Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism

UNFETTERING POETRY

Other Works by Jeffrey C. Robinson Dorothy Van Ghent. Keats: The Myth of the Hero, ed. Jeffrey Cane Robinson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Radical Literary Education: A Classroom Experiment with Wordsworth’s Ode. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. The Current of Romantic Passion. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Romantic Presences: Living Images from the Age of Wordsworth and Shelley. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1995. Spliced Romanticism [poetry]. Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Poetry Press, 1997. Reception and Poetics in Keats: My Ended Poet. London/New York: Macmillan St.Martins, 1998. Passione e Bellezza: Fenomenologia del Romanticismo. Translation of The Current of Romantic Passion. Napoli: Liguori Editore, 1999. Gilbert, Roger, Jeffrey Robinson, and Anne Wallace, eds. The Walker’s Literary Companion, and The Quotable Walker. New York: Breakaway Books, 2000. The Life of Things: Utter Wordsworth [poetry]. Boulder: TreeHouse Press, 2001. A Wordsworth Notebook [poetry]. Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Poetry Press, 2002. Amenia: A Memoir [poetry]. Boulder: TreeHouse Press, 2002. Wordsworth Day by Day. Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 2005. Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey Robinson, eds. Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 3: The University of California Book of Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming.

UNFETTERING POETRY FANCY IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM

Jeffrey C. Robinson

UNFETTERING POETRY

© Jeffrey C. Robinson, 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6513–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robinson, Jeffrey Cane, 1943– Unfettering poetry: fancy in British Romanticism / by Jeffrey C. Robinson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6513–7 (alk. paper) 1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Experimental poetry, English—History and criticism. 3. Invention (Rhetoric)—History—19th century. 4. Romanticism—Great Britain. 5. Fantasy in literature. 6. Visions in literature. I. Title. PR590.R57 2006 821⬘.709145—dc22

2005044602

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Beth

Poetry is like a swoon, with this difference: it brings you to your senses. Charles Bernstein, “The Klupzy Girl” A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same. . . . John Keats, “Ode to Psyche”

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction:

1

“Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race”

Part I Chapter 1 Fanciphobia: A History of Skepticism about the Fancy

25

Chapter 2 Lyric Subjects in Romantic Poetry

49

Chapter 3 Cursory Observations on Poetry and Cheerfulness (with an excursion on rhyming tetrameter couplets)

83

Part II Chapter 4 A Poetry of Mind: The Della Cruscans, Mary Robinson, and the Fancy at the Time of the French Revolution and Beyond

111

Chapter 5 “Affectionate Eternity”: Leigh Hunt and the Poetics and Politics of the Fancy

139

Chapter 6 The Poetics of Expiration: Felicia Hemans

167

Part III Chapter 7 The Fancy: From Poetry to Boxing and Back

195

Chapter 8 William Hazlitt’s Poetics of the Fancy in His Select British Poets: A Cockney Anthology, I

223

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CONTENTS

Chapter 9 Select British Poets, II: Fanciful Readings of Canonical Romanticism

245

Notes

277

Bibliography

291

Index

297

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

or extended, thought-provoking discussions, readings of parts of this book in manuscript form, support in publishing parts of this work, and serious intellectual support, I would like to thank: Jeffrey Cox, Judith Ferster, Giovanna Franci, Marilyn Gaull, Nan Goodman, Rob Kaufman, William Keach, James R. Kincaid, Jane Lilienfeld, Susan Manning, Jerome McGann, Timothy Morton, Gerda Norvig, and Nicholas Roe. At a critical point Arthur Krystal helped me significantly with revisions. I have been lucky to know and learn from the following colleagues and students, past and present, at the University of Colorado, Boulder: Adeleke Adeeko, Christopher Braider, Gloria Eastman, Sidney Goldfarb, Elissa Guralnick, Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Bruce Holsinger, Karen Jacobs, Patricia Manwaring, Warren Motte, Daniel Peddie, Hollis Robbins, David Simpson, Charlotte Sussman, Will West, Ester Zago, and Sue Zemka. I have been privileged to know Hazel Barnes, a great philosopher, classicist, and teacher at the University of Colorado, and to have won the Hazel Barnes Prize for research and teaching at the University of Colorado. The following have contributed invaluably over the years to my knowledge of Romanticism and my confidence in the current project: Isobel Armstrong, Julie Carlson, Lilla Maria Crisafulli, Paula Feldman, Michael Gamer, Paul Hamilton, Gary Harrison, Anne Janowitz, Kenneth Johnston, Theresa Kelley, Nigel Leask, Jon Mee, Anne Mellor, Leah Price, Charles Rzepka, William St. Clair, Catherine Schieve, Esther Schor, Nanora Sweet, Heidi Thompson, and Paul Youngquist. This book could never have been conceived without the influence, and in many cases friendship, of the following poets who have, in effect, given me a postgraduate education in experimental poetry and poetics, the most salutary corrective to the inevitable predispositions of the academic discipline of criticism and scholarship: Reed Bye, Richard Greenfield, Carla Harryman, Anselm Hollo, Karla Kelsey, Maureen Owen, Patrick Pritchett, George Quasha, Elizabeth Robinson, Jerome Rothenberg, Eleni Sikelianos, Anne Waldman, Barrett Watten, and the late Ed Dorn. Many of these people, and others, I have met through the Naropa University

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Summer Writing Program, which I have attended and once, happily, taught for over the past ten years, probably the finest concentration of experimental and liberated practitioners of and thinkers about poetry in the United States: I particularly thank Anne Waldman and Anselm Hollo, the Program’s leaders, for welcoming me into their group. Sidney Goldfarb (mentioned above) has been my most consistent teacher of modern poetry for the past three decades. Let me also thank the staff at the Trident Café in Boulder, where many pages of this work were written. I am grateful for the assistance of the staffs of Special Collections at the University of Colorado Library, the Houghton and Widener Libraries at Harvard University, the Berg and Pforzheimer Collections at the New York Public Library, the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Library, and the British Library. This work could not have been completed without the support of a University of Colorado Faculty Fellowship (2000–01) and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2003–04). Sections of this book in earlier versions have been given as talks at the University of Colorado, the NASSR 2001 conference, Buffalo State University, and the University of St. Andrews; Susan Manning and Nigel Leask invited me to conduct several seminars on aspects of my topic at the University of Cambridge. An earlier version of the chapter on Felicia Hemans appeared in Romanticism on the Net, and an earlier version of the chapter on Leigh Hunt appeared in a volume of essays on Hunt edited by Nicholas Roe. Elizabeth Robertson has insisted, in our discussions and in her expert readings of chapters, that at all times I put my best, my intellectually most far-reaching, self forward. For this and for support and companionship I thank her most of all.

INTRODUCTION “POETRY FETTER’D FETTERS THE HUMAN RACE”

nfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism is a history and analysis of the poetic faculty of the Fancy and its emanation in the poetry and poetics of the Romantic Period from, roughly, 1770 to 1840. These years, of course, are marked by major revolutions in Europe and America that produced a generalized critique of social institutions. Romantic art by and large reflected this politically charged temperament and attempted to catch the urgency of a need for change in the lives of citizens and the structure of institutions seen as repressive. Indeed, it often proposed such changes by means of visionary poetry; it also satirized the world as it was found and, more simply, acknowledged those disenfranchised members of society whom the revolutionary temperament championed. In this sense, most Romantic art came into being under the sign of hope for social and individual betterment. What has yet to be realized is that this politically radical poetics was described and analyzed, both in its own time and later, under the rubric of “the Fancy,” a poetic principle the effect of which poets and critics, then and now, attempted to diffuse by forms of belittlement. This poetic faculty, its origins, its characteristics, and its manifestations in poetry of Romanticism and later, is the subject of this book. Just as members of society often risked their security and even their lives in challenging the status quo, so politically progressive or radical poets often took risks with the forms as well as the content of their art. The poetics of the Fancy embodies these risks in form and vision in ways that were often criticized by their establishment contemporaries. Such criticism has continued throughout the history of poetics from the Romantic Period to the present, and has led to a privileging of a more conservative Romantic poetics, seriously underplaying the significance of this experimental poetics both for the history of British Romanticism and for the later history of nineteenth- and

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twentieth-century poetry. Furthermore, although readers have readily acknowledged the progressive politics in the post-Revolutionary period they have, with a very few exceptions, refused, on the whole, to acknowledge a progressive poetics. Just as progressive politics can challenge society’s ideological assumptions of the “normal” (which may in fact include forms and sites of inequality and inappropriate use of resources), progressive poetics challenges those principles of poetry that encourage acceptance of the conventional and the familiar as “mind-forg’d manacles.” This book, then, explains and explores the Fancy. What is the Fancy? (1) It is a theory of poetry defined by eighteenth-century philosophers and Romantic poets. (2) It is an embodiment of that poetics in poetry itself, and particularly in the poetry of William Blake, the Della Cruscans and Mary Robinson, and the so-called Cockney school of poets that include among others Byron, Shelley, Keats, Leigh Hunt, and John Hamilton Reynolds. (3) It is the Romantic precursor of a great range of later-nineteenthcentury instances of poets practicing what is called a counter-poetics such as Hölderlin in Germany, Mallarme in France, and Whitman and Dickinson in the United States, to name only some of the most famous. (4) It is the Romantic precursor of the vast body of experimental poetic writing in the Western world during the twentieth century and into our own. It has always been defined as expansive and exploratory but also reactive and contestatory. Readers of British Romanticism and more generally of British and American Literature know the term “Fancy” primarily through Coleridge’s summary formulations in chapters XIII and XIV of the Biographia Literaria, where it appears as a category distinct from, in relation to, and subordinate to the Imagination; consider first Coleridge’s famous accounts of the latter: [The poet] diffuses a tone, and a spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put into action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul (laxis effertur habenis) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities. (II, 16) [The secondary Imagination] dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially dead. (I, 304)

In both passages the imagination emerges as a faculty acting upon the world in a way that changes its apparent character and effect: the world is full of objects of often opposing natures; this multiplicity or variety seems to demand an action against it, a dissolving and reconciling of elements into a

INTRODUCTION

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unity, which is the primary goal and achievement of Imagination. “Invention,” in fact, occurs out of these dissolutions and reconciliations. The world exists to be transformed, “idealized,” into a whole. The acknowledgment or account of the world, which is what the Fancy can do, is insufficient because it leaves the world as it found it, and thus Coleridge subordinates it to the Imagination: FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.1

Compared to the Imagination with its muscular, sculptural powers of invention and unification, the Fancy acts superficially, adumbrating the pleasant but inessential features of grace and ornament. Therefore, in Coleridge’s view, “GOOD SENSE is the BODY of poetic genius, FANCY its DRAPERY, MOTION its LIFE, and IMAGINATION the SOUL that is every where, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.” With “irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul,” the Imagination and its subordinates, will and understanding, act as an ideal parent in the face of a wayward and vulnerable child. Implicit here, and very much in the tradition of writers in the previous seventy-five years, both the world and the Fancy are destructively, dangerously, uncontrollable, in their variety, excess, and unpredictability; the world, being where one lives and with which one is absorbed, makes the desirability for a principle of coherence great. Coleridge’s now famous dichotomy of Imagination/Fancy, along with the explicit hierarchical relationship conferred upon them, constitute the poetics and the critical apparatus that have characterized Anglo-American literary culture for the past 250 years—in work from that of eighteenthcentury philosophers to Wordsworth and Coleridge and to influential critics from Matthew Arnold to the present. Need this be the case? Might one not ask if this hierarchical scaffolding is not just another theoretical skeleton too flimsy to sustain Romantic poetry itself? In fact, the case can be made that priority ought to go the other way, and that the most exciting, indeed the most characteristic, poetry of the turbulent and reformist Romantic Period shows the influence of the Fancy rather than of the Imagination. It is the Fancy rather than the Imagination that most aptly and acutely reflects the impulse in Romantic poetry to expand consciousness, to evaluate social and psychological realities (often through play with language), and to celebrate the mind’s freedom within an oppositional social

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and, in some instances, philosophical framework that actively seeks to constrain perception. It therefore becomes necessary to redraw the landscape of Romantic poetry and poetics according to the very faculty that was once viewed as secondary. But things are never quite so simple. The terms “fancy” and “imagination” have a labile history, with one word often taking on the qualities customarily associated with the other. The OED, for example, gives as one definition of imagination, “Fancy”; another as “a fanciful project.” Shakespeare says, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown; the Poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation, and a name,” attributes, we shall see, easily identifiable as those of the Fancy. But in common, as opposed to technical usage, “imagination” invariably signifies the locus in the mind for acts of creation, whereas the Fancy conveys the weak sense of whim and casual desire. Imagination for Coleridge meant vitality of mind, the ability to synthesize the materials presented to it and to transform them into something new, hardly principles of poetry one would have reason to quarrel with. At the same time, Coleridge’s Imagination also regarded the mind as both separate from and “above” the world in which we participate; and it is from this supernal vantage point that the imagination engenders an aesthetics in which continuities and containments are valued more than discontinuities and contradictions. In effect, the imagination, or more accurately Coleridge’s conception of it, finds “unities” in art and life where none may exist. In the visual arts it favors line and perspective over color and movement. In music it commends melodic structure rather then an atonal non-rhythmic dynamism. And in poetry, it privileges the dramatic speaker, or lyric subject, at the expense of a true account of the world or referent, which can dwindle, shadow-like, into the background. The imagination, however expansive it may seem, prefers a poetry of closed forms. The Fancy, on the other hand, as most readers and poets from the eighteenth century on have observed, is a dispersive faculty. It at once reaches out toward the variousness of the world and nurtures the mind’s “flights” outward to the mental domain of images, words, and sounds. It clearly does not focus on “unity” and containment and thus has no commitment to closed forms. This apparently casual attitude toward closure has historically been met with suspicion. The Fancy’s fundamental brush with chaos, its blurring of subject–object distinctions, and its readiness to accept a limitless world are behaviors finally to be curtailed. Distrust of the Fancy joins the distrust, going back to the Homeric epics and the Stoics, of images themselves, of dream, the irrational, and even chance, all of which could signify a wandering from the “truth.” In the world of eighteenth-century

INTRODUCTION

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Europe, this distrust could take the form of uneasiness with representation and expression of lower classes and popular or “peripheral” cultures and with “peripheral” states of mind such as reverie and dream; even Coleridge, in assigning the Fancy to a “lower” position than Imagination, would speak of a “fanciful delirium.” Of course, proponents of the Fancy view these “failings” as the essential poetic faculty precisely because they engage domains of existence beyond the familiar, because they court elements of chance (thus acknowledging that the mind does not control all events), and because they recognize the body’s role in perception and understanding, all of which awaken the conscious mind to a “de-familiarized” and therefore truer version of a world. And it is this potential realization, this freedom of mind, that social and political institutions seeking ideological control often suppress. Unhappily, these two categories, representing opposing points of view about mind and art, have hardened into cultural sediment in which are imbedded far-reaching implications for reading, writing, teaching, and publishing. Imagination (or rather the principle of poetry it represents) has become associated with conservation, stability, and consolation. Since the late eighteenth century, institutions of cultural power have chosen to delegate under the banner of Imagination, whereas poor Fancy has been relegated by these same institutions into triviality, a childish impulse: immature, escapist, possibly eccentric, and thus to be provisionally tolerated until it grows up. And if it doesn’t, if the impulse continues to express itself in the presence of grown-ups, why then it must be soundly thrashed by a vicious review or silently edged out of mainstream publishing. Fancy, let me say parenthetically, is not the only generally accepted aesthetic feature or principle to meet with such cultural disapprobation. “Color” has also been regarded with similar suspicion by the art world. In a discussion of the culturally adversarial nature of the Fancy and its manifestations, it is useful to observe how color also has been registered as the loss of, (civilized) control. In Chromophobia,2 David Batchelor goes so far as to argue that color has created a suspicion sometimes bordering on phobia. According to Batchelor, color is seen to stand in opposition to white or “whiteness” (a generalized principle invoking “the suppression of colour”) and therefore “has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture.”3 Like the Fancy, color is dangerous: it is associated with the feelings, with passion, with bliss; it smacks of excess and the uncontrollable; it proliferates and “swallows up thought.” Color apparently belongs to the unconscious and the dream state; it intoxicates and acts like a narcotic. And in the sense of being both artificial and cosmetic, color covers up and deludes. For Julia Kristeva, color is linked to “subject/object indeterminacy,” to regression, to the childlike, “to a state before the self is formed in

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language, before the world is fully differentiated from the subject” (p. 82). Color, she notes, is “a pleasure that exceeds discursiveness,” is the “shattering of unity,” it is excess, it is “anti-disciplinary.” Similarly, the Fancy is bent on proliferation, on sheer imagery and association rather than on discursive coherence, on multiplicity rather than unity, or excess rather than control. At best, color is decorative and superfluous. Kant, describing color as “feminine,” says: “Colour enhances a painting, but she is only a lady-in-waiting, because all she does is to make more attractive the true perfections of art” (p. 53). Of greater phenomenological import, it has been argued that color stands in opposition to the line or outline, whose actualization may be said to impart meaning, order, and limits to the Kantian manifold of senseimpressions. The outline corresponds to traditional abstract form in poetry and a focus on the precision of identity expressed by the lyric subject; color is like the breaking-down of subject/referent boundaries in the Fancy. One may take issue with such formulations, but in the artwork, says Batchelor, one often finds “the rhetorical subordination of colour to the rule of line and the higher concerns of mind. No longer intoxicating, narcotic, or orgasmic, colour is banned, ordered, subordinated and tamed” (p. 49). The Fancy, too, promotes the conjunction of language and the erotic and sensuous, which a poetry of Imagination tries to transcend and control. In which case, whiteness is the ultimate suppression of color and all the cultural baggage it carries—to the point that it “produces a blindness to colour, even when colour is literally in front of your face” (p. 47). Color blindness therefore partly comes from choices made by artists and partly from cultural prejudice, that is, a way of looking. This, I believe, is also true of the prejudices and fears about the Fancy. Resistance to color mirrors resistance to the Fancy, and if blindness is one form of resistance, the “weakening” and distorting of Fancy’s powers is another. Fanciphobia blinds one to a truer history of the poetry and poetics of Romanticism. To place my argument in a particular cultural context: If the “Romantic Period” is largely defined as a time of social tumult in which progressives and radicals brought their intellectual energies to critique the institutions of slavery, colonialism, marriage, and religion education, and if they protested unfair parliamentary representation and economic inequities, was it the conservative, consoling Imagination they availed themselves of or was it the Fancy? One must bear in mind that this was a time when printing methods began to allow for the dissemination of political and literary writing to a relatively vast audience, when the disenfranchised began to be heard in greater numbers, when industry was altering the urban/rural population ratios, and when “literature” itself—novels, plays, essays, and poems— felt the burden and excitement of carrying and creating social change. If such an atmosphere of tragicomic turbulence and social consciousness

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existed—which it did—and if it was a moment in history when many people took personal risks for the sake of ideals and social change—which it was—then surely the history of Romantic poetry and poetics cannot be described or funneled through a conservative poetics of Imagination, especially a poetics that conceives itself as a “defense” of the “self” against the encroachments of a bad world and against the imagined delirium of a mind let loose in a chaos of images. The Fancy, therefore, needs reevaluation such that the negativity associated with chaos takes on the positive implications of liberation, the urge to “unfetter” citizens from social constraints and repressions is expressed as an “unfettered” version (a version according to the Fancy) of poetry itself. The political associations to the liberation or unfettering of prisoners from their chains—in, for example, the Bastille—is revisited in the visionary liberations described in some poems of the period and in the unfettering of traditional form and conventional syntax. Clearly some important assumptions underscore these observations, namely that poetry’s language, grammar, and syntax can actively participate in the protest and revisioning of the world. In which case, poetry can also question the consoling function often associated with our sense of it—that is, the notion of its congruity with a stable self and, by extension, the notion of the poem itself as stable, a “monument” that withstands the buffets of the world “cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,” as Wordsworth remarked. There is, in fact, a long countertradition of poetry that broke open in the late eighteenth century, appeared sporadically throughout the nineteenth, exploded in the twentieth, and is currently very much alive—a tradition of self-aware, difficult, experimental work that locates poetry’s “political” role (as a means to a reawakening of human possibility) in the very elements of poetry itself: its form, syntax, grammar, and language. These elements, according to experimental poetry, are not invisible conduits of poetic “content” but reveal the constraints on the mind, while indicating the means by which to throw off these constraints. The lesson or message of such poetry is contained in Blake’s aphorism: Poetry fetter’d fetters the Human Race.

Blake’s wonderful line is both dire and optimistic. With these six words he lets us know that the fettering occurs not only within the formal elements of poetry but also within the concept of the self. Limiting one limits the other. The potential reciprocity thus has a personal, aesthetic, and historical reality, which is manifested in poetry’s affect and in cultural attitudes toward translation, the place of play and work in poetic production, the actual substantiality of a poem and its “usefulness” in a market economy,

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and in the act of perception itself. What Blake wrote is what all serious readers know: there are crises of a social, personal, and spiritual nature concentrated in the brief space of a poem. Consider the repetition of “fetter” in Blake’s line, its traveling from poetry to the human collective community, which immediately establishes the connection between the two domains. The relationship also suggests a possible “fetterer” whose binding, constraining activities can extend over both individual lives and the means of cultural production. Therefore, the line also suggests that in the relationship between art and life exists the power of the aesthetic object to affect that part of the human community that itself has nothing to do with art. This powerful form of poetry, confrontative in its experimentalism, what in the Romantic Period we are calling the poetry of the Fancy, belongs to a tradition of poetry that extends past Romanticism into the experimental modernism and postmodernism of the twentieth century and of our own. Poems for the Millennium4 edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, the great two-volume anthology of twentieth-century poetry defined through its avant garde and experimental movements and inclinations, begins with a section called “Forerunners”: selections from the nineteenth-century poetry of Blake, Hölderlin, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and others that demonstrate the presence of radical modernism in the apparently more poetic and socially stable world of the nineteenth century. This validates my own sense of the historical continuity of experimental poetry of the past century and the poetry of the Fancy of a century earlier. Indeed Rothenberg and Joris describe these “forerunners” (as well as the experimental modernists themselves) in terms similar to what I have outlined as the poetry of the Fancy. Speaking of these nineteenth-century poets, they say: “Their moves were simultaneously formal & experiential, a merging of the poem’s making with an inner need to change both worlds & minds” (p. 19). But although the poetry of the Fancy, in the discussions that follow in this book, may anticipate the poetry of experimental modernism (as Jerome McGann argues about the eighteenth-century “poetry of sensibility”), it does so on its own often different terms since such poetry preceded Marx, Freud, the First World War, and the “heave” of blank verse into a less abstract line. With these differences in mind, it is still possible and, I think, necessary to utilize certain features and principles of modern experimental poetry to illuminate an earlier poetry of the Fancy and its characteristic features. Critics have failed to realize that the Fancy reaches its fullest expression in the poetic experimentation of the past century. Rather they tend to read the Romantics (and other poetries of the past) through the poetics championed by T. S. Eliot or the New Critics, a fact that has always struck me as a willful suppression or avoidance of the “instruments” available to us in the present.

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Rothenberg and Joris can help us to revise our reading practice by making these historical connections. They describe the relationship between Romantic forms and the traditional poetic line and experimental modernism’s break with them by observing that “the Romantic poet carries a still traditional, if increasingly shaky, image of the poem, with its formal structure or poetic ‘line’. . .,” which seems an accurate portrait of the state of affairs when “Romantic poetry” is described in terms of the experimental work of the twentieth century. That is, most Romantic poetry is written in predictable forms: stanzas, couplets, rhymes, blank verse, sonnets; yet signs of turbulence reside within these structures, such as parataxis, excessively long blank-verse paragraphs, half-rhymes, seemingly endless rhymed tetrameter couplets, and unconventional grammar and syntax. And although I agree that the unfettering of form and line is part of the trajectory the authors elucidate, there are other categories in the phenomenon of the poem in which Romanticism contributes to the history of poetic experimentalism. This “traditional image” means that from our perspective the expression of the poetics of the Fancy may initially appear less sensational or “obvious” than what readers of surrealism, objectivism, beat poetry, and language poetry are used to. But this relative invisibility is precisely what invites a critical intervention, even though response during the Romantic period itself often suggested that poetry of the Fancy affected readers in an “antithetical” manner.5 Given that the Fancy declares itself both as a mental faculty and as poetry itself, and given that a poetry of the Fancy in the Romantic Period pushes the limits of traditional form but does not yet (for a hundred years) blow form open, it is important to define the term first beyond and then within the precincts of the poem. Definition of the Fancy According to the OED and the Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, the word “fancy” in 1579 meant “delusion.” This sixteenth-century definition that has dogged discussions of the Fancy in its more modern history masks the range of other dictionary definitions that make out the Fancy to be a potent mental faculty in its engagement both with its own movements, with the world, and with its own (artistic) constructions. The word itself is a contraction of “phantasy” (sixteenth century), which is derived from the Greek “phantasia”—“to make visible”; and from “phainen”—“to bring to light” and “to shine.” Fancy’s origins emphasize illumination of something previously unseen. In another early rendering (1545), however, the verb “to fancy” meant “to portray in the mind, to conceive, to imagine,” focusing more on the “mental image” (1663) of the thing rather than the thing itself.

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Most definitions of the Fancy emphasize the activity of mind that it represents, in particular its independently spontaneous aspects. As early as 1471 and 1579, it is associated with the mind in its “capricious,” “whimsical,” and “arbitrary” capacities. In music a fancy is “a composition in impromptu style” (1789). The words call to mind the important accompaniment of a highly charged affective state with the activity of mind: it’s a short leap to another early eighteenth-century definition—“amorous inclination” (indeed, “inclination” itself appears as early as 1465). What tends to get lost in these definitions is the necessary focus of the mind, no matter how capricious or arbitrary, on or in relation to an object—either one to be illuminated or to be desired. In 1722 the link is made clear: “We know matters of fact by the help of. . .impressions made upon phansy.” This sentence, however, doesn’t catch the historical ambivalence attached to the Fancy’s relationship to the world or even to its constructions in the world. For example, the nineteenth century defined a “fancier” as “a dreamer” (1828), but in 1856 a fancier made “artistic designs.” This points to the association, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of the Fancy and artistic production, design, and fashion (“fancywork”), often with emphasis upon the decorative and ornamental elements in art. When in 1785 Thomas Reid declared, “Fancy may combine things that never were combined in reality,”6 he allows for the possibility that such combinations can produce in themselves a new reality. In such compound words from the nineteenth century as “fancy-blest,” “fancy-bred,” “fancy-framed,” or “fancy-woven,” the Fancy assumes a role in the mind’s interaction with the world. The history of the word Fancy as something that can penetrate the world projects at times a strong sexual connotation. In the nineteenth century, a fancy-piece or fancy-woman was a mistress; a fancy-man a pimp; fancy work, in this sense, was genitals; a fancy-bit a vagina; a fancy-house a brothel; and to fancy someone was to desire them sexually. Concretized here in unsanctioned sexual behavior and, linguistically, in slang, the Fancy as mental faculty becomes linked to forms of the unregulated and transgressive mind. Thus eighteenth- and nineteenth-century adjectives such as “wandering,” “capricious,” “sportive,” and “whimsical” join other adjectives associated with the Fancy also meeting with disapprobation: “excessive” and “wasteful.” Jumping to 1937, the OED records an instance of the word “fancification” useful for a poetics of the Fancy: “constant elaboration, figures of speech, conceits, fancifications, involutions.” Extrapolating from the earlier examples, we could talk about the erotic urge of the Fancy as the source, if not the occasion, for poetry’s peculiar vitality in language itself, its freshness of observation and attention, often accompanied by a loosening of the borders of the ego or lyric subject.

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Dictionary definitions from the Late-Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, to sum up, propose a phenomenon of enormous vitality and complexity, one that is very appealing to the lives of people both within and beyond the precincts of poetry but one that has brought with it, particularly since the middle of the eighteenth century, a measure of social danger and threat to the various wardens of socially acceptable behavior. A profile of the Fancy emerging from these definitions might look like this: a faculty that acknowledges “the referent” through the playful, unpredictable, erotically engaged, unregulated mind of the subject, without a ruling regard for the socially acceptable—a mind that can just as well bring together (“combine”) images in a way that is also unpredictable and, furthermore, can construct these combinations and referents in various forms of art. Implied, though not stated, is that these constructions project simultaneously the referent and the mind in a state of heightened awareness. The Fancy offers the possibility of an image of the interpenetration of mind and world. The Fancy—in opposition to the imagination; phantasia as opposed to Einbildungskraft—begins to emerge as whimsical, playful, trivial, physical, sexual, and popular, more than enough reasons for the poetry of the Fancy to trouble the cultural police. In time it becomes “winged” and “sportive” and thus difficult to “fetter.” Indeed, its triviality or whimsicality is precisely what keeps it from remaining a polite ornament of the literary aristocracy. Once the Fancy had been degraded to the status of a lightweight escapist mental epiphenomenon, its force in making reality more real, even in being able to “mark,” to “wake up” people to the real, turns it, once embedded in a vision of poetry, into a counter-poetics. This transgressive and defiant element weds poetry to economics. Poetry of the Fancy isn’t about “work” or “usefulness” but about play. As do children, poems of the Fancy play seriously. Yet in the seriousness of play, which implicitly acknowledges the unfettering of mind and the mind’s awareness of the greater world, resides the fact that poetic play simply is and feels just like play. The power of effect and consequence in Blake’s aphorism should not blind us to the “airiness,” the slightness, the evanescence, even the “waste” fulness proposed in the poetry of the Fancy. “Sacred waste,”7 an oxymoron in which ephemerality becomes associated with an event (poetry), pointedly excludes the world of a market economy.8 A poetry of the Fancy assumes a connection between this defiance of the world defined by the market and success in its political aim often through an awakened peripheral vision and the erotic (playful, sensuous) side of consciousness, or what Blake calls the expanded senses. The Fancy encourages thinking that a poem is an awareness gained through a playful opening of the mind to a felt attentiveness (to gather in a term privileged by contemporary experimental poets) of other centers of subjectivity and affectivity.

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Poems of the Fancy do not primarily record “the drama of the lyric subject” in its path to self-realization or maturity (see chapter 2) but exist, one might say, to praise the liveliness of mind itself as an exploring, witnessing, winged feature of humanity. I believe that the above account of the Fancy and its poetry—particularly in its (expanded) erotic aspect—which is one of the subjects of this book, provides the correlate in Romantic poetics to one of the major tenets of the New Historicism, the foregrounding of the erotic in the literature of Romanticism as part of the latter’s challenge to forms of repression of individual identity. In three studies that helped define the Romantic New Historicism—Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries (1982) and Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology (1983) and his later The Poetics of Sensibility (1986)—we witness how the erotic (often the mythicerotic) informs some of the politically progressive poetry of the Regency decade. Examples of the erotic in Romantic poetry include: Shelley’s Alastor and Epipsychidion, parts of Byron’s Don Juan, and sections of Keats’s Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes. The erotic could also apply to the sensuous language of Keats’s shorter poems. Butler and McGann distinguish this poetry from that of the earlier Romantic decades (“spousal” but not erotic verse); yet McGann notes the presence of the erotic in the 1790s in the works of Erasmus Darwin as well as the Della Cruscans and Mary Robinson (Sappho and Phaon). In terms of love poetry, at least since the time of Catullus (e.g., carmina v and li) if not before, love stood as a challenge to conventional social norms. Unsurprisingly, the Fancy in the eighteenth century was associated with “amorous inclination,” perhaps in the way that such eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century novels of l’amour passion (from La Nouvelle Héloise, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, and Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis to Wuthering Heights) participate in what Stendhal in his brilliant fanciful treatise De L’Amour calls crystallization, his term for the way that the fancy’s role in projection of an idealized beloved discovers and cements, paradoxically through the wild intensity of distortion, the reality of love. Although none of these writers commits himself to the word “fancy,” each could be said to explore and follow the fancy’s capacity to cross the threshold of normative consciousness into love’s extravagance. Moreover, it is no accident that this willingness to cross domains of reality is complemented by progressive politics. Of course, overseeing a poetry of erotics written at the time of the French Revolution is the figure of Blake, for whom the erotic illustrates a synergy of body, senses, energy, and mind in order to produce visionary apprehension, expanded consciousness, and not least a society founded on democratic principles rather than on egotism and control.9 Does the poetry of the Fancy have a form? And if it does, what is its form, or what are its formal elements? Specifically, what would the formal

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elements of a poetry dedicated to the interpenetration of lyric subject and referent and to the mind as a wandering, capricious energy look like? I argue in the following pages that a poetry of the Fancy is not formless. As Denise Levertov has observed: “free verse” isn’t “free” in the sense of formless; rather it is “organic,” a form based on a different shapeliness, namely that of the breath required to speak the words of a phrase: the pressure for the line to break at a certain point is not the abstraction of traditional meters but is “unfettered” by the body of the speaker. Romantic poetry rarely attempts this example of organic form, but it has other ways of shaping the principle of unleashed proliferation and multiplicity, often expressing itself in a paratactic syntax. Parataxis can honor the outward-directedness of the Fancy by the theoretically infinite listing of elements in the world or in images. The stress is laid on the referent, not on the lyric subject, the “I.” This open-form tendency also appears in streamy verse forms, such as highly sinuous blank verse and the endlessly repeatable rhymed tetrameter and trimeter couplets. In this manner, the poetics of the Fancy proposes that poetic form is not a priori an instrument of “containment” and control, but rather a means of expression that reveals a mind-in-motion and makes concrete the un-fettering of mind. The poetry of the Fancy relies, along with parataxis, on the juxtaposition of referents and images as they occur in observation and perception; here the sentient mind tends to record the things it sees regardless of their intrinsic or desirable compatibility or on their resolution, “reconciliation” (in the Coleridgean sense), or evaluation. This unguarded juxtaposition, as the surrealist Pierre Reverdy noted, belongs to the visionary (as well as comic) side of the Fancy, since it proposes a reality unanticipated by ideologically predictable thinking, a reality that may be, so to speak, fantastic, or that can combine socially “incompatible” elements. In a poetry of the Fancy, metonymy reigns supreme among tropes. Moreover, the juxtaposition of an elegant or traditional stanza form (evidence of the “aristocracy” of poetry) alongside content from the domain of the dispossessed and disenfranchised—such as Barbauld’s elegant heroic couplets (Eighteen Hundred and Eleven) that contain a severe critique of British society and policies—produces an unsettling but exciting expanded poetic reality. This is poetry that refuses to subordinate an aesthetic and formal reality to a current social reality; it rejects the capitulation of the poetic imagination to the overwhelming tragedy or outrage found in society (slavery, poverty, madness, etc.). And the resulting tension, in the words of Louis Zukofsky, appears as “thoughts’ torsion.”10 The period of the 1790s, with its enthusiasm for representing the previously invisible and inaudible members of society, produced a substantial number of such formal juxtapositions (e.g., “Poetical Sketches,” “Lyrical Ballads,” “Lyrical Tales,” “English Eclogues”).

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These formal properties of the Fancy in fact enrich one another because although it is the syntactic image of proliferation, parataxis also preserves, as Leigh Hunt noted, the principle of juxtaposition. In linking thematic and grammatical elements together with commas, “and”s, “or”s, and “now”s, one creates at every juncture a connection between two elements that may belong to different domains. Indeed, the simultaneous presence of parataxis and juxtaposition creates a problem for parataxis.11 Does it act to foreground the isolated, individuated identities of all of the elements contained within its string, or does it work to link them altogether in a totality? One can put the problem positively by saying that the poetics of the Fancy allows for the acknowledgment of individual elements in the world as they exist in relation to other elements. * * * As the formal elements of the Fancy obviously image a stress for poetry on the elements of the world, the question arises: what is the fate of its opposite, the lyric subject? The gardener Fancy, says Keats in the “Ode to Psyche,” is one who “breeding flowers will never breed the same,” and so the subject of this poetry is creation in its multiplicity. The lyric subject in that wonderful poem relinquishes center stage to facilitate, somewhat comically, the love between Psyche and Amor, which seems to be equivalent to the facilitating of the Gardener Fancy’s breeding of flowers. Wordsworth said, by contrast, that in his poem “The Thorn” he portrayed a superstitious man as one whose mind was “adhesive” and thus stuck in the given: this is the opposite of the inherently mobile and transformative mind of the Fancy. Instead of burrowing into the “self,” the poetry of the Fancy locates the speaker, often through parataxis, in the “cosmos” of world elements. Thus when he brilliantly said of Wordsworth that he “takes a personal interest in the universe,” which is usually read as this poet’s characteristic ego-overinvolvement, William Hazlitt may also have been indicating the dispersive nature of the Fancy, a restless, unpredictable drive out from the domain of the ego and the corresponding liveliness of mind that follows and attends to the world of presences.12 As an image of mind-in-motion, the poetry of the Fancy moves, in Charles Olson’s famous phrase in “Projective Verse,” “from perception to perception.”13 The Romantic poetry of the Fancy, as is the case with its contemporary literature of l’amour passion, its centrifugal thrust of thought and language, and its emphasis on the referent, reveals a different attitude toward the lyric subject from what criticism has traditionally led us to expect—namely that the lyric subject is not the stable entity that standard poetics has desired and pictured. Indeed, one may contend that the very imagery of flight and

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streams, the focus on multiplicity, on the referent, on language and syntax, on the insubstantial that characterize the lyric, but which rely on the language of the Fancy, challenge the notion of the stable, fixed “bourgeois subject” as a sublime transcendence of and (paranoid) defense against “the bad present”—that is, an exterior world of malice and terror in which the disenfranchised invariably confront defensive social institutions. It is, I believe, largely because proponents of these institutions and of the status quo, including literary critics from the 1790s to our own time, have endeavored to keep the bourgeois subject strong and bounded, defined by strict forms and a notion of “internal” integrity, that the poetry of the Fancy has been neglected or diminished. The poetry of the Fancy is finally a poetry of lively thought.14 When Wordsworth collects a suite of poems under the heading “Moods of My Own Mind” (1807), when Coleridge and others identify a type of poem as an “effusion,” they wish to collapse the distinction between the conventional monumentality of poetic genre and the fleeting, expansive quality of conscious thought, partly to challenge the panopticon’s attempt to control and regulate the minds of citizens. A poetry of “mind” differs from a poetry of the lyric subject in that the latter exhibits a drama of subjective completion at the cost of a distancing of itself from the world, whereas the former comes into being at the point of encounter with the world, at times (as I shall show) losing itself in the referent. In effect, the freedom of mind displayed in a poetry of the Fancy emerges in a world not excluded, but celebrated. This accounts in large part for the affect of “cheerfulness” accompanying the Fancy, marking an attitude not of loss—the elegiac element championed in the history of criticism of Romantic poetry—but of abundance in the acknowledged world and pleasure in the sheer athleticism of mental activity. The Fancy—with its juxtapositions, its excesses, its expansiveness beyond normative domains of consciousness—seeks a vision of inclusiveness, embracing dream and reverie states as well as democratic ideals. * * * The history of thinking about the Fancy from the eighteenth century on says nothing about gender. Just as a poetry of the Fancy displays or assumes an openness of one sort (such as playfulness of mind), it can also remain closed to certain realities, such as the presence of women in their society but also the presence of poetry by women. This exclusionary aspect represents something more than homosocial bonding among poets and fellow travelers; indeed, such poetry often appears, or feels, homosexual, which, if the appropriation of the feminine partially characterizes homosexuality,

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would perhaps explain the sense given in that poetry of, at times, the male “performance” of the Fancy as feminine—with its flights and its airiness, its childlike quality (as associated in Wordsworth’s The Excursion, for example, with the feminine temperament). On the other hand, despite this exclusion, women poets participated in the Fancy by themselves making poems of the Fancy. The social marginality of women and women’s consciousness, the cultural association of the “ego” with the masculine, would make the Fancy seem a more natural poetics for women themselves, with its mission to make visible and include that which was not seen or heard for itself, but also with the playful habit of the fanciful mind coming from the culturally less “serious” position of women’s thinking. At the same time, given that the best Romantic women poets of the Fancy often focused on topics important to all members of society (e.g., Robinson’s “London Summer Morning,” Barbauld’s “Washing-Day” and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, or Smith’s Beachy Head ), the playfulness of this poetry of the Fancy would seem particularly subversive. This might in part explain the vituperative reception of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven by the press and the striking fact of nearly universal omission of the women poets from the major anthologies of the period (by, for example, Thomas Campbell and William Hazlitt—for the latter, see chapter 8). And it also may account for the particular success a twentiethand twenty-first-century “poetry of the Fancy” has enjoyed among women poets—to name a few: Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, Lorine Niedecker, Susan Howe, Alice Notley, Lyn Hejinian, and Maureen Owen. The inclusion of studies of women poets (Mary Robinson and Felicia Hemans) in this book is an effort to insist upon their relevance to the study of the Fancy and to suggest that maybe the issue of poetics itself may account for the exclusion of Romantic women poets from the canon for so many years. Modern Criticism Although no one has written extensively on the Fancy and Romantic counter-poetics,15 a number of critics have prepared the way, such as Donald Wesling, whose The New Poetries (1985) first charted the path from Romantic Poetry to modern open-form poetry. By showing how Coleridge’s Preface to Christabel, with its opening of the foot from accentual-syllabic to accentual meter, was an important step toward “free verse,” Wesling abetted William Keach’s definitive study of Keats’s “Cockney couplets,” which, in focusing on this new formal laxity, says much about the linking of politics and form. Two very important studies, Marjorie Levinson’s Keats’s Life of Allegory and Jerome McGann’s The Poetics of Sensibility, discuss Romantic Poetry as one of surfaces rather than

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of depth, as meaninglessness rather than meaningfulness, and as, in the case of Keats and the Della Cruscans, instances of “expenditure” and of fashion. Taken together, Jon Mee and Jeffrey Cox present a compelling case for reconsidering the Romantic Period and by a kind of metonymy “the Romantic Lyric” as characterized by communal exchange rather than solitary contemplation: this typifies the making of Romantic poems from the early Della Cruscans and Mary Robinson (see chapter 4) to the late Cockney School (see chapters 5 and 7). The work of Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre attempts a large-scale account of Romanticism and its modern and postmodern sequellae based on a definition of Romanticism as a proto-marxist critique of the marketplace and its pernicious effect on the whole-souled life of the individual and the community: Romanticism, they argue, in a way that seems to reinforce the work of Mee and Cox on its communal nature, finds its most fruitful and successful outcomes not primarily in art but in social programs such as the environmental, feminist, and Latin American liberation movements. Paul Hamilton’s Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory traces the presence, in Romantics such as Rousseau (as opposed to Schiller), of a similar trajectory of an art that predicts the fulfilment of its principles in community. This might be a way of defining “open” in “open-form” poetics—poetry opens to the world transformed in its own image (certainly implicit in the poetics of the Fancy). At the same time, the opening, as I suggest at the beginning of this paragraph, results in a change in poetics, a “counter-poetics,” of surface, “waste” and expenditure, the anti-monumental (see chapter 6 on Felicia Hemans), and construction. Robert Kaufman’s essays on Adorno, Kant, and Romantic poetics further discover the constructivist (as opposed to the organic, unthinking) poetics characteristic of postmodern aesthetics, already inherent in Kant and some Romantic poets of the Fancy such as Shelley. William Keach’s new book, Arbitrary Power16 brilliantly proposes that the “arbitrary” nature of the poetic sign (which recalls the early definition of the Fancy as “arbitrary”) and which roughly could be identified as an effect of the Fancy) exactly opposes the “arbitrary [political] power” imposed by tyrants upon their subjects. These works taken together provide a strong basis for the more systematic account of a progressive Romantic poetics, along with substantial readings of poems, pursued in this book. It remains to speak at greater length about the single most important precursor to the present work, the above-mentioned The Poetics of Sensibility. In that book (as well as in the previously cited work by Lowy and Sayre, Wesling, and Kaufman) “Romanticism” appears as an early prototype of experimental writing or community in the twentieth century. McGann demonstrates the presence of a poetry-of-mind in eighteenthcentury and Romantic poetry of “sensibility,” which is also an image of the

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eroticisation of mind. It is also a poetry of artifice and surfaces and signifiers and, although he does not use the word, construction. The descendent of this poetry is Gertrude Stein as opposed to the “high moderns” (Yeats, Frost, Bishop, etc.), the conservative inheritors of the conservative element in Romantic poetics, with its emphasis upon the poetry of the lyric subject, the drama of personal “development” over and against the world. His conviction is that we will learn to read the Romantics more accurately and more in the spirit of their hopes for a transformed society when we open ourselves to the line of experimental poetics that the Romantics initiate. McGann is right to open the canon for discussion to a larger range of poets, a practice that I follow here. Moreover, the poetics delineated throughout The Poetics of Sensibility is basically consonant with the poetics of the Fancy as I develop it. My only serious objection to his book emerges with his discussion of Wordsworth, whose poetics appear, once again, as a foil (as it was in the 1970s contrast between the radical poetics of Blake and those of Wordsworth) to that of the Della Cruscans, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, and others. Wordsworth, to McGann, is the champion of a poetry of sincerity, the natural, the “deep,” as opposed to the artificial and the superficial. Although as a generalization, and based on passages from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and individual poetic passages, McGann’s argument may hold, it flattens, I believe, the actual phenomenon, the “event” of many of Wordsworth’s poems, in which one can see signs of the poetics of the Fancy at work.17 The analogy is with T. S. Eliot as described by Jerome Rothenberg: in spite of Eliot’s ultimate conservatism, he advances in his earlier poetry principles of experimental poetics that other poets foreground with less or no ambivalence.18 I imply in my book that the continually compelling poetry of Wordsworth is in no small measure a function of his ambivalent commitment to the poetics of the Fancy swirling around him in the 1790s and early 1800s.19 His political ambivalence during these years is manifest in a poetic one (see, in particular, chapter 9).20 Outline of the Book The chapters in part I (1, 2, and 3) define the Fancy in terms of the conflicts that historically have brought it into being as a strong poetics. Chapter 1 presents a history of the attempts, driven by distrust and suspicion of the Fancy, to trivialize the Fancy largely along the lines of its supposed “immaturity,” moving from eighteenth-century thinkers, through Wordsworth in his Preface to his 1815 collection of poems, and into modern academic criticism. This line of thinking is countered by examples from primarily eighteenth-century poets for whom the Fancy is not tied to human

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chronology because they perceived it as the poetic faculty, constant whenever poetry was fulfilling its visionary calling. The Fancy’s supposed immaturity has, in mainstream criticism, been mapped onto individual poems interpreted as a poetry of the individualist lyric subject, the point of departure in chapter 2. Here I sketch several other subject positions present in Romantic poetry more in keeping with the critical and exploratory character of the Romantic Period: the subject as a type or disenfranchised class, the “communitarian” subject (“we” as opposed to “I”), the witness whose voice comes into being at the moment of attentive encounter with the other, and finally the syntax of the Fancy’s poetry of the referent in which the subject of a sentence (“I”) gives way heavily to the (more important) referent. This outward-directed focus on the referent—its typical multiplicity rather than the lyric subject’s singularity—and the generally proliferative nature of the Fancy produce the characteristic affect of “cheerfulness,” the subject of chapter 3. Cheerfulness (defined by Leigh Hunt in 1818) stands opposed to the characteristic affect of the poetry of the lyric subject, melancholy or “anti-cheerfulness” (defined by the poet Maria Jewsbury in 1825) resulting from the alienation that typically accompanies a poetry that, whereas the subject increases in precise and full definition, loses its precise account of the world. Cheerfulness is also the affect of a poetry of transformation and hope. In this chapter is an excursus on poetry of the “rhymed tetrameter couplet,” what I call the verse form of cheerfulness, from Shakespeare to the Romantics. I end with accounts of a poetics of cheerfulness in contemporary theory and poetry (Adorno, Yeats, and Lyn Hejinian). The three chapters of part II (4, 5, and 6) establish the principle of the continuous presence of a poetry of the Fancy throughout the Romantic Period. To restructure thinking of Romantic poetry in terms of the Fancy demands an upgrading of the status of noncanonical poets to the point that the principles behind their poetry influence the way that the major figures are interpreted. These relatively new voices must have more or less equal presence in the Romantic conversation. Moreover, the voices of women poets—so effectively suppressed over the past century—both as individual phenomena and as embodiments of various poetics of the Fancy, must enter that conversation. Chapter 4 presents Della Cruscan poetry, as an openly acknowledged poetry of the Fancy, first in its own right and then as a major driving force in the poetry of Mary Robinson, from its early Della Cruscan idiom (ca. 1790) through the erotic poetry (Sappho and Phaon), the urban poetry, and finally Lyrical Tales (1800). A major part of the argument establishes a fundamental link, through the poetics of the Fancy, between the playful poetry of fashion and the politically progressive, socially conscious poetry

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emerging out of the French Revolution. The 1790s in this chapter offers a very different profile of early Romanticism from the traditional one that centers on the Coleridgean poetry of “retirement.” Chapter 5, through a reading of Cockney poet Leigh Hunt’s books Feast of the Poets (1811, 1814, 1815) and Foliage (1818), appears as a Regency decade update of Della Cruscan poetic principles challenging the contemporary statements by Wordsworth (1815) and Coleridge (1817) that promote a preference for a poetics of the Imagination. Della Cruscans and Cockneys, moreover, associate poetic production with the (somewhat marginalized) group rather than with individualist inspiration through contemplation. If the Romantic poetry of the Imagination as a poetry of the lyric subject tends to situate itself against or beyond the world of market economy, the Regency poetry of the Fancy insists upon a more complex relationship to it, at times defiantly promoting a poetry of “waste,” expenditure, and ephemerality. The late lyrics of Felicia Hemans (ca. 1826–34), in contrast to her more monumental poems written earlier in her career, confer value on the insubstantial in what I call a “poetry of expiration,” her later Romantic version of the poetry of the Fancy; this is the subject of chapter 6. Looking at the chapter titles in the final third of the book (7, 8, and 9) might cause one to wonder what could hold altogether a reading of Regency boxing literature, a nearly unnoticed anthology of British poetry compiled by Hazlitt, and a set of readings of canonical Romantic poets and poems. The answer comes from two words in the Fancy lexicon: inclusiveness and juxtaposition. In all the works discussed in chapter 7 on boxing—Pierce Egan’s Real Life in London, J. H. Reynolds’s The Fancy, and Hazlitt’s essay “The Fight”—the upwardly mobile middle class mingles with the nobility, with the seemingly classless “dandies,” and the (often) lower-class boxers and fans. Poetry joins in the literary landscape with reportage of the fight and the life of the boxing Fancy. The vision of inclusiveness, however, refuses to reconcile opposite and discordant qualities, but instead revels in their juxtapositions (at times in a Chaucerian or Rabelaisian manner): the reader experiences a pleasurable but pointed flaunting of barriers and exclusivities of class and of literary genres and subjects. And in such mixings lies no room for the individualist ego and the promoting of the one over the many. In a spirit of cheerful generosity that dominates this world of the Fancy (both kinds), all voices and types are heard. The pervasive critique of the ego here corresponds to the critique of a poetry of the lyric subject. Inclusiveness and juxtaposition are, of course, an issue in the making of anthologies: how much of what gets included, and what poem sits next to what? Hazlitt’s Select British Poets (1824), which includes poetry from Chaucer to Byron, uniquely for its time featured a large section of “living

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Poets,” a section that, for obscure copyright reasons, was immediately suppressed in a second edition, which appeared in 1825. Very few copies of the first edition remain; although copyright is almost surely the primary reason for its vanishing, the fact that the selection of Living Poets seems to have been made according to the poetics of the Fancy and therefore of political concern to establishment publishers is a possibility. Regardless, “Living Poets” presents a Romanticism according to the Fancy and is thus not only strikingly different from twentieth-century selections of Romantic poetry but stands as a kind of authentic origin that cultural prejudice and predisposition have over the past 175 years suppressed. This is the subject of chapter 8. How does one define “Romantic Poetry” on the basis of Hazlitt’s anthology (as well as according to his theories of poetry)? Chapter 9 concludes the book with readings from the poetry of Wordsworth and with an extended reading of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” poetry included in Hazlitt’s selection. (A few of the Wordsworth poems presented are not in Select British Poets.) Wordsworth in this chapter emerges not as the essential poet of the lyric subject (the “egotistical sublime”) but as a visionary directing attention to the principle of animation in the world. And the “Ode to a Nightingale” appears not as a “mature” dismissal and critique of the Fancy (“The Fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf”) but as a critique of the trivialized Fancy. The two-tiered thesis of this book is that throughout the Romantic Period the poetry of the Fancy transforms itself, Proteus-like, from one manifestation to another; and that a poetics of the Fancy defines the poetics of Romanticism in its most spirited, exploratory, and experimental aspect—exactly the opposite of what traditional history and readings have told and continue to tell us. Instead of being in Hume’s words, “loose reveries,” the poetry of the Fancy embodies the poetics of generation and regeneration; it exemplifies de-familiarization, expanded vision, the eroticization of language and “revolution of the word”; it communicates the voice and image of the disenfranchised, the expanded, or deconstructed subject, and can become a poetry of the signifier; and, perhaps above all, it reveals the mind in conscious, liberated motion—the mind in critical excitement. A poetry of the Fancy is the mind free to celebrate its “realization” through action that is not above, but within the community; not above, but within ideology, creating not through contemplation but more dynamically through a construction of the world it sees as new.

