his inability to live without a self finally grounded by God, the inability for there to be




Romantic Fiat

thinking without God in the world. But in what Tim Milnes nicely calls Coleridge’s ‘anti-foundational creationism,’49 he actually opposes nothingness in the passage, not atheism. Taken at his word Coleridge is speaking against God’s ex nihilo creation, and he implies assent to the ‘chaos’ theory in reading Genesis. Borges catches Coleridge’s governing sense of awe just as well by suggesting, after Job rather than Genesis that ‘we do not know what the universe is’: Obviously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and speculative. The reason is quite simple: we do not know what the universe is. ‘This world,’ wrote David Hume, ‘was only the first rude essay of some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance …’50 And after again quoting Hume in evidence, Borges concludes: ‘We must go even further, and suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambitious word.’ In both Cleanthes’ response to Demea in section IX of the Dialogues and in the First Enquiry, section XII, Hume says in effect ‘whatever is may not be. No negation of a fact can be a contradiction.’ The question will remain ‘why there is something rather than nothing?’ This claim remains a philosophical leap or crack (Sprung) in the poetic arguments of Coleridge on origin (Ursprung): ‘there had to be something … even though there is no being of which one could say it had to be.’51 In the face of the continuity of bodies and the continuity of this doubt about our knowledge of them, the ‘persisting matter,’ as Rundle terms it,52 so much is the pinch and perhaps anguish we hear in romantic philosophical song after Hume. As a minimalist defense of the being of beings, prefigurative of the current theoretical articulation of a subjectivity without subjects, or an ecology without nature, so much, too, is what faced Coleridge as anti-humanism at the zero-degree of Wordsworth and Kant, and what totally creeped him out. Having confronted then explicitly stated his lack of interest in the ontic level that at times more than just looks mad, Hume more than any other thinker enables a parallel – groundless but ongoing – framework of constitutive beliefs. He realizes there have to be beliefs and that his and our supposedly secular modernity is swimming in them, even though there are no individual promptings on which we can enjoy justification.



138

5

This [life according to the good] is the greatest end both in common for all men and for each man separately. But men also come together and maintain the political community in view of simple living, because there is probably some kind of good in the mere fact of living itself [kata to zen auto monon]. If there is no great difficulty as to the way of life [kata ton bion], clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold on to life [zoe] as if it were a kind of serenity [euemeria, a beautiful day] and a natural sweetness. – Aristotle, Politics 1278b, 23–31 … as if we are conspirators either for or against ourselves. – Stanley Cavell, on Emerson’s ‘Fate’ Since the last chapter gave to epistemological concerns a foundation both in ontology and in the lyric, I’d now like to address that rubric, ‘ontology and the lyric,’ under a specifically aesthetic heading – the concept of beauty. This chapter, the book’s final one on Wordsworth directly, highlights two main issues not taken up in any fixed order in the discussion below. The first comes in response to the last few decades of high-powered philosophical writing on ‘aesthetic ideology.’1 Associated primarily with the romantic New Historicism of the 1980s, it is my judgment, rather, that this critical trend is taken to its furthest extent instead by forces already implicit in Yale School deconstruction. The inheritance runs through an approach developed in some important individual essays by Geoffrey Hartman to be discussed below, and 139



Wordsworth and the Beautiful Day

Romantic Fiat

in the book of that title by Paul de Man. A simple point I’d like to make in this connection is that Wordsworth’s images of enchantment don’t primarily relate to the realm of aesthetic form. Through a verbal mimesis of ‘abundant recompense’ or an extended image of imaginative mastery such as that appended to the ‘spots of time,’ his poems might in places seek an unseemly closure in terms of their cognitive or emotional yield; but to my mind, they never aim at seamless formal closures.2 It bears pointing out that this is something we can’t say or wouldn’t want to concede, for example, about constructions of beauty in Keats’s letters or in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ In other words, even where Wordsworth’s poetry asks most to be called out by sharply demystifying critical approaches, it is the purchase of thinking in lyric altogether, and not some kind of allegedly unified product of art, that is really at stake. For this reason, the present chapter argues that Wordsworth’s poetic of demystification and enchantment relates to what Kant would call the purposiveness of understanding associated with ‘natural’ beauty, not with ‘art’ beauty alone. But since we do experience these encounters in poems, I risk trying to get away with something here. I need to amend that statement to say that the poetry concerns images of natural beauty, and offers the poet’s implicit reading of something very much like Kantian purposiveness, gesturing in its most ceremonial occasions toward the fortuitous and yet ineluctable sense of a ‘fit’ between the ‘individual Mind’ and the ‘external World.’3 In concert with Home at Grasmere and that poem’s intended role in The Recluse project, The Prelude gives an epic-scale importance to arriving at a choice of where to live: where perspective might or even must be situated to produce fit. Yet can poetry truly be concerned with natural rather than artistic beauty? Under this productively questionable heading, I argue with a more peculiar kind of symbolic concentration that Wordsworth vies everywhere for a poetics to honor and realize ‘present joy’ in time;4 the poetry aesthetically aspires to project, maintain, and re-achieve, the promise of a beautiful day – a phrase I take from Agamben’s Homo Sacer in translation, who himself has taken it, with translation, from Aristotle’s Politics. My concern is that we should not group this aspiration with that of making a beautiful poem exactly (under which terms several of Coleridge’s conversation poems might well rate higher than Wordsworth crisis lyrics); more strongly still, it is not to be conflated with banking on the composition of beautiful kinds of poetry (as in the genre of the picturesque tradition).5 Yet the point of view I defend here is no doubt in tension with the fact that lyric poems do bear most of



140

what we know about those days for which Wordsworth expresses so much ultimate care ‘in themselves.’ The perspective this chapter develops then has against it the further hunch that Wordsworth would not finally want the days without the celebratory accompaniment of poetry to serve as their seal in another register. In this way The Prelude’s ‘glad preamble’ is arrested by the incompatibility of two callings. Honoring present joy through a spirit of idle receptivity simply does not mesh with the very different calling that aspires to epic verse, the high argument of ‘philosophic song’ – whether it be Milton’s kind, that aimed at by all Coleridge’s prodding, or the sort about which more recently Simon Jarvis has written so well. No: A life devoted to attending the ‘purposive’ mystery of what Kant called ‘natural beauty’ may not at all merge with a life devoted to ‘art beauty’ in this sense. For Wordsworth at least, one impulse may cancel the other. Following from this initial dilemma registered in Book 1 of The Prelude, a further problem results from the fact that romantic critique of ‘aesthetic ideology’ has always presumed the goal of its energies lay in exposing the false consciousness riveted to aesthetic objects. Are there philosophical approaches that can aid us with poems whose motives may not be ultimately aesthetic, and are certainly not about the finality of objects of art? Through an approach that recommends itself more directly to Keats and Shelley, an ‘Adornian’ Wordsworth is currently in full swing, about which we can say that apprehension of the beautiful day is necessarily observed through lyric condensations and the accretions of some of the more non-spatial aspects of poetic ‘form’: ‘textures, syntaxes, rhythms, and tonalities,’ in the words of a leader of this movement, Robert Kaufman.6 These intensively lyrical qualities register pressures that society places on the subject position, and which thus find expression through that privileged vehicle for subjectivity, the lyric poem. They are markings of counterfactual aspiration, or negative witness, as Adorno contends of the lyric in his address, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society.’7 An urge to perfect the day, perhaps to complete it precisely by not seizing it for once, yields no ‘Coleridgean’ organic unity in any event. In the elegy ‘Peele Castle’ – the immediate text I consider in the chapter – Wordsworth’s claims to expose aesthetic illusion ought to be referred to important studies on the topic such as those written by de Man, Marc Redfield, and Terry Eagleton. Yet this is despite the fact that Wordsworth never was a poet to stake beauty as a matter of sheltering form. As characteristic embodiments of their less palpable formal architecture, compare ‘Kubla Khan’ to the figure of the poet just returned from France, shivering beneath Stonehenge in the Salisbury



Wordsworth and the Beautiful Day 141

Romantic Fiat

Plain poems. As I think readers generally intuit, Wordsworth therefore must be understood to unmask aesthetic illusion in a domain whose better, though by no means more easily explained, mode is not art per se but the apparently purposive ends of life itself: a domain that comes to us under his aegis of ‘joy in widest commonalty spread.’8 He’s after an image of happiness; but whether it is the guiding image, or the happiness, that might sustain itself best through time becomes a central problem and source of confusion. The axis of this concern in part is what makes the elaborate jussive depiction of the ‘science of happiness’ in The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater so successful as an interpretive parody of the coziness of a Wordsworth habitat. Now living at Dove Cottage, De Quincey uses stagy and god-like language to depict his surroundings on a winter’s night, as if they were merely conjurable from language: ‘Let there be a cottage. Let the mountains be real mountains,’ etc.;9 he suggests that the Lake District home and surrounding natural beauty in their own way constitute ostentatiously built space. The chapter’s second main point acknowledges the inescapable horizon of the operations of ‘art beauty,’ both in Adorno’s work as I understand it, and for the strand of romanticism I’m most interested in through Wordsworth. That point of emphasis will expand upon my brief reading in Chapter 2 of Coleridge’s nature in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.’ I saw there a version of the command to nature to be on its best behavior – and not yet, as it functions in Wordsworth, to do what it already does – in earnest of one of Adorno’s most strangely powerful passages in Aesthetic Theory: his notion of a ‘promise’ in nature that art must break to keep. If ‘nature’ in some sense ‘does not yet exist’ according to Adorno, if it remains under the ‘spell of universal identity’ in the closed circle of the drive for mere self-preservation, it uniquely falls to art to depict the utopian idea that a nature and culture of the future might both exist and coexist.10 In ‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’ Coleridge thinks of nature’s prospective role in his career as one that somehow must be deprived of what is, notwithstanding that statement of original loss, a pre-insured ‘promised good’ of the poet’s experience (line 65). No less for its being broken, then – for being based on an entire poetics of lack – Coleridge’s guiding image, phrase, and indeed his overall method yield a very effective machine of form. Basically, the reason for this perverse formal productivity in ‘This Lime Tree-Bower My Prison’ is that its losses unveil an even more powerful logic in lieu of the actual substance of fulfillment. Here too, my essential contribution in this chapter will be to hold that Wordsworth isn’t at all formal in this way. His promises are in no sense bindingly contractual.



142

Wordsworth’s ‘diurnal’ poetics by contrast (a notion owing much to recent work by Angus Fletcher, and to Paul Fry, again, on the poet’s ‘chronometric’ time),11 has the effect of constructing all emotionality under the condition of an open-ended promise whose collapse, if and when it can be shown to occur, will be felt to taint even past days in hindsight. This – the way most ‘romantic’ relationships work in the ordinary language sense; the way suffering American baseball fans often feel at the end of a summer; the fear Walter Benjamin had even for the dead if Hitler were victorious – is the method by which Wordsworth appears to construct all experiences of a self held together in stressed but open continuities through time. I shall argue the process occurs in ‘Peele Castle,’ and perhaps it nearly usurps the frankly upbeat side of ‘Resolution and Independence’ when it seeks to enact that ‘timely utterance’ referred to in the Ode. Thus, responding to Fry, I’d argue that if Wordsworth is a poet whose sole originality lies in the disclosure of non-human somatic in-difference, he is also a poet who seems especially aware how enlarged the claim to a certain non-traditional personification becomes, once it has been at all engaged. The River Derwent that so ‘loved / To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song’12 is conceptually a weak force indeed; but in terms of the poet’s autobiographical story of associations, it is the strongest measure of relation toward a personal duty – the poet’s sense of his resources on the one hand, and the due retort he feels against himself, on the other – in the entire poem. Wordsworth observes a redoubled scope of personification as soon as the anthropocentric realm has been entered, since not only does ‘mere’ human being already always exist as somewhat more than a bare minimum of life’s biological needs. But also, modes of human feeling acknowledged across time reach beyond themselves in a promise-like, subjunctive, and ever-connective gesture of ongoing works and days. That a kiss can never just be a kiss, because after it the poet fantasizes if Lucy were to be dead and now he cares about her creaturely human being, constitutes one of Wordsworth’s strangest fiats of passion.

Planting a castle There is a word given definitive placement in the ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ known commonly as ‘Peele Castle’ (1806), but common elsewhere in the earlier poetry of Wordsworth’s major decade. That word is plant used as a verb.13 Ah! THEN, if mine had been the painter’s hand, To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,




144

Romantic Fiat

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile Amid a world how different from this! Beside a sea that could not cease to smile; On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. (lines 13–20)14 The act of notionally ‘planting’ the ruined pile becomes the poem’s central gesture, the main imagined evidence of how material a separation has taken place between now and ‘THEN.’ Yet the great pressures bearing upon the term’s meaning feel eccentric. Readers of ‘Peele Castle’ are almost encouraged to forget another (by no means the only) prior use of ‘plant’15 in Wordsworth’s ‘memory fragment,’ the two-part Prelude of 1799. But like the later poem in its chastisement of false ‘consecration,’ what The Prelude calls its ‘weakness of a human love’ for the past is expressed through a complexly entwined figurative thinking that is no simple debunking. I began My story early, feeling, as I fear, The weakness of a human love for days Disowned by memory—ere the birth of spring Planting my snowdrops amid winter snows. (1799 Prelude, 1.443–7) The varieties of tense in this passage (encompassing the simple past, continuous present participles, and a past-perfect timeframe: ‘began,’ ‘feeling,’ ‘ere’ a spring long since) nicely catch the play of autobiographical knowledge common to Wordsworth. If one wanted, using narrative theory, to specify the difference between the plot and story of this segment of his remembered life, the ‘story’ would be impossible to establish. He ‘began’ by setting recollections too early for attribution and he feels the danger of projection and self-delusion in this choice, yet proceeds despite such reservations. In a usage with radically branching implications, ‘plant’ either implies the snowdrops (memories) could not have existed at the time, or that they were latently ‘there’ but not visible ‘amid winter snows.’ A gap Wordsworth does not overtly measure lies between the organism of a ‘plant’ and its specular role in construction of memory.



The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration, and the Poet’s dream;

Questions about what it means that a castle ‘pile,’ like these flowers, can be planted exactly – where that word discontinuously joins fictive and natural reference – motivate my treatment of the poem. I find in it, if only in Cavell’s idiosyncratic sense, a ‘conspiratorial’ pattern: one either excessively for or against some constructed notion of his self by means of this word.16 Literally there is a cover-up, as we shall see: one that recent commentators reveal to involve pirates, loot, and death.17 Whether the poet’s plantings are judged benign or criminal remains a divisive issue among scholars, reflecting a division in romantic studies about the moving contradictions of Wordsworth’s poems as either selfcritical or ideologically self-serving. And even if we can agree in finding Wordsworthian autobiography quite critically engaged with dynamics of active projection, is it transcendence – or the sheer framing of the problem – that emerges from of such recursive awareness? Jerome McGann writes of ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘Its pathos is a function of that paradox. For Wordsworth’s poem does not actually transcend the evils it is haunted by, it merely occupies them at the level of consciousness.’18 Resistance to the rule of a normative Wordsworth has not always been so one-sided though. Clearly ‘plant’ offers an ambiguity of William Empson’s seventh type, like the famous example of the ‘light of sense’ in The Prelude, which ‘goes out’ in two very different ways leading to opposite views regarding Wordsworthian enlightenment.19 The word ‘plant’ has the effect of adding enriched layers to a naturally grounded past – reconfirming the past by adding new instances of continually rooted origination. But in Wordsworth’s hands it also skeptically questions authenticity. To critically recognize, even mock, the practice of adding ‘the gleam, / The light that never was on sea or land,’ as that key rhetorical moment in ‘Peele Castle’ has it, may ring good hard sense in submitting youthful enthusiasm to mature inquiry. When juxtaposed with the light, the almost throwaway phrasing of ‘By sea or land’ nonetheless may show the depth of questions behind Wordsworth’s scrutiny. Comparable to phrases in the ballad language he found so oddly satisfying, the phrase risks affected simplicity: so much poetic stuffing for the ‘nowhere’ attributable to the things in which this light can be empirically verified. At least in the approach suggested later by Percy Shelley (my subject in Chapter 6), the poet after ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ is a sort of demobbed revolutionary bringing news of encroaching tedium by sea and land. Thus if Shelley in Peter Bell the Third would dash Wordsworth as Pope had dashed Colley Cibber in The Dunciad, by charging a ‘ultralegitimate’ Dullness, Shelley does so after the model of a prior interpretive motion Wordsworth had actually passed on himself.




Romantic Fiat

Zones of experience in ‘Peele Castle’ are at once liminal and totalizing. Diagnosable excess comes from the fact that the poem dresses down all non-material value. At the source of that imperiled metaphysical sense lies another foundational perception of light not on ‘sea or land’: the fiat of God’s constitutive ‘let there be light,’ which then could be said to instate a disturbingly comparable nullity. In the same move Wordsworth also would seem powerfully to unwork what Marc Redfield, in his own formidable study of aesthetic ideology in the alternate, prose Bildungsroman tradition, calls ‘the subject of aesthetics’ in a multiple sense: The subject of aesthetics is not only prefigurative and synecdochic of its own universality; it also produces itself as this subject in the act of judgment, modeling itself not just on tropes, but on the magical immediacy of a divine fiat, which is to say, in more prosaic terms, a performative. Since in the absence of God only language can claim to create ex nihilo, the linguistic model cannot be dispensed with.20 I am suggesting that Wordsworth – never one to build walls around the aesthetic or to think of beauty as primarily a man-made thing – already undoes this subject by invoking judgment in the poem as a counterwork, a decreative production. This effect extends so far as to include a radical instinct about Redfield’s less ‘prosaic terms,’ because part of what Wordsworth everywhere opposes is the idea that God or human language actually creates ex nihilo. The Wordsworths – William and Dorothy in some form of joint testament – attest heartily to this conviction in an 1815 letter to Catherine Clarkson.21 Unrealistic details are there to be teased or meditated in Genesis from the start. God’s ‘fiat lux’ precedes by two days the creation of sea and land (Genesis 1:3, 1:9), and the stars by several: ‘let there be lights’ is Genesis 1:14. This is no problem for those ready to affirm divine light as a metaphysical entity, a thing wholly self-legitimating and apart; but any phenomenal light would fall too under the pat dismissal of ‘the gleam / the light that never was on sea or land.’ The poem’s adamancy maybe addresses only what Kant would call ‘art beauty.’ In which case, the simplified – and quite understandable – version of Wordsworth’s claim is to say that the mere painting of light, à la Thomas Kinkade, no more can bear life’s weight. Yet, writing to mark his personal development and to moderate his enthusiasm in following merely personal lights, would Wordsworth have wanted to imperil his source? His claims to demystify autobiography have a broader reach;



146

and the unintended impact on a global ‘sentiment of being’ (The Pedlar, line 209; 1799 Prelude, 2.450), here seen in its negative mood, is what so wholly characterizes Wordsworth on both sides of his recurrent self-examinations. At stake here is a sense of being imperiled beyond the arc of any personal narrative. As in Homo Sacer’s powerful redeployment of Aristotle’s zoe (Agamben’s ‘bare life’), which is characterized in the epigraph as a ‘beautiful day’ when there is ‘no great difficulty as to the way of [political] life,’ dark aspects loom in Wordsworth’s inclination to record and bless under these increasingly ‘difficult’ conditions of living. The blessing shows the way toward what may become cursing, in a setting that might show only a contingent difference. If being itself can be figured in this scheme as something like the psychological virtue of a discrete spot of time, the figurative achievement of a ‘beautiful day’ gives strikingly framed limits (diurnal attainment) to what is otherwise illimitably spread. Impossible to grasp in its totality, the unity of life for the purposes of idealism is totalized nonetheless in a prevalent version of ‘aesthetic ideology’ after Hegel. As opposed to its strikingly framed opposite – a sentiment of nothingness spread – a rapport with and in the conditions of being can be nurtured and preserved.22 But then can being also be denatured? God performs a similar totalizing verbal act with the fiat, rendering limits to the different aspects of creation (each with their own day) and regarding them (non-verbally, as it turns out) as ‘good’ in the Genesis refrain. But what if God’s more-or-less aesthetic judgment of taste had not produced such liking? What if the decree of ‘good’ were rescinded or given a codicil – as every generation since Noah’s has felt the threat? Giving a much more shadowy reprise to the old notion that the poet is most like God, with ‘Peele Castle’ Wordsworth evolves a means to clear away an ontological field he reconceptualizes as mere being that has gone flat – and what had been a positive inflection before in his poetry concerning ‘simple living,’ ‘the mere act of living itself,’ is afterward returned to with disturbing weight. Ominously, the review of a conditionally open-ended past that Wordsworth now counts false marks areas for disowning, zones of being it subsequently becomes thinkable to discontinue. So much is my speculative conclusion regarding the poetics and ethic of ‘Peele Castle’; but one ought to shrink before presuming all this too fast, and recur to the outset of this process of critical cutting back. My aim in what follows is to show how the range of what he can ‘plant’ demonstrates a vexed continuity of figurative practice between ‘Peele




Romantic Fiat

Castle’ back into Wordsworth’s earlier poetry. This emphasis reorients an influential prior account of ‘Peele Castle,’ Marjorie Levinson’s focus on biographical and historical reference. I then argue that the divergent senses of ‘plant’ – which can be thought of as an earthy parallel to the famous 1951 ‘Dialogue on Interpretation’ regarding the German word scheinen as meaning either ‘to shine’ or ‘to seem’ (designating organic and intrinsic or, alternately, fictitious and specular modes of representation) – display Wordsworth’s poetry on both sides of an aesthetics of enlightenment and its most vigorous modern counterclaimants: the incisive difference between Adorno and Heidegger in the twentieth century. His poetry broaches the philosophical risks both of an enchantment that obfuscates the necessary mediation of being, and a demystification that collaborates also with symbolic violence. Yet my point is not to catch and hold a view of Wordsworth in either of these extremes. I hope to join those who see in Wordsworth’s poetry not just arable discursive terrain – extracting something from poetry – but an embodiment of the volatility of enlightenment in distinctively poetic thinking. On the broadest level of establishing some conclusions about a poetics of the ‘beautiful day’ as an open and, in that sense, antiformalist assessment of aesthetic illusion in and by Wordsworth, my own thoughts run to this: Wordsworth abandons Kant’s definition of Augenschein as ‘precisely what we see’;23 he appears to follow intuitively after Schiller’s definition of beauty in the Letters on Aesthetic Education as an achievement, rather, of tranquil stasis. And in doing so, the poet loses out on the challenging opportunity to expose Schein yet see it nevertheless as dynamic.

Blindness and invisibility During his long episode of almost nauseous confusion in Book 7 of The Prelude, the anarchy of London crystallizes in the poet’s encounter with two figures of unhinged but seemingly characteristic representation: a black-suited actor with ‘INVISIBLE’ written on his chest (1805, line 310), and a blind beggar holding a paper to explain his story (lines 608–23). While the first instance is branded an effect of willing theatrical deception, the latter strikes the poet as a profoundly admonishing image, an experience that Book 7’s immediate turn to the healing resources of Lake District nature both preserves and cancels. Nonetheless, with striking consistency for one hailed so often as ‘Poet of Nature’ – and for a writer who was also a fine amateur gardener – Wordsworth’s ‘plant’ suggests a fictional and complexly representational art of placement.



148

First physically suffering the debility that later conditions existential fears of blindness in Coleridge’s ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ and the ‘Immortality’ Ode, not surprisingly it is Milton who stands as model for the romantics’ more-than-natural sense. Wordsworth’s practice of ‘planting’ stems ultimately from Paradise Lost; its source lies in the latter part of Milton’s invocation to ‘holy Light’: So much the rather thou celestial Light Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight. (3.51–5; italics added) The word ‘plant’ here involves compensatory inward vision in return for sensory loss. From M. H. Abrams onward, this passage has anchored what is meant by romantic internalization. Milton’s ‘plant’ is a very grotesque image.24 Two moments from Shakespeare, Ariel’s ‘those were pearls that were his eyes’ and the series of brutal metaphors for Gloucester’s ‘expunged’ eyes, stand close by. Milton calls for vision on the inside, in a hard-line puritan refusal of established image worship (a view offered with dogmatic clarity in the phrase, ‘thou celestial Light / Shine inward’). Nevertheless, Milton was an obdurately nature-loving poet; and he preserves an organic aspect in the troping of flowers, the recidivist lushness of their planted eyes. Set in an invocation to the creation of day and the eternity of light, are the eyes then like dais-ies? They would not so much see beauty or ‘wisdom,’ as Milton more carefully puts it, but be as a matter of unself-reflective ontology, somewhere in between the flower and the human. It is a short jump from here to Empson’s view of Paradise Lost as an act of iconic barbarism, where other figures bearing animist unseeing eyes – an Aztec or a Benin sculpture, as Empson says25 – give emblems of the poem through the unmasking of the sacrificial logic of its Christian God. Somewhere in this process, the anthropological wing of enlightenment inquiry has come home to roost in its soaring poets. It proves important to note that where Milton’s invocation to light represents his stunningly direct ambition to repeat and renew divine fiat in the act of paying homage, Wordsworth’s own echo of this moment reveals how all fiats following God’s are personified hailing – are apostrophes to fiat creation and hence give a verbal tautology of the fiat as substance-making verbal performance. Apostrophe, the contentless ‘O’ of voicing, represents a volatile tactic that is both resistant to meaning and essential to




Romantic Fiat

poetry, as Jonathan Culler has shown, writing about ‘Peele Castle’ itself as a culminating example.26 Wordsworth’s ‘plant’ enacts fiat incidentally, without invoking the traditional jussive (‘let there be …’) formula. An apostrophe to the castle that suggests two ‘hoary’ figures in a moment of reflective interchange – ‘I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile, / Amid a world how different from this!’ – assumes the author’s identification with light and his powers of world-creation, if only with regard to this conditional vision of how he might have been inspired to reshape the past. In what has become after Emerson a cliché about raging idealism, the excursive force of the poet’s wellbeing would have diffused through all existence (‘joy in widest commonalty spread’). But in ‘planting’ or selectively placing the castle, as an artist or God would do, Wordsworth highlights his ordering rage in an off-center or off-key way. He reverses emphasis between foreground and context. In a typical move for his poetry of humanity in non-human environments, accent falls on the surround (what Geoffrey Hartman calls Wordsworth’s imaginaire and Jonathan Bate a laudable ‘ecopoetics’27). The reverse-gestalt maneuver is kept from over-analysis by its unconscious character. Wordsworth tends to imply that planting is a craft prone to a human guile but exceeding conscious intent. ‘Plant’ holds together the space between natural and figurative orders of creation for Wordsworth, if it can be so held. But this rhetorical insight has been well established in romantic studies, most dramatically of course by de Man, who offers a great analysis in The Rhetoric of Romanticism of ‘the intrinsic ontological primacy of the natural object.’ ‘Poetic language seems to originate in the desire to draw closer to the ontological status of the object,’ de Man writes. ‘There can be flowers that “are” and poetic words that “originate,” but no poetic words that “originate” as if they “were”.’28 What is, I think, a new interest to be raised lies in how ‘plant’ triangulates these with a third element. And this we can only call sleight of hand. Whatever its underlying subtleties, The Prelude differs crucially from ‘Peele Castle’ in refusing to say that the presence of this critical judgment is something new. That ‘feeling’ and ‘fear’ have coincided all along with writing the poem on the growth of the poet’s mind, and there is no reason to suppose their expulsion from an enlightened future.29 Snowdrops are among the earliest flowers of spring in Britain. But with their white on white coloration, and the linguistic near-identity of the flower’s name upon this background – would someone who ‘planted’ snowdrops by writing snowdrops upon snow ever find them? Was it Wordsworth’s intent to retrieve the flowers or lose them? The occluded



150

content of Wordsworth’s snowdrops becomes a touchstone of the poet’s habit at once to display and hide his central motivations in writing about history.30 The moving phrase, ‘days / disowned by memory,’ finds its tribute in David Bromwich’s extraordinary study of the poet in the 1790s;31 but where the passage up to this point unites poetic eloquence and discursive sense, it is as though Wordsworth chose in the end to embrace richly obscure figurative thinking. His goad has us thinking too hard, or leaving too much undetermined, or all of the above. In addition to implying ‘not yet possessed,’ and maybe ‘not at all subject to possession,’ ‘days disowned’ are more violently banished.

Supplanting the past? Taken in its peculiar usage from Milton – and thus found implicitly at the very foundation of the poet’s calling – plant also entwines around the presence of two men important to Wordsworth’s vocation in the years after 1800: his brother John Wordsworth and patron Sir George Beaumont. In 1803, Beaumont’s offer of a parcel of land known as Applethwaite initiated much thought on Wordsworth’s part about his calling, habitation, and personal independence. The gift ultimately was accepted, but the land was not built on, and the emblematic character of this delicate gift-exchange seems worth pausing over. Wordsworth responded: [W]hat I sh[ould] wish is, that I might be considered at present as Steward of the land with liberty to lay out the rent in plant[ing] or any other improvement which might be thought [advi]sable with a view to build upon it. And if it should [be] out of my power to pitch my own tent there, I would then request that you would give me leave [to] restore the property to your own hands[.]32 Seizing on my keyword plant for its commonplace meaning, Beaumont replied more effusively: ‘Plant it, delve it – & build upon it or not, as it suits your convenience, but let me live & die with the knowledge of the sweet place, with its rocks, its banks, & mountain stream are in the possession of such a mind as yours.’33 An 1804 sonnet, ‘At Applethwaite, Near Keswick,’ addresses Beaumont at once to commemorate the gift and to suggest why it is that such ‘favoured ground’ may remain just notionally, not practically, fruitful to the poet’s vocation. Though it is admittedly slight verse, the reason Wordsworth calls to mind schematically frames the sustained argument of his major lyric




152

Romantic Fiat

Beaumont! it was thy wish that I should rear A seemly Cottage in this sunny Dell, On favoured ground, thy gift, where I might dwell In neighborhood with One to me most dear, That undivided we from year to year Might work in our high Calling—a bright hope To which our fancies, mingling, gave free scope Till checked by some necessities severe. And should these slacken, honoured Beaumont! still Even then we may perhaps in vain implore Leave of our fate thy wishes to fulfill. Whether this boon will be granted us or not, Old Skiddaw will look down upon the Spot With pride, the Muses love it evermore.34 Wordsworth imagines a double bar to the prospect of ever dwelling on the land. ‘Necessities’ have narrowed Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s free scope to choose an ‘undivided’ life. And if they had not, or if these forces should ‘slacken’ eventually, ‘thy wishes’ (from Beaumont’s perspective) may not yet align with ‘our fate.’ Word choice indicates a certain dissonance between Beaumont’s plans and theirs. The ‘our’ that unites poets on the sentence level could equally be shown as biographically counterfactual. Philosophical fault lines suggest further divisions. As Paul Fry has argued in the context of Jeffrey, Wordsworth here too departs from the implicit humanist anthropocentrism of Beaumont’s offer to improve nature by dwelling on it.35 That ‘Old Skiddaw will’ nonetheless ‘look down’ – that this bare ‘Spot’ as an unwitnessed site should all the same matter – secures ‘pride’ and attracts ‘the Muses’ even with no poets there. Wordsworth’s own unstated wish was further from Beaumont’s than he lets on. It is hard to tell how sad – or, alternately, how wryly free-spirited – the invoked ‘fate’ must be that keeps them all separate. Wordsworth and Coleridge each had the habit of pronouncing dire omens in powerfully optimistic poems. Much like Wordsworth’s fear in ‘Tintern Abbey’ that ‘I should be where I no more can hear’ Dorothy’s voice (line 147), or Coleridge’s similar inkling in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ that he might go blind later and even now – despite being



poetry over the next two years. The poem begins with the conceit of planning to ‘rear’ the cottage like a child, anthropomorphizing the sense of building and ‘improvement’ found in Wordsworth’s letter:

25 years of age – may never see his friends again (line 6), somehow the treatment of this gift elicits darkening reflections. ‘Ode to Duty’ and ‘Peele Castle’ will make an oracle of what is, rather, an excuse in this sonnet. In ‘Ode to Duty,’ Wordsworth revises the sonnet’s prediction as he continues to extend, making a plea that necessity inhibit choice and take all his slack, not allowing anymore for an untrammeled ‘free’ choice: Me this uncharter’d freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance-desires: My hopes no more must change their name, I long for a repose that ever is the same. (lines 37–40)36 With ‘Peele Castle,’ Wordsworth fulfills the sonnet’s precondition of a kind of ‘fate.’ John Wordsworth’s death as an event, and ‘Peele Castle’ as a poem, together serve to cast fate as a retroactive coloring over Wordsworth’s elapsed career. The revocation of the past, through loss, strangely weds him to a darkly affirmative principle going forward. In Hartman’s celebrated words, the poem’s energy and affirmation ‘amount almost to an amor fati and reveal how much power is left.’37 At this point (aided greatly by Richard Matlak’s study, Deep Distresses) it may help to review the commonly known details of Beaumont’s impact. In prior biographical readings, John’s story tragically imbues Wordsworth’s mature idea of vocation, with its culminating expression of suffering stoicism in ‘Peele Castle.’ On these lines, Matlak does much to strengthen the presence of John across Wordsworth’s poems. His first major departure from the received narrative comes in the depiction of Beaumont himself as a major source of the optimism the poem rejects. Beaumont’s theory of painting in the fading school of Reynolds took for granted the espousal of a generalized viewpoint that preserved the theodicy of Pope (‘whatever is, is right’) – a theodicy negated on at least one level in this poem to powerful effect (‘A power is gone, which nothing can restore’ [line 35]). The gloomy subject of Beaumont’s painting (‘This sea in anger, and that dismal shore’ [line 44]) indicates the main scheme of the poem, in which visual art reveals to poetry the depth of gravity it faces, and Wordsworth more or less obsequiously feigns the idea that the spirit of poetry receives correction from a picture. Yet Beaumont’s treatment fails to anticipate the poem’s key reservations about Reynolds’s or any other kind of enlightenment. It leaves out both the singular kind of grief Wordsworth would have associated with John,




