Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press, 2015) is a collection of essays with a polemical intent, as the editors announce in their introduction. Decrying the “institutional Romanticism” of textbook anthologies, which they call “a system of exclusion and distortion,” Carr and Robinson offer instead “a claim for Romanticism as an enactment of an avant-garde and innovative poetry, a claim that links vitally a poetry of the past and a poetry rediscovering itself in a present at any stage of subsequent history. Our book insists, against the grain of established cultural expectations, upon Romantic continuities, recurrences, and proliferation.” I wonder if textbook anthologies might not be fairly innocuous windmills rather than the pernicious giants that Carr and Robinson seem to think them, but the reconception of Romanticism offered here is interesting and provocative for its rejection of a liberal-progressive narrative of literary history. Carr and Robinson counter liberal historicism with a Walter Benjamin–inspired philosophy of literary history in which crises “of democracy could be said to define a form of Romanticism that can spring up at any moment.”
The introduction is a quasi-manifesto, delineating four “premises” of active Romanticism, which I don’t have space to engage with here. They are interesting, tendentious, and written in the language that is appealing to contemporary academic Leftist(ish) poets and critics. The gist of it is that active Romanticism is inherently political, experimental, and, dammit, still alive. To show just how alive and kicking Romanticism is, the editors have gathered essays written mostly by contemporary poets. These poets are supposed to “bear witness to the effects of Romantic poetry and poetics on modern and contemporary innovative poetry.”
Unfortunately, I come away from the book with the impression that contemporary poets aren’t reading the Romantics very much or very well. Part of what has been radical—a word much prostituted in this book—about criticism of and scholarship on the Romantic period in the last fifty years is the recovery of, or renewed focus on, women poets, working-class poets, poets of color, colonized poets, and queer poets. Despite the editors’ commitment to this program, Active Romanticism is, generally speaking, regrettably canonical and Anglo-American in its focus; in this it is like the “institutional Romanticism” that Carr and Robinson decry. Here is a simple list of the Romantics given at least some degree of sustained attention in the book, essay by essay: Erasmus Darwin, Whitman, Thoreau, Keats, Emerson, Wordsworth, Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Whitman, Coleridge, Whitman, Robert Burns, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Anna Barbauld, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Clare, Percy Shelley, Keats, Schlegel, Novalis. This poor state of affairs is made worse by the fact that Mary Shelley, Anna Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, and John Clare are all concentrated in Judith Goldman’s excellent essay “Dysachrony: Temporalities and Their Discontents, in New and Old Romanticisms.” The worst offenders not only stick close to the canonical six British Romantics and their American equivalents, but also concern themselves almost solely with their greatest hits.
Dan Beachy-Quick’s essay “‘The Oracular Tree Acquiring’: On Romanticism as Radical Praxis,” is a case in point. After starting with some interesting and less well-known passages from Thoreau, he goes on to focus his attention on Wordsworth’s emotion recollected in tranquility and Keats’ negative capability, fluctuating between gross generalizations about Romanticism and gross generalizations about Poetry. The essay is full of claims that would amuse the average philosopher: “Romanticism claims poetry as that difficult art that shows us the condition we are in by making that amazed condition apparent. The cost of the gift is being included in the gift’s trap, and to fail is to both escape the maze and be lost in it.” When Beachy-Quick claims that “Romanticism claims” such and such, I claim that Beachy-Quick needs a large dose of Arthur Lovejoy’s classic critique of the ideological coherence of the word Romanticism itself. At his most inflated it seems as though Beachy-Quick fasted for seven days and then performed a séance to summon the spirit of Emerson to serve as his amanuensis. There is nothing radical here, and certainly no praxis.
When the essays do focus on more neglected figures, the results can be less than enlightening. Elizabeth Willis’s essay, “Bright Ellipses: The Botanic Garden, Meteoric Flowers, and Leaves of Grass,” for example, begins with Erasmus Darwin, a very interesting poet-scientist whose didactic poems written in eighteenth-century couplet style were quite popular, and exerted influence on more canonical poets such as Shelley. Willis seems to want to make Darwin sexy through a (now banal) deconstructive focus on paratextual material, but she only succeeds in affirming history’s conclusion that Darwin must be really boring if she has to resort to writing about the errata leaf and commonplace printing conventions like the leading words from one page to another. This focus leads to postmodern excesses beyond all bounds of indecency:
Typeset beneath the footnote, the word ‘Breathe’ is an interruption to the notational commentary on ‘The Swallow’ and is visually severed from what precedes and follows it within the central text. A page turn, like a line break, is literally a space to breathe. But here the turn also creates new grammatical alliances: ‘Linnaeus observes that the wood breathe.’ Indeed Darwin’s pages do breathe in the interstices between words and stanzas, and in 1791 they would have been made of previously breathing, plant-based materials.
Forgive me if I’m not buying it.
There are some sparkling exceptions to the book’s too-narrow canonical focus. As already mentioned, Judith Goldman’s essay exhibits a wide and deep knowledge of Romantic writing, admirably marshaled in a series of short but sharp reflections on time out of joint in various Romantic works. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in her essay “Singing Schools and ‘Mental Equality’: An Essay in Three Parts,” offers a fascinating and historically valuable reading of the intersubjective poetic dialogue between Coleridge and Mary Robinson, showing that “dialogues between male and female poets were a lively mode of practice” in the Romantic period. Through a keen reading of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Robinson’s “To the Poet Coleridge,” the latter a remarkable poetic response to the Coleridge poem (which Robinson read in manuscript), DuPlessis makes a lucid argument about the importance of “gendered tropes” and their power to “construct a powerful cultural legacy that must be acknowledged and faced.” Like several of the essayists in the volume, DuPlessis moves toward personal reflection at the end, but she does so in an admirable way, keyed closely to the historical fate of women writers like Mary Robinson.