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PART I

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CHAPTER 1 FANCIPHOBIA: A HISTORY OF SKEPTICISM ABOUT THE FANCY

hilosophers, theorists, reviewers, and literary critics from the French Revolution to the present have sought to devise strategies to displace or disarm the power of the Fancy. This skepticism, or what I have called “fanciphobia,” adopts or takes several forms: (1) The Fancy is trivialized (associated with escape and unreality). (2) The Fancy is subordinated to the Imagination as a poetic faculty (i.e., it is honored but kept under control). (3) It is associated with the carefree nature of childhood or with an apparently simpler historical past (and thus it becomes irrelevant to the present). (4) After childhood and adolescence, the Fancy becomes the object of a “mature” person’s skepticism about its viability in the real world of getting and spending. Skepticism toward the Fancy’s dominance in mental life expresses the successful maturation of the adult. (5) It is considered a gatherer of “raw materials” that are to be shaped into something permanent and beautiful by the Imagination. The ability of poetry to mold or direct the minds and therefore the actions of citizens, obviously transcends debates about the Fancy, which is only one historical expression of the issue surrounding poetry. In fact, a number of writers adduced in these pages do not mention the Fancy at all: instead they express their skepticism and suspicion about the habits of mind associated with the Fancy by describing the success of poets and poems in terms of “maturation,” or the ability to transcend a certain primitive or unformed level of development (which only later became attributes of the Fancy). For instance, the Reverend Vicesimus Knox’s very popular poetry anthology, Elegant Extracts (first published in 1784), was intended specifically to guide young middle- and upper-middle-class people into a bourgeois capitalist adulthood (see chapter 8). Knox likens the minds of children and adolescents to the Fancy; and the job of the anthology and watchful parents is to lead

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them through the pleasurable (“sportive”) but treacherous waters of poetry (the Fancy) so that they can enter the world of adult reality. The challenge was to keep the young from becoming excessively or permanently engaged with Fancy-driven poetry. Success depends upon maturation, a coming of age and a coming-to-the-conclusion that poetry and a fanciful response to it belongs to an earlier chronological stage of life, a stage one must leave behind with a grim sense of triumph if also with a touch of nostalgia. By contrast, such eighteenth-century poets as Thomas Gray, Joseph Warton, William Collins, and William Blake (and in the next century Walt Whitman) struggle against overt fanciphobia and eventually redefine the fancy as a natural condition of human response. In effect, the Fancy comes to be associated with will and attentiveness. Moreover, the fact that poets write about the Fancy in poetry itself suggests that “poetry” can bring to “theory” certain elements of poetic response to ideas—passion and desire, sensuousness and surprise: in Coleridge’s term, the discussion of a philosophical or aesthetic principle under the sign of poetry makes the account of the Fancy “whole-souled.” The two-part structure of this chapter sketches first a “history” of fanciphobia, from eighteenth-century philosophy to present-day literary criticism, a history that labels the Fancy as a mental faculty associated with an “immature” stage of human, individual development. The spring-time associations of the Fancy—capricious, playful, eruptive—belong, so the conventional wisdom goes, at best to the spring-time of life and must recede, in the successful poet, with age and an accompanying tragic wisdom. In the second part of the chapter, I present some instances from eighteenthcentury British poetry with a forward look at the mid-nineteenth-century American Walt Whitman (thus bracketing “Romanticism”) demonstrating an alternative view that the principles of the Fancy are available to any poet at any point in life: they are not the product of an unwilled biological moment or a fantasy of an Arcadian past but represent a critical poetic decision to write a visionary poetry of engagement and regeneration. I Although the attributes of the Fancy produce more or less universal agreement, like the chromophobia I discussed earlier, it is their valuation that creates interest for poetry and poetics. More often than not, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Fancy’s value is weighed in relation to that of Imagination.1 In what was for his century a typical point of view, William Duff’s “An Essay in Original Genius and Its Various Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, Particularly in Poetry” (1767) the Imagination, thoroughly allied with “genius,” assumes such a magisterial

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and comprehensive role in any significant act of creation and production that another faculty, such as the Fancy, could hardly vie for critical importance. He writes: Imagination is that faculty whereby the mind not only reflects on its own operations, but which assembles the various ideas conveyed to the understanding by the canal of sensation, and treasured up in the repository of the memory, compounding or disjoining them at pleasure; and which, by its plastic power of inventing new associations of ideas, and of combining them with infinite variety, is enabled to present a creation of its own, and to exhibit scenes and objects which never existed before.2

Whereas in Duff the Fancy assumes without question its secondary position among poetic faculties, elsewhere one sees a range of attempts to recognize the contribution of the Fancy as essential if not primary in value. One senses an uneasiness about the Fancy—at once so appealingly vital, and yet to be reigned in. For some eighteenth-century thinkers, for example James Beattie, the Fancy works harmoniously with the Imagination as a kind of servant or “lady-in-waiting” providing “raw materials” for the Imagination to shape into something “original.” This accessory role is typical. But Duff finds more potential conflict between the Imagination and the “rambling and sportive” Fancy: It should even seem that on some occasions an extraordinary vivacity of Fancy, which includes a certain degree of volatility, occasioning the mind to start as it were from one object to another, without allowing it time to conceive any of them distinctly, might be prejudicial to that vivid conception, and that extensive combination of ideas which indicate and characterize true Genius. In this case, the mind, hurried with precipitancy from one theme to another, though it may catch a glimpse, yet rarely obtains a full view of the object it desires to contemplate. This seems to be the principal reason of GENIUS, whose ideas are VIVID and COMPREHENSIVE, is not always united with WIT, whose conceptions are QUICK and LIVELY, but frequently SUPERFICIAL. (Pp. 58–59)

Acknowledging the Fancy’s quick movement from object to object (in poetry this would be the naming of one object or perception after another in a list), Duff nonetheless interprets this as a superficiality, specifically, a deficiency in conception and perspective (the “full view”). The Imagination, defined by Duff not only as conceptual but also reflective, clearly calls attention to consciousness rather than to that which the Fancy cares about, the referents upon which consciousness plays. Superficiality in poetry means to Duff a deficiency of attention to the conscious mind; superficiality also means the “glimpse” as opposed to the “depth” of the

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comprehensive or full view. His preferences are clear: depth over superficiality, perspective over the glimpse, subject (consciousness) over object (referent), slowness over quickness. Duff finds a secure place for the “quick and lively” Fancy, however, in “wit” and “humor,” a place of less ultimate and monumental value. Despite Duff’s view that the Fancy is deeply immersed in the world of the referent, the history of fanciphobic thinking at the same time tells us that it takes no part in the world of reality. Usually the Fancy is associated with the tradition that labels figurative language decoration, embellishment, and—like “color”—superficial: on the surface of the object. Superficiality, moreover, is linked to the mind’s “mechanical” action under the laws of association: again, to be superficial and mechanical is to be thoughtless and unreflective. Similarly, “reality” does not belong to the world of the Fancy, even though the Fancy is seen as dwelling in the world of objects. According to Ernst Platner (1772), Fancy is “the presentation of ideas without reference to reality and without the test of possibility, verisimilitude, and proportion.”3 Depth, in turn, implies slowness of mind— time for the world of objects to be embraced and “colored” by the reflective mind. Superficiality as action occurs as “caprice” and “whim” or accident. As with chromophobia, one can discern in these assessments of the Fancy a fear in aesthetics of the mind, the body, and social order getting out of control. The valuation of the Fancy as superficial, slight, whimsical, and partial is one way of neutralizing occasions of excess and extravagance, eros, eccentricity, and political criticism. Aesthetics handles fanciphobia with versions of trivialization and marginalization. Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, for example, disarms the unpredictable power of the Fancy by considering it merely a gatherer of materials that the Imagination then shapes into a poetic object: . . .imagination is a complex power. It includes conception or simple apprehension, which enables us to form a notion of those former objects of perception or of knowledge, out of which we are to make a selection; abstraction, which separates the selected materials from the qualities and circumstance which are connected with them in nature; and judgment or taste, which selects the materials, and directs their combination. To these powers, we may add, that particular habit of association to which I formerly gave the name of fancy; as it is this which presents to our choice, all the different materials which are subservient to the efforts of imagination, and which may therefore be considered as forming the ground-work of poetical genius.4

Put positively, in Stewart’s view the imagination makes meaning out of materials and events, surely a major function of poetry: the human world is chaotic (full of “raw materials”) and poetry gives coherence and value to

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human lives. Yet it is easy to read this as a principle of control, in which the gathering of materials is analogous to the tasks of a laborer—unthinking, anonymous, strictly mechanical; even the term “ground-work”5 distinguishes it from “higher” spiritual and mental functioning. The activities of imagination—conception, abstraction, judgment, selection, direction— comprise a rich vision of the mental life, the moral life of the conscious will imposed upon the subservient provider’s gatherings. In terms of poetic figures (Stewart’s chapter title, “Of Poetical Fancy,” confirms the intrinsic connection between fancy and poetry), the fancy creates “analogies,” or metaphor, in which the vehicle serves the definition of the tenor; the relationship is thus hierarchical; the vehicle (discovery of the fancy) has no interest independent of the tenor. The striking fact about these eighteenth-century discussions of imagination and fancy is not that thinkers shouldn’t have been compelled into foregrounding these attributions of poetry as much as that they insisted upon their complete separation from one another in a manner that creates a drama of control and submission, of “mind” over “matter” and the body, of ethics over ethical indifference, of maturity over immaturity and youth. Although they claim this clear separation, these thinkers unconsciously admit that no such true separation exists. There are curious slips in these discussions that suggest an instinct, usually checked, to find imagination and fancy aspects of the same thing—for example, when in Anthropologie in pragmatisches Hinsicht (1800) Kant at one point defines imagination and at another fancy in the same words: “schoepferische Einbildungskraft.”6 Or, in Duff’s “Essay on Genius” the “errant” and air-borne qualities usually associated with the “rambling and sportive” fancy apply as well to the imagination, which is “wandering” or “rambling and volatile” and “attempting to soar. . .and deviate into the mazes of error,” and which requires the judgment that “arrests the wanderer in its vagrant course.” Moreover, it is possible to find in these thinkers both imagination and fancy capable of making new combinations, both capable of gathering images, both instances of the free play of mind. At this point one sees the terms almost as shifting signifiers in a larger system—both poetic and political—of control and release, shapings and playings, containment and overflow. The bifurcation of Imagination and Fancy in the eighteenth century has its analogue in the history of the sublime and the beautiful, in which, as Elaine Scarry has argued,7the former acted to diminish the power of the beautiful; the beautiful prior to the eighteenth century enhanced the exercise of justice and the position of being just. Then, later in the period, the split between the faculties ended up with beauty, instead of acting in alliance, or on a continuum, with the sublime, was placed in contrast to it; and since the definition of the sublime was more directly linked to power

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and reason, beauty was not these things and thus became diminutized and trivialized, “and because [beauty] was almost always the diminutive member, it was also the dismissible member.”8 At the same time politically, Scarry argues, the new version of beauty in its seductive power dangerously drew people away from signs of injustice. Similarly the sublime “cut beauty off from the metaphysical, permitting it to inhabit only the ground of the real.” Then the political critique—along with a closely related moral critique and a critique from realism—came forward to assert that beauty (forever discomforting mortals with its idealized conceptions) has no place on the ground of the real. Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land. (Pp. 85–86, my italics)

The metaphor of the fugitive birds calls to mind a central image for the Fancy—flight—to which this passage could with only a few alterations be easily applied. The bifurcation of both the sublime and beautiful and the Imagination and Fancy caused a diminishment in the possible eroticisation, or energizing, of observation, critical thought, and pleasure, and the “going out of our own nature” into a genuine love—which may include critique—of the world. In both instances, the subject isolates him- or herself in meaning over and against its link to the referent. Now, it’s not clear to me that beauty and being just make the kind of fit that Scarry (and I, and many people) would like to see, particularly since her associations of beauty with aesthetic symmetry seem extremely limited, but it seems equally certain that the promoters of the sublime/beauty hierarchy and also the imagination/fancy hierarchy are threatened by beauty’s and fancy’s powers. William Wordsworth, an immediate inheritor of the Imagination/Fancy and Sublime/Beautiful contestations, is perhaps even more significant that Coleridge in establishing the nineteenth-century preference for Imagination, and yet as we shall see in the final chapter, his instinct for a poetry of the Fancy ran deep. For example, before arriving at the preference for the Imagination over the Fancy in his preface to 1815, Wordsworth’s views about the Fancy—as poetically fundamental and not part of a hierarchy of faculties—are elaborated and confirmed in his 1800 Note to “The Thorn”: Superstitious men are almost always men of slow faculties and deep feelings: their minds are not loose but adhesive; they have a reasonable share of imagination, by which word I mean the faculty which produces impressive effects out of simple elements; but they are utterly destitute of fancy, the power by which pleasure and surprise are excited by sudden varieties of situation and by accumulated imagery.

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He is obviously critical of fanci-less people so mired in superstition that they cannot act upon the needs of an isolate, brokenhearted widow. But in the Preface to 1815 he says: “Imagination, in the sense of the word as giving title to a Class of the following Poems, has no reference to images that are merely a faithful copy, existing in the mind, of absent external objects; but is a word of higher import, denoting operations of the mind upon those objects, and processes of creation or of composition, governed by certain fixed laws.”9 To understand Wordsworth’s change in attitude, from 1798 to 1815, toward the two faculties, one needs to think about the book that he was composing: Poems 1815. In 1809 Wordsworth wrote to Coleridge (May 5, 1809) about his proposed “arrangement” for this volume—that the book would follow the life history of a person from childhood to old age, and corresponding to this biological organicity, emphasizes a faculty he labels “predominant” in the composition of poems that “ascend through a regular scale of imagination.” Thus, to Wordsworth maturity in poetry is equal to both maturity in age and a prevalence of Imagination. The book organized on such principles needs to be read through from start to finish, Wordsworth says, because the reader then imitates in his/her mind the gradual deepening of moral/poetic engagement, the exercising of “contemplation” and “meditation.” Although developing a concern for the social world, Wordsworth’s ideal reader is one who tends toward a more and more capacious enclosure of that world in the sacred space of the contemplating mind. The Preface to 1815 and the volume of poems itself follow this organization explicitly, the Fancy being a step in a developing capaciousness; here is the plan for the volume itself: . . . the following Poems have been divided into classes; which, that the work may more obviously correspond with the course of human life, [and] for the sake of exhibiting in it the three requisites of a legitimate whole, a beginning, a middle, and an end, have been also arranged, as far as it was possible, according to an order of time, commencing with Childhood, and terminating with Old Age, Death, and Immortality.

“Poems of the Fancy” precedes that of the Imagination in this trajectory. In the Preface, an account of the two faculties, as they are embodied in poems, makes very clear that the Imagination is a more active faculty—modifying, inventing, recreating; more specifically, these modifications result in turning the literal into the figurative, the metaphorical, the animated, and personified. These activities work on the largest scale: that of the “eternal.” The Fancy is more “passive” in its simple gathering and recording of images and things, but this doesn’t preclude its also being a “creative” faculty. Indeed, Wordsworth manages (like the eighteenth-century thinkers before him) to accord to the Fancy considerable vitality and importance to poetry

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while at the same time maintaining the view of Imagination’s profounder engagement with life. One cannot help but see in Wordsworth’s discussion, in his Preface, of the two faculties the absurdity of the distinction on the level of poetry itself; it is only in terms of ideological issues of social power and aggrandizement that the distinction has meaning. But in the following passage from the Preface, his characterization of the Fancy renders it ripe for the later Cockney inversion, with its preference for Fancy over Imagination. The Imagination’s power resides largely in its capacity to make powerful metaphors. Here, what to Wordsworth and Coleridge is valued as less than the Imagination, the Fancy’s mere observing and recording as opposed to its “modifying” capacity, becomes to the history of experimental poetics the most vital of poetic activities: The law under which the processes of Fancy are carried on is as capricious as the accidents of things, and the effects are surprising, playful, ludicrous, amusing, tender, or pathetic, as the objects happen to be appositely produced or fortunately combined. Fancy depends upon the rapidity and profusion with which she scatters her thoughts and images; trusting that their number, and the felicity with which they are linked together, will make amends for the want of individual value: or she prides herself upon the curious subtlety and the successful elaboration with which she can detect their lurking affinities. If she can win you over to her purpose, and impart to you her feelings, she cares not how unstable or transitory may be her influence, knowing that it will not be out of her power to resume it upon an apt occasion.

A champion of the Fancy could spin these comments in the direction of a strong description of visionary poetry: a poetry of chance, of proliferation, of juxtaposition of unlike images and domains and social provenances, of “sacred waste,” of excess, of the mind-in-motion, of the erotic, of play, of the forging of new combinations. The “scattering” of thoughts and images becomes, just a few years later, Shelley’s radical hope for a prophetic poetry of social change, in “the Ode to the West Wind”: “Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth / Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!” An aleatory poetry of chance events not only could describe, thematically, the quintessential Wordsworthian moment of the “halted traveler” and the “spot of time” in which the protagonist encounters something in the world by chance, “all at once,” but it becomes the principle of the postmodern aleatory poetics of a John Cage or Jackson Mac Low. The “projective verse” of Charles Olson with its injunction of poetry to move “from perception to perception” “INSTANTER” is anticipated here as is the surrealist principle of the juxtaposition and combination of unlike images. Wordsworth, however, cannot stay with the notion of Fancy’s potentially great visionary power but must limit its effects, finally, to “the domestic.”

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(See the discussion, in the final chapter, about his sonnet to Fancy.) In the same Preface, Wordsworth can say: “Fancy does not require that the materials which she makes use of should be susceptible of change in their constitution, from her touch; and, where they admit of modification, it is enough for her purpose if it be slight, limited, and evanescent.” Fancy represents for Wordsworth that faculty over which Imagination exerts its control. In terms of the constellation of social life under Fancy’s influence, it includes—as Julie Ellison has definitively shown largely with respect to The Excursion10 the world of domesticity, childhood, women, and generally the social world under patriarchy. Wordsworth’s view carried deep into the later nineteenth century; we can pick it up again in his Victorian admirer Matthew Arnold. The eventual patriarchal domestication of the Fancy preferred by the poet of Rydal Mount obscures a more violent nineteenth-century attack on the Fancy when, for example, its eroticism gets out of hand, as in Matthew Arnold’s infamous judgment upon Keats’s poetry. Arnold’s otherwise favorable evaluation of the poetry founders upon the recent publication of the passionate letters to Fanny Brawne, which indicate an iron limit to the capacity for great poetry like that of Shakespeare and Aeschylus. Excessive passion in Keats’s adolescent life implies excessive passion in literature, which in turn predicts inaccessibility to the most “mature” of literary forms, tragedy. Stuck forever in Arnold’s mind, as a “surgeon’s apprentice,” Keats, had he lived, would have remained stuck in an apprentice relationship to literary possibility. By further implication, the Fancy as the faculty of erotic excess gives way, in the greatest of writers, to the Imagination or the faculty that acknowledges the value of limits to both erotic and visionary excess and the corresponding deeper truth of the tragic vision. When he praises Keats unreservedly in a way that Arnold cannot, James Russell Lowell, in the United States in 1853, nonetheless mirrors Arnold’s (and countless others’) literary values; here the praise of Keats is in fact an attack on the poetry of the Fancy: In his Odes he showed a sense of form and proposition which we seek vainly in almost any other English poet, and some of his sonnets. . .are the most perfect in our language. No doubt there is something tropical and strange overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but it was maturity nevertheless. Happy the young poet who has the saving fault of exuberance, if he have also the shaping faculty that sooner or later will amend it. . . Without losing its sensuousness, his poetry refined itself and grew more inward, and the sensational was elevated into the typical by the control of that finer sense which underlies the senses and in the spirit of them.11

Lowell makes Keats’s adolescence a triumph of maturity in poetry.

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In moving into the early twentieth century by turning to the somewhat shrill but influential negative judgment on Romanticism by Irving Babbitt in Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), we see how more generally Romanticism is mapped onto the “Romantic” personality mired in adolescence, flailing in passionate inaction, fantasy, escape, and melancholic longing. In this view, the Fancy may occasionally dwell in the realm of poetry but it primarily crystallizes the inchoate otium of a cluster of failed citizens. Babbitt, a professor of French at Harvard in the early years of the twentieth century, agrees with Arnold’s condemnation of the Romantic poets as insufficiently knowledgeable about the world and its culture, that is, for their presumed adherence to the principles of the Fancy. For Babbitt, Romanticism fails to produce “active” citizens. He sees the heroes of these writers in “today’s young radicals,” guided by an “enervation” of mental energies as a result of too much fancy—coded as escape—and too much passion. A dominant passion is melancholy that doesn’t lead to a preferred joyous tragic acceptance of the condition of life but to, in Hazlitt’s and Keats’s phrase, a “morbidity of temperament.” “Whether the victim of Romantic melancholy feels or analyzes he is equally incapable of action. He who faces resolutely the rude buffetings of the world is gradually hardened against them. The Romantic movement is filled with the groans of those who have evaded action and at the same time becomes highly sensitive and highly selfconscious.”12 It is important to see that Babbitt’s version of maturity entails a more defensive relationship to the world and its rude buffets; indeed “action” is defensive. Romanticism is a state of the subject, an indwelling of excessive ineffectual feeling and thought: it does not constitute a productive relationship to life beyond the boundaries of the self. Babbitt underestimates Romanticism’s and the Fancy’s relationship to reality and to action. Taking just the instance of Romantic melancholy, Babbitt misreads utterly Keats’s version, which stands not in opposition to action but to denial and oblivion or escape. As Keats says: “Go not to Lethe.” In the “Ode on Melancholy,” the imagery of accepting melancholy is about feeling and tasting and thus through the senses, knowing the world, not escaping from it. Keats’s melancholy thus enjoins the reader to connect to the world even in its death-perfused state, and the Fancy is a faculty of linkage and engagement in its very freedom. Babbitt does not see mobility and transformativity of mind as a civic strength; nor does he see a Romantic poem as both a model of mind in its freedom and as something that stimulates play of mind in the reader, with the possibility that it serves as benevolent social critique. Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795) contain for Babbitt what is wrong with Romantic theory: its formulation of the Spieltrieb, or play-drive, as that which leads

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us to a higher state of civilization, as conscious, communal spontaneity through art is to Babbitt actually an illusion. Elysium, the utopian end point of the Spieltrieb is, for Babbitt, only Arcadia, the fantasized origin of innocent Grecian unity before divisions and self-consciousness of history set in. There is no development, either of the individual or of society, through play and art; there is no crucial, pivotal place for the Fancy. We do not mature as citizens or as artists through play and the Fancy-as-play, except as we leave them behind as a mistaken excess of early enthusiasms and biology. The history of the criticism of Romanticism since Babbitt can be seen as largely reactive to this negative view, and the recuperation has obviously succeeded. But the terms of success have, surprisingly, not changed very much: Romanticism has been reevaluated as a celebration of maturity. Before Babbitt, in the mid-nineteenth century, one sees Lowell’s attempt to find maturity in Keats as something that happens nearly instantaneously because of his link to the family of immortal poets; time and the life in the world have a nearly epiphenomenal status: “Keats learned at once the secret of his birth, and henceforward his indentures ran to Apollo instead of Mr. Hammond [the master surgeon]. Thus did the Muse defend her son.”13 Poets, as well as heroes, can spend an entire career seeking the secret of one’s birth, the “sources of life,” but only through the arduous engagement with the world: Keats gets “all at once” the badge of poetic maturity, Keats an example of the “senex puer” whose inherent status as beginner oxymoronically translates into a mature lateness. The father is Apollo, the mother the Muse who, unlike the mother of Orpheus attacked and dismembered by Maenads, “defends” her son against sexuality, passion, violence of the world. “Defend” is not in the line from Milton’s “Lycidas” but interprets the position that Babbitt will later take for the ideal citizen confronting the bad present. This line of thinking is related to the interpretation of the Fancy as avoiding the world and not engaging it. * * * Moving into the mid-twentieth century and into our own time, we turn to statements about Romantic poetry and the fate of the Fancy from some of the major academic critics in the field in order to show how the terms of the discussion inevitably change, but the valuation accorded the poetics of the Fancy does not. Modern critics are careful, for example, not to deny the passional, fanci-ful, sensual, and engaging side of Keats. Lionel Trilling begins his famous essay “Keats: The Poet as Hero” (1950) by celebrating, better than any work before it, Keats’s sensuousness and his geniality. Trilling, however, then makes these qualities assume a place subordinate to Keats’s growing tragic sense, his ability to see the world as a vale of soul

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making. And what does Trilling call this muscular capaciousness? A “mature masculinity,” a discovery of the “hard core of self.”14 Keats’s is the heroism of “growing up,” the account that Trilling gives as well of Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode.” Both poets engage the world only to overcome it, not to engage it, to connect to it, to criticize it, to try and change it, to celebrate it. This drama of maturation is precisely the drama in which the Fancy, with its sensuous and participatory energies, gives way to the disinterested tragic attitude. With the advent of the New Critical persuasion, the maturity of the poet-in-history becomes the maturity of a self-realized speaking subject in the poem. Trilling’s essay praising the drama of maturation in Wordsworth’s Ode leads to the most influential of all the mappings of the “greater Romantic lyric,” those of M. H. Abrams.15 I said at the beginning of this chapter that skepticism toward the Fancy is a direct expression of successful adulthood. Major critics from Abrams (beginning in the 1960s) to the present focus primarily on the issue of maturation although skepticism toward the Fancy and/as a visionary poetics appears as well. The visionary during the Romantic Period is often played out through social issues. By contrast, the “greater romantic lyric” of Wordsworth and Coleridge, as Abrams observes, flowers amidst “retirement” from the repressive political climate of the late 1790s. “Frost at Midnight” and “Tintern Abbey,” for example, represented, on the one hand, the maturation of a self away from hands-on political action; on the other, the maturation of the self beyond the haunted passions of adolescent fancy into something spiritually transcendent and therefore stable. Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” ranks very high in this canon because, in the traditional reading, it weds skepticism about vision with maturation: the speaker recognizes that the drive to follow the Fancy into the other domain of the nightingale is impossible, implicitly dangerous, and must be checked. Elided is the Fancy’s important link to the social and political, more simply, with the referent as specific and defining. With Harold Bloom this view of the Romantic lyric becomes revised as mythic archetype and psychological triumph. In Bloom’s 1970 essay, “The Internalization of Quest Romance,” the social and political world, the world of the other, became a stage in the quest-romance journey of the self’s maturation: a vision of psychoanalytic progress toward the self’s apocalypse, toward what Geoffrey Hartman called anti–self-consciousness. With the advent of New Historicist readings of Romantic poetry in the early 1980s (Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries and Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology), one might have expected to see a shift of emphasis in the assumed poetics of Romantic poems. The belief in the inherently social nature of the language of the lyric—for example, the political use of apparently nonpolitical language of nature in “Tintern Abbey”—might

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have led Romantic criticism to acknowledge the poetics of the Fancy with its outward-turning, domain-breaking excesses, its anti-Panopticon flourishings, and at times (e.g., in Blake, Robinson, Barbauld) its overtly social observations. But this simply has not happened—partly because Historicism’s eye tends in the direction of context rather than text, a fact also often characteristic of feminist studies. The text itself has typically yielded dramas of social consciousness, naturally enough, but in allowing this to happen, criticism has assumed that poetic form and poetic language are an invisible, inert vessel carrying and displaying drama, idea, and historical fact. With the assumption that “content” can change (through historicization) without a corresponding change in poetics, imagination/fancy hierarchy has remained firmly in place. In the last decade, in fact, four well-established critics have published “monumental” studies of Romantic poetry (two on Keats) that reinforce the hierarchy in terms of the maturation of the poet. Michael O’Neill, Thomas McFarland, Mark Storey, and Jack Stillinger have all recommitted themselves to “the” Romantic lyric as a poem of the “mature,” necessarily skeptical imagination, in which the poetic as well as experiential excesses of passion and sexuality give way before the “flint-and-iron” heroism of a poetry of the completely realized subject. Keats’s career, according to McFarland, charts the shearing away of excess in order to reach the “essential” “lyric instant” that is his “genius” to isolate. The excesses of Keats’s poetry written before the Odes are winning because they belong to a young man but also because he learns to transcend them. Keats’s Odes, according to Stillinger, represent his “most serious considerations of the dangers of overreaching in visionary imagination.”16 Whereas McFarland finds the miracle of Keats in the “completeness” of the Odes blossoming amidst the “tragic incompleteness” of his life, poetry at its most realized existing beyond the poet-in-history, Mark Storey in his commitment to the same visionary skepticism of the Romantic poem at its best finds Romantic poetry beset with and revealing a “problem” in its midst, the problem of the utopian or visionary imagination—in effect, the Fancy—recalling the interest of 1970s criticism (e.g., Bloom) in the prominence of the “selfhood” or “covering cherub,” the self-conscious, selfprotective element of a person skeptical of “apocalyptic” imagination. Storey refers to the “dark idolatry of self” that pursues Keats and Shelley in their poems and, since poetry foregrounds the lyric subject, it questions—in an echo of deconstruction—its (poetry’s) very existence. As poetry follows the pathway from hope and gladness to despair and madness, it survives in self-conscious checks to any exuberance in anticipating an overflow of its own possibilities. Storey’s book is about Romantic poetry’s harsh skepticism toward the unleashing of the mind in the service of a visionary poetics. The “gladness-madness” trajectory, the discovery of incoherence, confusion,

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disorientation as a final outcome tells a cautionary tale: poetry had better tend to loss and its consolations than to utopian mental exertions; it had better remain in past experience rather than in present, participatory experience. Discord, for Storey, signals the failure of a reconciling imagination, not—what Fancy offers—insight into the contradictory nature of reality and the playful nature of the mind: poetry, for that matter, has little primary interest in the world, or referent. At best a Romantic poem reveals high tragic realism, at worst the pathos of the self crushed by a ponderous, isolating self-consciousness.17 In all of these recent critics, the features of poetry and mind associated with the Fancy dwindle to various judgments of immaturity and are naturalized to sites of immaturity, in particular youth. The “greater romantic lyric” itself becomes a kind of Bildungsroman in verse—long and well-enough formed to contain the expression of the Fancy as a stage eventually absorbed and overcome by the more mature shaping spirit of imagination.18 Even more recently, Helen Vendler’s Coming of Age as a Poet actually gives case studies of four poets—Milton, Keats, Eliot, and Plath—overcoming the forgivable inadequacies of their apprenticeship in order to achieve the first “perfect” poem of maturity. The range of poets, moreover, seals implicitly the view that not only is this pathway of a poet’s progress of defining interest but also that it determines the major line of the poetic tradition in lyric from the Renaissance to mid-twentieth-century confessional poetry. Romantic poets and poems, of course, write growth-and-development into their work. We only need to think of “Tintern Abbey” and the “Immortality Ode” and The Prelude of Wordsworth, “Frost at Midnight” of Coleridge— as poems that posit change and growth from childhood to adulthood. Keats’s poetry and even more his famous letters about “the mansion of many apartments” and the “vale of soul-making” posit the world as first a house through which one passes, room by room, through the stages of life, and second as a school in which the subject matures. Indeed, in these letters, the world, or referent, exists to propel the subject into ripened autonomy. II The representation of the Fancy and the manifestation of attributes of the Fancy in eighteenth-century poetry, in contrast to eighteenth-century theory, not only reveal little skepticism about it but demonstrate no particular interest in the drama of the lyric subject, maturation, and self-realization. Mind is often revealed in these poems of the Fancy as a playful, at times transformative, and often visionary instrument, not particularly subject to movement through biological or historical time. Correspondingly, the

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poetry of the Fancy in the eighteenth century intervenes as an event in the world in any number of formal presentations. But a fairly consistent, though not required, feature of this poetry is the naming of the faculty itself—as if to observe that, in the midst of the “sportive” or “naive” atmosphere it produces, there emerges a “theory” of the Fancy; the speaker is one who speaks about the Fancy as a special efflorescence of mind in nonnormative activity. What follows is a discussion of a number of (known and relatively unknown) eighteenth-century poems, with occasional remarks upon the crises of skepticism that the Fancy is required to overcome—a situation and a vision for poetry precisely opposite to that produced by the standard reading of poetry from the mid-eighteenth century and the aesthetic and critical theory that has supported it. Blake, not surprisingly, opens up this lively, disruptive side of the Fancy—in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, through a series of sections he calls “Memorable Fancies.” The Blakean Fancy, full of the bizarre “combinations” that at once define the content and intention of the literature of “wit and humor” and also anticipate the surrealist visions of the next century, pitches speech out of the strictly personal and into the collective, into the realm of wisdom literature (the “Proverbs of Hell”), and into an energy field of visionary social critique that is at times full of cheer, or delight: How do you know that ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way Is but an immense world of delight clos’d by your senses five?

Hardly trivial or superficial, Blake’s Fancies evoke the following predictable put-down from his control-freak, fanciphobic companion, the Angel, who calls him a “pitiable foolish young man.” Unable to trivialize the speaker’s scintillating visionary intelligence, the Angel trivializes the speaker himself, accusing him of immaturity—not unlike the later reviewers of Keats’s 1817 loose heroic couplets. The Angel also claims: . . .thy phantasy has imposed upon me & thou oughtest to be ashamed. I answerd: we impose on one another, & it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics Opposition is true Friendship.

This exchange denies the qualities of inconsequence, lack of seriousness and depth, attributed defensively to the Fancy; but more specifically it associates the Fancy with power and manipulation, with the exertion of the will. The Angel, says the speaker, tries to mask what might be called his ideological intention with “analytics” whereas the speaker engages him as

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a contrary and as a “friend.” Thus the Fancy, far from being “the presentation of ideas without reference to reality” (Platner), intends reference solely to “reality,” which, however, is reached through the transformation of the familiar and conventional by opening the doors of perception. It is important to associate the Fancy in The Marriage with Blake’s proverb, “mental things alone are real,” which may be the most significant contribution of the Romantic lyric, to enact the reality of the mental life in its freest, most thoughtful state, and to insist upon its acknowledgment. Blake’s goal of the free expression of mind does not (as its 1960s counterculture advocates may have wished) deny the issue of control, but rather reinterprets control as dialectical opposition and accepts the fact that the reality of mental things, the fundamentally celebratory approach to the human-centeredness or ethical responsibility of persons in the world, does not mean mind’s uninvolvement with or transcendence of issues of power. If aesthetics exist to rationalize or naturalize the wish to suppress and contain mind impelled and shaped by desire, Blake rethinks, rather than decries, the meaning and possibility of the impulse to control in terms of transformation and the acknowledgment of “the only life.” As he says in the Marriage, “Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.” Regarding “Memorable Fancy” itself, Blake’s revision of Swedenborg’s “Memorable Relation” associates vision with mind as desire. Much of the Marriage embodies and argues for poetry and living as ideally a visionary breaking free of the “rules” and “fetters” of custom and organized and natural religion; the Fancy does and becomes what it perceives, which is the worldas-mind, when desire is and is not fettered. Fancy also is not self-absorbed but interrelational and speaks in “the voice of honest indignation”—that is, it is restless with “the way things are.” Swedenborg’s visions do not challenge the view for the lion and the ox; in Blake’s Memorable Fancies, the speaking subject is not, as in Swedenborg, passive before the god. And, unlike Swedenborg, Blake offers his Fancies as occasions of dialectical exchange between himself and the Angel, and, in this sense, his Fancies are, in Coleridge’s definition of the term, modes of memory emancipated from time and space, and yet within and producing the matrix of human, “progress”ive exchange. The Memorable Fancies are themselves revisionary dialogues with Swedenborg’s Memorable Relations, where the negative fury of beasts and god become transformed by Blake into “the fury of spiritual existence.” Similarly, they dwell in the collective myths of civilization, revising and also creating them so that the personal and the collective blend together. The speaking voice, full of “wit and humor,” articulates not the “reflective” or “mediating” mind but the mind at play amidst the elements bizarrely related to one another, of a cosmos in which people live.

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An apparent contradiction, during the early Romantic period, about the place of mind lies at the center of the poetics and poetry of the Fancy. How can it refuse reflection and promote thoughtless observation, belong—as those who demote or limit its power and centrality would have it—to mere “mechanical” associationism, and at the same time be absolutely productive of the “mental fight” of Blakean poetics? “Reflection,” in this instance, I believe, refers to the imposition of a particular point of view, a mediating of the evidence of the world through an evident subjectivity. The poet of the Fancy, like the poet of Keats’s Negative Capability, bristles at the imposition of a single point of view. As Keats says elsewhere of Wordsworth: we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, which in turn recalls Hazlitt’s retrospective observation on his own essay-writing that he did not impose a point of view upon his readers. This means, then, that the reader of the Fancy works in a condition of relative freedom to think—not in a free space designed for contemplation but in the midst of conflict and opposition. But what if a poetry of the Fancy is, as the detractors had it and continue to have it, regressive or immature with respect to its thoughtfulness, its “conception”? Artists of all stripes often complain that too much thought, in the manner of Keats’s Apollonius (Lamia), kills art. Apollonius, however, stands less for “thought” over and against the poetry of the Fancy than for the scholar’s, the school’s, “regulation” of thought-imbued-with-desire. In considering the Fancy as a poetics of reform, visionary release, and acknowledgment of the actual world, it is interesting to observe that, whereas the philosophers—from Duff and Stewart to Coleridge and his many subsequent adherents—label the Fancy secondary, immature, and superficial compared to the imagination in the making of poems, many eighteenth-century and Romantic poets praise and enact a poetics of the Fancy as the essential element in serious poetry: true poets do not write to demonstrate control of the excesses of the mind but rather to demonstrate and produce freedom in others’ minds, and the altering of perception by some versions of excess, or boundary-crossing. I must, however, qualify this general truth by observing that for some eighteenth-century poets, the Fancy is that which has already vanished amidst the process of a person’s “maturation” past childhood or adolescence. To the degree that the Fancy indicates the “obstinate questionings” that Wordsworth says is the adult’s living legacy from early childhood, its vanishing would make way for the “complacence” that the schools, in Guillory’s analysis, would prefer in modeling socially and politically conformist bourgeois citizens. In the following discussion of poems from the eighteenth century, I trace a range of positionings of the Fancy, from being linked to childhood, to belonging to an unretrievable past time in literary history (and thus a

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object of nostalgia), to becoming (as it is in Blake) an ever-available source for a lively poetry. This is not fundamentally a chronology of change as it is a series of visions of the Fancy’s relationship to poetic possibility. Consider first this famous passage from Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1746),19 which vividly makes the case for Fancy as a faculty of schoolboy immaturity, linked firmly to a bio-emotional chronology: While some [students at Eton] on earnest business bent Their murmuring labours ply, ’Gainst graver hours, that bring constraint To sweeten liberty: Some bold adventurers disdain The limits of their little reign, And unknown regions dare descry: Still as they run they look behind, They hear a voice in every wind, And snatch a fearful joy. Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed, Less pleasing when possessed; The tear forgot as soon as shed, The sunshine of the breast;. . . Alas, regardless of their doom, The little victims play!. . . These shall the fury Passions tear. . . If ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise.

Gray’s “fancy” exhibits several features that, with an opposite inflection, would indicate the poetic faculty praised in this book; here, however, he links them positively to childhood and adolescence: the disdaining of limits, exploration of the unknown, animation and personification of the world (“a voice in every wind”), the linkage of Fancy and hope and vision, the mingling of pleasure and happiness with the body, the subordination of grief, play as a means of encounter with the world, and a youthful, in the sense of renovative, disposition. By embedding the Fancy with the life before adulthood, he refuses the connection between Fancy and conscious thought thereby separating Fancy and passion, Fancy and mind, Fancy and knowledge; he associates animation and personification with fear, Fancy with sadistic seduction (“less pleasing when possessed”), and assumes that under the influence of the Fancy grief is “forgot” or suppressed. A youth led by Fancy, moreover, is without power, victimized. Maturity, the poem implies, occurs

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when the “reason” that comes with age disabuses one of the Fancy and ushers one into the bitter-sweet status quo of the tragic “prospect” on life. Knowledge means tragic knowledge achieved when we mature into a perspective. That Gray’s Ode is a prospect poem grants to the speaker’s meditation the complacency of economic comfort. Thus Fancy is severed from its value as the empowering faculty of social critique, a value that only increases with greater “maturity” and knowledge. Gray’s position forecloses this question: what might happen when the Fancy’s exuberant flights, driven by positive passions for change and freedom, would act out of knowledge and self-trust? This last point assumes something that the association of the Fancy with immaturity denies—that the Fancy is an act of mind and body independent of chronology and biography and, consequently, it is a social act with a consequence in poetry. In this sense, it is not simply a self-contained psychological efflorescence but a social event, in the way that Adorno indicates that all good modern poems, regardless of content, are social events. In 1746 Joseph Warton and William Collins each published a book of poems in which an implicit dialogue ensues over the availability of the Fancy to modern poets; but they agree that poetry without the Fancy sinks into the trivial and, as Warton says, the “unhallow’d.” It is a commonplace of British poetic history that the middle and late eighteenth century, culminating in the early Romantics, witnesses the efforts of poets to recover the “true” nature of poetry—its roots in vision and feeling that had been submerged by the societal poetry of Neoclassicism. The Fancy, however, has not figured in this history. In Collins’s now-canonical “Ode on the Poetical Character,” the Fancy is born from god simultaneous with the Creation and subsequently inspires the poet: And she [the Fancy], from out the veiling cloud, Breathed her magic notes aloud: And thou, thou rich-haired Youth of Morn, And all thy subject life was born!

Collins’s models for Fancy-visited poets are the prophetic, rapturous ones, Spenser and Milton: great poets make great visionary leaps occasioned by huge boosts of poetic energy. The poem does not complain about the lack of greatness, of “genius” in poets (although this may be implied). Rather the speaker simply observes that the sources of visionary power have not attended to the contemporary poet: . . .Heaven, and Fancy, kindred powers, Have now o’erturned the inspiring bowers, Or curtained close such scene from every future view.

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The poem, perhaps a challenge to poets, leaves open the question of how they might access the Fancy, a question taken up by Shelley in poems such as “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and the “Ode to the West Wind.” If one cannot write poetry without the Fancy, then the Fancy cannot be identified with a particular period of life—youth. Efforts by eighteenthand nineteenth-century poets to remove Fancy from a human chronology or to insist upon its resilience, its refusal to decay, are very moving rituals of the definition of poetry as “the postponement of the end of the world.” Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnet (XLVII) “To Fancy,” written, as almost all the sonnets, out of her chronic grief, engages the question of Fancy’s persistence in the midst of the narrowing of perception, the closing off of affect and apprehension that grief, loss, and disappointment bring: Thee, Queen of Shadows! shall I still invoke, Still love the scenes thy sportive pencil drew, When on mine eyes the early radiance broke Which shew’d the beauteous rather than the true! Alas! Long since those glowing tints are dead, And now ‘tis thine in darkest hues to dress The spot where pale Experience hangs her head O’er the sad grave of murder’d Happiness! Thro’ thy false medium, then, no longer view’d, May fancied pain and fancied pleasure fly, And I, as from me all thy dreams depart, Be to my wayward destiny subdued: Nor seek perfection with a poet’s eye, Nor suffer anguish with a poet’s heart!

Preceding the poem seems to be the assumption that prolonged grief itself would evacuate the Fancy; yet the poem begins with a defiant insistence upon its invocation, although the inversion in the first line equivocates declaration with interrogation until the end of the quatrain. Equivocation becomes, I believe, a torturous and bewildering adherence to the Fancy despite the cultural predisposition to be done with it. The poem works between present and past; because of grief the Fancy’s glowing tints are dead, but the love of its “sportive pencil” (anticipating Mary Robinson’s epithet for the Fancy) remains. The repetition of “still” underscores the persistence of the Fancy and the speaker’s love for its early (youthful) works. That current love transmutes to a current need (“Now”) for the Fancy to continue painting present life—though without the happiness associated more naturally, or conventionally, with the Fancy. The Fancy, though changed, remains, with a different, apparently compatible, task. Similarly the past now appears false, or “fancied”: a more real fancy is

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required, one totally aligned with the poet’s eye and heart; or, does this new state of truth-telling mean the end to poetry? To say that it does seems ingenuous, since poetry “still” is going on. The maintaining of the Fancy—like the petition “To the Muse” in Sonnet LXXXIV not to leave one “In languid, hopeless sorrow”— becomes a statement about Fancy as a potentially metamorphic principle of poetry itself; the poem attempts to define such a principle against a conventional wisdom, an ideology that seeks to keep poetry within the domain of the familiar, the known, and in the perspective of the normative, in this case called “grief.” “To Fancy” helps us see through that ideology and imagine a poetry that, full of realism, places itself at odds with the given. Joseph Warton, less troubled than Smith will be, opens his book with an “Advertisement” that sets his poems over and against “the fashion of moralizing in verse” even though he anticipates that “certain austere critics should think them [his own poems] too fanciful and descriptive” and poems in which “imagination is much indulged.” “Invention and Imagination,” he says, are “the chief faculties of a Poet.”20 The “advertisement” leads directly to his suite of poems, the first of which, a kind of invocation to his book’s Muse, is called “Ode I. To Fancy.” I quote from this poem at length, as it is unknown and as it sets forth crucial poetic principles and attributes that seem vital for the poetics of the Fancy for most of the following one hundred years: Waving in thy snowy hand An all-commanding magic wand, Of pow’r to bid fresh gardens blow ‘Mid chearless Lapland’s barren snow, Whose rapid wings thy flight convey Thro’ air, and over earth and sea, While the vast, various landscape lies Conspicuous to thy piercing eyes;. . .

This daemonic figure (like Collins’s fancy) will quicken the new birth of gardens out of the vacuity of winter (called “chearless,” implying that the poet’s spring is “cheerful”). The speaker petitions the (typically for the Fancy) winged creature to dart rapidly “from perception to perception” (Charles Olson). The poem continues: At every season let my ear Thy solemn whispers, Fancy, hear. O warm, enthusiastic maid, Without thy powerful, vital aid,

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That breathes an energy divine, That gives a soul to every line, Ne’er may I strive with lips profane To utter an unhallow’d strain, Nor dare to touch the sacred string, Save when with smiles thou bid’st me sing. O queen of numbers, once again Animate some chosen swain, Who fill’d with unexhausted fire, May boldly smite the sounding lyre, Why with some new, unequall’d song, May rise above the rhyming throng, O’er all our list’ning passions reign, O’erwhelm our souls with joy and pain, With terror shake, with pity move, Rouz with revenge, or melt with love. Like light’ning, let his mighty verse The bosom’s inmost foldings pierce; With native beauties win applause, Beyond cold critic’s studied laws: O let each Muse’s fame encrease, O bid BRITANNIA rival GREECE!

The poem is a compendium of poetry written under the influence of, and life lived touched by, the Fancy, in which power, vitality, breath, soul, and divinity are infused into poetic lines. And, like Collins’s Fancy, Warton’s may “animate some chosen swain,” except that here this seems a possibility. This poem anticipates poems such as Keats’s “Ode to Psyche,” Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and his “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark.” And like its predecessor “L’ Allegro,” “To Fancy” is a poem of springtime and new births (as well as appearing in the Fancy’s preferred verse-form, the Rhyming Tetrameter Couplet). Poetic melody is associated with heat and energy (lyre/fire, a rhyme found in a later poem), and then, in turn, with total revolutions of the emotional, passional life, previously guarded, indirectly, with the studied laws of cold criticism and the throng of bad poets curtailing all passion with, as Keats says, dull rhymes. One could slap the label “nationalism” on the poem’s last line, but it would be more in keeping with the outward trajectory of the Fancy to see a wish to garner a Grecian golden age quickening power of poetic manifestation (what Geoffrey Hartman once referred to as the “westering” influence of eighteenth-century British poetry). One naturally wants to think of “Ode I. To Fancy” as the authenticating frame of the suite of poems that follows, and one could imagine something

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of epic or romance proportions of the reach of, as Collins proposes, Spenser and Milton. Indeed, that Warton’s poems are strictly in the odic/lyric vein of “minor” (i.e., short) poems, leads one to equate, rather than distinguish, Collins’s and Warton’s mid-eighteenth-century views on the inaccessibility of the Fancy to modern poets. And yet Warton channels the concepts of the Fancy into his “various” lyrics: on Liberty, Health, Superstition, against Despair, to Evening, to the Nightingale, on Spring, on Shooting, to Solitude, and several occasional poems addressed to acquaintances. The poems, like his landscape on “To Fancy,” are “various,” and it leads one to want to associate the book of occasional, miscellaneous, and “fugitive” lyrics, so popular among both male and female poets from this period on, with the quickening, eruptive, chance or aleatory poetics of the Fancy As a coda to this chapter, I turn to a North American poet of the midnineteenth century: no poet more lovingly and challengingly insists on the permanent, singular poetic faculty—blessedly continuous through life— than Walt Whitman in his farewell poem “Good-Bye My Fancy!” Perhaps it signals the historical fact that experimental poetry in English burgeons in the twentieth century in the United States and Latin America more than in the country of its origins (there are exceptions, of course), and that Whitman is unquestionably its precursor: Good-bye my Fancy! Farewell dear mate, dear love! I’m going away, I know not where, Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again, So Good-bye my Fancy. Now for my last—let me look back a moment; The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me, Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping. Long have we lived, joy’d, caress’d together; Delightful!—now separation—Good’ bye my Fancy. Yet let me not be too hasty, Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter’d, become really blended into one; Then if we die we die together, (yes, we’ll remain one,) If we go anywhere we’ll go together to meet what happens, May-be we’ll be better off and blither, and learn something, May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who knows?) May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning—so now finally, Good-bye—and hail! My Fancy.

Whitman’s is a poetry of aperture, of proliferation. Significantly the poem that precedes this one in his last suite, “Second Annex: Good-Bye my

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Fancy,” “Unseen Buds,” envisions precisely the “billions and trillions” of “germinal” buds presently hidden in darkness and cold but on the verge of emergence and bloom; the poem could be a motto for the Fancy’s vision of proliferation and blossoming, of praise for the act of creation, for infinite dawnings. And then the “Good-Bye.” The Fancy is a lover—a lifelong lover— from whom at imminent death the speaker must separate. But just as death produces a crisis of unknowing, so the Fancy’s place in his death emerges as a profound uncertainty, a fact that in itself prolongs the life of the Fancy into a living mystery. As the poem moves toward and transforms its close, the Fancy comes to reside precisely on the threshold of life and death amidst the possibility of renewal and the possibility that the Fancy will manage (yet again!) a transition across domains. The brilliant ambiguity of “undoing, turning” poises itself on the verge of a possibility for poetry, that death is an entropic dissolution of poetic form or that it comes to the end of one “line” and “turns” back, as it always has, to begin again in the next line. The Fancy-transformation of Catullus’s elegiac heroism on the death of his brother, Ave atque vale, hail and farewell, into “Good-bye—and hail!” superbly summarizes the slow confirmation of the intimate livingness of the Fancy not only into extreme old age but possibly past it. So much for the Fancy and immaturity.

CHAPTER 2 LYRIC SUBJECTS IN ROMANTIC POETRY

The modern, Protestant-individualist self. . .is now the sole source of meaning and value, and in its absolute, God-like freedom brooks no restraint. . . .The world for this strenuous Protestant humanism has no significance in itself: it is a dark, fearful, inhospitable place where we can never feel at home. It is thus an essentially tragic philosophy, as opposed to that cosmic at-homeness, that conviction of all being ultimately well, which is the essence of comedy. Terry Eagleton1 We awaken at the same moment to ourselves and to things. George Oppen2

hese two epigraphs mark the poles of possibility for the Romantic lyric subject in poetry as outlined in this chapter: that poetry either features the dramatic manifestation of the self, often over and against the world, or a poetry in which the self comes into appearance as it encounters and reveals that world. The former, based roughly on Eagleton’s account of the “individualist self,” a modern view that undergirds the Romantic self, has been praised and described again and again, and I review it presently. The latter has never been described with any systematic force; reflecting, with its outward directedness, the poetics of the Fancy, it becomes the topic of the second part of this chapter and can be felt throughout the rest of the book. Let me note that the burden of this argument rests with two observations: (1) there are some Romantic poems that feature the drama of the lyric subject even though there are many more that do not, (2) criticism has privileged this small group as characteristic and exemplary and, moreover, has, by insisting on the drama of the lyric subject and the fate of visionary poetry, has distorted our understanding of the poems themselves. I am trying at once to remove the exemplary status from Romantic poems of the lyric subject and point to a range of subject positions and attitudes toward the subject in Romantic poetry.