154

Romantic Fiat

Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone, Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind! Such happiness, wherever it be known, Is to be pitied; for ’tis surely blind. But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, And frequent sights of what is to be borne! Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.— Not without hope we suffer and we mourn. (lines 53–60) Matlak’s emphasis where it is most original traces a network of associations that exceed individual tragedy. Deep Distresses links John’s desire to work for his brother’s vocation as captain of an East Indiaman with William and Dorothy’s own dreams of sustainable wealth. As family narrative and cultural history, Matlak braids these narratives together, so that when he points out the history of Piel Island as ‘a haven for smugglers,’ where even the ancient monks were accused of piracy (DD, 143–4), there is both an historical and lyrically associative suggestion of the poem’s hidden economics. ‘Thou shouldst have seemed a treasurehouse divine / Of peaceful years’ (lines 21–2), the assertion immediately following that with which I am concerned, supports this inference. Matlak’s argument, in short, is that a more recent susceptibility to John’s commercial scheme is screened in the poem by the argument about youth. Is it a surprise, then, to learn that some emerging definitions of my keyword plant at the time involved economic scheming or criminality? The OED gives: ‘a hoard of stolen goods’; ‘to hide, to conceal; esp. stolen goods’; ‘to place (gold dust, ore, etc.) in a mining claim in order to give a false impression of its productiveness; to “salt”’ (definitions 7a, 8, 9a). Intriguingly, the idea that Wordsworth ‘salts’ the meaning of his past shores up the link between the memory fragment passage and ‘Peele Castle’ – a link which in itself of course is all about undermining narrative authenticity and coherence. The passages I have quoted move the argument to great lengths in alternate directions: ‘planting’ (in The Prelude) as a fictional act that renews commitment while exhibiting Wordsworth’s attendant skepticism that he is ‘salting’ the self on barren grounds; or another kind of practice (in ‘Peele Castle’), where a reductive idealism is exposed and blasted to prevent renewal, as in the Roman salt-sowing of Carthage. The volatile mixture of outlooks that is



and the community of mourners who live on and who, at the end of ‘Peele Castle,’ are made to assemble over the claim simply to endure:

blended in The Prelude, in ‘Peele Castle’ is instead subject to final division, choice, and repudiation. The model of one is inclusive growth, of the other, a liquidation that is followed by more close binding to the winning side or, less invidiously, to what remains. With these terms one begins to appreciate on several levels the fruitfulness of Geoffrey Hartman’s triangulation of Wordsworth, critical theory and postHolocaust writing as a question of intensive ‘culture.’38 Through John’s East India Company or the nearby Africa House, it is tempting to invoke the period’s ‘plantation’ economies as well, along with their staging center at another seaside pile (Cape Coast Castle): imperial histories with which Wordsworth has pervasive but very indirect links. Still, one need not go beyond the vigorous mainstream of commentary to find ‘planting’ uprooted and thrown into doubt. Many of the now-classic formulations point out and reiterate just this, an inorganic generativity that reorients the older view of a simply pledged nature poet. Immediately one thinks of de Man on the ‘Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,’ Hartman’s via naturaliter negativa, James Chandler’s ‘second nature.’ However, ‘Peele Castle’ demands a unique kind of attention. And here I rely increasingly on the later Hartman as a witness to twentieth-century history, since the conditions that make ‘Peele Castle’ unique make it also a work about historical eventfulness in the modern sense. It is the first poem of Wordsworth to question the ethics of turning loss back into ascending and ‘abundant recompense,’ even if he could. The poem doubts whether growth remains possible, the starting point alike of the ‘Immortality’ Ode and ‘Tintern Abbey.’ A lesser poem in every other way, ‘Peele Castle’ broaches an issue beyond these two great lyrics. Wordsworth questions if it remains appropriate and good to turn toward (even admittedly real) renewal after some forms of catastrophe. Suffering that cannot be assimilated comes as an advent in ‘Peele Castle,’ and dictates a before-and-after structure of reconsideration. Through the pressure of this event as Wordsworth’s deepest contact with suffering, or the experience he was most willing to have represent suffering for all occasions, the personal arc merges into a wider profile of historical solidarity. Ironically perhaps, if Wordsworth’s nearest contact to epochal history being made, in France in 1792–3, leads ultimately to a countervailing poetry of the self reassessing its ground, his cumulative testament can be understood with time as an historical act, a built up document – housed in the subjective frame of the person who has constructed his memory – to attest faithfully. Since I have now invoked history several times, this seems an appropriate moment to address Marjorie Levinson’s major New Historicist




Romantic Fiat

account of the poem. As Levinson especially notes, the argument of ‘Peele Castle’ makes a privileged claim of knowledge over the authorial figure of Wordsworth and his oeuvre. In writing of a painting, the ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ quite materially hold that all prior optimism was a naïve varnish or sunny gloss.39 The premises and findings of ekphrasis obtain for life: artificial light is added to a subject that would otherwise be troublingly dark. Levinson retrieves prior versions of the imagery that the poem understands itself to uncover and disabuse, in earlier renderings of this treacherous seascape in Book 10 of The Prelude, and in earlier formulations of a personal and political resolve that are not now simply recalled at the first sign of shadow, but began in sun and shadow of historical occurrence. Levinson parses the distinction between blithe, revolutionary youth and adult, apolitical disillusionment as instead two views of political Wordsworth. She summarizes: Both ‘islands’ – 1793 and 1794, Rampside and Wight, Romish chapel and Peele Castle – contained moments of intense hope and despair, personal and political currents often working at cross purposes. […T]he relationship of sea to land is used to figure the character of the Revolution as it appeared to Wordsworth in, respectively, 1793 and 1794. The relational axis consists of ‘charm’ (glassy serenity) on the one side, the side of the beautiful Revolution, and on the other, deluge, or the violently sublime and destructive Revolution. (WGPP, 120) Though one can dispute Levinson’s assumption that Wordsworth ever reached all-consuming subjectivity, and thus here needs so desperately to free himself from it, like McGann on ‘Tintern Abbey,’ her enduring contribution lies in seeing ‘Peele Castle’ as ‘Wordsworth’s mechanism for figuring, not healing, a breach’ (WGPP, 108). Yet the argument to follow marks how far Levinson goes in raising the poet as an argumentative scarecrow. Divisions are said to exist ‘for slicing up experience into discrete, antithetical, and normative levels in the interest of freeing himself from a granite subjectivity’ (108). As she herself concedes, this version of ‘Peele Castle’ is top-heavy with its binaries (103). A map of clear contrasts – displacing to some extent a more complex, miserable reality – exists in the poem to be lifted out, to be sure. But as a matter of elaborating the poem’s interest, the reductiveness of Levinson’s axes speaks less to the poem’s content (which enacts a series of self-censoring, or conspiratorial, double- and triple-crossings in its allusions within the



156

oeuvre and to the life beyond), than to her own analytical aims and the criticism’s facility at playing all roles. The idea is to demonstrate Wordsworth’s huge neediness for a network of object relations; anything to escape self. Yet the past textual moments Levinson herself retrieves belie the stance of ‘Peele Castle’ as a discovery, and show its judgmental posture to be a unique example of overkill, of the bad faith that New Historicist commentary still occasionally attributes.40 Instead, Wordsworth’s vehemence stoically precedes in its volunteerism the revisionist urge. Two claims might be made here. The first is that Wordsworth, as opposed, say, to Coleridge, Shelley, or Keats, rarely can be found making claims for art as exempt from larger sociality. Certainly he never does so in ‘Peele Castle,’ where – renouncing any special preserve of the aesthetic had there been one – Wordsworth urges a test of values against his own past representations. His approach surprisingly aligns with the critical efforts that Levinson mounts through ‘Peele Castle’ and McGann with The Ruined Cottage and ‘Tintern Abbey’:41 as interpreters who set a weighty ethical imperative against presumably ahistorical pleasure and beauty, all three decry the gleam and diagnose it as false shine over the surface. Hence if Wordsworth had actually pursued the art of displacement he is accused of, the approach of exposing this light would substantially repeat his own demystification. Wordsworth much more than Levinson engages the complex position of lyric in larger society, the culminating statement of which is Adorno’s ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’: To repeat mechanically, however, that great works of art, whose essence consists in giving form to the crucial contradictions in real existence, and only in that sense in a tendency to reconcile them, are ideology, not only does an injustice to their truth content but misrepresents the concept of ideology. That concept does not maintain that all spirit serves only for some human beings to falsely present some particular values as general ones; rather, it is intended to unmask spirit that is specifically false and at the same time to grasp it in its necessity. The greatness of works of art, however, consists solely in the fact that they give voice to what ideology hides. Their very success moves beyond false consciousness, whether intentionally or not.42 The danger, in other words, lies not in the lack of realism in certain art forms and aspirations, but in the wider spell of a capitalist culture that




Romantic Fiat

reigns by veiling our engagement with its operation. So, for Adorno, alongside the danger of reductively framing the lyric’s role of social analysis, lies the compound error of failing to grasp ideology in itself. Whether specifically aesthetic or not, non-purposiveness offers a way to slip from the riveted assembly line subject position. In what is perhaps the most arresting literary evocation of the state of Aristotle’s ‘mere fact of living itself,’ Rousseau tells the story in The Reveries, in which he achieves a kind of satori concerning existence after being struck by a Great Dane. And Adorno famously commends the state of ‘Rien faire comme un bête, lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, “being, nothing else, without any definition and fulfillment”.’43 He thus invests in just the ‘dreamy inactivity’ (HW, 305) that Wordsworth often catches so well in The Prelude’s ‘spots,’ and toys with in the morals of earlier poems, what ‘Peele Castle’ troubles over as ‘perfect’ calm on a ‘glassy sea.’ As Levinson shows, the brittle dichotomies of ‘Peele Castle’ will topple, given historical pressure. The most treacherous contrasts, however, are found in preconceptual risks Wordsworth takes, and they occur verbally by way of unassuming prepositions. Like ‘plant’ these are the simple words: ‘Amid,’ ‘Beside,’ ‘on,’ ‘beneath.’ Taking these cue words from their setting in Wordsworth’s deliberately old-fashioned elegy nearly suggests the spatial forms of a modernist paratactic style: so much depends upon ‘upon’ and ‘beside,’ and the same words feel so different in a poem like, say, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud.’ In the end ‘Peele Castle’ renders these locales disastrously transposable, in an environment of broken contiguities of land, sky and sea, where such positionings make all the difference between dwelling and drowning. Many of the poem’s traits set it facing backward in literary history. It is addressed to a patron not to mass readers, and takes its formal model from a painting shown at the Royal Academy; its scene, far from urban, occurs in a Lake District landscape of long endurance. Yet ‘Peele Castle’ nevertheless displays an impatience with semblance itself, Schein, voiced in an allegorical style that suggests even Wordsworth has a prefigurative role in the poetics of the artist’s lost halo.

Shine and enlightenment ‘What help from thought? Life is not dialectics’ – Emerson, ‘Experience’ In the midst of the catalog of rejected treatments for his epic toward the end of The Prelude Book 1, Wordsworth associates Edmund Spenser



158

with listening to ‘the grave reports / Of dire enchantments faced and overcome / By the strong mind’ (1850, 174–6). Along with the echoes of Mammon that Matlak observes, Wordsworth’s autobiographical practice evokes another telling Spenserian topos. The poet who revisits his past and its inclusive faith in the eye becomes a modernized Sir Guyon. A critique of sensory appearances as aesthetic illusion stands at his side like the palmer, his conscience a sort of club in his hand. Translating Spenser’s allegorized pleasures to the realms of personal and historical memory, Wordsworth destroys his own continuity with the past as a bower once available as the storehouse of pleasure. The ‘pile’ by contrast is stoical, even sacrificial. This analogy, however, holds one important condition. To modern eyes Guyon’s destructiveness is patently over-the-top, while Wordsworth’s, by contrast, has encouraged and largely won the assent of readers that it’s just a wise submission to adult sense. Unique in its disparagingly metacritical stance, ‘Peele Castle’s’ iconoclasm against natural beauty is not utterly new in kind though. From the 1798 Lyrical Ballads onward, Wordsworth often depicts a capricious spirit that mars joyful wellbeing. These moments – tokens of the undirected plenitude of life captured as a single beautiful day – promise a sufficiency that often culminates in Wordsworth’s marking their provocation, through intrusive narrators who treat simple abundance as excess: something to be cut down, or analyzed invasively. Before he arbitrarily forces his five-year-old companion to rank pleasures between two adoptive homes, the narrator of the lyrical ballad ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ gives us this rationale: A day it was when I could bear To think, and think, and think again; With so much happiness to spare, I could not feel a pain. (1798 version, lines 12–16)44 Most modern readers see the thrust here as dialogic. Whether it is his own or a dramatic interest, we see a human instinct that is arbitrary, spiteful, and a little bit comedic, as well as the less discursive notion that he simply could afford to address the meddlesome intellect on such days (as is said disturbingly of the Pedlar, ‘he could afford to suffer’). The ‘mutilated bower’ of ‘Nutting’ emerges from the same provoking self-sufficiency: ‘It seems a day / (I speak of one from many singled out) / One of those heavenly days that cannot die’ (lines 1–3). In a poem that despoils nature and drags it out of a covering of healthful




Romantic Fiat

seclusion, one which bears the disturbing human analogy of rape, those last two words grow graver in connotation as ‘Nutting’ advances. The ‘mature’ outlook eventually found in ‘Peele Castle’ adds a complicating presence even to some of the apparently simple ballads, such as the 1798 version of ‘Lines Written in Early Spring.’ To my knowledge, the careful dialectical sense of the lines’ mediation of pantheism through skepticism has not been enough noticed, and so I spent a good deal of time explicating this poem in Chapter 1. Far from evincing a simpleminded and ‘early’ bias, that is to say, in this poem the animist impulse is urged by a recurrent energy that, while felt all along, is acceded to last. A continued feeling despite skeptical self-questioning – ‘And I must think, do I all I can,’ ‘If I these thoughts may not prevent’ – that there is pleasure in nature and that a leaf breathes and enjoys that breath then emerges in a language of ‘creed’ and ‘plan’ that anticipates the more disciplinarian view of poetic calling in ‘Ode to Duty.’ Changes in future versions of ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ to invoke ‘heaven’ and ‘Nature’s holy plan,’ however, suggest that the balance of skepticism and enthusiasm with something we might call duty was amended with time toward the latter.45 Both words, it should be noted, appear prominently in Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface. Countering these poems and their range of dramatic tonalities, ‘Peele Castle’ aggressively supposes the former pleasures to be merely naïve. (The memory fragment passage was read to show how they were not, how they were skeptically though, indeed, figuratively constructed to give form to several layers of living contradiction.) ‘Peele Castle’ stabilizes a false story about the past in order to knock it down, begging the question how the poetry has taken such a course. To begin this essay, I took my second epigraph from Stanley Cavell’s suggestive writing on Emerson’s ‘Fate.’ The passage in context reads: Yet there is, I agree, a departure in the essay ‘Fate,’ a steady awareness that may present itself as a new maturity or realism. I find it contained in the statement, ‘In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be party to his present estate’ – as if we are conspirators either for or against ourselves.46 In this inexhaustibly rich chapter, ‘Emerson, Coleridge, Kant (Terms as Conditions),’ Cavell directs much interest toward what he considers the ‘new maturity’ of Emerson in ‘Fate.’ That ‘new maturity’ strikes me as a phrase with applications for Wordsworth (Quest, 34). He turns over



160

from many angles ‘an idea that Emerson and any Romantic would be lost without, that the world could be – or could have been – remade, or I in it, that I could want it, as it would be, or I in it’ (Quest, 35). Standing out among romantic poems, ‘Peele Castle’ exhibits Cavell’s sense of what is found ‘distasteful’ about this optimism, ‘maddening if kept green … a continuous rebuke to the way we live, compared to which, a settled despair of the world, or cynicism, is luxurious’ (Quest, 35–6). Kant is positioned in the foreground of Cavell’s chapter. And just as any new and final maturity for Emerson in ‘Fate’ would necessarily carry a debt to Kant’s definition of enlightenment as ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,’47 Wordsworth, without using the word, in ‘Peele Castle’ invokes maturity as the condition he enters by renouncing ‘the light that never was.’ A trusted commentator positions this term at the apex of Wordsworth’s career: ‘Throughout his greatest period of creativity Wordsworth was interested in the development of the adult mind, the adult moral sense, and sought to demonstrate its evolution in one exemplary specimen – himself.’48 Regarding enlightenment as a word and something more, there is palpable contradiction here in the poet’s striking for maturity against the light. Throughout ‘Peele Castle’ one senses (in the almost allegorical form I have linked to Spenser) the violence involved in a transition from an attitude about enlightenment in line with Rousseauesque idealized youth – ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains,’49 what man has made of man – and Kant’s exactly contravening sense that, no, ‘enlightenment’ involves precisely the exit from immaturity. We have self-incurred this tutelage by having others think for us, read for us, and almost to eat and live for us. Not at all customary to him as ‘second nature,’ Wordsworth entertains his own second form of enlightenment by this transition: it is no longer the revolutionary dawn of enthusiasm, but something like Kant’s mixture of intellectual freedom, negative liberty, and positive duty together: the claim found in Kant’s praise of Frederick, ‘Argue … but obey!’50 The problem that ‘Peele Castle’ reveals to us, though, is specific to the poem’s figurative thinking, and lies in a maturity from which the light is not so much lost as from which it has been programmatically stripped. The poem confutes at least one core enlightenment premise: the joint progress of optimism with self-knowledge. Wordsworth then offers a dark enlightenment to go with what certainly is a very grim culmination of ‘Fate’: ‘One key, one solution to the mysteries of the human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness.’ To handle this notion, famous in itself through its role




Romantic Fiat

in the American legacy of W. E. B. DuBois, Emerson shifts registers into an extraordinary image of trick equestrianism, or what is called – with a uneasy look in the direction of the coliseum – Roman riding: ‘a man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other.’ Finally, with his feet indeed planted on such a shaky and unexpectedly populist image (the philosopher not only at the circus but as a rodeo man), Emerson in this section becomes truly frightening. He insists on finding impersonal grounds to bless the ‘Universe’ at the expense even of the subject, and the answer takes hold of him: ‘he is to rally on his relation to the Universe, which his ruin benefits. Leaving the daemon who suffers, he is to take sides with the deity who secures universal benefit by his pain.’51 The logic of this is stupendous, and is precisely the de-conversion from the self, or conspiracy moving against the self and toward the species, which Cavell claims to have found in ‘Fate’ beyond the essay’s ‘nice little bale of genteel sentiments’ (Quest, 39). Under strongest inducement, which for Emerson, as for Wordsworth, is the impulse to bless life’s net running calculation, Emerson betrays youth for the punitive father. ‘Fate’ leaves the Jesus who suffers and enables others’ Christ-like qualities, for the God who has forsaken him to his plan. In Byron and Shelley’s terms, he leaves Prometheus for Jupiter. ‘Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity,’ concludes Emerson’s paradoxically assured vision of strong capitulation (Emerson, 793). Similarly, we may glimpse Wordsworth’s staging of an emotion recollected in soberness, if not quite tranquillity, in the lawyerly phrasing: ‘This, which I know, I speak with mind serene’ (line 40). ‘Peele Castle’ finalizes his will and testament. Fixing a permanent serenity in his mind, one meant to replace the faux-serene finish of the calm sea, it announces a principled philosophical change that emerges from, but is larger than, the miserably close-up vantage on John Wordsworth’s death. On this point Levinson writes: ‘A brother’s death is a dreadful thing, but it is not a revelation of Nature’s treachery, nor is it an indictment of the poetical character, or not of a character that had weathered very bad storms’ (WGPP, 103). Right; and from this we ask: why does ‘Peele Castle’ frame an epochal event, one that functions to divide time into before and after, and so on its own scale, stands for Wordsworth in the place of any life’s worst catastrophe? As the cause of a breakdown in both the possibility and the desire for theodicean affirming – defining theodicy as the proof of a universe made so that all experience nets good, or at least that such a complexly mixed world is as benign as it



162

could be – the events behind ‘Peele Castle’ strike Wordsworth much the way the Lisbon earthquake had shaken the consensus from the philosophes fifty years prior.52 In response to deep personal grief and ‘the worst British maritime accident on record’ (DD, 18), the poem may anticipate a version of the claim that lyric affirmation has become either impossible or obscene, for which Adorno is often cited in Negative Dialectics. (I do not compare events; Adorno’s distrust of ‘the positivity of existence,’ and ‘mockery of the construction of immanence as endowed with a meaning,’ are what I mean to isolate.)53 Wordsworth’s analogous conviction is that he can’t write the same poetry about ‘recompense’ anymore. Where ‘hope’ remains, the restorative construction of meaning is shared through endurance with ‘the Kind.’ It is no longer an individual prerogative to take recompense. One of the poem’s most powerful implications, as a result, leaves as a question whether a theodicy in the largest sense remains possible or in any sense is in place. Lost for good is the narrative going back to ‘Tintern Abbey’ of an ever-expanding self ‘led on’ from within by a trusted guide (especially if that guide is the eye). Yet is this loss just leverage for a bigger theodicy? Agamben demonstrates how easy it is to collapse back into an outlook of theodicy according to a narrative of human ‘sacrifice.’54 The Wordsworth who wrote ‘our prayers have been accepted’ to end The Prelude may never have abandoned such an outlook. But there is a change. Bluntly, it is from an economy of the unexchangeable self to a position that throws the self under, using its renunciation under certain terms as a way to bargain for ‘the kind.’ Yet if, in negative outline, one is to see in ‘Peele Castle’ the shape of an event that shakes the poet’s faith in benign nature and progressive history (Hartman’s word is tremendum [Culture, 100]), the poem appears remarkably discursive about all this. Wordsworth not only writes poetry, but a voluble ‘poetry of statement’ from a level of suffering whose usual marking is only the most watchfully broken silence (Wordsworth’s Poetry 287; Culture, 102). Because it puts forth an exclusive claim to scouring away old illusions in the name of ‘unvarnished’ truth, the judgment of such a poem operates with a destabilizing logic that must sacrifice either past or present. Unlike ‘Ode to Duty,’ its companion poem in many ways, ‘Peele Castle’ does not merely give evidence of Wordsworth’s path down the one-way street toward the socialized accommodations of age (a shift in ‘kind,’ not to be judged without care). In so aggressively redescribing things, it alters the meaning of that past. Yet discomfited critics need not follow E. P. Thompson’s insistent charge of specifically political apostasy.55 Simon Jarvis has written compellingly about the




Romantic Fiat

power of idols and idol smashing in Wordsworth.56 Applying his challenging, apt approach to a poem that readily fits, the ‘ideology’ of ‘Peele Castle’ reveals itself not in sunny views but in the poem’s signal excess of demystification. The best among Wordsworth’s earlier constructions of hope were less one-sidedly naïve than themselves part of what Jarvis’s previous book-length subject, Adorno, might have granted as a full dialectic of enlightenment. Just as one finds confronted in Adorno’s philosophical fragments, Wordsworth’s poems involve a conceptual process of disillusion and almost dogged enchantment. This is followed in turn by further demystification and more obstinate re-enchantment: all means of gesturing toward the ultimately non-conceptual nature of life; the fact that having its structures exposed does not stand in the place of its being lived. For Adorno, it is the perpetual ‘promise’ of natural beauty that alone keeps the aesthetic in touch with something we have not made (call it ‘nature’), with more than just art: Natural beauty shares the weakness of every promise with that promise’s inextinguishability. However words may glance off nature and betray its language to one that is qualitatively different from its own, still no critique of natural teleology can dismiss those cloudless days of southern lands that seem to be waiting to be noticed. As they draw to a close with the same radiance and peacefulness with which they began, they emanate that everything is not lost, that things may yet turn out.57 That, from Adorno’s posthumous Aesthetic Theory, still manages to invoke the critical aesthetics of a ‘beautiful day’ so crucial to Wordsworth and his poetics of feeling as promise. At the same time, ‘Peele Castle’s’ reduction of the aura of poems to a technical-rhetorical trick represents one of literature’s severest implementations of Adorno’s attack on ‘jargon.’ A comparison of ‘plant’ and the German scheinen or Schein can be traced extensively and carries this point. On his side of the famous exchange of letters collected as ‘A 1951 Dialogue on Interpretation,’58 Heidegger betrays an unquestioning need to have the ‘scheint’ in Mörike’s poem, ‘Auf eine Lampe,’ translate as ‘shines’ or ‘lucet.’ He insists, ‘[t]he lamp, the objet d’art (“O beautiful lamp”), combines in one its appearance to the sense and the luminosity of the idea as the essence of the work of art’ (‘Dialogue,’ 421). Heidegger takes the New Criticism to an even more priestly view of art – a parallel track that is



164

set especially deep when we align it with a contemporary in AngloAmerican scholarship, Abrams’s classic The Mirror and the Lamp (1953). But for Wordsworth’s part, the anticipatory notes I have drawn from ‘At Applethwaite’ sound more like the position of Emile Staiger, Heidegger’s understandably bemused correspondent. Rather than the powerful self-emanation of a shining forth, Staiger holds for a salutary inattentiveness – something like Fry’s in-difference – as a phenomenological outlook, while he acknowledges that the aesthetic does not inhere in things beyond ‘efficacious illusion’:59 ‘I never claimed that “scheinen” points in the direction of “phantom.” But I did interpret the last lines, there as here, as follows: the work of art is hardly attended to. “Yet” (I too did not miss this word!) how could this harm it? It seems to be blissful within itself and not to need us at all. It “seems!”’ (‘Dialogue,’ 426). So, shines or seems? Rather appealingly I should think, Staiger is less exercised than Heidegger about whether beauty authentically flashes or not. More interesting to him is the notion that the beautiful object does not need us and cannot be finally known from the inside out, any more deeply than the light we temporarily shine on (or brush on) it. As he anticipates both the Heideggerian project of emphatic being and authentic Schein, and Adorno’s scourging of these indulgences as a flimsy and collaborationist Scheinkulter (Culture, 106–7), the philosophical resonance of Wordsworth’s poetry ranges everywhere in the critique. His affinity to Heidegger certainly has been well charted. Adorno, for his part, deploys further language that evokes Wordsworth. Each reveals a protective layering of obfuscation around being, as analysis strips those layers away. Each performs rough demystification: Adorno upon Heidegger as his philosophical and, in some ways, cultural nemesis, and Wordsworth upon himself. They share the figurative recognition that a ‘varnish’ was applied, meant to protect a privileged being against the labors of reason: A profane language could only approach the sacred one by distancing itself from the sound of the holy, instead of by trying to imitate it. The jargon transgresses this rule blasphemously. When it dresses empirical words with aura, it exaggerates general concepts and ideas of philosophy – as for instance the concept of being – so grossly that their conceptual essence, the mediation through the thinking subject, disappears completely under the varnish.60 For the reading of poetry, Adorno’s response to the school of Heidegger would make us question whether any ‘ontological’ project adequately foregrounds its mediation by ‘the thinking subject.’




Romantic Fiat

Just as Heidegger’s scheinen (‘to shine’ with beauty, but also just the outer laminate of ‘appearance’) is attacked as illusion or even deliberate trick, Wordsworth’s ‘plant’ registers the same potentially mystified claim for being when it is grounded in the earthbound, naturalized terms that Heidegger at other times favored: the earth tones of ‘the unfeeling armour of old time’ (line 51). Where Wordsworth’s contribution to unmasking a ‘jargon of authenticity’ finds its climax in ‘Peele Castle,’ one is tempted to say he might exceed Adorno’s negation of Heidegger by administering disenchantment upon himself. But that idea too remains unstable. On the one hand, Wordsworth’s act might be seen to present a more thoroughgoing negativity by engaging the self through its critical optic – this is no simple grinding of personal axes. On the other hand, unlike Adorno’s Jargon, ‘Peele Castle’ is hardly content to stop with exposure. The depths of Wordsworth’s commitment to a ‘conspiracy either for or against’ himself become violently intense in the poem and, beyond mere dialectics as Emerson would say, attack the preserve of life. Closely following Merleau-Ponty throughout her rich discussion of semblances in The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt points out that no demystification of appearances yields anything but more of the same kind of thing: [N]o elimination of errors or dispelling of illusions can arrive at a region beyond appearance. ‘For when an illusion dissipates, when an appearance suddenly breaks up, it is always for the profit of a new appearance which takes up again for its own ontological function of the first … The dis-illusion is the loss of one evidence only because it is the acquisition of another evidence … there is no Schein [beauty] without Erscheinung [‘mere’ appearance, as opposed to ‘true’ Being], every Schein is the counterpart of an Ersheinung.’ (LM, 26)61 Arendt’s comment for me raises the most important question elicited in response to ‘Peele Castle’: had Wordsworth gone from disgust with illusions to a willful negation of all appearance? To move critically ‘against’ the past can be shown as an all-too vehement pledge toward the reconstituted future, throwing his weight to another side in countervailing excess. These turns also become dramatically ironic. (Who’s betraying whom, any reading of the poem – any reckoning about final ‘maturity’ – must ask, and thus realize what David Bromwich presents as a striking feature of Wordsworthian autobiography, in his treatment of the past and present self as different persons.62) The attack on ‘varnish’



166

added over ‘the concept of being’ of course explicitly judges his past. At the same time, it contributes a fiction of its own in which self-critical engagement produces what is potentially a virulent new strain of ideals in self-denial, and the reformulated ontology that attends to them. This new ideal emerges as the stern axiom that accommodation and sacrifice could themselves reground experience for a mature writer, that the stoic sense of a life ‘philosophy’ as a way to weather storms – always more appealing to Wordsworth than Coleridge’s knowledge-based philosophical tradition – isn’t just a survival technique but enforces a prescribed doctrine about what is ‘really’ real. The maturity of that new birth has an explosively alternating status as enlightenment discourse. In the end, Wordsworth seems to gesture through the uncanny concatenation of his memories both to the maturity of Kant as a point of vantage, and to the retention of the child, the glorious yet unaccommodated human, as the experience about which the adult exists to think. Wordsworthian enlightenment could alone be that ‘double-consciousness’ of maturity that is neither Kant’s nor Rousseau’s grounds for enlightenment exactly, but an interpenetrative vision of the two that itself offers us another semblance. This yields a difficult line on progress that might link Wordsworth instead to America through Emerson, and after him DuBois. Unlike Blake’s ‘organized innocence,’ for example, this is not for Wordsworth an artist’s dialectic. The reader is spectator to an event showing a kind of poetic power that can only be reached at a cost. We read the loss of something vital about appearances in mistaking them for illusions, as if the binary logic of appearance and reality could sustain that obliteration of one of its two members; as if thinking of everything as ‘mere’ appearance didn’t have the effect of converting appearance to the new ontology of ‘all’ there is.







Part III

From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. – James 3:10 Speak— But don’t split off No from Yes. Give your say this meaning too: give it the shadow. – Paul Celan



Blessing Cursing




Contracting Obi: Shelley’s Cosmopolitanism and the Curse of Poetry

‘And now I have a little Boat,’ William Wordsworth fancifully boasts, in the prologue that goes on for almost two hundred lines before the narrator embarks on the ‘promised Tale’ of Peter Bell (1819).1 Sailing through the clouds in a boat shaped like the crescent-moon was only the first of the perceived offenses for which this poem took criticism. To come were infractions at once stylistic (abba quatrains flattened into five-line ballad stanzas, the hero riding an ass) and political (a back story of polygamy and conversion through the example of Methodist ‘Ranters’). Even after the bounteous ‘Detraction Which Followed the Publication of a Certain Poem,’ though, Wordsworth continued to exhort his fictional hero not to hear all the satirical and outraged responses. Take to heart just the praise of your maker, he says in the sonnet that replies to such ‘Detraction’: if praise of men To thee appear not an unmeaning voice, Lift up that grey-haired forehead and rejoice In the just tribute of thy Poet’s pen!2 This is Wordsworth trying out the style of an assured controversialist, not backing off but implying that one has to make enemies in order to be among the elect. As I read the slippery double negative of these lines – an apostrophe from an author to his embroiled character – he doggedly identifies the curses thrown at the poem as earnest of its worthiness for ‘tribute.’ They are the flip side that ensures overall value. ‘Praise of men’ might ‘appear … an unmeaning voice’ if it became cheaply common, too universally won. Or, as I think we must assume in this case, such a case might result if all the voices around you were 171



6

Romantic Fiat

so harsh as to condition you not to hear anything. In supposing Peter’s relation to praise absent ‘unmeaning,’ with a certain playful toughmindedness Wordsworth also simply preserves the difference between a person and a literary figment: another good reason why a character wouldn’t hear human praise. This chapter takes up a well-heeled topic of romantic intertextuality in what I hope to be a new way. In a manner that goes beyond the contingent outcome in the case of Peter Bell (others’ ridicule of a poem Wordsworth liked) it presents the issue of poetic praise and blame as an intrinsically double, dual concern.3 A necessarily two-voiced discourse that reaches back both to formative enlightenment discussions of judgment and taste,4 and to the archaic modalities of lyric, here I argue that Peter Bell along with the other major effort it provoked – Percy Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third (also of 1819, but unpublished until 1839) – together represent lyric poetry’s full heritage of blessings and curses. Going back to ancient Greek lyric, this is the heritage on the one hand of Pindar, the singer of commissioned praise, and on the other of Archilochus as the first lyricist to hope words could kill as well as defame.5 That recognition of a double inheritance makes for a profane revision to the biblical epigraph from the epistle of James above, which presents the ideal that the mouth should be a single-voiced instrument. Thus in a slightly earlier passage than the one I quote, the tongue is likened to a series of small tools that provide control over otherwise unmanageable forces: Behold, we puts bits in the horses’ mouths, that they may obey us; and we turn about their whole body. Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven by fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm, withersoever the governor listeth. Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. (James 3:2–5; Authorized King James Version) The author of James denounces the tongue altogether, but at very least he aims to have it harnessed. Here it is figuratively compared to the helm of a great ship. Still, isn’t the result much like Wordsworth’s little boat? Traced through a filiation of Peters, and having already received all the simply descriptive attention it may need from critics,6 then, the relation of Percy Shelley to the ‘apostasy’ of Wordsworth might now be contained in the kid’s joke about Peter and that boat. ‘Pete and Repeat



172

were in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was left?’ Shelley’s stance regarding Wordsworth exhibits something particular about that structure, I argue: the outlook of the younger poet suggests a remnant who also looks on with weird envy – the envy of the skeptic toward the appallingly committed figure – before falling into the same depths, almost by a logical tautology in his turn. His role is Repeat’s. To go on placing great things with small incongruously, the monotonous labyrinth of the riddle is crisply exited in the way a no-nonsense respondent replied online: ‘Nobody, Pete’s action was repeated by Repeat.’7 What else could he do? The comment has a shorthand way of suggesting for my purposes how Shelley’s second-generation romanticism cannot draw from any intrinsic difference in the language to correct the failures of first-generation Wordsworth – whether in terms of Pete and Repeat, or Peter Bell and Percy Bysshe.