Nigel Leask’s essay “‘A Spark o’ Nature’s Fire’: Robert Burns and the Vernacular Muse” is another high point. Leask reads Burns’s use of the Scots vernacular as a “challenge to the class-based imperative of ‘standard English’,” avoiding, at the same time, a reductive account by paying close attention to the “self-conscious artifice of his poetry.” Leask juxtaposes Burns with lesser-known Scottish precursors, contemporaries, and conflicted followers such as Allan Ramsay, Alexander Geddes, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Tom Leonard, weaving a rich and nuanced account of the changing valences of Scots dialect verse, especially as it intersected with class politics, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Two of the essays collected here deserve notice as one-off performances. In “A Deeper, Older O: The Oral (Sex) Tradition (in Poetry),” Jennifer Moxley turns the apostrophic O of Romanticism from a figure of embarrassment, as Jonathan Culler has it, to a figure of “radical receptivity,” using oral sex as a master trope. It’s a fun read, but I’m a bit miffed. I won’t be able to read some of my favorite poems anymore—Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus—without thinking of blow jobs. (It could be worse, I guess.) For Moxley, fixated on double entendre, not death but (oral) sex is all metaphors. Moxley’s essay is smart, her adroitness in reading poems is obvious, and I’m sympathetic to her aims. But it gets a bit sophomoric at points, as when, in a footnote on the Intimations Ode, she intimates that “Wordsworth’s ‘Ye that pipe’ recalls the French slang term for blow job, faire la pipe.” Wink, nudge. I groaned a deep, long O, and not of pleasure.
Simon Jarvis’s essay, “Hyper-Pindaric: The Greater Irregular Lyric from Cowley to Keston Sutherland,” is a singularity here. But then, Simon Jarvis is a singularity among contemporary critics: simultaneously one of the best we have and perhaps the most idiosyncratic in his focus, his aims, and his commitments. Taking the long view on what M. H. Abrams famously denoted the Greater Romantic Lyric, Jarvis provocatively jump cuts from Abraham Cowley’s “The Resurrection” (1656) to Keston Sutherland’s Hot White Andy (2007), tying the form to the larger historical development and fate of the Pindaric ode. “The discussion of these two widely separated terminuses,” Jarvis writes, “prepares the ground for a future discussion of the great irregular ‘Romantic’ ode, not as an inexplicable outburst of native woodnotes, but as a critical instance in that series of deaths and resurrections of the Pindaric which has characterized the grand English lyric ever since Cowley’s reinvention.” Cleverly structuring his essay in the dialectical form of the ode itself—strophe (Cowley), antistrophe (Sutherland), and epode (historical synthesis)—Jarvis brings to bear the virtuosic attention to technique that has become his hallmark, arguing that the “nuts and bolts” of meter, rhyme, and rhythm “constitute an essential condition, not only of the poems’ versification, but also of their loftiest and most rarefied thoughts.” This commitment to technique, to counting the “small change,” coupled with his astonishing historical breadth, yields the kind of insights into the development of verse forms that is all too rare these days.
Not content to stop with this contribution to poetics and literary history, however, Jarvis also hopes to make “a small contribution to literary theory” by stepping into the contemporary debate on lyric. Jarvis doesn’t have any interest in adjudicating “the controverted question of exactly what lyric is,” arguing instead that the concept of ‘lyric’ should not be “deployed emphatically.” The argument feels tacked on in response to the notoriety that the new lyric studies has accrued lately, and I wish that Jarvis had developed the point further.
Finally, for a book that is supposed to be, as the subtitle has it, about The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice, I was surprised to find virtually nothing about nineteenth-century popular radicalism, despite the fact that the poetry and poetics of so many of the Romantic poets considered in the book were deeply imbricated with radicalism—whether in solidarity or reaction. For example, “The Mask of Anarchy”—Shelley’s outraged ballad written in response to the Peterloo massacre—was widely circulated by the Chartists, and, as Michael Demson has shown, found its way into the early labor movement in the US. As Paul Foot notes: “Gandhi quoted it when agitating among the South African Indians in the early part of this century. More recently it was translated and chanted during the students’ uprising at Tiananmen Square, Beijing.” That’s an example of the “radical impulse” in Romantic poetry, and poetry as radical praxis, active still in contemporary poetic practice. Politics in so much contemporary academic writing consists in merely fighting little semiotic skirmishes in the cul-de-sac of language. Those that are interested in carrying on the tradition of nineteenth-century radicalism and its political praxis should be diligent in calling out the entropic effects of the misappropriation of such terms. But if one disregards the subtitle and the introduction—or, better and more generously, considers them as prefatory not to the present book but to a future book that could, and probably should, exist—then what one is left with is a widely and wildly divergent grab-bag of essays by contemporary poets, mostly British and American, working through their own relation, or that of their contemporaries, to the Romantics, again mostly British and American. There’s much of value in that.
July 2017
This review was published in Issue 60:3.