T

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Eagleton, of course, is not writing particularly about poetry but about a modern outlook on the world and the self, one in which the “dark, fearful, inhospitable” world comes into being as such with the highly asymmetrical privileging of the self, which asks not only for a “tragic philosophy” but also for the elegiac sentiment: something has been lost, excluded, and that is the world and the community. However, many of these ideas inhabit accounts of the Romantic subject. By contrast, in Oppen’s view, the self has no particular existence until it encounters, through consciousness, surprise, desire, the world of things. A perfect motto for the action and effect of the Fancy, Oppen proposes that a juxtaposition (oneself, things) occasions an awakening and implies, for him and other visionary poets, that the sudden efflorescence of consciousness occurs as a knowing reversal of strenuous Protestant humanism’s attempts to exclude the world from the self. In this chapter, I redefine twentiethcentury criticism’s most characteristic formulations of the representation of the self, arguing that a poetry of awakening to self and to things elicits one of its most ethical callings: attentiveness, from which comes acknowledgment of what isn’t seen, now seen for the first time for what it is. The self, in the context of the Fancy then, is less, or less importantly, “reflexive,” interested in the drama of its own absolute unfolding, and more an empathic consciousness and energy playing over, constructing, what lies or acts beyond the self. One feels it belong in “that cosmic at-homeness.” The Romantic lyric subject, according to the Fancy, “marks,” as Blake says in “London,” the other, the contradictoriness of reality, the endless multiplicity of things, the suppressed voices of suppressed classes and types; it, in principle, notes these things with articulate surprise. My purpose here is not to denigrate one type of poem in favor of another but first to criticize the main tradition of reading Romantic poetry that characterizes it as a poetry of the individualist subject and then to indicate a range of poetries that, with their outward-directedness, fit much more closely to the progressive and at times radical spirit of the age. I How has twentieth- and twenty-first-century Romantic criticism constructed the powerful paradigm of “the greater Romantic lyric”? As early as 1940, Lionel Trilling, in his essay “The Immortality Ode,” reacting against the common view that Wordsworth in this poem was describing the failure of creative energies, said that it was in fact about “growing up”—a drama of the self as maturation.3 This drama is the paradigm that predominates in criticism to this day. On the other hand, Trilling also claimed that the poem is about “optics,” or ways of seeing. Growing up, in

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other words, does not exclude the possibility of becoming more “attentive” to the world; and a poem about the self doesn’t necessarily exclude the possibility of being about life beyond it. The complexity of this reading, only intuited by Trilling himself, was not pursued by the critics who followed. Instead poems became more and more the records of partial (or complete) self-realization. Thus by the time of M. H. Abrams’s elegant essays on Romantic poetry (1960s), the “greater Romantic lyric” became defined as a drama of the lyric subject: [These poems] present a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually a localized, outdoor setting, whom we overhear as he carries on, in a fluent vernacular which rises easily to a more formal speech, a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene, but more frequently with a silent human auditor, present or absent. The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces 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.4

In the course of elaborating this paradigm, Abrams focuses primarily on Coleridge’s “invention” of it as a fulfillment of the Fancy/Imagination binary, with the subordination of the former and the triumph of the latter’s capacity to “resolve,” “reconcile,” and “integrate” the human divisions of subject and object, “man” and nature, and “head and heart.” Furthermore, he says that Coleridge’s poems, such as “This Lime-tree Bower My Prison,” “Frost at Midnight,” and “Dejection,” are crucially placed in a highly localized natural setting that helps to exchange strident radical thought for the more rounded, healing character of domestic thought. The world of urban society and its issues, politics, and history are to Coleridge, in these poems, irrelevant as is the Fancy itself. In the work of Abrams and his more psychoanalytically inclined successor, Harold Bloom, engagement in the world in the Romantic lyric becomes a stage, eventually a failed stage, on the path of self-realization.5 For Abrams the massive “disappointment” felt by English radicals after the Reign of Terror, taken on as a betrayal of radical principles and outcomes, led to the poetry of “retirement.” Retirement in nature produced, in the monologues of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the greater Romantic poem of the lyric subject, which would mirror in the poem itself the transcendence

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of political, urban, even erotic (passional) connections to the world. Heavily influenced by Blake, Bloom called this earlier stage (after Blake’s failed revolutionary, Orc) “Prometheus,” which he defined as “deep involvement in political, social, and literary revolution, and a direct, even satirical attack on the institutional orthodoxy of European and English society, including historically-oriented Christianity, and the neoclassic literary and intellectual tradition, particularly in its Enlightenment phase” (p. 11). Bloom continues: “The Real Man, the Imagination [Blake], emerges after terrible crises in the major stage of the romantic quest, which is typified by a relative disengagement from revolutionary activism and a standing aside from revolution and satire, so as to bring the search within the self and its ambiguities.” Abrams, Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman (“Romanticism and Anti–SelfConsciousness”) are fully committed to the “expansion” of the self past the emotional and mental roadblocks of narcissism and self-consciousness. Indeed, that is Hartman’s definition of his term “anti–self-consciousness.” But the drama of the actual poem for them stays within the categories of self. The world exists to be transcended. Like psychoanalysis, the success of the work done between therapist and analysand will be presumably proven “in the world,” but the work itself remains in the closed, if expanding, space of the analyst’s office and the patient’s mind; the world is metaphor, material for the transference, in Keats’s phrase a “vale of soul-making,” which is what the Romantic poem within this frame can become. Thus the Fancy, the faculty that makes contact with the world and with images, is not of particular importance for these critics because that contact and those relationships among images and “things” have no value in and of themselves; they (and the faculty that gathers them) become ephemeral, at best instrumental. This, in turn, implies that the nature of the greater Romantic lyric stands at odds with the politically progressive elements in the personalities of the Romantic poets, not an impossibility but one that should be viewed as at least problematic. One would have thought that the advent of New Historicism in the 1980s, by accentuating the social and historical nature of poetic reference, would have magnified the contradiction apparent, with hindsight, in the criticism of Abrams, Bloom, Hartman, and likeminded critics.6 The first question might be: how does historical insight and grounding affect the poetry of the lyric subject? But a more radical question might follow: does the presence of acute historical consciousness on the part of the poets alter the meaning of a poetry of the lyric subject? Moreover, does it make such poetry more of an epiphenomenon in the poetry of the period? And finally, does the historical consciousness of poets allow for the production of a different kind of poetry—a poetry, and therefore a poetics, of the referent? In what follows I review a range of recent criticism written either directly or indirectly under

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the influence of New Historicism but only to discover that, in spite of their various contributions, these critics have not fully addressed these questions. The critical history of “Romantic poetry” after Bloom and Hartman shows that to these critics the poem continues along the path of “self-reflexivity.” In the concluding chapter of his learned and influential Poetic Form and British Romanticism,7 Stuart Curran writes: “The sonnet’s prominence throughout Romanticism and its remarkable candor in artistic self-reflexiveness make it a simple index to the nature of poetic form in culture after culture. Its history in the nineteenth century, with the necessary adjustments made for formal continuities and experiments, is replicated in the ode, the elegy, the ballad, the romance, the epic, and in every shade between.” The sonnet, a form in constant revision, models all Romantic poetry in its self-consciousness, Curran says, its attention inward. In some sense, then, a poem such as Shelley’s political sonnet “England in 1819” is on a continuum with Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy and “Frost at Midnight,” all somehow belonging to the “self-reflexive” impulse behind the Romantic sonnet. And along with selfreflexivity comes, naturally, a “skepticism,” about poetry’s visionary capacity and perhaps about poetry at all. Of the “perfect” “To Autumn,” Curran concludes: it “constitutes the logical culmination of a poem of self-reflexiveness and of the characteristic displacement of the Romantic ode, forcing the self-reflexive principle from the author and onto each reader of the poem. . . .Undoubtedly the skeptical spirit of the age underpins the dialectical modes of thought revealed in all these odes” (p. 84). It is a short leap from Curran’s association of self-reflexivity and skepticism in Romantic poetry and in its reader to Michael O’Neill’s recent assertion: “A valuable feature shared by many self-conscious Romantic poems is the way they explore the limits of poetry” (p. xix). The sense of limit expands, in O’Neill’s introduction, to include the self-conscious poem’s resistance to history and economics, the poetry of the women poets of the Romantic period, and ideology (to which one might add Bloom’s conviction about the Romantic poem’s “renunciation of the natural object”8). Not overtly stated or even implied in Abrams’s earlier version, O’Neill’s version of a Romantic poem triumphantly excludes, as if it were a principle to do so, what might be called “the world.” To critics of Romantic poetry from New Criticism on, including Michael O’Neill, formal elements and genre reinforce the thematic connection of the poem to the psychological development of the lyric subject. “Form” has first of all meant that which can contain an expansive or expanding subjectivity: thus Curran’s argument that the Romantic sonnet (with its self-reflexivity and poetic skepticism) expanded into the Ode and other forms fits with the requirement of a poetic genre as a container of triumphant self-realization. At the same time “form” becomes for the

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Romantic poet an engagement with that most heroic of binaries, in Susan Wolfson’s words, constraint versus freedom. As she says of Byron’s The Corsair: “Byron’s poetry shimmers with a complex interplay of formal commitments in which the energies of freedom and eruption are set against the demands of constraint and conservatism.”9 “Form” as constraint (in Byron’s case, the heroic couplet) serves to showcase the lyric subject’s “absolute freedom” (Eagleton) against the resistance of form. But what does not happen in this scenario is the breaking or unfettering of the form. If form images content, then one would expect that a New Historicist reading of Romantic poems, with its assumption of the interrelatedness of the poem and the social world, would call attention to formal and generic elements in a way other than that of a privileging of the drama of the lyric subject. In her recent book Formal Charges, a major sequel to Poetic Form in British Romanticism, Susan Wolfson takes on the important task of revising the New Critical formalist readings of Curran with respect to the more recent concentration in Romantics Studies on historical and cultural research. Such a project might, for example, acknowledge first poetry’s focus on the referent as the place of history (one way of thinking about the poetry of the Fancy) and second the “mind” of the poem as an instrument of transformation of the perception of the referent. Instead, in her Introduction, Wolfson uses as a primary exhibit of Romantic form the passage in The Prelude, I, where Wordsworth describes the life of the “mind of man” as a structure of self-realization over time, an architectural form: The mind of man is framed even like the breath And harmony of music. There is a dark Invisible workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, and makes them move In one society. Ah me, that all The terrors, all the early miseries, Regrets, vexations, lassitudes, that all The thoughts and feelings which have been infused Into my mind, should ever have made up The calm existence that is mine when I Am worthy of myself.

Wolfson comments: “The poetic ‘I’ comes into being in form cast as a system that precedes it, takes possession of it, and defines it. There is no better demonstration of Stuart Curran’s claim that poetic form was an ‘inescapable. . .necessity for Romantic subjectivity’ ” (p. 28). Form equals self-formation. In this reading of the passage, the form, blank verse, bears no historical specificity and instability: it isn’t part of a poetic decision,

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except insofar as the successive revisions by Wordsworth (1799, 1805, 1850) bring form and self-formation into closer and closer proximity. In the late 1790s, on the contrary, poets such as Wordsworth, Southey, and Robinson are experimenting with a troubling but exciting possibility for poetry—that older forms (such as blank verse and ballad stanzas) associated with poetic aristocracy might be asked to accommodate a nonaristocratic content and that the results might be a jarring juxtaposition of a poet, with his or her privileged stock of formal materials, with the voice or image of a disenfranchised person. This is the situation of Lyrical Ballads and Lyrical Tales. Similarly, poets are experimenting with blank verse to see how well it images a person’s speech in a democratic society, a freestanding agent unconstrained in speech. But the politics of this blank verse would seem to be: does blank verse provide the image of that freedom, or is it, with its regular decasyllabic line, a form of regulation? What are the implications of this for the freedom of the speaking voice? How, furthermore, does Wordsworth’s blank verse about the building up of the self compare with other contemporary instances, such as Anna Barbauld’s in “Washing Day” or Mary Robinson’s in “A London Summer Morning”? Here blank verse becomes unstable and active in the production of the poetic effect. This expression of the poetics of the Fancy—in contrast to the poetics of the lyric subject—as the juxtaposition of an unpredictable, “winged” mind with a traditional “aristocratic” form, suggesting the contiguity of two different versions of social reality, emerges, as Wolfson perceptively illuminates it, with the simple contrast between the “outlaw” Corsair (his life as a subjectivity) and the traditional formalism of Byron’s couplet. This excellent point leads, it seems to me, to a different conclusion than Wolfson’s about the generalized overcoming of constraint: it demonstrates, in the manner of Louis Zukofsky already discussed, the juxtaposition of the unruly life with the rule-bound, the contemporary with the traditional (formal), an instance of the contiguity of two different visions of reality. Here form is as active a principle as “content.” Lyrical Ballads (much closer to Zukofsky’s “Mantis,” with its images of “the poor” juxtaposed with the elegant, aristocratic form of the sestina) brings into contiguous relationship the lives of the dispossessed and disenfranchised with traditional ballad stanzas. Instead Wolfson discusses the form/content interaction as the accommodation of form to subjectivity, focusing on, again, a passage from The Prelude, the “drowned man” episode (Book V) that, in its successive revisions, demonstrates the capacity for “mind” to absorb into itself the shock from a ghastly encounter with the world. Form, for Wolfson, becomes “revision” (referring, i.e., to Wordsworth’s successive revisions of this passage), which shapes poetry to the needs of the succeeded subjectivity of the protagonist.

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According to the history of recent criticism, Romantic poems (and by implication the poets who produce them) “succeed” as realized subjectivities much less than they “fail.” Since Bloom and Hartman, this poetry is dogged, in Mark Storey’s term, by “the problem,” which can be self-doubt, despair, skepticism about poetry itself, and sheer confusion. Though very much in the line of the critics recited here, Storey paints a darker picture of poetic outcomes than the others do: poetry leads, he says, eventually, potentially to the discovery that the self, always the paramount presence and issue in Romantic poetry, is, in Clare’s late phrase about himself, “a sad non-identity.” The Clare of his asylum poem “I am” presides not only over the culminating Clare chapters but over the book as a whole. Even in the early Clare and in his nature poetry evidence can be found for the self-doubt that springs forth in “I am,” self-doubt only different in degree from what plagues Wordsworth and even Blake. At the end of his book Storey sums up: “[The Romantic Poets] were only too conscious of poetry’s tendency to undermine and vitiate, to desert them, to leave them alone with their shrivelled selves.”10 It is not that an account of Romantic poems such as Storey’s cannot be illuminating but that it greatly distorts the subject–referent conflict in Romantic lyric and also pitches the emphasis or characterization of a poet in the wrong place. Of no poet is this truer and more damaging to his particular genius than John Clare. With this in mind and before turning to the range of Romantic poetries that do not feature the drama of the lyric subject, I present two contrastive instances from John Clare as he has and has not been anthologized. Capitalizing on a stereotype of Romantic artist as fully alienated and helpless, anthologizers have made John Clare a kind of sacrificial poet, an admonitory presence whose few, sad, last but best utterances rise heroically out of the blackness of his life of poverty, unrequited love, and derangement, the last of which produces in response a brilliant lyric, “I Am.” This poem authenticates the wreck—barely controlled in his verses—of the “inner life,” that centerpiece of the Romantic Ideology. To quote the Norton Anthology of British Literature:11 “And a small proportion of Clare’s introspective asylum-poems achieve so haunting a poignancy and are spoken in so quietly distinctive a voice that they have made the great mass of mainly humdrum manuscripts he left at his death an exciting place of discovery to recent editors.” Of the seven poems given in this edition of the Norton, only two could be called “nature poems” and all seven could be described as dramas of the lyric subject: Clare becomes a late Romantic voice of introspection and haunting distinctions, whose great mass of humdrum verse yields a few precious grains of poetic value: I am—yet what I am, none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivions host,

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Like shadows in love frenzied stifled throes And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed. . . .

It is a wonderful poem—condensed, honest, and precise in its announcement of pain, and pushes to an extreme that fundamental contradiction in lyric, the insistence upon speech and form in the presence of a condition that tends toward incoherence and silence. It also rehearses the previously discussed familiar, respected, and fully accepted formula for the “best,” “most moving” lyric poetry. But to measure Clare in terms of this poem alone minimizes his poetic achievement. This lens of the lyric subject allows us to appreciate this poem and at the same time it encourages us to trivialize the power of his other poems. A broader definition of a Romantic poem, guided by an understanding of the Fancy, will open up the astonishing and unique liveliness of Clare’s “nature” poetry. Contrast “I am” as a standard type to another late Clare poem, a sonnet on fly catchers that begins: They’re spotted like the sparrows paler grey Fly catchers in old hovels build & lay & build a nest of cobwebs & of straw I’ve clumb the nest the eggs I never saw The fire tails eggs are small & blue & pale She builds in old trees pierced with spinney rails. . . .

Here emphasis falls on the intricate life of birds; the speaker, by contrast, is inserted as an epiphenomenon of the drama of nature. And the poem proposes a value different from those generally preferred for Romantic lyric: focus on the referent (the world) rather than on the speaking subject. The referent, in turn, appears as it “really” is, which includes an animating principle; so the poem not simply describes but celebrates the world. Clare’s genius includes imparting a human, praising, and loving aura to the scenes described; there is, in other words, a lyric subject very evident but it has a relational presence, a witnessing not a dominating one. The visionary intention of the speaker is to include himself amidst a larger world. We also see this in “Emmonsails Heath in Winter”: I love to see the old heaths withered brake Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling While the old Heron from the lonely lake Starts slow and flaps his melancholly wing. . . .

The speaker opens the poem with self-reference, a reference to desire, not a longing for something vanished or unavailable but an expression of (repeated) pleasure in his present, which he then discloses in the account of

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birds, trees, and landscape in motion. (The subject of the sentence vanishes in the fullness and liveliness of the predicate.) The last line of this sonnet contradicts the very idea of closure, and therefore of the lyric subject’s condition of separateness and distinctness: And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove Flit down the hedgerows with frozen plain And hang on little twigs and start again.

The ending that says, “start again” implies a different principle of poetry than that of the closed articulated speaking subject. What starts again is not the human subject but the coy bumbarrels. Even their name closes the poem on a note of strangeness. II The assumption of much twentieth-century criticism of the Romantic lyric that the individuated lyric subject is a stable entity and that a drama of the imagination takes place within it flies in the face both of modern and postmodern theories of the subject more generally and of the actual practice of Romantic poets. The theories of subjectivity arising in the past several decades have built on the Freudian tenet that the self is not natural or a priori, as one finds in Rousseau and Kant, but has been constructed out of pressures coming from outside the self. Even though the Freudian formulation of an unconscious seriously attacked the notion of a unified self, it still proposed that a person could achieve a kind of unity of the self through “maturation”—indeed, the Romantic scheme of self-realization is in this sense Freudian. It has taken postmodernism to critique and dismantle the principle of unity that lies behind Freud. With this recent history in theories of the self there ought to be further scrutiny into the Romantic use of the first person singular. A powerful advance in this direction has come with studies of the importance for Romantic poetry of the first person plural. For example, the recent work of Cary Nelson on American Modernist poetry and Anne Janowitz on communitarian Romantic poetry convincingly demonstrate that both of these poetries include a much greater range of subject positions that significantly embrace the idea of a subject as a socially engaged identity. Moreover, they argue that it is precisely this identification with a class or social type, usually an oppressed class, that has led to the belittling of such poetry or its omission from the canon. In the terms of the Fancy, the mind is dispersed past its own inner concerns, past “dramas of the self,” toward engagement with larger social entities.

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Postmodern theory seems committed to the idea that the subject either is made by those who require it in others or at the very least it exists under severe constraints. Foucault, for example, argues that subjectivity has no existence other than in the minds and action of political “leaders” who create it for the subjection of others. More hopeful thinkers, however, such as Kristeva, Bourdieu, or de Certeau, see the condition of repression or constraint as incomplete. In this regard, perhaps the faculty of the Fancy (as I showed in chapter 1) has been trivialized from the eighteenth century on precisely because of its centrifugal trajectory—the winged breaker of boundaries and explorer of domains, going out from the center or, if there is no center, no “arborescent” or tree-like selfhood of rootedness, then “rhizomes” of generation and growth. The Fancy, by its most characteristic imagery, contradicts the image of the stable, bounded self; and thus its poetry demonstrates a self more in keeping with postmodernism than with earlier twentieth-century notions of the maturing individual. The Romantic Period offers many poems in the voice of a person other than that of the anonymous lyric subject, the voice belonging to one or another collective accompanied by its own narrative (notably in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Southey’s Botany Bay and English Eclogues, Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, and Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales). Such poems refer not to the fate of an individual consciousness but to that of a representative one. The history of reading Romantics has by and large refused to acknowledge as central to the Period’s poetic enterprise the force of voices speaking as a group or having the status of a class of people. Similarly, there are many instances of poems that ventriloquize a figure from the collective: for example, “Petrarch,” “Werther,” “Sappho,” “Joan of Arc.” These poems present us with a person already known to us but whose voice, in its particularity, emerges newly out of a perceived silence or blankness in a way that reinstates his or her significance in the collectivity of the moment. There are, in fact, so many poems not in the voice of the “individual” (the anonymous lyric voice) that one wonders whether those poems appearing in that individual voice need rethinking for their “representative” significance. There have been powerful and characteristic omissions in the canon of British Romanticism, omissions caused by the exclusive focus on the speaker as anonymous lyric subject and as poet-in-history without acknowledgment of the lyric subject as social type. The problems facing the anthologizing of American Modernist poetry identified by Cary Nelson could well be applied to Romanticism. Nelson demonstrates that the canon of American poetry since the 1950s has dramatically distorted, by narrowing the profile of, American Modernist poetry.12 He speaks of this period as

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“a process of literary forgetfulness.” “The full range of modern poetries is so great that it cannot be presuasively narrativized in any unitary way” (p. 7). Poetry by working class, African American, and women poets have disappeared or if retained and anthologized, often shorn of the publishing context that gave them social or political meaning. The book demonstrates convincingly that anthologies have canonized the poetry of the individual and have generally excluded the poetry of the type. Nelson observes that this constricting of many poetries to one and the “forgetting” of the poetry of the type—for example, workers’ poetry, poetry of women, poetry of African Americans—occurred roughly in the 1950s, the post-War period and the period of McCarthyism. Whereas the constriction of the Romantic poetic canon began much earlier, its modern (as opposed to early nineteenth-century) theorization may be said to occur roughly at the same time up to and including the publication of books such as Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company and M. H. Abrams’s influential “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric” (1965). These works established attention on the dramatic narrative of self-realization as the paradigm of the Romantic poem. As Anne Janowitz has argued, in contrast to earlier critics including the New Historicist ones previously mentioned, the “communitarian” strain in poetry from the 1790s into the mid-nineteenth century is very strong and vies for importance with the poetry of the individuated subject.13 A largely working-class poetry speaks, as does the American poetry discussed by Nelson, for the class or type rather than for the individual, a specified “we” as opposed to an anonymous “I.” She begins to establish the models of more than one poetry, of poetries coexisting simultaneously and coexisting in the same poet. In her view, one form of Romantic lyric poetry includes “the very contestation of communitarian and individualist identities, along side the mutual inflections of oral and print cultures, within the shaping of both the aesthetic ideology and the interventionist poetics of radicalism” (p. 22). Communitarianism produces “another version of subjectivity. This path is one through which the subject of customary culture—a pre-capitalist, communitarian, plebian subjectivity—is dialectically engaged with the emerging voluntaristic or unencumbered self. This takes place in lyric experiments, such as lyrical ballads, in ‘we’ voices within lyric poetry, and in lyrics which attempt to intervene in and not simply represent human life. . . .Romantic lyricism thus incarnates a turning point in the valuation of the self in its relation to a larger context and much of its power derives from its mutability in this regard, its perfection highlighting its vulnerability as well” (p. 27). Janowitz cites as theoretical support the poet George Dyer (1755–1841), who champions a representative subject as opposed to an

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individual, and who distinguishes between differentiated and individuated images of persons: The mere imitator, being confined by his own individuality, moves, as it were, within a given circle; whereas the REPRESENTATIVE poet is bound by no circumferences, except the characters, which he borrows, for the time.

And: Those poems, in which the speaker wears a fictitious character, differ from such, as are merely imitative, on this ground: the latter still reserve the personality of the author; whereas the former go out of the poet himself, and come forward as representative of another. (p. 54)

And finally, and conclusively: “representation is the only true measure of liberty.” Writing in a representative voice (class, type), according to Dyer at the end of the eighteenth century, opens up a certain possibility for poetry, the translation and expansion of the self out of its ordinary, social, normative boundedness. Indeed the language of boundaries and narrow circumferences recalls Blake’s concern that poetry break the “fetters” of the social self. Dyer demands that the poet envision more than what he/she knows familiarly, ideologically. Dyer’s language of the poet—“go out of the poet himself”—anticipates Shelley’s “the great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own” (Defence of Poetry). To put stress on the speaker as a representative voice requires, says Dyer, making a distinction between the speaker and the poet. The speaking voice does not belong to the poet in his/her historical and social dimensions but has become the Other. Extending Dyer’s observations—along with Shelley’s—we have a principle applicable to much of Romantic lyric. That principle is, in fact, reinforced by him in whom one would expect to find it least: Wordsworth in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. When he says that a poet is “a man speaking to men” and that he should “bring [his] language near to the language of men,” “poetry is the image of man and nature,” and so forth, he seems to be thinking of “man” as a type, not as a discrete individual. (That is, the word “man” in the Preface seems to be the collective term of all humanity.) Similarly, later in Poems, in Two Volumes the section of the book “Moods of My Own Mind” does not reduce or narrow the speaker to the quotidian and strictly individual but types as a genre—the genre of moods—a previously unprivileged and invisible state of mind: in fact, they work to expand the theater of poetic possibility.

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If through the work of Janowitz one learns to acknowledge the powerful presence of a lyric subject not as idiosyncratic but as a type, one can also discover a Romantic poetry in which the lyric subject has become a mere sense of subjectivity or has been dispersed into invisibility throughout the poem. If we look at the selection of Romantic and nineteenth-century poems found in Poems for the Millennium (mentioned in my Introduction), we find that they are not poems that foreground a lyric subject at all. In the “Forerunners” section, instances of mostly open-form, visionary poetry written in the nineteenth century, the contents are striking as a constellation of poems that certainly present an unfamiliar profile of nineteenthcentury art: from Blake’s Milton, a late Hölderlin fragment, from the Finnish epic The Kalevala, Whitman’s “This Compost,” from Baudelaire’s Fusees, Dickinson’s “My Life Had Stood—A / Loaded Gun,” Bald Mountain Zaum [sound] poems, Hopkins’s “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire,” from Lautreamont’s Maldrador, from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, from the Navajo The Night Chant, and from Mallarme’s Le Livre. In these poems the first-person singular is scattered throughout these poems but rarely as the magnet drawing all else to it. There is, for example, a Hölderlin fragment of a completely displaced voice, prophetic in its vision first of the past when “Time was God judged,” in contrast to now when there is only “a race of vipers!” The fragmented form of this poem written, amazingly, while Wordsworth was writing The Prelude (ca. 1803–06), gives blanks and silences where the speaking subject in traditional poetry would be filling the page with sentences; here the lyric subject has dissolved before prophetic speech: On the lips O in the name of I call you Down, old daemon!

This poem, “In the Days of Socrates,” is preceded in the “Forerunners” section by the powerful manifesto section from Book Two of Blake’s Milton, which shouts out, in long lines, the need for “self’annihilation”: The Negation must be destroyd to redeem the Contraries The Negation is the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in Man This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off & annihilated alway To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-examination. To bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not Human I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration . . .

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The lyric subject, from the point of view of these poems and the others in this introductory section to an anthology of experimental poetry, is too narrow, too restricted to engage the “grandeur of Inspiration.” Not only do these Forerunner poems thematically downplay or elide the lyric subject, but, consequently, they appear in unusual forms and line lengths. None of these forerunner poems, for example, are written in the ten-syllable line that from the time of Shakespeare through the Victorian period was the preferred verse form of the lyric subject. Some are in a long line, some in broken lines arranged spatially on the page, others are in prose, and the one in stanza form, again by Emily Dickinson, contains her serious rethinking of the caesura and of the conventions of syntax. If the pentameter line has almost always imaged the voice of the person of ordinary consciousness, its disappearance in this group indicates an emphasis on nonsocial, nonsubjective, and nonnormative forms of speech: one in which the speaker appears either as one element in the world or as a principle of transformation. Rimbaud, arriving near the modern end of “Forerunners,” describes the self melting or (negatively, angrily) decaying into another world; and when the speaker reemerges he or she is wholly and spectacularly human and divine: “For I is an other. If brass wakes a trumpet, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I witness the birth of my thought, I watch it, I listen to it; I draw a stroke on the bow; the symphony begins to stir in the depths, or springs onto the stage.”14 III When the speaker/poet’s real intent extends primarily beyond the borders of himself, he or she shifts from being a figure-apart to being one who participates in the rest of society. This condition differs substantially from Abrams’s notion of the “greater Romantic Lyric,” in which the poem’s voice is uttered in “retirement.” From here to the end of this chapter, I consider two ways that Romantic poems, in the mode of the Fancy, fulfill George Oppen’s observation placed as the epigraph for this chapter: “We awaken at the same moment to ourselves and to things,” in order to show a different drama of the subject. First is the witness poem, in which consciousness occurs solely and precisely in the (usually surprised) presence of otherness. Second is not so much a type of poem as a particular syntax, in which the sentence formally marks the transfer of attention from the desiring self to the desired referent. In the first case the lyric subject is transformed and thus redefined by an encounter, and in the second it dissolves altogether. In the following poems of Mary Robinson and Anna Barbauld the subject comes into being at the moment of response to a situation. Robinson’s

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“A London Summer Morning” turns the poet/speaker simply into a voice ranging, or “listing,” the sounds from London streets, from beginning to the end, with the figure of the poet appearing only at the poem’s close: And the poor poet wakes from busy dreams, To paint the summer morning.

Waking happens only at the point that the morning impinges on his/her senses; the response is not to think about or feel it or to shape it but “to paint” it: a city, the sounds and sights of which link together through the speaker’s sentences. Linkage, or parataxis, defines the poem’s motion and creates a “constellation” of events and personages, particularly notable when different elements come into relation through the pathway of a single sentence: On the pavement hot The sooty chimney-boy, with dingy face And tatter’d covering, shrilly bawls his trade, Rousing the sleepy housemaid. At the door The milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell Proclaims the dustman’s office; while the street Is lost in clouds impervious.

The poet, then, becomes one more sight, one more event, in the seemingly endless variety of urban activity, and urban economy. Poetry, as Robinson figures it, doesn’t emanate from high social position, can’t distinguish itself either by wealth or perspective, but belongs within the very matrix that it describes. This point is repeated in miniature in Robinson’s “January, 1795,” by means of a quatrain stanza that flattens hierarchies of presumed importance by cramming contradictory realities, poetry included, into its one “room”: Poets, Painters, and Musicians; Lawyers, Doctors, Politicians; Pamphlets, Newspapers, and Odes, Seeking Fame, by different roads.

For Robinson, in these poems poetry and art and those who produce them belong fully to the economy and—in this instance—to the goal of immediate “Fame.” As a result her work conflicts with the growing view of poetry as a higher calling, separated and at its best untainted by economy and the whole power motive of society. The lyric subject (metonymically, “Odes”), from Robinson’s perspective, may be precisely the manifestation of a poetry of “higher calling” and therefore less relevant to a poetry emanating from

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within society. At the same time the constellation of activities that include poetry speaks to one of its potential strengths, that it will gain in the value and truth of its representation the closer it is in distance and kind to other human experiences; such poetry, she implies here and even more in “The Poet’s Garret” (discussed in chapter 4) will evince far more interest in the world than in the lyric subject since the latter is not sheltered from the former. Beauty produced by genius, the recovery of the soul through art, the unmediated representation of the subject, and a subject not defined through its inherent “sociality” are what to Robinson seems spurious.15 In a very different register than Robinson’s urban poems is Anna Barbauld’s “Washing Day” with its mysterious but unconventional handling of the poet as subject. Because it continually transmutes the subject positions taken from beginning to end and therefore as a continual critique of the contemporary equation of blank verse and the lyric subject, “Washing Day” may be the most ambitious short blank-verse poem of the Romantic Period. On Washing Day “the master” is not gratified—the master of the household, the patriarchal line swamped by an emerging matriarchal undersong (grandmother, mother, daughter/poet) of the disruption of household hierarchies by the complete upheaval of universal cleaning, the master-epic form mocked, the “clean high-sounding phrase” of the dramatic and epic masters jettisoned for the “domestic Muse, / In slipshod measure loosely prattling on,” and a strange new “ponder”ing voice of poetry. The poem begins with a speaker roughly identified as a poet, with a consciousness of a shift in poetics from martial to domestic epic. Throughout the first half of the poem mock-epic language prevails, though its purpose is not to trivialize by epic association but rather to shift the category to the serious, regular, material, indeed bodily, labor of washing clothes, sheets, towels, and the like, of a household. Bad weather can make the chaos and the filth worse. The poem presents a day that from the master’s point of view is a revulsion of order and cleanliness even though it serves cleanliness and ultimately the master’s desires. But it also creates the space, in the mind of a child, also ungratified on this day when things get messier before they get neater, to see and hear the events with a dispassionate clarity or, more precisely, with “the awe This day struck into me. . . .” Pushed aside, she went And sheltered me beside the parlour fire: There my dear grandmother, eldest of forms, Tended the little ones, and watched from harm, Anxiously fond, though oft her spectacles

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With elfin cunning hid, and oft the pins Drawn from her ravelled stocking, might have soured One less indulgent.— At intervals my mother’s voice was heard, Urging dispatch: briskly the work went on, All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring, To fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait. Then would I sit me down, and ponder much Why washings were.

The little girl’s “retirement” from the commotion allows a new cosmos to begin to appear, an order of women to which adhere the feelings and a rhythm of the sounds of women’s work (iambic, in fact: “to wash, to rinse,” etc.). The poem beautifully cumulates these childhood impressions and reorderings, which strangely enter two third of the way through an eternal-present-tense sketch of a Washing Day. Where is there space for pondering on Washing Day, and similarly where is there space for recollection? There is a moment in each day that Satan cannot find. From here to the end of the poem, the meditation curiously lingers in the play of children amidst the labor of the adults, so that pondering links itself to blowing soap bubbles; and the voice—declarative, recollective— slips into a pondering, playful apostrophe: Sometimes through hollow bowl Of pipes amused we blew, and sent aloft The flowing bubbles; little dreaming then To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball Ride buoyant through the clouds—so near approach The sports and children and the toils of men. Earth, air, sky, and ocean, hath its bubbles, And verse is one of them—this most of all.

The poet, alluded to by the word “verse,” but not named, asserts the crisis of poetry and the range of its possible significance: play, technological advance, production, or waste. “Verse” becomes an element in the correspondences, the constellation of the supplemental. Indeed, her speech at the end, by contrast with its earlier mode, takes on the airier pondering that easily identifies with bubbles: fragile, the effluence of labor, waste, yet valued (particularly at poem’s close) as precious. Precious is the very concrete account of a Washing Day; the labor of women becomes the content of poetry; and with the most advanced of her contemporaries in poetry, Barbauld uses poetry to bring the invisible or peripheral members of society

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into the foreground. But poetry itself, and the “poet” as a speaking subject, remains shadowy, shifting presences on the periphery. If “Washing Day” is, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth, “the growth of the poet’s mind,” it occurs because society floods the child’s mind and senses with a confused state of affairs. It is instructive to contrast this to Wordsworth’s moments of expanded consciousness in the 1799 Prelude. There the (male) child strikes out, alone, toward horizons (“the utmost boundary”) in nature, he disturbs the natural order (e.g., nest-stealing); nature responds with verbal sounds (murmurings, utterances) that reconfigure and expand the child’s awareness; these events “build up” a self that becomes a poet. Barbauld’s young self seeks nothing, is not solitary but overwhelmed with society turned upside down. She responds not only with expanded forms of the senses but with mind, and her poem in fact turns outward to analyze as well as describe a Washing Day. Unlike Wordsworth, to whom “feeling comes in aid of feeling,” Barbauld accumulates a very precise set of images that, although they contain no Gothic mystery (“the stolen boat”) that produces an expansion of the horizon as disembodied, even confused images, still result in questions not only about the social order but about associations to different forms of play and labor. The mind of the child grown into an adult has become over the years not only attentive but playful in a serious way; the poem—for all its mock-epic solidities—ends as a launched balloon of thinking, airy and ascending, emblematic of mental play, relatively free of what in contrast— compared to many of the blank-verse domestic poems of the 1790s—seem like defensive structures for the ego. The image of a bubble floating skyward points, at once tentatively and precisely, to a visionary poetry. It belongs to a different category or domain than Washing Day (although it emerges from it), which is further indicated by its vertical trajectory and its speed so unrelated to the regular, machinelike, purposeful rhythms of woman’s domestic labor. “Washing Day” ends as an implicit crisis of the visionary in poetry that characterizes the poetry of the 1790s. Does poetry, or rather the lyric subject, stay within the normative scale, or does it cross horizons and the “utmost boundary” (Wordsworth)? In Barbauld’s “To Mr. S. T. Coleridge” and Robinson’s “To the Poet Coleridge” the crisis becomes clear. “Mr.” versus “The Poet”: the social person versus the visionary; the grounded blank verse of the one versus the incantatory stanzaic address to the other. Keep, says Barbauld, on the path of the quotidian, reasoning mind; you are “beloved of Science—of the Muse beloved.” Write a poetry linked to and dependent upon your social self. The tangled, enchanting mazes of the unreal, of images and shades, are worth encountering but dwelling places must be elsewhere.

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Robinson’s poem not only celebrates that world but in addressing the Poet she describes a Keatsian (“Already with thee!”) ecstasy or transport: Spirit divine! With thee I’ll trace Imagination’s boundless space!

It responds directly to Coleridge in “Kubla Khan,” which has already put forth an image of a poet who, like the Ancient Mariner, transfixes his listeners in worshipful gaze. How, in the presence of such transport, and transported oneself, does poetic speech begin again? And what can it accomplish? Unlike Barbauld who challenges the giving over to images, Robinson speaks directly to him in the mode of ecstasy yet still finds space to establish the mode of her own visionary poetry. (A fuller discussion of this poem appears in chapter 4.) “To the Poet Coleridge” was written, or signed, by “SAPPHO,” a heteronym (as the Portuguese Modernist poet Fernando Pessoa identifies the personages who, he says, write “his” poems). Heidi Thomson has proposed that Robinson (particularly in Lyrical Tales) uses the heteronym to define the speaking voice in her poems that are other than—indeed “far, far remov’d”—from herself. What does it mean for Sappho to address the Poet Coleridge? First it frames the address in poetic, not in social (“Mr.,” “Mary Robinson”) terms. Second it recalls that “Sappho” is the female version of the economy of scarcity in poetic production, particularly in the use made of her myth of radically disappointed loved current in her time and in which she participated (Sappho and Phaon): the poet gives up her life for her song. And finally, Sappho is the quintessentially erotic and passionate female poet, whose intense love for her beloved makes her “Paler than dying grass” and whose heart-in-love shakes like an oak shaken by a whirlwind. Sappho is the female poet as heroic victim, a designation that seems far, far removed from herself in this poem, just as she describes her greeting of the Nymph as “far, far remov’d from mortal pleasure.” This kind of hero, analogous to 1790s readings of Chatterton and Burns, marks the essence of a poetic authenticity, here a “greeting of the spirit” at a remove from the mortal pleasure so necessary to the very definition of Sappho. The price of ecstasy may be registered in the particular heteronym, but a price, apparently for Robinson, worth paying. Barbauld and Robinson differ on the preferred relationship of the lyric subject to the world and, more important, to poetic language and the poetic image. The poet, implies Barbauld, loses her connection to the world, to “truth,” and to “knowledge” if poetry means the full embrace of the image world, a full entry into it and a “tracing” of its boundaries: one must retain a sense of the social scale of human life to serve the latter most

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effectively. In “To the Poet Coleridge,” by contrast, Robinson does not address life on the social scale; the intensity and compelling, even erotic, power of Coleridgean vision floods all other attentions. This makes less startling the juxtaposition of this poem with Lyrical Tales that draws its power from the “real world” of more or less disenfranchised persons, in the manner of Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, and it leads to yet another important subject-position, to be distinguished both from that of the visionary poem and the poem of the social scale: the witness. There is a collaboration of attentiveness and responsiveness. During the 1790s, a witness poem catches the speaker either at or just after a point of waking up. The power of the object of encounter draws the speaker out of a concentration of self so that the representation apparently settles upon the object. At the same time the witness as witness, as feeling/thinking subject, never ceases to inform the power and precision of the representation. Consider the opening three lines from Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” from Experience: A little black Thing among the snow: Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe! Where are thy father & mother? say?

Arrested by a sight confusing in its nature, the speaker—in an amazingly compressed progression of response—utters what he sees, which from the first seems barely caught from oblivion: “A little black thing,” so easy to “pass by,” something that intrinsically radiates nothing to catch the attention. Read, however, with the illustration, the “thing” is already a child. So thingness emotively actually draws the speaker into the trajectory of reductiveness, the social condition of the sweep’s life. It is thus a register caught in sympathy, as is the bewildering preposition “among” that requires but does not receive a plural and probably human object. But the speaker does not stay caught in society’s reification of the human. He next marks his crying and his weeping as a language, a verbal utterance, and then interprets his music in terms of affective states. His questions respond and petition yet another response. As a paradigm for the Romantic witness poem, “The Chimney Sweeper” superbly evokes at a primary level the sympathetic nature of persons expressed through both the activation of the senses and the investigative faculty. The cumulative flow of witness-consciousness directly enters the domain of the referent, activating the expansive and definitive response of the sweep. But the poem does not appear obligated to return to a further level of witness-consciousness; the revelation of the bitter reality of the sweep suffices. Implicitly his speech unfolds and rationalizes in a

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near cosmic scope the confusion that initially generated the witness’s questions. Implicitly the witness’s next response proliferates as poetry and subsequently proliferates as disseminated knowledge making others secondary witnesses. The subject, as such, becomes boundless. Unlike “The Chimney Sweeper,” Blake’s “London” represents in detail the event of witnessing, from the position of the witness. Everything and everyone in London emerges through the perception of the speaker: I mark, I hear. Here and in Blake’s other Songs the witness is not situated but instead “wanders,” as if to witness requires a certain dislocation, an alien mobility that is also a vulnerability and openness to sights and sounds to which situatedness would blind or deafen one. The speaker exists only in the condition of encounter, perception, and notation. In that sense his experience does not precede his writing about it; the poem flows directly from the event, indeed is part of the event, just as the referents flow from and to the witness, who has his subjectivity distinct from the proliferation of the world. The subject acts not in a free space but in a “chartered” one; the freedom, the illegitimacy, the subversiveness of his observations express precisely a certain mobility and fecundity unanticipated by the dictates of the Magna Carta. Strangely the freedom belongs to the system of control. Blake indicates this in the first two lines: I wander thru’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

“London” restores the practice of the subject, which is to “walk out” into meaning through dream-like figures of the city that expand and enrich the sites of human oppression in which the human expression—sighs and cries—has been silenced, forgotten: “Dull would he be of soul. . . .” At the same time this speaker cannot be found and chartered: “To walk is to lack a place.”16 Or, as Marina Tsvetaeva has said, the poet dwells not at home but at the crossroads. To speak of the subject as fixed, realizable, is to locate it, to make it susceptible to the systems of charter and control. This implies that these poets seek to define the subject in a moment or condition of freedom which could mean, as Levinas said, a subject not reduced, by psychology for example, to the subjective, which thus becomes the matrix of all the thinkable”; Levinas wants to assert the presence of a subject not bound by “nature” and not bound by law.17 To think freely, in the poetry of the Fancy, is to think not reflectively but attentively. The issue of the subject’s freedom to think is superbly raised in Robinson’s Lyrical Tale, “All Alone,” which represents the lyric subject caught in a deeper conflict (than in Blake) between her own boundaries, her own projective sympathies, and the sounds and viewpoints of a bereft

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orphan encountered in its own fixed isolateness. The poem becomes a tug of war between the domain of sympathy and an emotional hunger turned in upon itself, the speaker persisting in her declaration that she is proof that the child isn’t “all alone,” and the child insisting that the nearby grave of its mother walls it off from any living connection. Unlike the Blakean witness, this one cannot flow into the domain of the Other, and thus captures powerfully the stronghold of egoism that flourishes as a form of sympathy. In fact, the poem may be a critique of a too-easy response of sympathy. The poem, however, establishes a wider interpretative frame than the speaker can, simply because the child has the last word in which, even though it continues to address the speaker, the figure of sympathy effectively gets blotted out: My Father never will return, He rests beneath the sea-green wave; I have no kindred left, to mourn When I am hid in yonder grave! Not one! To dress with flow’rs the stone;— Then—surely, I AM LEFT ALONE!

Similarly at the same time the child asserts this pinched vision, this impossibility of relationships and human civility, the poem enacts a visionary expansiveness, in the simple fact of its length, its many stanzas that proliferate the details of a life. The witness, at once arguing against the child’s bereft state yet repeating stanza after stanza the ominous refrain of the child, “All alone,” sketches the child’s life, as does the child itself. Its world expands, if not for the protagonists, then for the reader, who “witnesses” all. Why can’t her poetic outlook forestall his misery? After all, she, like many visionary poets, can see more than the world embraced by his grief. But what she began to learn (as students of witness such as Primo Levi, Shoshana Felman, and Giorgio Agamben have shown so powerfully) is that the witness cannot know the full extent of the victims’ suffering; at the same time the poem does not preclude a change in the child’s thinking and feeling sometime outside the precinct of the poem. “All Alone” reveals a barrier to poetic dwelling in real history and offers a witnessing speaker who remains at the crossroads. Writing about six years after Blake’s “London” and during the peak years (ca. 1798–1800) when some poets were “retiring” from urban society in order to find a poetic authenticity of the unencumbered and moreor-less autonomous self, Mary Robinson establishes the salvific possibilities of witness, sociality and sympathy, and perhaps even communitarianism. Her poem is neither pessimistic nor skeptical because it prolongs a social

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analysis of encounter in a world of unequal distribution of care: it does not “retire” from that world when it appears inhospitable. But she makes the crisis of the poet-as-witness more complex than it appears in Blake’s Songs. The witness who like Blake’s, “marks” and “hears,” implies the witness-aspoet, but one who cannot easily dissolve into the referent. Recent discussions of witnessing insist upon the necessity of the act of witness in the face of inevitable misperception and the incompleteness of knowledge. Whereas much of this discussion comes from Holocaust testimony and theory, the principle seems to apply to the Romantic version as well. “All Alone” acknowledges the misperception as a necessity for getting past her own fantasy about the orphan. Wordsworth wrote a witness poem, “Old Man Travelling,” based on corrected misperceptions, which works by the juxtaposition of conflicting viewpoints. The results also found in at least three other poems in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads—“We are Seven,” “The Thorn,” and “The Idiot Boy”—speak to the reality and perceptions of it more than to a drama of the lyric subject. But none of these engages the problem as starkly as “Old Man Travelling”: The little hedge-row birds, That peck along the road, regard him not. He travels on, and in his face, his step, His gait, is one expression; every limb, His look and bending figure, all bespeak A man who does not move with pain, but moves With thought—He is insensibly subdued To settled quiet: he is one by whom All effort seems forgotten, one to whom Long patience has such mild composure given, That patience now doth seem a thing, of which He hath no need. He is by nature led To peace so perfect, that the young behold With envy, what the old man hardly feels. —I asked him whither he was bound, and what The object of his journey; he replied “Sir! I am going many miles to take “A last leave of my son, a mariner, “Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth, “And there is dying in an hospital.”

The first half of the poem presents a highly sympathetic and aesthetically satisfying view of a person who has evolved with age to a position, as close as a human can get, “at one with nature.” Part of Wordsworth’s resistance to a movement designed to place the aged and infirm in institutions, it

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demonstrates—as does at much greater length its contemporary “The Old Cumberland Beggar”—a mutual beneficence and reciprocity among the old man, animals, birds, and children. And, perhaps most important, the old man’s mind and senses harmoniously are subdued to the slow, ground-level condition of his bodily movement (far from the Fancy). The superb blank-verse enjambments reinforce this fruitful binding of elements. This half is spoken, it appears, by an omniscient observer. Then at the break, the voice of omniscience suddenly inhabits a body and a curious and presumably sympathetic mind. It intervenes in its own meditation with a pertinent question to which the old man gives a pertinent, precise, and tragic answer. A man whose mind had just seemed “insensible” and at one with his decrepit body is in fact thinking and moving with far more than biological purpose. If the first half of the poem demonstrates “Wordsworthian quietism,” the second cancels it with a vision of human pain and poverty caused by the collateral damage of a questionable war and an inequitable economic system. And yet, is the first half cancelled? Whereas in “real life” the news of the old man presented to the poem’s speaker may have fully supplanted the meditative observations of the first half, in the poem both “views” exist contiguously, granting each its own kind of truth. As in “All Alone,” Wordsworth seems to say, the poem shows that the witness participates in the problem he would like to overcome: the first half—spoken, it must be noted, by an apparently unanchored voice—notes the powerful “institutional” demand not for juxtaposition but for integration, harmonization, a “smoothing” down or reconciliation of incompatibles, of “complacence,” and calls this beautiful. The poem then, in the spirit of the Brechtian “scene,” proposes a final aesthetic that insists on the juxtaposition of both realities (what Isobel Armstrong calls the “broken middle”) as a representation of a true social condition. In terms of the drama of the lyric subject, this poem could not show less interest. Instead the poem offers the juxtaposition of two consciousnesses that presumably inhabit the same person. But it is the disenfranchised person who, like Blake’s Chimney Sweeper and Robinson’s orphan in “All Alone,” has the poem’s final word: his reality exceeds in importance any chagrin registered by his questioner. “Old Man Travelling” looks roughly like a blank-verse sonnet, a fact that proposes another juxtaposition—between a traditional form of high culture and an event arising out of the representation of the lower class. In the poetry (and the reading of the poetry) privileging the drama of the lyric subject, form perfectly contains and emblematizes the “completeness” of human speech and a kind of inner fulfillment. Here there is ultimate conflict: formal closure confronts the openness, that is to say, the overwhelming largeness of tragedy—the openness brought about by social inequality.

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A crucial and dismaying necessary footnote to this discussion lies in the poem’s history of publication, in which Wordsworth, from 1815 on, published it without the corrective dialogue of the poem’s second half, thus jettisoning the politics and poetics of the witness and reinforcing the speaker’s initial fantasy as reality itself. The more one accumulates these poems—these instances of the flowing, the scattered, the submerged subject—the more that “subjectivity” itself, with its well-defined borders, its fervor of completion and definition, seems ephemeral (and in keeping with over a century of philosophical and linguistic questioning of “the self”), the more it makes sense to ditch that obsession, with its inevitable restrictions on the Romantic canon and distortions of it. The criticism of the 1960s and early 1970s, with its paradigm of self-realization, of apocalyptic opening beyond “selfhood,” did not lead readers to follow the implications of the open form; instead the “imaginative” man and woman reverted back to the self, the normative representation of normative reality: the self, now encrusted with history rather than liberated through it into the world, is a kind of carcass that remains of the living poem. Traditional poetics is the form that the carcass takes. In rejecting the old way of looking at the Romantic lyric subject, we give up a false notion of the autonomous self and of a subjectivity that exists independent of an event or an “investigation.” Now the subject becomes woven in a cosmic web, or in a web or constellation of words, not static but dynamic, not “individualist” but highly particular. Perhaps we call the subject “the Poet” when he/she signifies the subject in that precisely dispersed, expanded, as opposed to normative state. Consider one of the most canonical of Romantic lyrics, Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Since the rehabilitation of Dorothy Wordsworth’s beautiful Grasmere Journals, readers have tended to see the poem as a parasitic refiguring of the expansive account given in the Journals, with its multiple subjects, a constrictive shifting of attention to the “egotistical sublime” of the Poet Wordsworth. And whereas psychologically it’s easy enough to assent to Wordsworth’s appropriative personality, his use of the women in his life, it produces, I believe, a poetic misreading that avoids the seriousness and importance of Wordsworth’s definition of the poetic vocation. No Romantic poet has been more crippled, in his reception, than Wordsworth by the tyranny of normative readings. The feminist reading mentioned above is perhaps the most troubling, but there are others—in particular, the kind that focuses on memory, that invokes the definition of the closed poem as authoritatively Wordsworthian, a poem of emotion recollected in tranquillity. Experience is over, and the poet’s given task is to record it. Similarly, this poem affirms by indirection the severe criticism

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of Keats: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” That is, if you have an epiphanic experience in nature, it may come back to affirm your life later on: it’s the palpable design of The Prelude. All three of these accounts of the poem underscore (with a self-righteousness) the normative reading, of the selfish ego, or, for those inclined toward Wordsworth, the fulfilled ego. “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” however, exhibits that same “going out of one’s own nature” that one finds in so many poems of this revolutionary period. Notice how, in the opening stanza, the “I,” by chance encounter, becomes immersed, absorbed in, and thus subordinate to the lively scene of flowers: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils, Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

The writing itself is full of agitation and excitement: the shift from “crowd” to “host” indicating the intensifying of multiplicity with associations of social and heavenly groups or, more precisely, the indication of a mind suddenly shifting from a societal to a Biblical register; the rhythmic/ grammatical repetition in the fifth line, indicating an eye darting from daffodil-site to daffodil-site. This stanza features neither the subject taking precedence or importance over the referent or the referent over the subject: rather as George Oppen has said at the beginning of his book The Materials: “We awaken at the same moment to ourselves and to things.” The poems placed before “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by Wordsworth in 1815 together make an essay or set of “experiments,” in different forms and points of view, with vitality. Many of these poems display moments of breathings, glitterings, shootings, mutterings, the voluptuous, the unfettered, the blossoming, the delighting, the haunting, the startling, the fiery, the floating, and. . .the fluttering and dancing. These energies either erupt or are submerged, they are epiphanies or secrets, they are embraced or rejected; they belong not to the speaker but to the world. This is the Poet of the Fancy—not a conserving or primarily elegiac poet but one “pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him . . .” (Preface, 1802). This is the poet of “Moods of My Own Mind.” As this Poet alights upon or “visits” the poem, the 1807 sequence, and then the 1815 sequence, one cannot link it definitively to the poet-in-history or even to

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the speaker of the poem. It refuses, in other words, to coalesce into a subject, and yet it defines perfectly clearly the principles of this poetry, the poetics: a poetics of the Fancy, of “cheerfulness” privileges both influx and outflowings of sound and sympathies. It is tempting to read the poem as a characteristically Wordsworthian memory: experience is over, the poem records the event and endows it with meaning. But the speaker (taking on the mantle of Poet? visited by the Poet?) in the final stanza joins recollection with full present engagement: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.

In this intense realization, one cannot accurately speak about a lyric subject other than an occasion for powerful sensations or receptions of in-flowings from other sources and centers. “I” gives way to “my heart,” an important, jarring metonymy; daffodils do not reside in memory but act in the present, in brilliance of movement and light. Pleasure, a liquid, fills up the heart, which, independent of any subject, dances with the daffodils. Just as the daffodils repeat their vitality in a finer tone, expanding sight inwardly, so solitude, defined initially as at best a condition of potentiality (Schiller’s “filled infinity”) now returns as the “bliss” of itself. In the speaker’s current writing, bliss emerges in the paratactic “redoublings” of the final lines: “And. . .And.” He confers upon experience a meaning (and only a jealous poet would find here a “palpable design”) but only by having the experience again in his language: the “naive” encounter returns “yet once more” in the “sentimental” poem. The visionary revolution of the account in the Journals is complete: brother and sister tramping through Gowbarrow Park, having vanished, speaker and Poet remain only as agents of a celebration of the creation. Yet “thought,” apparently vanquished by or reticent before the daffodils, now presides, in Elias Canetti’s phrase, as a “thought-lark,” a soaring of conscious, desiring, intelligence.

IV Just as one can discover the inclination for the Fancy in Wordsworth (where even Hazlitt said it didn’t reside), so in Charlotte Smith, the author of Elegiac Sonnets, a work of (apparent) total absorption in the self in grief,

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one discovers, in the very syntax of her superb blank-verse meditation Beachy Head, the signs of the Fancy. Beachy Head can be read in a way that anticipates the poetry of Clare (and my discussion of it concluding this chapter); both employ what might be called a syntax of the Fancy, in which the referent or object in a sentence absorbs the subject: I loved to trace the brooks whose humid banks Nourish the harebell, and the freckled pagil; And stroll among o’ershadowing woods of beech, Lending in Summer, from the heats of noon A whispering shade; while haply there reclines Some pensive lover of uncultur’d flowers, Who, from the tumps with bright green mosses clad, Plucks the wood sorrel, with its light thin leaves, Heart-shaped, and triply folded; and its root Creeping like beaded coral; or who there Gathers, the copse’s pride, anemones, With rays like golden studs on ivory laid Most delicate: but touch’d with purple clouds, Fit crown for April’s fair but changeful brow. Ah! Hills so early loved! In fancy still I breathe your pure keen air; and still behold Those widely spreading views, mocking alike The Poet and the Painter’s utmost art. (ll. 354–71)

This brilliant passage becomes what Smith, a few lines later, calls an “inwreathed volute,” or spiral-shelled mollusk, a sentence that streams outward from the subject and verbs—“I loved to trace. . .and stroll among”—to the “widely spreading views”; but one element in her list of sights is “some pensive lover of uncultur’d flowers” who also engages (“plucks”) the world of nature. The first predicate, in other words, takes off (sparked by “love”?) and assumes its own momentum. At the same time the subject “I,” not however the “I” of the narrative past but that of the present speaker, maintains a “trace” of presence in those quiet registers of mental energy, the “haply” and the “or.”18 A clause that anticipates Leigh Hunt and the early Keats—“in fancy still / I breathe your pure keen air”— could be said to describe the preceding proliferative sentence. Furthermore, as I have argued, the Fancy does not preclude precise observation of the object world, with which Beachy Head abounds. The movement in the traditional Western lyric poem from its opening to its close follows the path of continuous linear restriction of possibility concurrent with a sharpening focus and alienation of voice and meaning.