Cosmopolitanism and urbanity Scholarly commentary rightly is not so quick to provide answers that stick like the joke’s repetitively negative one. The ambivalent, unexorcised modeling of Wordsworth in Shelley’s poetry has been fruitfully examined repeatedly in the criticism. I nonetheless return to the topic, and plan to show in this chapter that Shelley’s curses upon Wordsworth place a strong counterclaim upon his future-oriented position in a meliorist enlightenment: a position that has often been attributed in the main not only to Shelley’s long-view of reform, but to his capacity for tolerance specifically.8 As a consequence, Shelley’s works often can be seen to anticipate the very contemporary interface of troubled secular values, religion, and philosophical aesthetics. For example, along with this powerful counterpull within enlightenment, concerns for internationalism, the conflicting imperatives of forgiveness, and the darkening potential of ever finding a place of refuge link Shelley very closely to the late thought of Derrida in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness.9 In his own time, friend Leigh Hunt’s Examiner had characterized a tolerantly progressive Shelley in contrast to Wordsworth: [Wordsworth] The Poet of the Lakes always carries his egotism and ‘saving knowledge’ about with him, and unless he has the settlement of the matter, will go in a pet and plant by the side of the oldest tyrannies and slaveries. [Shelley] Our Cosmopolite-Poet would evidently die with pleasure to all personal identity, could he but see his fellow-creatures reasonable and happy.10



Shelley’s Cosmopolitanism and the Curse of Poetry 173

Romantic Fiat

In parallel with the famous Keatsian aesthetic characterization, Hunt volunteers Shelley as a utopian political figure of negative capability, a ‘Cosmopolite-Poet’ ready to ‘die with pleasure to all personal identity’ in order to bring about (or merely witness?) change. Viewed as this unique sort of quietist-activist, the ‘modern’ (and even, in the Baudelairean sense, modernist11) Shelley who authors Peter Bell the Third has been understood so far through a sense of the cosmopolitan interrelations that combine materialist with spiritual forces, recognizing these too as the circulating coin of one realm. Peter Bell the Third evokes the negative aspect of that interdependence through what the poem calls Hellish London’s ‘smother’ of forces (349).12 In language that instead hearkens to the curse of Victor Frankenstein (‘“By the sacred earth on which I kneel, by the shades that wander near me, by the deep and eternal grief that I feel”’13), near the end of Adonais (1821) Shelley writes of an aspiring benediction of love: That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea[.] (426) Here Shelley admits that life is altogether cursed (by ‘birth’), but nonetheless insists there is more.14 By contrast, Peter Bell the Third and other poems among Shelley’s great 1819 effort knit apparently distant forms of life in a relentlessly immanent web, making all denizens of a single universe – cosmopolitans or ‘citizens of the cosmos.’15 Unlike the emphatically ‘English ground’ in The Mask of Anarchy (323), Shelley’s picture of London in Peter Bell the Third is unmistakably that of the imperial metropole. The kind of topical reference The Mask extends to Lord Eldon (316), who prosecuted Shelley’s personal child-custody case in 1817, in Peter Bell the Third goes to Thomas Moore’s Fudge Family in Paris and Ireland (339–41); to ‘Monk’ Lewis’s and other accounts of West Indian Obi (340, 358); and to the defiant Aztec leader Guatimozin (363). Taking seriously and therefore expanding the inclusive prompt for what Wordsworth had called ‘the very world, which is the world / Of all of us,’ he rejects all determinism along with its binary opposite, autonomous transcendence. Yet this image of a self-correcting dialectical poet should not obscure the often-wild extremes to which his immanence, especially, can be prone. Sensing as much, that may be why a number of classic accounts of Shelley operate on a bipolar model. Our cosmopolitan Shelley has grown out of a previous generation’s judgment of his urbanity, but has in turn



174

elided what those earlier critics grasped by also writing about his vatic or apocalyptic mood. The grace note of Shelley as an ‘urbane’ poet has been common since Harold Bloom burst upon the scene in the 1950s trumpeting a thinker in much need of an advocate, but no need of defense. In his first works, Bloom offered revisionary Shelley, without basing his view in what T. S. Eliot famously called ‘puerile,’ shrill, polemic or in Matthew Arnold’s ineffectual angel. Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959) and The Visionary Company (first edition 1961) show a writer fashioned to the ideal of an extremism oscillating between poles of ‘Urbanity and Apocalypse’: This spirit of urbanity is so prevalent in Shelley that one learns to distrust the accuracy of any critic who finds Shelley’s poetry shrill, without humor, self-centered, or exhibiting only ‘primary impulses.’ Ideologically Shelley is of the permanent Left, in politics and religion, and his morality insists on the rights of private judgment in every possible human matter. He is nothing short of an extremist, and knows it; he says of himself, ‘I go on until I am stopped, and I never am stopped.’16 Despite the many ways in which the scope and judgments of The Visionary Company have aged, this assessment of Shelley to some extent hasn’t. Many readers still find him ‘shrill, without humor, self-centered.’ The main drift since Bloom has been a small recalibration that shifts away from waspish ‘urbanity’ as a term and toward literary cosmopolitanism; yet in the process in large part we abandon whatever qualities were imperfectly signified by the visionary, second term. ‘Urbanity and Apocalypse’ now looks like an unnecessarily Christianized and teleological version of Dialectic of Enlightenment. There remain fascinating inroads to be had in Shelley along ‘visionary’ lines within a Frankfurt School approach. The passage Bloom cites on this very page, treating Act Three, scene four of Prometheus Unbound, in which ‘all / Were somewhat changed’ and soon become sleepy again after the culminating revolutionary event, we might re-examine by way of the ‘weak messianic power’ found in Walter Benjamin’s second thesis on history, no longer focusing on the ‘I and Thou’ form Bloom used from Martin Buber in Shelley’s Mythmaking. ‘“One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature,” notes Benjamin from the writings of Lotze, “is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future”.’17 If, for Benjamin, the ‘weak’ power is ineradicable because it relates to an impossible hope for redeeming the past, even the contrasting futurism of Shelley too now




Romantic Fiat

stands under its aegis: a shelter without protection under which the weak form merges politics and aesthetics (and opens up another possible reading of Adonais’s ‘one frail Form’ visiting the bier of Keats [419]). On such terms it is possible to find the celebratory character of Bloom’s Shelley preserved under an armature of much greater political and theoretical sophistication – especially in the ambitious work of Robert Kaufman – that nevertheless remains comparably enthusiastic.18 Finding polemically fresh their resistance to longstanding misreadings of Kantian reflective judgment that still find it determined or ‘closed,’ and how they open and maintain a potentially interventionist space whereby Kant’s aesthetic judgment could frame the constructed form of judgment in general, my only reservation about the summons for a romantic ‘world legislation’ is that it could place more weight on the nightmares of Kant’s project.19 Shelley’s version of bad dreams is all the more interesting for being not just self-legislating through the hard drive of the mind, but self-summoned more peculiarly, I think. It emerges as not only a cognitive frame but also a value form: a recursive and regressive, essentially ethnographic poetics of curse. Because he takes the idea of spiritual agency so seriously throughout his works, the force of hope and blessing in Shelley’s poetry indeed must be offset by this conditional poetics of imprecation, praise kept honest by blame. Often read as a definitive moment for the whole arc of Shelley’s career, the ‘recall’ of the curse in Act One of Prometheus Unbound (211, 217–18), along with Asia’s later ministrations of non-violent change, not only rewrite the tortured revenge plot of The Cenci from earlier that year; such renunciation precedes the absolute fun Shelley had with retribution in Peter Bell the Third, his most underestimated major poem. In the latter work Shelley upsets any simple arc of relinquishing violence; there he sets a cultural vision of blight as deep as any benediction within his verbal art (with ‘setting’ a technical term for the application of curse, deployed by Shelley from the ethnography of Jamaican Obi). Curses extend in time and through ruptures in the cultural landscape: from a future London broken down into mere ‘nuclei of islets’ in the Thames, to poetry’s unknown new ‘transatlantic commentator’ judging from radically different scales of the aesthetic (341). As they present vying – conditional or modal, not simply indicative – declarations about the not-yet-fully realized nature of ‘the very world,’ my argument here is that the curses reach just as far in Shelley as any envisioned hope extends. As importantly to Shelley’s transgenerational sense of time that makes his view of non-purposive progress in formal terms so much like that of Kant, the imprecations (as acts of literature) remain just as long as do acts of sympathy.



176

The angriness of Shelley’s lyricism encounters what we might call the problem of praise: the final impossibility of insulating a vocation of praise from historical legacies of blame. Through the following sections, I hope to make this interchange between praise and blame visible first in the context of Shelley’s lyric commands to replay traumatic events in The Mask of Anarchy; then in his deployment of Obi within the incredible farrago of conjurations known as Peter Bell the Third; and finally I gesture toward the uneasily sovereign implications of The Defence of Poetry on how exactly it is that poets legislate. In an unsettling way, The Defence blurs faculties of mind as if they might also be branches of government, suggesting Shelley’s covert hope to install poetry too as an exercise of arbitrary power, only one that in his view exists for good.

The Shelleyan United Nations: witnessing the event At the start of The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy writes of what remains of the hopes of true community in ‘communism’: it is an ‘emblem no longer in circulation, except in a belated way for a few; for still others, though very rare nowadays, it is an emblem capable of inferring a fierce but impotent resistance to the visible collapse of what is promised.’20 Both this promising structure and its collapse in terms of redemptive content need very little recalibration to apply to secondgeneration British romantics. Resonating with the prophetic model of Isaiah, Shelley and his cohort understand themselves to be remnants of historical collapse. These writers suggest that revolution both did and did not happen. It took place but missed its chance. This lost moment is related to the promise of the Rights of Man – a movement that lies in between contract politics and less specifiable social energies – and applies on a circumatlantic if not global scale.21 Percy Shelley’s first ‘Pete and Repeat’ poem, the accusatory sonnet ‘To Wordsworth,’ discloses the presence of contracted expectations only in the face of their broken promise:22 Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar: Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood Above the blind and battling multitude: In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,— Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, Thus having been, that thou should cease to be. (92)




Romantic Fiat

In the same year this sonnet was probably drafted,23 the Shelleys read together Wordsworth’s only philosophical long poem published to date, and Mary wrote in her journal: ‘Shelley calls on Hookham, and brings home Wordsworth’s Excursion, of which we read a part, much disappointed. He is a slave.’24 What is the weight of this charge? At a climactic moment in Frankenstein – in the midst of ‘wanderings … to cease but with life’ that remind one of Percy Shelley’s Alastor – Victor Frankenstein curses the creature he is now pursuing. He then hears ‘a loud and fiendish laugh.’ We are guided in context to think the laugh belongs to the creature who indeed is there and shortly proclaims, ‘I am satisfied.’25 But Victor’s own state of mind is so uncannily frenzied, the sound might be his own demented laugh returning to him from outside – whether in physical point of fact or just symbolically. While Victor’s is an extreme plight, I’d argue there is similar excess in Percy and Mary’s denunciation. Its force confounds within and without, and habitually recoils to vex Percy Shelley’s mechanism of urging revolutionary change through instilling in others a feeling of transformative shame. His youthful excitement over Robert Southey’s Curse of Kehama (1810) had functioned this way; and thus Prometheus curses Jupiter: I curse thee! Let a sufferer’s curse Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse, Till thine infinity shall be A robe of envenomed agony[.] (218) Conversely, the salt of ‘To Wordsworth’ lies in its logic of mortality, in Shelley’s calling the poet dead in the midst of his notoriously long life. This is especially true given the address of the poem’s missive title. In parsing through this reading, we realize how Shelley converts a fan letter into a bag of shit left on the doorstep, though he retains a deniability of tone in which the thin veneer of a cosmopolitan sensibility is preserved. While this sense of the poem’s argumentative euphemism – ‘good as dead’ – is routinely applied, it can be pressed further into a lyric exemplification of dialectics of enlightenment. The sonnet as a civilized tribute genre is loaded with ancient powers of killing satire, a force of hateful agency not to be expunged by Shelley’s own feeling that he criticizes Wordsworth from a progressive view. Shelley’s characteristic maneuver turns to advantage his own useless position to effect change directly, marshaling all the ‘weak power’ that does belong properly to his language. This proves the same tactic that conditions the much-discussed role of agency in The Mask of Anarchy, an avowedly interventionist poem written after the event of the ‘Peterloo’



178

(Saint Peter’s Field) massacre as it broke in upon the poet’s sleep in Italy (316).26 The Shelleyan method, operative throughout his poems and prose, works by faith in spiritual agency as a non-transcendental, ineradicable binding force that circulates through the world. This is a ruthless but often highly indirect structure of relation, which can be seen to mime in advance at least two important discursive features of modernity at large – repetition and third-party witnessing. On this last topic Hannah Arendt writes: ‘Politically, the fallacy of this new and typically modern philosophy is relatively simple. It consists in describing and understanding the whole realm of human action, not in terms of the actor and the agent, but from the standpoint of the spectator who watches a spectacle.’27 A quietly sustained debate about how ‘hot’ Wordsworth really had been in the politics of revolutionary France (as he later claimed in a Fenwick note), exists between David Bromwich’s persuasive if opaque sense that he was a participant in violent acts, Kenneth Johnston’s gripping account in the two chapters titled ‘A Return to France?’ and ‘A Return to France’ in The Hidden Wordsworth, and Paul Fry’s characterization of the poet along proto-Baudelairean lines as ‘a Paris flâneur.’28 Arendt’s remark, though, subtly modifies this range of possibilities by suggesting that the revolutionary ‘torrent’ of social rather than political change is in fact experienced in spectatorship not action. If one agrees with Arendt here, this makes Bromwich’s remarkable analysis of guilt in the poetry not necessarily the memory of a conventional ‘actor.’29 Neither is Shelley a conventional orator.30 As critics both for and against The Mask’s aesthetic framing of politics have yet to note fully, the poem climaxes in a hortatory, jussive section that blends actionable measures and fantasy to astonishing effect. The immodality of Shelley’s voice here – its unfixable position between actionable and aesthetic modes of intention – is indicated by the lines’ staging as political exhortation under the aegis of both Kantian moral theory and fictional surmise, the mode of ‘as if’: As if their own indignant Earth Which gave the sons of England birth Had felt their blood upon her brow, And shuddering with a mother’s throe Had turned every drop of blood By which her face had been bedewed To an accent unwithstood,— As if her heart had cried aloud[.] (320)




180

Romantic Fiat

‘Let the blue sky overhead, The green earth on which ye tread, All that must eternal be Witness the solemnity. (323) ‘Let a vast assembly be, And with great solemnity Declared with measured words that ye Are, as God has made ye, free— (324) ‘Let the laws of your own land, Good or ill, between ye stand Hand to hand, and foot to foot, Arbiters of the dispute[’.] (325) The crux of the poem has always been whether mediation can be wrested into a politics. Much like the ‘let’ exhortations of Orc in Blake’s America (see Plate 6),31 Shelley’s jussive climax in The Mask pursues a logic of retrospective command over world-historical events. For Shelley, both hope and the conception of freedom are based in the revision of language, the motivated apprehension of images. But this extended passage – whose series of ‘let’ formulations at least doubles the number I quote – asks readers to confront a more disturbing series of questions than those about the buffering, ‘dreamy’ aesthetics that frame the poem’s beginning and end. It presents Shelley’s largest historical fiction in his will to repeat the event he has (as it were) ‘thoughtlessly’ missed in exile. Throughout this ostensibly reported speech, Shelley goes back to pretend witness and control, and to offer a disturbing kind of benediction over the events at Peterloo. Exacerbated by the delay of news, the timing of his ‘lyric now’ is thus necessarily out of joint with the completed and unanticipated character of the actual event. By means of this temporal fiction that at the same time marks Shelley’s potent genealogical force in modernity, he offers a projective attempt to outflank trauma experienced by others. The poem stages a Nietzschean will to repeat by ‘willing what has taken place,’ thus ‘transforming every “it was” into a “thus I wanted it to be” – amor fati.’32 Two ‘natural’



‘Let a great Assembly be, Of the fearless and the free On some spot of English ground Where the plains stretch wide around.

tendencies for the leftist writer (to want to have been there, to want to remain a poet in the Wordsworthian line of those who bless) combined yield this perverse act of will, and represent a collapse back into an outlook of theodicy on the heels of catastrophe.33 Furthermore, Shelley’s own quasi-formalist ‘Kantian’ account of history under the sign of an ‘as if,’ synthesizes out of the uncomprehending victims a kind of third party.34 In order to ‘shame’ aggressors into change and self-confrontation, the gendered victims must watch all they are subjected to (325): ‘And if the tyrants dare Let them ride among you there, Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew,— What they like, that let them do. ‘With folded arms and steady eyes, And little fear, and less surprise Look upon them as they slay Till their rage has died away.[’] (325) Both Shelley and the ‘real,’ violently feminized, victims at Manchester by this means are transformed into a type of United Nations deployment. The mantra given about their ‘vital’ roles35 – as American politicians are prone to say with dismissiveness of the UN – thus we see laid open to being judged impotent and/or redundant alongside more fully instrumentalized forces. Like Shelley’s, the UN’s witnessing presence is regularly made subject both to charges of excessive interventionism (didacticism for the poet) and to the charge of perpetuating human suffering by means of the very ‘buffering,’ apparently insufficient, mission that they are structured to fulfill (just handing out ‘sandwiches at the gates’36). Shelley studies’ most capacious resemblance to the UN lies in its constant rehearsals of the perils of unilateral thinking. The emergent picture of a ‘multilateral’ thinker (a Shelley found conceptually disciplined, indirect, idealistic but not wish-fulfilling) rather than the old unilateral figure (good or bad) is perhaps the sharpest demarcation we can establish. A Philosophical View of Reform’s resonant phrasing of ‘a generous enthusiasm which accomplishes not’ to me seems its just banner: Towards whatsoever we regard as perfect, undoubtedly it is no less our duty than it is our nature to press forward; this is the generous enthusiasm which accomplishes not indeed the consummation after




182

Romantic Fiat

Kantian in the form of its purposiveness without instrumental purpose, this initiates the same work as UN peacekeeping (to foster renewed order by behaving as if it naturally belonged, thereby entertaining the possibility Shelley mentions of meritorious delusion). The following might have been articulated by either Shelley or the UN platform: ‘If Reform shall be begun by the existing government, let us be content with a limited beginning, with any whatsoever opening.’ A Shelleyan United Nations thus appears not to need, and in some sense may not even benefit from, the crystallization of its principles in an individual. Yet it had a charismatic one: the Brazilian figure who looks from my vantage like a fusion of Byron and Kant, Sergio Vieira de Mello. Simon Bolivar in 1826 was the first real-world politician to try to construct Kant’s perpetual peace; and de Mello’s intellectual legacy developed out of a very long romantic enlightenment indeed (from Bolivar to Paris ’68, where he was beaten badly), stemming from Kant to make wider enjoyment of rights in the modern world of pressing immediacy. It is no coincidence that de Mello – the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who was killed in the 2003 Baghdad embassy attack – just like ‘Kantian’ Shelley throws his hopes into the future under the sign of an ‘as if.’ Thus Samantha Power reports on de Mello’s speech, ‘Philosophical History and Real History: The Relevance of Kant’s Political Thought in Current Times’: He closed out his lecture with words that would foreshadow his approach to negotiating in conflict zones. ‘We must act as if perpetual peace is something real, though perhaps it is not,’ Vieira de Mello said, quoting Kant. Then he added his own coda: ‘The future is to be invented.’38 ‘How many wars could have been avoided … if statesmen had not shown contempt for nations’ self-esteem!,’ de Mello also maintained in that speech.39 Interestingly, by far the most contemporary-sounding note in Shelley’s arrangement of the faculties comes from ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ in praise of ‘Love, Hope, and Self-esteem’ (94; emphasis added).40 The comparison to de Mello helps us to see the full breadth, commitment, and volatility of Shelley’s cosmopolitan dialectic, to whose



which it aspires, but one which approaches it in a degree far nearer than if the whole powers had not been developed by a delusion.––It is in politics rather than in religion that faith is meritorious.37

other side I now return. ‘To Wordsworth’ makes a perversely superior logic out of Shelley’s own inability as a modern to cause death with his satire. More than just an ambivalently rich intertextual sonnet, ‘To Wordsworth’ is then a curse poem that lodges its bitterness in a primitivist, ethnographic sense of the reciprocal, invisible forces that hold together the broad cultural field of the lyric: writer and addressee; poet and beloved; curse and victim. This language provokes on the most basic level. Not just Wordsworth had he cared to listen, or Shelley recursively, but we are made uncomfortable by the vehemence of the performance. Partly this is true because the version of Shelley I am offering, as a self-identifying Welsh or Irish curse poet41 who at the same time imagines for his poems a kind of mediatory role like that of the modern UN, was also an ideologue who used abstract ‘slavery’ as the chosen vehicle of hate-speech. Why do the radical Shelleys use ‘slave’ as their worst version of a slur? Though one can be reminded looking back that generations of radical thinkers did this,42 or look to the future at the presciently Hegelian, theoretical view that the Shelleys held on slavery (a forerunner not only of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, but of his notion of a slavish ‘unhappy consciousness’ that stalls in skepticism),43 this verbal weapon seems at best double-sided. Mary’s claim still offers a raw doubleness for its part: that the Shelleys used ‘slave’ as their worst imprecation in dealings that provoked contempt or the perceived need for scornful counterattack.

Obi and the transatlantic commentators In taking the measure of Shelley’s poetics of retribution, the other major poem explicitly addressed to Wordsworth, Peter Bell the Third, also gestures in its paratext toward a slavery that in fact proves essential to both the poem’s argument and to the conceptual stakes of Shelley’s ‘mythmaking.’ Shelley puts his own, knotty and complex, signature on the old theme of Wordsworth’s apostasy. The later poem mounts a transition from the sonnet’s word – desertion – to the claim that Wordsworth has now converted to ‘White Obi.’ In his introduction to William Earle’s 1800 novel, Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack, Srinivas Aravamudan gives us the means historically to reimagine the traditional, insular British readings of romantic political desertion, since: Fleeing slave society and sometimes attempting to form alternative political communities based on subsistence agriculture and political autonomy in the woods and inaccessible mountain areas, escaped




184

Romantic Fiat

Shelley’s allusion to the power of Obi that served these maroon communities offers a new way to triangulate him with the reactionary Lake School mountain keeps. After a ‘Tintern Abbey’-like five years have passed, the 1819 Peter Bell the Third finally identifies the new cause with which Wordsworth’s desertion has finally taken up, the ideological content that has filled Wordsworth’s alleged eviscerations of value. As Shelley’s most urban poem – an apt parallel both to The Dunciad and to Book 7 of The Prelude – Peter Bell the Third also insists on making mischief with the archaic sources of poetic vitality:45 Furious he rode, where late he ran, Lashing and spurring his lame hobby; Turned to a formal Puritan, A solemn and unsexual man,— He half believed White Obi! (358) The poem’s best satire on Wordsworth at the same time consistently shows the uncanny grounds of Shelley’s admiration: Thus—though unimaginative, An apprehension clear, intense, Of his mind’s work, he made alive The things it wrought on; I believe Wakening a sort of thought in sense. (351) And these obscure remembrances Stirred such harmony in Peter, That whensoever he should please, He could speak of rocks and tress In poetic meter. For though it was without a sense Of memory, yet he remembered well Many a ditch and quickset fence; Of lakes he had intelligence He knew something of heath and fell. (354)



and former slaves experimented with various forms of desertion (also known as marronage [from which we get ‘maroons’]) especially in eighteenth-century Jamaica and Surinam.44

For language was in Peter’s hand Like clay while he was yet a potter, And he made songs for all the land Sweet both to feel and understand As pipkins late to mountain Cotter. (355) That Wordsworth is ‘unimaginative’ strikingly does not hamper the notice of his originality. As always for Shelley, imagination relates instead to the power he connects with love, to reach beyond the narrow interests of the self in time and space. (Thus Shelley is able to exaggerate a telling instinct he has had of Wordsworth as The Ruined Cottage’s ‘one life’ pedlar: ‘And coolly to his own soul said;— / “Do you not think that we might make / A poem on her when she is dead?”’ [360].) From a different point of origin that has the effect of revealing the occasional join of sympathetic criticism and critical satire, Paul Fry seems to channel Shelley’s insight when he reminds us of one of the strangest effects to be found in Wordsworth and his critics: ‘To recall the profound comment of Cleanth Brooks in response to the concluding lines of the Westminster Bridge sonnet (written en route to France in 1802), Wordsworth puts the houses to sleep in order to make them seem alive. He is always doing that to things.’46 Thus the claim that an aging Wordsworth has been frozen by acculturation is belied by Shelley’s sense of his access to the lyric’s archaic ground. In the dedication he states: You will perceive that it is not necessary to consider Hell and the Devil as supernatural machinery. The whole scene of my epic is in ‘this world which is’—so Peter informed us before his conversion to White Obi–– The world of all of us, and where We find our happiness, or not all. (340) What is the valence of this conversion ‘to’? Has Wordsworth converted to egotistical self-worship, or just to the tired old state religion by this unusual name? Anyway, Shelley attacks Wordsworth for succumbing to what Marx would call false consciousness, for choosing an exit-strategy from the world that would appear to lift him out of the inclusive fate of others’ uncertain happiness. As Charles Mahoney has recently shown, ‘apostasy’ etymologically means a ‘standing off’ or ‘away’ that undergoes the ‘unpredictable romantic operation … as a falling.’47 The ironic




Romantic Fiat

presumption behind the claim of Wordsworth’s apostasy has always been that fallen members of the ‘Satanic School’ use it to describe the poet’s conversion to High Church standing. (What ideological inversion!) Shelley manages both to say this and not, by leaving Christianity unspoken in favor of what he does name, Obi. While he thus addresses Wordsworth’s lapsed faith in this-worldly community, and reinforces his own mock-epic’s abiding place in ‘the world which is’ (at once a possible heaven and an actual hell), his choice of allusion through which to ‘set’ the curse offers the supposed Christian antidote to obeah known as ‘White Obi’ (Aravamudan, 19). Citing a cultural practice he may have anecdotally heard about through the recent travels of ‘Monk’ Lewis,48 this remains the least marked of all Shelley’s brilliant satirical inversions – moments that Steven E. Jones cites as loci of Shelley’s ‘passive-aggressive resistance,’ through which the poet diligently works the psychologizing capacities of lyric poetry to have enemies damn themselves.49 The glimpse of Obi implies that a turn to orthodoxy is every bit a fetish or reification.50 For unlike some other romantic texts that incorporate Obi in their plots, Edgeworth’s novel Belinda or her story ‘The Grateful Negro,’ for example, Shelley includes Obi as an act of intensive and figurally constructed meaning, not one of narrative exposition or historical reference in a direct sense.51 Where Edgeworth’s story actually does offer Christian ‘White Obi’ as a paternalistic means to ‘pull’ the curses that AfroCaribbean Obi ‘puts’ or ‘sets,’ the dynamic cultural field of Shelley’s Obi is open to debate due to the term’s emergence in a vibrantly associative context. The mere allusion works explosively as trope. Like ‘enlightenment,’ ‘romanticism,’ and ‘modernity’ themselves, in Shelley’s usage Obi dwells at the in-between juncture of notions of historical reference and figural meaning: a gap into which it is impossible not to project what Aravamudan calls ‘irresistible agency’ so as to ‘read’ history as legible at all (47). It is hard not to think of Shelley’s White Obi as a prescient effort moving toward the recognition of Derridean White Mythology: the covert alignment of historical, conceptual, and figural fields under the name of philosophy. Just by bringing the term up, Shelley both ‘sets’ and ‘pulls’ together. He conjures and exorcises, names the disease and cure, along with the supposedly civilized and regressive errors that attend both forms of reading Obi. In the end Shelley may be as dismissive about the material conditions of colonial subjectivity as he is about Wordsworth’s position as a cozily domestic ‘apostate’ subject. His own ‘coolly’ offhanded reference to actual historical legacies of slavery



186

and colonialism is important to note and preserve.52 Yet Shelley’s Obi does something different from affirming the wronged party of historical violence. It disseminates blame, in a logic of potentially reversible and compulsory interrelation; and it denies Christianity the ability to distinguish its own ‘slavish’ abjection from the institutional enslavement of others. Thus while several romantic authors and their contemporary critics discuss the practice as an important and painful matter of expanding historical knowledge, to read Obi through Shelley is to shed the positivist narrative of historical recovery, and witness the practice spring to an unpredictable figurative life; while, bringing down with it more obnoxiously self-assured European values that made a demand for Obi a pressing eighteenth-century phenomenon to begin with, all sides of the practice are subject to a process like ‘affirmative’ deconstruction. Charles Rzepka has made the most eloquent statement to this effect, in the essay that accompanies his 2000 staging of Obi, when in reply to the questions, ‘Why Obi? and why now?,’ he maintains: ‘If the performance of Obi [not Earle’s novel, but Fawcett’s pantomime] has any scholarly – or moral – value, then, it will lie only partly in conveying facts about the past.’53 An important early historian of Obi, J. J. Williams, has observed that the practice was largely centered on old men who brought it from West Africa, transformed through the experience of middle passage. With the outlawing of the British slave trade in 1807, and the eventual banning of slaveholding through the colonies formally in 1838, the long Regency window on Obi places it under the sign of a soon extinct, or extinguishing, phenomenon that slides from fearful associations among Londoners to a more easily dismissed comedic performance. Again, however, we see this position of comfort inverted in Shelley’s poem. In dialogue with Thomas Moore’s Fudge Family in Paris (1818) – a poem whose very travel letters are made possible by a post-Waterloo Holy Alliance and not a ‘perpetual’ peace – he imagines the extinction of religious monuments central to London and an indirect new life for transatlantic African culture. If I am right in thinking Peter Bell the Third the equal even to The Mask of Anarchy as a political poem, its style of light malevolence – rather than straight exhortation – may owe something to Shelley’s wish not to sound like the character Phelim Connor in Moore’s Fudge Family. Connor, the family’s Irish tutor, is hortatory to the extreme in his three letters and at one point is simply cut off: ‘Still let your…’* ‘*I have thought it prudent to omit some parts of Mr. Phelim Connor’s letter,’ Moore notes in a faux-editorial voice. ‘He is evidently an intemperate




188

Romantic Fiat

Hoping that the immortality which you have given to the Fudges, you will receive from them; and in the firm expectation that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo bridge shall becomes the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers and case the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, – some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and of their historians; I remain, Dear Tom, Yours sincerely, Miching Mallecho. (341) Shelley’s astoundingly decentered vision of England in this passage is not wholly original. Anna Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) provides a model for some of the imagery and the overall historiographical vision of ruined London as a curiosity for new-world tourists, as James Chandler has explained.55 Yet the added inclusion of a world critical perspective does seem unexampled. The cultural identity of this ‘transatlantic commentator’ in Peter Bell the Third stands as an intriguing possibility radically opened by Shelley’s treatment of Obi. Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1937) records Voodoo in Haiti and Obi in Jamaica and fulfills Shelley’s prediction through one such commentary and its revised subject positions. Cosmopolitanism shows one of Ghanaian Obi’s last commentators in Kwame Anthony Appiah.56

Farrago and the encyclopedic poem Beyond the historical practice in itself, Shelley’s textual relation to William Earle’s Obi deserves comment. Typically thought a ‘bad’ Shelley poem (especially in the batch of 1819), Peter Bell the Third stands to be enlarged more fruitfully than almost any other of Shelley’s works in light of a currently vexed exchange between cosmopolitanism and violated creatureliness,57 Shelley’s Baudelairean modernity and the collaboration of a more standard, enlightenment, modernity with ‘things as they are.’ Yet Peter Bell and Obi the novel are compellingly (not simply) bad, and we might come to an aesthetic realization of this guerrilla form in the artistic composition of both works as farrago. Farrago, the



young man, and has associated with his cousins, the Fudges, to very little purpose.’54 Dialoguing with Moore, Shelley concludes the preface:

ill-matched encyclopedia of literary form, a genre non-genre, allows Earle as a novice practitioner of fiction to piece together his story’s range of divergent cultural attitudes and materials.58 The book contains generic components of embedded poetry, prose narrative, letters and epistolary fiction, the novel of sensibility and at least a potential plot of historical slave resistance, as well as a fascinating anthropological footnote essay – a lopsided miniature treatise on plantains and bananas that is moving in its bias toward the former in the face of today’s banana dominion (Obi, 124). Earle’s narrator, one George Stanford, from the beginning is unclear about what he is doing in generic terms: ‘In fact, what I am now going to write is nothing more than a copy of what I had sometime ago begun to put in a regular story, out of several memoranda collected at different times. So, without lengthening this preamble, I thus begin’ (Obi, 71). Such a narrative technique materializes in the objects and practitioners of Obi themselves. Just before his execution, the aged African patriarch Feruarue is said to be ‘covered over with the farrago of his weak and impotent charms’ (Obi, 99). And in the House of Commons Sessional Papers that Aravamudan’s appendices provide, we are told ‘The Obi is usually composed of a Farrago of Materials, most of which are enumerated in the Jamaican Law, viz. “Blood, Feathers, Parrots, Beaks, Dogs Teeth, Alligators Teeth, Broken Bottles, Grave Dirt, Rum and Eggshells”’ (Obi, 172). Deemed the finest of poetic technicians by Wordsworth, we can assume Shelley exercised a controlled looseness of farrago style in Peter Bell the Third’s dedication, prologue, and seven parts. Unlike Peter Bell’s odd impression of elevated seriousness, Peter Bell the Third satirizes epic pretensions while demonstrating an aesthetically harnessed energy of intent. Beyond my remarks already about how Shelley’s Obi releases on Wordsworth a kind of historically charged pharmakon, a mixed spit of poison and cure, the cut and dried annotation that Obi is ‘sarcastic’ in Shelley obstructs vision of what I take to be the compelling point (Aravamudan, 47). Following relentlessly toward either good or ill, Shelley throughout his work takes up invisible value making and the flow of credit with utter seriousness.59 To him no other inquiry is so enlightened and real, even though this dynamic yields the same flow of credulity that informs conventional dismissal of Obi. Peter Bell the Third’s sweeping depiction of London – or of Regency Britain altogether – reveals the metropole’s culture as itself existing under an Obi that connects the lack of colonial justice with failed invisible forms of value in all modes: epistemological, legal, literary, environmental, and economic.