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Poetic closure constitutes the assertion of the completeness of the particular acts of speech. The lyric poem is the unmodifiable image of the voice. This tragic view—exclusion, alienation, and the precise flowering of the individuated voice—seems true enough and powerful in the general case. But poetry often challenges the implications of this view, particularly Romantic poetry at its essence. Poetry resists the implications of closure, and of tragedy, both of which contradict the visionary (comic, proliferating), interactive, and unfixable and unsituated, erotic and overflowing possibilities of the human mind: “I love to wander at my idle will” (Clare). Just as a sentence refuses the closure of the poetic line, so the “unfettered” mind, the lyric subject, refuses the tragic closure of the poem. It’s easy to write a poem within the implications of the genre; it’s easy to read one the same way. This is the way that John Clare’s poetry (and, as I began the chapter with Clare, I now return to discuss his poetry more fully) has been anthologized. No one can deny the power of “I am,” a brilliantly concise and precise account of the lyric self as tragically complete and failed, but it does not follow his characteristic poetic principles of accumulation and parataxis, of loving attention to the referent in which the lyric subject says: “I love to . . .” Clare’s speakers are quite literally expressive, pressing outward from a responsive center back into the world that elicited the response: the circuit, or journey, of Clare’s speakers begins and ends with the referent.19 The lyric subject catches the world in its extra-human flight, and marvels; it dwindles, wanders, lies passive, muses, nestles, and marvels, does not exist beyond or alienated from the conditions that shape and evoke him. If, generically, the voice inevitably emerges distinct from its surroundings, the content of the voice labors to assert its blending, its proximity, its status as an instrument of praise and wonderment. We read Clare and our eye follows his outward and darts around like the animals, birds, and “boys” that he describes. He helps us become darting registers of the world, animated by keen human love and interest. In a Clare poem the speaker joins an event in consciousness, for an instant of becoming. But after that moment the referent continues in its activity. The effect of reading many Clare poems is to discover the speaker as a star in a larger constellation of world elements: his function is, directly or indirectly, to praise. One day accross the fields I chanced to pass When chickens chelped & skuttled in the grass & as I looked about to find the seat A wounded partridge dropped agen my feet She fluttered round & calling as she lay

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The chickens chelpd & fluttered all away I stooped to pick her up when up she drew Her wounded wing & cackled as she flew I wondered much to hear the chickens lye As still as nothing till I wandered bye & soon she came agen with much ado & swept the grass & called them as she flew But still they kept their seat & left no trace & old cows snorted when they passed the place

The sonnet has a wonderful detail regarding the lyric subject: he’s about to sit down among the chickens when the wounded partridge drops next to him: he’s prevented from being a settled, situated subject. Everything from this point on is a swarm of chance or chaotic activity, and his neverseated mind and body enters the flow of this mild chaos: he wonders, he wanders. He doesn’t do anything else; indeed the natural impulse to help the bird evaporates as the wounded creature manages its own flight. He’s in the midst of and part of this “brownian motion” of animal life represented in the poem by the restless line-by-line shifting of reference among partridge, speaker, chickens, and cows. All the animals show supreme unconcern toward anything but their own endeavors. And the speaker, in spite of his “sympathy,” finally belongs among those other, healthy and wounded, wanderers. So, even though the poem is the image of the speaker’s voice, it doesn’t feature that voice; it is not about a lyric subject alienated from the world around him by the fullness of selfpresentation. Clare, instead, in John Ashbery’s words, makes “a distillation of the natural world with all its beauty and pointlessness, its salient and boring features preserved intact.20 In a fascinating poem, “The Eternity of Nature,” Clare associates the mobility and fluidity of the subject with a deeply modest view of poetic pretension. An excellent “manifesto” of anti-monumentalist poetics, this poem celebrates, by contrast, the eternity of nature: And the small bumble bee shall hum as long As nightingales for time protects the song And nature is their soul to whom all clings Of fair or beautiful in lasting things The little Robin in the quiet glen Hidden from fame and all the strife of men Sings unto time a pastoral and gives A music that lives on and ever lives Both spring and autumn years rich bloom and fade Longer than songs that poets ever made

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And think ye these times play things pass proud skill Time loves them like a child and ever will And so I worship them in bushy spots And sing with them when all else notice not And feel the music of their mirth agree With that sooth quiet that bestirreth me And if I touch aright that quiet tone That soothing truth that shadows forth their own Then many a year shall grow in after days And still find hearts to love my quiet lays Yet cheering mirth with thoughts sung not for fame But for the joy that with their utterance came. . . .

Traditionally time in poetry is associated with mutability, with our vanishing. Though Clare often situates himself in the pathway of loss, in this poem and, I would say, characteristically at his best and most unique, time is fecund and sustaining for the hidden music of the world. This view of time allows for a comic vision of the world whereas the lyric subject does not have to assert itself in the face of time’s winged chariot, in a sublime but tragic aristeia of self-representation. Instead the speaker is drawn into the “cheering mirth” of nature’s music in the way of worship and song. Rather than distinguishing his song from nature’s, he strives to supplement it; and success in that extension of nature into his own poems would in effect transpose those hidden songs into language and thought. And just as the poem is not a monument, and the speaker does not stand foregrounded in a permanent image, so also “fame” (for the late Romantic a code for the problem of too much ego and of the capitulation to government ideology) is replaced by the “joy” of the utterance. He is, again in Ashbery’s phrase, “above all an instrument of telling.”21 Understanding Romanticism through the lens of the Fancy allows us to reclaim for Romantic poetry the sense of a subject flowing into the world that it describes, celebrates, transforms—a sense precisely that of the Fancy; in Shelley’s phrase it is “love or a going out of one’s own nature.” Lyric poetry seems to work, from one point of view, with a relatively fixed energy pool that directs its attention to the subject or the referent; yet the lyric poem, as the genre of the other mind, represents the world-as-mind, the humanized world through not necessarily the world of a privileged ego. Even if the generalization has its exceptions, it is better, I believe, to assume that in the poetry of an “adversary culture,” as is that of the Romantic Period, the subject-in-poetry emerges as an interaction, as a flowing and dissolving into the world, as a waking up into a consciousness of the world that it is compelled to represent more urgently than itself. Thus, whereas one might be inclined to associate this attitude toward the subject more

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readily with the poetry of women (Barbauld, Robinson) and with the peasant class (Clare), it is possible to discover its presence and effect in any poet for whom the acknowledgment and the fate of the world matters and for whom in poetry his or her own fate lives only as a celebration of world in human, that is, thoughtful, terms.

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CHAPTER 3 CURSORY OBSERVATIONS ON POETRY AND CHEERFULNESS (with an excursion on rhyming tetrameter couplets)

It is characteristic criticism of Emerson to say that he lacks a sense of tragedy; for otherwise how can he seem so persistently to preach cheerfulness? But suppose that what Emerson perceives, when he speaks of his fellow citizens as existing in a state of secret melancholy, is that in a democracy, which depends upon a state of willingness to act for the common good, despair is a political emotion, discouraging both participation and patience. So when Emerson asks of the American Scholar that he and she raise and cheer us, he is asking for a step of political encouragement, one that assures us that we are not alone in our sense of compromise with justice, that our sense of an unattained self is not an escape from, it is rather an index of, our commitment to the unattained city, one within the one we sustain, one we know there is no good reason we perpetually fail to attain. Stanley Cavell1

I Perhaps ever since the Fall of Adam and Eve from Paradise into History, cheerfulness, as an emotion reflective of “the human condition,” has been considered more superficial, more temporary, and less fundamental than melancholy. At best, as when Anna exhorts her son, melancholy from exile in Siam, to “whistle a happy tune,” cheerfulness is a brave defense against the more basic condition. But Emerson demands cheerfulness of a true democracy, upgrading it to a civic emotion of the highest importance. It is in this spirit that cheerfulness can be called the affect of the Fancy. The title of this chapter comes from Leigh Hunt’s Preface to Foliage (1818). Certainly now, and probably then, the association of poetry and cheerfulness acts to trivialize the former, or at least to direct attention to what must be a narrow and peripheral precinct of the great art. Hunt

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means, however, to identify a fundamental principle of poetry, particularly necessary for the present time of the late Regency decade. Its intended generality and currency in the Romantic Period was brought home to me when recently I discovered another preface, to Phantasmagoria; or, Sketches of Life and Literature, poems by Maria Jewsbury (1825), entitled “Why Is the Spirit of Poetry Anti-Cheerful?” This faintly comical argument in late British Romanticism, about the relationship between an avowedly superficial yet praiseworthy emotion and poetry has its own not inconsequential history—before, during, and after Romanticism. In the preceding chapter I argued that Romantic poetry would be more accurately described not in terms of privileging the lyric subject except as it expresses an outgoing attentiveness—that is, a cheerful affect—toward the referent. Simply put, the anti-cheerful (or melancholic) often accompanies a poetry of the lyric subject; cheerfulness belongs to the poetry of the referent and of mind as a playful instrument—a poetry of the Fancy. The debate between Hunt and the poet Maria Jewsbury about whether poetry is cheerful or anti-cheerful thus becomes one facet in the larger debate about a poetry of Imagination or a poetry of Fancy; it becomes a debate between poetry as conservation and poetry as transformation, poetry as exclusion and poetry as inclusion, closed-form and open-form poetry. As the place of cheerfulness moves into more general concerns about poetry, it extends past the historical period of Romanticism and, indeed, becomes a topic of interest for twentieth-century thinkers and poets: at the end of this chapter I bring cheerfulness into the present with observations by Adorno, Yeats, and the American Language Poet Lyn Hejinian. By the same token, cheerfulness interested British poets from the Renaissance and the eighteenth century. Yet it is not surprising that Romanticism is where this affect, in relation to poetic production and vision, gets codified and seriously debated (as well as made manifest in poetry). Cheerfulness spreads into poetry as a playful, at times mocking, at times intensely lyric (nonnormative) current, a deliberate flaunting of the defensive sobriety of establishment ideologies—a perfect expression of the rebellious “spirit of the age” from the Della Cruscans and Mary Robinson (and at times even William Wordsworth) to Leigh Hunt, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. The presence of cheerfulness as the (implied) affect of experimental modernism and postmodernism from Gertrude Stein and Lorine Niedecker to The “New York School” including Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to Charles Bernstein, Tom Raworth, Anselm Hollo, and Lyn Hejinian (just to name a few) seems to me a direct recovery of the experimental and irreverent side of Romanticism, the side of the pointedly “superficial” and “immature,” the side that refuses the traditional assumption about poetic economy that sees “life” and “poetry” (the world of images)

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as mutually exclusive, associating poetic gain with the loss of living in the world: poetry as sacrifice and thereby occasioning melancholic affect. A poetry of cheerfulness, as Cavell observed of Emerson, risks denial of “tragic” elements, of death itself, which great poetry of the past has often approached with profundity. But the point is exactly that a poetry of cheerfulness (the Fancy) takes risks—in particular, can the potential gains of a visionary poetry of transformations and inclusiveness outstrip the denials inherent in cheerfulness? The dominant commercial culture of the United States, blanketing the worlds of entertainment, consumerism, and politics, is beset by what the Nicaraguan poet Daisy Zamora has called “obligatory optimism,” which she says blankets our republic of an “oppressed, sad people.” Cheerfulness must be distinguished from false, oppressive, mind-numbing positivities, which also include an excessive sentimentality that seeks to produce a collective harmony based on a denial of realities and differences. Finally, the poetry of the lyric subject—and even more the academic criticism and mainstream publishing that foreground it—have created a similar mental complacency and ideological complicity. Conscious of these resistances and sentimental predispositions toward a “heroic” poetry of personal “absolute” identities, the poetry of “cheerfulness” risks attempts to subvert the pieties of grief and elegy and conservation for an enactment in language of mental liberation and clearer acknowledgment of the world in all its contradictions. One must remember that cheerfulness, like the Fancy, and like fantasy itself, has as much “reality” as a legitimate product of mind as the more privileged melancholy: for poetry “comedy” is as real and legitimate a vision of life as “tragedy.” In this chapter, after discussing the specifically Romantic debate about cheerfulness and anti-cheerfulness, I turn to what I consider the cheerful verse-form of the Fancy, the rhymed tetrameter couplet, following its trajectory from pre-Romantic versions (e.g., Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, and others) into Romantic manifestations. Supporting the theory of the rhymed tetrameter couplet and following my discussion of it is a presentation of Leigh Hunt’s comments about “dithyrambic” poetry and Hunt’s other (very modern) cheerful poetic deformation experiments. Leigh Hunt—the “Cockney” purveyor of cheerfulness in his person, theory, and poetry— claims (in Foliage, 1818) that, in the spirit of the Fancy, cheerfulness belongs to (and perhaps helps to create) a combative tradition for poetry: it combats exclusivity and promotes inclusivity; it combats bigotry and promotes tolerance. It refers to a “love of sociality” as opposed to hierarchical cliquishness, groups existing to assert social and economic power. It is historically perceived as an actualization and restoration of a Golden Age communality. (In this sense Hunt and his urbane friends and “cheerfulness” enact, continue, and revise for the Regency Decade the Pantisocratic movement of the 1790s.)

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This characteristic outward-directedness results, for the poetry of the Fancy, in love of the Creation in its proliferative aspect. The mind “moving from perception to perception” takes cheerful delight in such movement, such quickness. (Interestingly, the tradition of critics who describe Keats as a fundamentally elegiac and tragic poet—for example, Bate, Sperry, Stillinger—call attention to instances of “massive” “stillness” in his poetry, such as the “Miltonic stationing,” moments of sublime inertness, of god and goddess in the tragic opening of Hyperion, whereas Keats is full of the movement of the cheerful Fancy.) Cheerfulness also is manifest in the moment of awakening—the song of the rising lark, a moment of lyric expansiveness of mind, an inflowing of sound, a revisioning of the world. It is the spirit of excess, of overflowing, of intoxication, of the breaking of boundaries and of transformations, of extending consciousness past the self and into the variety of the world. One could easily describe this as the essence of poetry: the mind waking up in and to the world anew, and finding it good. Detractors or skeptics may conflate or confuse this new alertness as the youthfulness of “immaturity” whereas it may be that poetry lives precisely at the borders of this morning harvest of perception. And if we consider that what precedes waking—the whiteness before the poem— is in fact the fullness (potentiality, intimacy) of sleep, then poetry simply exchanges one fullness for another, surely an occasion for “good cheer.” When, in 1825, she responded negatively to the Fancy-driven notion of poetry’s fundamental cheerfulness, the British poet Maria Jewsbury was defining poetry as the domain of the lyric subject: “Why Is the Spirit of Poetry Anti-Cheerful?”2 Her view, antithetical to Hunt’s and the whole countertradition of cheerfulness, helps to define the precinct of the latter. Cheerfulness for Jewsbury is curiously nonpoetic. An overflow of high animal spirits alone, do not constitute cheerfulness, because they are variable and evanescent, whilst cheerfulness, in its true sense, rests upon a more solid foundation. It may be defined as subdued mirth; as the union of contentedness and complacency; the medium between gaiety and gloom; the point at which the mind is no longer perpetually turning round on the pivot of circumstances, but resting on the centre of its own resources, acquires a settled stationary being; as the result of correct principles, active habits, and benevolent dispositions. The habitually cheerful man neither contemplates the world through the gloom of misanthropy, nor the bright haze of imagination; but, taking a calm and sober estimate of things as they really are, his mind is sufficiently broad for active usefulness without becoming too refined for sober enjoyments.

Interestingly, the very qualities she says are nonpoetic are essential to the Fancy. But for her the cheerful person is centered, not eccentric; domestic,

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not wandering; contained, not overflowing and excessive. His/her life ensures “active usefulness.” Jewsbury’s implicit praise of the cheerful life of Horatian proportions, resolute and independent but moderate in all things, means that to a degree, for her, the healthy life gets sacrificed by the submission to poetry with its melancholy acknowledgment of a life situated among images and on the horizon, the margin, of the familiar and the conventional. The poet has her own set of even more compelling (anti-cheerful) intensities: His emotions therefore are not only more vivid and intense, but more delicate than those of other men; he walks abroad, tremblingly alive to every impression of pain or pleasure, of beauty or deformity, of resemblance or difference; he views bright forms of beauty where others find an unpeopled solitude,—his soul is linked to the fair scenes of nature, and a withered leaf, a flower, a shadow, can exact over him a mighty and subduing influence; calling ugly the magic of association, things “to dream of—not to see”— early impressions, lost ideas, and shadowy recollections—all that has been described by a master spirit in his well known line, as—Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

The intensity and range of experiences absorbed by the Poet of the world and of the mind, of sensation, of dreams, of affect itself—in short, of the expanded world to which she is linked—the Poet finds more compelling than the life of ordinary consciousness. Later in the essay Jewsbury associates this version of the world with the Fall; her melancholy results from, presumably, a loss of innocent, or cheerful, attention from an Eden of relative unconcern. Moreover, the Fall consists of the move to Poetry as opposed to “action” in the world, which further “enervates. . .character.” Finally her increased sensitivity produces a Pascalian consciousness of contradiction: “ ‘he desires greatness and feels that he is degraded,—he aims at perfection, and cannot dismiss his infirmities,—he sees the image of truth, and embraces falsehood. . . .’ ” Jewsbury’s position is not uncommon for the “Romantic” artist like, for example, Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, except that she can rely on Christian salvation to remove her eventually from her melancholy. In terms of the history of poetics Jewsbury stands as one of many nay-sayers of the poetics of the Fancy. In her defense, it could be argued that for a woman poet writing in 1825, a clearing of the space for the lyric subject meant something different than it would for a man: the serious representation of the female voice—that is, one extended past the strictures of, say, domesticity, which can be defined as situated in the center of the middle-class domain—becomes a particularly precious poetic obligation. On the other hand, her contemporary poetic sisters, Felicia Hemans (see chapter 6) and Laetitia Landon seemed willing to cultivate a poetics of the Fancy.

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II During the Romantic Period, and particularly in the Regency Decade, the poetry of cheerfulness often appears in rhyming tetrameter couplets. In British and American poetry, the line of less than ten syllables often signifies perceptual transformation, the speaking voice not precisely partaking of social speech, and the domain not quite belonging to the ordinary social world. In short, the line less than ten is quintessential lyric. Rhyming couplets in a short line, moreover, are further removed from the ordinary world of social discourse. Before showing, with examples from English poetry, that rhyming tetrameter couplets have a well-defined set of attributes leaning toward the poetics of the Fancy, we need to look at handbooks of literary and poetic terms where one finds our couplet reduced to at best second-class status. Only the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics refers to its “distinguished” tradition from Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” to Coleridge’s Christabel, and even here the pentameter is the most important couplet. In Abram’s Glossary of Poetic Terms, the “heroic [pentameter] couplet” has its own entry, but the tetrameter couplet is hardly mentioned at all. John Hollander (Rhyme’s Reason) reinforces the predisposition to diminish the tetrameter couplet in importance and seriousness: Couplets can be of any length, And shorter size gives greater strength Sometimes—but sometimes, willy-nilly, Four-beat couplets sound quite silly.

Significantly he associates the tetrameter couplet with the “feminine” ending and triviality, and the relative shortness of the line is stronger, a curious notion that a line of poetry could, like a stick of wood, be cracked in two depending upon its length. But we don’t hear in Hollander what “strength” means: a possible (probable) explanation occurs in Paul Fussell’s classic Poetic Meter and Poetic Form: What happens when the octosyllabic couplet is expanded to the heroic is that adjectives and adverbs come flocking in. Thus the two sorts of couplets deal in very different textures: the texture of the octosyllabic couplet, regardless of who is writing in it, is likely to be lean and clean, spare and logical, a texture supremely appropriate to sarcasm or solid virile reasoning; the texture of the heroic couplet, with its abundant modifiers and qualification, is likely to be more shaded, subtle, and busy. (P. 138)

Fussell’s view of the tetrameter couplet could not differ more from that which I have observed. And Hollander combined with Fussell, though

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contradictory (“sarcasm or solid virile reasoning” versus “silly”) leave out the whole possibility of imaginative flight (the Fancy) and visionary construction. “Unheroic” (it has no epithet of its own!), the tetrameter couplet is shrunk to the level of the social domain, an area where serious poetry dwells only at its peril. Nor does this (collective) definition of the tetrameter versus pentameter couplet engage the issue of the lyric subject. The same voice may speak in both since the longer line is like a nest filling up with a “flock” of modifiers. That the visionary range and the intrasubjective range is different, that the commitment to an ideological given is stronger in the lengthier line, is not considered. And our term cheerfulness does not figure in their discussions—only, at best, silliness. No wonder the tetrameter couplet has remained, with a few exceptions, a minor presence in traditional poetries. One can summarize, by contrast, the characteristics of rhymed tetrameter couplet poetry as follows: the lyric subject speaks primarily from outside the domain of ordinary social speech. This allows for transformation of ordinary perception, occurs frequently, and is produced by juxtaposition of unrelated (or relatively unrelated) elements and by parataxis. The relative speed of movement vertically through the lines of the poem encourages a sense of cheer and at times erotic pleasure, which in turn encourages the pleasure of mental liveliness. Transformation often is projected beyond the borders of the poem into social life. Two indisputable sources for the poetry of rhymed tetrameter couplets in Romanticism are the Renaissance dramatic poetry of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer-Night’s Dream and The Tempest and Beaumont and Fletcher and Milton’s “L’Allegro” (and to a lesser extent “Il Penseroso”). (A third source, women’s poetry of the eighteenth century, is a fascinating but uncertain possibility, since it is unclear whether the Romantic poets read them.) In Shakespeare only the fairies—Oberon, Titania, and Puck— speak, or sing, in tetrameters. They live in and create a world of harmony and delight, and while categorically removed from the “real” world, they obviously shed a benign if playfully mysterious and confusing influence over it. The fairies who speak in rhyming tetrameters perform playfully grotesque and gothic transformations on the main characters, a set of comic “defamiliarizations” and combinations that eventually result in marriage and friendship, including that of the players with the audience. Puck concludes the play (as does Prospero at the end of The Tempest) with a cheerful gesture of friendship that links tetrameters to the “sociality” of the community valued by the Hunt circle, as a restoration of inevitable brokenness: Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends.

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Furthermore, the sprite Ariel in The Tempest, important in Shelley’s late poems to Jane Williams, links his tetrameter songs to transformation and restoration: Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

And in his final song, he installs himself as a muse-like daemon of cheer in nature. Notice how the final tetrameters swell like honey in the comb, the possible excess of accentual meter: Where the bee sucks, there suck I, In a cowslip’s bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat’s back I do fly After summer merrily. Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Ariel anticipates Blake’s piper, who, in tetrameters, “piped with merry chear.” Andrew Marvell’s mid-seventeenth-century rhymed tetrameter couplets (among the best in English poetry) calmly affirm the otherness of the lyric voice, linking it to cheerfulness and to holiness. Even “Bermudas,” a narrative of travelers on the sea, situates the voice within a lyrical, nonnarrative transformed vision: Where the remote Bermudas ride In th’ ocean’s bosom unespied, From a small boat that rowed along, The list’ning winds received this song: . . .

The poem frames the song not only with distance and the unknown and unexplored but says that its audience is not social human beings but wind, as if its lineage were primarily Orphic. This song is apparently inspired by a political vision: . . .through the wat’ry maze Unto an isle so long unknown, And yet far kinder than our own. . . . Thus sang they in the English boat An holy and a cheerful note;

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And all the way, to guide their chime, With falling oars they kept the time.

This corresponds to the perfect fit of the rhyming couplet and the closure that each couplet makes. “English,” they nonetheless sing from another domain, a song “holy and cheerful.” Another Renaissance poem popular during the Regency years, both for its theme of cheerfulness and for its tetrameters couplets, was Milton’s “L’Allegro,” “the cheerful one.” Along with its companion “Il Penseroso,” the two poems compose a set of (Blakean) contraries about affect and deportment and equally about poetics. Yet behind the distinction associated with cheer and melancholy lies at least one commonality, which is cheer itself. Hunt once identified “Il Penseroso” with “a cheerful contemplativeness and a willingness to enjoy the sight of animal spirits in others” (p. 547), an observation that, except for the word “contemplativeness,” could apply equally to “L’Allegro.” Cheer animates both poems, or—in a Blakean sense—the spirit of contraries, and thus is the more fundamental condition of a poetry of the Fancy, a visionary poetry of transformation. It is hard to imagine a more inspiring influence on Romantic poetry of the Fancy than this great Renaissance lyric of cheerfulness; practically a manifesto of lyric visionary poetics, “L’Allegro” features two winged creatures of awakening, the lark and the cock, notable to those who live “In unreproved pleasures free”: To hear the lark begin his flight, And, singing, startle the dull night, From his watch-tower in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise; Then to come, in spite of sorrow, And at my window bid good-morrow, Through the sweet-briar or the vine, Or the twisted eglantine; While the cock, with lively din, Scatters the rear of darkness thin; . . .

This is a domain in which singing startles and a lively din scatters dullness. Light and new sight, under the influence of cheerful song, proliferate, extend, amplify, and above all link sounds and sights. The rich paradox of visionary lyric dwells in the way that explosive, dispersive experience uncovers, or produces in the poem, a set of correspondences, linkages, relations. Of the pair of contraries “Il Penseroso” has always been preferred. The reasons comprise a litany of closed poetics: the focus on the lyric subject,

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contemplation and watchfulness, ecstasy, emphasis on the otherworldly and cosmic, solitude and seriousness, death and tragedy. These seem more in keeping with the “high” style and intention of British and American poetry; indeed, it’s easy to make the leap from “Il Penseroso” to Milton’s great elegy “Lycidas” and then to the greatest of all elegies his Paradise Lost. “L’Allegro,” by contrast, deserves the judgment given it by “Il Penseroso”: “fancy fond” (foolish). This poem-of-cheer seems superficial, almost brittle or constrained, ceremonial. Where is scope and the “depth,” the fate of the individual, the sorrow that we associate with great lyric? Where is the speaker crying out for fulfillment of desire? for completeness? None of this is in “L’Allegro.” A poetry of the lyric subject typically enacts the subject’s own uniqueness, at once poetry’s glory to embody, but also its alienation from the world: tragedy is part of the poetic bloom. But there is also a crucial impulse in poetry to locate the human subject within larger correspondences of the world and cosmos or within a larger chaos. Thus in “L’Allegro” the speaker acknowledges his presence in the poem not as a figure of need and longing or even of primary interest but as a sheer primary phenomenon that registers the sights and sounds around him. Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures, Whilst the landscape round it measures,. . .

The twentieth century (surrealism and after), with a few nineteenthcentury “forerunners,” makes the tremendous discovery for modern poetry that cosmic harmony, supported by “cheerfulness,” can embrace the most dramatic juxtapositions of difference and dissonance and even death and loss. Poetry’s vision, of a variety and multiplicity that represents the very nature of the Creation, asserts harmony primarily at the level of correspondences or “constellations.” Mark Akenside’s “Hymn to Cheerfulness,” published in the 1740s, shows the characteristic slide into harmony as aesthetic and consoling, so that poetry becomes a balm against eating cares. The difference between Milton and Akenside, the latter’s rhyming tetrameters clearly modeled on Milton’s, appears in the former’s well-documented metrical “irregularities” and variations, whereas Akenside’s meter is regular and fully predictable—what Hunt would later call “smooth” but not “sweet,” boring and not stimulating. Such regularity works as a fantasy of consolation, or, in the language of John Guillory and Jon Mee respectively, “complacence” and “regulation.” One wonders whether Akenside (and other poets in the eighteenth century) is consciously misusing the visionary potential of the rhymed tetrameter couplet. At the same time that Akenside defines Cheerfulness, and poetry, as consolation, he gives signs of an openness to the larger, more capacious and

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vigorous poetics. It is seen in small ways, such as his appropriation of vernal, quickening, imagery, with adjectives such as “radiant,” “blooming,” and “enliven’d.” And he suggests a poetic progress in which “melancholy” is associated with late and lesser poetry: Let Melancholy’s plaintive tongue Repeat what later bards have sung; But thine [Cheerfulness] was Homer’s ancient might, And thine victorious Pindar’s might, Thy hand each Lesbian wreath attir’d: Thy lip Sicilian reeds inspir’d: Thy spirit lent the glad perfume Whence yet from Tibur’s [sic] Sabine vale Delicious blows the enlivening gale, While Horace calls thy sportive choir, Heroes and nymphs, around his lyre.

The history of the great poetry—epic but mostly lyric—of the West is to Akenside the triumph of Cheerfulness as the presiding muse. Thus he associates great poetry with the spirit of animation, the quickening power of expansiveness and transformation. It is interesting and impressive to find Horace, Akenside’s own primary classical influence, amidst this lineage coming down to the present (mid-eighteenth-century) day. Akenside seems a poet torn by opposing poetics. Less conflicted about the poetry of the Fancy than Akenside is his contemporary John Dyer, whose poetry seems unequivocally committed to the play of mind. The mind in its activity takes off on a walk in John Dyer’s 1726 poems “Grongar Hill” and “The Country Walk,” an enactment in the world of mental vision. The poems step through states of mind as they step through scenes in the world, observing both along the way: the mind observing itself as part of what extends beyond it. Examples of the prospect- or hill-poem, Dyer’s pieces mix the transcendental quality of the rhyming tetrameter couplet, closed but signifying the stillness of the perspectival eye, with the couplet as the unit within the infinite sequence of such units; here the eye dwells and roves in the imminence of the world. Thus the lyric subject serves in part as an observer of the referent. At the same time the poem does not engage the world precisely in the social scale (e.g., as it does in the blank verse “Tintern Abbey”): I am resolv’d, this charming day, In the open field to stray; And have no roof above my head, But that whereon the gods do tread.

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A cosmic perspective worthy of Thomas Traherne, this frames the poem of proliferation and eternal renewal: Before the yellow barn I see A beautiful variety. . . Through spreading beds of blooming green, Matted with herbage sweet and clean, A vein of water limps along, And makes them ever green and young.

Here, as in so many eighteenth-century meditative poems, nature allows wandering thought a respite from “care,” and, by implication, so does poetry. The rhyming tetrameter couplet transcends only in the sense of avoiding the world of cares: it is a reduction. Dyer writes, as Marvell does not, for consolation. “Repose” does not, as in Marvell, open out to a fuller, more conclusive reality. On the other hand, it literally opens onto the world itself, in this poem very conventional and artificial. No poetry of the early Romantic period seems more designed to confirm tradition’s prejudices toward the Fancy than the “artificial,” light, frothy rhyming tetrameter couplet dialogues of Della Crusca (Merry) and Anna Matilda (Mrs. Hannah Cowley). The dialogue of seduction and resistance hardly holds the imagination of one nurtured on the wit and profundity of their distant predecessor in form and theme “To His Coy Mistress.” But Jerome McGann (The Poetics of Sensibility) has shown that a certain mental eroticism, Blakean in kind, actually drives the playful sexual teasing in the Della Cruscan poems, in a sense a skimming off of the seductive playfulness of Marvell’s carpe diem classic. The great poetic principle of the carpe diem tradition is the stalling of the perceived rapid passage of life into death through erotic love; Marvell’s couplets keep “running,” but the effort to deflect time’s intransigence appears heroic, requires and receives brilliant verbal wit, and is seductive. With the Della Cruscans no such urgency makes itself felt, in spite of words such as “rapid,” “light’ning,” and “ardor.” One looks at this game of words—play of seduction, play of mind, play of language and quotation or commonplace—to ask what is at stake. “The Adieu and Recall to Love” (Merry, 1787) is an address to Cupid, first asking his departure, then regretting it, and finally calling him back.3 The absence of Love, he discovers, gives him little that is interesting to do, particularly wandering in the domain that Love requires: No more with devious step I choose To brush the mountain’s morning dews; To drink the spirit of the breeze, Or wander midst o’er-arching trees;. . .

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Obviously these lines do not indicate a love of nature, but rather a love of a certain constellation of cultural images, a set of cultural and literary props: Love stimulates literature; and its absence precipitates a “frozen apathy” and “A sad vacuity of mind.” The presence of the god of Love stimulates mental activity, the opposite of vacuity. The poetic dialogue between Merry and Cowley is about the recovery or simply the promoting of the Fancy as the desired faculty of poetry. Probably throughout literary history poets from time to time feel compelled to write about the driving force, the quickening power of mind, that visionary poetry requires. “To Della Crusca. The Pen” recalls William Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character,” which bemoans the loss of Fancy to contemporary poets. If in Collins the Fancy is associated with a girdle of chastity, here it is linked to the sexual energy and potency of the pen of poetry: the pen that (genealogically): . . .fell from Cupid’s burnish’d wing As forcefully he drew the string; Which sent his keenest, surest dart Thro’ a rebellious frozen heart; That had till then defy’d his pow’r, And vacant beat thro’ each dull hour.

Whereas Della Crusca openly tries to seduce Anna Matilda with poems, she responds by unpacking the relationship between the erotic nature of poetry and love itself. The images of frozenness and dullness, which Love poetry attacks partly through the mind, anticipates by only a few years Blake’s Urizenic tyrants that freeze and dull the mind against love, social critique, and a renovative imagination—against repression of the mind. Here the rhyming tetrameter couplet comes to us hot. The poem continues and concludes: Be worthy then the sacred loan! Seated on Fancy’s air-built throne; Immerse it in her rainbow hues, Nor, what the Godheads bid, refuse. APOLLO, CUPID shall inspire, And aid thee with their blended fire. The one, poetic language give, The other bid thy passion live; With soft ideas fill thy lays, And crown with LOVE thy wintry days!

This strangely superficial poetry works like a manifesto to argue the unfreezing of the mind in a repressive era, the Fancy being the site of this

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act. The sexual immersion of Cupid’s pen in Fancy’s rainbow hues corresponds to the blending of Apollo’s and Cupid’s influence. (See the Bacchus-like Apollo in Hunt and Keats.) The stanza ends with an emphasis on the phrase, “soft ideas” (three syllables for “ideas”), the sensuousness of thought as an expanded version of it. Cowley’s “Ode to Della Crusca” (1788) ascribes to his “light’ning Pen” the capacities for a Fancy-poetics of impermeability, or the superficial, rather than depth, which includes the virtue of visionary expansiveness. She accomplishes this visually at the end of the poem with lines that break the fetters of octosyllabics: Nor is thy gift “dull torpid ease,” The Mind’s quick powers that dost not freeze: No! Blest by Thee, the soul expands, And darts o’er new-created lands; Springs from the confines of the earth To where new systems struggle into birth; The germ of future Worlds beholds, The secrets of dark space unfolds; Can watch how far th’ ERRATIC runs, And gaze on DELLA CRUSCA’s Suns; In some new Orb can meet, “his starry mail,” And him, on earth unknown, in Heaven with transport hail.

Earlier I observed, speaking of Shakespeare and then Marvell (“Bermudas”), that the rhymed tetrameter couplet registers a domain shift from ordinary consciousness and at times bespeaks transcendence. In Romanticism, however, as McGann argues about Della Cruscan poetry, transcendence does not mean elevation above our world or journeying beyond it: transcendence, in a feature also central to Blake’s poetry and poetics, is a visionary apprehension of the present world. This leads to a particular apprehension in Blake, Robinson, and Keats—the embracing of seeming incompatibilities in one line or one couplet (anticipating the surrealist “combination”). In Blake’s Auguries of Innocence this occurs between the two lines of the couplet establishing an effectual or causal moral as well as physical relationship: A Robin Red breast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage. . . A Skylark wounded in the wing A Cherubim does cease to sing.

The principle is later stated more openly: It is right it should be so Man was made for Joy & Woe

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And when this we rightly know Thro the World we safely go Joy & Woe are woven fine A Clothing for the Soul divine. . .

Auguries of Innocence performs a wisdom poetry of visionary transformation, which it accomplishes through combinations. At the same time, rejecting as foolishness the moral generality—“one law for the lion and the ox”—the poem proliferates many “laws,” or truths that apply to one creature. The rhyming tetrameter couplet supports all of these functions. The visionary dimension of the couplet appears in Mary Robinson’s “The Camp” as sets of correspondences showing a society of infinitely various elements. The couplet at once highlights difference and, vertically, proliferates it. Here are the beginning and the ending: Tents, marquees, and baggage-waggons; Suttling-houses, beer in flagons; Drums and trumpets, singing, firing; Girls seducing, beaux admiring; . . . Washerwomen, fruit-girls cheerful, Ancient ladies—chaste and fearful!! Tradesmen, leaving shops, and seeming More of war than profit dreaming; Martial sounds and braying asses, Noise, that ev’ry noise surpasses! All confusion, din, and riot, Nothing clean—and nothing quiet.

The trochaic foot, repeated for an entire poem, calls attention to the final unaccented syllable that rather than giving finality to the end of the line moves it forward to the next, encouraging the sense of correspondent linkages; the falling meter may also underscore the poem’s leveling of hierarchies as part of its vision (see her poem “January 1795”). Included, presumably, in the noise and confusion is her own poem; but the laying out of sights and sounds changes confusion into relationships, a swirl of detail becomes a constellation. Keats’s “Welcome Joy, and Welcome Sorrow” complicates the effect of the rhymed tetrameter couplet as the verse form of cheerfulness because of the thematic presence of “sorrow” and melancholy. What happens when a cheerful form comes up against a melancholic theme? The poem begins with a mixture of abab rhymes and couplets, perhaps to give the impression of the mixing up of opposites, and then settles into rhyming couplets that capture both the pleasure and the reality of odd juxtapositions, the acknowledgment

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of which is one important calling of the poet: Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow, Lethe’s weed, and Hermes’ feather, Come to-day, and come to-morrow, I do love you both together! I love to mark sad faces in fair weather— And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder; Fair and foul I love together; . . .

Not a wisdom poem, this simply associates pleasure with such juxtapositions. A gently erotic temperature heating the mixture recalls the spirit of the rhyming tetrameter couplet from Shakespeare (notable here) and Marvell on, including the recent Della Cruscans. At poem’s close the rhyming opposites and disparates take on a peculiarly personal intensity, and one feels that Keats’s self-proclaimed “morbidity of temperament” colors the game of opposites, or maybe it is his own infection with cultural predispositions: Laugh and sigh, and laugh again, Oh! The sweetness of the pain! Muses bright and Muses pale, Bare your faces of the veil, Let me see, and let me write Of the day, and of the night, Both together,—let me slake All my thirst for sweet heart-ache! Let my bower be of yew, Interwreath’d with myrtles new, Pines, and lime-trees full in bloom, And my couch a low grass tomb.

The cheerfulness of the form and the tradition catches him up a bit when the juxtapositions turn to affect and to himself: the form basically faces outward; the “I” should be, a la Rimbaud, the “Other,” which becomes difficult to maintain even with his final rhyming opposites that suggest both closure and aperture, ending and beginning, monumentality and fecundity: yew, new, bloom, tomb. In a traditional reading of the poem, the cheerfulness implied in juxtapositions and in the rhymed tetrameter couplet vanishes, is defeated by, the closing thematics. But reading according to the (visionary) Fancy, one evaluates the thematics and the form as itself comprising a juxtaposition: the form of cheerfulness redistributes the theme of melancholy along the axis of cheerfulness. Little criticism of Shelley’s “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills” has emerged, according to Donald Reiman, because tetrameter couplets

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are not associated with Shelley and make the poem “peripheral”4—an argument that could apply as well to Keats but, as we shall see, for different reasons because of a different content. This poem diverges substantially from others studied so far although it observes the most significant feature of the form—its placement out of the domain of ordinary consciousness. But the realm is not magical (like Shakespeare or Coleridge), nor is it overtly literary (like Milton). It places the lyric subject within a real geography (the plains of Lombardy in northern Italy) and within both real historical time and the time of day. This last associates it with the hill poems of Dyer and Wordsworth’s early pedestrian (not tetrameter) poems (An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches). As the sun travels through the day, so the poem travels from poem’s opening to poem’s close: but the speaker reflects on the fate of Italian cities—Venice and Padua—under tyranny. As the eye focuses descriptively on the present with intensity, so the instances of tyranny past and present drive the lyric intensity of the poem and its metaphors. The opening metaphor, returning twice later in the poem, meditates not only on the human need for sites of consolation but also (implicitly) on the requirements for this poem: Many a green isle needs must be In the deep, wide sea of Misery, Or the mariner, worn and wan, Never thus could voyage on— . . .

By the end, the reader has experienced the poem as one of these green isles except that the mind in its visionary as well as critical capacity has been stimulated and roused amidst utopian constructions of the beautiful. This wedding of apparent opposites (for Shelley the beautiful surfaces with the stimulation of mind) leads to a form, and a metaphor for the form, that eschews the monumental and the relentlessly subjective: the tetrameter couplets pour forth in a “swift stream of song.” The speaker participates in this flow; the tetrameter couplets register it through their own shiftings: enjambments and caesurae, half-rhymes, rhyming triplets, hepta- and octosyllabic lines, and feminine endings. Through these variations the voice itself becomes “free” in spite of, in relation to, borders, streamy, and quick—the enjambments act like rocks in the stream-bed over which the water speeds up, and thus the voice becomes less inscripted and alienated and sinks into that voice-of-waters from which much poetry springs. Description, reflection, wisdom join the flow like detritus from the banks that the stream draws into its current. Around the time that Shelley wrote “Euganean Hills” (1818), Ugo Foscolo, living and writing in England, revised and published the final

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version of his superb novel of l’amour passion and the Fancy Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis, which tells of a Werther-like suicide of an Italian progressive in exile on account of the whimsical Austrian control over northern Italy and the consequent repression of dissidents. This novel, like Shelley’s poem, takes place largely in the Euganean Hills and mourns the failures of Venice and Padua, but—like Werther—it views social, political, and personal life from a growing alienation amidst a conviction about the need for love and compassion in a world set against him. Shelley’s poem may be that novel’s antiphonal voice—instead of an alienated consciousness (and Shelley was certainly capable of it), the poem promotes a richly imaginative consciousness of connection, linkage, and correspondence. The stream of the poem places even Venice and Padua (with its closed seat of learning, its university) amidst the larger vision. In fact, commitment to the rapid flow of verse allows the vision of transformed humanity to catch up, as it were, to the acknowledgment of social tragedies and failures. The vision dissolves the stalemate of Jacopo Ortis’s alienation with the “interpenetration” of all parts of the universe, animated by love, a “healing Paradise.” The poem ends: . . .each breathless interval In their whisperings musical The inspired soul supplies With its own deep melodies, And the love which heals all strife Circling, like the breath of life, All things in that sweet abode With its own mild brotherhood: They, not it, would change; and soon Every sprite beneath the moon Would repent its envy vain, And the earth grow young again.

In his final vision of a healing Paradise for himself and his friends, the speaker says: “And we may live so happy there . . .” Happiness in this poem may be the utopian transformation of cheerfulness, the culminating possibilities and awarenesses latent in Hunt’s term of cheerful communality, “sociality.” Written the same year as the publication of Foliage, “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills” may be Shelley’s rhymed tetrameter couplet contribution to Huntian poetics. To conclude this discussion with an anticipation of modern experimental poetics, is it mere coincidence that rhyming tetrameter couplets occasion Coleridge’s path-breaking “heave” in modern metrics and verse when he announces in the Preface to Christabel (1816) the switch from accentualsyllabic to accentual meter? Though the syllables “may vary from seven to

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twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless, this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion.”5 The introduction of accentual meter within this verse form suggests a turbulence within the lyric vision. Instead of excess announced by means of enjambments and caesurae, by the long line horizontally or by the long vertical stretch of the poem and by parataxis, it bends only from within, introduces a fold or crease where there was once a planar surface. III. Reading Leigh Hunt’s essays and notes on poetry draws one into the world of the casual, transient, even ephemeral world of journalistic cheerfulness, but his 1854 essay “On Poems of Joyous Impulse”6 opens a window onto a class of poems, Dithyrambics, that has consequences for a counterpoetics of the Fancy. He defines Dithyrambics as “effusions of the most impulsive and enthusiastic description, full of new compound words and excessive expressions, the result, or supposed result, of an intoxication of the spirits. They were originally, and for the most part continued to be, Bacchanalian poems; but as love can intoxicate as well as wine, they came by degrees to sing of love, and so of any other feeling, in which enthusiasm predominated.” Immediately Hunt observes that almost all of these ancient poems have been lost: “they would almost seem to have been stifled on purpose by those half-witted literati of the monasteries . . .” unable to “enjoy, and praise the enjoyment of the ‘good things’ which Heaven has been pleased to give us.” Hunt turns to recent Italian poetry as a beacon for verse not caught in the censor’s gaze. Much of the essay bemoans the “dearth of national [English] dithyrambic,” quoting the few choice morsels from Spenser to the present. He includes a poem by Coleridge called “The Visit of the Gods,” an imitation of a “small dithyrambic poem from Schiller” and published in 1817 (Sibylene Leaves). Hunt says of it, “the effusion is truly poetical” and “has Coleridge’s beautiful music.” It may be the reason that Hunt calls Coleridge the “inner priest” of English Romanticism (1818). Here is the final third of the poem (as quoted by Hunt): O give me the Nectar! O fill me the Bowl!— Give him the Nectar! Pour out for the Poet, Hebe! pour free! Quicken his eyes with celestial dew, That Styx the detested no more he may view,

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And like one of us Gods may conceit him to be! Thanks, Hebe! I quaff it! Io Paean, I cry! The wine of the Immortals Forbids me to die.

Hunt’s poetics of cheerfulness, scattered throughout his essays and poems, begins to emerge as a counter-poetics of the Romantic Period. In “On Poems of Joyous Impulse,” he speaks of “effusions of the most impulsive and enthusiastic description.” He values effusions, or flowings-out, driven by enthusiasm, impulse, and joy (cheerfulness). He says that the ancient dithyrambics “did not know where to stop”; the same can be said of the rhyming tetrameters in the “L’Allegro” tradition: this is a poetry of boundlessness, of excess. Cheer and intoxication often produce this overflow, which in turn announces the poetry of the morning, the song of the lark and new wakefulness, and of “sociality.” It is easy to miss the experimental impulse in Hunt’s poetics, perhaps most evident in his proto-prose poems, but they are here in his account of “dithyrambical ventures” composed of “irregular metres and compound words.” This impulse appears further in a cheery essay called “Rhyme and Reason; Or, a New Proposal to the Public Respecting Poetry in Ordinary.” Published not long after Foliage in The Indicator,7 this piece defines a type of poem consisting only of end-rhymes, the opposite of a poetic line that assumes a “natural” (i.e., conventional) syntax and speech. It looks like a bit of playful nonsense, authorized by some frothy Italian poems with one word per line: O cielo Dal gielo Tradire Languire

Morire Soffrire Non puo.

These single-words, “which are at once line and rhyme,” are “abrupt and saltatory,” attributes that English poets “do not naturally take to,” another occasion for importing Italian poetics into English. The compression of line and rhyme into one, the line as the progress of the imago vocis toward its completion and what Hunt calls “very sufficing terminations” annihilates the “depth” usually granted the lyric subject, indeed it annihilates the lyric subject, to replace it with a “surface” of metonymic notations: “If they are brief as the love of which they complain, are they not pregnant in conclusions, full of a world of things that have passed, infinitely retrospective, embracing, and enough?” If not “vast” are they not “voluminous”? On the one hand this recalls Blake’s visionary dictum: to see the world in a grain of sand; on the other, “It comprehends all the possible commonplaces in vogue. . . .” So, a poem becomes a metonymic constellation composed of

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commonplaces. It also, in a gesture toward experimental poetics, becomes what we might call a deformation, implying the existence of a “straight” poem presently deformed:

Grove, Night, Rove, Delight.

A Love Song Heart, Prove, Impart, Love.

Kiss, Blest, Bliss, Rest.

Such poems propose poetry as a set of codes that resists the possibility of the “absorptive.” They coalesce as correspondences that refuse the power of the signified for the play of the signifier. Such thinking could imply the essence of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” also made up of a tissue of cliches or quotations. The poem becomes a playfulness. At the same time it refuses the focus on the original and on the lyric subject. All is, and alludes to, quotation and commonplace. Cheerfulness, in sum, has become a condition for poetic experiment. IV Concern for a poetics of cheerfulness hardly concludes with Hunt’s casual forays; the twentieth century takes up the issue amidst a decidedly un-cheerful epoch. It seems important to take some modern engagements with it into account in order both to authorize the previous discussion and to characterize the significance in the history of poetics. In an essay written just two years before his death, “Is Art Lighthearted?” (1967),8 Theodor Adorno asks if the cheerful (“heiter”) in art does anything more than succumb to the bourgeois demands of the culture industry to establish a place for leisure and relief (art), a way of turning a blind eye to the uncomfortable fact of class inequality: “Life is serious, art is lighthearted” (“Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst”), says Schiller. But Adorno recasts the lighthearted, or the cheerful in Schiller, in a way that gives it a very particularized place and dignity in art. His comments reinforce my view of the history and analysis of cheerfulness and the mobility of mind in Romantic poetry. Art is appropriately cheerful (a translation of “heiter”) not in its contents but in “its demeanor, the abstract fact that it is art at all, that it opens out over the reality to whose violence it bears witness at the same time.” Through cheerfulness, “a priori, prior to its works art is a critique of the brute seriousness that reality imposes upon human beings. Art imagines that by naming this fateful state of affairs it is loosening its hold. That is what is lighthearted in it; as a change in the existing mode of consciousness,

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that is also, to be sure, its seriousness.” Thus, in true art lies a fundamental contradiction between the affect of free play of mind and the subject matter, which is loss of freedom or the fettered imagination. Adorno does not associate cheerfulness in art’s “demeanor” with high (German) Romantic irony; indeed he sees cheerfulness as an instance of the mind’s “having escaped the constraints of self-preservation.” Auschwitz, however, is why, for Adorno, “Art can no longer equate the expression of mourning with what is most joyful.” The fact of genocide as the precursor to contemporary art, destroying the human scale of death and evil, annuls the capacity for lightheartedness, or free play of the mind in the presence of reality. And yet the history of art since 1945 demonstrates clearly that lightheartedness, cheerfulness still, in Adorno’s sense, and in spite of his deserved pessimism, feeds the minds of “serious” artists and poets. Adorno’s association of lightheartedness to Kant’s “purposiveness without purpose” invites a consideration of the transformative potential within Kant’s vision. Robert Kaufman’s previously cited recent studies of Kant’s appeal to Adorno have revealed this aesthetic impulse in Kant linked to his vision of world peace—in other words, the play and pleasure associated with purposiveness without purpose is not (as it may be in Schiller) leading nowhere but instead imagines an outcome in a changed social reality. This would come about (as readers of Romanticism have claimed for years but perhaps not strongly enough in recent times) through a recontextualizing of “brute reality,” a new “constructivism” (Adorno) in art. But for Adorno, the crisis with lightheartedness and art lies in art’s resistance to or lapsing into kitsch: “the criterion of kitsch whether an art product gives form to consciousness of Contradiction—even if it does so by stressing its opposition to reality—or dissembles it.” And here we have found a way of evaluating and understanding the poetry of cheerfulness. Adorno’s cautionary dictum about lightheartedness, that it operate on the general, the generic scale of the fact of art and not in art’s content refers, I believe, to the broad highway—overwhelming in modern society—to kitsch. For if lightheartedness becomes the content of art, the expression of the contradiction in art between free play of mind and the subject matter of reality—forms of overwhelming constraint—will vanish, making the art product the perfect vehicle for consumer culture. The rhyming tetrameter couplet, for example, stands on the precipice of kitsch. Shelley’s poems (particularly “Euganean Hills” and The Sensitive Plant) avoid becoming kitsch because their thematic concerns are not themselves pointedly cheerful: one observes instead “cheerfulness” as free play of mind, as formal/ thematic juxtaposition. They are to me the supreme instance in Romantic poetry in which the free play of mind “constructs” instances of brute reality in a way that dramatizes the presence of the latter within the (contradictory)

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purview of the former: hope is a thoroughly legitimate issue in the mind of the reader, of these poems. No poem fulfills this promise more than the rhymed tetrameter couplets of The Mask of Anarchy, his great work on the catastrophic response of tyranny to the needs of the people. The case of Leigh Hunt is harder to assess. His “lighthearted” personality may have swamped his sense of the (Adornian) poet’s greater calling, so that his purposiveness without purpose may have faltered before the larger vision of world peace; he may be the sacrifice of lightheartedness to bourgeois culture. This seems to be Dickens’s unsparing critique of Hunt in Bleak House: the “dissembling” of lightheartedness reinforces and can produce suffering in the inequitous world of consumer culture. At the same time, it is worth noting that in Hard Times, written during the same period as Bleak House, “the Fancy”—asserting itself over and against the heartless destructiveness to human beings living in a relentlessly aggressive bourgeois capitalist society—is the hero of the book. Hunt deserves a more generous reading—if not in his personality and biography, then in his own poetry and his essays and manifestoes. They need to be read carefully in terms of context, the efforts to revive the quickening power of poetry and to promote it, in the burgeoning world of the magazines. It is tempting to think that from the 1820s on Hunt crossed the line into kitsch as Adorno defines it, and that the earlier Hunt of The Feast of the Poets, Foliage, and so on caught what has continued to live in more recent experimental poetic movements. But the minimalist poetics and deformation of the late Hunt and his publication of The Mask of Anarchy, to take two examples, belie this view. The same vulnerability resides in the idea of the Fancy and the poetry of the Fancy. The Fancy does become trivial when it dissembles lightheartedness as a vision of reality. And its detractors have wasted no time in pointing this out. But their critique is misplaced when they deny to the Fancy its transformative potential and its engagement with reality. A poetry without the Fancy in its nobler form is dead; and a readership that refuses it accepts inertness of mind. One way to accept the lightheartedness of poetry is to label it naive (in Schiller’s sense), belonging to a Golden Age, or creating one and then walking into it; you can look upon this world with envy, with nostalgia, and a sure sense that a poet who constructs and acts out of a kind of innocence has achieved a completeness and perfection but one that accepts a limited apprehension of the world. Yeats, in his essay about William Morris, “The Happiest of the Poets,”9 defines Morris as a happy archaism, an idealized artisan, one who loves his labor, forgets his and the world’s pains and sorrows. He is happily situated and, says Yeats, would like to live in one of the houses he imagines and then builds. “. . . to be happy,” says

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Yeats, “one must delight like Nature in mere profusion, in mere abundance, in making and doing things.” Morris “has but one story to tell us, how some man or woman lost and found again the happiness that is always half of the body; and even when they are wandering from it, leaves must fall over them, and flowers make fragrances for them.” Happiness is a function of feeling connected to the body and to the earth, a situatedness. This, however, produces problems for art. “His poetry often wearies us as the unbroken green of July wearies us, for there is something in us, some bitterness because of the Fall, it may be, that takes a little from the sweetness of Eve’s apple after the first mouthful.” The happiness, for Yeats however, resides first in the poet and next in the poem, whereas for Adorno Heiterkeit is a function of the mind in the poem. By the time Morris’s happiness has entered his poems, it is no longer (if it ever was) a principle of energy and transformation, but has entered the content, the thematics, of the poetry and thus vanquished the juxtaposition, the excesses that typically register a (“cheerful”) mind acknowledging the contradictoriness in reality and the independent onrush of thought. The “demeanor” of a mind free in relation to reality not only is characteristic of Romantic poetry of the Fancy but also enters the domain of syntax and language in much twentieth-century experimental poetry, thus allowing the affect from the poet and from the lyric subject to “scatter” and seed itself nutritively in the very furrows of the poetic line. Happily, the brilliant essay-in-poetry by Lyn Hejinian,10 cheerfully explores the possibility that, whereas not monumental and thus not giving up on the identification between poetry and life, she does not deny brute reality but—as the blurb on the back cover says—“maintains a sublime ambivalence towards the strictures of death and decision.” “Happily,” the adverb, must modify the unstated verb “to create,” as in the creating that God did. . .and saw that it was good. God’s pleasure in this is of interest only insofar as it establishes value in the appearance of the object and thus in the object itself. The poet, according to Hejinian, however, does not create out of nothing but creates in the sense of acknowledging an encounter with an other, a chance happening. “Happily” and “happening” both come from “hap”— fortuitousness or chance. “Happy” refers to good luck at that which has happened, or come to pass, indeed to the point that “happy” can mean “blessed,” drawn out of the ordinary in pleasure. One thinks again of Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” where the happening that produced a blessed happiness occurs “all at once,” as when one says, in startled surprise, “Fancy that!” “Happy” can also mean “Having the feeling arising from satisfaction with one’s circumstances or condition.” But if “happily” refers primarily to the lyric subject or even to “the poet,” its effect resides primarily in the object brought into view: the object encountered,

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described, and felt in context, that is, the object comes to be as it is encountered, described, and placed in relationship. Actually, as “Happily” progresses, it separates happiness and joy from the subject at the moment of the happening of chance encounter; or, the subject itself, in its state of apprehension, has no stability or fixity: Having awkward heaviness “I” never moves freely about unless passing and happening accompanied

Hejinian’s vision of happiness (and joy) not only recalls the sense of God’s acts of creation but also of one of poetry’s oldest function: to rescue objects from oblivion by bringing them, as appearances, into view. Yet rather than conjuring this act to the heavy stability of monumental form and position, she elevates the preciousness of the recovered object by having its discovery occur in the floating, or rapidly moving, correspondences of subject and object, of affect and perception, all very much in the present, the “Now”: Happinesses are not events that not a time can be taken for States of intuition may be only sudden Now is a blinding instant one single explosion but somehow some part of it gets accentuated And each time the moment falls the emphasis of the moment falls into time differently No sooner noticed no sooner now that falls from something Now is a noted conjunction The happiness of knowing it appears

Poetic apprehension of the other (“happily I’m feeling the wind in its own right rather than as of particular pertinence to us at a windy moment” and “And more is left than usefulness / It’s this that happiness achieves”) needs to muster, in our utterly un-innocent age, some innocence (“all at once I saw”), some state untouched by “self-preservation” and consumerism (Adorno). It seems in this sense a desperate poetics, but then happiness intervenes, a kind of heroic intervention in the present and in the object and a trust in the rightness and independence of sentences with which her disquisition upon happiness began. She “accordions” sentences: ones with solid handles (a clear beginning and a clear end) but with a middle that is pleated and flexible. My intention was to allow for the influx of material that surges into any thought, material that is charged with various and sometimes even incompatible emotional tonalities. These emotional tonalities make it impossible to say with certainty that one is happy, for example,

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just as they make it impossible to say that one is not. That is, one is never solely happy. “I mean, of course,” as Robert Duncan says, “that happiness itself is a forest in which we are bewildered, run wild, or dwell like Robin Hood, outlawed and at home.”