Romantic Fiat

All London is netted in Obi’s accursed community of fictional credit, value forms that are passed among citizens like diseases, or imprecations: ‘They are damned by one another, / By none other are they damned’ (349). Failed blessing and realized curse provides the very infrastructure of Shelley’s avowedly imperial – and in that sense ‘epic’ – poem: Hell is a city much like London— A populous and a smoky city; There are all sorts of people undone And there is little or no fun done; Small justice shewn, and still less pity. There is a Castles, and a Canning, A Cobbett, and a Castlereigh; All sorts of caitiff corpses planning All sorts of cozening for trepanning Corpses less corrupt than they. There is a Southey, who has lost His wits, or sold them, none knows which; He walks about a double ghost, And though as thin as Fraud almost— Ever grows more grim and rich. There is a Chancery Court, a King, A manufacturing mob; a set Of thieves who by themselves are sent Similar thieves to represent; An Army;—and a public debt. Which last is a scheme of Paper money, And means—being interpreted— ‘Bees, keep your wax—give us the honey And we will plant while skies are sunny Flowers, which in winter serve instead.’ There is great talk of Revolution— And a great chance of Despotism— German soldiers—camps—confusion— Tumults—lotteries—rage—delusion— Gin—suicide and methodism. [...]



190

And this is Hell—and in this smother All are damnable and damned; Each one damning, damns another; They are damned by one another, By none other are they damned. ’Tis a lie to say, ‘God damns!’ Where was Heaven’s Attorney General When they first gave out such flams? Let there be an end of shams, They are mines of poisonous mineral. (346–7, 349) Like ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ Peter Bell the Third was written in the radically open moment while finishing Prometheus Unbound, Shelley’s great work on the ambivalent divides between conjuration and exorcism, praise and blame. Those poems on Obi (to which we might punningly add that equally charged lyric moment of exorcism and conjuration, the magic apostrophe to the wind – ‘O be thou me!’), however, should not be considered as relaxation from Prometheus’s achieved solutions concerning what David Bromwich calls a thematics of ‘Love Against Revenge.’ Rather, the Obi’s darker realizations of immanent agency as the disease of the world can be said to offer the same form of meaning exhibited in Prometheus toward an opposite end of non-egotistical, truly impersonal, vengefulness; while Peter’s Obi similarly anticipates in negative form the championing of imagination in The Defence of Poetry. The scheme of renovation in that lyrical drama (leveraged through the fact of Prometheus’s nearly uncreated versus Jupiter’s created state in latter days) makes change an inevitable necessity given the one edge Prometheus holds, not moral right in any obvious sense, but truly non-human, infinitely protracted, time.60 Yet in the realm of human history there is a very narrow bridge between Prometheus’s grounds of hope and any mortal grounds: the ‘infinitude’ of love, which I take as a faith in a figure, even for Shelley. For Diotima, the embodiment of love in Plato’s Symposium, such infinitude is negative: ‘Love, therefore, and every thing else that desires anything, desires that which is absent and beyond his reach, that which it has not, that which is not itself … that which it wants ….’61 In human history, change will only occur through Shelley’s invitation of readers through the elective construction of a simultaneously politically and aesthetically posed ‘as if’; we cannot know when or if Prometheus’s timeless logic intersects time on the level of human events.62




Romantic Fiat

Yet since the necessary good of poetry’s effect in The Defence is repeatedly exposed to being thought not so good at all (witness the bad influence of Homer to promote hectoring [516]), or to being not substantively value-driven (in the Kantian, formally empowering but ‘purposeless’ sense), Shelley’s love becomes at times perilously content-free. His confidence relates only to the form of feeling beyond oneself – to the admirable hunch that this is how everything good finally takes shape. My argument has been that this effort is necessarily a projection, and so discovers its relational shadow as an Obi – even as it strives toward an image of global self-esteem (de Mello’s UN ‘legitimacy’) as a romantic extension of enlightenment political justice. Shelley’s best poems and his defenses of poetry can and do, I think, convince us of the scope of poetry in actually imaging change through the utter refusal to seek domination through causal power. But insofar as Shelley’s Defence makes its own enlightenment leap of faith in so badly needing a concept of poetic historical agency that is altruistic, the Obi – white and black – will haunt poetic legislation as its compulsory obverse. Standing in the place of the second term that Susan Buck-Morss urges we confront through ‘Hegel and Haiti’ – if you like – Obi is the poetic legislation cast across emergent relational communities, which instead of self-legislating haunts and ravages. *** In ‘Our Word is Our Bond,’ Geoffrey Hill relates Ezra Pound’s error – set within J. L. Austin’s theory of the performative – of confusing the ‘verdictive and judicial’ claims of poetic utterance with ‘legislative or executive acts.’63 ‘But poets are not legislators, unless they are so employed,’ Hill straightforwardly concludes. Striking here is that he does not address Shelley directly. Beyond just a citation, he would have made a more rigorous and self-aware example than Pound does. Where Shelley on Obi finely interrogates the shared zone of the ‘verdictive and judicial,’ in the displacement of content-based truth into forms of value judgment, the Defence in turn appears to make a significant distinction between the ‘legislative or executive acts’ that Hill instead conjoins. Pound in a letter remarked, ‘All values ultimately come from our judicial sentences.’ He felt this to be magisterially Shelleyan. But in Hill’s comment that this influence does less than justice to Pound, he puts things the wrong way. The terms of Pound’s homage pay less than is owed to Shelley, by making the romantic poet’s claim too flash – not nearly smart, mediated, and modest enough. Pound dangerously believed in the poet’s special privilege and in his direct, minister of culture type, effects. Shelley disciplined his ideal of ‘poetic



192

legislation’ with both a carefully wrought ‘Kantian’ aesthetic extending to moral theory, and a persistently indirect and systemic idea of historical change. Yet when Shelley tried to give linear form to the back-and-forth of civilization and revenge in A Philosophical View of Reform, the subject and the treatise broke off: There is one thing, which certain vulgar agitators endeavor to flatter the most uneducated part of the people by assiduously proposing, which they ought not to do nor to require; and that is Retribution. Men having been injured, desire to injure in return. This is falsely called the universal law of human nature; it is a law from which many are exempt, and all in proportion to their virtue and cultivation. The savage is more revengeful than the civilized man, the ignorant and uneducated than the person of a refined and cultivated intellect; the generous and …64 Because it allows people to frame how results ‘answer’ pre-posed yes or no questions, the Azande practice of consulting Benge, a strychninebased chicken oracle, places justice in the hands of those who perceive themselves as victims (leaving unclear whether conceived as a juridical or epistemological institution). Power aligns with victimization and even impotence in this arrangement. If poetic blessings can work despite being unacknowledged, this is all the more true of the acknowledged fears that manifest their credit as the ruthless laws of invisible value, and circulate their history in the form of a curse. A crucial facet in E. E. Evans Pritchard’s classic ethnography of this people from the southern Sudan, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937), is that for the poison oracle to work individuals cannot know whether their unspoken resentments toward others make them witches or not. In defining his art as an immanent community and a network always held open to blessings and curses – through linguistic acts that are cast as proto-judgments on the very conditions of a future world, and not by the writer’s intent or formal technique – Shelley defines poetry in a similar manner. With perhaps disturbing similarity to the consultant of Benge or the setter of an Obi curse, The Defence ends with what feels like a magic thought: a near blessing that knows its own indirect force of threat. By emphatically stating that ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ (535), Shelley fuzzes over the difference between what late Kant would call Rechtspruch and Machtspruch, a statement meant to preserve, and a force meant to exempt, rule of law. Such a forcefully eloquent legislation going on in secret again risks losing the multilateral




Romantic Fiat

Shelley in univocal, executive, and sovereign claims to the prerogative of going it alone, even if that authority is said to be exercised for the people in evidence of their own unactivated freedoms.65 ‘“The unacknowledged legislators of the world” describes the secret police, not the poets,’ W. H. Auden has written.66 And thus Derrida holds: ‘The police become omnipresent and spectral in the so-called civilized states once they undertake to make the law, instead of simply contenting themselves with applying it and seeing that it is observed.’67 This allusion to what John Barrell has lately presented as The Spirit of Despotism in the 1790s might remind us that Peter’s other inspiration was King George III. The satirical target for Shelley was not just a Wordsworthian rustic, as it was exhaustively for Coleridge and Jeffrey, but the full complex of a potter-sovereign. Commentators have noted the influence of the story of Balaam’s ass (Numbers 22) on Peter Bell. In an obscure connection, Shelley turns to the major prophetic source, Isaiah, to enlist a voice for denouncing reification in the potter’s trade, cursing the future on a public scale with a breaking of vessels: You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? Shall the thing made say of its maker, ‘He did not make me[?]’ (Isaiah 29:16) Therefore thus says the Holy One of Israel: Because you reject this word, and put your trust in oppression and deceit, and rely on them: therefore this iniquity shall become for you like a break in a high wall, bulging out, and about to collapse, whose crash comes suddenly, in an instant: its breaking is like that of a potter’s vessel that is smashed so ruthlessly



194


Despite Peter Bell the Third’s explicit fun at the expense of Kant’s ‘world of words’ (357), the pure theory that a Kantian care for words represents can at least be said to intervene in the chain of command between the Peter Bells of the world and an abusive state. A main aspect of this chapter has been to exhibit Shelley’s intimate aptitude with the regulative forms of Kantian judgment (regarding the aesthetic, yes, but …), especially in moral, historical, and political terms that are not privileged over but are contiguous with the openwork of aesthetics. The openness brings mobility, a view cast out beyond the exhaustion of individual life, as well as utter defenselessness against the emphatic cross-purposes of the singular will, the irruptive event. As Samantha Power reports them, Sergio Vieira de Mello’s last words before the blast at the UN headquarters in Baghdad were ‘Oh Shit!’68 They fall on an undiplomatic side of cosmopolitanism. Unable to replay and make either therapeutic or legible the event to which, on the instant, it responds – de Mello’s exclamation has the look of an apostrophe but it isn’t one, representing as it does the kind of ‘now’ that is not lyric.



that among its fragments not a sherd is found for taking fire from the hearth, or dipping water out of the cistern. (Isaiah 30:12–14)

7

‘We are now living in a spiritual super-nova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane.’ – Charles Taylor, A Secular Age ‘… it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity …’ – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities The ‘glorious pair’ of European literary celebrity during the romantic period, Goethe and Byron, stand forth in their fiats as they do in so many other ways.1 Faust and Don Juan reintroduce the changed world to an epic that also is fundamentally different. Enlarging upon the lyric mode I took to be a departure from Milton’s epic project in the Introduction, in their hands modern epic becomes an endlessly generative form that has been substantively undercut, yet somehow gallops ahead nevertheless.2 These texts offer parallel, full-scale representations of the social evolution of fiat commands in poetry and – just as importantly – pursue consequences of fiat-like effects. Their registers are both material and, seemingly, magical. Byron and Goethe create new myths of modernity in aggressively thematizing the wonderment and explosion of projects that take flight on groundless credit. The project of modernity itself is included in their charge; they help us to see how it is the same modernity at issue in eighteenth-century Edinburgh as in contemporary Manhattan, an economic system at once projected and sustained with a single trajectory. Hence Goethe’s and Byron’s works are especially prescient from the later view of American usage after the mid-nineteenth century, whereby bank notes are explicitly ascribed to monetary ‘fiat.’ The greenback is fiat money:3 a word from the Latin 196



Paper Money Poets

Vulgate Bible that makes a constant imprint upon these authors’ associative declensions from religion to economics. Acting in a way as a second introduction, this last chapter discusses the romantic long poem’s indignant satire of modern fiat developments in economics, technology, and warfare. I begin, therefore, by identifying moments where imaginative valances and social ideas of fiat shift in Faust and Don Juan. Writ large, the shift involves alienation and dismantling of the divinely singular command of the Genesis ur-fiat. There is further a movement toward what I shall call (especially in Byron’s case) a portmanteau technique that includes an array of symptomatically modern behaviors – all of which prolong the momentum of credit and belief. This pattern resonates with my use of David Hume’s associational theory and figures of imagination in Chapter 4; it also takes up the recent thesis of Charles Taylor in his influential doorstopper A Secular Age (2007), insofar as the paradigm Taylor constructs situates any particular faith – even those that profess transcendence and universality – as just one option among many that now constitute the tenacious afterlife of belief. The signal disenchantments early on in these two modern epics – of Faust from his hermetic books, or of Juan from the faith of his Calvinist mother – lead to what in Taylor’s language might be called a ‘nova effect’ of disparate cultural substitutes for the creative fiat.4 Goethe moves from offering a Faustian parallel to Luther’s translated Grundtext of Christianity in part one, to the wildly heterogeneous style of part two, in which paper money fuels a ‘tragedy of development.’5 Yet the redeployments of fiat are even more diverse in Byron’s oeuvre. They range from bloodshed that bitterly parodies God’s ability to create substance, to the digressive fiats of Byronic style, and finally conclude with the modern industrial-capitalist version of ‘let there be light’: the advent in Paris and Regency London of gas-illuminated lighting. *** Indebted to pathbreaking scholarship by Marc Shell, Kurt Heinzelman, Marjorie Levinson, and Alan Liu in a period that roughly spanned the 1980s,6 the decade of the 2000s to date has seen an exciting burst of writing concerning ‘the economy of lyric.’7 Work in the last few years in particular has made good on the effort to theorize money and the aesthetic object in joint terms, going further than any previous historicism had done to elaborate the lyric’s monetary form. Current research thus promises to take us beyond ‘deconstruction in period costume.’8 Two of the newest studies of Wordsworth understand his poetry in



Paper Money Poets 197

Romantic Fiat

terms of its spectral, fundamentally speculative, relation to the role of imagination in social life. Robert Mitchell describes Wordsworth as a Serresian ‘parasite’ of the 1790s financial crisis;9 and (in his third major reading of the poet) David Simpson argues for Wordsworth’s verse as the earliest and most enduring expressive symptom of the modern commodity. Somehow, we have not left behind or even seen as far as Wordsworth was able to do, into the unprecedented state of ‘radically disoriented subjectivity’ in economic modernity, this ‘emotional money form.’10 For the widest canvassing of such a story, one cannot do better than Ian Baucom’s and Mary Poovey’s bracingly ambitious books about the emergence of discursive modernity in the long eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century institutions of credit.11 On the level of individual essays rather than books, meanwhile, work by Alex Dick and Kevin Barry helps us understand how romantic-era literary authors regarded the written genre of paper money. Dick’s 2007 essay, ‘The Ghost of Gold,’ connects Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy with British government prosecutions of forgers; while in his lucid article ‘Crediting Power,’ Barry had earlier surveyed most of the Big Six romantic poets before recounting – even lauding – the way Coleridge in particular embraces the ‘modern’ principles of inflationary economics.12

Euphorion’s deflations As we will see in a moment through Goethe’s diagnostically critical handling of romantic energies, it proves convenient to take a ‘romantic project’ on the whole as pressing inflationary strategies to revitalize language. We nearly define this literary ‘moment’ as inflationary, because the aspirations that count go beyond deliverable measure of what at any point can be made good – to be cashed in were there ever to be an actual ‘run’ on the bank of poetic art.13 The romantics, then, engage in mythmaking about the phenomenological experience of a monetary fiat, in addition to the analytical and symptomatic frameworks I have just quickly recounted from current scholarship. Figurative language moves out ahead of any equivalent to ground it in ‘prose’ sense. In the economic version of Charles Taylor’s ‘spiritual’ narrative, there occurs a ‘nova effect’ in which heightened intensities – increased lumens – involve a radical decrease in any material phenomenology of the world’s mass: the source of Marx’s literally ‘sublime’ observation that all that is solid melts into air. In that way, the iron-cage structure of modernity that Max Weber diagnosed oftentimes bears an incongruously slight physical presence. Like the popular image of the romantic poet himself



198

(think of Shelley’s representation of defiantly frail forms in Adonais), paper money too is both frail and potentially absolutist, weak and overbearing. And because of its historical facticity as ‘the way of the future’ from our own retrospect (gold being no more ‘natural’ a symbol, yet it is a commodity), the poets like Coleridge who herald a fully arbitrary paper currency might receive tendentious welcome. In a stray remark he once made in his book A Common Sky, the late A. D. Nuttall also cited Coleridge’s as an ‘inflationary mind.’14 However, there is no insinuation that he was gratifyingly like us present in Nuttall’s comment. The imaginative archive for fiat in ‘Kubla Khan’ leads further back into the chasms of the past. If the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz winds through an allegory of Gilded Age American monetary debate, the Road to Xanadu takes a similarly historical path through its dreamwork. Samuel Purchas’s renaissance tome and its story of the Khan are secretly all about the introduction of paper currency, which Kubla devised to fund his own wars to conquer Korea and Japan in the 1200s. (They were not even bank notes yet, but nomadic tender.) From that obscure starting point in the wartime economics of imagination, the famous poem displays Kubla’s reign as the model for a wider political aesthetic of absolute decree. This basic positioning of Coleridge as an exemplary figure might in turn be supplemented by his organicist defense of paper money in The Friend. Evoking Britain through its new economics as an imagined community, there Coleridge conjures vivid images of the circulatory system to extol the policy of national debt. He maintains an invisible network to link the nation together during war – country and city alike. Catherine Gallagher recounts the passage in the first chapter of her 2006 book, The Body Economic: What has rendered Great Britain … with more than metaphorical propriety a BODY POLITIC, our Roads, Rivers, and Canals being so truly the veins, arteries and nerves, of the state; that every pulse in the metropolis produces a corresponding pulsation in the remotest village on its extreme shores! ... I answer without hesitation, that the cause and mother principle of this unexampled confidence, of this system of credit, which is as much stronger than mere positive possessions, as the soul of man is than his body … has been our NATIONAL DEBT.15 The passage attempts to dissolve ‘positive possessions’ – a tradition in political theory moving from Locke to the Burkean ideology of




Romantic Fiat

rootedness – in favor of an even more radical, systemic but groundless, collectivity of imagination. From here, Gallagher’s remark that Coleridge not only encourages an organic theory, but ‘desire[s] to gain a monopoly on true organicism,’16 resembles very much the conclusion of Alex Dick’s splendid essay on Percy Shelley. For Dick, Shelley understood the paper money fiat in close competition with his own poetic legislation enforcing literature’s claims. Rather than alliance, in other words, the analogy had spurred differentiation in Shelley’s case – or even the kind of exorcism and distancing I have already recounted as a dialectics of Shelleyan cosmopolitanism, praise, and blame. Modern credit off any naturalizing standard emerges as a frame of thought vying with other fundamental dispositions to become the sovereign means of valuation. Dick holds that ‘Literature … is itself the law that measures all relative values’ – or ought to be such an immanent law – for Shelley.17 Once recognized to circulate in parallel, monetary and poetic coinage for that very reason might prove incompatible in their social positions. Do they compete or share the sovereign power to operate ‘unacknowledged’ within the value form? The feeling that our world has lost its inheritable mass, that we have lost orientation toward sense gives William Cobbett’s vitriolic lament on paper money its force.18 But even though his output on the subject is so voluminous, it is impossible to retrieve Cobbett’s sturdy English attack on paper as an inheritable legacy. Cobbett’s anti-Semitism is a real danger; and so to a lesser degree is the method his style recommends, of an exclusively Anglo-American scope of analysis. Looming at the fore of the British imaginative response to inflationary banking in the 1780s and 1790s are the examples of Jacques Necker’s pre-revolutionary financial policies, then Burke’s extended use of paper money as a touchstone to gauge decline of national cultures in the Reflections. These international figures must appear in any story about the relations of romantic literature and money. However – with Marc Shell’s books as major exceptions19 – studies of money in the romantic imagination have not fully acknowledged major sources of European debt. By placing Goethe and Byron together, I hope to suggest a European romanticism that includes the British. Hovering at length around the modernity of the fiat, they both pursue the associations of a linguistic if ‘inhuman’ arbitrary power, as it moves from a singular origin in God’s creative word to the dispersed regime of credit. Faust and Don Juan disclose networks of belief at once groundless, brutalizing, and pervasive. Across an intellectual spectrum ranging from Taylor to Jean-Luc Nancy, contemporary theory in the humanities seems intent on readdressing the place for something we might yet



200

call world-making in our relation to the globalization of value. In The Creation of the World (2007), Nancy’s study of what I’d call the contemporaneity of the fiat, a basic divide in the ethics of creation rehearses a split between negative ‘globalization’ and positive but ungrounded ‘world-forming.’ By a series of examples more than anything else, this chapter argues that the range of experience Nancy identifies ought to be realized as vital already to Goethe and Byron’s permutations of epic. Like The Creation of the World, Faust and Don Juan repeatedly ask – Can there be a mode of fiat in the human imagination that is not theologically beholden, or violently assertive of its own sovereign prerogative toward abuse, or just totally capitalist? One can’t exactly articulate substitutes to such intransigent features of reality; but I can point out how Goethe and Byron’s texts are taken up in this way with envisioning an immanent global situation. A project worth calling revision of the fiat – not just creativity in the decaffeinated sense – plays out in their epics’ variations as the idiom for both the problem, and, more strenuously, for imaginable solutions. The positive turn I bring into view could be one reason why the ‘Euphorion’ section of Faust was intended to be set to music, even if it never was in Goethe’s lifetime.20 The scene’s complex function as a poetic drama depicting ‘romantic’ spirit indeed requires such modal and even generic counterpointing. These interwoven, split codes of music and language at one point in literary history would simply have been accorded alike to the prehistory of lyric. In the proposed Byron opera of Faust Part Two, an active but not-yet realized sensuousness therefore runs alongside the explicit ‘negativity’ of Goethe’s plot. The combination together enacts something more, or different, than just inflation before the inevitable fall. The deflation of Euphorion at the same time prefigures what comes after both epic and pastoral in generic literary history. For the Baudelairean modern lyric poet, this fall is a precondition of the ongoing possibility of voice: an irony that Goethe too, in his image of grasshoppers (Zikaden) in the Prologue in Heaven, has Mephistopheles present before the Lord (line 288): Earth’s little god runs true to his old way And is as weird as on that primal day. He might be living somewhat better Had you not given him of Heaven’s light a glitter [Schein]; He calls it reason and, ordained its priest, Becomes more bestial than any beast. He seems to me, begging your Honor’s pardon, Like one of those grasshoppers in the garden




202

Romantic Fiat

That leg it skip-a-skimming all day long And in the grass chirp out the same old song (lines 281–90) 21

The famous ‘Study Scene’ is the clear touchstone for the theme of fiat in Faust. On first blush Goethe’s text seems content to play on a grand scale with the difference between God’s creation and our speculative attempts to gloss the ‘word’ – through an energetic but faulty, dramatized interpretive ‘act.’ Yet there are, I think, at least three moments in Faust – a work composed between 1770 and 1831 and hence as eventfully disparate as the romantic period altogether – that embody the shift I outline; there is not just the one locus. Through the course of these passages, we move from ‘simple honesty of feeling,’ to the wild capitalist projects of post-revolutionary speculation. Finally we are shown versions of the fiat that are as much about the dialectic of enlightenment as anything before Adorno and Horkheimer, displaying the material domination of the land and those who traditionally dwell on it. In the Prologue in Heaven, a Miltonic host praises the Lord for his doings on the Hebrew Bible’s ‘primal day’ (lines 250, 270). Mephistopheles responds directly to God (‘O Lord’ [line 271]): On suns and worlds I can shed little light, I see but humans, and their piteous plight. Earth’s little god runs true to his old way And is as weird as on that primal day. (lines 279–82) Wryly, Mephistopheles replaces the Host of Angels’ chorus on creative sublimity – ‘Sublime [herrlich] as on that primal day’ (270) – with the observation that humanity is merely ‘weird’ and wonderful (wunderlich). We might anticipate already the plot of part two, in which the godgiven ‘light,’ through our access to a mere ‘glitter’ of Heaven (Schein des Himmelslichts), morphs both magically and materially into the cultural scheming of Geldschein, or paper money. In the immediate context, the devil ‘can shed little light’ upon the sun and world-creating utterance of ‘let there be light!’ Mephistopheles insinuates that the meaning of creation is as incomprehensible as his own inability to perform it: an effect he achieves by the double-strategy of conceding power to God and yet refusing to join in the hymn. Though some Midrashic commentators allow Wisdom (Sophia, Shechinah) to be with God at the creation, and thereby account for the Genesis text’s use there of a ‘royal we,’ the



***

creatively plural ‘let us,’22 Goethe has Mephistopheles undermine even this possible rationalization. The human and ‘weird,’ not the wise, resulted from God’s original creative action. Noticing the Prologue in Heaven, with its clear echoes of both Genesis and Job, helps us to see a developing pattern in Faust that draws from techniques of the Higher Criticism. Hence the famous scene that next invokes fiat-like powers of origin engages a revisionary Christian – and not Hebrew – textual source. Faust emulates Martin Luther’s translated Grundtext (‘In the beginning was the Word’ [Im Anfang war das Wort]) in the well-known passage that translates the Greek, logos, into a ‘Deed.’ I feel an urge to reach For the original, the sacred text, appealing To simple honesty of feeling To render it in my dear German speech. (He opens a tome and sets forth.) ‘In the beginning was the Word’—thus runs the text. Who helps me on? Already I’m perplexed! I cannot grant the word such sovereign merit, I must translate it in a different way If I’m indeed illumined by the Spirit. ‘In the beginning was the Sense.’ But stay! Reflect on this first sentence well and truly Lest the light pen be hurrying unduly! Is sense in fact all action’s spur and source? It should read: ‘In the beginning was the Force!’ Yet as I write it down, some warning sense Alerts me that it too, will give offense. The spirit speaks! And lo, the way is freed, I calmly write: ‘In the beginning was the Deed!’ (lines 1215–37) Commentators including Cyrus Hamlin point out (361) how the presence of Mephistopheles, incarnated as a poodle, delivers an ironic riposte to Faust’s speech. The heroic scholarly work on Christ’s incarnation ends, and immediately Faust turns to yell, ‘Poodle, stop your barking’ (line 1238). Were Faust’s spirits petty and distracted even while he was intoning the gospel? Is it then a botched spell, a mis-incantation? There is no reflective glow comparable to the Genesis God’s ‘and he saw that it was good,’ rather the bickering of shut your ‘yap!’ (line 1240). It is nonetheless hard to read the sequence of translations as entirely




Romantic Fiat

satire. ‘Sense’ (Sinn) would affirm an organicist feeling that is present in early German romanticism, and reflects uneasiness precisely with the rhetorical aspect of the Word; Hamlin notes that ‘Power’ (Kraft) retrieves the Sturm und Drang character of Goethe’s own Sorrows of Young Werther; and ‘Deed’ corresponds to the self-positing of action celebrated in the idealism of Fichte’s 1794 Wissenschaftslehre. Dismantled with astonishing force, Nietzsche would transform this basic idea later in his analysis of Tun (‘doing’) in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). In his argument there, Nietzsche displays the retrospective illusion of positing a noun, lightning, behind the mere happening (‘it lightens’) without an intentional subject or substrate; this is how the masses falsely project a humanized, ontological ‘being’ behind sheer occurrence. The Paper Money Scene in Part Two of Faust exists in dialogue with Faust’s biblical translation. Marc Shell lays out the connection best: In Part One […] Faust deposits his soul in order to transfer to himself special powers, and in Part Two the Emperor deposits his subterranean estate in an attempt to save the empire from ruin. Faust’s contract with Mephistopheles elucidates his attempt to translate linguistically the ‘Word’ of the Bible (Grundtext) into action, and the Emperor’s contract elucidates an attempt to translate, by the medium of paper money, real estate (Grundbesitz) into gold.23 Later on Shell writes: ‘The seemingly appropriative power of money is actually a powerful logic of symbolization, a money of the mind, with which the devil, as Luther has him, plans to abuse unthinking men in order to damn them.’24 By contrast to Luther’s grim anti-monetary screeds, in one of Goethe’s original strokes he depicts authorization of paper money as a tableau of light. The ‘dawn’ of modernity occurs in the naturalizing of paper money fiat. This happens in the section of Faust Part Two, Act One, given the head note of ‘Pleasance, Morning Sun.’ The treasurer bids the Emperor to ‘Recall’ his own ‘screed’ of ordering a vast paper currency distributed to the elated ‘folk’: Your own self signed it at the time, Only last night. You stood in Great Pan’s mask, And with the Chancellor we approached to ask: ‘Allow yourself high festive joy and nourish The common weal with but a pen’s brief flourish.’ You signed; that night by men in thousand arts



204

The thing was multiplied a thousand parts; So that like blessing should to all accrue, We stamped up all the lower series too, Tens, Thirties, Fifties, Hundreds did we edit, The good it did folk, you would hardly credit. Your city, else half molded in stagnation, Now teems revived in prosperous elation! Although your name has long been widely blessed, It’s not been spelt with such great interest. The alphabet has now been proved redundant: In this sign everyone finds grace abundant. EMPEROR. It circulates like gold of true assay? The Court, the Army, take it in full pay? I scarce believe it, though I know I ought. MARSHAL. The fugitives could never now be caught; The stuff was scattered broadside in a wink. (lines 6066–87) Reinforcing Shelley’s vision of a near-synonymy that makes for contest between fiat money and poetic art (and maybe the alphabet [6081]), the Marshal concludes that language itself ‘has now been proved redundant.’ New money’s equally arbitrary ‘grace’ – its apparent power to supply wants and create surplus – has taken over the master position for all circulatory logic. Reaching a judgment comically supported by the Fool’s later decision to trade in his paper money for land (to Mephistopheles’ approval! [6171–2]), Shell writes that ‘The Paper Money Scene is part of a critique of the idealist philosophy that operates without material guarantees or substantial securities.’25 Where the translation of John’s ‘In the beginning was the Word’ had straddled the divide between enthusiasm and a critique of such misreading, Shell is clearly right to hail the scene as outright critique of paper money speculators, from the later vantage of its composition around 1827–8. The representation is extravagant, and comments at a safer distance upon the heady mixture of Napoleonic Europe and the dynamically instantiated thinking pursued by German Idealism.26 In this book I have charted a development from a pattern of sovereign, fiat, modes of social imagination to those based rather in the decentering ideas of perceived legitimacy and credit. By quoting Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation), Shell devastatingly relates that fine slip from belief to credit. The two words in German are nearly synonymous already (the noun Glaube and verb glauben). Schopenhauer fears the previous generation’s philosophy has acted ‘to prepare the credit for that




Romantic Fiat

which was only to be offered on credit.’27 This move into deferral – to an infinite regress or relay – outlines the conceptual genealogy of the promise as a formalist economy with ‘no promise of redemption,’ as one Dictionary of Americanisms phrases its entry on fiat money.28 The greenback functions by offering the government’s backing of a promise to pay, while establishing as its very operational terms the withholding of the thing in itself, the tenor of value. In this sense, we can say, the spirit of a philosophical idealism that is never timely unexpectedly joins with economic interests that only ever compute the short-term realization of profits. Thomas Carlyle’s and Marx’s laments of the exclusivity of ‘cash payment’29 are in this sense already outmoded; modern relations are prepared for a generation earlier in a romantic arena of credit-exchange, one which both produces and critiques the idea that new monetary values give promises of promises and no payment. *** To revisit the language I pursued throughout Chapter 2, the Byronic ‘command to nature’ occurs as a weirdly plangent type of apostrophe, in which the poet directs his language to time itself and to the ocean. Both Childe Harold and the later Byronic narrator of Don Juan associate unproductive life with the sea (citing ‘vain days’ that measure mortal time before moving beyond that reckoning, the expanse in which ‘Life seems the smallest portion of existence’ [Don Juan 4. 100]). And unlike Wordsworth’s characteristically British, en-isling, notion of the sea, Byron’s command that it remain wild summons little of the old Elizabethan Armada-myth, in which storms work for English providence. No doubt that is part of what exile costs Byron’s lyric conjuration:30 Before the Chastener humbly let me bow: O’er hearts divided and o’er hopes destroy’d, Roll on, vain days! full reckless may ye flow, Since Time hath reft whate’er my soul enjoy’d, And with the ills of eld my earlier years alloy’d. (Childe Harold, Canto 2, 922–6) Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin—his control Stops with the shore[.] (Childe Harold, Canto 4, 1603–6)



206

As opposed to Wordsworth’s sense in ‘Tintern Abbey’ that his ‘prayer’ releases a benediction upon the prospect of a future dwelling place in memory, it interests me that Byron places both these invocations at the close of Childe Harold’s two installments, published 1812 and 1818. These are exit-strategies rather than initiating, even obscurely productive, gestures. The strategy nullifies hopes that invocation return anything – however indirect, as I think the returns are from ‘Tintern Abbey’31 – from the repertoire of the nature poet. I don’t think the apostrophic commands to nature serve as envois to their cantos in a ‘textual’ reading tradition. In Jerome Christensen’s terms or in those of McGann, both deft scholars of the published ‘work’ instead, the apostrophes bookend units in the publication culture of ‘Byronism.’ At the same time, Canto 4 looks back with autobiographical intensity across Byron’s life, in dreamlike longing for his daughter Ada. Awaking at sea to start Canto 3 (at the poem’s precise middle, a shaken and anti-epical ‘start’), the poet lashes his damaged will forward in the thinnest simulation of joy and freedom: ‘Once more upon the waters! Yet once more! (3.10). The culmination to Canto 2 had similarly retrieved the Childe’s ‘Good night’ song upon setting forth (‘“Adieu, adieu! My native shore / Fades o’er the water blue”’ [1.118–19]; ‘“Let winds be shrill, let waves roll high / I fear not wave nor wind”’ [1.142–3]). Is this departure something more than what Hans Blumenberg has called ‘the high seas of optical subjectivity,’ the perceptual allegation that the shore flees us instead of the other way around?32 Is it something other than prolonged whistling over the sea’s vast graveyard? Godlike and creaturely levels are often juxtaposed in Byron’s series of personae. McGann highlights ‘the most salient aspect of Byron’s work’ as the idea that ‘he wrote about himself, and that his books, like God’s human creatures, are made in his image and likeness.33 If Jane Austen can be god-like in how she wraps up the last chapter of Mansfield Park, the theology of authorship in Don Juan relates instead to the all-powerfulness of Byron’s lordly habits of digression: ‘But “laissez-aller”— knights and dames I sing, / Such as the times may furnish’ (15.25). Taking up these evolving texts that are in many ways co-extensive with their authors’ lives – or immanent to the very frame of (a) life, like the constant expanding of the big-bang universe – in effect I just point out a growing sprawl of fiat-like cultural practices in the apparently secular worlds of Faust and, now, Don Juan. The modern epics of Goethe and Byron take the fiat beyond the original, sublime but restrictive, moment in Genesis, to represent ever-recurrent sites of genesis, deferral, and increasingly just sheer brute imposition upon what is ‘given,’ whatever it is on which the technological will operates.