Literary history has defined the onset of Romantic poetry as a new “poetry of meditation,” an internalized quest romance, a poetry of and in retirement, tinged with the melancholy of “disappointment” in the failure of social revolution, and that characterization has fundamentally served the favored poetry from that time to the present. But imagine a history that begins with the late 1780s and 1790s poetry of the Della Cruscans and Mary Robinson who put forth a vision of responsiveness, of inclusiveness, and of comedy. This, then, is the subject of chapter 4.

PART II

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CHAPTER 4 A POETRY OF MIND: THE DELLA CRUSCANS, MARY ROBINSON, AND THE FANCY AT THE TIME OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND BEYOND

I Consider the profile of Mary Robinson—beautiful woman, sought after by many men, dubbed either whore or lover of the nobility, innocent (“lost”) victim, mother, fine actress and novelist and poet, crippled during her last and very productive decade; one who presented herself through many pseudonyms (or, as Heidi Thomson has called them in the term of Portuguese Modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, heteronyms); a poet who wrote in many poetic genres and who was particularly adroit in the variety of her lines and verse forms, and whose poetry reflects the mixture of eroticism, fashion, sociability, and serious social critique that describes her life. Multiplicity characterizes her every step, and one of the crucial features of the poetic Fancy is multiplicity. It is less well known that in Mary Robinson’s poetry, the word “fancy” appears 106 times. I base my discussion of Mary Robinson’s poetry of the Fancy on historical and biographical phases of her work and on the influence upon it of the socalled Della Cruscan poets who preceded Robinson with a poetry of the Fancy. In the late 1780s the Della Cruscans, a group of British poets led by Robert Merry, wrote and published a fanciful, fashionable “verse” primarily in a magazine The World; they then published their work in a book, The Poetry of the World (1788, and expanded from two to four volumes in 1791) and followed this with The British Album that went through several editions (1790–93). Much though not all of the poetry was written as a series of wittily erotic flirtatious parries between male and female poets and usually

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with pseudonyms (e.g., “Della Crusca” and “Anna Matilda” for Robert Merry and Hannah Cowley respectively). After about 1793, Della Cruscan poetry as such seemed to have little sustaining force and dropped from the literary scene. Mary Robinson engaged this group briefly during the period of its efflorescence and just at the beginning of her most famous writing (the 1790s). After her Della Cruscan phase proper, she wrote the great erotic sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon, then a number of miscellaneous “urban” poems (e.g., “A London Summer Morning,” “The Poet’s Garret,” “Modern Female Fashions”), and finally, just before her death in 1800, her response to Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, Lyrical Tales. I argue that the notable variety of Mary Robinson’s poetic productions as well as the character of each phase of her work in poetry can be accounted for as manifestations of the Fancy. There has been a misassessment of her poetry. According to the general appreciation of Mary Robinson, both in her own time and now, Della Cruscan poetry from about 1789 to 1793 was formative in Robinson’s “great decade” of the 1790s, but as the quintessential poetry of the Fancy—fashionable, “superficial,” playful, and inconsequential—it had to be squelched or transcended for Robinson to become a serious poet. I believe, on the contrary, that the influence of the Della Cruscans as poets of the Fancy on Robinson was continuous and pervasive. If, however, its poetry established a domain of fashionable exchange, and if it influenced Robinson, how does one account for her non–Della Cruscan poetry of great erotic passion (Sappho and Phaon), urban observation, and witness of the disenfranchised (Lyrical Tales)? Drawing on some of the major characteristics of a poetry of the Fancy developed in the preceding chapters (a poetry of transformations, of witness and acknowledgment of the referent, of parataxis and rapid, erotically playful, and cheerful movement of mind, its urban focus), I show that her career in poetry defines the Fancy in an expanded way. In particular, her poetry, seen in conjunction with the political modifications made in Della Cruscan poetry during the period of the French Revolution, shows that the swing to a more overt social content and concern can be found both in Robinson and the Della Cruscans. This chapter includes a section on the poetry of the latter before it turns to that of Robinson. During the period of the French Revolution (1789–93), the Fancy gets associated with the “dangerous enthusiasms” of progressive and radical political thought and its potentially widespread influence: indeed the Revolution may be said to unmask the true fear of the Fancy among conservative government institutions and their mouthpieces, such as William Gifford in The Baviad deriding the poetics of the Della Cruscans.1 A history of Romanticism as “progress” would argue that the decline or decay of Della Cruscan poetry around 1793 would signal the proper closure on

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misguided art; the new Romantic poetry would not have to refer to it. Similarly, the poetry of Mary Robinson currently most anthologized and appreciated shows no obvious dependence upon her brief flirtation with the Della Cruscans. As the Memoirs of Mary Robinson say: she was for a brief period “dazzled by the false metaphors and rhapsodical extravagance of some contemporary writers [the Della Cruscans]” and “suffered her judgment to be misled and her taste to be perverted: an error of which she became afterwards sensible.”2 In this chapter I intend to argue the opposite. The supposed frivolousness and wastefulness of Della Cruscan poetry in fact experiments with a set of poetic principles, different from those of a poetics of the Imagination, at a high conceptual level and with considerable poetic mastery. It is precisely these vital qualities that Mary Robinson first reinforces in her own Della Cruscan poems and then transmutes in various ways in the later 1790s.3 But first I want to observe two attempts to praise her by discrediting her as a poet of mind and a poet of the Fancy: one by her daughter and the second by a recent editorial critic. Just as John Thelwall’s Prefatory Memoir to his 1801 collection of poems attempts to dismiss or weaken his powerful radical political identity of the preceding decade (and, one could say the same for Wordsworth’s Prelude that it casts the formative elements of his life in terms of nature rather than of politics), so Mary Robinson’s Memoirs—begun by herself and finished by her daughter—mute her feminism and the political tenor of her writing in order to defend herself against charges of a disreputable life. In her poetry and in her Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, Robinson insists that the mind of women and its cultivation is important for their independence of thought. Mind represented in the Memoirs, by contrast, is made to seem a function of Robinson’s health (by 1791 she had effectively become a cripple): The mind of Mrs. Robinson, beguiled by these pursuits from preying upon itself, became gradually reconciled to the calamitous state of her health: the mournful certainty of total and incurable lameness, while yet in the bloom and summer of life was alleviated by the consciousness of intellectual resource, and by the activity of a fertile fancy. In 1791, she passed the greater part of the summer at Bath, occupied in lighter poetical compositions. But even from this relief she was now for a while debarred: The perpetual exercise of the imagination and intellect, added to a uniform and sedentary life, affected the system of her nerves and contributed to debilitate her frame. She was prohibited by her physicians not merely from committing her thoughts to paper, but, had it been possible, from thinking at all. (Italics added; vol. II, p. 128)

The pressure to delimit the independence of her mind, to insist that mind is a fragile thing at the mercy of her (female) body takes its place, insidiously,

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nested in a master narrative of the phenomenon we call Romanticism that it is one purpose of this book to acknowledge and dispel. This stage, or generation, of Romantic poetics, marked by visionary pretensions and “excesses,” is followed by a generation that corrects, or in Jon Mee’s term, regulates, those excesses with a more nature- and reality-based (reality being a sense of the tragic nature of life) and “skeptical” view of both the world and poetry’s capacity to engage and transform social life. (On a smaller scale, Keats—according to Harold Bloom’s paradigm of Keats’s development—“outgrows” the excessive bohemian, “loose” poetics of the progressive Hunt to engage a “mature” tragic view supposedly found in the Odes and the Hyperion fragments.) A similar narrative is contained within the reading, by her fine recent editor Judith Pascoe, of a sonnet by Robinson herself.4 The poem “Twilight” first appeared in the Morning Post on April 20, 1798, and is thus (only two years before her death) a “mature” product of Robinson’s career: How placid is thy hour, O Twilight pale, How soothingly sublime! Thy fragrant breath Steals o’er the flow’ry margin of the vale, Cold as the Vestal’s sigh,—and still as death. The western cliff, dim with expanding shade, Scarce meets a gleamy star to point the way Of wilder’d traveller, whose footsteps stray Along the sandy waste, or lonesome glade. Soft on the field flow’r falls the spangling dew, ‘Till the young moon her silver wreath uprears To crown the mountain’s brow. The purpling hue From the dark woody height now disappears; While nothing seems to breathe, save where the song Of Philomel forlorn trills her dark haunts among.

For Pascoe, the sonnet “conjures up a moment of escape” in a “restorative” nature; the “wilder’d traveler” reminds her of the vagrants in Wordsworth’s early poems, clearly in need of restoration. But this (visionary) hope is undermined by the “intrusion of death in the ‘dark haunts’of the nightingale,” acknowledging in this way the failure of poetry to sustain a transcendent gesture. “It is a familiar kind of disappointment,” she says, anticipating comparable moments in “Tintern Abbey” and “La Belle Dame sans Mercy” (p. 21). Thus the poem reenacts, and anticipates future versions of, the narrative of visionary naivete and hope followed by its self-correction registered as disappointment. But a reading of “Twilight” through the Fancy demonstrates no such internal disappointments and disavowals. It is true that Robinson may be

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referring to an “hour” of escape from the world of cares and commerce in Adorno’s sense that all modern poems derive their energies from an implied resistance to the degradations of society (and are thus all social poems). But the poem does not speak in the language of escape or attempted self-absorption in the scene. Not only does the lyric subject not identify herself at all, but she does not claim any need of escape. (Adorno’s analogous specimen is Goethe’s popular “Wanderers Nachtlied,” which Robinson probably knew.5) Instead, the speaker turns intensively to sheer observation and acknowledgment: this is a poem of the referent, about stages of twilight. Her mind, however, is free to wander or associate in the service of her object. Thus she can imagine a “wilder’d traveller,” can speak in metaphor and personification, and generally can quote the idiom of her tradition. In this mental freedom (of constant and primary value throughout Robinson’s career), the speaker works within the frame of a visionary narrative, a simple two-step narrative that observes a fading toward death, toward nothingness, and then insists upon the presence of life in the absence of death. Perhaps it isn’t a narrative at all but rather a reversal of a valence occurring in only one moment of perception. This reversal happens precisely in poetic language. Take, for example, the first highly metaphorized observations: “Thy fragrant breath / Steals o’er the flow’ry margin of the vale.” Twilight, she says in the fourth line, is still as death. But is it?—it has a breath, and a fragrant one at that. And this breath steals. The enjambment can, if we allow it, work doubly: to steal as in to creep quietly across, or to steal as in to carry out a theft. Both definitions are relevant, but the real point is that this apparent thinning out of the day is described as having an abundance of life. (A similar movement works in the late lyrics of Felicia Hemans and, more famously, in Keats’s “To Autumn.”) Language continues, almost programmatically, to layer the fading out with color and sound and life: you might say that she constructs a vision of entropy. For example, the phrase, “The western cliff, dim with expanding shade,” describes the loss of light as a gain of shade. The best poetry finds ways to fight the human tendency to believe that versions of perceived loss define the truest vision of life itself. In Keats’s phrase, the presence of loss can produce in one a “drowsy numbness”; to reverse that, the poet, in the manner of Keats or Hopkins, can practice “infelt” perception: “Soft on the field flow’r falls the spangling dew. . .” Or along with the loss of imaginative sensation comes a further distancing from the present. So the speaker says “now”: The purpling hue From the dark woody height now disappears,

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and by this time we are prepared to feel the activity, the fullness not the emptying, of the verb “to disappear.” And “now,” following the thinking of Leigh Hunt on that conjunction, insists that it contain a juxtaposition of two events: the disappearing of the purpling hue and, simultaneously (“while”), “nothing seems to breathe.” But this apparent cessation of breath contains within it, and we know this thanks to the speaker’s keen ear, a sound: . . .nothing seems to breathe, save where the song Of Philomel forlorn trills her dark haunts among.

“Save” means, of course, “except,” but its other meaning, “to conserve,” instinctive with poetry, seems relevant here: the speaker saves for the reader the sound of the nightingale’s song (an idea reinforced by the lengthening of the line by one foot). Robinson, with her Della Cruscan background working for her, and in the tradition of the Fancy, knows that poetry, finally, lives less wholly in the object, the phenomenon, and largely in language itself as occasioning the mind’s freedom in the presence of tendencies in the world to curtail it. This is one outcome of the poetry of the Fancy (anticipating the Language poetry of the late twentieth century) with its emphasis on the sign and not the referent. Thus, just as she insisted on the juxtaposition of “dim” and “expanding,” she now places in contiguous relationship “forlorn” and “trills” and “trills” and “dark haunts.” Part of this sonnet’s success lies in its full reliance on the mythic history of the nightingale and on the tradition of eighteenth-century lyric. The poem becomes in this regard highly culturally specific and alive, registering, through prosody and idiom, her particular, of the hour, reenactment and quickening of a cultural formula, which we can otherwise greet with a drowsy numbness, a pseudo-act of prereading. Robinson insists all the way to poem’s close on visionary necessities. II In beginning the exposition of the continuity, through perpetual transformation, of the Fancy in Robinson’s poetry, it is interesting to observe that her daughter as apologist cannot help but note the continuity even as she disavows it: It has been observed, that of the glitter and false taste exhibited in the Della Crusca correspondence she became early sensible: several of her poems, even at this period, before the public mind recovered from that species of intoxication which novelty seldom fails to excite, breathe a spirit of just sentiment and

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simple elegance, which genius combined with feeling can only produce: of this her Maniac and her first Ode to the Nightingale afford examples. Her ingenuous muse soon learned to disdain the meretricious glare of perpetual ornament, false sublimity, and strained allusions; while it collected from the treasures of nature a rich store of imagery, and a happy series of illustrations which, introduced with judgment, applied with taste, and expressed with fervor, diffuse throughout her compositions a lustre and genuine glow, which never fail to kindle into enthusiasm the affections of the reader. (Memoirs, II, pp. 176–77)

She further notes the link to Della Cruscan principles in describing her verse response to Robert Merry’s The Laurel of Liberty (1790), Ainsi va le Monde, in which “Mrs. Robinson is at once the animated eulogist of Mr. Merry’s talents, the dignified assertor of her own, and the graceful and intrepid champion of Freedom, which, in the following lines, is thus beautifully described”: Through all the scenes of Nature’s varying plan, Celestial Freedom warms the breast of man; Led by her daring hand, what pow’r can bind The boundless efforts of the lab’ring mind? (P. 179)

The kindling of imaginations, with “enthusiasm,” immediately connotes the “unregulated” response that Della Cruscan poetry could have, something more than Shaftsburian polite conversation, an electric response that could in principle know no class or population boundary. This potential political consequence is felt in Robinson’s poetic answer to Merry, which is really a continuation, across the arc of sympathetic conversation, of The Laurel of Liberty. The Robinson signature appears in the uncoupling of the couplet “bind/mind.” The point is that fairly quickly after adopting Merry’s Della Cruscan poetics, Robinson follows its tendency, in Merry, to take its progressively political implications into a more openly public poetry. But first it is important to observe this transformation in the poetry of Merry himself and that of the Della Cruscan phenomenon. Reading Merry’s major poems of 1788–90 in quantity creates the impression not of superficiality and ornament in the frivolous sense but of enormous energy and poetic vitality and, actually, verbal precision. Once again the notion, from the time of the Della Cruscans to the present, that they wrote trivial poetry for the fashionable is misplaced when attention is paid, and in this case it seems to me that the attention must be quantitative. Moreover, one must read the poems as they were asked to be read, petitioning and receiving from time to time poetic responses in kind. The poetry moves quickly, from couplet to couplet, from stanza to stanza,

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an overflowing of language and rhythm and rhyme and melody. Absorbed at last in this unusual poetic domain, one begins to accept its character as legitimate, just as much as one—given the highly prescripted Romantic poetics we have come to accept as the norm—now reads the meditative, slow-moving (“Romantic”) poetry of the lyric subject in the presence of the natural world. Most poetry in the Western tradition seems to ask its readers to “slow down” and enter a place of poetic time where meditation on the poem and its language is infinitely available to us, a paradise distinct from normal life—perhaps a “Romantic” idea of reading. In his brilliant photographic essay, On Reading, Andre Kertesz makes this point again and again; his subjects read, oblivious of the social world often swirling around them. By contrast, the Cambridge poet Tom Raworth, often writing in short lines, purposely reads very rapidly, so that one is catching meaning as epiphenomenon and is more taken with the “flow” of language and rhythm. Indeed, bad poetry, according to Merry himself, is often characterized by a “Slow-lab’ring logick” that exposes the poor thinking and the poor use of figures (“Mangled Metaphor”). One also assumes, in a poetry that moves quickly, that not much must be going on in it; it must be devoid of content and poetry itself, or the “poetry” must be all figure, eschewing all serious engagement with the referent and uninterested in celebrating the “sentiment” of the speaker in his or her solitary grandeur. None of this needs be true. Indeed, recent contemporary poetry in the United States, particularly that by women, has demonstrated the rich complexity and intellectual and emotional excitement, surely capable of “kindling enthusiasm,” that accompanies the streamy poetry of poets such as Alice Notley, Leslie Scalapino, Bernadette Mayer, and Lyn Hejinian, the true heirs of the eighteenth-century and Romantic poetry of the Fancy. On the other hand, a fast-moving poetry calls attention to the peculiar wastefulness of poetry in relation to meaning: in a sense all good poetry, like life itself, “happens” before we can have the illusion of controlling it with our understanding. Much Della Cruscan poetry moves quickly and feels empty, but looked at more closely reveals its thoughtful and precise, at times inflammatory, poetics. Three extraordinary, rather lengthy but fast-moving, poems—Diversity by Robert Merry, The Grove of Fancy (anonymous, but verbal echoes suggest Merry as its author), and Laurel of Liberty by Merry, published respectively in 1788, 1789, and 1790—establish the poetics of the Fancy as a driving force in the world of poetry at the time of the French Revolution. At the same time (1790–93), the popular publisher John Bell had collected altogether in an elegant book format, called The British Album, the more typical lyrics of the Della Cruscans, originally published in The World. The three long poems act as a kind of manifesto for the poetry in The British

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Album; indeed, in its fourth edition (1792–93) Bell included Diversity. This barrage of Della Cruscan poetry and editions, widely and repeatedly appearing, makes up a powerful poetic presence and a clear statement of poetic priorities: it is not at all surprising that William Gifford’s sharp satire The Baviad (1791) seemed a necessary response in kind for those who could not tolerate both the poetics of the Fancy and, as Michael Gamer has shown, its poetry presented in book form as a challenge to the critics, those self-appointed orchestrators of the canon.6 Diversity, over thirty pages of poetry, along with an equally lengthy The Grove of Fancy, demonstrate the multiple, proliferating effects of the Genius of poetry (called Fancy in the second poem) first on poets and second on poetry’s subjects. The poems’ lengths simply attest to the great list of things and persons that the spirit of poetry engages. These poems enact Fancy as the principle of animation, of kindling, of scattering, of transporting, of transforming, personifying, enlightening, and enlivening; and not wearing itself out. “Extatic poetry” is a “vivifying Maid” who, luckily for the British (“my favor’d race”), seems particularly fond of England—a point that suggests not so much a chauvinism as an opportunity for consciousness. Dear proud Asylum of my favor’d race! Where Contemplation joys to trace The classic feature, and the form of sense, And hail the MUSE SUBLIME, and PATRIOT ELOQUENCE. These are the plains that FANCY loves, O’er these white cliffs she wanders free, And scatters in the floating gale, Her long array of fairy pageantry. While MELODY, in some far vale, Weaves on the air a length’ning line Of cadence soft, and swell divine; What time the maniac RAPTURE roves, His jet locks dripping with the vap’ry show’r, That EVENING weeps upon each folded flow’r, As down the shad’wy hills her less’ning car Tracks the slow progress of her idol star. Then here in sweet delerium will I stay, And meet on every blast a variegated lay. (Diversity)

The opening passages of The Groves of Fancy define the Fancy and its central role in poetry. Fancy “rul[es]” the Poet’s soul And giv’st the varied verse to roll: Thou, FANCY! Whose impassion’d strain

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Calls forth the Muses’ shadowy train; When, in the intellectual hour, The Bard exerts creative pow’r; And, skill’d in all thy magick art He strikes the note that thrills the heart.

The sensuous, feeling, erotic essence of Della Cruscan poetry, emphasized by McGann, is also typical of the poetry of the Fancy; here it is manifest in The Groves of Fancy. The “intellectual” moment of creative power becomes fundamentally “impassioned” when the Fancy intervenes. Declaring its status independent from mind—it isn’t a faculty but more of a daemonic spirit—leads the speaker to recall its place in infancy and childhood: O Fancy! Source of transient joy, Whose visions bless’d mine infant eye! Ere yet I knew thy pow’r to name, My conscious bosom felt thy flame;. . .

The Fancy’s origin in childhood does not mean, as philosophers and reviewers and many poets insist, that it defines the immature state of a person; on the contrary, its independence allows for its potential return. The petition that follows recalls Goethe’s poem “Prometheus” and anticipates Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” in which the speaker calls on his daemon to return after an exile; perhaps it too recalls Sappho’s “Hymn to Aphrodite,” where the speaker seeks for a return of Aphrodite’s help in love. Far from being a property of a stage of life, the Fancy (as I described in chapter 1) stands at the juncture of will and chance at any point in a poet’s life perceived as a crisis of poetic authenticity: O let thy glowing touch divine, Inspirit, oft, the labour’d line: And where the grace of Art shall fail, Let Nature’s hallow’d warmth prevail; Oft animate with smiles the theme, And paint as still I weave the dream.

The Fancy here is the quickening power that makes poetry more than mere verse. The energies it supplies lead inevitably to a kindling in the mind of the reader: . . .with enthusiast hand profuse, She scatters wild her burning hues, And waves her sportive pinion bright, And drops her many-tinted light.

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Capable, as these passages suggest, of erupting, conflagrating at any moment and at any place, the Fancy would seem to defy the overall structure (and the tradition) in which these two poems are laid out. Both Diversity and The Grove of Fancy offer a progress-of-poetry animated by the Fancy, beginning with Chaucer and working up to the present. The linearity of a “progress” or history stands at odds not only with the Fancy and its chance appearances but also with its perpetually renovative nature: it is always converting the pastness of recorded experience into the present moment. At the same time the poems are trying to portray passage of time. As the poem approaches the present, a clear anxiety about the capabilities of modern poets emerges, but again this is where the Fancy engages possibility. The Grove of Fancy has an apparatus at the bottom of the page that contains “Imitations,” which are sources in canonical English poetry for some of the lines in the poem itself. The poet of the present, “feeble” and “exhausted” from the encounter with the major poets of the past and from the debilitating social world of the 1780s, must, with the help of Fancy, “renew” that poetry into his/her own: thus the poet “imitates” the past, quotes it but revivifies it in his own idiom or context. This visual juxtaposition of “original” and “revised” poetry replaces the Bloomian agon of influence, its denials and misreadings, the harsh oedipal vision of violence and scarcity, with a “comic” montage of related but distinct domains of poetry producing less the mournful victory of the belated poet and more a lively “thoughts’ torsion” in the reader’s mind: the juxtaposition makes a “present” out of history. This is a powerful instance of the Fancy as a principle of renovation, of working with (not escaping from) the reality of the moment. The turn, or transformation, of the political implications of the Fancy, from a polite world of bourgeois liberalism to that of progressive and radical movements cannot be overemphasized. The lively, “intellectual,” burning, renewing poetics of the Fancy takes a fascinating, crucial turn in Merry’s The Laurel of Liberty (1790), addressed as it is to the “National assembly of France, the True and Zealous Representatives of A FREE PEOPLE,” toward a poetry of political protest. The progress, that is, ends in a present of political engagement. In Mary Robinson’s response (in kind), Ainsi va le Monde, she affirms Jon Mee’s view that a poetry of conversational (Shaftsburian) respectability, a poetry that implicitly confirms the social conditions supporting such conversation, can transform itself into the potentially infinite proliferation of conversations protesting these conditions. And as an important corollary, a poetry that exhibits the mind at play can redirect this quality to serious intellectual outrage and inquiry; this redirected playfulness accounts for both her initial response to the Della Cruscans and the later transmutations of her work. All the energies of

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poetry engage political realities and the speaker’s indignation; the mind of Fancy carries the indignation far past national borders into the multiplicity of nations cursed by Tyranny. Liberty notes “biggotry” and “Destructive Ignorance” in Britain and rages against Ruthless Rulers! hearts of stone and steel Ye, who can never heed what others feel, But swol’n with pow’r, and insolence of state, Presume to call your little selves, THE GREAT!

Mary Robinson, in Ainsi va le Monde, “catches fire”; her poem recapitulates the major points of The Laurel of Liberty, lays out its significance in terms of the history of poetry, the contemporary needs for an animating art in a decadent time, and finally demonstrates, as does Merry, the transfer of aesthetic power into the realm of social freedom following the French liberation. She begins by observing that Della Crusca’s poetic “genius” is not dependent on the poem’s subject matter: O, justly gifted with the Sacred Lyre, Whose sounds can more than mental thoughts inspire, Whether its strings HEROIC measures move, Or lyric numbers charm the soul to love; Whether thy fancy “pours the varying verse” In bowers of bliss, or o’er the plumed hearse; Whether of patriot zeal, or past’ral sports, The peace of hamlets, or the pride of courts:. . .

His poetic power resides first in its reach past ordinary consciousness and second in its availability to all subjects and domains, which means that poets have the power to direct their “kindling” energies wherever they choose (an anticipation, perhaps, of Robinson’s own poetic career). But the first step for Della Crusca is to wake up a repressed people into life through poetry’s enchanting, bewitching power—the fancy’s time-honored function put to visionary use: The task be thine to check the daring hand That leads fantastic folly o’er the land; The task be thine with witching spells to bind The feath’ry shadows of the fickle mind; To strew with deathless flou’rs the dreary waste; To cheer with smiles the Muse’s glorious toil, And plant perfection on her native soil: The Arts, that thro’dark centuries have pin’d,

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Toil’d without fame, in sordid chains confin’d, Bid Envy shrink, and Ignorance expire.

In the spirit of Diversity, The Grove of Fancy, and The Laurel of Liberty, this energy of poetic renovation resides in Merry as the most recent in the line of great poets beginning with Chaucer. But, and this occurs right at the center of Robinson’s poem, the poetic legacy must greet its most burning subject, the need for “celestial freedom” in the wake of the French Revolution: Led by her daring hand, what pow’r can bind The boundless efforts of the lab’ring mind. . . . From her, expanding reason learns to climb, To her the sounds of melody belong, That wakes the raptures of the Poet’s song; ‘Tis god-like freedom bids each passion live, That truth may boost, or patriot virtue give; From her, the Arts enlighten’d splendour own, She guides the peasant—She adorns the throne;. . .

Freedom and poetry work together and can be mutually enhancing in the goal to reactivate the mind “lull’d by tyranny.” But whose mind?— everyone’s, but she specifically asks about “the feelings of the hapless throng.” Poetry of the Fancy seeks to know the world of the silenced ones, with “many a dreadful tale of woe.” Perhaps it is this spirit that, nearly a decade later, leads Robinson to write the poems of Lyrical Tales. The final sixty lines of the poem sketch out a world permeated with Freedom and the Rights of Man. Strikingly that world is described largely in the imagery of Della Cruscan poetry. It is a world past narrative, intensively, ecstatically lyric, and one in which (telling reverberation to Blake) poetry and the erotic figure together: Freedom—blithe Goddess of the rainbow vest, In dimpled smiles and radiant beauties dres’t, I count thee from thy azure-spangled bed Where Ether floats about thy winged head; Where tip-toe pleasure swells the choral song, While gales of odour waft the Cherub throng; On every side the laughing loves prepare Enamel’d wreaths to bind thy flowing hair: For thee the light-heel’d graces fondly twine, To clasp the yielding waist, a zone divine! Venus for thee her crystal altar rears,

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Deck’d with fresh myrtle—gemm’d with lovers’ tears; Apollo strikes his lyre’s rebounding strings, . . .7

Before turning to the later and better-known poetry of Mary Robinson, I call attention to a very popular Della Cruscan publication in which Robinson participated though not as a central figure: The British Album. It collects essential Della Cruscan lyric poetry—exchanges between Robert Merry and Anna Matilda, occasionally Mary Robinson (whose contributions are pointedly singled out in a postscript to the second and third editions as the “charming Productions of LAURA”), and a few others. Verbal exchanges, erotically tinged playfulness and wit, variety or “diversity” of form and type, and occasional subject-matter come to the reader in a pleasing format to hold and read. The fourth edition (1792–93), in deep red boards and an ornate spine is smaller than the earlier editions (only 9 ⫻ 15 ⫻ 1.5 cm.). Volume I presents an engraving of Della Crusca (Robert Merry) on its frontispiece and Volume II Anna Matilda (Hannah Cowley), so that the books are framed by this erotic, playful conversation, which brings visual, embodied pleasure to bear upon the repeated enlivening pleasures of the texts of Fancy. Indeed, the intellectual and erotic tension between the two poets frames and defines the book. The title page contains the following epigraph: Oft from her careless hand the Wand’ring Muse Scatters luxurious sweets, which well might form A living wreath to deck the brow of time.

The contents do not exist for “use” (moral, consoling, or economic) but are supplements of pleasure, appeals to the senses—excessive (luxurious), emanating not from a fixed, known locus in the social or even the spiritual world but from a Muse-in-motion and without a recognizable, familiar source (e.g., the Pierian Spring) and whose gifts come randomly and without the burdens of current industrial society, without cares. The verb “to scatter” appears in any number of Romantic poems of the Fancy,8 suggesting both a playful carelessness but also a not-previously-discriminated audience: who will respond and what will their response be? This conjoining of playfulness, pleasure, and possible social change, in what has come to be considered the mainstream poetry of the 1790s, pleasure that of course leads to excess, as does enthusiasm, exists to be curtailed, modified, regulated. After all, it is the Voice of the Devil who says that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” has long been perceived as embodying the principle of regulating sentiment or enthusiasm of mind; its trajectory announces Coleridge’s own

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self-regulated Della Cruscan impulse. But it is surprising to see how many poems in The British Album stage a drama of pleasure or desire or impassioned questioning only then to stage pleasure’s curtailment. The difference between the Della Cruscan response to that cultural injunction and the Coleridgean, or canonical, response is enormous.9 It seems to me that the nearly ritualized and relentless occasions in The British Album that stage the defeat or the reprimand or loss of pleasure at the hands of a delighted, erotic, proliferative poetry have the desired effect of installing the constellation of pleasure as a valued and resilient presence that keeps popping up, continuing to thwart the efforts of society’s fanciphobia to suppress it and continuing to teach the poetic lesson of the Fancy. For example, The British Album ends with two poems, added to the second edition, one spoken by Della Crusca and followed by a response from Anna Matilda, that announce the end of the game because the two poet/lovers have for the first time actually met: Anna Matilda reveals that she is in fact married to someone else, “DUTY” forbidding her to continue the erotic/poetic relationship. The two poems brilliantly accept in life the fact of marriage and the necessity of following the dictates of DUTY and that there will be no more poetry between them, but they refuse the implication that Duty should affect the poetics of the present poems. They end in a fury of passion and protest and display. In this sense they continue the basic visionary principle of the Fancy as a poetics: a condition in the world of closure or loss does not require a conformity of the mind, or, the mind under the influence of Fancy refuses to accept the world’s strictures. Here is Della Crusca: And tho’ ANOTHER, O how blest! Has felt Her soften’d soul in dear delirium melt, While from her gaze the welcome meaning sprung, As on her neck in frantic joy he hung, Yet I will bear it, and tho’ Hell deride, My pangs shall soothe, my curse shall be my pride. Nor can HE boast like me; O no, HE found The tranquilizing balm that cures the wound; He never knew the loftier bliss, to rave, Without a pow’r to aid, a chance to save; HE never bath’d him in the Nightshade’s dew, Nor drank the pois’nous meteors as they flew, Nor told his rending story to the Moon, Link’d with the demons of her direst noon; He never smiled Distractions ills to share, Nor gain’d the exalted glory of despair.

Going out with a bang and not with a whimper foregrounds the poetry of Fancy and enthusiasm; with its imageries of cosmic transport the passage

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ends significantly with reference to Distraction, that marker of the centrifugal, peripheral wandering that a poetry of the Fancy would exhibit. And this is the point, although their relationship arose and sustained itself through erotic fantasy (anticipating the erotic e-mail relationships of today), at which the poetic principle of the Fancy is held onto with passionate commitment, the poet refuses to accommodate his poetics to the loss of what occasioned it and the cold light of “reality.” In poetry, Fancy, Della Crusca is saying, must always be considered real, in its capacity to sum up great feeling perceptions of both individual and social worlds; its characteristic of animation is noted as the only true poetic principle that matters, the curtailing of which means the end to all imaginal and, ultimately, ethical life. Anna Matilda’s response is similarly defiant but more in the service of defining the accomplishment of Della Crusca (as does Mary Robinson in Ainsi va le Monde): How I would write of DELLA CRUSCA dead! O! I would weave such verse, that round my head The Demons of the Night Arrested in their wheeling flight, Should learn to pity and to mourn, And curse their bounded pow’r. . . But O! How should I paint his mind, A taste so true, and so refin’d! How should I speak of his IMMORTAL MUSE That now can such delight defuse? A Muse which forms a NATION’S TASTE! And o’er the weedy waste Of long-neglected Poetry has thrown A vivid light, which so sublimely shown, That to its source ten thousand poets flew, And form’d their songs, and tun’d their harps anew.

Although first published in The World in 1789, this poem’s placement at the end of the 1790 edition of The British Album and, more to the point, its republication in 1793 (fourth edition) insists upon the popularizing nature of Merry’s poetry and, as Michael Gamer has shown,10 upon its defiance of the assumed “rights” of establishment critics such as William Gifford to create taste and the canon. The elegant fourth edition of poetry, the final claim of which is that Della Cruscan poetry and poetics has a far-reaching effect in the larger, potentially democratic community, is insisting upon a fusion of aesthetic and intellectual concerns with democratic ones, an insistence that by 1793 had begun to find enemies in those committed to keeping the two realms safely separate. Della Crusca is saying, as did, for

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example, the sentimental anti-slavery poets, that political change requires an excess of socially conscious sentiment, and that it is precisely poetry that can carry this excess. Della Crusca, in fact, more or less ceased writing his best poetry at this time, but it is possible to see Mary Robinson as the major poetic talent of the mid- and late-1790s who carried out a poetic program, in a series of different registers (“varying” and “irregular” or “diverse” as the Della Cruscans would say), that brought her poetics of the Fancy into erotic/ mythic, urban, and balladic progressivism (Sappho and Phaon, her “London” poems, and Lyrical Tales respectively). The diverse characteristic of the poetry of the Fancy, with its origins in the complex weave of Della Cruscan poetry, becomes manifest in the later career of Mary Robinson. More specifically, she carries on the Della Cruscan “constructedness” (as opposed to artlessness) of poetry, and part of what she constructs are variations on the Della Cruscan trademark of the lyric subject as intersubjective, or responsive. III I originally began the study for “Part I,” on Della Cruscan poetry and Robinson’s brief and, I thought, tangential relationship to it, with the plan to review it quickly as the starting-off point for a poetry of the Fancy, which, I wished to show, transformed itself repeatedly, in her major poetry of the 1790s and 1800. In one sense the plan is still intact. But I realize that behind my claim of continuity between Della Cruscanism and her later work lay an unacknowledged commitment to the standard view not only with respect to her poetic career but to the history of Romantic poetry— that Della Cruscanism was a seductive poetic fashion any worthwhile poet or poetic tradition would finally, emphatically reject in order to get to the serious business of (“Romantic”) poetry. So, “transformation” of Della Cruscanism means “rejection” of it. But this common view to which I am susceptible does not take into account the nonbinary, non-Oedipal way of considering influence, revision, and transformations in poetic traditions. The common view (and, say, the view of the Baviad and any criticism bent on the suppression and diminishment of the Fancy) sees the Fancy (in this case Della Cruscanism) as an origin, a locus of poetry-gone-wrong, an entity to be stamped out, more congenially, to be transcended or outgrown. Imagine, on the other hand, that the poetics of the Della Cruscans, the Fancy, can be characterized the way that the prescient nineteenth-century theorists of “Romanticism,” such as Stendhal, Friedrich Schlegel, and Walter Pater, viewed their subject: not as based historically upon a period-definition but

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more as a quality, an energy of poetry, seeded in poems and poets throughout history. In all lyrical poetry of “closure,” says Allen Grossman, resides a poetry of “aperture” (or Fancy); this is particularly true of Mary Robinson about whom one might say that a Della Cruscan poetics resides in all her poetry regardless of appearances. To describe more accurately what seems to me the truer phenomenon of Robinson’s poetic career, one needs to do away with the language of origin or source and manifestation; for this the imagery of the rhizome, recently developed by Gilles Deleuze and exploited brilliantly in the “Nomadic Poetics” of Pierre Joris, catches correctly the fundamentally shifting movement of her work, the always oblique positions of the lyric subject, and her participating—no matter what the particular content—in the playful intellectual mobility of the Della Cruscan vision. To the extent that the trajectory of Della Cruscan poetry was toward the politically outraged and progressive, her poetry joins that tendency and makes the associations of “nomadic” with her speakers a useful one. A rhizomatic, nomadic poetry claims no center, no origin, no dwelling place. Speaking of the motion at the heart of nomadic poetry, Joris says: “We can still use Olson’s statement that the need is to move, instanter, on—but no Interzone for us, no Idaho [Pound], in or out, no Gloucester [Olson] hankering for a more perfect past.”11 He says: “there is no single other, there are only a multitude of them—plurality. . .hetero-pluralities” (p. 29). To associate a poetics coming out of postmodernism (revising poetry of collage and fragment into the deeply metonymic poetics of the rhizome and the nomad) with the work of a late-eighteenth-century English woman poet is not to claim her for the modern world as much as it is to color her poetry in the strangeness it deserves. This means, in her case, the continuing branchings that characterize Della Cruscan vision, and in her poetry, “a desire to feel everywhere estranged, in touch with or at least reaching for the other, out of house & home” (p. 46). Her speakers are unpredictable and almost never solidly directed toward the elaboration of interest in themselves. If there is any characteristic subject-position, it might be described as a “betweenness,” something attending to an otherness, the witness of a referent.12 Biographically all this seems of a piece with her own life of displacements, disappointments, and mistreatments in love, her hungering (not unlike Keats) for upward mobility, and her self-realization as an actress playing roles. Even the many portraits painted by Gainsborough, Romney, Reynolds, and others do not resolve into “one” Mary Robinson but maintain their distinctions, one “character” from another. Many people probably would crumble or retreat under these strains, but they seem to have mobilized her into writing in a way that turned personal dislocations into an event of prophetic cultural manifestation.

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Her distinctiveness we can measure by setting her work in contrastive relation to the blank-verse domestic pantosocratic poetry of the self by Lamb, Lloyd, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Mary Robinson’s blank-verse poetry, in The Progress of Liberty, is distinctly inferior to the blank-verse poems that envision the city (e.g., “London Summer Morning”) and some of the Lyrical Tales. The vatic poetry of The Progress of Liberty, like much blank-verse poetry of the 1790s, assumes, or imagines, a lyric subject as a free-standing agent, a vision of the subject that finds its most successful fit in the post-pantisocratic domestic monologues of Lloyd, Thelwall, Lamb, and, of course, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Blank verse at this point in literary history achieves this vision through the enjambment, not—as one might argue about the Miltonic epic—because enjambment extends human apprehension to embrace a cosmic dimension, but because conscious speech of the individual appears defiantly unfettered by the police. That the domestic blankverse monologue had a short, if wondrous, existence attests to the incompatibility of the image of the freestanding agent with later Regencydecade reality. Mary Robinson’s best poetry images the condition of human beings in the 1790s more in the Zukofskian mode, conflict between speech and content on the one hand and form on the other, the juxtaposition of realities. Moreover, her poetry—unlike that of the domestic blankverse poems—does not valorize any particular “dwelling” (bower or cottage); no place or condition in the world itself will solve the problem of power. Poetry, with this in mind, achieves most when, instead of imagining a (utopian) dwelling and the human expression emergent from that dwelling, it records mind itself in the act of observation. But if Robinson rejects the current idea of the lyric subject as freestanding agent, how might she choose to define it? Although no poet is required to make such a declaration, she is most inclined, as I argued in chapter 2, to define the lyric subject as a witness. In some of her best poems, the speaker describes more than reflects, witnesses more than remembers. No accident that Lyrical Tales, her own favorite volume, begins with “All Alone.” No accident that the cluster of “urban” poems—e.g., “London Summer Morning,” “January 1795,” “Modern Male Fashions,” “Modern Female Fashions,” “The Camp,” “Great and Small,” and “A Poet’s Garrett”—record someone observing the life of the city. All of these poems have the quality of a construction; the sense of the world filtered through a mind, or being a mind, is very strong, and the speaker as a subjectivity emerges only as a kind of responsive sensorium for the vision. The poetry does not foreground the drama of mind, as the process of “self-realization,” just as it doesn’t seek to validate the view of the referent as “true.” A witness does not identify herself through her “home”; she is out there, at best at the “crossroads” (Tsvetaeva)

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or at an “oasis” (Joris), because the reality that startles her exists only in her startled apprehension. What she sees exists only in her words for it. This foregrounding of the poetics of the Fancy as mental activity and exertion—Robinson’s Della Cruscan commitment to a poetry of mind—is an expression of her feminism revealed in her 1799 Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. She bases her argument for the education and valuing of the minds of women on this condition of repression: “woman is denied the first privilege of nature, the power of SELF-DEFENCE” (p. 73). Her kind of poetry, then, has a defensive motive, which, however, would appear to fulfill the following: “However contradictory it may seem, to contracted minds, I firmly believe that the strongest spell which can be placed upon the human affections, is a consciousness of freedom” (p. 73). That is, expressions of mental liveliness and consciousness bring together and reinforce in a positive way personal with civic needs. She argues the direct relationship between repression and female literary production: The embargo upon words, the enforcement of tacit submission, has been productive of consequences highly honourable to the women of the present age. Since the sex have been condemned for exercising the power of speech, they have successfully taken up the pen; and their writings exemplify both energy of mind, and capability of acquiring the most extensive knowledge.

Declaring that nature has given women a “mind capable of expansion,” which will allow woman “to feel her own importance in the scale of society,” Robinson proposes that the best contemporary novels, having been written by women, are themselves the expression of precisely the integration of feeling and mind, art and reason, the domestic and the civic, that women seek and that society as a whole should emulate: . . .their pages have not only been embellished with the interesting events of domestic life, portrayed with all the elegance of phraseology, and all the refinement of sentiment, but with forcible and eloquent, political, theological, and philosophical reasoning. (Pp. 90–93)

Robinson here could be talking about her own poetry, in the sense that the expansion and strengthening of the female mind through passion is made manifest by the recognition and assessment of the world and the connection to it. Sappho and Phaon, similarly though in a genre about the achievement of conscious love, is an expression of the expanded powers—reason and passion mutually reinforcing—of the female mind. In her Preface she

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says: “But leaving superior minds to correct themselves, and pay dearly for their experience, it is necessary to observe, that it is not against strong, persevering passions; but romantic wavering feelings that I wish to guard the female heart by exercising the understanding: for these paradisiacal reveries are oftener the effect of idleness than of a lively fancy.” The “paradisiacal reveries” do not return passion to the real world in the way that the “lively fancy” does. In her Letter, she sketches a vision of the fulfillment of women and also an art (made by and presenting a mind of the Fancy) characterized by inclusiveness. In her 1806 posthumous complete works (which she largely if not solely ordered), this is manifest in her famed “diversity” or heterogeneity of poetic type and line and theme and the continual juxtaposition of apparently “contradictory” (e.g., affective and civic) content. In keeping with the Fancy all her poetry exhibits this vitality of mind and theme; thus a poetry about fashion, an anacreontic or Della Cruscan erotic poetics, carries political weight. But it is interesting to consider the “witness” as a particular expression of that mental vitality erupting in a manner that makes the distinction between the “personal” and the “political” meaningless. Robinson insists, particularly in her urban poems, on a paradox of a poetry of the Fancy: a poem focusing on the liveliness of the perceiving mind can produce a compelling and at times transformative account of the referent. Consider again “London Summer Morning,” originally published in the Morning Post, August 1800, and subsequently in The Wild Wreath (1804) and the collected poems of 1806. One can quickly isolate Robinson’s poetics of the Fancy in the terms just reviewed by contrasting it with Swift’s roughly similar sketch, “A Description of the Morning” (1709). Swift declared that in his poem, unlike the fantasy-burdened poetry common in his time, he had “described things exactly as they happen.” He in fact admits to no witness or viewer, but instead the heroic couplets simply recount the world of the referent. The reference to “Now” (see Leigh Hunt’s essays on the word “Now”) at the beginning of three of the first seven (of eighteen) lines alludes indirectly to a subject registering events as they happen. Robinson’s poem, slightly over twice as long, has over twice as many “now”s, but significantly they are scattered throughout the poem and placed mostly internally in the lines. This, in the midst of blank verse, projects a stream of presents, a mind constantly moving “from perception to perception.” Similarly, Swift’s poem brilliantly “couples” juxtapositions and antiphonal, satirical elements to form a series (see Diderot and Brecht) of “scenes.” For example, in the couplet Now Moll has whirl’d her mop with dext’rous airs, Prepar’d to scrub the entry and the stairs

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the mimicry of upper-class freedom of expression is coupled with the reality of scrubbing floors. The couplets add up to a constellation of urban morning vignettes, but that a sentient (listening, witnessing) being is filtering and registering them is neither evident nor of interest. “London Summer Morning,” on the other hand, is framed at the beginning and at the close by a witness of sounds and sights. The “busy sounds / Of summer morning,” the poem insists, only exist through a social consciousness of one who “lists” (to list, to listen—both are applicable) them. The force of the opening question in Robinson’s poem indicates that the city inspires the consciousness of a citizen who, in turn, can give back an account of it, and anticipates Wordsworth’s observation in “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” another London poem: 1) Who has not wak’d to list the busy sounds Of summer’s morning, in the sultry smoke Of noisy London? (Robinson) 2) Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty, . . . (Wordsworth)

No one, whose senses are at all vulnerable to the immediate world, could pass by or not list the sights and sounds. (The organs of sensation, so to speak, differ in each poem: the eye and ear in Robinson, the eye and “soul” in Wordsworth, which produce different versions of the city.) These poems argue that anyone can witness the city, can “mark” it, as Blake’s London witness says. At the same time the fact that the question needs asking says, in the manner of a challenge to the ready wakefulness of citizens, that most people do pass by and don’t notice their city: thus the need for a poetry of sheer observation and praise. But is this person, who subsequently does listen to, mark, and list sounds, the same as the “poor POET” who “wakes from busy dreams, To paint the summer morning”? The witness in this poem thus either witnesses herself (poor POET) waking up, or the listening/listing one differs from the poet linked to the series of sights and sounds described, or one witness metamorphoses into the other: the list-er becomes a painter. Important, I think, is the immediacy of waking-to-list and waking-to-paint: witnessing here implies the elision of any subjectivity that might exist between waking (consciousness) and response to the referent by recording or describing it. In other words, the witness belongs to the world she describes and does not muster a disinterested distance from it. The compatibility of the poetics of the Fancy to the witness as lyric subject results from the idea of the mind itself as mobile,

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sensuous, engaging, and permeating the world; by definition that mind cannot stand apart from the referent any more than it can disavow (skeptically) the products (images, dreams, fantasies) of the Fancy. One can speculate that witness poetry for Mary Robinson emphasizes description by contiguity. This is how she utilizes blank verse as opposed to the reflective, untrammeled subjective domestic poetry of her male contemporaries and Swift’s heroic couplets that work by juxtaposition. She portrays a mind actively moving “from perception to perception” each of which gets laid down next to another. The blank-verse stream images things of the urban world linked perhaps causally but mostly topographically. Contrast Swift’s couplet noted above to Robinson’s: At the private door The ruddy housemaid twirls the busy mop, Annoying the smart prentice, or neat girl, Tripping with band-box lightly.

The “eye’s mind” “traces” (as Robinson and Charlotte Smith would say) a path of visual connection among different domains. That the contiguity has pointedly a syntax (unlike Swift’s independent couplets) indicates the indistinguishability between language and the referents comparable to the indistinguishability between the lyric subject and the observing eye. A final note about witnessing in this extraordinary poem. The conjunction of sound, sight (painting), and listing (contiguity) creates a visionary poetry that insists upon spatiality as well as rhythmical, horizontal linearity; the poem, with all its “Now”s, becomes a kind of verbal action painting, with the motion of mind realized visually. (For all its reference to sounds, it is actually more visual than aural.) One sees the strangeness of the stream of perceptions and their linkages. Curiously, the 1806 Poetical Works normalizes the punctuation and capitalization of earlier versions (e.g., The Wild Wreath) thus minimizing both the strangeness and the streaminess (contiguity) of the verse. One effect of capitalization internal to the line in “London Summer Morning” is to grant equal agency, usually noise-making status, to objects and persons: as objects are animated and personified, it is not clear whether the many referents in the poem have all become subjects or all objects. What is a poetry of mind? I am suggesting that it differs from a “poetry of meditation” (see Louis Martz on the Metaphysical lyric) or a “conversation poem,” the last being more expressive and manifest in relative solitude and featuring the drama of the lyric subject: we are to forget, in a conversation poem, that we are in the presence of a poem as an opacity, a resistance; we are to find the poem a transparency or an emanation of an actual person elaborating a drama of real life. In this situation, the domestic,

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meditative poem contains, and to the degree that it contains, contrary to the freedom announced by blank verse, it regulates; the person stands free as long as the stream of speech does not overflow its banks. A poetry of mind, by contrast, allows the contradictions of the world to appear; it isn’t surprising that it tends to occur in urban settings where such contradictions (of class, of wealth, of profession, of behavior and motivation) are more in evidence than in the country or the home. At the same time that more of “reality” is let in, the formalism of the poem does not conform to the formless proliferation of the referent. Instead the rigid adherence to linear and stanzaic forms creates demands upon the presentation of formless reality by the mind of the witness. The paradox of this poetry of the Fancy, like that of Swiftian satiric couplets, lies in the expansion of mind, of observation and judgment, within the constraints of form; and attention gets thrown back on the mind that at once allows observations, a phenomenon of chance, while it works the materials into the preexisting forms. A witness poetry, then, is a poetry of mind that is seen playing with its referents; the reality of the poem that emerges features an essential contiguity of referent, mind, language, and form, a contiguity that produces a “visionary” reality, one that admits— against the wishes of the social status quo—to “diverse” elements. No late Robinson poem demonstrates the “playful” mind (as opposed to the “lyric subject”) describing the world better than “The Poet’s Garret” (1800): Come, sportive fancy! Come with me, and trace The poet’s attic home!