Romantic Fiat

Mirroring the Bible’s two modes – the account of creation in Genesis and the Gospel of John’s bearing of the Word – Faust toggles between material instantiations and verbal representations of fiat. The latter half of Faust Part Two is taken up largely with what Marshall Berman has called a ‘tragedy of development’ – and in that tragedy, enabled by Mephistopheles and paper, Faust oversees the building of a massive dyke that overcomes everything in its way: a ‘public’ works project that is instead powered by Faust alone. In a mythic version of the story of enlightenment capital ‘improvement,’ he rides over the old couple, Philemon and Baucis, since Faust covets their land for a tower from which to survey his project. Himself now blind, Faust’s deranged scheme goes forward in frightening single-mindedness: ‘To bring to fruit the most exalted plans, / One mind is ample for a thousand hands’ (lines 11509–10). Insofar as a supernova provides the exemplary image for Taylor of modern practices of belief, an originary power is acknowledged but only in decreation. Whether it be in Childe Harold’s sense that all we mark is for ill, Manfred’s (failed) commands to nature’s elements until he invokes the strong curse upon his soul, or the nihilistic cosmogony of Cain – this also appears to be Byron’s starting position. The costs of material dominion over both nature and humanity itself govern Byron’s representation of modern warfare in Don Juan Canto 7. In the midst of the siege of Ismail, Byron declares ‘“Let there be light! said God, and there was light!” / “Let there be blood!” says man, and there’s a sea!’ (7.41). In line with McGann’s reading of the ‘monstrous joke on the word “awful”’ in Manfred (II.163),34 this astounding moment shows the actualization of war, but places the fact of warfare beside a human verbal miscue: a solecism or blundering with language that approaches a very dark kind of stooging. In his attempt to command nature, Faust too had meant to control the sea in Act Four: an aspiration that results in his alignment with the Emperor and forces of reaction (11035–42).35 As a matter of language here, Byron’s fiat produces not ‘blood’ in verbal realization of the command, but instead the element that most eludes us – ‘sea.’ Yet in the poem’s larger context of the siege, it is human agency alone that of course produces a ‘sea of blood.’ The rest of the ottava rima then spells out this immanent human version of the fiat, while making it clear that power is decreation: The fiat of this spoiled child of the Night (For Day ne’er saw his merits) could decree



208


Later, in an equally original move, Byron escapes laterally from that powerful but simple denunciation of what humanity can do; he transitions from this most savagely indignant tone to a critical perspective that is more far-sighted and oblique. The recurrent target of Byron’s demystifying gusto is, as Eric Strand incisively comments, ‘its specifically economic content.’ ‘In Don Juan the paper credit of the bond market is merged with accumulation in general, and identified as supporting the “Conspiracy or congress to be made— / Cobbling at manacles for all mankind”’ (Dedication 14).36 ‘The wealth of worlds (a wealth of tax and paper),’ is what Juan encounters but cannot yet rightly see upon his arrival in London, where pollution (‘each wreathe of smoke’) fueled by war industry and burgeoning commerce ‘Appeared to him but as a magic vapour’ (10.83). Throughout Don Juan, Byron fulminates on paper money and the move off the gold standard. Paper becomes the surest sign of degenerate times; it embodies the next stage of decline after that signaled by his Age of Bronze (1823), in which all heroic examples have already been used up and the present severely downgraded. Paper is Byron’s symbol of the fundamentally spectral nature of modernity, to raise David Simpson’s recent Marxian language in addressing what is so unnerving about Wordsworth at the origins of commodity culture. But even though his examples, like Charles Taylor’s, may be increasingly various and pluralistic, for Byron modern money is rather more integrated as a belief practice than pre-modern religion had been; money is ‘that most pure imagination’ (12.2). We all believe it. The poetry of money, at its most essential, lies not in the object of valuation but in its enabling of ‘pure imagination.’ Sometimes this insistence is taken up as a mere theme; bullionism can read like a hobbyhorse worthy of Fox News. One passage (‘Oh Gold! Why call we misers miserable? / Theirs is the pleasure that can never pall; / Theirs is the best bower-anchor’ [12.3]) suggests Coleridge, who in this parody would rather have gold than nature’s lime tree for his bower. More often, though, the theme registers as a whole economics of imagination fueled by speculative energy, the historical rift between values of capital, commodity, land, and credulity. In the English Cantos, Juan encounters the ghostliness of paper money and gothic conventions



More evil in an hour, than thirty bright Summers could renovate, though they should be Lovely as those which ripened Eden’s fruit, For war cuts up not only branch, but root. (7.41)

210

Romantic Fiat

Juan was petrified; he had heard a hint Of such a spirit in these halls of old, But thought, like most men, there was nothing in’t Beyond the rumour which such spots unfold, Coined from surviving superstition’s mint, Which passes ghosts in currency like gold, But rarely seen, like gold compared with paper. And did he see this? Or was it a vapour? (16.22) After Juan kills Tom the highwayman in self-defense, he greets the sight of London as the metropolis of the first ‘lamp lighting nation’: Through Groves, so called as being void of trees, (Like lucus with no light); through prospects named Mounts Pleasant, as containing nought to please, Nor much to climb; through little boxes framed Of bricks, to let the dust in at your ease, With ‘to be let,’ upon their doors proclaimed; Through ‘Rows’ most modestly called ‘Paradise,’ Which Eve might quit without much sacrifice;— Through coaches, drays, choked turnpikes, and a whirl Of wheels, and roar of voices and confusion; Here taverns wooing to a pint of ‘purl’, There mails fast flying off like a delusion; There barber’s blocks with periwigs in curl In windows; here the lamplighter’s infusion Slowly distilled into a glimmering glass, (For in those days we had not got to gas:)— The line of lights too up to Charing Cross, Pall Mall, and so forth, have a coruscation Like gold as in comparison to dross, Matched with the Continent’s illumination, Whose cities Night by no means deigns to gloss: The French were not yet a lamp-lighting nation, And when they grew so—on their new-found lanthorn, Instead of wicks, they made a wicked man turn. (Don Juan 11. 21–2; 26)



simultaneously. He plays the role of Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland – ‘Gothic daring shown in English money’ (16.59):

We are a far cry here from the symbolic auspices of M. H. Abrams’s lamp in The Mirror and the Lamp (1953). Seen through the logic of paper money, the locodescriptive poet’s menu of sights all make for deflated variations of what they claim to be (‘Mounts Pleasant, as containing nought to please, / Nor much to climb’). Even night no longer glosses day. The modern moment of the fiat lux is not so much the creation of light as an elimination of aboriginal darkness: a technological refusal to let the night sky ever fully shine. Present in Byron’s own timeframe but not yet in Juan’s, an urban fiat of illumination comes with the gas lamp, which serves even more to establish the indistinction between day and nighttime, blurring their ‘natural’ colors as well as the corresponding human rhythms of movement and consumption. Gas lighting was first utilized at Pall Mall, London, in January 1807; after that, gas lamps were used in Paris by the 1820s and – Byron points out – convicts were routinely hung under them. Dickens could write in A Tale of Two Cities (1860), a novel inspired by Carlyle’s account not just of the revolution, but particularly of the revolutionary Age of Paper: For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long as to conceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their condition.37 The advent of gas lighting amounts to a new dispensation of modern life, broached first in the history of the romantic period. It announces a dun world, through this polluting choice of illumination rather than an origination of everything meant by the ‘first world’ associated with ‘lux.’ Byron flaunts before us repeatedly the idea that modern, groundless, value may not after all take part in an inflationary movement. As opposed to a religious imagination holding as its model the dramatic illumination of the world, the fiat of the English Cantos reflects a shift into the cultures of urban nighttime consumption and policing. A rarified theological concern reappears now all of a sudden in an associative space that is like nothing so much as the arcades of Walter Benjamin: The arcades are a center of commerce in luxury items. In fitting them out, art enters the service of the merchant. Contemporaries never tire of admiring them, and for a long time they remain a drawing point for foreigners. An Illustrated Guide to Paris says: ‘These




Romantic Fiat

arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the passage is a city, a world in miniature.’ The arcades are the scene of the first gas lighting [in Paris].38 This final chapter has followed a serendipitous back-and-forth process, through which Byron’s reading of the Faust legend (first in Manfred) and Goethe’s later use of Byron as a tragically fallen ‘romantic’ symbol of the poet (Faust’s Euphorion), portrays a complex vision of how the romantic imagination might relate to the poetics of fiat beyond its rarified first instance. Though both Faust and Don Juan contrast the positive substance of a pre-existing creation to what humanity can only mar, speculative upon, or dominate – they also point the way forward to new lyric ingenuities precisely by naming the death of any naïve subject position and the eclipse of all pastoral, all ‘nature poetry’ that enjoys a pre-critical stance. *** If not well before this point, here the most basic questions intervene. Are the romantic poets tough and assimilative as a group about this subject matter? Or are they frail Arnoldian angels who seek to command an audience whose everyday lives they can’t engage? Do they, conversely, adapt and game their audiences with this poetics of deferral: this new aesthetic institution of literature? Though Byron’s works definitely suggest the first and third options, almost inevitably after his death the Byronic hero becomes a fragile and over-striving, otherworldly and ‘romantic,’ symbol of poetry. In his dramatic periodization, Goethe acknowledged basing the story of Euphorion on Byron’s death. ‘Ever upward am I heading, / Ever farther must I gaze,’ Euphorion is made to say forebodingly (Faust, 9821–2). ‘Euphorion flies too high, as does paper money,’ Shell avers, and ‘he ends in the sea.’39 As in the responses of so many others, Goethe speaks to the Byronic hero, not to the much more resilient phenomenon of commercial ‘Byronism,’ then? Jerome Christensen has discussed the apposition of Don Juan itself to this Byronism and named it Lord Byron’s Strength, heralding an ‘ethical challenge to the murmurous complacencies of commercial society,’ even though Byron’s was a ‘speculative strategy of the poem and the career.’40 Predictably in one sense – quite oddly, inaccurately, in another – Goethe



212

channels Byron as a figure of modern inflationary imagination, which he diagnoses as broadly romantic. Just here, though, and in what is close to my last turn, I hope to argue in contrast to what is merely reductive about Euphorion as an image of romanticism. Through the death of the ‘poetic spirit’ (but not altogether of poetry as a discourse or as an object of formal materiality), in Euphorion’s downfall one can detect the early gambits of a modern poetic figure that walks away from the crash. Just as the Prologue in Heaven showed the grasshopper always to return to the grass (muck, Quark), already a Baudelaire is implicit in the fall of Euphorion, with his aura in the mud. This last figure is still found in twentieth-century poetry – especially in the boom and bust project of a poet like Hart Crane. While Crane’s own fusion of lyric and epic, The Bridge (1930), has long been understood to pose or suffer the question of whether poetry can sustain a visionary public role when we know it to be an inflation without grounding (a poetry launched from catachresis, composed as if its result were a single word that did not exist before), Crane’s earlier poetry often seems quite savvy about the conditions of depression. Like Marx, one could even say, this modern lyricist displays recognition of his own wares and the forms of credit involved to read them as ‘fictitious capital.’41 Influenced by the visionary mountebanks in Christopher Marlowe’s and Ben Jonson’s plays even more than by Goethe, Crane – in a lyric like ‘Porphyro in Akron,’ or in his first effort at a long poem, ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’ – presents a Euphorion myth for a constellation of later social poetics: of the ad man and candy counter boy; the queer cruising for sailors; the Chaplinesque sidestepper. The other modern poet I have in mind is W. H. Auden, who takes a direct line back to Byron as the example of an ironic and yet committed voice on romanticism. In a curious reprisal of his too-famous remark that poetry makes nothing happen, Auden offers an uncharacteristically buoyant observation in his verse epistle to the dark year 1940, the New Year Letter.42 This poem begins by placing Auden before the judgment of all his artistic and philosophical predecessors: ‘any influential ghost / From those whom he admires the most’ (203). In particular, the letter offers a kind of interpretive digest of romantic and post-romantic thinkers from the vantage of their impact on – and potential use for – the restitution of public culture at a time of total war (‘Though language may be useless’ [206]). In Part Two, Auden suggests that romantic poets (including Wordsworth [215–16]) and social theorists (especially Marx, ‘Obscure in gaslit London’ [216]) were prey to the devilish seduction of ‘moral asymmetric souls’ (220). Yet in the poem, the critical activity of a




Romantic Fiat

kind of art that includes Marx and Wordsworth has enlightening results, effects which are in direct dialogue with the conviction that poetry still makes nothing happen. Even the devil himself cannot downright lie, only provide ‘half-truths we can synthesize’ (220). Auden then gives the magic of agency to the ensuing moment of dialectical reflection that is indeed late, and not particularly defensible in terms of logic: So, hidden in his hocus-pocus, There lies the gift of double focus, That magic lamp which looks so dull And utterly impractical Yet, if Aladdin use it right, Can be a sesame to light. (220) This climactic passage combines the fiat lux, Aladdin’s lamp, and the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves from Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Through an act of poetic guile that at once brings to mind religious sublimity and poetic legerdemain, Auden conjures the work of the poem as some kind of eventful understanding: a ‘sesame to light.’



214

Just as fiat money is backed by no promise of redemption to be convertible on demand into gold, Thomas Love Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics (1837) allege that the poets sought to benefit from ‘tactics of making large promises in order to make paper money out of little or nothing.’1 If the collection is seriously intended as such, how are we to evaluate this as a criticism of ‘Wordsworthian’ nature poetry, especially as it takes on meaning through reception in (paradoxically, deracinating) time? It is interesting, for example, that for all their real ingenuity New Historicist critics never touched Peacock’s Lyrics. In her outstanding 1979 monograph, Peacock Displayed, Marilyn Butler limited remarks to a single nod in a chapter about Crotchet Castle.2 Paul Hamilton since then has offered some of the most searching comments the collection has received; however, the presiding tone is one of informed restraint within a longer historical survey: ‘In economic debates of the time, value-making was not a Nietzschean overcoming of humanity, but a routine choice between contested options.’3 Nonetheless the Lyrics seem to me to map out an interesting – perhaps even unique?4 – overlay between the two main options now largely available to scholarly Wordsworth critique: Peacock appears the natural ally of those who study the self-interested decisions of Wordsworth so as to triumph in a literary marketplace, his carefully-run ‘profession’ of literature; but he is also a predecessor for those now taking up the ‘economy of lyric’ considered as an expressive symptom of emergent capitalism in the lateeighteenth century, through circulation of an imaginative currency by way of analogy to money form. The Paper Money Lyrics seize on Wordsworth’s ‘Moods of my own Mind,’ the subsection of thirteen poems within the 1807 collection of Poems, In Two Volumes. Called out with some justice, this is the section containing 215



Coda: Nature Poets and Fiat Money

Romantic Fiat

the Daffodils poem. The substantive reach of Peacock’s satire returns to the 1790s, on the other hand, and to the emergent conditions of Lyrical Ballads. Economic and imaginative fiat enter into a powerful constellation together beginning with the already famous years of 1797–8. During the months the scheme for Lyrical Ballads was coming together, the Bank Restriction Act was debated over and over in committees of Parliament. Cobbett’s Parliamentary Register for ’97 and ’98 contains much blocked out space for entries like ‘Debate in the Commons on the Bank Restriction Bill,’ followed by many lines of ‘Debate on the Same.’ A different version of ‘routine choice between contested options,’ Cobbett’s journalism recounts something like the monotony of true eventfulness. Similarly, the Annual Register for 1797 argues that unprecedented ‘domestic events,’ foremost the Bank Bill, were of ‘such unusual magnitude and interest’ as to draw air from other major historical developments: ‘Rebellion in Ireland’ and ‘changes in the French Government.’5 To my ear, these ‘domestic events’ sound the same note as Wordsworth’s description of great national events, the referent of both past Terror and the encroaching conditions of savage torpor, in overview of the just-finished decade in his 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Peacock returned to this field of historical associations in interesting ways – updated to reflect interim events6 – when he actually composed his satirical Lyrics in the mid-1820s. The perception of a self-serving lyrical enthusiasm toward nature exercised Peacock’s critical edge. The first poem of the collection, ‘Pan in Town,’ shows how that pastoral figure had become the new voice of urban panic, with the failure of country banks spreading to London: The Country banks are breaking: The London banks are shaking: Suspicion is awaking: E’en quakers now are quaking: Experience seems to settle, That paper is not metal, And promises of payment Are neither food nor raiment; Then, since that, one and all, you Are fellows of no value For genius, learning, spirit, Or any kind of merit That mortals call substantial, Excepting the financial, (Which means the art of robbing



216

By huckstering and jobbing, And sharing gulls and gudgeons Among muckworms and curmudgeons) Being each a flimsy funny On the stream of paper money, All riding by sheet anchors, Of balances at Bankers; Look out! for squalls are coming, That if you stand hum-drumming, Will burst with vengeance speedy, And leave you like the needy Who have felt your clutches greedy, All beggarly and seedy And not worth a maravedi. (7.101–2)7 As Peacock quips in one of the following Lyrics: ‘The promise is not to be kept, that point is very clear; / ’Twas proved so by a Scotch adept who dined with me last year’ (7. 116). The author’s ironic revenge upon the system in response is to serve the economist a menu instead of a meal. In the preface to the volume, Peacock writes of his theme as ‘broken promises and bursting bubbles.’ The included verses, he goes on to explain: will be applicable to every time and place, in which public credulity shall have given temporary support to the safe and economical currency, which consists of a series of paper promises, made with the deliberate purpose, that the promise shall always be a payment, and the payment shall always be a promise. (7.100) Peacock’s ‘A Mood of My Own Mind,’ with its long ecomimetic subtitle8 – ‘Occurring During a Gale of Wind at Midnight, While I Was Writing a Paper on the Currency, by the Light of Two Mould Candles’ – offers the usual ascription of self-satisfied duties to late Wordsworth: I have a pleasant little nook secured from colds and damps, From whence to paper money men I serve out many stamps; From thence a fair percentage gilds my dwelling in the glen; And therefore do I sympathise with paper money men. (7.113) Making one think twice about a possible common thread between political economy and lyric, Peacock’s location of the source of sympathy in



Coda: Nature Poets and Fiat Money 217

Romantic Fiat

‘a fair percentage’ is interesting. This caricature of the ‘late’ Wordsworth takes fright after receiving news in the beginning of the poem ‘that out of all their mass of promises to pay, / The devil alone will get his due: he’ll take them at his day’ (7.113). At this point in its development, however, the protest that Wordsworth fears the devil’s revenge, along with the conclusion of the poem in which the paper money men are blessed, might be felt to run up against the stronger model of its original on the same matters. Peacock’s satire loses its point when it gets down to an evocation of the devil’s work that – far from being inimical to Wordsworth’s sense of wind-picked exposures – links up immediately with the address to Dorothy I have so often cited from ‘Tintern Abbey’: The storm is on the mountain side, the wind is all around; It sweeps across the lake and vale, it makes a mighty sound: A rushing sound, that makes me think of what I’ve heard at sea, ‘The devil in a gale of wind is as busy as a bee.’ (7.114) Then this ‘Wordsworth’ continues: I hear amid the eddying blast a sound among the hills, Which to my fancy seems the sound of bursting paper mills. A money-grinding paper mill blows up with such a sound, As shakes the green geese from their nests from many miles around; Oh woe to him who seeks the mill pronouncing sternly ‘Pay!’ A spell like ‘open sesame’ which evil sprites obey. (7.114–15) Against Auden’s ‘open sesame’ as a kind of burnishing of the ‘dull’ to elicit a cosmopolitan irony and poetic insight, Peacock in ‘A Mood of My Own Mind’ imagines to have blown up the swindler – the Pedlar – in his economy of lyric and sent the poet running, all by uttering the word ‘Pay!’ He imagines, that is, a straight stab to the heart of the poetic system.9 And if the mere promise of a promise to pay enables such a cozy existence for the lyricist, this indeed is the word to get out to effect what Paul Hamilton calls a run on art. For those seeking an outlet or reply to these arguments, I see two possibilities from within the work itself of Wordsworth and Coleridge, as the two most important and common targets of such a parody when



218

it is at all serious. The first involves recognizing Peacock’s topical satire instead as a dynamic of universal history; we might choose not to countermand and whittle away at Peacock’s terms through whatever comes to hand, but to enlarge upon them radically. Paper Money Lyrics indeed is brilliant from the start in simply identifying the promise as the encompassing form and problem in romantic lyric. Many of Coleridge’s best-known works, of course, are structured according to a promissory elaboration based on a starting position of want. Both the philosophically formalist and spiritually redemptive economies of this position would recommend his thinking not in terms of the Christian ideas of apocalypse and millennium to which it is often ascribed, but to the very different terms of a range of contemporary writings on the temporality of the messianic promise.10 ‘Coleridge is tortured by his own promise, his reputation as the most promising man. That’s the myth of Coleridge.’11 To respond, on the other hand, by following close along the grain of Wordsworth’s project puts us in line with another Cavellian endeavor, that of re-encountering and finally inheriting the everyday. This construction of time, in which even the continuities to be strived for involve no explicit pledges, could not be further from messianism. Wordsworth understands there to be no promises placed upon our future in the formal sense; or else he images the promise, exactly, of nothing sure. No explicit promises chart the work – whether through their lack or fulfillment – as a set of desires and plotted commitments. In the place of such a framework there is a resolute but absolutely vulnerable testament to ever-renewed continuation. The last philosophical and political question we might put to Wordsworth asks whether his ability to value things that simply are extends also to those that are simply by virtue of their potential.



Coda: Nature Poets and Fiat Money 219

Introduction: Fiat in Lyric 1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 text), ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 195. ‘The origin keeps itself concealed in the beginning,’ writes Martin Heidegger in What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 152. 2. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776); quoted by Eric Foner in The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998), 16. 3. Hugh Blair telescopically envisions this change by contrasting the sublime to what is merely the sublime style. Blair exhibits the difference between ‘“God said, let there be light, and there was light”’ – which he dubs ‘striking and sublime’ – and the ‘fallen’ thought and bathos of saying, ‘the Sovereign Arbiter of nature, by the potent energy of a single word, commanded the light to exist.’ See Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 223. I’d like to thank Eric Gidal for alerting me to this passage. 4. Taken more or less at random from the Kant teaching text I use, a good example of this widespread philosophical ‘fiatism’ is the following statement from the Critique of Judgment: ‘For unless such a point of view were adopted there would be no means of saving the claim to universal validity of the judgments of taste’; Basic Writings of Kant, ed. Allen W. Wood (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 312. The force of Hazlitt’s objection appears in his essay, ‘Coleridge’s Literary Life,’ where it comes to this head: As for the great German oracle Kant … He has but one method of getting over difficulties: – when he is at a loss to account for any thing, and cannot give a reason for it, he turns short round upon the inquirer, and says that it is self-evident. If he cannot make good an inference upon acknowledged premises, or known methods of reasoning, he coolly refers the whole to a new class of ideas, and the operation of some unknown faculty, which he has invented for the purpose, and which he assures you must exist, – because there is no other proof of it. His whole theory is machinery and scaffolding – an elaborate account of what he has undertaken to do, because no one else has been able to do it – and an assumption that he has done it, because he has undertaken it. If the will were to go for the deed, and to be confident were to be wise, he would indeed be the prince of philosophers. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930–3), 16: 123–4. 5. For two discussions that successfully merge literary study with romanticera economic history, see Robert Mitchell, Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (New York 220



Notes

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

and London: Routledge, 2007), esp. 135–40, and Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 153–96. Peter Fenves, Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (New York: Routledge, 2003), 32–74. For the argument that lyric poetry is not fictive, see Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. Marilynn J. Rose, 2nd edn. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 233–4. I owe my awareness of Hamburger’s account to the discerning comment of Paul H. Fry in A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 43. J. L. Austin establishes a parallel between how his ‘performative’ and the common ‘imperative’ are used (How to Do Things With Words, ed. J. O Urmson and Marina Sbisa, 2nd edn. [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975], 6). His notorious comment to follow – ‘I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem’ (9) – implies that something about the poetic language renders it inoperative; poetry is neither happily performative nor subsumed under the presumed default of a ‘descriptive’/constative language model. Throughout this book with varying levels of explicitness, I argue that we should follow Austin – despite his flip tone – in thinking of this quality as the poem’s ‘immodality’: a word he uses with some resonance at the start of the paragraph famously ending ‘our word is our bond’ (10). William Cobbett, Grammar of the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 44. William Cobbett, Rural Rides, ed. George Woodcock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 199. Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1996), 459–67. Paul de Man, ‘Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric,’ in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 239–62: 262. Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); subsequently cited by page number in parentheses. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 58. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 59–60. Susan Stewart is equally compelling on such issues in ‘The Privations of Night and the Origins of Poiesis,’ in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–17. Oblique to Agamben’s discussion, Adorno drives absence as a critique of presence more strongly, taking Hegel to court for a spurious celebration of what is never ‘mere’ about facticity. See Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 158–72. Terada points out ‘that a “fact” is not mere existence but existence recognized conceptually, already raised to consciousness’ (160). ‘Hegel’s extension of facticity to mental entities is no longer productive when it begins to imply that ideas back-projected by history are any more factive than alternative past or future possibilities’ (166). Shelley, Frankenstein, 195.



Notes 221

Notes

18. De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 261. Northrop Frye in ‘Approaching the Lyric’ compares lyric displacement to when ‘a chimpanzee crossed in love starts digging holes in the ground instead’; Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 31–7: 32. 19. Anne-Lise François, ‘“Hum-men”: In Place of Further Development’ (In Honor of Geoffrey Hartman), The Wordsworth Circle 37.1 (Winter 2006), 19–22: 19. 20. Paradise Lost quotations, by book and line, are from the Norton Critical second edition, ed. Scott Elledge (New York: Norton, 1993). 21. Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 171. 22. Ibid., 171–2. 23. Ross Hamilton gives a short, cogent rundown of Badiou on set theory in Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 5–7. 24. Lord Byron’s favorite American, George Washington, in life declined the very powers he was understood to embody, and transitioned in death from the subject of monumentalized art to the face on the dollar. 25. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970 [1961]), 179. See James L. Kugel, The Bible as it Was (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 53–64, for a condensed summary of the ancient interpretation of Genesis 1:1–2:3. 26. John Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 64; subsequently cited by page number in parentheses. 27. German for Reading Knowledge, 4th edn., ed. Hubert Jannach and Richard Alan Korb (Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1998), 252. 28. For Emile Benveniste (Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek [Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971], 231–8), Austin fails to honor the methodological promise of keeping his different materials rigorously separate. In The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), Shoshana Felman draws attention to Benveniste’s discussion, and reads that drama of inevitable ‘loss of the ground’ as Austin’s Don Juanism: he always knows ‘the promise will not be kept’ (64–9: 66). 29. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 25. A slightly different version of the remark, appearing in Austin’s essay ‘Performative Utterances,’ is quoted by Felman in The Literary Speech Act, 65. 30. Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 155–91. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). See especially Butler’s instancing of ‘Let there be light!’ as an Austinian ‘masquerading’ performative (50–1). 31. Butler, Excitable Speech, 2. 32. Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, 173. 33. I take the phrase ‘plenary power’ from Tom Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 39. 34. Two sensitive accounts of these poems are G. Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins



222

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

University Press, 2004), 166–7, 180–7, and Christopher R. Miller, The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 91–5. John Keats, Hyperion, Book 1, line 391, in The Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), 255. Herbert F. Tucker, ‘Dramatic Monolog and the Overhearing of Lyric,’ in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, 226–43: 243. See The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longmans, 1969), 427. I’d like to thank Christopher R. Miller for drawing my attention to this poem, as well as for pointing out the dynamic of its ‘let be’/‘let there be’ interplay alongside the more famous ‘Ode on the Poetical Character.’ Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 115. Virgil’s sixth eclogue contains the lines ‘A Shepherd / Should feed fat sheep and sing a slender song’; cited by James Longenbach in The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 2. Wai Chee Dimock, ‘Epic and Lyric: The Aegean, The Nile, and Whitman,’ in Walt Whitman, Where Present Becomes Future, ed. David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 17–36. Thus Ian Balfour quotes Walter Benjamin on the ‘magic’ immediacy of language as mediation: ‘All language communicates itself in itself; it is in the purest sense the “medium” of communication. Mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem for linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is magic.’ See Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz and trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 316–17; quoted in Balfour’s The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 8. This is Giorgio Agamben’s characterization of language and the ‘desubjectivized I’ in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), 140. Motlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 7. David Bromwich has written a widely informed polemic against this idea in ‘Why Authors Do Not Create Their Own Worlds,’ in A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 247–63. Paul de Man, ‘The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,’ in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 6. Summarizing her own work in Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), Angela Esterhammer writes: ‘[T]he Romantic Period saw not just a heightened awareness, but indeed a crisis, of performative language: the Romantics’ experience of how socio-political authority as perpetuated and manipulated by public speech acts (declarations, constitutions, laws, censorship, etc.) clashed with traditional ideas about the effectiveness of an individual poetic voice … the biblical account of God creating a world through acts of speech (a traditional analogy for poetic creation).’ See ‘Performative



Notes 223

47.

48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

54.

55.

Notes Language and Speech-Act Theory,’ in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 452–9: 455. In his book Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), Jacques Khalip offers a full-scale discussion of Shelley companionable to the one I briefly mark (97–132). A widely influential study that draws often and with little critical mediation from the romantic poets, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), marks just the most recent and massive effort to rehearse the limits of secularism. Geoffrey Hartman’s writings scatter illuminating remarks on fiat. His most direct observations can be found in ‘Words, Wish, Worth’ in The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), 90–119. On the other hand, Roland Barthes shows the desire to extricate language from the conflictive stipulations even of modal speech; see The Neutral, trans. Rosalind Kraus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 45. I allude to Geoffrey Hartman’s essay, ‘The Psycho-Aesthetics of Romantic Moonshine: Wordsworth’s Profane Illumination,’ The Wordsworth Circle 37.1 (Winter 2006), 8–14. Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1997), 14. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 44, 55, 46. A few of these studies are Sara Guyer, Romanticism After Auschwitz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Khalip, Anonymous Life; and Nancy Yousef, Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008); Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2007) and Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009).