The larger point here, and elsewhere in Robinson, is that the mind describing reality does not have to be bound to reality’s own categories; the “sportive fancy” plays and wanders but also traces, describes, acknowledges. Written in a mock-epic language and faux-Miltonic syntax replete with archaisms, “The Poet’s Garret” satirizes the lofty disinterestedness attributed to poets, and “the creative process,” aloft, above the crowd, freely ranging within the zodiac of their own wit. Through the mock-epic language we see a man in fact mired in poverty, hunger, and cold, inundated in a fury of literary disorder and fragments and scraps of paper: torn vestiges Of an unquiet fancy.

Yet not only is the satire not complacent, but it yields both a sympathetic compassion for the poet and, imperfectly, the possibility that the raw materiality of poverty inadvertently perhaps throws the poet back on a

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more authentic visionary poetic necessity, not unlike that of Mary Robinson herself: Sonnet, song, and ode, Satire, and epigram, and smart charade; Neat paragraph, or legendary tale, Of short and simple metre, each by turns Will these delight the reader.

This snowfall of poetic genres, nothing privileged above anything else, a kind of democratic poetic citizenry, describes the profile of Robinson’s own oeuvre; that each in turn will delight the reader rings true for two of her primary influences in 1800, Lyrical Ballads with its insistence on “giving pleasure” to the reader and the Della Cruscans whose major drive toward poetic speech assumes a response in delight. The witness, her eye more reliable than her armament of poetic presuppositions, slips from the latter, with its holy, aristocratic singularity, into a vision of real poetic activity, the “wreathed trellis of a working brain” (Keats): . . .the poet’s attic home! The lofty seat Of the heav’n-tutor’d nine! The airy throne Of bold imagination, rapture fraught Above the herd of mortals. All around A solemn stillness seems to guard the scene, Nursing the brood of thought—a thriving brood In the rich mazes of the cultur’d brain.

Multiplicities, crossings, nourishment, and generativity, the features of a poetry of the Fancy, emerge, a materialist poetry as opposed to the idealist one formulated with the vertical coordinate of singular (Urizenic) royality. Just as this poet actually partakes of Robinson’s own poetics, so the poetics of the Fancy travels the rich mazes that link witness to “the poet.” The word Fancy appears, in this seventy-two-line piece, four times, each with a different modifier—sportive, unquiet, whimsical, and sick: “Fancy” a common denominator for every aspect of energetic poetic activity. None of the four modifiers of “Fancy” connotes seriousness, stability, or substantiality; in the history of talk about poetic, or more generally, mental faculties, all could be said to subscribe to its trivializing and dimunitizing: sportive, unquiet, whimsical, sick. To call the scraps of poetic work “torn vestiges / Of an unquiet fancy” movingly and, one feels, knowingly, captures the condition of the “poor Poet’s” labor in the presence of high ambitions and ideals, in the presence of quotidian reality and the high, aristocratic (“Attic”) poetic tradition. As she uses the phrase “poor Poet” here

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and in “London Summer Morning,” it becomes an oxymoron of modern poetry’s commitment to idealism and materialism simultaneously. The results may seem like “torn vestiges,” which sound tragic, or pathetic, until one imagines the entire phrase as a definition of some modern experimental poetry.13 In a fine pun (to look at the juxtaposition in different terms) the speaker observes: A pair of silken hose, whose footing bad Shews they are trav’llers, but who still bear Marks somewhat holy.

Indicating, of course, the poet’s poverty, the observation hints at another identity of the poet, a traveler or pilgrim, as Susan Howe said of Emily Dickinson, “on the trace of the holy.” This poet dwells within the two poles of holiness and materiality, and his poetry—if he is competent—will mark that strange space. So, the “lofty seat” of his attic (at once on the periphery of the house of society and at the center of the Athenian/Attic literary tradition) is not pure mockery and misguidedness. The “poor poet” dwells, to be sure, but in his material reality, not on his Mt. Olympus. Robinson, I believe, understands that to propose a “home” that defines one and that one imagines as complete and perfect, a nostalgic utopia, is to give up on her feminist project of a poetry of (her) mind discovering vitality in the unacknowledged subject rather than the previously acknowledged object. Robinson is a poet for whom, as Celan says, reality must be won. A poetry of mind—and one feels it in poetry from Robinson’s overtly Della Cruscan efforts and playful anacreontics to her urban poems of parataxis to her Lyrical Tales—is a poetry that continually reinvents and constructs reality. As Octavio Paz said about the art of Marcel Duchamp: “the transformations in his painting reveal our time as one which affirms itself only by negating itself and which negates itself only in order to invent and transcend itself.”14 Without claiming an identity between late-eighteenth-century British poetry and twentieth-century experimental European painting, I do think that Paz’s account of the latter becomes a useful lens to reveal the nature of the lively, fecund strangeness of Mary Robinson’s poetry. The poetics of the Fancy sees no particular gap or disjunction between a poetry of fashion and the “visionary theme” of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and Mary Robinson’s “enthusiastic,” “rapt” response “To the Poet Coleridge,” which begins: Rapt in the visionary theme! SPIRIT DIVINE! With THEE I’ll wander,

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Where the blue, wavy, lucid stream, ‘Mid forest glooms, shall slow meander! With THEE I’ll trace the circling bounds Of thy NEW PARADISE extended; And listen to the varying sounds Of winds, and foamy torrents blended.

On the one hand, the poem’s announcement of the speaker’s enthusiasm, or “rapt”ure, suggests the opposite of the poetry of the Fancy, an ecstatic “absorption” in another domain, or dwelling, occupied by Coleridge. Yet she locates (in the manner of Keats who very possibly modeled the “Ode to Psyche” on this poem) that domain in the mind, which is at once the external world of “awful [as well as ‘varying’] sounds, / of winds, and foamy torrents blended.” The poem itself features the movement of mind in a typical mode of the Fancy, with its repeated insistent location in the present: “Now,” “And now,” “And now.” The liveliness of a poetry of participation as response to the work of another poet makes one realize that “To the Poet Coleridge” has an unlikely precedent for Robinson, at the beginning of the decade of the 1790s in Ainsi va le Monde, with its powerfully identificatory, sympathetic, and intellectual response to Robert Merry’s The Laurel of Liberty. So, “To the Poet Coleridge” is a more “Romantic” update of her Della Cruscan engagement, each with its embrace of a powerful new program for civic poetry, in the largest sense of extending one’s understanding of the world past the constraining familiar. The poem to Coleridge releases that same sense of erotic response to the male poet, not in a subservient way but in order to claim responsiveness itself as an essential feature of a socially visionary, incendiary poetry. She images a mind “catching fire,” as Werther says, through another’s “thoughts that breathe, words that burn.” Pascoe is right to say that “women poets [in the early 1790s] strategically appropriated Merry’s [Della Cruscan] verse” (p. 81) and in a theatrical manner, but one must realize that deeper than appropriation is a very poetics of reaction and response. This poetics Robinson takes further dramatically in the final strophe; in the spirit of her own heterosexual response to the male poet (in the Della Cruscan manner) she gives a singing voice to Coleridge’s “damsel with a dulcimer,” who, homoerotically “wakes [her] in ecstatic measures” that cause an upsurge of a kind of vatic madness or extremity.15 What might the consequences of such a ventriloquism bring, in society or poetry? We can’t know if this poem, like Keats’s “Ode to Psyche,” proposes for its poet a new transmutation of the poetry of the Fancy, but the history of the previous ten years of writing would suggest that Fancy’s “diversity”

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would reveal another face. Indeed, in the poetry of the Regency decade and the 1820s, the presence and the announcement of the Fancy continues unabated, but it by and large decouples itself from the universalist language of the early 1790s. All of its attributes, however, remain with, perhaps, less show but a new confidence: the poetry of association and juxtaposition indicates the socially conscious and lively mind, continuously moving beyond the language and syntax of government and ideological control, pointing out the poverty of the life of persons under the thumb of market economy (a poetry, instead, of “sacred waste”), and anticipating the mixing of popular and high culture, lower, middle, and upper classes.

CHAPTER 5 “AFFECTIONATE ETERNITY”: LEIGH HUNT AND THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF THE FANCY

he history of the Fancy as a poetics—from Romanticism to experimental and avant-garde modernism and postmodernism—has yet to be written.1 As described in the introduction, that history presents itself as a continuity, a persistence. By turning from the Della Cruscans and Mary Robinson to Leigh Hunt, I am charting that persistence between “early” and “late” British Romanticism: the presence of the Fancy as a visionary poetics persists between the decade of Blake, the Della Cruscans, and Mary Robinson and the decade of Leigh Hunt and the “Cockney” group of poets. One purpose of this chapter is to counter the still-prevalent view of a skeptical, cautionary reaction of the younger Romantic poets (in their short poems) to the visionary excesses of the earlier generation. No literary presence figures more prominently in this persistence of the Fancy than Leigh Hunt and the group of artists associating with him: Keats, Shelley, Reynolds, Hazlitt, and others. The word “persistence” suggests a force against which something needs to prevail. During the Regency Decade the Fancy had to persist against the powerful authoritative pronouncements of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In 1815, Wordsworth elaborated the now-familiar Imagination/Fancy sequence and hierarchy, championing the Imagination, summarized and canonized in 1817 by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria. Hunt—in his poetry, manifestoes, and commentary from 1811 to 1818—unfolded, in opposition to Coleridge and Wordsworth, the counter-poetics of the Fancy. This chapter, after introducing him through the lens of the sympathetic, inquiring, and susceptible John Keats, charts Hunt’s poetics through extended readings of his two major collections published during the High Romantic Period, The Feast of

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the Poets (1811, 1814, 1815) and Foliage (1818). I break briefly in the middle for an excursion into Wordsworth’s 1815 descriptions and evaluation of the Fancy, in order to underscore the contested domains of poetics in the evolved thinking of the period’s major poet. The Victorian and twentieth-century judgments of Hunt as a minor poet and lightweight critic and journalist and the “Cockney School” of poets as a designation unjust to the greatness of Keats and Shelley has begun to change, the new position more in accord with the recognition of the contemporary Tory press and of Arthur Hallam’s 1831 essay “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry”2 about a “new school of reformers. . .the cockney school. . .[that] contained more genuine inspiration, and adhered more steadily to that portion of truth which it embraced, than any form of art that has existed in this country since the days of Milton.” Hunt’s poetry and poetics of the same years can rightly be considered both a challenge to the by then conservative “Lake Poets” and then a response to their authority in poetics. This attitude includes a stress on the erotic, the playful, the antimonumental, the irreverent, and the communal, what Hunt calls “sociality.” The poetry, however, can be disturbing, in terms of its pointed exclusion of women (both in the poetry and in the Cockney School group that, in a sense, produced it and which it reflects), which in turn raises questions about its “quality”: how good is this poetry of the Fancy? Finally each book ends with a section of pointed poetic translations, which, in their shape and content, are an act of literary transgression but also of inclusiveness. Before turning to Hunt’s publications, I open the discussion of Hunt through an account—given by his most engaged yet most ambivalent admirer and student, John Keats—of Leigh Hunt, of Keats’s response to him, and of Keats’s newly beloved Fanny Brawne. Keats’s ambivalence indicates the subversive appeals and dangers of Hunt’s poetics of the Fancy. Moreover, Keats’s own sexual ambivalence may have been stirred by the strong homoerotic inflection of the Hunt circle. Here one moves toward Hunt through Keats at Fancy’s Party; it’s December 1818: The night we went to Novello’s there was a complete set to of Mozart and punning—I was so completely tired of it that if I were to follow my own inclinations I should never meet any one of that set again, not even Hunt— who is certainly a pleasant fellow in the main when you are with him—but in reallity [sic] he is vain, egotistical and disgusting in matters of taste and in morals—He understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself possesses— he begins an explanation in such a curious manner that our taste and self-love is offended continually. Hunt does one harm by making fine things petty and beautiful things hateful—Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white Busts—and many a glorious thing when associated with him

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becomes a nothing—This distorts one’s mind—makes one’s thoughts bizarre—perplexes one in the standard of Beauty.

Although traditionally read as a welcome sign of Keats’s maturation—his letting go of the ephebe poet’s attachment to the seductive poet of lush imagery, lax lines, and loose politics—the passage, I believe, offers a contrary, more complex, meaning, one that proposes for Keats a further exploration and definition of Hunt’s poetics of the Fancy.3 Keats, it must be recalled, never really pulled away from Hunt, referring to him often in later letters and, of course, accepting a generous invitation to stay with him and his wife in the weeks before going on the fatal journey to Italy. It is easy to dwell in this passage on Hunt’s punning and his attitude toward Mozart as a sign of trivialization of great art coupled with a controlling egocentricity that appropriates and flattens beautiful objects. But there’s an aesthetics at stake here: Keats wants great art to produce in him enchantment, wonderment, and as he says “speculation.” Hunt snatches the depth out of the beautiful and drags the pure serene of desire for the beautiful through the mud of self-conscious and skeptical thought. Keats, says tradition, is learning quickly to rise above this, to recover again, but tempered and sobered with the tragic experiences of his life: the cold pastoral beauties of Grecian urns and melodious nightingales. The most moving part of this passage comes at the end, after Keats has vented his spleen about Hunt’s egotistic and appropriative behavior, when he complains that Hunt has distorted his mind, made his thoughts bizarre, and perplexed him in the standard of beauty. This is not the language of rejection but of a confusion about aesthetics that hits him with two vulnerabilities: his vocation in poetry, and poetry as a consolation and relief about the death, a matter of days earlier, of his brother Tom; as he says later in the same paragraph: “I live under an everlasting restraint—Never relieved except when I’m composing.” But Keats has already, in poetry, shown a third vulnerability, the penchant (as Marjorie Levinson has shown) for a play with signifiers, treating Mozart and white busts as words or codes, and will continue to do so. When she is introduced two pages after the discussion of his response to Hunt, Fanny Brawne, the occasion for Keats’s probings about the Fancy in the domain of love and desire, seems made to order for Hunt’s perplexed disciple: “with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort—she wants sentiment in every feature—she manages to make her hair look well—her nostrills [sic] are fine—though a little painful—her mouth is bad and good—her Profil is better than her full-face which indeed is not full but pale and thin without showing any bone. . .[She is] monstrous in her behavior flying out in all directions. . .[She has] a penchant. . .for acting

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stylishly.”4 She is a figure at once from nature and from artifice, fashionable and interested in fashion, not “composed” (in the Wordsworthian sense) and contained or restrained but dispersed, not full and realized but suggestive, evanescent. That most Keatsian theorist of l’amour passion, Stendhal, called falling in love a “crystallization” of glittering surface elements in the beloved’s appearance, a playfully erotic engagement with images (here a kind of blazon) that brings Keats’s description of Fanny Brawne in line with Huntian poetics. At least as much as he gravitates toward the “depths,” Keats is drawn—in the way of the Fancy—to the surface, to, in Charles Bernstein’s term, the poetics of impermeability. If Hunt makes glorious things become a nothing, that too may be good for Keatsian poetry. If things are no things (as Keats says in another letter), then all that’s left is the desire for them: a poetics of desire (a poetics of the Fancy) points to the desire not for an object as object but for an object as subject, or for words themselves as playful. In what I have just described, poetry and poetics may seem secondary to the drama of personalities and egos, culture and communities. But now one focuses precisely on the Fancy as a poetics, but one made manifest in the lives and careers of persons. A precursor to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, this motley, artistically inclined, group centered in Hunt finally makes its contribution in the principles of poetry. Keats, at once observer and participant, neophyte and genius, is passionate in his response to Hunt and his Cockney circle because of poetry, his perplexity a function of Hunt’s championing of the faculty of the Fancy as a major poetics—a cultural position—powerful during the Regency decade and to Keats. Now consider Hunt on Keats. Hunt’s understanding of Keats’s poetry reveals something about each poet: how much Keats participated in the poetics of the Fancy and how predisposed Hunt was to view Keats’s poetry that way. While reviewing Keats’s 1820 volume for The Indicator (August 9, 1820), Hunt observed: Mr. Keats’s versification sometimes reminds us of Milton in his blank verse, and sometimes of Chapman both in his blank verse and rhyme; but his faculties, essentially speaking, though partaking of the unearthly aspirations and abstract yearnings of both these poets, are altogether his own. They are ambitious, but less directly so. They are more social, and in the finer sense of the word, sensual, than either. They are more coloured by the modern philosophy of sympathy and justice. . . .The character of his genius is that of energy and voluptuousness, each being at will to take leave of the other, and possessing, in their union, a high feeling of humanity not common to the best authors who can less combine them.

Keats’s scope, says Hunt, includes more than the social domain; he deserves to belong to those poets of epic pretension. On the other hand, his poetry

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derives his strength from the social scale and of the sensual/erotic domain. His poetics are progressive, to be approved of by Hazlitt (sympathy) and Hunt himself (justice). Unlike decades of modern critics, Hunt shows no interest in the elegiac or awareness of it as a significant preoccupation of Keats’s work. Behind this reading of Keats is the belief that poetry reaches humanity less through the tragic vision and more through the comic vision of energies and sensualities. Sensuality dwells in sounds and rhythms; Hunt in 1832 described the heroic couplets in Lamia as a kind of sensual current, or rather a core of consciousness radiating independently of language’s signifying aspect: “the lines seem to take pleasure in the progress of their own beauty, like sea-nymphs luxuriating through the water.”5 Hunt’s view of Keats as a poet of the Fancy seems to fit with how Keats practiced poetry; his ambivalence toward Hunt I do not think was a “skepticism” about the Fancy (i.e., something that traditional criticism has said that Keats “outgrew” for the sake of a more tragic poetics of the Imagination). Rather he may have found the homosocial and homoerotic texture of the Hunt circle both appealing in its uncontrolled exuberance and disturbing in its exclusion of women; similarly the relationship of Keatsian to Huntian poetics may register a sense of exclusion of the other in Hunt. Behind this, Keats may have intuited a violence against the other, in keeping with a suppressed association in Western poetry between lyric beauty and the rape of the female (the “Philomela complex” in poetry). Keats, for example, gives a complex account of poetic divinity in the Hyperion fragment. The defeated Titans of Books I and II (celebrated by traditional criticism for their autumnal death-infused grandeur, the highly lyric sobriety of the recognition of their approaching extinction as a successful outcome of the poetics of the Imagination) clearly has been rejected in Keats’s cosmic history for a new kind of poet-figure, his Apollo of Book III struggling into existence less as an “Apollonian” temperament of grand disinterestedness and more a Bacchic one of sensuality and engagement. Consider the lines that introduce Apollo (ll. 10–22): Meantime touch piously the Delphic harp, And not a wind of heaven but will breathe In aid soft warble from the Dorian flute; For lo! ‘Tis for the Father of all verse. 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-lipp’d shells, On sands, or in great deeps, vermilion turn

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Through all their labyrinths; and let the maid Blush keenly, as with some warm kiss surpris’d. (III: 10–22)

As if to acknowledge silently a danger of Huntian poetics and at the moment of Apollo’s apotheosis a few lines from the end of the fragment, Keats wrote the following lines and then cancelled them: Into a hue more roseate than sweet-pain Gives to a ravish’d Nymph when her warm tears Gush luscious with no sob.

Airy and sensuous, nymphs belong to the world of Leigh Hunt (see Foliage later); Keats’s Apollo not only comes from Hunt but, like Hunt’s, sounds more like Bacchus—scratch an Apollonian god of the Imagination (poetry is power, claims Hazlitt), say the Cockneys, and you’ll come up with the wine-god—the orgiastic, sensual, disorganized, but oddly democratic promoter of the Fancy. But why, the cancelled fragment seems to ask, should this sensual efflorescence lead to a rape (“a ravish’d Nymph”)? Does it have to? Why should the “aching pleasure nigh,” the “sweet pain” of lyric beauty exact such a price? The problem for Keats is inherent not just with Huntian poetics but in the very assumptions of the Western (masculine) lyric from the medieval pastorelles on—that poetic beauty is based on the violent suppression of women. Yet the power and allure of the Fancy for Keats emerge in its vision through poetry of the liberation of body and mind. Keats, I believe, did not solve this problem, but it is clear that he engaged and complicated it not with a return—“maturation”—to a poetry of the Imagination but from the point of view of the Fancy. Now, however, it is time to turn to his troubling source, the extraordinary, experimental, if in some ways limited, poetry of the Fancy of Leigh Hunt. I Hunt’s The Feast of the Poets (rev. edition 1815) features a Bacchic Apollo that probably appealed to Keats; like Foliage of three years later, it offers a compelling, irreverent community for poets. The book is organized in three parts: first is the narrative of the feast, presided over by Apollo, designed to establish the best poets of Britain past and present; second an extensive set of annotations to the poem the longest of which is a powerful essay on Wordsworth’s poetics; and third a set of translations from Catullus, Horace, and the Homeric Hymns. The annotations make up the

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greater part of the book, with interpretation of poets and evaluation of their work, particularly their “versification.” The Feast of the Poets is manifestly funny, and the translations, reminding one of Tom Moore’s Anacreontics, seem at first glance manifestly and pointedly slight, hardly a match for another poetic publication of 1815, Wordsworth’s first Collected Poems. If the Gothic Church metaphor accurately describes Wordsworth’s intentions for his poems and his oeuvre, Hunt’s book, by contrast, promotes the anti-monumental. If Wordsworth in 1815 would be most recently known for The Excursion (1814), a stony monument in blank verse, Hunt’s Feast, by contrast, celebrates the passing event in tripping anapestic tetrameter couplets. If Wordsworth in 1815 (and in The Excursion) strives for a vision of benign patriarchal control and a kind of chaste domesticity, Hunt’s master of ceremonies is extravagantly protean, a shape-shifter terrifying to bad poets but youthful, soft, and gorgeous to the authentic ones (including Hunt as reporter of the feast), one keen on good food and excellent (named) wines, presiding over a meeting where the “fancies” “flow’d,” where poetry spills out like wine plentifully consumed, and finally one whose vision of the laureate (unlike the British establishment that crowns Robert Southey the laureate) insists upon a wreathe for each poet in attendance. Wordsworth, by the way, leaves the party, not because he’s a bad poet but because the “melancholy” that characterizes Hunt’s Wordsworth, his privileging of solitude, finds no place at the feast: Let us make us a heav’ n of our own upon earth, And wake with the lips, that we dip in our bowls, That divinest of music,—congenial souls. (Feast, p. 16)

Congeniality is a principle of Cockney poetics, as is inclusiveness. To say that every poet is crowned is to say that all poets, of whatever stripe as long as they are good, belong at the table of poetry, “from old father Chaucer to Collins and Gray” (significantly, the women poets must be dining elsewhere this evening), and it is precisely the range of “poetries” in mutual relation that bespeaks the health of the tradition and the current state of the art. Moreover, striving for immortality in poetry doesn’t mean leaving the world in a poem, as we learn from Apollo, who breaks up the group at “eleven” so he can return to “heaven,” in a parting shot to his guests: “ ‘For poets,’ he said, ‘who would cherish their powers, / And hop’d to be deathless, must keep to good hours’.” All leave the party “highly delighted”; good poetry doesn’t require melancholy in contemplative isolation and “the tragic sense of life.” Apollo can lead a congenial, cheerful version of a bacchic rout. It is at this juncture that Hunt’s substantial reading of Wordsworth’s poetics in a “Note” becomes useful to an understanding of the Cockney poet’s intentions in Feast.

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Hunt, like most of the serious poets and essayists in the Regency decade, finds Wordsworth too good to hate or dismiss. In the first edition of The Feast of the Poets (published in The Reflector in 1811), Hunt criticized Wordsworth heavily but had since shifted his view, so that now Wordsworth is “the greatest poet of the present.” “Mr. Wordsworth speaks less of the vulgar tongue of the profession than any writer since that [age of Collins who ‘saw farther into the sacred places of poetry than any man of the last age’] period; he always thinks when he speaks, has always words at command, feels deeply, fancies richly, and never descends from that pure and elevated morality, which is the native region of the first order of poetical spirits.” Hunt defines good modern poetry as the association of thought with language—a fascinating critique of bad poetry that severs poetry and thought. Such poetry enters the domain of the sacred—poetry does not rest within the normative, a crucial observation that is reinforced by Wordsworth’s refusal to write in the “vulgar tongue.” Poetry is suffused with deep feeling and, through the Fancy (notice that there’s no mention at all of the Imagination), ranges through domains, is not tied to the world as it is given. It is based upon a morality that (one sees from Hunt) acknowledges the centrality of the community. Wordsworth achieved this success by recalling poetry, and the experience of its readers, to nature. To this extent Hunt finds him crucial to the renovation of poetry in the present age. Wordsworth’s problems, in Hunt’s view, derive from the misinterpretation of the natural. The poet of “thorns and duffel-cloaks” (Feast, 1815, p. 95) has misplaced the natural from human experience onto unimportant objects, whereas his effort to write poetry with minimal “versification” misconstrues the relationship between conscious artistry and artificiality in verse. Hunt finds that, ironically, Wordsworth creates poetry that appeals less to “the great and primary affections of our nature”: “It gives us puerility for simplicity, affectation for nature” (Feast, 1815, pp. 91–92, 93). The goal of simplicity, as a counter to the “gross and violent stimulants” of modern urban society, turns out too often to reduce the poetic scale. Such poetry contracts rather than expands the horizon of the reader and is in effect an anti-poetic gesture. Hunt’s is an art of inclusion, one that embraces the conjunction of seeming incompatibles. Inclusion in art is therefore potentially disturbing and inevitably produces that which is Hunt’s second major idea: a poetry of thought. This isn’t necessarily a poetry of “ideas” but a lyricism that exhibits and stimulates a lively, critical mind. Finally, this poetics assumes a reading and thinking scene of the social and of sociability: . . .in point of effect, in point of delight and utility, [Wordsworth] appears to me to have made a mistake unworthy of him, and to have sought by eccentricity and by a turning away from society, what he might have

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obtained by keeping to his proper and more neighbourly sphere. Had he written always in the spirit of the pieces above-mentioned [e.g., the “Lucy” poems, the “Female Vagrant,” the London sonnets, the “Ode to Duty”], his readers would have felt nothing but delight and gratitude; but another spirit interferes, calculated to do good neither to their taste nor reflections; and after having been elevated and depressed, refreshed and sickened, pained, pleased, and tortured, we close his volumes, as we finish a melancholy day, with feelings that would go to sleep in forgetfulness, and full waking faculties too busy to suffer it. (Feast, 1815, pp. 90–91)

Wordsworth turned away from society in order to recover for his poems and his suffering audience a simplicity of life, but, having turned away, had not returned to the human community. Hazlitt, too, finds Wordsworth trapped in the nonsocietal world of the country as if he were a Dante, lost in the dark wood but more or less content to stay there. The country and village life that Wordsworth embraces are images for poetry and, according to his thinking, sources of personal and social recovery from too much society. But as he brings them back to us in poems, so goes Hunt’s argument, he does not acknowledge the social livingness of his audience. He “turns our thoughts away from society and men altogether, and nourishes that eremetical vagueness of sensation,—that making a business of reverie,—that despair of getting to any conclusion to any purpose, which is the next step to melancholy or indifference” (Feast, p. 97). This sentence suggests that Wordsworth’s poems set the same trap for us as nature did for him and encourages the loss of mental vitality and urgency. The melancholy of the characters’ lives get reproduced in the reader’s mind; the despairing vacuity of, say, a Martha Ray, reemerges for us in a kind of mental stupor, an inert and solipsistic form of reverie, which, rather than activated by the Fancy, becomes itself a business. Just as the Wordsworth of 1815 is “marked as government property” (Feast, p. 99), so he has allowed that mental state, which ought to be able to elude discipline and the commodity culture, to succumb to them: mental and emotional isolation produces the mechanical ratio that the repressive government wishes for its passive subjects. Wordsworth at his best, says Hunt, is a poet of the (cheerful) Fancy as well as a poet who “thinks when he speaks.” When, however, his poetry feeds that melancholic inertia, the Fancy vanishes and poems, in a wonderful and pointed neologism, “simplicize our thoughts.” Hunt, however, and in keeping with his own poetics, makes his final criticism of Wordsworth a subtle gesture of generosity: We are, he thinks, too much crowded together, and too subject, in consequence, to high-fevered tastes and worldly inflections. Granted:—he,

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on the other hand, lives too much apart, and is subject, we think, to lowfevered tastes and solitary morbidities;—but as there is health in both of us, suppose both parties strike a bargain,—he to come among us a little more and get a true sense of our action,—we to go out of ourselves a little oftener and acquire a taste for his contemplation. We will make more holidays into nature with him; but he, in fairness, must earn them, as well as ourselves, by sharing our working-days:—we will emerge oftener into his fields, sit dangling our legs over his styles, and cultivate a due respect for his daffodils; but he, on the other hand, must grow a little better acquainted with our streets, must put up with our lawyers, and even find out a heart or so among our politicians:—in short, we will recollect that we have hearts and brains, and will feel and ponder a little more to purify us as spirits; but he will be good enough, in return, to cast an eye on his hands and muscles, and consider that the putting these to their purposes is necessary to complete our part in this world as organized bodies. (Feast, pp. 107–08)

It’s an impressive statement that carries into poetic/critical practice the festival of poetic inclusion and diversity celebrated in The Feast of the Poets itself.6 This vision of openness—in the community and in the poem—is a form of “artifice,” which finally means a conscious shaping; the Fancy, for all its exuberance and dispersive energies, alights on realities and acknowledges desires; great poetry, says Hunt, has “fancy, feeling, knowledge.” It’s not hard to conclude that, in the definition ripening in this long note, the fanciful is the poetical. After The Feast of the Poets and its lengthy annotations, the book slides into a strange and apparent inconsequence with a set of brief translations from Greek and Latin lyric. To understand the import of this antimonumental structure—its flaunting of the trivial—one needs to think of translation as potentially belonging to the poetics of the Fancy. It is a kind of Fancy-practice, a flight (“winged words,” “winged poesy”) from Greece or Rome to England but one that doesn’t follow the rules of the original; rather, the flight is to a nowhere, comparable to a walker’s window-shopping, a something that is a nothing. Hunt’s translations exhibit a quality of the superfluous, the supplemental; he makes this point by printing the Latin under the translation so that the reader can witness certain outrages against the original. Second, the collective thematics of these poems build, in fact, a substantial commentary upon the book’s entire enterprise. Something fundamentally “poetic,” in the sense of a poetics of the Fancy, emerges in these translations as points of mental energies producing a constellation of subjectivities from afar. As a commentary on the failure to “simplicize” in Wordsworth’s poems, these translations live as a series of motions, transformations that leave the reader open and expansive; they make free spaces out of the given pathways of the original poems.

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The polemical spirit of the translations reinforces that of the book as a whole: in his 1814 Feast the final piece, “Bacchus, or the Pirates,” the seventh Homeric Hymn, links up with the Dionysian Apollo of The Feast of the Poets. Some pirates at sea take on board a “blooming youth” who, when bound, immediately breaks his bonds. A helmsman urges the crew to deposit him on land immediately lest this seeming divinity “call the winds about him, and we die” (Feast, pp. 153–54). But the ship’s captain disagrees, seeing in the youth a “god-send” of possible wealth. No sooner has the captain insisted on his way than the captive, who is Dionysus himself, begins to transform the ship: “a fountain of sweet-smelling wine / Came gushing o’er the deck” and “a vine-tree over’ran the sail” (Feast, p. 155). He changes into a lion and then a bear, and does away with the captain and crew all of whom leap in terror into the sea where they are turned into dolphins. The helmsman, however, is befriended by Dionysus for his understanding and is promised happiness—“And well shall this day be, for thee and thine” (Feast, p. 157). This is a wonderful poem of Bacchic transformative vitality, revealing the consequences of attempts to deny the wine-god. Dionysus bears a great resemblance to the earlier Apollo, beautiful and youthful and full of energies that have poetic consequences. Thus the two poems, Feast and “Bacchus, or the Pirate,” frame the book with Dionysian poetics. The last lines of Hunt’s version emphasize the poetic context more overtly than the Greek original: Must never bard forget thee in his song, Who mak’st it flow so sweetly and so strong (Feast, p. 157)

a couplet that neatly summarizes Hunt’s contention that Dionysus compels poetry that is both “sweet” and “strong.” To summarize the poetics embodied in this Homeric Hymn: poetry follows from intoxication and sensuousness, it involves the welcome acknowledge of different domains (the helmsman knows intuitively the difference between mortal and immortal), poetry is transformation (Dionysus turning into lion and bear, the ship turning into vines), it takes a stand against greed and the commodity form. The Loeb Library translation says: “seeming like a stripling in the first flush of manhood, his rich, dark hair was waving about him, and on his strong shoulders he wore a purple robe.” Hunt translates: As like a blooming youth he sat one day, His dark locks ripening in the sunny ray,

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And wrapt in a loose cloak of crimson bright, Which half gave out his shoulders, broad and white.

This Dionysus is not only beautiful but erotic and enticing. Hunt’s is a poetics of desire. It remains to address the contradiction, or apparent contradiction, in Hunt’s poetics of inclusiveness: it does not include women. And although there is no rule that says poetry must include what some may want it to include, it also cannot be denied that “the Cockney School” is a male bastion and that, to anticipate, Foliage contains a sequence of poems to his male friends7 that tends to define the world of sympathetic readers and collaborators as masculine. Does this create—in comparison to the poetry of the “major” Romantics—a certain thinness, a sense of narrowness (exclusiveness) in the experience represented? Perhaps. At the same time, one must consider that the poetry of the Cockney School—with its homosocial focus and at times homoerotic appropriations of the feminine— potentially carries its own subversive program for poetry: a poetics of inclusiveness elaborated over a restricted human community may in fact be a contradiction or deception, but, poetically, it is a juxtaposition. Typically, we praise poetry for its fullness, its concision, its capacity to compress much into a small space, but what do we do with, so to speak, an emaciated poetry? (See the discussion of “Fancy’s Party” later.) This raises the question: Is Hunt constructing a masculine community of poets or simply entering the canon and reinforcing, as does Hazlitt in Select British Poets (see chapter 8), the unfortunate segregation of male from female poets typical of the anthologies of his own time? J. H. Reynolds’s The Fancy (see chapter 7) associates the male community of boxing with the sacrifice of heterosexual love: this community, tied as it is to the “Cockney” one, stands, willingly, at the margins of middle-class society and is full of criticism of it; Hunt’s poetic constructions may embody a similar critical stance. Indeed, it would be interesting to explore the continuities, in this regard, between the Della Cruscans and the Cockney School but also to entertain the possibility that the latter pushes further the implications of the socially and poetically adversarial marginality of the Della Cruscans’ overtly heterosexual character. II All the lively heterogeneity of The Feast of the Poets is manifest in Hunt’s next major volume of poems Foliage (1818), a bizarre yet confident Mischgedicht with an almost jubilant Preface-manifesto (on poetry and Cheerfulness, see chapter 3) that celebrates the recovery of the genuine poetic tradition. I begin my discussion of this book by considering the

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relatively short short-line poem “Fancy’s Party” (the first of the book’s Miscellaneous Poems), which upset Tory critics. It indicated to them an extreme irreverence—in poetics, in sexuality, and in the implication of a “party” of opposition. (Another name for The Feast of the Poets might be “Fancy’s Party.”) FANCY’S PARTY A Fragment Juvat ire per ipsum Aera, et immenso spatiantem vivere coelo. Manilius We take our pleasure through the very air, And breathing the great heav’n, expatiate there. In this poetic corner With books about and o’er us, With busts and flowers, And pictured bowers, And the sight of fields before us; Why think of these fatalities, And all their dull realities? ‘Tis fancies now must charm us; Nor is the bliss ideal, For all we feel, In woe or weal, Is, while we feel it, real: Heaven’s nooks they are for getting in, When weeping weather’s setting in. And now and now I see them, The poet comes upon me, My back it springs With a sense of wings, And my laurel crown is on me; The room begins to rise with me, And all your sparkling eyes with me. Far, far away we’re going From care and common-places, To spots of bliss As fine to this, As your’s to common faces; To spots—but rapture dissipates The pictures it anticipates.— And hey, what’s this? The walls, look, Are wrinkling as a skin does; And now they are bent

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To a silken tent, And there are chrystal windows; And look! There’s a balloon above, Round and bright as the moon above. Now we loosen—now—take care; What a spring from earth was there! Like an angel mounting fierce, We have shot the night with a pierce; And the moon, with slant-up beam, Makes our starting faces gleam. Lovers below will stare at the sight, And talk of the double moon last night. What a lovely motion now, Smoothing on like lady’s brow! Over land and sea we go, Over tops of mountains, Through the blue and the golden glow, And the rain’s white fountains. What a pleasure ‘tis to be Sailing onward smilingly; Not an effort, not a will, Yet proceeding swiftly still! ‘Tis to join in one sensation Business both and contemplation; Active, without toil or stress; Passive, without listlessness. Now we pierce the chilly shroud Of a sight-enfolding cloud; And could almost crowd together, As at a home in wintery weather: Now we issue forth to light, With a swift-eyed scorning; And with gently stooping flight Slide us down the sunbeams bright, And travel towards the morning. *********************

Blackwood’s Magazine (October 1819) singled out “Fancy’s Party” (and a later poem in the book, to Hazlitt) as the political lightning rod in Foliage: “Jupiter drinking tea at Hampstead with Mr and Mrs Hunt and Mr Hazlitt!” and “a debauch of two Cockneys, Hunt and Hazlitt.” Based less on the idea of a political party with a program of social control and more upon the (threatening) spontaneous eruptions of passion, intellect, and “invention,” Cockney geniality inspires a poetry of play, a welcome

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tolerance of difference and multiplicity of viewpoints, the “multiple” in poetry itself. “Fancy’s “Party” is an ungainly, inelegant-looking poem, with its already short-lined stanzas emaciated in the middle (lines shrinking to dimeters), its “feminine” endings (in the first part of the piece) and “nonce” lines amidst the rhymes, the casual shift from seven to eight lines per stanza, its asterisked ending. The Tory reviews squirm, one imagines, not only because of its ungainly political implications (“the Monarch of Olympus and the Lecturer [Hazlitt] at the Surrey Institution”) but because of its form and execution. It is (as the outraged reviewers said about Keats’s early heroic couplets) a “loose” poem. Thematically as well, the poem persistently jars. Nature, in the opening stanza, is loosely mixed with a culture that, in a suburban way, is partly the commodity culture (“busts and flowers, / And pictured bowers”). The poem has no stability; it declines in every way the possibility of the poem-as-monument. It is a poem of a succession of presents and built-in spontaneities, one stanza beginning ingloriously: “And hey, what’s this?” And it is a poem of “now”s: And now and now I see them. . . . And now they are bent. . . . Now we loosen—now—take care;. . . What a lovely motion now. . . . Now we pierce the chilly shroud. . . . Now we issue forth to light,. . .

Counter-poetics (i.e., the poetics of the Fancy) in the past 200 years focuses less on the final product and more upon representing a process of mind as quick moving “from perception to perception” “INSTANTER” (Charles Olson).8 “Now” is the essential conjunction for this mental operation. Hunt, in his wonderful essay “A Now, Descriptive of a Hot Day,”9 understands the word more in terms of its related property, the combination, that juxtaposition of the unlike, not to be “reconciled” but to be acknowledged as a fact of reality: “that masterly conjunction, which possesses the very essence of wit, for it has the talent of bringing the most remote things together. And it’s generosity is in due proportion to it’s talent, for it always is most profuse of it’s aid, where it is most wanted.” A mind moving quickly among perceptions inevitably encounters, by chance, contradictory elements (“opposites” in the language of Coleridge and traditional Romantic theory, but not, in the poetics of the Fancy, to be “reconciled”). The lively movement in “Fancy’s Party” is joined with an erotic element. Desire appears in this poem partially through a covert homoerotic

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language: “comes,” “rise,” “spots of bliss” (instead of Wordsworthian “spots of time”!), “rapture dissipates / The picture it anticipates,” “loosen,” “mounting,” “We have shot the night with a pierce,” “join in one sensation,” “Active, without toil or stress; / Passive, without listlessness.” The poem, so apparently unlike its Dada and Surrealist descendants, anticipates their attachment to reality (notice how “feel” rhymes with “real”) and to critical social comment—while seeming to have escaped as in a balloon flight. Since Edmund Burke’s condemnation of the Jacobins as the “aeronauts of France,” ballooning had been associated with speculative political and philosophical schemes, which were often condemned as “fanciful” in the sense that they were dangerously unrestrained and “lunatic” (hence the “double moon” in Hunt’s poem). Hunt (recalling the Della Cruscans and Mary Robinson) gives us Fancy as an untrammeled expression of the revolutionary spirit: “Not an effort, not a will, / Yet proceeding swiftly still.”10 “Fancy’s Party” fully supports the manifesto of Foliage. In the Preface, Hunt claims that the “poetic faculty” in England has “reawakened” and that it is an enlargement of the French School’s (e.g., neoclassical) “narrow sphere of imagination” (Foliage, p. 11). If the Fancy takes the mind to new domains, the Imagination, contra Coleridge, says Hunt, has “the power to see, with verisimilitude, what others do not” (Foliage, p. 13); that is, the Imagination is not for Hunt about “reconciliation of opposites,” but about sheer perception of the world. Such poetry demonstrates “a sensitiveness to the beauty of the external world, to the unsophisticated impulses of our nature.” Geniality is an anti-egotistical and anti-bigoted attitude. Poetry, such as his Story of Rimini, he says, ought to be “tolerant and reconciling, recommending men’s minds to the consideration of first causes in misfortune, and to see the danger of confounding forms with justice, of setting authorized selfishness above the most natural impulses, and making guilt by mistaking innocence” ( Foliage, p. 17). That “Fancy’s Party” does not cover all of these requirements, indeed seems singularly lacking in seriousness, speaks to the perceived need for a somewhat estranged poetics, excessive in its weirdness. Hunt analyzes the need for poetic excess in relation to political reform.11 Foliage was published a year after another leafiness, Coleridge’s Sibylene Leaves. Hunt’s book turns away from the vatic and the mysterious and the portentous to a strange mixture of the urbane and the fanciful, but always “green” and “genial” and “breathing.” The structural plan of Foliage contrasts dramatically, for example, with that of Wordsworth’s 1815 volumes; the latter’s organic development of poetry of youth to poetry of old age, of poetry of the fancy to poetry of the imagination, of the “dawn” of life to its maturity, of the conspicuous placing of grand philosophical poems such as “Tintern Abbey” and the “Intimations Ode,” bears little relation to a book that starts off with a Preface about poetry and cheerfulness, a spun-sugar

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fantasy about nymphs, the scurrilous jeu d’esprit of “Fancy’s Party,” a set of occasional poems about married love and children, a group of occasional epistles to his Cockney friends (Byron, Moore, Hazlitt, Baron Fields, Lamb), some mostly occasional sonnets, and a set of apparently miscellaneous translations (bits of Homer, Theocritus, and Catullus). This book has immaturity written all over it, and it is hard—with Wordsworth and Coleridge publishing their ambitious opera at the same time—to take it seriously, unless one examines the judgment of immaturity as a complex code for an altogether different poetics, one worked through in the shape or structure of the book as a whole. Foliage juxtaposes an erotic visionary poetry (The Nymphs and “Fancy’s Party”) with an array of occasional, urbane poems that evoke the “Cockney” community of friends and artists, and finally a set of translations from ancient poetry. Together it (like “Fancy’s Party” itself) produces an ungainly shape, quite opposite to the elegant categories of Wordsworth’s 1815 collection (Poems of the Fancy, Poems of the Imagination, etc.). Moreover, the conjunction of the visionary and the urbane is surprising. But the poetics of the Fancy featured here encourages such dispersals of poetic types and domains. I now proceed, in linear fashion, through the book. The first poem, The Nymphs, begins with an invocation to the Muse that certainly directs the reader to think in terms of the childlike and the immature: Spirit, who waftest me where’er I will, And seest, with finer eyes, what infants see, Feeling all lovely truth With the wise health of everlasting youth, Beyond the motes of Bigotry’s sick eye, Or the blind feel of false Philosophy,— O Spirit, O Muse of mine, Frank, and quick-dimpled to all social glee, And yet most sylvan of the earnest Nine, Who on the fountain-shedding hill, Leaning about among the clumpy bays Look at the clear Apollo while he plays;— Take me, now, now, and let me stand On some such lovely land, Where I may feel me, as I please, In dells among the trees,. . . (Foliage, pp. v–vi)

Visionary poetry (of the Fancy) comes from Apollo-as-child, from the visions (not trailing clouds of glory and coming from God who is our home) of infants; yet startlingly Hunt associates the cultivation of this

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source with “the wise health of everlasting youth” and with a vision “Beyond the motes of Bigotry’s sick eye.” The Nymphs depicts the excited mind of a person who travels to a different domain, beyond ordinary consciousness, and who then describes what he sees. The occasional six-syllable line shows the speaker moving occasionally into a visionary idiom. Late in the poem he actually hears the nymphs sing, and the line drops from ten to eight syllables—rhymed tetrameter couplets: Ho! We are the Nepheliads, we, Who bring the clouds from the great sea, And have within our happy care All the love ‘twixt earth and air. We it is with soft new showers Wash the eyes of the young flowers; And with many a silvery comer In the sky, delight the summer; And our bubbling freshness bringing, Set the thirsty brooks a singing, Till they run for joy, and turn Every mill-wheel down the burn. . . . (Foliage, pp. xxxi–xxxii)

The playful rhyming octosyllabic line is easy to think of as less “mature” (more “cheerful”) than the decasyllabics, which are linked to a normative consciousness. In The Nymphs, however, the octosyllabics represent the same “looseness” of poetic decorum. Politics and social/sexual morals are also implicated in this verse form, the same that the reviewers found in Keats’s early (Huntian) heroic couplets and other earlier versions of the supposedly immature as subversive, such as the self-styled “hobbling rhymes” of eighteenth-century women poets of octosyllabic verse, but now with a visionary trajectory. What can we expect of the trajectory of a book that begins with The Nymphs and then “Fancy’s Party”? In the next three sections of Foliage (childlike songs about love and love-of-children, verse epistles, and sonnets), one finds surprisingly the poetics of these poems welcomed into the domain of social and domestic life. What has happened to the leaping and soaring to other domains? Reading these sections from the point of view of a poetics framed by the first two poems, one gradually learns that a newer, even wider, poetics is being proposed. The opening epistle to Byron, “On His Departure for Italy and Greece,” begins with anticipating a poet of The Nymphs: Since you resolve, dear Byron, once again To taste the far-eyed freedom of the main,

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And as the coolness lessens in the breeze, Strike for warm shores that bathe in classic seas,— May all that hastens, pleases, and secures, Fair winds and skies, and a swift ship, be yours, Whose sidelong deck affords, as it cuts on, An air slope to lounge and read upon; And may the sun, cooled only by white clouds, Make constant shadows of the sails and shrouds; And may there be sweet, watching moons at night, Or shows, upon the sea, of curious light; And morning wake with happy-blushing mouth, As though her husband still had “eyes of youth;” While fancy, just as you discern from far The coasts of Virgil and of Sannazzar, May see the Nymphs emerging, here and there, To tie up at the light their rolling hair.

His hail-and-farewell to the poet immediately assigns freedom as the mental condition of poetry, so that Byron’s journeying to the South becomes both the occasion and the metaphor for the proper state of mind; a freedom exploring other countries, literary domains, and other states of being. Byron becomes the poet of the fancy. But Byron’s poetic as well as real departure for Italy and Greece leads Hunt to meditate on the poetry possible to an Englishman of Byron’s temperament in the South: Italy is feminine, a “charmer,” and England more masculine; can Byron write a poetry as an affair between these masculine and feminine principles?—an erotic union between two poetries? And he speculates: “Gods! What may not come true, what dream divine,/If thus we are to drink the Delphic wine!” (The fusion of imagery of poetry, classical myth, and wine clearly influenced Keats: “Oh, for a beaker full of the warm south.”) But the visionary trajectory of most of the poem then drops off toward the end of the poem with hopes stated for Byron’s future success with Italian women, thanks for his long-standing friendship with Hunt, and praise for his virtue, in spite of his high rank, in fighting “vile hypocrisy.” The poet, the friend, the social and the moral life are all wrapped together so that the visionary side of Byron is at one with the normative aspects of being. The rest of the Epistles are written in more casual rhymed anapestic tetrameters with an added, jokey, feminine ending and bubble over with “sociality,” but at this point the continuities among the elements of a cultural person’s life are well established; the effect is to assert the fundamental sociality, plurality, of literary culture and literary art. As occasional poems they confirm the fancy’s anti-monumental insistence. Thomas Moore is introduced as a poet of sparkling surfaces always in motion and in pleasure.

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The bee, with its playful/erotic/Anacreontic overtones pitched to Moore’s temperament and style, is taken on as an emblem for an idyllic poetry of sensuous surfaces: Even now while I write, I’m half stretched on the ground With a cheek-smoothing air coming taking me round, Betwixt hillocks of green, plumbed with fern and wild flowers, While my eye closely follows the bees in their bowers. People talk of “poor insects,” (although, by the way, Your old friend, Anacreon, was wiser than they;) But lord, what a set of delicious retreats The epicures live in,—shades, colours, and sweets!12 (Foliage, p. lxxxi)

Upon arriving at the Epistle to William Hazlitt, one realizes that any association of fanciful poetry with the childish (“boy’s play”) has been modified to register more positively energy, ingenuousness, social consciousness and idealism, and a desire to disrupt convention. The link from the poems to Moore to the brilliant, caustic, and subversive intellect of Hazlitt comes through touch: Dear Hazlitt, whose tact intellectual is such That it seems to feel truth, as one’s fingers do touch,— Who in politics, arts, metaphysics, poetics, To critics in these times, are health to cosmetics, And nevertheless,—or I rather should say, For that very reason,—can relish boy’s play, And turning on all sides, through pleasures and cares, Find nothing more precious than laughs and fresh airs;— (Foliage, pp. xc–xci)

The poem turns upon relative claims of the country and the city, and throughout the poem Hunt maintains a witty intimacy and irreverence toward conventional middle-class life and “bigotry.” An evening with Hunt and Hazlitt, the poem says, would be a breezy tour through music, wine, a walk, food, and of course talk, a kind of “impermeable” skating over the surface of things, tasting them in friendship, but fully alive and not sunk or “absorbed” in any of them. This is the irreverent position and one that the Tory reviewers singled out for derision: “Jupiter drinking tea at Hampstead with Mr and Mrs Hunt and Mr Hazlitt”: The tea made by one, who, (although my wife she be,) If Jove were to drink it, would soon be his Hebe;

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Then silence a little,—a creeping twilight,— Then an egg for your supper, with lettuces white, And a moon and friend’s arm to go home with at night. (Foliage, p. xciv)

The reviewers objected to Hunt’s apparently undiscriminating inclusiveness of country/city, play/seriousness, society/myth, suburban inconsequence/ Olympian authority. Blackwood’s, for example, commented on the passage above, “we have ‘the love of sociality, of the country and of the fine imagination of the Greeks,’ all in one.”13 These reviewers reveal the ideologically unsettling impact of the figure of juxtaposition as social inclusiveness. The cluster of twenty sonnets that follows begins with a “Description of Hampstead,” Hampstead here representing an inclusive terrain where country and city merge: “Streets, hills, and dells,” “cottaged vales with pillowy fields beyond.” This nature does not draw one into it, unlike Wordsworth. In place of a Wordsworthian depth of feeling or perception are social feelings, intimacies, playfulness, and fancy-filled (“haunted”) minds: “Towns without gain, and haunted solitudes” (Foliage, p. cxxvii). The sonnets aim—through art, friendship, and social outrage—to vanquish closed-minded vulgarity; the Fancy (a word scattered throughout these sonnets) harbors and manifests that liveliness challenging the ostensible narrow scale of these poems. As Hunt says at the end of one sonnet: “In me / Behold affectionate eternity.” This lovely oxymoron describes his poetics. “Eternity” in poetry implies the sacrificial relationship between art and life, but Hunt seeks a nonsacrificial relationship where life flows directly into art and back again and is based upon the affections. “The Translations in the present work are in the same spirit as the original poems;—that is to say, they were written from the same love of nature, and in the same cause of cheerfulness” (Foliage, pp. 30–31). The phrase, “the cause of cheerfulness,” indicates the fervor of the manifesto, the sense of urgency of its representation and embodiment—cheerfulness as the sparking of relationship, of community productive of good, genial, feeling, working consciously, though naturally, against the gray oppression of the dominant culture. In the London 1818 edition of Foliage, Hunt collects his own work under the rubric of “Original Poems” and paginates them with Roman numerals, thus suggesting that they are introductory to the main business of the book, which are the “Translations,” paginated in Arabic. Can we infer that translations for Hunt represent the quintessence of a poetics of the Fancy? Compared to the occasional poetry in Foliage, the translations feel very much like a “flight” to the mythic/poetic world of ancient Greece. The movement essential to the Fancy is literally represented in the selection and ordering of the book’s materials. As Hunt says that the “main features are,

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a love of sociality, of the country, and of the fine imagination of the Greeks,” he means that his translations constitute his culminating intention. Not only, then, is flight and “carrying across” part of this intention, but poetry itself he defines not in terms of originality, which stands in an introductory or subsidiary relationship, but as a particularly generous (“genial”) act of giving to the “intelligent reader” “a stronger sense of the natural energy of the original [Homer and the Greek pastoralists and lyricists], than has yet been furnished him” (Foliage, p. 31). The Greek poets contain a “natural energy” that many translations obscure but that is at the heart of what poetry can give, so the task of the translator is in keeping with that of the poet of the Fancy, to direct the modern reader’s attention to the sources of life that the ancient poems embody. This has to do less with literal translation and more with the recovery of primary, formative energies. Hunt’s translations in Foliage, particularly of Homer and Theocritus, are firstrate. With Homer he is most revisionist and most polemical: Pope’s Homer he calls an “elegant mistake” with verses of “smooth little toys”; Pope’s and others’ translations he says are full of “gratuitous and vague talking” (Foliage, p. 32). Of the pastoral poems he says that their “real genius and character the public have hitherto had no idea whatsoever given them by the translators,” and therefore he “resolved, at all events, to write in blank verse, as their great charm is sentiment, and a perfectly unshackled simplicity . . .” (Foliage, p. 33). His own translations are simple, written with almost no drift toward archaism, either in diction or syntax. The blank-verse versions from the Iliad catch the sense of conflict that one expects in the epic, deploying alliteration, double accents, and strong caesurae, as in the battle over the corpse of Patroclus: And thrice did the Ajaces, springy-strength’d, Thrust him [Hector] away; yet still he kept his ground, Sure of his strength; and now and then rushed on, Into the thick, and now and then stood still, Shouting great shouts;—and not an inch gave he. (Foliage, p. 4)

The beautiful blank-verse translations from Theocritus’s Idylls, on the other hand, practically reject the standard conflictual relationship between line and syntax for what feels like a (postmodern) poetics of congruence; the enjambments act inaudibly upon the slight tension created by abrogating the line-break, as Hunt seems intent upon recovering the “stream” of poetry’s ur-language, a poetry, in Schiller’s sense, of the “naive.” Ageanax, if he forgets me not His faithful friend, shall safely cross the seas

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To Mitylene, both when the south wind, Warned by the westering kids, adds wet to wet, And when Orion dips his sparkling feet. Let halcyons smooth the billows, and make still The west wind and the fiercer east, which stirs The lowest sea-weeds;—halcyons, of all birds Dear to the blue-eyed Nymphs, and fed by them. Let all things favour the kind voyager, And land him safely;—and that day, will I, Wearing a crown of roses or white violets, Quaff by my fire-side Pteleatic wine; And some one shall dress beans; and I will have A noble couch, to lie at ease upon, Heaped up of asphodel and yielding herbs; And there I’ll drink, in a divine repose, Calling to mind Ageanax, and drain With clinging lips the goblet to the dregs. . . . And Tityrus shall sing also, how of old The goatherd by his cruel lord was bound, And left to die in a great chest; and how The busy bees, up coming from the meadows To the sweet cedar, fed him with soft flowers, Because the Muse had filled his mouth with nectar. (Foliage, pp. 26–28)

It is interesting to contrast this “pastoralizing” with the most prominent blank verse of the day by Coleridge and Wordsworth, which magnificently calls attention to the imago vocis of the speaker’s freestanding mind in the world of the panopticon. In that condition the boundary of the self still resonates and is defined against the social world, whereas here the speaker self-silences as the images of a collective, mythic nature spread out to fill each line like a pool of water. The poetry of the Fancy tends to define the lyric subject less insistently, encouraging a continuum between subject and object, or a loss of distinction between them. Hunt’s final Homeric translation—Mercury’s landing on Calypso’s island in Odyssey V—distinguishes itself from Pope, Fitzgerald, and Lattimore by proposing an ambience in which Hermes participates. Most translations of this passage, as well as the original, turn—once Hermes has landed—to Calypso and her Edenic “bower” (Pope); Hermes fades before its brilliance. But Hunt refers all the sensory power of the setting back to the perception of the god of thresholds: He paus’d; and there came on him, as he stood, A smell of citron and of cedar wood,

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That threw a perfume all about the isle; And she within sat spinning all the while, And sang a lovely song, that made him hark and smile. (Foliage, p. 19)

The bower, moreover, in contrast to that of the original and the other translations, pushes a Dionysian allusion in a manner that recalls the translation of the Homeric Hymn to Dionysius. Whereas Pope says: “Depending vines the shelving cavern screen, / With purple clusters blushing thro’ the green,” Hunt revises this to: “The cave in front was spread with a green vine, / Whose dark round bunches almost burst with wine.” The bower becomes the locus of an intensely pleasurable erotic and perceptual confusion, which then becomes identified with the god of transformations: “And so admiring, there stood Mercury.” Although it would prove fruitful to follow the details of Hunt’s verbal decisions in translation, I prefer now to survey and comment on the content and the sequence of the translations themselves in the book as a culmination of the poetics of the Fancy. Hermes’s flight to Calypso’s island, his “admiring” wonder, the sense of the crossing of thresholds from one domain to another, the visionary dissolution of subject–object distinctions, all come to represent the purpose and effect of the translations in Foliage.14 That the book concludes with poetic translations confirms the belief in poems as conduits for the expansion of the imaginative domains of the reader, and as acknowledgment of the worldwide presence of imaginative subjectivities, an acknowledgment that most of the hegemonic poetry of the Romantic Period avoids for the sake of an Anglo-centrism. Similarly, the book creates a community of poetries, and not surprisingly, a major theme in the translations is that of community (“sociality”). The passages from the Iliad show community to be a problem, at best an overcoming of tragic distances. Hunt begins with the passage of Achilles’s return to the field of war on hearing about the death of Patroclus; this section concludes with the “community” of Achilles and his comrades weeping over the body of the “beloved companion.” The Theocritean passages are “happy-minded,” “golden times when the belov’d loved too.” The first passage depicts the harmonious relationship of an amoeban singing contest. Idyll XI, “The Cyclops,” recalls the kindly monster’s attempted wooing of Galatea and poetry as a balm to unrequited love, but first he imagines a utopia when poetry would become a happy-minded life of love: O Galatea, that you would come forth, And having come, forget, as I do now Here where I sat me, to go home again!