1. Romanticism and ‘Exaggeration of Thought’ 1. In Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Madden (London: Routledge, 1972), 75. Hereafter cited as RS. 2. Charles Altieri, ‘The Sensuous Dimension of Literary Experience: An Alternative to Materialist Theory,’ New Literary History 38 (2007), 71–98: 71–2. I thank Brian McGrath for pointing out this essay. 3. I am thinking again of Blair’s use of the fiat in contrasting the biblical sublime with the ‘sublime style’: a passage found in Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla’s selection from the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783); The Sublime, 213–23: 223. Massimiliano Demata supports this view of Jeffrey and Blair (‘Prejudiced Knowledge: Travel Literature in the Edinburgh



224

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

Review,’ British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002], 87). I draw from Rodolphe Gasché in The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 18. The diverse array of kindred literary critical texts on ‘poetic thought’ includes not only Jarvis (noted below) but also James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Helen Vendler, Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Robert Von Hallberg, Lyric Powers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. 1–32; ‘Thinking in Verse,’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 98–116; and ‘What Does Art Know?,’ in Aesthetics and the Work of Art: Adorno, Kafka, Richter, ed. Peter de Bolla and Stefan H. Uhlig (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 57–70. Cavell’s engagement with romanticism has appeared as a subject in many collections devoted to his work, but despite his having written now on Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and (most recently) Jane Austen, there has been no specific reckoning of his stake in British romanticism. ‘Questions and Answers,’ in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 225–39, offers an illuminating window on his views of canonical romantics. Alternate and comparably intriguing paths into a revitalized interest in ‘romantic’ Hume can be found in Gilles Deleuze’s study, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and Anne-Lise François, ‘To Hold in Common and To Know By Heart: The Prevalence of Gentle Forces in Humean Empiricism and Romantic Experience,’ Yale Journal of Criticism 7.1 (1994), 139–62. For the fuller view that ‘Jeffrey’s opposition to the Lake School has on occasion encouraged the mistaken view that he was antipathetic to Romantic literature,’ and that ‘Jeffrey was both an enlightenment thinker and a keen follower of Romantic literature,’ see the introduction to British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review, ed. Demata and Wu, 7, 10. Orrin N. C. Wang, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Orrin N. C. Wang, ‘Kant’s Strange Light: Romanticism, Periodicity, and the Catachresis of Genius,’ Diacritics 30.4 (Winter 2000), 15–37: 20. One remembers Foucault’s influential ‘hypothesis’ that Kant’s enlightenment ‘is located, in a sense, at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise.’ ‘What is Enlightenment?,’ in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 303–19: 309. In The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), Giorgio Agamben locates ‘life’ as ‘what cannot be defined, yet, precisely for this reason, must be ceaselessly articulated and divided’



Notes 225

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

Notes (13). Also see Ross Wilson, ed., The Meaning of ‘Life’ in Romantic Poetry and Poetics (London: Routledge, 2008); Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, eds., Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–38. See Michael Taussig’s essay in the collection, ‘Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic,’ which makes the point that ‘The mystery is heightened, not dissipated, by unmasking’ (273). Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 227. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 163. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1996), 15–20. An instance, singled out only for its quality, is Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), xv. Synergy between clear-sightedness and magic in poetry is apparent, for example, in the way Jonathan Culler writes about ‘demystified apostrophe’ in Baudelaire; see his influential essay ‘Apostrophe’ in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, and Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 144. Since it marshals both old and fresh historicist arguments and attributes them to Wordsworth’s awareness with complex credit, David Simpson’s Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) affords a compelling occasion for discussing what ‘post’ New Historicism could look like. More or less at random, these terms come respectively from John Ruskin’s ‘Of the Pathetic Fallacy’ (The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings, ed. John D. Rosenberg [New York: George Braziller, 1963], 62) and Karl Marx on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (as quoted by Karl Ameriks in Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Interpretation [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006], 238). See Eric Lindstrom, ‘Imagining Things as They Are,’ Studies in Romanticism, forthcoming. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 95–117. Quoted in ibid., 115. The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 136, 162–3. Theodor Adorno treats this problem as the ‘untruthfully affirmative’ character of the ontological need; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 65. Giorgio Agamben writes on the disturbing construction of ‘a new theodicy’ in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), 20. Leibniz’s Théodicée is succinctly treated by Haun Saussy in ‘The Case of God Defended,’ in A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 340–5. John Ashbery, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1985), 151.



226

26. W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 24–75. 27. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 153. 28. ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ line 27; John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), 279–81. 29. William Christie, ‘Francis Jeffrey in Recent Whig Interpretation of Romantic Literary History,’ ELH 76 (2009), 577–97: 584. 30. See Robert Baker, The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), esp. 1–90. 31. Citations are from William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). I cite this volume afterwards by page as LB. 32. See Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern, 171. 33. Wheareas Culler theorizes poetry’s ‘timeless present … better seen as the temporality of writing,’ Dimock shows Whitman to be a poet of ‘nonsurvival,’ who for that reason partakes of a deathless future through the ‘lyric pronoun’; see Culler, ‘Apostrophe,’ 149; Wai Chee Dimock, ‘Epic and Lyric: The Aegean, The Nile, and Whitman,’ in Walt Whitman, Where Present Becomes Future, ed. David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 17–36: 18, 31. 34. David Ferry, The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth’s Major Poems (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959). 35. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn., ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 359–60. This edition is cited by page number as SPP. 36. The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). That usage speaks to McGann’s stated ‘general purpose … to make a fair representation of the work (as well as the kind of work) being read in the period, of the poetry that was in more or less general circulation’ (xxiv). 37. Rei Terada, ‘Thinking for Oneself: Realism and Defiance in Arendt,’ ELH 71.4 (2004), 839–65: 840. 38. David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 22. 39. See John L. Mahoney, Wordsworth and the Critics: The Development of a Critical Reputation (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001), 4–5. 40. At one end of the spectrum of judgment on poetic discourse’s relation to rational discourse, Mutlu Konuk Blasing argues that while ‘poetic forms can host rational discourse’ – and ‘[l]iterary study is a rational enterprise, of course’ – poetry itself is ‘a nonrational linguistic system that is logically and genetically prior to its rational deployment’; Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1–2, 3, 6. 41. Jacques Lezra, ‘Foucault’s Perfection,’ Contemporary Literature 35.3 (Autumn 1994), 593–623: 616. 42. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, eds., Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834 (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1996), 1. 43. Heidi Thomson concludes that ‘[a]fter considering how a range of characters, from the little maid to Simon Lee to the forsaken Indian woman, try to



Notes 227

44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58.

Notes cope with disaster, “Tintern Abbey” is Wordsworth’s experiment to consider how he himself copes’; ‘“We Are Two”: The Address to Dorothy in “Tintern Abbey,”’ Studies in Romanticism 40.4 (Winter 2001), 531–46: 535. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 3. See Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 65–6. This ‘releasement’ (Gelassenheit) comprises a version of the English ‘let’ imperative whose importance is hard to place determinately among English language poets, but also cannot be overstressed. Mayo’s remark is quoted by Aidan Day in his student guide, Romanticism (London: Routledge, 1996), 39–40, a book that uses Mayo’s research to structure discussion. Sara Guyer, Romanticism After Auschwitz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 47. In his essay ‘Wordsworth and the Ethics of Things’ (PMLA 123.2 [March 2008], 390–404), Adam Potkay offers compelling remarks on ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ in light of Wordsworth’s affirmation of the unmade, ‘the things that include us’ (390–1). Cavell makes illuminating and informal remarks throughout ‘Questions and Answers,’ in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, 225–39. I quote at 227 in the sentence just above. Richard Berkeley deploys the terms of Heidegger (‘ontology of understanding’ [8]) and Gadamer (‘fusion of horizons’ [9]) to engage this anterior ‘prejudice-structure’ of interpretation; see Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 7–10. Barbara Johnson writes: ‘When de Man says that we can get “Obsession” from “Correspondences” [two Baudelaire poems] but not the other way around, this is a way of repeating Freud’s experience of the disruption of the pleasure principle described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a study in which Freud grappled with the very limits of psychoanalysis. Freud noticed that there were experiences or facts that seemed to contradict his notion of the primacy of the pleasure principle in human life (negative pleasures, the repetition compulsion, the death instinct).’ See Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 195. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1982), 9–10. I think of Hannah Arendt’s phenomenological reading of ‘appearances’: ‘no elimination of errors or dispelling of illusions can arrive at a region beyond appearance’ (The Life of the Mind, one-volume edition [San Diego: Harvest, 1978], 26). Jacques Derrida discusses the indissociable link between ‘there is’ and ‘it gives’ for Heidegger’s ‘Es gibt’; Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 20–2. See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Prayer Without Demand’; The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), 227–35. See Emmanuel Levinas’s 1946 essay, ‘There is; Existence without Existents,’ in The Levinas Reader, 29–36: 32. Paul de Man supports his view of the freezing process of anthropomorphism (‘not just a trope, but an identification on the level of substance’)



228

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74.

by mentioning how Ovid’s stories ‘culminate’ and ‘halt’ in the arrival at a proper name; ‘Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric,’ in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 241. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle 1, lines 15–16; The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 504. British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review, ed. Demata and Wu, 1–2. Paul H. Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 42–59. The Oxford Authors, Byron, ed. Jerome J. McGann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 275. Though he favors what Keats would call ‘consequitive reasoning’ and yokes thought to problem solving, John Dewey tries to have it both ways when he says ‘These imaginative enterprises often precede thinking of the close-knit type and prepare the way for it’; What is Thought? (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1910), 3. Peter Fenves, Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (New York: Routledge, 2003), 32–74: 33. Mahoney, Wordsworth and the Critics, 17. Jane Austen, Emma [1816], ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 194, 190. See ‘Thinking,’ in The Wittgenstein Reader, 2nd edn., ed. Anthony Kenny (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 120–34: 122. The work of Richard Eldridge is exemplary for its knowledge of such a territory, while Tim Milnes’s writing on Wittgenstein and the image of ‘the riverbed of thought’ is also striking in this connection (Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 19–24). For J. L. Austin’s romanticism, see Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 51. Michael Wood, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Paul H. Fry, A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 43. Even quietism can be marked as assertively volatile with the English ‘let.’ In what is at times an astonishing study (The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004]), Jacob Taubes originally writes in English rather than German: ‘I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it go down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it as’ (103). Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thinker as Poet,’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 8. Lambert Zuidervaart, ‘Truth and Authentication: Heidegger and Adorno in Reverse,’ in Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions, ed. Iain Macdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 22–46: 23. Here ‘Only a God Can Save Us,’ the posthumously published interview account of Heidegger’s relation to National Socialism from the 1930s on, is very illuminating and comparatively accessible; see The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 91–116.



Notes 229

230

Notes

1. Paul H. Fry, A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 106. 2. For Taylor’s poem, see The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 252–3. 3. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 112. 4. The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1. 5. Sigmund Freud, ‘Animism, Magic, and the Omnipotence of Thoughts,’ in Totem and Taboo (1913), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 21 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1958), XIII, 75–99. 6. John Keats, Hyperion, Book One, lines 286-95; Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), 254–5. 7. Keats, Complete Poems, 266. 8. Keats remarked in a September 1819 letter to Richard Woodhouse: ‘I shall persist in not publishing The Pot of Basil—It is too smokeable’; Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 298. 9. Hartman concludes his essay: ‘The philosophical critique of instrumental reason is preceded by a poetic critique of instrumental language in the form of a maieutic and divinatory poetry. Wordsworth before Heidegger’; Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), 206. 10. Tony Fry, A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999), 52. 11. For Hamburger, ‘lyric’ pertains only to what she calls ‘the statement of a statement-subject’ and does not fall into the aesthetic of fictional narrative; Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. Marilynn J. Rose, 2nd edn. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 233–4. 12. The sexuality of all this is something Byron plays with relentlessly in the commands of Don Juan. The Sultana Gulbeyaz is surprisingly unable to seduce Juan in Canto 5; she loses her appeal by being so accustomed to commanding; see The Oxford Authors, Byron, ed. Jerome J. McGann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 575–7. 13. I modify slightly the ‘plain prose’ translation in Goethe, Selected Verse, ed. David Luke (London: Penguin, 1964), 52. 14. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10. 15. William Gilpin remarks in his oft-cited manual of the picturesque, Observations on the River Wye (1782 [5th edn. 1800]): ‘From a stand near the road it [the abbey] is seen to more advantage’ (49). Among the many commentaries on ‘Tintern Abbey’ I single out three to start. In his essay ‘Pictures of the Mind: Iron and Charcoal, “Ouzy” Tides and “Vagrant Dwellers” at Tintern, 1798,’ Charles J. Rzepka offers a clear-sighted and thorough recontextualization of these themes in the poem after several major historicist ‘errors that have accrued in its transmission’; Studies in Romanticism 42.2 (Summer 2003), 155–85: 155. A persuasive account that recasts ‘Tintern



2. The Command to Nature

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

Abbey’ in the political tradition of a Miltonic picturesque – rather than the later tourist mode associated with Gilpin – is found in Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). In Literature, Life, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), Richard Eldridge considers the poem at length through the interface of poetry and philosophy (69–100). Modern scholars of the European Reformation(s) agree that this famous statement is at least partly apocryphal; Roland H. Bainton’s biography of Luther had popularized its drama; Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Abingdon Press, 1950), 185. For the distinctively Protestant ‘conception of the calling’ (Beruf) that Wordsworth inherits as a poet from Milton, see Max Weber’s account in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), 79–92. W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003), ix. Sebald, ‘Air War and Literature’; On the Natural History of Destruction, 39–40. I quote from the Two-Part Prelude of 1799, 1.1, and the 1805/1850 texts at 1.271 and 1.269, respectively. Throughout, my reading copy of all versions of the poem is The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979). The role double-entry bookkeeping plays in literary history is discussed by Celeste Langan in Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 62–4, and by Mary Poovey in A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). The idea of repeating and perfecting – if only through Beckettian modes of ‘better’ failure – the logics of past revolutionary violence is central to Slavoj Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008). See Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 92–144. William Gilpin, The Life of Bernard Gilpin (London: John and James Rivington, 1753), 36; The Life of Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester (London: Charles Rivington, 1755); The Lives of John Wicliff and of the Most Eminent of his Disciples (London: J. Robson, 1765). Marjorie Levinson’s paradigmatic essay in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems notes the dispossession of the abbey while drawing the opposite conclusion from mine. Reading the poem by what she claims are ‘its own lights,’ Levinson marks the Cistercian community as an institutional realm that the poem counters and makes private, as though Wordsworth’s act was no more than an untroubled repetition of ‘Protestant argument’; see ‘Insight and Oversight: Reading “Tintern Abbey,”’ in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 14–57: 16. A similar silhouette is pictured of St Mary’s Abbey, York, which appears on the cover of Francis Aidan Cardinal Gaquet’s edition of William Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland [1827] (Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1988). See pages 50–150 for Cobbett’s stirring and highly partisan account of the destruction of the abbeys under Henry VIII. See Simon Jarvis on the link ‘From idolatry to ideology,’ and on Wordsworth’s alignment of ‘Happiness’ with monasticism in portions of The Recluse



Notes 231

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

Notes project; Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 56–83; 111–32. Geoffrey Hartman writes in many places about Wordsworth’s unwillingness fully to admit visionary apocalypse; in particular see Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787– 1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), where he notes of ‘The Solitary Reaper’ that ‘it hides the intense and even apocalyptic self-consciousness from which it took rise; it is generically a veiling of its source’ (18). David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 71–3, 86. The way the poem records the very ‘motion our human blood’ (line 45) recollects the traumatic experience Rousseau narrates in the Reveries of a Solitary Walker [1782], trans. Peter France (London: Penguin, 1974), 35–45. During his second walk, in the midst of a rambling meditation on rare Paris flowers Rousseau is hit ‘at full tilt’ by a gentleman’s Great Dane (38). Regaining consciousness, he describes how ‘I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me’ (39). In the first Landing Place of The Friend, Coleridge presents linked historical reflections on many of the historical religious thinkers and philosophers I mention in this chapter. He is especially gripping on the subject of Luther, whose vehemence Coleridge likens to Rousseau, while reckoning their different historical moments; The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke; Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 4 (Princeton: Bollingen, 1969), I, 127–43. A point of emphasis Richard Eldridge also captures: ‘Given his unresolved uncertainties, the poet’s “dare to hope” is more apt than “claim to know”’ (Literature, Life, and Modernity, 90). Instead ‘“Tintern Abbey” shows a consciousness achieving a measure of composure in time, without intellectual certainties. It points to and exemplifies a path between dogmatism and nomadism, intellectual and moral alike’ (85). Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 36. I cite ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ by page in subsequent references. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, one-volume edition (San Diego: Harvest, 1978), 197; cited hereafter as LM. Susan Stewart, ‘In Praise of Dejection’; but also see ‘What Praise Poems are For,’ PMLA 120.1 (2005), 235–45. A concern treated by Michael Wood in Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and in a hulking, oblique way by Stathis Gourgouris in Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). This interplay between marked and unmarked parts of a semiotic field assumes a major role in the title essay of Hartman’s Unremarkable Wordsworth. Robert M. Ryan, Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31–2. Jeffrey repeatedly invokes the adjective German (the first time in italics), but for historical reasons never the proper noun (RS 68–9). See William Christie, ‘Francis Jeffrey in Recent Whig Interpretation of Romantic Literary History,’ ELH 76 (2009), 577–97. Particularly in contrast to Gifford at the Quarterly Review (114–26), William Hazlitt’s essay on ‘Mr Jeffrey’ in The Spirit of the Age (1825) gives a balanced portrayal of journal



232

39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

and editor with ‘little of the cant of morality’ and ‘quite free from that of religion’ (128). However, Jeffrey ‘descends too readily to a sort of special pleading in defense of home truths and natural feelings’; The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930–3), 11: 128–9. See Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 19–25. From Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets (1818); Complete Works, 5: 162. This is Nicholas Boyle on Luther; German Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 30. Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’; Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 235–49. Peter Fenves introduces Schwärmerei – ‘an act of “swarming”’ – in his Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 101. Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 13–14. Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, Prose, and Letters (New York: Library of America, 2008), 153. The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 64–5. Moore’s own poem could reflect a similar jumbling of desire, overshooting the immediate context that lay along her path: Bryher’s awful marriage, and Moore’s own uncertain status in the group with Bryher and H.D. J. G. Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftlehre and Other Writings (1797– 1800), trans. Daniel Breazeale (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 7. For a view of Fichte that radically desubjectivizes his ‘I’ and works against my quick reading through Moore, see the remarks by Paul de Man in ‘Kant and Schiller’; Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 129–62: 160. A detail offered by Allen W. Wood in Kant (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 3. William Godwin, Fleetwood: or, The New Man of Feeling [1805, 1832], ed. Pamela Clemit (London: Pickering, 1992), 31. Ibid., 19. Whereas in Gray’s Bard the poet had been imagined as the last site of cultural resistance to despotism. Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 103–4. Wordsworth’s anthropological concern for marginal persons is the subject of Alan Bewell’s excellent book, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 5–11. For a sensitive book on the topic in general – not in Wordsworth – see William Waters, Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).



Notes 233

Notes

57. Three exemplary studies with such emphasis are Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems, 1795–1798 (Sussex: Harvester, 1979); Lucy Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); and Paul Magnuson, Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 58. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 105–30. 59. A point made in repeated and witty ways by J. L. Austin; see Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 60. René Descartes, Meditations and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. Desmond M. Clarke (London: Penguin, 1998), 24. 61. Ibid., 23. 62. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 87. 63. A very different conclusion drawn along similar lines is found in Sebald’s quotation of Elaine Scarry; On the Natural History of Destruction, 19–20. 64. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 text), ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 81. 65. For ‘The Table Turned,’ see LB 108–9. 66. Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, 165–79; Paul Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 135–6. 67. Arendt quotes (with ellipses) from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 36–7. 68. See the chapter, ‘What is the Scandal of Skepticism’ in Stanley Cavell’s Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 132–54. 69. The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), 160. 70. Trilling is quoted by Geoffrey Hartman in ‘Wordsworth before Heidegger’ (202). 71. Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth (New York: Norton, 2000), 431. 72. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 77. 73. Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 431. 74. Stanley Cavell, ‘Being Odd, Getting Even’; In Quest of the Ordinary, 108. 75. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), 140; de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 172–8. 76. See Anne-Lise François, ‘“O Happy Living Things”: Frankenfoods and the Bounds of Wordsworthian Natural Piety’ (Diacritics 33.2 [2005], 42–70), where she writes: ‘In his Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason (1793), Kant praised the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6:9–15 and Luke 11:2–4 for “capturing the spirit of prayer” by hardly being a prayer at all, as it does not ask for things to be otherwise but only that we may be what we already stand to be by virtue of the act of prayer itself … – in other words, it expresses a wish which to have is to have granted’ (66). 77. Marcel Mauss, On Prayer, ed. W. S. F. Pickering (New York: Durkheim Press, 2003), 22.



234

78. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 79. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 27–8. 80. Adam Potkay has observed the poem’s ‘pseudo-logical’ use of ‘therefore’ with similar interest, in which ‘Wordsworth faintly parodies the narrative logic of consequence or the philosophical logic of deduction’; ‘Wordsworth and the Ethics of Things,’ PMLA 123.2 (March 2008), 390–404: 399. 81. Heidi Thomson, ‘“We Are Two”: The Address to Dorothy in “Tintern Abbey,”’ Studies in Romanticism 40.4 (Winter 2001), 531–46: 533, 535. 82. Bromwich cites from The Origins of Totalitarianism; see Disowned by Memory, 22. 83. See Mauss, On Prayer, 23, 32–4, 37. 84. Bromwich, Disowned by Memory, 91. 85. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 33. 86. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 87. 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads; The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Owen and Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), I. 118. 88. Ibid., I: 138. 89. Laura Quinney, The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), xiii; also ‘“Tintern Abbey,” Sensibility, and the Self-Disenchanted Self,’ ELH 64 (1997), 131–56. 90. Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, eds., Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3. For Taussig in this collection, see his essay ‘Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic’ (272–305). 91. Especially in the work of Kenneth Burke, Owen Barfield, and Northrop Frye. 92. M. H. Abrams, ‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,’ in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), 229. 93. Ibid., 201. 94. In a distinctive – if not to say strange – text, McGann ebulliently confronts this bias in Are the Humanities Inconsequent? Interpreting Marx’s Riddle of the Dog (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009). 95. Paul Muldoon, Madoc: A Mystery (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991); Charles J. Rzepka, ‘Sacrificial Sites, Place-Keeping, and “Pre-History” in Wordsworth’s “Michael,”’ European Romantic Review 15 (2004), 205–13; J. H. Prynne, Field Notes: ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge Printers, 2007). 96. My reading text for Coleridge’s verse is The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997); for ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,’ see 138–40. 97. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1971), I: 334–6. 98. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 65–6.



Notes 235

Notes

99. Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 27. 100. LB 351. 101. Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 89. 102. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, ed. and trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 100–1. 103. Unless noted, translations refer to The Harper Collins Study Bible, ed. Wayne A. Meeks et al. (London: HarperCollins, 1993). One of Walter Benjamin’s notes on Baudelaire, collected in ‘Central Park,’ offers an intriguing reflection on a comparable source from Judges: ‘To interrupt the course of the world – that was Baudelaire’s deepest intention. The intention of Joshua. Not so much the prophetic one, for he gave no thought to any sort of reform’; The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings and trans. Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 145. 104. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal, April 15, 1802; The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 85–6. 105. The unpointed consonants of this name in biblical Hebrew refer both to a ‘female speaker’ (or soothsayer, DBRH) and to the noun for ‘word’/‘thing’ (davar). 106. Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 94–105; page numbers cited parenthetically.

3. Wordsworth’s Useless Fiat in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ 1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 42. 2. I should say, he boldly addressed Llandaff in a letter he did not publish! 3. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), I. 45, 47. 4. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, III. 350. 5. Stationed between an explicitly public and a poetic form of exhortation – and perhaps it is relevant to add, between ‘real’ and closet drama – Wordsworth’s preface to The Borderers makes an interesting case for fictional directives. ‘Let us suppose a young man of great intellectual power, yet without any solid principles of genuine benevolence’; the description goes on: ‘Let him be deprived of power, though by means which he despises, & he will never forgive. It will scarcely be denied that such a mind, by very slight external motives, may be led to the commission of greatest enormities. Let its malignant feelings be fixed on a particular object, & the rest follows of itself.’ See The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, I. 76, 78. 6. Letter of Charles Lamb to Wordsworth, January 30, 1801; The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), 1. 239.



236

7. I cite ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ from Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 228–34. 8. Certainly The Prelude includes large portions of such a critique, as in Wordsworth’s refusal to divide ‘intellect by geometric rules, / Split like a province into round and square’ (1805, 2.209–10). 9. Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 16–25; Alex J. Dick, ‘Poverty, Charity, Poetry: The Unproductive Labors of the “The Old Cumberland Beggar,”’ Studies in Romanticism 39.3 (2000), 365–96; David Chandler, ‘Wordsworth versus Malthus: The Political Context(s) of “The Old Cumberland Beggar,”’ The Charles Lamb Bulletin 155 (July 2001), 72–85. 10. Sung-Joong Kim, ‘Beyond New Historicism: Adorno and Wordsworth,’ European Romantic Review 15.3 (September 2004), 463–80; I quote at 465. (Kim cites here from Adorno’s ‘The Actuality of Philosophy.’) 11. The phrase, interestingly, occurs in John Cumming’s translation: ‘The creative god and the systematic spirit are alike as rulers of nature. Man’s likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the countenance of the lord and master’; see Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1997), 9. 12. Angela Esterhammer, ‘From Fiat to “Thou Shalt Not”: Reflections on Genesis, Romanticism, and Language,’ History of European Ideas 20. 4–6 (1995), 699–705: 703; cited hereafter as Fiat by page number in parentheses. 13. Stephen Gill, ‘Wordsworth’s Breeches Pocket: Attitudes to the Didactic Poet,’ Essays in Criticism 19.4 (October 1969), 385–401. 14. David Collings’s discussion of ‘The Discharged Soldier’ and ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ both parallels and precedes mine; Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 100–17. 15. It is significant that ‘y’hi’ resembles the Tetragrammaton, Yahweh, the unspeakable name of God, since in this way the Hebrew fiat approximates the limits of tautology in representational language. Esterhammer refers to John Searle’s version of Austinian language philosophy in this connection; Searle’s main example of transcendent declarative speech – an utterance claiming perfect realization of intent – is indeed the Genesis fiat; Fiat, 699–700. 16. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 353. 17. Angela Esterhammer, Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); see especially the chapter ‘Speech Acts and World Creation,’ 42–64. 18. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, ed. J. O Urmson and Marina Sbisa, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 13; hereafter cited parenthetically as Austin. Against the attitude of Derrida and most literary critics, it is this kind of passage that provoked the linguist Emile Benveniste to wish for more rigorous formal separations in Austin; Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 231–8. The interpretive difference between Shoshana Felman’s Austin and the figure honored so richly by Cavell also emerges



Notes 237

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

Notes from the demands of addressing a moment like this. Whereas Felman takes up Austin’s necessarily failed promises (of systematic coherence, fidelity to task) and his linguistic play to liken him to Don Juan the playboy, Cavell emphasizes Austin’s playful gravity in enforcing the claims of intelligibility within language; for the views of both, see the new edition of Felman’s The Literary Speech Act (The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan With J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002]). Also see Eric Lindstrom, ‘Austen and Austin,’ in European Romantic Review (forthcoming). Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 16–17. I also draw below from ideas in Derrida’s Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992); see especially his interview, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature,’ 33–75. Pointing out that Austin’s ‘Sense and Sensibilia is a book of notes that can precisely be described as a dismantling of the craving for presence,’ Stanley Cavell thinks Derrida either has a tin ear for, or is unfair to, this aspect of Austin; A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 57–127. In ‘Austin’s Swink,’ Christopher Ricks both traces and embodies the character of literary allusion in Austin; Essays in Appreciation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 260–79. Also see Geoffrey Hill, ‘Our Word is Our Bond,’ in The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 138–59. Ricks calls this grave, mobile essay a ‘great enquiry’ and ‘a Defence of Poetry for our age’ (261). Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), 95. The word ‘posit’ especially links Hartman here to de Man’s reading of a fiat-like ‘positing power of language’ in ‘Shelley Disfigured’; The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 116. This quotation comes from the ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse. My reading edition for this poem is the one-volume Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson and revised by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 590. Cleanth Brooks repeatedly invokes the poet’s ‘special pleading’ in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’; ‘Wordsworth and Human Suffering,’ in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 373–87. This essay is cited parenthetically as Brooks, with page numbers. After the failure to approve major reforms in 1796 and 1807, that proposed new legislation would ultimately be passed as the Poor Law Amendment Act, but not until 1834. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8. The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 199356. Both Gary Harrison and David Simpson present socially informed judgments on the poem based on the issues of class. Harrison summarizes much of the poem’s critical literature in Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty, and Power (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 139–71. For Simpson, see Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987), 162–74.



238

28. A ‘statesman’ in Wordsworth’s usage was also a name for the class of Cumberland freeholders; see, for example, Juliet Barker, Wordsworth: A Life (London: Viking, 2000), 309. 29. David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 23. 30. Dick’s essay is hereafter cited parenthetically with page numbers. 31. See Angela Esterhammer’s The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 169–73; Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth, 75–89. 32. ‘It is a strange and sad thing, but it probably seemed to Wordsworth that, when he made these changes, that he was only giving the lines a bit of polish. What he was doing was more like turning the guns round from firing at the Germans and pointing them against the French.’ See William Empson, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (London: Chatto & Windus), 237–8. 33. Brooks sees a ‘shockingly candid’ depiction of the beggar as an ‘inverse scapegoat’; ‘Wordsworth and Human Suffering,’ 376–7. Heather Glen argues that the poem, which began as an authentic interaction with an ‘undecipherable other,’ ends ‘with a paternalistic distancing’; Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 83–4. Both linguistic and political aspects of the title phrase are treated by William Keach in Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 34. Note the unsettling resonance of this line of thought to the episode of the ‘hunger-bitten girl’ in The Prelude, 1805, 9.511–34. More ambiguity exists than has yet been recognized in the reflection ‘“ ’Tis against that / Which we are fighting”’ (my emphasis). The ideal end of poverty comes unsettlingly close not just to an extinction of the state of this girl, but to an end of her in death. Even in an ethical call to act, one feels discomfort in singling out a person deictically as ‘that.’ David Simpson addresses this scene and its problems at length in Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 18–22. Simpson also gives an important place to ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ in this book. His repositioning of the poem – which puts more weight on the idea of an omniscient narrator than I do (‘the general equivalent or money form’), and reads the beggar as an uncannily human embodiment of mechanized labor – can be found on pages 63–80; I quote at 74. 35. Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination, 162. 36. William Wordsworth, Last Poems, ed. Jared Curtis with Apryl Lea DennyFerris and Jillian Heydt-Stevenson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 112–24: 123. 37. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution [1963] (New York: Penguin, 2006), 25, 46.

4. Between Cant and Anguish: Hume in Coleridge’s Imagination 1. See Allen Grossman with Mark Holliday, The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Reader and Writers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,



Notes 239

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Notes 1992), 250; Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), xv. Peter Thorslev, ‘German Romantic Idealism’; The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 74. Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (London: Chatto & Windus, 1950), 90–1. Gilles Deleuze puns on Hume’s ‘modern skeptical virtue’ of humor in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone, 2001), 34–5. Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking, 1980 [1955]), 181. Also see Frederick Beiser’s The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 89–91, 122–6; and Richard Berkeley, Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 68–89. In a bracing if general way, my argument about the constitutive role of fiction in modern belief compares to A. Kiarina Kordela’s use of fiction and psychoanalytic thought in $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007). See Rei Terada, ‘Coleridge Among the Spectra,’ in Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 35–72. Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 36; hereafter cited by title and page number. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1982), 192. ‘[I]f the act of thinking is belief, thought has fewer reasons to defend itself against error than against illusion. Illegitimate beliefs perhaps inevitably surround thought like a cloud of illusions. In this respect, Hume anticipates Kant’; Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 [1953]), ix; cited by page number hereafter. In ‘Wandering in the Landscape with Wordsworth and Deleuze,’ Ron Broglio announces his intention of ‘using Deleuze to “flatten” Romanticism and deflate the humanist subject at its center.’ See Romanticism and the New Deleuze, Romantic Circles Praxis Series online (http://www.rc.umd.edu /praxis/deleuze/broglio). David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals [1748, 1751], ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 7, 10, 16. Hereafter cited by page number. Tim Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). In Looking Away, Terada argues that a supposedly ‘Humean’ fact/value distinction itself can only be problematically affirmed: ‘It is easier to understand how Hegel can come to be seen as the champion of fact [by Adorno] when we recall that a “fact” is not mere existence but existence recognized conceptually, already raised to consciousness’ (160). In ‘Coleridge’s Conversation Poems: Thinking the Thinker’ (Romanticism 14.2 [2008], 168–82), Frederick Burwick discusses the two, receptive (as



240

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

‘primary’) and expressive (‘secondary’), phases of Coleridgean imagination. Burwick shows how the conversation poems as a sequence ‘thematically … reveal an increasing indictment of passivity as moral turpitude’ (171). Deleuze himself makes the term ‘associationism’ central to his main theory about Hume, which Martin Bell summarizes as ‘a thesis of the externality of relations which is not based on a contrast between analytic and synthetic judgements, nor on the contrast between a priori and a posteriori knowledge’; see Bell’s chapter, ‘Transcendental Empiricism? Deleuze’s Reading of Hume,’ in Impressions of Hume, ed. M. Frasca-Spada and P. J. E. Kail (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 95–106: 101; also Empiricism and Subjectivity, 100, 108; Pure Immanence, 38. Smart prompts on the Coleridge/Hume connection can be found in A. D. Nuttall’s A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 73, 99, 110–11; hereafter cited by page number. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 397n. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems [CP], ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997). Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1, 5. Stuart Peterfreund, ‘The Way of Immanence, Coleridge, and the Problem of Evil,’ ELH 55.1 (Spring 1988), 125–58. Bede Rundle, Why There is Something Rather than Nothing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 147. Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1996), 213; Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 416. Cairns Craig, Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal Chaos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Cairns Craig, ‘Coleridge, Hume, and the Chains of the Romantic Imagination,’ in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan and Janet Sorenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20–37; hereafter cited as ‘Chains.’ Craig, Associationism, 48–50. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 29. Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 53. Recent philosophy has done much already to reunite Hume and Kant, complicating the standard account of fifty years ago with a sense that they are ‘engaged in a common project’; see Lewis White Beck, ‘A Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant,’ reprinted in Immanuel Kant’s Prolegemona to Any Future Metaphysics [cited hereafter as Prolegomena], ed. Beryl Logan (London: Routledge, 1996), 139–55. In his study Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), Paul Guyer offers an authoritative and up to date treatment of Kant’s and Hume’s skeptical arguments. Also see Henry E. Allison, Custom and Reason in Hume: A Kantian Reading of the First Book of the Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).