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This poem of great sensuousness ends: ‘Twas thus the Cyclops quieted his love, With pipe and song; and passed an easier life, Than if he had had gold to give for one.

This and the other pastorals here are written with the blessing of “father Saturn,” a golden-age fantasy of a world that, ambiently, absorbs longing and disfigurement (the conditions of the Cyclops) into a serene whole, without condescension, dismissal, or sentimental overinvolvement. It creates a kind of impermeability of pleasure sustained in the poems that follow. The last Theocritean poem, here called “The Rural Concert,” invokes two presiding figures of the Fancy, the Nymphs and Pan: Now play me something sweet, for the Nymphs’ sake, Upon the double flutes. Come, I will take My bow, and touch out something to begin; And Daphnis here with pleasure will throw in His wax-cemented breaths.—We’ll seat us there Behind the cave, close by the oak’s old hair, And through the leaves wake Pan with a sweet air. (Foliage, p. 61)

Pan and the “spirit of noon-day” run through these poems, encouraging a lively wakefulness in a way that supercedes the apparent “superficiality” of golden-age or “naive” poetry. The reference to the Nymphs brings us back to the opening poem of the book, a reintroduction of the Nymphsof-Fancy in the mode of translation, occasioning a new self-consciousness in the midst of the naive. These flittings back and forth are the very image of translation; the reader can become a kind of Hermes encountering the other with wonderment. Hunt, however, doesn’t rest within this pastoral mode completely; the poems of Bion and Moschus allude to modes beyond the idyllic but still within the frame of the Fancy. In Bion’s “The Teacher Taught,” the poet who has been teaching Cupid the pastoral is being taught the poetry of love by its master; the teaching of Cupid displaces in the poet’s mind his now former adherence to pastoral and the idyllic. Similarly Moschus’s famous Elegy on the Death of Bion (part of which was also translated by Shelley) appears as the passing of not only pastoral but of all love lyrics (e.g., Sappho and Pindar) for the sake of the “dirge.” The community reforms in the presence of death, and poetry goes into crisis.

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Elegy, however, does not—unlike the dominant tradition of reading Romantic lyric—become the preferred poetic choice; instead the poem of Moschus is followed by those of Anacreon (in the spirit of Tom Moore), one of which, spoken by an old man, makes the Huntian case perfectly: Grey-beard age away be flung, And I’ll join ye, young for young. Some one then go fetch me wine Of a vintage rare and fine, And I’ll shew what age can do,— Able still to warble too, Able still to drink down sadness, And display a graceful madness. (Foliage, p. 87)

Hunt had said in the Preface: “the Anacreontics, I fear, are worth little, except a few lines at intervals;—it is so difficult to transplant those delicate Greek flowers into rhyme, without rendering them either languid and diffuse, or too much cramping them up.” Yet, in this poem, age is overcome by imaginative energy and vision, and sadness too is overcome by wine and poetry, which indeed is the representation of a mental state that absorbs the facts of biology, aging, and impending death, not into wisdom but into “gentle madness,” or a coherent vision of an energized fancy. It is a shock to turn to the penultimate poem in the book, Catullus carmen lxiii, the “Attis,” with its ungainly sixteen-syllable lines mixed with short lines, resolving into heroic couplets and most of all with its perversely sexual, its violent subject matter—a poem of maddened and destructive states. Attis, driven mad by the goddess Cybele (for too much worship? for falling in love with another woman? there are various source myths, and Catullus doesn’t specify which one drives his poem), castrates himself making his gender thoroughly ambiguous; there is no transformation in this poem, no lyric inversion of the human context. The poem ends with the narrator’s unabashedly self-interested cry: O Goddess! Cybele! Dread name! O mighty Pow’r! O Dindymenian dame! Far from my home thy visitations be: Drive others mad, not me: Drive others into impulse wild and fierce insanity! (Foliage, p. 99)

Hunt himself anticipated the reader’s bewilderment at finding this grim poem of self-mutilation and regressive and despairing isolation inserted as

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the penultimate leaf in his foliage: I need not apologize to such readers as I address, for the plain-speaking in the translation of Atys. I think that voluptuousness, in the proper sense, is rather an ill-used personage; but grossness I abominate; there is neither in this poem; and he would be guilty of the real grossness, the essence of which is inapplicability and degradation, who should not see that all other associations in it are overcome by its gravity and awefulness. It comes among the other pieces, indeed, like a spectre at noon-day; yet it is not unsuited to the general disposition of the work; still less is it a mere tale of horror, easy to imagine, or with excitement only for exhausted or callous nerves. It is one of the most striking lessons ever thrown out against a gloomy and ascetic enthusiasm, whatever fantastic sacrifice it may think fit to make, or whatever may be its notion of a tyrannical deity. (Foliage, pp. 33–34)

In order to understand the poem’s importance for the whole sequence, it is useful to have recourse to such visionaries as Georges Bataille and Giorgio Agamben. “Literature,” says Bataille, “is not innocent. It is guilty and should admit itself so.” He quotes Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “the roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.” Hunt uses a language of admonition to account for the poem’s significance, a warning against (gothic) solitary passions, the antigenial position, that contrary to the book’s disposition. A “gloomy and ascetic enthusiasm” is the opposite of a “cheerful” one, the poem a warning against “anti-cheerfulness.” But from a visionary perspective, this violence and perversion belongs to it, fulfills it, indeed helps it to transcend any inapplicability and real triviality because, as Agamben shows in Stanzas, “phantasia,” the essence of lyric, has at its root a wild desire linked though not directly to the sense of a lost object. Hunt seems to be proposing that “melancholia,” a mourning that refuses to be overcome because it fears that its overcoming will mean the loss of desire altogether, in fact rules the literature of desire that is the poetry of the Fancy. Melancholy, or “disappointment” as Hazlitt says, lies at the root of much Romantic poetry; Hunt’s translation of the “Atys” is his effort to deconstruct—by the violence and antisociality of the tale—a melancholy that acts as a consoling, drowsy numbness latent in the (rural) poetry of Wordsworth and the early generation of poets. To expose it as a violent and insatiably destructive force may, according to the structure of Foliage summarized at the beginning of this discussion, release poetry (is translation freed poetry?) to free the minds of its readers. That a “Nuptial Song” follows the “Atys,” indicates Hunt’s belief that the revelation, in this springtime context, of the

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violent sources of the apparition that is poetry, a Pan-like “spectre at noonday,” can release poetry and society into a comic outcome. Reading “Atys” back into the earlier sections of Foliage, one wonders if Hunt is commenting on a repressed element in the “original” poems. Not that they are “gloomy and ascetic” but that their cheerfulness hasn’t fully pursued the implications of a poetics of the Fancy: the book as a whole, with its warning about violence and its sources, may say more than any one piece. “Atys,” furthermore, may, like the cancelled lines in Keats’s Hyperion, silently and obliquely, perhaps even unconsciously, refer to the masculine exclusivity of the Hunt circle and of the company of laurelled poets. To bring up these communal exclusivities calls attention to the central place of inclusivity in the poetics of the Fancy and suggests that the poetics, in conjunction with the social world portrayed, haven’t quite achieved their intended results. It follows that the poetry itself might not be able to exploit the poetics fully: juxtapositions, transformations, animations, and personifications—the tropes of change and expansiveness as well as inclusiveness—may not be satisfactorily realized. The translations, however, do fulfill the expectation of a poetics of the Fancy—conceptually, thematically, and as performances. It is therefore not surprising that anthologies do not typically include Leigh Hunt’s poetry. We have, nonetheless, been at a feast of poetry, or at Fancy’s party. Charged with forgetfulness, we do not forget the whole, or rather, the book cumulates a knowledge or deepens a set of definitions; the poetry of the Fancy, cumulating its meanings, finds our fanciful seriousness becoming its meaning and its vision. One imagines, too, that Keats and Shelley, as poetic subversives and visionaries, found Hunt’s two strikingly original books of poetry energizing for their own work from 1816 on, Keats’s irritation with Hunt’s behavior notwithstanding. There is always a book ready for the advent of the book. The book follows. (Edmond Jabès15)

CHAPTER 6 THE POETICS OF EXPIRATION: FELICIA HEMANS

Speak— But don’t split off No from Yes. Give your say this meaning too: Give it the shadow. . . . But now the place shrinks, where you stand: Where now, shadow-stripped, where? Climb. Grope upwards. Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer! Finer: a thread The star wants to descend on. . . . Paul Celan1 To live is to defend a form. Friedrich Hölderlin2

alter Scott to Joanna Baillie, 11 July 1823: Mrs. Hemans is somewhat too poetical for my taste—too many flowers I mean, and too little fruit—but that may be the cynical criticism of an elderly gentleman; for it is certain that when I was young, I read verses of every kind with infinitely more indulgence. . . .3 Why does one not like poetry for being too poetical—a poetical “flower”—for being too much itself? A poetical “fruit” gives health and nurturance along with a well-defined or contained and symmetrical beauty, but flowers have no use value beyond the function of giving pleasure. What can you expect of a lady/mother poet, a Mrs. Hemans, but to write flowers? She

W

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has gone too far: her poems are wasteful and excessive. Perhaps Scott meant that Hemans’s poetry is too ornamental, artificial, “constructed,” supplemental. All color and scent, all evanescent, insubstantial intensity, a poetry of flowers may translate into a poetry of the Fancy, which in turn may stimulate in Scott a chromophobic and fanciphobic response. Still life with fruit makes sense: still, solid, heavy on the plate.4 Still life with flowers is oxymoronic: by breezes blown, always opening and “disclosing” their perfumes. Although in what follows I emphasize the “supplemental” side of Felicia Hemans’s poetic seriousness, toward the end of the chapter I engage her investment in the other side of the conflict, the use-value of poetry in not so much economic or materialist but in religious terms: “the holy.” In this sense, Hemans’s late lyrics written between 1826 and 1834 toward the end of her life (and at the periphery of canonical Romanticism) help us locate another aspect of a poetry of the Fancy: poetry as (supplemental) insubstantiality, but also—in the language of George Bataille—poetry as sacred waste. A poetry, as I show, that alludes to the dying, the expiring breath, the final act of speech before extinction, that focuses on disembodiment, that wrestles with the possibility of poetry as “waste,” either is declaring its own deficiency or is attempting to find value in a domain of reality different from most of the poetry in the tradition. This, it seems to me, occasions in the poetry of Hemans a crisis of gender: can value be found in that which is expiring, becoming insubstantial; value, it is implied, resides elsewhere, in that which has been built up, not that which is coming apart. The great male poets of the tradition, such as Milton and Wordsworth, speak of building up the lofty rhyme, building in poetry, “composing,” a substantial, “worthy” self; they assume that such monumental structures underscore their rightful place in a society. For them moments of expiration in their poetic projects are either epiphenomena or altogether invisible. From the point of view of society, Hemans implies in her late lyrics, women live in the penumbra, in the place that society deems epiphenomenal to its focus and self-image and values. These poems rest on a powerful imaginative turn: that which appears insubstantial and dying, that which acknowledges finalities and severe constraints, eventuates as a new freedom, possessing the most value, indeed belongs to the sacred. They are attempts, in this regard, to insist upon value in women’s experience, no matter how much society and even Hemans herself (in a spirit of self-deprecation) may devalue it. Her poetry of expiration (my term) discovers a locus at which the crisis of the voice of a woman (or anyone on the periphery of the life of society) and its valuation meets a definition of the poetic line. As modern poetic thinking has shown, such as that by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Allen Grossman, inspiration is the breath taken

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before the poetic line, and the line follows as the expiration or breathing out: a natural part of the rhythm of breathing, the receiving and the giving. On a smaller scale, the line is the expiring breath, and the space between one line and the next would be a new inspiration. One might say that in traditional masculine poetics emphasis falls on “inspiration,” the taking in of the world and of the Muse, a form of swelling, increase, a resubstantiation or building up of being. By contrast, a poetry of expiration, in one sense a literal embodiment of the definition of the poetic line, tries to catch the very motion of vanishing, entropy, and waste marked as an acute instant of transformed consciousness. Moreover, it neither has the cheerful wit nor attends to the details of the social world that one finds in Mary Robinson’s poems of the Fancy; they lack the playfulness (cheerfulness) and urbanity of Leigh Hunt’s poems. Their centering upon moments of dying and attenuation may appear to embody the antithesis to the poetics espoused in this book, yet a poetry that values the apparently insubstantial as precious or even holy and thus demands a visionary expansion of the categories of value is one way of defining and extending our definition of the Fancy. “To expire” also means, metonymically, to die. Consider Hemans’s poems called “The Last Song of Sappho,” “The Indian Woman’s Death Song,” “The Nightingale’s Death Song,” “No More,” “Passing Away,” “The Broken Lute,” “Music at a Death Bed,” and “The Parting of Summer.” All poems may be described as expirations, and Hemans’s poems highlight this account thematically. Creating occurs in the presence of dying; as the speaker expires the world fills her breath upon which language is inscribed. The poet at once conserves the expiring life and praises it. A poetics of expiration—the asymptotic approach of death, silence, substancelessness, oblivion—calls forth at the last possible moment a resistance to this vast tendency, a lingering, characteristic of the consciousness poetry seems to urge, out of which comes a complete reversal or conversion, in form, coherence, song, and praise. It is tempting to think of a poetry-of-expiration (and by implication all poetry of the Fancy) as a weak version of a monumental poetry that by its appearance and its subject matter seems built to last. The contrast, in fact, comes up within the oeuvre of Hemans herself. Hemans, in her 1816 poem Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy, narrates the return of classical art to Italy after Napoleon’s theft of many works, but as Nanora Sweet has demonstrated, restoration for Hemans can mean more than one thing.5 It is either the celebration of the return of monuments as monuments, a recovery of a stable if anachronistic past, or it recognizes that “classical artwork and culture are permanently destabilized; and a consciousness of history flows from the breakage of this art and the energy associated with its removal.”6 Destabilization takes the form of images of fragmentation,

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displacement, and dispersal, and, says, Sweet, is often figured by Hemans in the “broken or crushed flower,” associated with “the feminine” since Sappho. “Characterized by a shifting spectrum of ‘hues’ and by a cycle of growth, destruction, and resurgence, a floral aesthetic suggests not only fragility but also a productivity and recurrence available in history and for consciousness.”7 Returned to Italy after their being plundered, works of art now bring with them this historical awareness of their “fall” amidst their sustaining beauty; it desubstantiates but does not destroy them: they are converted into a kind of quotation of their former selves and thus de-monumentalized. Although she does not apply Hemans’s refiguring of the monumental in art to her own poetics, Sweet paves the way, I believe, for Jerome J. McGann’s essay-dialogue on Hemans’s poetics of quotation and the “signifying sign,” “Literary History, Romanticism, and Felicia Hemans,”8 and for my subsequent discussion. McGann argues that Hemans’s popular “The Homes of England” does not praise the great homes of the past and the aristocratic hierarchies that they represent, thereby confirming their monumental status, but quotes the language and the atmosphere that produced them, “a conscious elevation of various inherited and signifying signs.”9 The things that are her subjects become “mere” words. McGann says that when Kingsley Amis called a Hemans poem “superficially superficial,” he has gotten it just right; the phrase and the criticism behind it remind me of Scott’s saying that her poems were too much flowers and not enough fruit. “In her poetry what appears as substance is imagined on the brink of its dissolution, just as what comes as shadow continually refuses to evaporate. This is why she says that she has ‘a heart of home, though no home be for it here’ (Harriet Hughes, Memoirs of the Life, p. 188): like the stately houses reimaged in her poem, Hemans’s works understand that they are haunted by death and insubstantialities.”10 Domesticity, the locus of enormous ambivalence for Hemans, may also be seen as a monumental institution that at times engulfs her but the terms of which she can at times in her poems set free. Hemans’s visionary imagination, says McGann, deals with the crumbling of the monumental and its “restoration” as a poetry of the signifying sign. I find that Hemans’s poetry of expiration proposes something without center and structure, something not guided and shaped by the clear beaming of a speaking subject. Under the sway of the nineteenth-century conviction that a “woman’s poem” possessed certain intractable limitations, George Gilfillan still wrote accurately about Felicia Hemans11 that her major weakness, but also what describes her poem, is this: “A maker she is not. . . .She is less a maker than a musician, and her works appear rather to rise to the airs of the piano than that still sad music of humanity.”12 The whiff of condescension, the piano an occasion for proper (young) female

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accomplishment, ought not deter us from the interesting distinction between maker and musician. A maker composes at a distance from experience, craft of composition places experience in the background and allows for the possibility of “perfection”; to make is to build a structure, a monument. A musician enacts art in the moment, which erupts from the experience at hand. A maker has the distance and perspective to know, to formulate a Wordsworthian still, sad music of humanity, whereas the musician might sing it but not know it for what it is. “Airs” can refer both to the song rising on the air, but also to the air itself made up of song. Gilfillan places a premium on the long monumental poem. “Indeed, with such delicate organization, and such intense susceptiveness as hers, the elaboration, the long reach of thought, the slow cumulative advance, the deep-curbed, yet cherished ambition which a great work requires and implies, are, we fear, incompatible.” He is untroubled by the fact that Hemans wrote long poems and plays that he finds wooden and stale, and may be right to slot her in as a lyric temperament, which he defines perceptively: “She has caught, in her poetry, passing words of her own mind—meditations of the sleepless night—transient glimpses of thought, visiting her in her serener hours.” A Hemans poem, “flowing from a gentle mind in a happy hour, as an ‘ointment poured forth’ ” “carries a humble name in fragrance far down into futurity.” Formulating an anti-monumental poetry, disembodied, evanescent, he concludes—in a passage associating her with Shelley—extravagantly about her poems: “the sweet sounds often overpowered the meaning, kissing it, as it were, to death.” The charge that sound exceeded sense, in violation of poetic propriety, was of course leveled against Keats and other Cockney school poets, whereas here Gilfillan seems ready to give Hemans her due. Speaking of her “sweet sound” and “sweetest strains,” he further characterizes her poetry as more sensuously and affectively communicative than cognitive. “Sweet,” the Dantean epithet or predicate for that apprehension beyond words, and music, which both recalls Zukofsky’s statement that if speech is the lower limit of poetry, music is the highest limit, and Catherine Clement and Helene Cixous’s association of music and the feminine. The idea of the poem-as-expiration recalls the earlier Romantic poetic type, the effusion, most famously practiced by Coleridge in the 1790s. Both define a poem as an organic eruption of sound, language, and meaning from an apparently smooth and stable surface. And in both instances a poem appears to exceed artifice. Both link poetic authenticity with the triumph of an irresistible pressure for speech. They, however, perhaps may tell us much about the difference between early and later Romanticism, about male and female poetic intentions, and certainly may help to define the poetry of expiration. Both may be said to participate in the poetics of

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the Fancy because of their outward-directedness “the prefix “e,” “ex”) but do it with different implications and outcomes. The dictionary meanings of “effusion,” as well as those of its Latin antecedents “effundere” and “fundere,” indicate metaphorically a domain of liquid rather than one of gas or breath: a pouring out, a pouring out freely, an overflowing, an escape of a fluid leading figuratively to the pouring out of wine and animal spirits, the pouring out of emotions and of speech. The fundamental excess of effusion is valued all the way from extravagance, self-indulgence, squandering, and waste to generosity or abundant giving. Effusion is demonstrative. In its association with the escape of a fluid—such as blood or tears—out of its vessel, an effusion traverses, involuntarily, the boundary between inside and outside. Although it appears as if it were an emptying out (in the manner of an expiration), the effusion usually is marked as a filling up: to empty from one vessel leads to a filling up in another, a showing forth. Poetic effusions want to indicate abundance of speech and emotion; perhaps the blush is the visual equivalent of the effusion, the appearance of a slightly embarrassing but nonetheless pleasurable and desirable intensification. They therefore derive precisely from the dictionary definitions: an utterance poured out in all its fullness, from the “inside” to the “outside,” in which emotion and language fuse into a possibly intoxicated appearance of simultaneous extravagant waste and generosity. The effusion may be the quintessential genre of the poetry of sentiment. No accident that Coleridge called many of his 1790 poems “effusions” since they project an ambient fullness of loving utterance from the speaker to an assumed sympathetic interlocutor. The perfect Pantisocratic vision in poetry would declare that the space of alienation between persons is closed just as the division or separation between the inner emotional and intellectual life and the outer life of communication is healed. In Coleridge’s poetry of effusion, blank verse images this ideal as one line crosses over to the next unchecked by syntax. Significantly, “Effusion XXXV” (“The Eolian Harp”) opens with the speaker touching the interlocutor his beloved, all distance collapsed from the start: My pensive Sara! Thy soft cheek reclined Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is To sit beside our Cot, our Cot o’ergrown With white-flower’d Jasmin, and the broad-leav’d Myrtle, Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!). . .

Observing the dying of the day (“the clouds, that late were rich with light”) as the waning of one fullness, the speaker initiates a new fullness, less

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dependent upon nature and more upon the fullness of the “pensive” mind, the filled mental infinity of Schiller, “le pente de la reverie” of Victor Hugo: And thus, my Love! As on the midway slope Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon, whilst through my half-clos’d eye-lids I behold The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main, And tranquil muse upon tranquillity; Full many a thought uncall’d and undetain’d, And many idle flitting phantasies, Traverse my indolent and passive brain,. . .

Even the sounds coming from the Eolian Harp remind him less of breaths and wind and more of filled liquidity: “It pours such sweet upbraiding,. . .and now, its strings / Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes / Over delicious surges sink and rise,. . .” How do the poetics of effusion and the poetics of expiration register, respectively, their acknowledgment of their excess, their extravagance, in the mind of “the world”? In “The Eolian Harp” the beloved (My pensive Sara) famously turns on her speaker’s Pantisocratic fantasies at the end, popping them with the bubble of orthodox religion. What is important here is not that overworked concept of Romantic “scepticism” that brings visionary poetry back to earth, but that the poem apparently does not contain within itself transformative possibility. The same cannot be said for the poetry of expiration, which defines itself not as a filling but as an emptying, not initiating but fading and closing, but then, as we see in that aspect of the Fancy engaged by Hemans, it discovers within the line and the imagery a new fullness in a new domain, the heavenly. That shift of domains is something that the Coleridgean effusion cannot accommodate. Built into the drama of expiration is the very principle of the Fancy’s cessation: the speaker’s death and oblivion. To look ahead into the twentieth century, in the great Eurydice lyrics by H.D. and Marina Tsvetaeva, the female speaker wakes into the poem during the moment of vanishing, fading, expiring, or, to use a favorite word in Hemans’s poems, “wasting.” In this tradition the poetics of expiration belongs to women who observe themselves as always already forgotten. Sappho, wounded emphatically by unrequited love, expires. The Nightingale, raped and metamorphosed out of human life is, as Keats said of Fanny Brawne, eternally vanishing, yet their voices erupt on the ever-thinning air as a newly valued consciousness, a new vision: that which fades out becomes suddenly precious. How does one, amidst a vanishing world, write a poem of that which is vanishing? Hemans’s nightingale asks a relevant, critical poetic question

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near the start of her mournful singing: The skies have lost their splendor, The waters changed their tone, And wherefore, in the faded world, Should music linger on?

The word “linger” derives here from the early Romantics in, for example, Coleridge’s “The Nightingale,” the poem itself presented as a long lingering on a bridge before the farewell; in Mary Robinson’s “Ode to the Nightingale”: Sweet Bird of Sorrow!—why complain In such soft melody of song, That ECHO, am’rous of thy Strain, The ling’ring cadence doth prolong?

And in Charlotte Smith’s sonnets of Werther (a kind of dying nightingale) and implicitly in “The Departure of the Nightingale”: “Sweet poet of the woods!—a long adieu!” To linger is, in the words of the American poet Thomas McGrath, to postpone the end of the world, to offer a resistance to an inevitable end, accepting the world’s inevitable closure upon life and imagination but to propose the persistence of mind within an assumed closure. Hemans’s dying nightingale questions any kind of resistance: if all of nature is faded or fading, why hold on at all? But, in the vision of the Fancy as a poetry of expiration, the lingering, with a vital shifting of perspective, persists: the crisis of an acknowledged imminence of death resolves not in silence but in continued speech. In the same “mournful” spirit the nightingale—trapped, as all the dying must at some point feel, in the claustral bleakness of vanishing—manages to image, in the way of Blake’s sunflower poet, other domains: Where is the golden sunshine, And where the flower-cup’s glow? And where the joy of the dancing leaves, And the fountain’s laughing flow?

All of nature participates in this questioning: A voice, in every whisper Of the wave, the bough, the air, Comes asking for the beautiful, And moaning, “Where, O, where?”

They sound like the collective voice of pastoral mourners in the elegies, bent in sorrow and helpless. But the Nightingale has altered the vision of

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the dying by shifting to the shapes and images of energy itself: glow, joy of dancing leaves, laughing flow. The category of the lost has changed, but even with the change the descent continues down “In one deep farewell tone.” It (and other comparable poems by Hemans) recalls the famous descent in Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode”: Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight, And custom lie upon thee with a weight, Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

This speaker, like Hemans’s, suddenly realizes that at this moment of apparent frozenness “in our embers / Is something that doth live.” The remnant turns out to be a fullness of a kind previously unimagined, as the poem then takes pains to demonstrate. Wordsworth’s speaker shifts to “thought” and “love” as that which lives and sustains, even as the world stays the same. Hemans takes a different turn: Melt from the woods, my spirit! Melt In one deep farewell tone! Not so!—swell forth triumphantly The full, rich, fervent strain! Hence with young love and life I go, In the summer’s joyous train. With sunshine, with sweet odor, With every precious thing, Upon the last warm southern breeze My soul its flight shall wing.

A poetics of the Fancy different from that of the earlier Romantics is at work here, one that simply refuses the categories of nature and death not as a denial but as a prison of consciousness, in order to entertain and embody the undying “quickening” power that also acknowledges the preciousness of things. Reversing its position from the earlier part of the poem, she claims: “Alone I shall not linger.” She speaks amidst a metamorphosis, which is also a translation from one domain to another of eternal springtime. No slowing down or resistance occurs, no stay, but she proposes to join the quickening itself, winging her way on air, practically the breath of air. The new poetics implied here attends to energies and to the precious, or to the “sources of life”: The sky’s transparent azure, And the greensward’s violet breath, And the dance of light leaves in the wind, May there be no thought of death.

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One elegiac response to death and loss is a form of compensation (we will “find Strength in what remains behind”). Wordsworth’s speaker stays in place. Hemans shifts domains (here versus there), to live in and emulate “breath” and “wind,” the pure “transparent azure” and the “dance of light leaves.” The nightingale comes to approximate the poetry of aperture, or openness, seeking a language that participates in voices of the world rather than being alien and distinct from it and resisting it. This poem seems slight and projects effortlessness both thematically and poetically, not like Blake’s “laboring” lark in Milton. But Hemans clearly associates such visionary shifts with a heroism, analogous to that of public and military figures demanding sacrifice. In the “Indian Woman’s Death Song”13 the song of expiration appears heroic. On a suicide mission with her infant child, after learning of her husband’s infidelity, she, like the nightingale, doesn’t linger but enters the flow of the dark Mississippi River, her voice heroically rising above that of the waters carrying her deathward. As the narrator says, she . . .lifted her sweet voice, that rose awhile Above the soul of water, high and clear, Wafting a wild proud strain, her song of death.

The actual song is twice framed, first by a quotation from a historical narrative, then by the poem’s narrator speaking in blank verse; then the Indian woman sings in fourteeners, the line itself approaching in length the flow of the river itself, the song announcing at once the (Sapphic) grief of her betrayal, speech to her infant daughter insisting on the latter’s death, and her incantatory exhorting of the river: “Roll on!” The long line is an heroic inscription (that “rose awhile”) on the water, yielding to the near shapelessness of death: only the rhyming couplet keeps it afloat. Maria Jewsbury said of Felicia Hemans: “her enjoyment is feverish, and she desponds. She is like a lamp whose oil is consumed by the very light which it yields.”14 The poem enacts, in Allen Grossman’s phrase, the “bitter logic of the poetic principle,” the mutual exclusivity between the life and the work.15 In the end was the breath and the word. We typically associate discussions of poetry of the breath, of expiration, not with abstract forms and predictable, repeating metrics but with free or “organic” verse. How can we speak of something so bodily and spontaneous as a line-of-breath when faced with strict, assumed comfort of Hemans’s regular iambic tetrameters and trimeters? Or, from another vantage point, ought not “natural” speech appear in a poetry of effusion, or blank verse? A poem of flowings and glowings, perfumes and blooms ought

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to float and bloom across a page, instead of: All the soul forth flowing In that rich perfume, All the proud life glowing In that radiant bloom— Have they no place but here, beneath the o’ershadowing tomb?

Form here seems a tomb, a dark encasing of all that movement and life, a kind of opacity that “dulls my sense,” a burden of enclosure. But in fact Hemans herself is asking analogous questions, in which my notion of form as obstruction is like hers about “grief and fear.” “The Song of the Rose” opens: Rose! What dost thou here? Bridal, royal rose! How, ‘midst grief and fear, Canst thou thus disclose That fervid hue of love, which to thy heart leaf glows?

This is really an “abstract” and theological poem, at once a passionate exploration and a ritual performance about the fate of world energies. The formal stanzas, so innocent and assumed, actually serve to dramatize the very issue of freedom and constraint of the poem’s subject. And as quotations from the collective of poetic forms, Hemans’s stanzas float free of history and situation, just as the poem as expiration floats free. As Hemans pushes herself to see beyond grief and death, she pushes past form as a shutting down of imagination and understands it as a limit to be overstepped and absorbed. The visionary poet teaches, by example and invitation, the use of the visionary imagination. So, the “open-form” imagery works in the mind dynamically with the stanza. Form is also the recognition of tradition, the link to the company of poets. Breath and perfume hold the immediacies of mind and desire. “A Song of the Rose” borrows its form from another questing visionary lyric, Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” It mirrors Shelley’s stanza of trimeter lines that then open out or “disclose” in the final hexameter line, a drama of constraint and expanded vision. As Shelley’s skylark climbs higher and higher, it thins to its song but occasions a proliferation of similes from the speaker, a potentially endless outpouring or overflowing, which however does not decrease the poem’s epistemological, moral, and social pessimism. He petitions the bird for its wisdom and envisions a chain of teachings— from the bird to him and then from him to the world. Hemans’s response

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takes a different, characteristic, turn. She asks the fundamental question for visionary poetry: is there a life force independent from the world of “grief and fear” and death? One feels that in this poem she is defining the nature and purpose of a visionary poem. But the inquiry follows the predictable arc of observing and stating the appearance to seeing through and beyond it. Here, early in the poem, is her most Shelleyan stanza: As an eagle soaring Through a sunny sky, As a clarion pouring Notes of victory, So dost thou kindle thoughts, for earthly life too high.

In the next two stanzas she queries the consoling power of the rose, given to the dying, but finds that it cannot “detain” or postpone death, or “the end of the world.” Yet, I think, something has been set in motion with the phrase, “kindle thoughts,” thinking associated with the (Shelleyan) spark of desire. (It is important to remember this fiery energy of inquiry when confronted with the epithet “domestic” for Felicia Hemans. That term domesticates her poems, reduces their power as images of a poetic mind wanting to burn through the claims of convention.) “A Song of the Rose” ends with two stanzas that imagine the rose as belonging in Heaven, and appropriate to it: Will that clime enfold thee With immortal air? Shall we not behold thee Bright and deathless there? In spirit lustre clothed, transcendently more fair! Yes! My fancy sees thee In that light disclose, And its dream thus frees thee From the mist of woes, Darkening thine earthly bowers, O bridal, royal rose!

In an image of transport, she imagines the rose in another domain. Indeed, with Shelley in mind, it is difficult to remember that she is addressing a rose and not a winged skylark. Isolated for view is the appearance of the immaterial as brilliant and glorious, if reflected, light. The reference to fancy and dream marks the activation not of escape but of poetry itself, with its access to other, expanded states of consciousness. How easy it is to read the final two lines “sceptically”; the standard narrative of Romantic imaginative success (still alive in recent anthologies)

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congratulates the second generation for bringing some “realism” into the visionary athletics of the first generation; visionary poetry, the poetry of the fancy, is immature, impulsive, too idealistic, and deluding. A poet such as Keats must pass through it, but reality in the form of recognition of death and the body registers in him a need for tempered awareness, a sign of his own tragic maturity. I propose to think of Hemans’s stanza as a juxtaposition, a “combination” in which the rose in its lustrous, odiferous freedom sits next to the vision of pain and mortality, the two yoked together in the stanza. “A Song of the Rose” does not describe how we are to access that spirit lustre clothed, how we are to put it to use. Given, however, is a mind, a stanza, that contains them both: a vision of possibility. The most revealing word for the visions of released and available energies in this poem is “disclose,” a word that describes the plentifulness of expiration. It is what the rose does and what (in another poem) night-blowing flowers do. The poem begins: How, ‘midst grief and fear, Canst thou thus disclose The fervid hue of love, which to thy heart leaf glows?

and ends: Yes! My fancy sees thee In that light disclose, . . .

The rose’s perfume metonymically is desire itself, expressed with extraordinary synaesthetic fullness, and disclosed on the air, where the speaker’s encounter with it presumably set in motion her fervid questions and associated thinking. That in itself, the least “material” of encounters, becomes the most precious and the most erotic. Disclose: to reveal, to uncover, to send forth, to unfold, and even to hatch (a bird from its egg, an insect from its pupa)—a powerful verb at once transitive and intransitive. The word can indicate visionary experience simultaneously with generation. At the end of the poem it is used intransitively, further thinning down meaning into an essence of pure motion and revelation. The content of a breath, its matter becomes energy, still a hue of love sent forth, unfolded in a second-order blooming of the rose. Not wanting to deny poetry its engagement with death, Hemans nonetheless strenuously formulates a poetic power that while embodied in the familiar still emanates another domain of consciousness. One can also focus, with the verb “disclose,” on its power of sudden revelation, a spontaneous giving forth, or improvisation. “The habit of

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improvisation, never disciplined, disposed her to a looseness of style, an incoherence of thought, that no after revision corrected.”16 Others in the nineteenth century observed the same thing, prompted in part by the poet’s own fascination—as were many of her contemporaries—with the type of Italian performance poet called an Improvisatore, or Improvisatrice—a public performer of extemporaneous poems—apparently like the performance poet of today and those who perform at the popular contests called poetry slams. In a recent article,17 Caroline Gonda has outlined the extraordinary range of interest in the Improvisatore not only in England but in the Romantic literature of France, Russia, and Italy. Along with Coleridge, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, and L.E.L., Felicia Hemans wrote about these heroes of quicksilver singing in “Corinne at the Capitol”18 (based on Madame de Stael’s novel, Corinne, about an improvisatrice) and “The Dying Improvisatore.” The figure appealed to Hemans first for his or her passionate spontaneity and speed of “composition,” for the association with divine inspiration—poetry as breath: And thy [Corinne’s] voice is heard to rise With a low and lovely tone In its thrilling power alone. . . . All the spirit of the sky Now hath lit thy large dark eye, And thy cheek a flush hath caught From the joy of kindled thought;. . .

The improvisatrice weds thought and heat, poetic thinking as hotter than other thinking, more eroticized. This intensity of achievement, marked also by the loss of self amidst public performance, was seen as very appealing and “triumphant” in its leap beyond the “fetters” of ordinary consciousness and into the minds and spirits of a rapt audience. A version of a “disembodied poetics,” however, it demanded a severe sacrifice of the composition, the permanent, and always implied that the performance would seriously exceed the written version in brilliance or, in Hemans’s word, “lustre.” Indeed the poem would be the sign of an “expiring” rhapsody. Mary Shelley wrote (in “The English in Italy,” 1826): “the poet himself forgets all his former imagination, and is hurried on to create fresh imagery, while the effects of his former inspirations are borne away with the breath that uttered them, never again to be recalled.”19 “The Dying Improvisatore”20 is another Death Song that catches the sacrificial experience of improvisational poetry for the speaker and, it is certain, for Hemans herself. Dying, the improvisatore regrets that he has

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not left behind “Of love and grief one deep, true fervent song,. . . But like a lute’s brief tone, Like a rose-odour as the breezes cast, Like a swift flush of a dayspring, seen and gone, So hath my spirit pass’d! Pouring itself away, As a wild bird amidst the foliage turns That which within him triumphs, beats, or burns, Into a fleeting lay, That swells, and floats, and dies Leaving no echo. . . .

Hemans quoted part of this passage in one of her last letters applying it to her own felt failure at monumentality and permanence; supporting children “has obliged me to waste my mind in what I consider mere desultory effusions.. . .I have always, hitherto, written as if in the breathing times of Autumn storms and billows.” Her poem “The Diver”21—interestingly, like the Improvisatore one who gets his gems from the depths of the ocean, that is, from a different domain of being—concentrates further the sacrifice of the ego, the social gratification, for the art: But, oh! The price of bitter tears, Paid for the lonely power That throws at last, oe’r desert years, A darkly-glorious dower! Like flower-seeds, by the wild wind spread, So radiant thoughts are strewed; —The soul whence those high gifts are shed, May faint in solitude!

Hemans’s late poetry was, to her apparent regret, too fully a poetry of experience, too rooted in the present pain to gain the necessary “composure” for a major work. She bears interesting comparison, in this regard, to her sister of the previous generation Charlotte Smith, whose life of abuse and effectual imprisonment to raising ten children on her own led to the irrepressible announcement of her pain in practically all of the Elegiac Sonnets. Yet the poems stay rooted in the self, even though when taken as a large group of sonnets they work as a set of vibrant stars in a grand constellation. It’s a different approach to the extension of the self beyond the pain of experience: you would never describe Smith’s poetics as “disembodied.” For Hemans the figures of the Improvisatore, the nightingale, and the very type of female poet of pain Sappho, all work out similar versions of

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sacrifice or disembodiment. Fettered, as it were, compromised by economics, her poetry—in her view—is compromised, or nearly negated: “waste” she often calls it. Instead of adding to the world something of value, she has only polluted it further. But in her best lyrics, and in the drama of consciousness they enact, we experience that instantaneous reversal of the meaningless into the valued, the empty into the full, the oblivious into the represented, the dead into the living, the transformation of “waste” matter. As the poet Rosemarie Waldrop has said, following Georges Bataille, “the function of poetry is to waste excessive energy.” The principle of animated personification in the speaker’s consciousness in the poem comes from the breath of the wind. Or, in William Carlos Williams’s “Between Walls” a broken bottle gleams the color of new growth. Characteristically in Hemans’s lyrics, the speaking or lyric subject relaxes its boundaries before the world as the poem expands the vision of an available world and effective reality. Hemans’s anxiety about waste, apparent in some poems and certainly in her self-assessment just before death, thus seems resolvable to her as an act of inclusion. Her belief as a poet guides her to find both positive and negative experience of poetic value. In “Our Daily Paths,”22 having been asked by the philosopher Dugald Stewart to write not about “melancholy” but about the beautiful, she responds with a seriousness shown in moving from an account of beauty in nature (visionary in its close imagist attentiveness to natural detail) to an acknowledgment of the “cares” and burdens that necessarily accompany or even define life experience, and finally to a comic vision of acceptance of both world and self. Her use of the long line, again the fourteener, visualizes the mutual accommodation of beauty and sorrow, product and waste, self and God. “Our Daily Paths” holds to a characteristic “plot” of a Hemans lyric: although “there’s beauty all around our paths, if but our watchful eyes / Can trace it ‘midst familiar things,” that beauty gets lost in the daily “cares” and “sorrows” that “bind” us to the “narrow round” of tasks. But the thought of heaven, the final consoling resting place, ought to allow us to see both beauty and grief as a calming “training for the skies” after death. She claims that this view will make “vain conflicts cease,” but her poem, with the Christian plot of salvation imposed upon the aesthetic structure, nonetheless produces the paratactic listing of elements described above (a sign of the Fancy) and occasionally reveals the basic principle of animation as beauty within the long line itself: The [cares] hold us from the woodlark’s haunts, and violet dingles, back, And from all the lovely sounds and gleams in the shining river’s track. . . .

These expanded lines allow the reader to see an expanded world as the narrow one (where a reader typically resides before the poem begins) is

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described, as “cares, that ofttimes bind us fast, / While from their narrow round we see the golden day fleet past.” The expanded line belongs, so to speak, to God who feeds, even though they neither sow nor reap the lilies of the field and the sweet birds of the air. Like poetry, the birds and lilies are a kind of “waste” saved and valued by God. Poetry as visionary experience, as seen in “Our Daily Paths” and “Night-Blowing Flowers” (later), mediates the world’s relationship to holiness. The poet Fanny Howe, in her poem “Our Heaven’s Words,” catches this relationship: Our heaven’s words are wind, farther by far than “the language of love”. . . So heaven is a word for wonder and a term for separation’s horror.23

Fanny Howe (FH) helps us understand a central feature of Felicia Hemans’s (FH) lyric poems from 1826 to 1834. They are often heaven centered. The poems often posit heaven as a final fulfillment, after life has ended. Heaven also spreads a blessing over the contents of life, and it helps to make Hemans a praise poet, a poet of wonder. The immateriality of wind with material effect, the ruach of creation, a quickening power, may preoccupy her as poet most of all: to what degree are poems metaphors for the act of creation and to what degree are they the act itself? How does one emulate that immateriality with the fact of language’s materiality? Heaven is a crisis for Hemans: wonder or separation’s horror. It would be too easy to posit poetry as a binding or reconciling phenomenon, but poetry stands in conflict with Heaven, and with Holiness: poetry envisions and records multiplicity; Holiness is singular. Let me distinguish, at this impasse, between “holiness” and Bataille’s “sacred waste,” a phrase linking poetry to a reality not fit for “use,” to poetry as expiration and the dying breath, and, finally, to the Fancy. In this sense the domain of the “sacred” belongs to poetry as distinct from the quotidian world. A problem in Hemans’s lyrics: is a poem about source or creation? Which gets the most emphasis and praise? She often lists the creation, a sure sign that she adheres to poetry’s penchant for the multiple. But then there’s “the Wind, the wandering Wind,” or as she says in “The Breeze from Shore,” “A current of celestial air,” which suggests oxymoronically, the energy of the act of creation, within created things, and the source of energy in the holy, the definition of which and its problem and opportunity for the poet get dramatized in “Night-Blowing Flowers.”

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This poem is a dialogue between the wanderer and the night-flowers themselves: Call back your odours, lonely flowers, From the night-wind call them back, And fold your leaves till the laughing hours Come forth on the sunbeam’s track! The lark lies couch’d in his grassy nest, And the honey-bee is gone, And all bright things are away to rest— Why watch ye thus alone? Is not your world a mournful one, When your sisters close their eyes, And your soft breath meets not a lingering tone Of song in the starry skies? Take ye no joy in the dayspring’s birth, When it kindles the sparks of dew? And the thousand strains of a forest’s mirth, Shall they gladden all but you? Shut your sweet bells till the fawn comes out On the sunny turf to play, And the woodland child, with a fairy shout, Goes dancing on his way. Nay, let our shadowy beauty bloom; When the stars give quiet light; And let us offer our faint perfume On the silent shrine of night. Call it not wasted, the scent we lend To the breeze when no step is nigh; Oh! Thus for ever the earth should send Her grateful breath on high! And love us as emblems, night’s dewy flowers, Of hopes unto sorrow given, That spring through the gloom of the darkest hours, Looking alone to Heaven!

The simple yet strange opening petition tells that night-wanderers have traveled into strange states of mind: “Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory, / Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping” (Whitman, “The Sleepers”). Made vulnerable by darkness and (temporary) homelessness, the wanderer’s senses wake up into his confusion. He reacts protectively and conservatively, encouraging the flowers to retract their odors, to reverse nature, which seems thoroughly possible in his

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confusion. Making an analogy to the domain of poetry, one can say that the wanderer’s remarks are anti-poetic, about enclosing rather than disclosing; the petition, however, come from a spirit of praise and love, and one might say from another poetic instinct of containment and deferral: release the odors later, in the day! But in this proposal, the wanderer reveals a conventionality of vision, a narrowness in the imagination, and a willingness to stay within a familiar domain. The night (like that in Novalis’s Hymns to the Night) is a new domain, with different landmarks and different rules and possible events that evoke the coordinate of spiritual love. At the same time the wanderer instinctively, poetically, deems the odors precious; he wants to save them for what he considers proper use. The issue again is waste. Neither the wanderer nor the night-flowers wants to waste the fragrant bloom, but each imagines good uses differently. Read coolly from outside the wanderer’s poetic psychosis, the poem suggests that waste may be all there is; but to imagine waste is to imagine the precious, to describe and praise the unacknowledged. To unfold, to disclose, to expire, to release the breath that is waste: the wanderer exhorts the flowers not to waste their breath. The dictionary recognizes a “night-blooming flower,” a “night-blooming cereus, any of several tropical cacti of the genera Hylocereus and Selenicereus, with flowers that open only at night, esp. H. undilatus, which has very large fragrant white flowers.” Blowing, a form of breathing, is also a blooming. These blooms originate in the tropics, intense and penetrating, coming from afar, from another domain, which stimulate the trope of metaphor in the speaker. The expiring is also the blooming, creative breath. This poem proposes two different poetries in an agonistic conflict. The first is a poetics of deferral and containment: closure, postponing the end, contemplating, and remembering. The second indicates a poetics of presentness, of participation in the moment. The second fits more with this poem’s imagery, with its disclosing and dispensing of perfumes. It also fits with the imagery of expiration, in which poem’s close, like breath’s close, occurs “organically,” only with the death of breath itself. There is a correspondence: flowers are not only like people but work on the same principle of unfolding—odors, prayers—in a cosmos that, in spite of dispersal, is shaped responsively, by heaven. To import an image from Rilke, it is as if the dispersed odors and prayers eventually come to rest in the hands of God. In this essay I have been proposing that Hemans’s poetics of expiration thrives on the conversion of the implication of the expiring breath—an emptying out, an entropy, dying itself—into a filling and celebrating. The voice of what expires has a content deemed more precious for its thinness (as opposed to the effusive—that is, full and “thick” and ever-abundant—voice).

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The emptying becomes a disclosure and a proliferation. Not surprisingly, Hemans often dwells in the multiple: anaphora and parataxis appear with some regularity. In the poetry of expiration, the dying breath, a loss of the lyric subject’s integrity, its boundedness, recovers in new forms, which can include an accounting of elements of the referent, the world. As an expression of holiness, multiplicity for Hemans appears as correspondences radiating from the divine source. Hemans’s beautiful poem “To Wordsworth”24 places the poet whom she admired and with whom there was mutual poetic influence in the late 1820s in the context of her own poetry of expiration. The light she casts upon him therefore differs from that of tradition. For our century he epitomizes the “poet of the self,” one whose identity is stated clearly from the outset and whose poems chart an Odyssey of self-bewilderment and rediscovery. Further identified with “the poet” or with one of several possible social and political subject-positions, Wordsworth’s speakers have resided for us on the human scale, recognizable as persons who thrive in some aspect of our social world. He has been for us the psychosocial ego as hero. Hemans addresses Wordsworth in that same metrical scale (the ten-syllable line), but the poetry she is elaborating does not highlight the ego or the social person. Clearly she struggled with this issue in her title for the poem. She first called it “To the Author of the Excursion and the Lyrical Ballads,” then “To the Poet Wordsworth,” and finally “To Wordsworth.” The poem’s successive titles reflect her redefinition of his poetics and his effect on readers. A published author’s poems reach the reader on the level of the marketplace; in an age newly attuned to its power to affect response to poetry, Hemans—herself so completely a beneficiary of the marketplace’s largesse—sees Wordsworth’s function as striking at a more intrinsic level of being, the soul. To call Wordsworth a “poet” would bypass the problem of the marketplace but would characterize him in terms of his writing and his calling. To be a poet in the decade (1820s) after high Romanticism is both to establish a professional distinction and a certain alienation and specialization, but also it indicates the labor of writing inscribed, distinctly, upon the flow of prearticulate voices. Hemans often ventriloquises these voices (e.g., “The Voices of Spring,” “The Sound of the Sea,” “The Lyre’s Lament,” “The Voice of Music,” “The Voice of the Waves”). Even “The Nightingale’s Death Song” and “The Last Song of Sappho” and even more “The Indian Woman’s Death Song” gain a certain authenticity as they approach the place where poetic language as a form of death and the prearticulate language of nature and the collective merge. Finally, she alights upon “To Wordsworth” as a way of naming and praising a poetry that for her joins and supplements the voices of that surface and “flow

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forth” as the healthful waves of the sources of life. Her Wordsworth is a poet not “sentimental,” belonging to the stage of self-conscious inscription upon the world, but rather of “deep song” (like the origins of Garcia Lorca’s poetry, “canto profundo”). Her poem “discloses” or “diffuses” a definition and evaluation of his “deep song”: Thine is a strain to read among the hills, The old and full of voices—by the source Of some free stream, whose gladdening presence fills The solitude with sound; for in its course Even such is thy deep song, that seems a part Of those high scenes, a fountain from their heart.

Hemans is emulating, or envisioning, the effect, as she sees it, of Wordsworth’s poetry, pouring out from some free stream. The ten-syllable lines are for her unusually full and slowly paced (filled with a preponderance of monosyllables). Within the rhymed stanza form are well-placed enjambments (momentarily recalling Wordsworth’s own blank verse) that further lengthen the line. Adjectives modify dimly and unobtrusively, unabashedly serving the “flow” of line to its natural end. Two apparently opposing motions characterize his poetry: (1) poetry fills spaces or containers and (2) it “diffuses” or discloses, the latter, as I have shown, occurring in the presence of death and dying: Or where the shadows of dark solemn yews Brood silently o’er some lone burial ground, Thy verse hath power that brightly might diffuse A breath, a kindling, as of spring, around; . . .