Notes 241

Notes

28. The commentator quoted is W. H. Walsh. For Hume’s many conceptual headings of ‘imagination,’ see L. A. Selby-Bigge’s analytical index to A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 702; hereafter cited as Treatise. 29. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment [CJ] [1790], trans. J. H. Bernard (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000). 30. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 385. Paul de Man attests to Kant’s extraordinary confidence when he writes: ‘Kant elaborates a contrastive typology of sublime and beautiful states of mind, values, and characteristics with a categorical self-assurance that borders on the ludicrous’; Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 123. 31. Anne-Lise François, ‘To Hold in Common and Know by Heart: The Prevalence of Gentle Forces in Humean Empiricism and Romantic Experience,’ Yale Journal of Criticism 7 (Spring 1994), 139–62. 32. Reprinted in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ed. Paul H. Fry (Boston: Bedford, 1999); I cite at 114. 33. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge [N], 3 vols., ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge, 1957–73); The Friend, 2 vols., ed. Barbara E. Rooke; Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 4 (Princeton: Bollingen, 1969). 34. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria [cited hereafter as BL]; Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (Princeton: Bollingen, 1983), I: 121. In notebook entries Coleridge labeled Hume a ‘flashy modern’ and deemed him ‘infra-bestial’ among the ‘fashionable Metaphysici[ans]’ or rather the ‘Cataphysicians’ and ‘Hypophysicians, i.e. below Nature’ (N, II 2193, III 3281). 35. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Book I Value: Selected Marginalia, ed. H. J. Jackson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 3. 36. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930–3), 16: 123–4. 37. D. G. James, Scepticism and Poetry (London: George Allen, 1937); hereafter cited by page number. 38. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 110, 118. 39. I cite from the Norton Paradise Lost, 497, 501. 40. Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 2. 41. Terada, Looking Away, 43. 42. Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 43; henceforth cited LJK. 43. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, 1991), 100. 44. John W. Yolton, Realism and Appearances: An Essay on Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134–5. 45. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 39. 46. Benedict de Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding, The Ethics, Correspondence, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1955), 247. 47. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1922], trans. C. K. Ogden (Mineola: NY: Dover, 1999), 29.



242

48. Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 117–18. 49. Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose, 151. 50. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘John Wilkins’ Analytical Language’; Selected Non-Fictions (New York: Penguin, 1999), 231. 51. Rundle, Why There is Something Rather than Nothing, 147. 52. Ibid., 183.

5. Wordsworth and the Beautiful Day 1. Here the endeavor is not phrased as an ‘ideology of the aesthetic.’ Simon Jarvis contends in a bracing rereading of Marx ‘that social illusion always takes the form, not of mere mystification, but of disenchantment as mystification’; Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 57. For Jarvis’s cogent response to de Man’s sense of ‘materiality’ in Aesthetic Ideology, see ‘What Does Art Know?,’ in Aesthetics and the Work of Art: Adorno, Kafka, Richter, ed. Peter de Bolla and Stefan H. Uhlig (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 57–70: 58, 60, 66–7. 2. Susan Wolfson offers what might well be a definitive counter-argument to my assertion, when she takes up the topic of ‘Revision as Form’ in the Wordsworth chapter of Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 100–32. 3. ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse, lines 816, 818; Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson and revised by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936). Kant makes much the same claim through the fortuitous alignment between the understanding and natural beauty as an indeterminate concept. 4. 1805 Prelude I.56, 109; The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979). 5. I disagree here with William Keach’s splendid book, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) in those moments when Keach appears to lump Wordsworth and Coleridge together, either with polemical aim or unreflectively; see 33, for example. A countervailing risk, detailed with candor in Paul H. Fry’s Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), x, is to extract Wordsworth from the overdetermined muddle of an ‘ideology of the aesthetic’ by giving up Coleridge in his place. 6. Robert Kaufman, ‘Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity’; The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 355. 7. ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’; Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37–54. William Keach presents a helpful overview of Adorno’s essay – alongside the influential formulations of Walter Benjamin and others – in ‘Rethinking Romantic Poetry and History: Lyric Resistance, Lyric Seduction’; The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 217–38.



Notes 243

Notes

8. ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse, line 18. 9. See Thomas de Quincey, The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 58–9. 10. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 74, 73. 11. I draw from Angus Fletcher’s A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75–93, to again remark on connections to Wordsworth that a brilliant author himself denies. Fry’s reading of ‘chronometric time’ – yielding a ‘lyric moment’ that measures time unsuppressed as opposed to war against temporality – can be found in Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, 91–118. 12. Two-Part Prelude of 1799, I.2–3. 13. A discussion of this figure and Wordsworth’s colonial reception history can be found in my essay, ‘What Wordsworth Planted,’ Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 56 (November, 2009). For other instances of ‘plant’ used as a verb, see A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Lane Cooper (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1911), 718. 14. William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 266–8: 267; line numbers are cited from this edition. 15. ‘The Convict,’ published in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads but never reprinted by Wordsworth, ends with a comparably fictive intervention using ‘plant’: ‘“My care, if the arm of the mighty were mine, / Would plant thee where yet thou might’st blossom again”’ (Lyrical Ballads, 115); also see ‘To M.H.,’ one of the ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ (Lyrical Ballads, 251). 16. See Jonathan Wordsworth’s essay, ‘Twenty Wordsworth,’ The Wordsworth Circle 31.3 (Summer 2000), 119–27, for an excellent example of this approach to tracing individual words. 17. Richard Matlak, Deep Distresses: William Wordsworth, John Wordsworth, Sir George Beaumont, 1800–1808 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003); cited hereafter as DD. Geoffrey Hartman offered what remains the foundational account of the poem in Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 283–8 (hereafter cited as Wordsworth’s Poetry). Marjorie Levinson builds off Hartman with New Historicist urgency in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 101–34; hereafter cited as WGPP. Kenneth Johnston remarks on the poem with compact suggestiveness, especially involving political matters, in The Hidden Wordsworth (New York: Norton, 2000), 305–6; cited hereafter as HW. 18. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 90. 19. William Empson’s notice of the radical ambiguity of ‘the light of sense’ actually is in The Structure of Complex Words (1951), whose treatment of The Prelude is reprinted in the Norton edition, 625–42. 20. Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 32.



244

21. ‘In fact, there is nothing in the course of religious education adopted in this country and in the use made by us of the holy scriptures that appears to me so injurious as the perpetually talking about making by God’; The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and revised by Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), vol. 3, II: 189. Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth transcribed this letter in parts, and just before the passage I quote the editors’ remark that ‘[Dorothy takes the pen]’ (188). 22. Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, 29; Adam Potkay, ‘Wordsworth and the Ethics of Things,’ PMLA 123.2 (March 2008), 390–404. 23. My discussion of sensory appearance is meant to preserve Kant’s Augenschein, and thus stay close to the discerning, strenuous line of discussion established by Paul de Man in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); see especially 82, 93, 127, 152, 161–2. 24. Franklin R. Baruch wrote of the image: ‘The brilliantly shocking, almost grotesque quality of “there plant eyes” is not only the poet’s recognition of his need for God’s superior sight: on the unconscious plane it is also the final relief achieved by dissociating personal identity from a personal existence made all too plain by action. The blind artist unconsciously forces the poet and the blind man to become separate personages. If he is an instrument in God’s hands, then the actuality of the visual deprivation is for the moment outside himself. He may then go on to a closing activity (“that I may see and tell”) because the physical has been fully abandoned, the framework of the actual has been pushed aside.’ ‘Milton’s Blindness: The Conscious and Unconscious Patterns of Autobiography,’ ELH 42.1 (Spring 1975), 26–37: 30. 25. William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 13. 26. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, and Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 151–2. 27. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Fateful Question of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 16n (hereafter cited as Culture). Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 28. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 7. 29. See Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci,’ in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 311–36. 30. A different discussion might explore how Wordsworth’s snowdrops draw from others. Mary Robinson’s sonnet on the flower was the model for an ode by Coleridge, and likely a precursor for Wordsworth too. 31. David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 2, 164–70. 32. Letter of October 14, 1803; The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 2nd edition, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and revised by Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 1: 408. 33. Letter of Sir George Beaumont to Wordsworth, October 24, 1803; quoted by Stephen Gill in William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 219. 34. For convenience, I quote the poem from my reading edition, PW, 199–200. 35. Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, 42–59.



Notes 245

Notes

36. Poems, in Two Volumes, 104–7. 37. Hartman,Wordsworth’s Poetry, 284. 38. The admirably framed, yet ‘immodest,’ claim for Wordsworth’s role in postHolocaust cultural studies is given in a long note in Hartman, The Fateful Question of Culture (16n). 39. In a doubly sharp approach for an ekphrastic poem about stripping illusion, Paul Fry connects painterly ‘varnish’ to the poem’s ‘light that never was’; A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 75–6. 40. Jerome J. McGann, ‘Byron and Wordsworth,’ in Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 191. 41. McGann, Romantic Ideology, 81–92. 42. Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’; Notes to Literature, 39. Empson may have approached aspects of Adorno’s thinking even earlier, in concluding about ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘I have shown that I regard the shuffling as a deeplyrooted necessity’; Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930] (New York: New Directions, 1947), 154. 43. Theodor Adorno, ‘Sur l’Eau,’ in Minima Moralia: Reflections of a Damaged Life [1951], trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 157. See Robert Kaufman, ‘Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third “Critique” in Adorno and Jameson,’ Critical Inquiry 26.4 (Summer, 2000), 682–724: 721–2. 44. The revised version of line 14 reads ‘Some fond regrets to entertain’; PW, 67. 45. Lyrical Ballads most forcefully casts its lot with pleasure, an emphasis that may yet remain in ‘Ode to Duty’s’ line: ‘And the most ancient Heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong’ (line 48); see Jarvis’s philosophical reading of this hypermetric line in Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, 12. 46. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 36; hereafter cited as Quest. 47. Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”’; Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54. 48. Stephen Gill in William Wordsworth: A Life, 10. 49. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole, revised and augmented by J. H. Brumfitt and John C. Hall, and updated by P. D. Jimack (London: Everyman, 1993), 181. 50. Kant ‘“What is Enlightenment?”’; Political Writings, 55. 51. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Poems (New York: Library of America, 1996), 792–3; hereafter cited as Emerson. 52. See Gene Ray, ‘Reading the Lisbon Earthquake: Adorno, Lyotard, and the Contemporary Sublime,’ The Yale Journal of Criticism 17.1 (2004), 1–18. 53. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 361. 54. Giorgio Agamben’s ethical deconstruction of the term ‘holocaust’ as such a theodicy appears in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), 18, 20, 28. 55. E. P. Thompson, ‘Disenchantment of Default? A Lay Sermon’ [1968], in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (New York: New Press, 1997), 33–74.



246

56. Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, 35–55. 57. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 73. 58. Reprinted in PMLA 105.3 (May, 1990), 409–35; hereafter cited as ‘Dialogue’. Fascinating discussion of this debate occurs in the question and answer session recorded at the end of ‘Kant and Schiller’ in de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology. De Man’s interest lies more in Heidegger than Staiger, and registers stunningly Heidegger’s ‘ontologization of the notion of phenomenality which is highly suggestive, and which has held me enthralled for many years – just as an example of its power’ (161). 59. Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, 202. 60. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 12, italics added. 61. Arendt quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, 40–1. 62. Bromwich, Disowned by Memory, 149, 165–6.

6. Contracting Obi: Shelley’s Cosmopolitanism and the Curse of Poetry 1. Lines 6, 195. I quote Peter Bell from the 1819 first edition, rather than the 1799 MSS. 2 and 3; Peter Bell, ed. John E. Jordan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). As Jordan says, ‘Wordsworth lived with Peter Bell a long time’ (3). 2. Miscellaneous Sonnets XVIII, in Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketchem (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 3. A poem Jordan groups with the Peter Bell manuscripts, ‘Andrew Jones,’ confirms this sense of praise and blame set closely together. It starts, ‘I hate that Andrew Jones,’ and proceeds to explain exactly why: not because he swears and drinks, but because he snatches donated money from a ‘traveling Cripple’ (line 10; in Peter Bell, 626–7). The affection Wordsworth harbors for Peter Bell bears a reversed image in Andrew Jones – even if the narrators of both poems are heavily dramatic. What he says of Andrew applies just as well to nearly every other reader’s reaction to Peter: ‘I wish the press-gang or the drum / With its tantara sound would come / And sweep him from the village!’ (lines 3–5). 4. One might note the extended reference to praise and blame in Hume’s ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757): an essay that is the indispensable prequel to Kant’s raising of the power of taste in the Third Critique. As opposed to the archaic quality of those competing modes in Greek lyric poetry, Hume positions these epithets as ‘suitable’ markers of the organized ‘subspecies’ of socialized judgment; Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 133–54: 143. 5. W. R. Johnson, ‘Praise and Blame: Greek Lyric,’ in The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 24–75; Robert Von Hallberg, ‘Praise,’ in Lyric Powers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 40–69. 6. Critics of Wordsworth’s ‘apostasy’ owe a common debt to E. P. Thompson’s ‘Disenchantment or Default: A Lay Sermon’ (1968), reprinted posthumously



Notes 247

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

Notes in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (New York: New Press, 1997), 33–74. A formidable work of a similar moment is Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), which notices how ‘Wordsworth had enabled Shelley to turn from parody of “language really used by men” to parody of archaic elevation’ (141). http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/18485 (accessed 26 May 2008). David Bromwich articulates the perspective in ‘Love Against Revenge in Shelley’s Prometheus,’ Philosophy and Literature 26 (2002), 239–59. A synoptic account of romantic tolerance is Mark Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001). I draw my immediate linkage of an internationalist Shelley to Derrida, including his Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!, from Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 25, 335. In preparing the chapter, I also benefited from Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), including the three commentators’ replies to the text of Benhabib’s lectures. Leigh Hunt, Examiner, May 9, 1819; Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Critical Heritage, ed. James E. Barcus (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 145. James Chandler makes the farsighted remark that ‘Peter Bell the Third ponders the extraordinary literary production in that most archaic of modes, lyric poetry, in the midst of the most advanced commercial metropolis in the world’; England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 485. On ‘Baudelairean modernity,’ see Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire; Foucault’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997); and Robert Kaufman, ‘Intervention and Commitment Forever! Shelley in 1819, Shelley in Brecht, Shelley in Adorno, Shelley in Benjamin,’ in Reading Shelley’s Interventionist Poetry, ed. Michael Scrivener; Romantic Circles Praxis Series online (May 2001); and ‘Lyric Commodity Critique, Benjamin Adorno Marx, Baudelaire Baudelaire Baudelaire,’ PMLA 123.1 (January 2008), 207–15. References to Shelley’s poems and to The Defence are to page numbers in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn., ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002). Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 text), ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 171. Ann Wroe quotes Shelley’s comment in a letter to John Gisborne that ‘he found absurd, even “demoniacal”, Wordsworth’s remark that happiness was found in the world “or not at all”’; Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself (New York: Pantheon, 2007), 374. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006), xiv. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, revised edn. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 285–6. Of interest given my discussion below, another radical literary figure who has been called



248

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

‘urbane’ is C. L. R. James; see Frank Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary: C. L. R. James and the Struggle for a New Society (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008). Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 253–4. ‘The hunchback, Benjamin writes, “will disappear with the coming of the Messiah, who (a great rabbi once said) will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment”’; quoted by Eric L. Santner in On Creaturely Life: Rilke / Benjamin / Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 25. The second thesis’s idea of a disinterested relation to the future should be compared, in romanticism, to William Hazlitt’s argument in An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805). See Robert Kaufman, ‘Legislators of the Post-Everything World: Shelley’s Defence of Adorno,’ ELH 63.3 (1996), 707–33; and ‘Intervention & Commitment Forever!’ Kaufman, ‘Intervention & Commitment,’ 10. Also see Bo Earle, ‘World Legislation: The Form and Function of a Romantic Cosmopolitanism’; European Romantic Review 16.2 (April 2005), 209–20. The broadened application of Kantian reflective judgment is essentially that of Arendt, who understands Kant’s aesthetic theory as also the model for ethical judgment. The nightmares I draw from Marshall Brown, The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 8–16, who in turn hearkens back to Paul de Man in Aesthetic Ideology: ‘What do we know about the nightmares of Immanuel Kant? I’m sure they were … very interesting … Königsberg there in the winter – I shudder to think’ (134). Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al., ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1–2. Later, in contending for the significance of Shelley’s allusion to ‘White Obi,’ I shall discuss his literary and anthropological use of this West African/Jamaican ritual practice. This takes up a conceptually ‘weaker’ yet pervasive force of contract as a discourse of imperialism and disease: obi’s connection to the biological ‘contracting’ of the actual disease of yaws. The descent of liberal contract theory into laissez-faire economic ‘liberty’ is recounted by Eric Foner in The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998), 115–37: 120. For a continuation of this argument, see Eric Lindstrom, ‘“To Wordsworth” and the “White Obi”: Slavery, Determination and Contingency in Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third,’ Studies in Romanticism 47.4 (Winter 2008), 549–80. Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (New York: New York Review of Books, 1994 [1974]), 274. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, vol.1: 1814–1822, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 25. Shelley, Frankenstein, 171–2. The Mask’s critics may be divided without too much reduction by speaking of those who celebrate Shelley’s politics before Wolfson’s Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) (see 195–204), and those who return in a dialectically sophisticated defense of Shelley thereafter. Marc Redfield’s account in The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 148–82, is particularly helpful. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution [1963] (New York: Penguin, 2006), 42–3.



Notes 249

Notes

28. David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth (New York: Norton, 2000), 262–93; Paul H. Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 145. 29. Arendt, On Revolution, 43, 103. 30. I wonder what this owes to Rousseau’s notionally fictive hortatory language in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755); see The Social Contract and the Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole, revised and augmented by J. H. Brumfitt and John C. Hall, and updated by P. D. Jimack (London: Everyman, 1993), 98. 31. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman; revised edn. (New York: Anchor, 1988), 53. 32. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), 99. 33. See The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 35, for Agamben’s understanding of the way Paul’s messianic ‘as not’ (hos me) separates from and suspends Kant’s ‘as if’ (als ob) and the suspect character of its ‘overwhelming success in modern ethics.’ 34. See Steven E. Jones, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), 95–8, for a summary of historiographical debate on just how passive the civilian crowd was thought to be. My discussion of cursing in Shelley’s poetry is indebted throughout to this study. 35. In this connection concerning the vitality of mediated interventions, I also think of Sara Guyer’s location of ‘the disconcerting possibility that poetry is inconsequential and that turning away from it will not overcome the inconsequence that it exposes’; Romanticism After Auschwitz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 220. 36. Samantha Power, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 134ff. 37. A Philosophical View of Reform; Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, vol. 7 (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), 46. For a bold discussion of literature and human rights (including the UN), see Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 38. Power, Chasing the Flame, 74. 39. Ibid., 73. 40. I should note, however, that the term ‘self-esteem’ has listings in the OED as early as 1657; a little later, Milton uses it in Paradise Lost for a speech of Raphael: ‘ofttimes nothing profits more / Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right / Well managed’ (3.571–3). 41. These are two places the young revolutionary spent critical time; see Holmes, Shelley, 117–45, 178–97. 42. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 26–8. The most universal study of this question remains David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). In this context see especially his Epilogue, ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Phenomenology of Mind,’ which underscores the value, once more, of M. H. Abrams’s Natural



250

43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

Supernaturalism. In Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), Orlando Patterson takes up the notion of ‘The Ultimate Slave’ from a global and transhistorical perspective (299–333), developing concerns that might be strikingly compared to Agamben on hyper doulon in Paul as ‘super-slave’ (The Time That Remains, 13). G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111–38, 383–409. William Earle, Obi: or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack, ed. Srinivas Aravamudan (Peterborough: Broadview, 2005); cited parenthetically as Aravamudan when I quote from the introduction, and Obi when I cite from the novel and appendices. Given Shelley’s allusions – both in his epigraph and in signing the dedication – to the ‘Miching Mallecho’ of Hamlet’s play within a play, Laura Bohannon’s ethnographic account, ‘Miching Mallecho: That Means Witchcraft,’ here is also of interest. Anthropology courses often informally refer to this text as ‘Shakespeare in the Bush’; it is reprinted in Magic, Witchcraft, and Curing, ed. John Middleton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967). In Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, 145, Fry corroborates Shelley’s view of an ‘unimaginative’ and therefore even more strikingly original poet, whose theme is the disclosure of being: ‘The case can be made that Wordsworth really has no theory of the “creative” imagination at all’ (14). Charles Mahoney, Romantics and Renegades: The Poetics of Political Reaction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 145. Known mostly for his gothic thriller novel The Monk (1796), Matthew Lewis was a peripheral friend of significant literary influence on Shelley’s circle in the ‘Byron Summer’ of 1816. He missed the famous ghost-story contest, but later entertained the group with his own fictional tales – and potentially his mysterious non-fictional experiences with Obeah in Jamaica. Though his Journal of a West India Proprietor was only published posthumously in 1834, Lewis had just completed his first voyage to Jamaica in June 1816, and by August was with Byron in Geneva. By May of 1818 he was already dead and buried at sea. Thus Shelley’s allusions to White Obi suggest a kind of pointed reference to the dead Lewis as an actual, though liberal, slaveholder against Wordsworth’s wholly ideological slavishness; see D. L. Macdonald, Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 12–13, 192–3; Obi, 181–93. Jones, Shelley’s Satire, 31. Adam Potkay, ‘Wordsworth and the Ethics of Things,’ PMLA 123.2 (March 2008), 390–40: 401. Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 192–9. One has to recall – if not exactly to make sense of – what Holmes calls Shelley’s ‘old Eastern scheme’ of getting a ‘respectable appointment’ in India ‘where I might be compelled to active exertion’: a scheme that would paint Shelley more as the prematurely aged, colonialist, Rimbaud than as a radical, and about which he shared musings with Hogg and Peacock as late as 1821; see Holmes, Shelley, 682–3. Charles Rzepka, ‘Obi, Aldridge and Abolition’; in Obi: A Romantic Circles Praxis Volume [online], ed. Charles Rzepka (August 2002), 3. For a treatment of Obi beyond the authors I consider, Rzepka’s ‘Thomas De Quincey’s “Three-Fingered



Notes 251

54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68.

Notes Jack”: The West Indian Origins of the “Dark Interpreter”’ (European Romantic Review 8.2 [1997], 117–38) is an excellent essay that also seeks to address canonical authors and figural dimensions of romantic reading. The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, Albion Edition (London: Frederick Warne, 1900), 466. Chandler, England in 1819, 120. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 35–39. Given Appiah’s praise here of ‘Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard’ (39) and his later statement that ‘There is only one reality’ (43), an interesting disjunction runs between Cosmopolitanism’s tempered view of ongoing enlightenment and Aravamudan’s more thoroughgoing relativism about the parity between scientific ‘truth’ and the cultural production of ‘sense’ (Aravamudan, 33). Sara Guyer writes of Derrida’s last interview: ‘The interrupted sentence seems to elaborate on the future of cosmopolitanism as if to suggest that Derrida might just as well describe its survival as its demise’; ‘The Rhetoric of Survival and the Possibility of Romanticism,’ Studies in Romanticism 46.2 (Summer/Fall 2007: Part 1 of 2), 247–63: 250. There is little criticism on Obi. Ann Wierda Rowland’s brief summary of the novel can be found in The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period, ed. Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 199–200. Alex J. Dick, ‘“The Ghost of Gold”: Forgery Trials and the Standard of Value in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy,’ European Romantic Review 18.3 (July 2007), 381–400. For recent analysis of the mythopoeia of Prometheus Unbound, see Christopher R. Miller, ‘Shelley’s Uncertain Heaven,’ ELH 72 (2005), 577–603; and Teresa Kelley, ‘Reading Justice: From Derrida to Shelley and Back,’ Studies in Romanticism 46.3 (Summer/Fall 2007: Part 2 of 2), 267–87. Quoted by Wroe in Being Shelley, 362. A discerning comparison between the messianic thought of Agamben and Derrida is David E. Johnson, ‘As If the Time Were Now: Deconstructing Agamben,’ South Atlantic Quarterly 106.2 (Spring 2007), 265–90. Geoffrey Hill, The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 159. A Philosophical View of Reform, 55. I draw ‘sovereign’ Machtspruch from one of the powerful new studies of late Kant, Peter Fenves, Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (New York: Routledge, 2003), 33ff. W. H. Auden, from ‘Writing’; quoted by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb in Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 29. Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 14. Power, Chasing the Flame, 4.

7. Paper Money Poets 1. To use the language by which Matthew Arnold has placed Byron and Wordsworth in more insular fashion among nineteenth-century English



252

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

poets. See ‘Byron,’ in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, vol. IX (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 236. Arnd Bohm, Goethe’s Faust and European Epic: Forgetting the Future (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007); Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Marquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1995); Herbert Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Disbanding the ‘Bretton Woods System,’ America in effect ended the international gold standard and transitioned to a fully fiat monetary policy in 1971. For a nineteenth-century American with cosmopolitan, non-protectionist views on fiat money and credit, see Henry Adams, ‘The Bank of England Restriction’ and ‘British Finance in 1816’; Chapters of Erie and Other Essays [1871] (New York: Holt, 1886), 225–302. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 37–86. See Kurt Heinzelman, The Economics of Imagination (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). Also deserving of notice here is Celeste Langan’s Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom, esp. 59–138. I discuss and cite Shell below. Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, 311–58. This phrase – which I like enough to quote out of context – is William Christie’s from ‘Francis Jeffrey in Recent Whig Interpretations of Literary History,’ ELH 76 (2009), 577–97: 580. Robert Mitchell, Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 121–61. David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1, 34. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Outside of literary studies construed narrowly, see Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Alex J. Dick, ‘“The Ghost of Gold”: Forgery Trials and the Standard of Value in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy,’ European Romantic Review 18.3 (July 2007), 381–400; Kevin Barry, ‘Crediting Power: Romantic Aesthetics and Paper Money 1797–1825,’ La Questione Romantica 3–4 (Spring 1997), 169–92. Paul Hamilton, ‘Keats and Critique’; reprinted in Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 88–114: 105. A. D. Nuttall, A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 99. Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 20; see The Friend; Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 4 (Princeton: Bollingen, 1969), I.230.



Notes 253

Notes

16. Gallagher, The Body Economic, 21. 17. Dick, ‘“The Ghost of Gold,”’ 394. 18. I don’t have space to include the wealth of scholarship on Cobbett and paper money: it overlaps the field of virtually all studies of Cobbett. The brief remarks and passages quoted by James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin in Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 28–31, are apt and helpful. 19. Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 20. One is tempted to compare the effect to Brecht’s epic theater. For brief commentary on the ‘Musikopoesie’ of the Euphorion section, see Hans Joachim Kreutzer, ‘Über die Musik in Goethes Faust’; Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik, ed. Walter Hinderer (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 454. 21. Quotations of Goethe’s poem refer by line numbers to Faust, trans. Walter Arndt and ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: Norton, 2001). 22. Geoffrey Hartman in A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 170; James L. Kugel, The Bible As It Was (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) 53–5. 23. Shell, Money, Language, and Thought, 84. 24. Ibid., 90. 25. Ibid., 102. 26. See Hansjakob Werlen’s entry on Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘The Universal and the Particular,’ in A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 417. Unconnected to the paper money scene, Gloria Flaherty’s chapter on ‘Faust, the Modern Shaman’ (Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], 183–207), is also of interest here. 27. Quoted by Shell in Money, Language, and Thought, 104. 28. A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, ed. Mitford M. Mathews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 600. 29. Niall Ferguson’s Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000 (New York: Basic Books, 2001), thus takes three of its four epigraphs respectively from Carlyle’s Chartism (1840), Past and Present (1843), and Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848). 30. The last apostrophe to the sea in Canto 4 holds interest in large measure because here Byron happily personifies the sea out of his love for and facility at swimming. 31. I draw an implicit contrast here to Jerome McGann’s smart but stacked account in ‘Byron and Wordsworth,’ in Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 173–201. I nonetheless agree that Childe Harold and ‘Tinten Abbey’ define ‘different “blessings”’ (177). McGann quotes Madame de Staël in linking Byron’s poetry to Goethe’s Faust, in ‘an art that deliberately cultivates defects of style’ (184). 32. Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1997), 16.



254

33. Jerome McGann, ‘The Book of Byron and the Book of the World’; The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 257. 34. McGann, ‘Byron and Wordsworth,’ 198. 35. In this act, Goethe alludes to Byron’s play Sardanopalus (10176). 36. Eric Strand, ‘Don Juan as Global Allegory,’ Studies in Romanticism 43.4 (Winter 2004), 503–36: 503, 509. 37. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities [1859], ed. Richard Maxwell (London: Penguin, 2003), 33–4. 38. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ (1935); The Writer of Modern Life, 30–1. 39. Shell, Money, Language, and Thought, 116. 40. Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); I quote from widely separate moments at xx, 213. 41. ‘Credit and Fictitious Capital,’ in Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1981), 525–42. 42. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage 1976), 197–243, hereafter cited by page number.

Coda 1. Kevin Barry, ‘Crediting Power: Romantic Aesthetics and Paper Money 1797–1825,’ La Questione Romantica 3–4 (Spring 1997), 169–92: 172. 2. Marilyn Butler, Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in his Context (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 215. 3. Paul Hamilton, ‘Keats and Critique’; in Rethinking New Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 108-42: 129. Reprinted in Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 88–114; see 105. 4. Though Strunk and White remind me there can be no degrees of ‘uniqueness,’ Paper Money Lyrics do have an earlier literary relation in James and Horace Smith’s volume of parodies, Rejected Addresses [1812], ed. Donald Reiman (New York: Garland, 1977). 5. The Annual Register, Or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature, For the Year 1797 (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1798), iv. 6. For discussion of what I telescopically call ‘interim events,’ including the 1815 Corn Law and eventual resumption of cash payments, see Boyd Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments, 1815–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 7. I cite Paper Money Lyrics from The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H. F. B Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones (London: Constable, 1931), 7: 95–150, hereafter cited parenthetically. 8. For the coinage of this term, see Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), passim. 9. In one breath, Marx characterizes the theorist of the credit economy as both ‘swindler and prophet’ (Capital, Vol. III, ed. Ben Fowkes [London: Penguin,



Notes 255

Notes

1990], 573). It’s the latter term that – however dialectical and ironic – seems missing from Peacock’s account of the romantic poets whose poems invite critical reflection on the aesthetic semblance to capital. See Jennifer Bajorek, Counterfeit Capital: Poetic Labor and Revolutionary Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1–11. 10. I can’t fully develop the poetics at issue here; see Eric Lindstrom, ‘“Bereft of Promised Good”: Messianism and Minor Emotions in the Conversation Poems’ (unpublished essay). 11. Stanley Cavell, ‘Questions and Answers’; Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 225–39: 239.



256

Abrams, M. H., 1, 18, 30, 80, 82, 149, 165, 211, 226n, 235n, 250n Adams, Henry, 253n Adorno, Theodor W., 27, 92, 104, 148, 164 Aesthetic Theory, 37, 85, 142, 164 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 89, 91, 109, 202 Jargon of Authenticity, 37, 165–6, 221n, 226n Minima Moralia, 28 Negative Dialectics, 37, 123, 163 ‘On Literature and Society,’ 141, 157–8 aesthetic ideology (and ‘romantic ideology’), 71, 83, 139, 141, 146–7, 157, 158, 164, 243n Africa House, 155 Agamben, Giorgio, 2, 6, 15, 75, 103, 104, 136–7, 140, 147, 163, 221n, 223n, 225n, 226n, 234n, 238n, 242n, 246n, 250n, 251n, 252n Allison, Henry E., 241n Altieri, Charles, 25, 224n Ameriks, Karl, 226n Annual Register, 216 apostasy, 83, 163, 172, 185–6, 247n apostrophe, 16, 19, 53, 67, 149–50, 171, 191, 195, 207, 226n, 227n, 254n Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 188, 248n, 252n (also see cosmopolitanism) Arabian Nights, 214 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 183, 186, 189, 251n, 252n Archilochus, 172 Arendt, Hannah, 20, 35, 37, 59–60, 63, 68–73, 75, 79, 111, 166, 179, 228, 232n, 239, 249n Aristotle, 75, 139, 140, 147, 158 Arnold, Matthew, 175, 212, 240n, 252–3n

‘art beauty,’ 140–2, 146 (also see natural beauty) Ashbery, John, 32, 226n associationism, 119, 241n (also see Cairns Craig; Deleuze; Hartley) Auden, W. H., 68, 194, 213–14, 218, 252n, 255n Aufhebung, 7 Austen, Jane, 47, 48, 207, 210, 238n and Stanley Cavell, 225n Austin, J. L., 3, 11, 14–15, 27, 47, 57, 75, 92, 98–101, 111, 192, 221n, 222n, 229n, 234n, 237n, 238n Badiou, Alain, 10, 22, 136, 222n, 224n Bainton, Roland H., 231n Bajorek, Jennifer, 256n Baker, Robert, 227n Balfour, Ian, 85, 223n Barbauld, Anna, 129, 188 Barfield, Owen, 235n Barker, Juliet, 239n Barrell, John, 194 Barry, Kevin, 198, 253n Baruch, Franklin R., 245n Bate, Jonathan, 150, 242n Baucom, Ian, 77, 198, 235n, 253n Baudelaire, Charles, 16, 107, 213, 228n, 236n ‘Baudelairean modernity,’ 174, 179, 188, 201, 248n Beaumont, Sir George, and Wordsworth, 151–3, 245n Beck, Lewis White, 241n Beckett, Samuel, 14, 221n beginning, 1, 6, 82, 96, 98, 101–2, 110, 137, 180, 182, 203, 205, 216 not an origin, 1, 7, 14, 220n (also see Heidegger) 257



Index

Index

belief, 19, 74, 85, 117–19, 131, 134–5, 197, 200, 205 credit and (Glaube, glauben), 205 dailyness of belief, 27 ‘modern’ belief, 116, 118, 138, 208–9, 240n and thinking, 240n ‘vain’ belief and performativity, 69, 76–7 Bell, Martin, 241n Benge poison oracle, 193 (also see Evans-Pritchard) Benhabib, Seyla, 248n Benjamin, Walter, 109, 143, 175, 211, 223n, 236n Bentham, Jeremy, 92, 104 Benveniste, Emile, 75, 222n, 237n Berkeley, Richard, 228n Berlin, Isaiah, 117, 240n Berman, Marshall, 208, 253n Bernstein, J. M., 235n Berry, Wendell, 32 Bible, 3, 10, 26–7, 48, 61, 86, 95–6, 98–9, 101–2, 110, 112, 197, 202, 204, 208, 236n Exodus, 97, 135 Genesis, 9–10, 17, 32, 46–8, 95, 105, 110, 112, 138, 146–7, 197, 202–3, 207–8, 222n, 237n Isaiah, 177, 194–5 James, 169, 172 John, 205, 208 Judges, 85–6, 236n Numbers, 194 Philippians, 95 Bishop, Elizabeth, 63, 233n Blair, Hugh, 26, 36, 220n, 224n Blake, William, 16, 40, 51, 96, 167, 180, 225n, 250n Blasing, Motlu Konuk, 223n, 227n blessing, 4, 20, 35, 37, 44, 60, 84, 85, 87, 97, 102, 105, 108, 109, 111, 147, 162, 169, 172, 176, 181, 190, 193, 218, 254n (also see curse) blindness, 14–15, 16, 84, 104, 108, 118, 124, 126, 133, 148–9, 152, 154, 177, 208, 245n Bloom, Harold, 82–3, 122, 175–6, 248n

Blumenberg, Hans, 207, 224n, 254n Bohannon, Laura, 251n Bohm, Arnd, 253n Bolivar, Simon, 182 Borges, Jorge Luis, 116, 128, 138, 243n Boyle, Nicholas, 233n Bromwich, David, 35, 56, 79, 103, 151, 166, 179, 191, 223n, 227n, 232n, 235n, 239, 245n, 247n, 248n, 250n Brooks, Cleanth, 100, 107, 110, 185, 238n, 239n Brown, Marshall, 249n Buber, Martin, 175 Buck-Morss, Susan, 192, 250n Burke, Edmund, 2, 21, 61, 64, 111, 199, 200 Burke, Kenneth, 10, 222n, 235n Burwick, Frederick, 240–1n Butler, Judith, 11–12, 222n Butler, Marilyn, 215, 255n Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 2, 27, 45, 127, 162, 182, 196–214 passim, 222n, 229n, 230n, 251n, 252n, 254n, 255n Age of Bronze, 209 Cain, 208 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 53, 54 Don Juan, 2, 45, 196–7, 200, 201, 206–12, 230n Manfred, 32, 45, 208, 212 Cain (biblical character), 108 Cameron, Sharon, 63, 74, 233n Canuel, Mark, 248n Carlyle, Thomas, 206, 254n catastrophe, 55–6, 155, 162, 181 Cavell, Stanley, 11–12, 20, 27, 37, 40, 47–8, 70–1, 74–5, 79, 122, 125, 137, 139, 145, 160–2, 219, 222n, 225n, 228n, 229n, 234, 237n, 238n, 241n, 243n, 246n, 256n Celan, Paul, 16, 169 Chandler, David, 92, 237n Chandler, James, 21, 155, 188, 255n, 243n, 248n, 254n Christensen, Jerome, 207, 212, 255n



258

Christie, William, 32, 227n, 232n, 253n Cibber, Colley, 145 Clarkson, Catherine, 146 Cobbett, William, 2–4, 23, 190, 200, 216, 221n, 231n, 254n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Biographia Literaria, 13, 20, 105, 120, 126–30, 134–6, 242n ‘conversation’ poems, 69, 140, 241n ‘Dejection’ Ode, 60, 120, 124, 125 ‘Fears in Solitude,’ 68 The Friend, 115, 121, 126, 137, 199, 232n, 242n, 253n ‘Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni,’ 105 ‘Kubla Khan,’ 17, 96, 105, 141, 199 ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,’ 52, 54, 69, 83–4, 142, 149, 152, 159, 209, 235n Notebooks, 119, 126, 129–30, 242n ‘Religious Musings,’ 68 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 60, 120, 125–6, 129, 242n Collings, David, 237n Collins, William, 12–13, 39, 223n commands, see imperatives Connell, Philip, 92, 237n cosmopolitanism, 218, 252n of Percy Shelley, 174–5, 178, 182, 188, 195, 200 counterfactual language, 19, 41, 141, 152 (also see optative; subjunctive) Craig, Cairns, 120, 122–4, 241n ‘creaturely life,’ 121, 143, 207, 249n credit, 19, 22, 41, 77, 123, 189, 190, 193, 196–200, 205–6, 209, 213, 226n, 255n Culler, Jonathan, 34, 150, 226n, 227n, 245n Curran, Stuart, 74, 234n curse, 20, 21, 35, 37, 44, 94, 108, 111, 147, 169, 171–8 passim, 183, 186, 190, 193, 194, 208, 250n (also see blessing) Davis, David Brion, 250n Day, Aidan, 228n

De Man, Paul, 5, 7, 17–18, 44, 51, 75, 101, 136, 140, 141, 150, 155, 221n, 222n, 223n, 228n, 233n, 234n, 238n, 242n, 243n, 245n, 247n, 249n De Quincey, Thomas, 66, 142, 244n De Vries, Hent, 15, 248n defuturing (Tony Fry), 53, 230n deictic language, 19, 57, 75, 239n Deleuze, Gilles, 116, 118–19, 127, 132, 225n, 240n, 241n Deleuze-Hume, 118–19 Delirious Milton (Gordon Teskey), 5–7, 9, 14–16, 221n Demata, Massimiliano, 224–5n Derrida, Jacques, 15, 22, 54, 92, 100, 103–4, 173, 194, 228n, 230n, 237n, 238n, 248n, 252n Descartes, René, 70–3, 75, 77, 121, 136, 234n Dewey, John, 229n Dick, Alex J., 92, 103–5, 198, 200, 237n, 252n Dickens, Charles, 196, 211, 255n Dimock, Wai Chee, 15, 34, 223n, 227n disenchantment, 28, 80, 83, 166, 197 DuBois, W. E. B., 162, 167 Eagleton, Terry, 141 Earle, Bo, 249n Earle, William (see Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack) East India Company, 155 Edgeworth, Maria, 186 Eldon, Lord, and Percy Shelley, 174 Eldridge, Richard, 229n, 231n, 232n Eliot, T. S., 26, 45, 133, 175, 242n Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 70, 75, 109, 139, 150, 158, 160–2, 166, 167, 246n Empson, Willliam, 105, 145, 149, 239n, 244n, 245n, 246n Entzauberung, 28, 83 (also see disenchantment) Erasmus, Desiderius, 58 Esterhammer, Angela, 93, 96, 98, 105, 110, 223n, 237n, 239n



Index 259

Index

Euphorion (Faust), 198, 201, 212, 213 and Brecht, 254n and Hart Crane, 213 and paper money, 212 as reading of Byron, 212 as ‘rock opera,’ 201 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 193, 252n Everest, Kelvin, 234n fact/value distinction, 120, 121, 138, 221n, 240n farrago, 188–9 obi as, 189 and Percy Shelley, 177, 189 Felman, Shoshana, 237–8n Fenves, Peter, 46, 221n, 229n, 243n, 252n Ferguson, Frances, 126, 242n Ferguson, Niall, 254n Ferry, David, 34, 227n fiat (lyric, poetic, romantic), 1–4, 7, 9–10, 12–14, 17–19, 20, 27, 29, 32, 37, 46, 47, 69, 95, 97, 101, 105, 118, 134, 135, 150, 196, 200, 201–3, 205, 207, 211–12, 216, 224n, 238n as apostrophe to creation, 149 and Byronic digression, 197 and Cartesian philosophy, 71 commanding nature, 52ff. and credit, 19 decreative, destructive (and war), 2, 197, 208–9 and emotion (‘strange fiats’), 16, 143 English language, 12, 96 (also see ‘let be,’ ‘let there be’) and Hobbes, 97 invocation in Paradise Lost, 165 and Jeffrey, 27, 38 and Kant, 220n and Machtspruch (Fenves), 46 minimalist, 51 and money (‘greenback’), economics, 19, 95, 196, 198–200, 204, 206, 215, 253n and Nancy, 9, 201 as opposed to creation, 2, 26

originary or biblical ur-fiat, 8, 9, 31, 46, 95–7, 99, 110, 122, 128, 146, 147, 149, 197, 237n as, versus, performative language, 98–9, 111 and ‘Preromanticism’ (Collins), 13 and secularism, 207 as ‘sublime style’ for Blair, 224n ‘useless,’ 69, 89–90, 93–4, 95, 99, 101–2, 103, 106, 109–12, 128, 134 violent ontology of, 137 as ‘word-wish’ (Hartman), 101 fiat lux, 2, 11, 16, 18, 26, 46, 102, 146, 211, 214 and gas lighting, 211 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 64–5, 75, 204, 233n fit, between mind and world, 96, 108, 140 ‘strange fits,’ 26 Flaherty, Gloria, 254n Fletcher, Angus, 143, 244n Foner, Eric, 220n Foucault, Michel, 104, 116, 225n, 240n, 248n Fox, Charles James, 90 Fox News Channel, 209 François, Anne-Lise, 8, 19, 123, 222n, 224n, 225n, 234n, 241n, 242n free indirect style, 48 Frei, Hans W. 233n Freud, Sigmund, 42, 51, 81, 83, 106, 230n Fry, Paul, 13, 19, 20, 44–5, 48, 50, 57, 136, 143, 152, 165, 179, 185, 221n, 223n, 229n, 230n, 234n, 242n, 243n, 244n, 245n, 246n, 247n, 250n, 251n Fry, Tony, 230n Frye, Northrop, 5, 7, 222n, 235n Gallagher, Catherine, 199–200, 253n gas lighting (and Benjamin, Byron, Dickens), 210–12, 213 Gasché, Rodolphe, 225n Gelassenheit (Heidegger), 48, 53, 228n



260

Gill, Stephen, 237n, 245n Gilpin, William, 56, 230n, 231n Glen, Heather, 239n Godwin, William, 64–6, 80–1, 107, 233n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 196 Faust, 27, 196–7, 200–8, 212, 254n ‘To the Moon’ (‘An den Mond’), 53, 230n Gottlieb, Susannah Young-ah, 68, 233n Goya, Francisco, 36 grace, 59, 105, 124, 205 ‘greater romantic lyric,’ 1, 30, 80, 82, 235n (also see Abrams) Grossman, Allen, 113 Guyer, Paul, 230n, 241n Guyer, Sara, 39, 224n, 228n, 250n, 252n

Heinzelman, Kurt, 197, 253n Hemans, Felicia, 98, 237n Henry VIII, 57, 61, 231n Higher Criticism, 61, 203 Hill, Geoffrey, 192, 238n, 252n Hilton, Boyd, 255n Hobbes, Thomas, 97 Hofkosh, Sonia, 227n Hollander, John, 10–11, 14, 222n Holmes, Richard, 120, 241n, 249n, 251n Homans, Margaret, 50, 88, 230n Horkheimer, Max (see Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment) Hulme, T. E., 118 Hume, David, 9, 21, 27, 47, 62, 70–1, 115–38 passim, 197, 225n, 240n, 241n, 247n Hunt, Leigh, 173–4, 248n Hurston, Zora Neale, 188

habit, 11, 16, 21, 39–40, 43, 65–6, 71, 79, 82, 97, 101, 103, 111–12, 118, 120, 126, 131–2, 142, 151–2, 178, 207 Hamburger, Käte, 53, 221n, 230n Hamilton, Paul, 120, 215, 218, 241n, 253n Hamilton, Ross, 222n Hamlet, 97 Hamlin, Cyrus, 203, 204, 254n happiness, 31, 33, 102, 120, 125, 142, 154, 159, 185, 231n, 248n Harrison, Gary, 238n Hartley, David, 116 Hartman, Geoffrey, 53, 57, 101, 105, 134, 139, 150, 153, 155, 163, 222n, 224n, 230n, 232n, 234n, 238n, 239n, 244n, 245n, 254n Hazlitt, William, 2, 44, 46, 62, 64, 127, 220n, 232n, 233n, 242n, 249n Hegel, G. W. F., 6–7, 68, 71, 132, 147, 183, 192, 221n, 240n, 250n, 251n Heidegger, Martin, 20, 22, 27, 32, 37, 38, 43, 48–9, 53, 58–9, 68, 70, 106, 137, 148, 164–6, 220n, 228n, 229n, 247n

imagination, 1, 90, 95, 198, 200, 201, 205, 212 apocalyptic foreclosure of, 58 and Coleridge, 105, 116–20, 122–4, 127–35 deflationary, 213 (also see ‘economics’ of) ‘economics’ of, 2, 199, 209, 213, 241n and Hume, 27, 119, 122–4, 130–3, 197 inflationary, 198, 213 (also see ‘economics’ of) Jeffrey’s definition of, 33 moral, 108 religious, 211 in Shelley, 185, 191 surprisingly lacking in Wordsworth, 251n (see Paul Fry) immanence, 19, 21, 32, 68, 102, 112, 120, 122, 137, 163, 174, 191, 193, 200–1, 207–8 ‘immodality’ of poetry, 3, 18, 179, 221n imperatives, commands, 3, 4, 23, 65, 69, 78, 81, 101, 107, 212 divine, 19, 26, 48, 75, 95, 97, 196, 197, 220n



Index 261

Index

imperatives, commands – continued ethical, 157, 173 grammatical, 3, 18, 23, 32, 48, 95, 221n philosophical, 220n (see Machtspruch) poetic, 10–11, 12, 14, 20, 23, 50–4, 67, 74, 83–4, 91, 102, 135, 142, 177, 206–8, 228n political, 67, 95, 110, 180, 195 and prayer, 88 sexual failure of, 230n and trauma, retrojection, control, 180 insurance, 69, 73–4, 77, 79 irenic language, 32, 58 (also see Erasmus) Jackson, Virginia, 115, 226n, 240n Jacobus, Mary, 67, 233n James, C. L. R., 248–9n James, D. G., 127–8, 242n Jameson, Fredric, 29, 226n Janowitz, Anne, 231n Jarvis, Simon, 19, 26, 57, 83, 141, 163–4, 225n, 231n, 234n, 243n, 245n, 246n, 247n Jeffrey, Francis, 21 Johnson, Barbara, 88, 224n, 228n, 236n Johnson, David E., 252n Johnson, W. R., 227n, 247n Johnston, Kenneth, 74–6, 179, 234n Jones, Steven E., 186, 250n Jordan, John E., 247 Jupiter (mythic god), 162, 178, 191 jussive commands, 3, 4, 10–12, 18, 25, 29, 51, 67, 90, 96, 142, 150, 179–80 justification, 5, 15, 19, 49, 69, 76, 78, 109, 130, 137 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 21, 22, 26, 27, 36, 37, 46, 50, 51, 58, 63, 65, 68, 117, 120–5 passim, 127–9, 136–8, 140, 141, 146, 148, 160, 161, 167, 176, 179, 181, 182, 192–3, 195, 220n, 234n, 241n, 242n, 243n, 245n, 247n, 249n, 250n

Kaufman, Robert, 141, 176, 243n, 246n, 248n, 249n Keach, William, 239n, 243n Keats, John, 32–3, 124, 140, 141, 157, 176, 223n, 227n, 229n, 230n, 242n Hyperion, 12, 51 ‘negative capability,’ 133–35, 174 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ 140 ‘Ode to Psyche,’ 124 Khalip, Jacques, 224n Kim, Soong-Jung, 237n Kordela, A. Kiarina, 240n Kreutzer, Hans Joachim, 254n Kunitz, Stanley, 32 Lamb, Charles, 84, 90, 236n Langan, Celeste, 231n, 253n lassen, 48, 106 (also see Gelassenheit) Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 119, 136–7, 226n ‘let be,’ 3, 4, 12, 27, 29, 97, 101, 104, 135, 225n ‘let there be,’ 2, 3, 4, 12, 27, 29, 142, 146, 150, 191, 197, 202, 208, 220n, 222n, 223n Letters on Aesthetic Education (Schiller), 148, 233n Levinas, Emmanuel, 43, 228n Levinson, Marjorie, 155–8, 172, 197, 231n, 244n, 253n Lewis, Matthew (‘Monk’), 174, 186, 251n Lezra, Jacques, 227n Lindstrom, Eric, 226n, 238n, 249n, 256n Liu, Alan, 197, 253n Longenbach, James, 223n, 225n Luther, Martin, 55, 57–9, 62, 67, 74, 197, 203, 204, 231n, 232n, 233n Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 44 Machtspruch (Kant), 2, 22, 46, 193, 252n Magnuson, Paul, 234n Mahoney, Charles, 185, 227n Malthus, Thomas, 92, 104 Maoism, 22 Marx, Karl, 28, 36, 185, 198, 206, 209, 213, 226n, 243n, 254n, 255n



262

Matlak, Richard, 153–4, 159, 244n Mauss, Marcel, 76, 234n (also see prayer) Maxwell, Richard, 252n Mayo, Robert, 37, 228n McCann, Andrew, 251n McGann, Jerome, 35, 71–2, 83, 145, 156, 157, 207, 208, 227n, 229n, 230n, 234n, 235n, 246n, 254n, 255n McGrath, Brian, 224n Melville, Herman, 21, 63 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 73, 166, 234n messianism, 136, 175, 219, 233n, 250n, 252n, 256n Mill, John Stuart, 54, 104 Miller, Christopher R., 223n, 252 Milnes, Tim, 119, 120, 138, 229n Milton, John, 1, 4–10, 13–16, 78, 85, 126, 128, 149, 151, 196, 222n, 250n Mitchell, Robert, 198, 220n, 253n Moore, Marianne, 64–5, 233n Moore, Thomas, 174, 187–8, 252n Moretti, Franco, 253n Mörike, Eduard, 164 Morton, Timothy, 255n Muldoon, Paul, 83, 235n Nancy, Jean-Luc, 9, 177, 200–1, 222n, 249n Napoleon (Napoleonic Europe), 205 natural beauty, 37, 55, 69, 72, 84–5, 141, 142, 149, 164 (also see ‘art beauty’) as indeterminate concept in Kant, 243n Necker, Jacques, 200 New Historicism, 21, 29, 55, 57, 139, 155, 157, 215, 226n, 244n Newlyn, Lucy, 234n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 40, 180, 204, 215 nisus (resistance), 126, 132 non-actualization, 26, 60, 87 non-existence (and Hume), 121 Nuttall, A. D., 127, 199, 24n, 253n obi (obeah), 171, 174, 176–7, 183–93, 195, 249n, 251n, 252n

Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (William Earle), 183, 188–9, 251n ontology, 4, 5, 6, 15, 26, 30, 32, 47, 54, 108, 127, 136, 139, 149, 167 and Adorno, 165, 226n and de Man, 150, 247n and epistemology, 136 ‘ethical’ versus ‘natural’ (Levinas), 43 of lyric poems, 3, 115–16, 135 of ‘lyric reading’ (Jackson), 115 ‘minimal ontology’ (de Vries), 15 and Nietzsche, 204 ontological leveling, 19 and the ‘Open,’ 121 and phenomenology, 166 as rationalization, retrojection, 137 and Wordsworth, 44, 147 ‘ontotheology,’ 15 ‘Open,’ the, 121, 136, 225n optative, 10–11, 18, 48 (also see counterfactual; subjunctive) Paine, Thomas, 1, 220n pantheism, 40, 42, 44, 63, 160 paper money, 2, 3, 19, 27, 190, 197–200, 202, 204, 205, 209, 211, 212, 215, 217, 254n Paper Money Lyrics (see Thomas Love Peacock), 215–19, 255n parataxis, 158 pastoral poetry and culture, eclipse of, 86, 201, 212, 216 Patterson, Orlando, 250–1n Peacock, Thomas Love, 27, 215–19 passim, 251n, 255n, 257n perlocution, 11–12 Perry, Seamus, 120, 129, 242n personification, 13, 39–44, 91, 97, 109, 132, 136, 143 ‘weak’ personification, 42 Peterfreund, Stuart, 120, 241n Pindar, 82, 172 Pitt, William, 2, 4 plantains, bananas, 189 ‘planting’, and figurative poetics, 143–5, 147–151, 154–5, 158, 162, 164, 166, 173 (also see William Wordsworth)



Index 263

Index

Plato, 6, 72, 191 ‘poetic diction,’ 39, 128 political theology, 2, 10, 136 Poor Law Amendment, 92, 238n Poovey, Mary, 198, 221n, 231n Pope, Alexander, 3, 44, 46, 145, 153, 229n Potkay, Adam, 228n, 235n Pound, Ezra, 192 Power, Samantha, 182, 195, 250n (also see Vieira de Mello) prayer, 8, 15, 16, 32, 75–6, 78–80, 85, 88, 110, 129, 163, 207, 228n, 234n promises, 64, 122 and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 85, 142, 164 in J. L. Austin, 98, 222n, 238n and Cavell on Coleridge, 219 and communism (also see Nancy), 177 and emotionality, 143 and fiat money, 206, 215 ‘Kantian’ formal structure of, 37 and messianism, 219, 256n in Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics, 216–19 ‘promised good’ in Coleridge, 84, 142 and Rights of Man, 177 and Wordsworth, 20, 140, 159, 171, 219 Prynne, J. H., 183, 235n Purchas, Samuel, 199 purposiveness (Kant), 93, 140–2, 158, 176, 182 qualia, 41 quietism, 4, 49, 86, 97, 174, 229n Quinney, Laura, 81, 235n Ray, Gene, 246n Redfield, Marc, 141, 146, 244n, 249n re-enchantment, 28, 164 Reformation, 55–7, 61–2, 129, 231n Rejected Addresses (James and Horace Smith), 255n remissive language, 18, 26, 97, 109, 110, 134

Restriction Act, 2, 3, 216, 253n Richardson, Alan, 227n Ricks, Christopher, 238n Rilke, Rainer Maria, 6–7, 16 Robinson, Mary, 245 Roe, Nicholas, 231n Roman riding, 162 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18, 158, 161, 167, 232n, 246n, 250n Rowland, Ann Wierda, 252n Rundle, Bede, 241n Ruskin, John, 226n Ryan Robert M., 232n Rzepka, Charles, 83, 187, 230, 235n, 251n Santner, Eric L., 136, 249n Saussy, Han, 226n Schein (scheinen), 21, 28, 148, 158, 164–6, 201, 202 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 205–6 Sebald, W. G., 55–6, 231n, 234n Shakespeare, William, 4, 126, 133, 149 shamanism, 5, 16, 254n Shell, Marc, 197, 200, 204–5, 212, 254n Shelley, Mary, 1, 7, 174, 178, 183, 220n, 234n, 248n, 249n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 16 Adonais, 174, 176, 199 Alastor, 178 The Cenci, 176 ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ 182 The Mask of Anarchy, 12, 174, 177–81, 187, 198, 252n, 253n Peter Bell the Third, 20, 35, 45, 145, 172, 174, 176–7, 183–91, 195, 248n, 249n ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ 53, 54, 191 A Philosophical View of Reform, 181–2, 193 Prometheus Unbound, 18, 175–8, 191, 252n ‘To Wordsworth,’ 177–8 Simpson, David, 109, 198, 209, 226n, 227n, 239n skepticism, 20, 37, 38, 40–2, 76, 122, 125, 128 , 154, 160, 183



264

mitigated’ (or ‘Humean’) 9, 70, 117–18, 123–6, 132 and modernity, 82–3 ‘Scandal of Skepticism,’ 73 Slaughter Joseph R., 250n slavery, 77, 97, 132, 134, 173, 183–4, 186, 187, 189, 250–1n ‘slave’ (as hate speech), 178, 183 Smith, Adam, 92, 104 Smith, Charlotte, 30–1, 37, 226n Southey, Robert, 25, 26, 30, 45, 46, 62, 83, 178, 190, 224n Spenser, Edmund, 13, 158–9, 161 Spinoza, Baruch, 137, 242n Staiger, Emile, 165, 247n Starr, G. Gabrielle, 222n Stevens, Wallace, 42–3, 118, 122, 228n Stewart, Susan 60, 221n, 232n Stirling, J. Hutchison, 122 (also see Cairns Craig; Hume; Kant) Strand, Eric, 209, 255n subjunctive, 10, 18, 48, 67, 89, 143 (also see counterfactual; optative) sublime, 2, 27, 32, 46, 51, 64, 77, 80, 97, 122–3, 198, 202, 207, 214, 224n, 242n ‘sublime style,’ 36, 220n, 224n (also see Blair) surplus, 28, 40, 41, 205 taste, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 45, 62, 64, 65, 147, 161, 172, 247n Taubes, Jacob, 136, 229n Taussig, Michael, 82, 83, 226n tautology, 43, 51, 85–6, 135, 149, 173, 237n Taylor, Charles, 196–8, 200, 208–9, 224n, 253n Taylor, Jane (‘The Star’), 50–1, 230n Terada, Rei, 35, 118, 120, 127, 129–30, 221n, 227n, 240n, 242n Terror, 2, 15, 22, 216 theodicy, 30–2, 44, 46, 137, 153, 162–3, 181, 226n ‘therefore,’ 19, 52, 54, 64, 67, 69, 71, 76–9, 83, 235n (also see Descartes; ‘Tintern Abbey’)

thing-in-itself (noumenon; also see Kant), 17, 121, 128–9, 136, 137, 206 thinking and Arendt (The Life of the Mind), 59–60, 68–79 Coleridge and mind’s self-experience of, 130–2 and Deleuze on Hume, 118 and Descartes, 121 exaggerative thinking, 21, 35 and Heidegger, 38, 49 ‘magical’ thinking, 51, 54, 66, 81, 126, 193 in verse, 26, 33, 37, 67, 68, 148 Thompson, E. P., 163, 246n, 247n Thomson, Heidi, 79, 227n, 235n Thorslev, Peter, 116, 240 tolerance, 62, 126, 139, 173, 248n Trilling, Lionel, 234n Trumpener, Katie, 81, 235n, 252n Tucker, Herbert, 223n, 253n Tyndale, William, 11, 95–6, 99, 102, 110 United Nations, 19, 177, 181–2 urbanity, 118 and Percy Shelley, 174–5, 249n Vendler, Helen, 225n Vieira de Mello, Sergio, 182, 192, 195 Virgil, 223n void, 7, 9, 17, 77, 92, 100, 126–33 passim, 210 Von Hallberg, Robert, 225n, 247n Walsh, W. H., 242n Wang, Orrin N. C., 28, 225n Waters, William, 233n Weber, Max, 28, 83, 86, 198, 231n, 236n (also see Entzauberung) Werlen, Hansjakob, 254n Whitman, Walt, 5, 15, 122, 221n, 223n, 227n, 241n Willey, Basil, 116–17, 119, 240n Williams, J. J., 187 (also see obi) Winnicott, D.W., 88 witnessing, 15, 40, 122, 141, 152, 155, 174, 179–181



Index 265

Index

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 47, 137, 229n, 242n Wizard of Oz, 199 Wolfson, Susan, 243n, 249n Wood, Allen W., 233n Wood, Michael, 48, 229n, 232n Woodring, Carl, 248n Wordsworth, Dorothy, 20, 67, 69, 74, 79–80, 83, 87–8, 146, 152, 154, 218, 236n ‘turn’ or ‘address’ to Dorothy, 20, 67, 69, 79, 80, 83, 86–7, 218 (also see William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’) Wordsworth, John, 151, 153, 162 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 244n Wordsworth, William ‘A slumber did my spirit seal,’ 36, 66 ‘Andrew Jones,’ 247n ‘Anecdote for Fathers,’ 33, 159 ‘At Applethwaite, near Keswick,’ 151–3 ‘Boy of Winander,’ 75 ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge,’ 185 ‘The Convict,’ 244n ‘Detraction Which Followed the Publication of a Certain Poem,’ 171–2 The Excursion, 21, 107, 178 Fenwick Notes, 73, 103, 179, 234n ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill,’ 81 Home at Grasmere, 75, 140 ‘I know an aged man constrained to dwell,’ 110 ‘I wander’d lonely as a cloud’ (‘Daffodils’ poem), 34, 88, 158, 216 ‘The Idiot Boy,’ 34 ‘Immortality’ Ode, 9, 41, 54, 58, 70, 73, 74, 134, 149, 155 Kendal and Windermere Railway, 89–90 A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, 89 ‘Lines Written in Early Spring,’ 37–44, 47, 72, 160, 228n Lyrical Ballads, 29, 30, 33, 36, 37, 39, 44, 49, 56, 66, 73, 81, 86, 90, 159, 216, 227n, 244n, 246n

‘The Mad Mother,’ 36 Michael, 83 ‘Moods of My Own Mind,’ 34, 215 ‘Nutting,’ 159–60 ‘Ode to Duty,’ 153, 160, 163, 246n ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’ 49, 50, 52, 54, 89–112, 237n, 239n ‘Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay,’ 33 ‘Peele Castle’ (‘Elegiac Stanzas’), 21, 141, 143–8, 150, 153–64, 166 Peter Bell, 171–3 Poems on the Naming of Places, 12 ‘On the Power of Sound,’ 110 Preface to The Borderers, 236n Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 32, 30, 33, 39, 60, 81, 160, 216, 235n The Prelude (all versions), 16, 30, 33, 56, 75, 93–5, 101, 103, 111, 140–1, 144–5, 147, 148, 150, 154–6, 158, 163, 184, 231n, 237n, 239n, 243n, 244n ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse, 103, 238n ‘Resolution and Independence,’ 143 The Ruined Cottage, 157, 159, 185 Salisbury Plain poems, 107, 141–2 ‘Strange fits of passion I have known,’ 26, 34 ‘The Tables Turned,’ 72–3 ‘The Thorn,’ 81, 86: Note to ‘The Thorn,’ 85–6 ‘Tintern Abbey,’ 4, 12, 19–20, 34, 36, 41, 44, 50–88, 108, 145, 152, 155–7, 163, 184, 207, 218, 228n, 230n, 231n, 232n, 235n, 246n ‘To the Torrent at the Devil’s Bridge,’ 105 ‘Yew Tree’ Lines, 41, 81 Wroe, Ann, 248n Wu, Duncan, 86, 236n Yolten, John W., 242n Yousef, Nancy, 224n Žižek, Slavoj, 22, 77, 224n, 231n, 235n Zuidervaart, Lambert, 229n



266

Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry

English Lyric Poetry

Excess and insufficiency: ontology in the romantic and modern lyric

Arion's Lyre: Archaic Lyric into Hellenistic Poetry

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse

Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words

Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

English Romantic Poetry (Bloom's Period Studies)

Fiat G91

The Problem of Poetry in the Romantic Period

Greek Lyric Poetry: A Commentary on Selected Larger Pieces

Romantic Poetry And The Fragmentary Imperative: Schlegel, Byron, Joyce, Blanchot

Majestic indolence: English romantic poetry and the work of art

Fiat Money Inflation in France

Fiat Money Inflation in France

Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry

English Lyric Poetry

Excess and insufficiency: ontology in the romantic and modern lyric

Arion's Lyre: Archaic Lyric into Hellenistic Poetry

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse

Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words

Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

Enchantment

English Romantic Poetry (Bloom's Period Studies)

Fiat G91

The Problem of Poetry in the Romantic Period

Greek Lyric Poetry: A Commentary on Selected Larger Pieces

Romantic Poetry And The Fragmentary Imperative: Schlegel, Byron, Joyce, Blanchot

Majestic indolence: English romantic poetry and the work of art

Fiat Money Inflation in France

Fiat Money Inflation in France

Recommend Documents