She proposes that Wordsworth, like the hills, has different voices for different occasions, and each stanza elaborates one, showing how in each case the voice insinuates itself into the well-being of persons. His poetry, in contrast to her own, has no waste. Moreover, he has managed the task of religious poetry, the singular source and the many manifestations: True bard and holy!—thou art e’en as one Who, by some secret gift of soul or eye, In every spot beneath the smiling sun, Sees where the springs of living waters lie: Unseen a while they sleep—till, touched by thee, Bright healthful waves flow forth, to each glad wanderer free.

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Bard, not poet, conduit of vision, seer but not maker, magician perhaps, who sets in motion the living energies that find their ways to those open to them, wanderers vulnerable to encountering the preciousness of the principle of life. Although his verse can “diffuse / A breath, a kindling, as of spring, around,” it is not described in any way as expiration; in this regard her Wordsworth’s poetry might be called “naive” whereas her own would be “sentimental”: her verse itself shows its consciousness of death. Although we might find that Hemans simplifies Wordsworth’s poetry, she would more accurately be said to focus, in ways that readers often forget to do, on the visionary side of it, the expansive qualities that take us past a social consciousness into the sources of life. One wonders if this poem written in 1826 affected Wordsworth’s poetry of the late 1820s and early 1830s. Evening Voluntaries is underappreciated by all but a few Wordsworth scholars, a “suite” of poems that attempts, even in its ten-syllable rhyming couplets, a streaming of verse, a gentle supplement that “sees where the springs of living waters lie.” One must consider her epithets for Wordsworth, “true” and “holy,” which are not simply general terms of reverent praise but are descriptive of a unique content and effect that may refer to that toward which Hemans herself struggled. Given that poetry deals with appearances, “true” and “holy” poetry—particularly for a poet, as Susan Howe said of Dickinson, “on the trace of the holy”—would be that which manages within the borders of the poem to see and release the “numinous,” as not so much a feeling but the objective presence of the divine (Rudolph Otto). She proposes that one capable of receiving this is defined as wandering, vulnerable, and unmoored but “glad” and revived on the journey of life. Hemans grants to Wordsworth the achievement of bardic holiness, which, I believe, would constitute her own (late) goal as poet. Yet a poet of expiration and of the Fancy, she more literally writes a poetry of “sacred waste” as a way of temporarily solving the tension between the call of holiness and the call of poetry. Her last poems are moving precisely because she understands this tension as central to modern (nineteenth-century) poetry and successfully makes it the drama of her lyrics. * * * Shortly after the death of Felicia Hemans in 1835, three poets—Laetitia Landon, Elizabeth Barrett, and William Wordsworth—composed tributes to her in poetry. All, particularly the first two, give serious and relevant readings of her work and catch Hemans’s conflict between the expiring life and the saved holy perfume of life in their debate. As her poem proceeds,

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Landon attaches herself to Hemans the person and finds that her life, with its sorrows and burdens, has seeped into the poems. Using Hemans’s imagery (and quoting an opening line of one of her most popular lyrics) she petitions: Bring flowers,—the perfumed, and the pure,— Those with the morning dew, A sigh in every fragrant leaf, A tear on every hue. So pure, so sweet thy life has been, So filling earth and air With odours and with loveliness, Till common scenes grew fair.

And later: Thy song is sorrowful as winds That wander o’er the plain, And ask for summer’s vanished flowers, And ask for them in vain.25

The perfumed expirations that fill others with pleasure contain the sorrows of Hemans’s life, and the rest of the poem builds her up as a poet of the “bitter logic” and scarce economy of the historical poet sacrificed to her work. Barrett refuses the grief in order to concentrate on her poetic line as something not touched by death: Perhaps she shudder’d while the world’s Cold hand her brow was wreathing: But wrong’d she ne’er that mystic breath Which breathed in all her breathing,— Which drew from rocky earth and man Abstractions high and moving,—. . .26

Unerringly she catches the language of Hemans’s line with its insistent language of breath and/as expiration, which for Barrett belongs properly to a poetry of holiness, unconstrained by her personal burdens. Between Landon and Barrett there appear two ways of reading, centering on the question of poetry’s submission (or not) to the normative and to biology. Wordsworth’s language for Hemans in “Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg” comes straight from her poem in praise of him: “holy,” “spring,” “deep,” and (with reference to her death), “breath” (less). Indeed the phrase “holy Spirit, / Sweet as the spring,” puts the debate about her in

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terms of the conflict between holiness and the sense (and sensation) of responsiveness of poetry to the world. Scott’s complaint from 1823, that Hemans’s poetry was too “poetical” with too many flowers and too little fruit, is, I have tried to show, precisely correct for and prophetic of her later lyrics. Disinclined to be dismissive, Scott puts off his valuation onto his “elderly” condition, as if to categorize hers as a poetry of youth, which means, of course, not the poetry of a person of relatively few years but one whose poetry engages spring-time energies of renewal, the visionary sense of finding in the wasteful expirations of flowers the sources of life, beauty, and love—in the infinitely capacious title of Williams’s early book, Spring and All. A paradox of visionary poetry: generativity without fruit. Mary Wollstonecraft (Vindication of the Rights of Man) associated the “flowers” of Edmund Burke’s rhetoric of invective against the French Revolution and its sympathizers with self-serving passions, with avoidance of the plight of the poor and of women, and with irrationality. She and Scott meet on the grounds of assessing the deleterious effects of figurative language as ornament, a venerable tradition in the history of, in particular, theory of metaphor. Hemans, I am arguing, anticipates the other tradition that finds perceptual transformation embedded in the (excessive) privileging of the supplement. Tempted to conclude with reference to this poetics of visionary fecundity and generativity, I have nonetheless been haunted by a harsher construction of these apparently slight yet very appealing lyrics, one that tests further their poet’s investment in “poetry” in an absolute sense. We have learned to encompass or interpret Hemans’s poetry through the lenses of the biographical, history and the historical, the religious, the domestic, and all of which in turn rests finally upon the question of gender. These late lyrics, so often stripped of obvious markers of social situatedness particularly when compared to her earlier longer narrative, discursive, and dramatic works, really do seem, as Sweet observed, displacements from that rootedness in contexts. The expiring breath, the hues and odors, the dying songs all contribute to the aura of dis-, or rather, un-location. A disembodiment for the sake of the holy implies a poetry of the absolute, at the same time that language as meaning-ful is emptied, as a “superficial superficiality.” It is hard not to see the gendered source and expression of her particular version of a poetry of the Fancy as less an expression of fecundity and “cheerfulness” and more an instance of Maria Jewsbury’s “anti-cheerfulness.” Yet in these poems this does not result in a retreat of a more predictable consoling stolidity or shoring up of “self”; rather Hemans pursues the possibility of a poetry of attenuation, of valued ephemerality, of unmoored voices caught in their passing on the stream of the air. Hemans’s terror, late in her life, that she had “wasted” her capacities on small poems

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instead of grander projects may be masking the “divine terror” of an extreme poetic utterance “without content” and may be what Fanny Howe means by “separation’s horror.”27 The Fancy, what might be called a comic poetics, has its sacrificial side: for a brief period in her career, Felicia Hemans committed herself to a poetic heroism unique in the Romantic Era.

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PART III

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CHAPTER 7 THE FANCY: FROM POETRY TO BOXING AND BACK

The fight, the fight’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. William Hazlitt, “The Fight” The more distant and legitimate the relations between the two realities brought together, the stronger the image will be. . .the more emotive power and poetic reality it will possess. Pierre Reverdy1

illiam Hazlitt presides over the final third of this book: the Hazlitt who wrote brilliantly about “poetry in general” and the English poets (1818) and who compiled in 1824 a superb anthology not only of British poetry from Chaucer but also of the first selection of “Living Poets,” and the Hazlitt who wrote one of the greatest journalistic essays in English, “The Fight” (1822). The juxtaposition and combination of disparate literary activities in Hazlitt’s career reverberate to the major trope in Hazlitt’s writing and are characteristic of the Fancy. In chapter 8 I present Hazlitt’s anthology Select British Poets as a work that, like most anthologies, interprets poems by means of contiguities—what sits next to what—showing how this principle guides Hazlitt’s choices. Then chapter 9, growing out of chapter 8, reinterprets Wordsworth and Keats according to the principles of the Fancy and following Hazlitt’s selections and juxtapositions. (Indeed, juxtaposition defines the procedure of Unfettering Poetry: canonical poetry discussed next to the noncanonical, poetry of men next to that of women, and in this chapter poetry next to prose.) In this chapter, poetry and boxing—“distant and legitimate” realities—inhabit the same frame.

W

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Hazlitt’s juxtaposition of boxing and poetry in “The Fight” is not idiosyncratic or whimsical since in the early nineteenth century the boxing community was known by a term associated, in another part of society, with poetry: the Fancy. “The Fancy” was the name ascribed to boxers, their managers, their promoters, and their “fans”—anyone, in other words, who “fancied,” that is, showed enthusiasm for, boxing. In “The Fight” Hazlitt calls attention to the curious coincidence of boxing and poetry, or the poetic faculty. But here he only alludes to the more overt linkage found in Pierce Egan’s Real Life in London (1821) and J. H. Reynolds’ The Fancy (1820), which record poems written about and occasionally by the boxers themselves. These three works, each of which I present in the course of this chapter, ask the student of the poetry and poetics of the Fancy how they can be further illuminated by this unexpected contemporary interconnection between poetry and popular culture and entertainment. Regency boxing conjoined with poetry releases an entire constellation of intimately but unexpectedly related elements. First of all there is the society of the Fancy: the boxers, usually but not always from the lower classes; their economically somewhat better off managers and promoters; their fans who come from all quarters of society, among whom are the “dandies” who, as strangely indeterminate figures performing fashion and performing the feminine, “mince their steps” in the Fancy-crowd. The writers of the (boxing) Fancy events, themselves sympathetic figures on the periphery of what can only be described as a festival of the fight (and to the degree that they partake of Cockney culture on the periphery of establishment culture), to a greater or lesser degree, construct their account of the occasion by emphasizing these various juxtapositions: in the spirit, then, of the poetic Fancy, the account is full of generic but also class heterogeneity. This extends to the signature slang of the boxing Fancy, its “flash” language, which results in a heteroglossal writing. Moreover, the Fancy produces generically hybrid literature: journalism and poetry (Real Life in London), fictional biography and poetry (The Fancy), and journalism and the traditional essay (“The Fight”).2 Although staged fights often took place in the country, the society of boxing and the literature it produced are distinctly urban, with the city’s swarm of classes and the aura of the market that permeates it. Characteristic of urban literature in Europe and England from the eighteenth century through surrealism is emphasis on the referent. The city—including the urban-inflected domain of fighting—constantly brings surprises and shocks to the sentient subject: something new or unexpected suddenly comes into view receiving notice, drawing the subject “out of its own nature” (Shelley). There is simply no space for the contemplative ego to expand its own drama of self. Instead lively conversation and confrontation make up

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the fabric of subjective existence. In this sense the literature of the boxing Fancy, like that of the poetic Fancy, features the referent more than the lyric subject. At times the literature of the boxing Fancy, particularly that of Reynolds and Hazlitt, turns this preference for the referent and diminishment of the subject into an ethical principle: better to cultivate a cheerful generosity toward others than arrogance and egotism about one’s own prowess; even bigotry (see Hunt on the dangers of “anti-cheerfulness”) in sport and in literature can result. One outcome of this egotism and its narrowness, particularly for poets, is a misplaced hunger for “fame.” The society of the Fancy, even though it features dramas of winning and losing, encourages a spirit of friendship, of generosity: in short, it proposes a society of cheerfulness. In poetry the arrogant writer, like an arrogant boxer, seeks fame directly. Reynolds, Hazlitt, and Keats all argue (often in the same terms) that fame in literature comes, if it comes at all, to the person who puts aside his ego in order to focus on the task at hand (the referent). Keats’s critique of Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime,” his goal of becoming a “chameleon poet” with no identity to block the path to a clear attention to and rendering of the referent, his “negative capability,” has this affinity to the ideal ethical state of the boxing Fancy but also, curiously, to that societal hanger-on, the dandy: the latter proclaims his own identitilessness, a figure of pure fashion, or rather a performer or entertainer of fashion, and of obscure economic and gender status. In all cases the refusal of a life driven by the ego becomes a critique of dominant cultural ideology and of the values of the market from within (not, as proclaimed by the Lake Poets, from without) urban society. The writing featured in this chapter takes the characteristics of the Fancy a step further into the matrix of popular, material culture. Begin by observing the phenomenon of the swarm or overflow of the society of The Fancy going to see a fight, a gathering that momentarily dissolves the class hierarchies of early-nineteenth-century England. It dissolves the social world as the site of “getting and spending” and instead, as mass entertainment, becomes a scene of vast expenditure without the “substance” (note the unexpected resonance with Hemans’s late lyrics) that the market offers. What kinds of persons enter such a scene?—first I focus on three types: the boxer who participates in the fight, the dandy who attends it and performs a world of sheer expenditure and the (otherwise underrepresented) world of the feminine, and the writer (poet or journalist as witness) who “constructs” this world as a set of juxtapositions of society’s varied elements including those of boxing and poetry themselves. In the middle section of the chapter, picking up on Hazlitt’s concern with narrow-mindedness and egotism in boxers, poets, and “John Bull” Englishmen, I consider in this regard Romantic assessments of Byron and Keats, specifically the interconnection

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of egotism and poetics as a major defining issue in a poetics of the Fancy. This discussion then leads to the concluding readings of Reynolds’s The Fancy (with its outcome in a flood of poems) and Hazlitt’s “The Fight.” Contemporary accounts of boxing matches (which can feature all three social types) evoke a scene that couldn’t be further from the standard image of Romantic poetic composition—the lonely vatic bard, the poet “lying on his couch” recollecting childhood. John Masefield (in his Introduction to Reynolds’s The Fancy) summarizes, by contrast, the colorful world of “overflowing,” as Hazlitt called it, humanity on its way to a fight to be held somewhere in the countryside—like a slow-moving swarm of bees the Fancy dances its way with all the variegation of an entire society: The noise, and the songs, and the music of the horns, and the thunder of the galloping horses, were not less stirring than the gallantry of the equipments. Each man wore the colours of his fancy; and each white overcoat was hung with a flag or streamer at the neck, where the blue and white neckcloth came rolling from the scarf-pin. The dandies came flaunting their crimsons; and now and then a famous fighter tooled past behind positions in scarlet. . . And then the battlefield. . .There are the gigs, and coaches, and curricles stream up in the fields, and crowded with sports, Jews, gipsies and flash coves. There is the inviolate green turf, with its white-roped square, and the colours of both men upon the stakes. . .There are the members of “the Fancy” chewing straws and gathering into little knots. And there, with music to welcome them, come the two principals swathed in rugs, and sucking oranges.3

The strange conjunction of fashion and sport, of boxers and dandies, promotes an even more obvious image of class confusion and mixings. Bryan Weller Procter (“Barry Cornwall”) lived this conjunction: For one brief period [1816] he lived the life of a London dandy. . .Most surpassing, in the light of the meek person his contemporaries described him as being, was his engaging Tom Cribb, the former champion of England, to instruct him in the fine points of pugilism.4

The excess associated with the fight—overflowing crowds, expenditure of vast quantities of money, the violence in the ring—belongs, of course, to visionary poetry such as that of the Fancy: boundaries exist to be broken! Exuberance is beauty! Georges Bataille makes the same connections but insists upon the sacrificial nature of both poetry and the “immense crowds” of huge entertainments and sporting events (such as boxing, which, however, he does not mention).5 Expenditure is loss: “Immense crowds are present; their passions most often burst forth beyond any restraint.” Loss of “insane sums of money” suggests that the production, so to speak, of the

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event in all of its nearly ecstatic splendour, occurs only with its ecstatic wasting of money. What is made is utterly ephemeral in terms of “product” but often lasting in collective as well as personal memories. Pierce Egan introduces his chapter “Fancy Sports” with a perfect realization of Bataille’s analysis of expenditure, sporting events, crowds, and poetry, by means of a poem addressed aggressively to the wealthy (the heroic couplet epigraph setting the boxer in the epic frame):6 [Boxers], with less malice, at destruction play. You, like gamecocks, strike death with polish’d steel; They, dung-hill-bred, use only nature’s heel; They fight for something—you for nothing fight; They box for love, but you destroy in spite.

For the Fancy, loss is real—money, even the fighter’s health—but it “produces” love, momentarily a classless society, perhaps what Agamben would call “unreality” but only in the sense that reality is made equivalent to use and exchange. Bataille’s “sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things” (p. 119) might therefore apply equally to the fight (love, vision of a mingling of classes) and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as a poem of sacrifice (life for art, “who are these coming to the sacrifice?”). Here is Egan’s, and the Fancy’s, version of Blake’s distinction between mental and corporeal warfare lined up with the predisposition of, respectively, the lower and upper classes. With the boxing Fancy destruction and non-productive expenditure have nothing to do with control and suppression but with love and play. This socially aggressive playfulness, like that of the Cockney school poets and fellow travelers, accounts for the marginal status of the Fancy, which, of course, they exploit and which appears as the flaunting of a particular slang of the Fancy coterie, a “flash” language and a flaunting of a negative—or weightless—or non-identity. In Egan, the introduction and description of a boxer occurs in the presence of flash language: “That,” said Tom, “is a curious fellow, and a devilish clever fellow too—for although he has but one arm, he is a man of science” [knowledge and skill in boxing]. “In what way?” enquired Bob. “He is a pugilist,” said Tom, “one of those courageous gentlemen who can queer the daylights, top the claret, prevent telling fibs, and pop the noddle into chancery; and a devilish good hand he is . . .” “I also put on a glove, for it would not be fair to attack a one-armed man with two, and no one ought to take the odds in combat. To it we went, and shewed first blood, for he tapped the claret in no time.”7

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Although the Fancy-slang indicates the powerful society of boxing enthusiasts and is a kind of “product” of the Fancy, such “flash” language calls attention to its value as pure signification, which in turn produces nothing but pleasure for its adherents and perhaps a more complex response to those beyond the inner circle. This slang is part of the “apparel” of the Fancy; so much of the identification of the Fancy, of dandies, and of “Cockneys” such as Keats, Hunt, and, peripherally, Byron is registered through appearances and fashion. (One might, by contrast, show interest in the dress of Wordsworth and Coleridge but not as the essence of who they are or what they do. Hazlitt, whose circle included all of the Regency periphery, actually presented a stunning verbal portrait of Wordsworth and Coleridge, discovering their identity in physical appearance and the sound of their voices, in “My First Acquaintance with Poets.” The Tory press, in an 1820 review of Leigh Hunt’s The Months, hoped for a future maturation of Keats to be registered in a decision to no longer to wear his collar open, Cockney-style.8) A society not simply of appearances but one that calls attention to life-as-fashion, one that plays with the markers of fashion, finds vitality in the ephemeral itself—the more one traffics in the fleeting, the more authentic one is. I have already given Masefield’s summary of the colorful boxing scene that includes the dandy; in “Tom’s” account of the boxer given above, Pierre Egan juxtaposes, or complements, the picture with a dandy: Tom’s foot caught the toe of a gentleman, who was mincing along the pathway with all the care and precision of a dancing master, which had the effect of bringing him to the ground in an instant as effectually as a blow from one of the fancy. (p. 72)

Though dandies such as Beau Brummell may have come from the lower classes, their pretentions directed them to the upper class, not precisely as aspirants but more in the manner of Rameau’s Nephew for whom the upper classes might provide the material necessities while leaving them free for their own somewhat critical performance of the world of privilege. The boxer and the dandy both have a strong public presence, but they engage society very differently: the boxer as one who engenders enthusiasm in his athletic skill and prowess, the dandy, by contrast, performing and miming a world of wealth and fashion from a position somewhat outside that world. The boxer’s identity derives from his success in the ring, the dandy’s from, paradoxically, a refusal of identity. Yet for both, egotism produces a self precisely inauthentic and beholden both to political and market hierarchies: the prized “depth” of character belongs to those who have been bought. For Hazlitt, to be sure, the heroic figure of the boxer

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can show a “pluck,” that asserts a moral courage, which those possessed of more “ego” do not have. But this lack of ego seems to have brought the members of the Fancy into the orbit of the Dandies described by Pierce Egan as “nondescripts,” who “profess to be Nothing,” and whose . . .gender [is] of the doubtful kind: A something, a nothing, not to be defined; ‘Twould puzzle worlds its sex to ascertain, So very empty, and so very vain. (Real Life. . ., p. 73)

“How many Dandies, professing to be Nothing, may be required to accomplish the proposed intention of making Something, may. . .be discovered by the worthy Magistrate”—that is, who would send them to jail for their insolence in calling themselves “nothing”; to insist upon one’s emptiness flaunts a system of (Foucauldian) control over the private life. Part of what both dandies and boxers resist, as I said before, is “depth” of personality. This is evident in Byron’s famous screen, with the image of art and culture on one side and a boxer on the other. The juxtaposition is all surface, appearance, and performance. “And as Balzac describes it, in making himself a dandy, a man becomes a piece of boudoir furniture, an extremely ingenious mannequin, who can sit upon a horse or a sofa. . .but a Thinking being. . .never.”9 Or, as Baudelaire said, “the dandy aspires to insensibility” (ibid., p. 28). What Giorgio Agamben says about the dandy’s reconsideration of the relation to objects and to social behavior, a critical attitude to the overweening culture of commodities can well apply to the boxers (and all with membership in the Fancy) and the Cockney poets at well:10 To men who had lost their self-possession, the dandy, who makes of elegance the superfluous his raison d’etre, teaches the possibility of a new relation to things, which goes beyond both the enjoyment of their use-value and the accumulation of their exchange value. He is the redeemer of things, the one who wipes out, with his elegance, their original sin: the commodity.

At the same time Beau Brummell’s “jests” are radically minimal, asymptotically disappearing, suggests Hazlitt, to the point that they barely partake of sense: “He has arrived at the very minimum of wit, and reduced it. . .to an almost invisible point. . .we may say of Mr. Brummell’s jests, that they are a meaning so attenuated that ‘nothing lives ‘twixt them and nonsense’:—they hover on the very brink of vacancy, and are in their shadowy composition next of kin to nonentities. . .”

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A figure spinning a discourse of nonsense and vacancy, Brummell, in the language of Bataille and Agamben, casts up a vision of expenditure without use; indeed, Hazlitt’s thing with the “mysterious attributes of a coat” approximates a realm of objects and a habit, or possibility, of mind not bent on the acquisition of meaning, or meaning-as-acquisition. This condition produces a poetry of the signifier, which, far from being a poetry of unreality, yields a focus on the object occasioning the free play of mind. This can be described as the poetics of the Fancy. It is telling that Hazlitt’s account of Byron—at times a dandyish figure who employs both parataxis and juxtaposition, tropes of a poetry of the referent—discovers egotism in the “noble poet,” which he associates with Byron’s upper-class position. Not only Wordsworth, but one of Wordsworth’s great contemporary critics (see Byron’s Vision of Judgment and Don Juan) comes in for his own drubbing from the pen of Hazlitt—in short, ego-driven poetry (and the active pursuit of “fame”), a topic of interest to Hunt, Hazlitt, and Reynolds as well as Keats, is blind to some of the pressing social issues of the age. It is also crucial to observe that the later Romantic critique of the free-standing ego is not a radical skepticism of early Romantic visionary idealism: on the contrary, it is a visionary critique from the perspective of the Fancy: egolessness opens one, partly out of a freed-up generosity, to the play of mind interacting with contradictory social realities. Furthermore, it refuses to stand above the world of new market forces and commodity culture but often turns to them in order to raise the possibility of entertainment and art as expenditure without use. Hazlitt and Reynolds, writing respectively about Byron and Keats, bring together the progressive Regency-decade outlook on the relationship among the ego, class, and poetry. Here their critiques do not engage the domain of boxing, but they will later in The Fancy and “The Fight.” Hazlitt’s complex review of Byron in The Spirit of the Age begins with praise for a vital poetics of juxtaposition: The Don Juan indeed has great power; but its power is owing to the force of the serious writing, and to the contrast between that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are surprised that any one should turn round and travestie himself: the drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and feelings. He makes virtue serve as a foil to vice; dandyism is (for want of any other) a variety of genius. A classic intoxication is followed by a splashing of soda-water, by frothy effusions of ordinary bile. . .(p. 122)

This passage shows Hazlitt at his most intuitive about the poetics-of-theage. The author of “The Fight,” “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” and

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“The Indian Jugglers” summarizes the defining features of Byron’s version of the Fancy and signals the poetics of combination or juxtaposition of unrelated elements, domains, and styles of writing. Dandyism is a variety of genius because, being without commitments, it is content with the juxtaposition of one thing and another—there is no ideological preference, no “depth” of mind or soul. The Dandy, Hazlitt implies, is the perfect character type to realize the genius of the Fancy. Furthermore, not seamless unity but discontinuity produces great power—precisely what Pierre Reverdy later claimed for the “poetic reality” of juxtaposed images. To take a very familiar and wholly characteristic example of Byron’s juxtaposition of domains in Don Juan (Canto I, stanza 92): He [ Juan] thought about himself and the whole earth, Of man the wonderful and of the stars And how the deuce they ever could have birth, And then he thought of earthquakes and of wars, How many miles the moon might have in girth, Of air balloons and of the many bars To perfect knowledge of the boundless skies. And then he thought of Donna Julia’s eyes.

Yet the strength of a poetry of juxtaposition, which Hazlitt admires, turns out, in the case of Byron, to have a limitation, a result of an egotistical cynicism based on his noble class. The world of contradiction to which the poetry of the Fancy ought to attend begins to lose its importance. Hazlitt says of Byron: “By hating and despising others, he does not learn to be satisfied with himself. A fastidious man soon grows querulous and splenetic. If there is nobody but ourselves to come up to our idea of fancied perfection, we easily get tired of our idol. . . .When a man is tired of what he is, by a natural perversity he sets up for what he is not.”11 Unlike a thoroughgoing poet of the Fancy, Byron gets caught in the unreality of the subject rather than appropriating it. His membership in the nobility reinforces a narrowness as a poet, not only because of his “splenetic” view of others and false self-adulation but because the play of mind and fostering of juxtapositions works, paradoxically, to restrict his range. “. . .he is that anomaly in letters and in society, a Noble Poet. . .His Muse is also a lady of quality.” Byron’s juxtapositions are not, as with most poets of the Fancy, based primarily on democratic impulses coming from within the process of the expanding, adversarial middle class, but from above it. He doesn’t see himself as part of the problem of society as well as its possible solution. Indeed, Hazlitt makes one wonder if the twentieth century has over estimated Byron’s democratic pretentions. Byron, in Don Juan, he says, “prostitutes” his talents, that is, becomes poetically promiscuous

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without becoming part of the world to which he alludes. Nothing could be further from Hazlitt’s Byron than Hazlitt’s narrative of “The Fight” with its fundamental juxtaposition of the aristocracy of literature and the amorphous, commingling mass of boxing enthusiasts called Fancy, all going to see a fight. (As we see later, Reynolds’s imitation of Don Juan’s ottava rima stanza includes a similar critique of Byron: Reynolds makes the stanza accommodate class juxtapositions.) In terms of experimental poetics, his most damning remark is that Byron’s “ruling motive is not love of the people but of distinction; not of truth but of singularity.” “Distinction” means being distinct from, and love of singularity refers to excessive self-love and far too little poetic interest in the multiplicity of persons and types. The juxtaposition of Byron and Keats demonstrates the stated causal relationship between the poet’s degree of ego-involvement and the degree of success with a poetics of the Fancy. Both Hazlitt and Reynolds see Byron’s limitations in poetry as a function of class. Keats’s attention to “the world” and to “other worlds” is in keeping with his life within and not above the swarm of society. In The Alfred of October 6, 1818,12 J. H. Reynolds, future author of The Fancy, published a defense of Keats and Endymion in reference to the infamous Quarterly attack, itself a critique from a member of a higher about a member of a lower class: the statement, anticipating Hazlitt, distinguishes Keats’s ego-less poetry from that of Byron, a “splendid and noble egotist.” Exactly three weeks later on October 27 Keats wrote to Reynolds his important formulation of the “chameleon poet,” one who has no character, whose identity is a nothing, and who enters and fills any object for the writing of a poem. This letter, along with its “Negative Capability” counterpart of December 1817, supports the tradition of Keats as Shakespearian disinterested poet. Historical research, of course, has dispelled the idea of Keats standing above the political fray, but readers have not considered that the self-less poet figure may emerge from the cultural and class nexus of dandies and boxers. No longer Trilling’s poet of “mature masculinity” with that “hard core of self” nor precisely the more “feminine” poet that critics such as Homans and Wolfson have recovered, Reynolds’ Keats, minimal and vacant, borders on a kind of gender-less, ego-less “non-identity”—marginal, imaginatively promiscuous. What kind of poetry does such a person write? Perhaps it is this frame of cultural marginality (dandies and boxers) through which we ought to view Reynolds’s proto-chameleon–poet account of Keats’s poetry. Starting, again, with the counterposition of Byron’s “noble egotism,” Reynolds writes: [Keats] knows that Nature is better and older than he is, and he does not put himself on an equality with her. You do not see him, when you see her.

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The moon, and the mountainous foliage of the woods, and the azure sky, and the ruined and magic temple; the rock, the desert, and the sea; the leaf of the forest, and the embossed foam of the living ocean, are the spirits of his poetry; but he does not bring them in his own hand, or obtrude his person before you, when you are looking at them.

Reynolds’s listings immediately calls up the grammar of the poetry of the referent and the promiscuous imagination that it requires. He would be referring, both in the previous passage and in the one that follows, largely to the long poems in “loose” heroic couplets from Keats’s 1817 volume and from Endymion (1818), poems in which the lyric subject, if it is visible at all, loses itself in the referent, or more likely, in a profusion of referents. Poetry is a thing of generalities—a wanderer amid persons and things—not a pauser over one thing, or with one person. The mind of Mr. Keats, like the minds of our older poets, goes round the universe in its speculations and its dreams. It does not set itself a task. The manner of the world, the fictions and wonders of other worlds, are its subjects; not the pleasures of hope, or the pleasures of memory. The true poet confines his imagination to no one thing—his soul is an invisible ode to the passions.—He does not make a home for his mind in one land—its productions are an universal story, not an eastern tale. The fancies of Moore are exquisitely beautiful, as fancies, but they are always of one colour; his feelings are pathetic but they are “still harping on my daughter.” The true pathetic is to be found in the reflections on things, not in the moods and miseries of one person.

A brilliant touchstone account of a Fancy poetics written by the author of The Fancy, the passage in its final sentence explicitly declares that the Fancy’s inherent movement and outward-directedness stands in contrast to the (apparently) widespread poetry that settles on the inner life of the subject. The phrase “reflections on things,” indeed, could refer to a “poetry of mind” in contrast to “moods and miseries of one person” as a poetry of the drama of the ego. From the perspective of the boxing Fancy, such focus on the subject distorts the world in an egotism—“the world” being the great social heterogeneity that the festival of boxing collects. Keats’s poetic mind is nomadic, following a cathexis to objects no matter whether or not they are “real”; indeed, the melting of distinctions between real and fanciful makes poetic reality a flattening of the two and also implies a poetry of energetic mobility. In the terminology of Charles Bernstein (and in the spirit of Levinson’s reading), Keats’s is more a poetry of “impermeability” (conforming his imagination to no one thing, staying with surfaces) than of “absorption” (in one thing, a depth). In the same spirit Reynolds focuses on the plural rather than the singular, which anticipates the value George Oppen

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places on the “numerous” in poetry rather than the singular—the numerous is the envisioning of praise of objects and persons as fundamentally relational, a “constellation” or democracy of individualities, something that the splendid and noble egotism of a Byron cannot envision. It is this anti-egotistical manifestation in Keats’s poetry that leads Reynolds to associate Keats not with the poets of the moment but with the “old” poets, something Keats himself is inclined to do. In this article, “the moment” is bound up with the ego as an instrument of the normative. Keats’s poetry is expansive, dedicated to a traveling among different domains, a feature of the poets that precede the present commodity culture of the ego. Considering The Quarterly’s effort to consign Keats to oblivion, Reynolds then observes that a privileging of the poetry of the ego has created a situation in which no present-day poet will achieve fame past this moment. Ego, and therefore an emphasis on following current fashions in art, leads one to pursue fame, but: Poetry is the coyest creature that ever was wooed by man: she has something of the coquette in her; for she flirts with many, and seldom loves one.

Keats clearly referred to this passage when, in the spring of 1819, he wrote his two sonnets on Fame, which “will still be coy / to those who woo her.” If the poet leaves Fame alone, drops the ego’s interest in its own aggrandizement and diminishes its overinvolvement in a poem, and consequently allows the world to flow into the place (as the “fancy” extends outward) it might otherwise have occupied, then possibly Fame will follow. The Fame sonnets are joined by Keats’s sonnet “To Sleep” a prayer for, in Geoffrey Hartman’s phrase, anti–self-consciousness, and are bracketed by the tetrametercouplet poem to “Fancy” of the preceding December and the “Ode to Psyche,” just weeks away, with its evocation of the “gardener Fancy who breeding flowers will never breed the same.” That is, while writing poems that warn against too much ego-involvement, Keats produces complementary poems that petition for or prescribe a state of mind open to the world beyond the ego. To turn now to Reynolds’s The Fancy is to encounter a Keatsian poetics dramatized and mapped onto the lower-middle-class domain of sport. Taylor and Hessey, who were then publishing not only Keats but the peasant poet John Clare,13 must have felt at home with publishing in 1820 Reynolds’s late Romantic gem of a book The Fancy; A Selection from the Poetical Remains of the Late Peter Corcoran. Of Gray’s Inn. Student at Law. With a Brief Memoir of His Life. As a literary perversion of Romantic themes and writing, and as a magnet for the representation of a subculture missed by the canonical writing of the period, it ranks—but with more whimsy and

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playfulness—with Hazlitt’s 1823 Liber Amoris. Peter Corcoran, somewhat neglected by his parents, grows up in the city, plans to study law, falls in love, but also lapses into a love for pugilism, a love of the Fancy. His early unregulated life and intermittent parental love, the novel implies, leads into the attractively dissolute world of gaming, boxing, drink, and exclusively male companionship. The study of the law and love for Kate slip from his grasp; not only boxing and its society but a kind of fitful broken poetry take the place of the former. As the latter assume dominance in his life, his health diminishes (as if the society of the Fancy itself were unhealthy) and he dies, leaving a substantial scattering of “poetic remains” a selection of which fills out, after the prose “memoir,” most of the book. The pathetic, though vibrant, trajectory of Peter Corcoran’s short life dramatizes the attenuation of identity, which characterizes the dandy and the boxer, in the sense that they occupy a space that the consumer society has trouble isolating—indeed, the fluidity of the boxer’s identity is both its danger and its appeal. Laced in the “Preface” and appearing intermittently in the poetry is Reynolds’s concern, more and more seen in dialogue with Keats, about fame: I once had thought to have embalm’d my name With Poesy:—to have serv’d the gentle Muses With high sincerity:—but Fate refuses, And I am now become most strangely tame, And careless what becomes of Glory’s game— Who strives—who wins the wondrous prize—who loses! Not that the heavy world my spirit bruises; But I have not the heart to rush at Fame.14

Reynolds, through the character of Corcoran, show his incapacity to achieve fame in the normal way and, less overtly, the possibility that fame is associated with an inauthentic ego and therefore not worth seeking. Corcoran’s dying has about it its own negative heroism of giving up that hunger to be known by the markers of consumer success. His death, like that of Werther, Jacopo Ortis, Adolphe, and the Alastor poet, establishes a value in the “non-identity” that he achieves. “Fame,” whether in boxing or in poetry, seems to have meant, along with a penchant for arrogance and self-absorption, a capitulation to bourgeois ideology—the boxer and the dandy being located on the periphery—which implies turning a blind eye to the possibility of a truly democratic community. From February 1818 to the publication of The Fancy in 1820, Reynolds seems to have been developing with Keats, in letters and poems, a conviction about fame: the sense of fame as the success of the poet in

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fashioning a language and a form that reaches beyond the domain of the familiar, that in Keats’s phrase is “great and unobtrusive” and comes “like leaves to a tree,” that seems inherently “natural,” full of, in Hunt’s word, “sociability,” and at one with the collective, is easy to confuse with the pursuit of fame. The expansiveness of the former has implications for a democratic poetic vision whereas the narrowness of the latter produces a narrow vision of social possibility. In addition to Peter Corcoran’s two sonnets on the giving up of the pursuit of fame in poetry, Reynolds wrote and sent to Keats a sonnet “Farewell to the Muses” on the same subject. This poem and two sonnets on Robin Hood were written and exchanged with Keats in February 1818 in their apparent conversation about fame and poetry. These and sonnets in The Fancy present two sides of the fame issue: the turning away from the focus on the lyric subject to attention to the domain of a carefree and democratic world of Robin Hood, and a withdrawal from the ambition of fame in poetry. The earthiness, the modesty and anti-egotistical behavior, the indifference to acquisition for its own sake, all bring Robin Hood and the society of The Fancy into the same domain. The virtuous outlaw eschewing the goal of acquisition (a point made in Keats’s “Robin Hood”) produces a delight and radiance in all that lives. The petition, in one of Reynolds’sonnets, to go to Robin Hood’s world is addressed to an undefined person—not specifically a poet but presumably one whose sensitivity produces its own poetry: Go there, with summer and with evening,—go In the soft shadows like some wandering man,— And thou shalt far amid the forest know The archer men in green, with belt and bow, Feasting on pheasant river-foul and swan, With Robin at their head, and Marian.

The poetry of Robin Hood comes from one who has abandoned situatedness and socially defined reality in order to pass, in the manner of poetry of the Fancy, from domain to domain. Reynolds’s “Farewell to the Muses,” written on a fly-leaf of a volume of Shakespeare that he gave to Keats (February 14, 1818), declares his ease with giving up poetic ambition: “No feelings climb / Ambitiously within me.” But the comparable sonnets in The Fancy result from Peter Corcoran’s slide from respectability and commitment into the dissolute world of drinking and boxing: His muse abandoned all hope of achieving anything great or good, and it was with this feeling that he wrote the following sonnets. When it is recollected

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that they were composed by a despairing, self-ruined man, they may, to feeling breasts, assume a pathos, though in themselves they may have it not.

Although the narration doesn’t interpret the sonnets as a rich and new confusion of poetic purpose, it seems appropriate to see them as a monumental genre put to non- or anti-monumental use, perhaps one definition of a Romantic poetry of the Fancy. At the same time, the narrator’s view of Corcoran’s use of language and syntax portrays him as willing to produce broken streams of words and idiom that represent his lively but broken and mixed existence. The Fancy, in both the pugilistic and literary sense, results in a style (Corcoran’s) summarized by the narrator in the following way: His style of writing is not good—it is too broken, irresolute, and rugged; and is too anxious in its search after smart expressions to be continuous or elevated in its substance. Corcoran was remarkably fond of puns, as his work will exemplify. He wrote with great rapidity, when he could bring himself to write at all; but he more often commenced than concluded works; and it was a common case for him, to plan and open a new piece at night which was neglected or forgotten in the morning.

He was an open-form poet (a poet of multiple beginnings) for whom oblivion belonged to his poem; he didn’t reach for the sublime, the unified, because of puns and quotation, which contributed to his “broken style.” A unified, smooth style of “conclusions” moreover, would signal a contentment with and absorption in the dominant bourgeois society, with its prescripted narrative of social and economic success, stability, and willed blindness to society’s contradictions. Presented throughout as the work of a pathetic human failure, Corcoran’s poems and the following letter nonetheless suggest the narrator’s more than casual interest in the “remains” as an expression of something vital, even cheerful, emerging precisely out of Corcoran’s consciously marginal and conflicted position in a society represented by the boxing Fancy. Consider this letter written by Corcoran to his beloved who had just expressed her utter disenchantment with him and the Fancy to which he was becoming more and more devoted: MY DEAR KATE,—I assure you I am not fibbing, when I say, I regret that my last letter proved so severe a punisher to you. You have, however, returned upon me pretty smartly. You have quite hit me off my pugilistic legs,—doubled me and my letter up at a blow,—and actually floored me. And though (as this may serve to show) you have not altogether “taken the fight out of me,” yet you see I come very languidly up to the scratch; and this will be in all probability the last round in which I shall present myself before you in a milling attitude.

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You are too much for me. I am but a light weight, and you carry too much gravity. My rallyings are of no use. If I make a good hit, it does not tell upon you. You are too well guarded. I waste my wits and my wind to no purpose: if I try to plant a tickler upon your ribs that shall shake your sides, you laugh at me, instead of with me; and finally put in a write-hander upon me by the post, that disables my jaw and drops me. There is no standing up against such a rum customer as you are. So I shall in future keep myself out of the way of such punishment. Alas, for poor Fancy!—If her flowers meet with so nipping a reception in the neighbourhood of her own Moulsey, she may as well, (like Lord Castlereagh’s crocodile), put her hands into her breeches pockets; or turn them to anything else, rather than double them into fists. She had better at once cut down her gloves into mittens, and put her fingers into rings, instead of going into them herself.

Unable to meet her any more on the grounds of familiar English prose, he has to write this in-your-face jargon of the Fancy, which permanently alienates her from him. And like his broken, irresolute, and rugged style, this letter is essentially impure in its larding the sentences with slang as a manifestation of his broken or mixed class position and his partly willed failure of ambition. Style translates into lifestyle and back into poetry. As death approaches, he maintains himself, in the face of the melancholic situation, “gay, active and spirited to the last”; he projects, in other words, the affect of the Fancy, cheerfulness. The poetry he writes during the last few weeks of life is “light” and “for his own amusement,” not “productions” or monuments but, again, a version of pleasurable “expenditure as waste.” In this sense, a monumental, unconflicted poetry is associated with life and health and, implicitly, heterosexual love, and a wasteful poetry with death and disease, just as the “diversion” of boxing to which he committed himself is precisely what made him sick. Boxer, dandy, and poet all express the sacrifice of the productive for the nonproductive that calls attention to inequality of exchange; all situate themselves on the borders of ruling and lower classes, on the boundaries of acceptable social behavior. The association of sacrifice with the life and poetry of the Fancy leads, by way of introduction to Peter Corcoran’s poems, to the question both of sacrifice and aggression in the culture and poetry of the Fancy. This topic is best understood as first an issue of challenging class boundaries and second an issue of the mind’s freedom in a perceived age of the Panopticon. Part of life that Corcoran (and Reynolds on the larger scale of the whole work) sacrifices is the vital presence of women. His behavior to Kate finally turns her away, so that the “heroic” achievement of a broken but authentic life is a pyrrhic victory of that life’s incapacity to absorb

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women into it. Corcoran embodies and internalizes all these juxtapositions and sacrifices as does some of his poetry, but there is a cost in health. In this sense the ancient economy of the mutually exclusive relationship between life and art gets recast in class and gender terms and in terms of an insistence upon art as wasteful expenditure in an intense commodity culture. The principle, moreover, of this art and lifestyle—play amidst constraint—is in fact challenging and therefore aggressive ( just as there was aggression in the 1960s counterculture of play and love), perhaps captured most succinctly in Hazlitt’s Shakespearean epigraph for “The Fight” with its bold substitution of “fight” for “play.” Furthermore the literary or aesthetic domain of the boxing/poetry connection may exist in the idea that boxing is (as Pierce Egan had observed) an appearance of war or battle; victory but not death, modest demeanor and not the perpetuation of hatred and dominance, the image (or appearance) in fighting prowess and not the outcome of prowess in war, is the thing. In this sense both poetry and boxing are appearances, but both have an unsettling effect in social reality. Thus the substantial amount of poetry that follows the Memoir—as fanciful, playful, satirical, and simply various as it is—coalesces as a summation of the life lived intensely in the “broken middle” of social and cultural contradictions. The poetry in The Fancy (four times the length of the Prefatory Memoir) begins with a play King Tims the First about British emigrants to America who discover that their dissolute behavior in the New World is no different from the way it was at home; a fragment of an ottava rima Byronic imitation The Fields of Tothill follows; and the selection ends with miscellaneous short poems. (Both Hunt and Keats have the same sequencing of long poems followed by short pieces in their volumes.) Alluding in a headnote to Beppo, and exhibiting some of the playful techniques of digression and the privileging of rhyme over sense found in Don Juan, The Fields of Tothill (also recalling Mary Shelley’s title “The Fields of Fancy” later revised to Matilda) scarcely ventures into the story, being much occupied by the indecision and gaiety of the author—and perhaps he is rather too indecisive in all that he notices; but he is so unreserved in his misgivings and his wanderings, so candid in his communications, and so amiable in his explanations, that it is thought the public will love it, if only for its record of Peter’s eager, rattling, rambling, and fanciful nature. One can hardly imagine a richer account of the state of mind and the expression of the writer of the Fancy, the spirit of “L’Allegro” or cheerfulness permeating a darting curiosity and playfulness. Focusing on Peter’s “eager, rattling, and fanciful nature,” the headnote states, means diminishing attention to the plot, a priority that defines plot as ideologically already given and therefore suspect. Instead the poetry presents, in David Antin’s

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term, a “subjectivity,” the image of a mind in its act of encounter with the world, the image of a kind of mental freedom amidst social and ideological constraints, full of desire and roughness, befitting the energies of a person on the margins of society. The indecision and misgiving refers to the other side of the playful Fancy, a condition that renders the position of the writer identitiless. This is, more or less, the spirit of Byron, in his ottava rima poems, but, as the stanzas and the characters show, the Fancy spreads its eagerness throughout the social classes—as if a rambling, rattling, and fanciful nature requires a more variable social alertness. I long to be a writer of the rhyme; And since men may be Poets, and not know it, Why may not I be fit for the soft crime Of linking language with the view to show it. I do not make a fuss about “all time,” Give me to be the fleeting, darling Poet, That simmers on the pot of life, and then Is skimmed away with other scum of men. (Stanza II)

As with Byron, he claims desire for an anti-monumental poetry, if for a moment he can be the public’s “darling,” but Byron would never imagine, after a moment in the sun, being swept back into the great anonymity of the despised lower orders of society. And throughout his “fragment” social and literary aristocracies are in an agon with the lower classes underscored in the last (fifty-third) stanza of the poem, including the final reference to Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera: So now I’ll stop at Fancy’s livery-stable, Where Pegasus is taken in to bait, (Not in the manner just described): At table, Over my Cape Madeira, I’ll instate Think over all the incidents I’m able For my new Canto. It is rather late: To-morrow after breakfast’ about ten, As Macheath says, I’ll take to the road again.

Both Byron and Reynolds have developed this “broken” or “rattling” style of extensive caesuras to mark sudden digressive switches of perspectives and domains; both therefore challenge the orthodoxy of consistency in form and voice. But Reynolds’s serves, as this stanza shows, the juxtaposition of class differences: Byron’s Fancy would not have a livery stable. (I cannot

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help fancying Keats’s birthplace, a livery stable, as the proper origin of the modern Fancy. One also might query Marjorie Levinson’s thesis that Keats strove for a literary upward-mobility, and propose instead, that like the Reynolds of this poem and Hazlitt in “The Fight” he sought to foreground an agon of lower-middle-class experience with the poetic forms—ode, sonnet, heroic couplet, rondeau—of the literary aristocracy.) The protagonists, scarcely developed in The Fields of Tothill, are a daughter Bessie and her father who raises her and who thrives on the life and society of the Fancy in bear-baiting, drinking, and boxing. The account of these two stretches the limits of the imagined aristocratic form and lower-class content relation in the ottava rima: Fancy’s a term for every blackguardism— A term for favourite men, and favourite cocks— A term for gentlemen who make a schism Without the lobby or within the box— For the best rogues of polish’d vulgarism, And those who deal in scientific knocks— For bull-dog breeders, badger baiters—all Who live in gin and jail, or not at all.

Consider the precisely oxymoronic quality of a poet as a “rogue of polish’d vulgarism,” one on the margin of society who makes words from the vulgar or most common collectivity a piece of (formal) elegance and who belongs to the same subsociety as a badger baiter and all who live in gin and jail! The group, or suite, of poems (just twenty-three pages) that concludes The Fancy continues these principles of poetics of the Fancy in which play, juxtaposition (oxymoron), and humor dominate. Peter Corcoran is a cheerful fellow, even in his adversity; this is a poetry of cheerfulness, and this affect produces anti-egoistic, anti-monumental poems, which can with equal confidence draw their form from proper ballad and song or from the aristocratic tradition of the sonnet and the rhymed tetrameter couplet. Form and content, the aristocratic and the popular respectively never cease to play cheerfully, if uneasily, together. Reynolds deals with the question of the lyric subject as sincere and “simple,” a la Wordsworth, by writing what are essentially dramatic monologues in the voice of his author/protagonist. And fame, the antagonist in Reynolds’s poetics, belongs to the real heroes of the book, the boxers who “strive for fame.” It is hard to think of another group of poems written during the Romantic Period that explore as extensively and self-consciously as these do some of the poetics of the Fancy. The poetics is announced in the framing “Stanzas to Kate” with the juxtaposition of boxing, love, and poetry: it is written to Peter Corcoran’s

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beloved “on appearing before her after a casual ‘turn up’,” “or unplanned boxing match,” and gain its authority with an epigraph from Don Juan: —A black eye in a recent scuffle, For sometimes we must box without the muffle [gloves].

She has rejected him for appearing with a black eye and for his boxing enthusiasm (or fancy), and the poem is his protest. Perhaps this is Reynolds’s version of “The Eolian Harp” as a protest instead of submission to Sara’s quenching of Coleridge’s metaphysical/erotic enthusiasm: . . .You know I love sparring and poesy, Kate, And scarcely care whether I’m hit at, or kiss’d;— You know that Spring* equally makes me elate, With the blow of a flower, and the blow of a fist. . . . Forgive me,—and never, oh, never again, I’ll cultivate light blue, or brown inebriety; I’ll give up all chance of a fracture or sprain, And part, worse than all, with Pierce Egan’s society. . . . And, Kate!—if you’ll fib from your forehead that frown, And spar with a lighter and prettier tone;— I’ll look,—if the swelling should ever go down, And these eyes look again,—upon you, love, alone. *I am not clear whether Mr. Corcoran alluded here to the season, or the pugilist of this name [narrator’s note].

Kate cannot stand the mixing and confusion that most of these poems promote, of boxing and love and love poetry. One senses in this that heterosexual love, in the society of the Fancy, stands for conventional mores and conventional poetics and perhaps accounts for the strong homoerotic tinge to this literature (including Hazlitt’s “The Fight”). Indeed, at several points in the sequence, the male body, “stripped” for the fight within the ring appears as an epiphany of male, heroic beauty, a vision of one who deserves to “strive for fame.” Heterosexual love and the constellation of love-poetry markers recede before the body of the “nonpareil” Jack Randall as a poetry itself.15 A footnote explains: Of all the great men of this age, in poetry, philosophy, or pugilism, there is no one of such transcendent talent as Randall;—no one who combines the finest natural powers with the most elegant and finished acquired ones. The late Professor Stewart (who has left the learned ring) is acknowledged to be clever in philosophy, but he is a left-handed metaphysical fighter at best, and cannot be relied upon at closing with his subject. Lord Byron is a powerful

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poet, with a mind weighing fourteen stone; but he is too sombre a hitter and is apt to lose his temper.—Randall has no defect, or at least he has not yet betrayed the appearance of one. His figure is remarkable, when peeled, for its statue-like beauty, and nothing can equal the alacrity with which he uses either hand, or the coolness with which he receives.

In the center of the sequence are three sonnets, all of which challenge the use of this form even more radically, in the sense I’ve been describing, than Keats in his “Sonnet on the Sonnet.” One of these elaborates for twelve lines what he calls a “sweet imagery/Of lover’s hearts, inseparable and bright,” a conventional pastoral imagery, only to break it in the final line-and-a-half: “but the Insolvent Court / Keeps me a prisoner still,—and mars one’s sport!” The second, extremely well handled, portrays a mind attuned at once to a “Wordsworthian” domain of natural and spiritual sensation and that of the Fancy: ON HEARING ST MARTIN’S BELLS IN MY WAY HOME FROM A SPARRING MATCH AT THE FIVES-COURT Beautiful bells! That on this airy eve Swoon with such deep and mellow cadences,— Filling,—then leaving empty the rapt breeze,— Peeling full voic’d,—and seeming now to grieve In distant, dreaming sweetness!—ye bereave My mind of worldly care by dim degrees?— Dropping the balm of falling melodies Over a heart that yearneth to receive. Oh, doubly soft ye seem!—since even but now I’ve left the Fives-Court rush,—the flash,—the rally,— The noise of “Go it, Jack,”—the stop—the blow,— The shout—the chattering hit—the check—the sally; Oh, doubly sweet ye seem to come and go;— Like peasant’s pipes,* at peace time, in a valley! *I fear Mr. Corcoran meant pipes for smoking here [narrator’s note].

The poem projects the juxtaposition of contradictory features of the world and of the mind attuned to the world, which lack the “inseparable” consistency of ideology but in fact define “the real” of modern society. It further contains the heteroglossia of poetic archaism (“Oh, doubly soft ye seem!”) and flash language or Fancy-slang (“The shout—the shattering hit—the check—the sally”), and the flow of Wordsworthian enjambment along with lines staccatoed with (urban) caesurae. The sequence and the book conclude in the same spirit with a lively three-page poem in rhymed tetrameter couplets, the meter of the Fancy,

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called “What Is Life?” If Shelley at the end of The Triumph of Life has no answer to this question, Reynolds, like Hazlitt in his essay, does: life is a journey to see a fight. The poem is introduced by a stanza serving up a telling cluster of rhymes and half rhymes on poetic measure: And do you ask me “what is LIFE?”— And do you ask me “what is pleasure?”— My muse and I are not at strife, So listen, lady, to my measure:— Listen amid thy graceful leisure, To what is LIFE,—and what is pleasure.

Form here does not exist to contain or control “wasteful” expenditures such as pleasure and leisure but rather expresses them. “What Is life?” is a dawn poem, a waking up into a journey toward “the fight” (the last words of the poem) delivered as a listing of events in the life of one of the Fancy on the day he lives for—from getting dressed in the costume of the Fancy, to arriving at the livery stable to “mount a gig” for the journey, to “revel down the road,” to “join the flash crowd for talk and drink” and continue to the ring, to see the fighter with his gleaming body, and then “the FIGHT!” The only other Romantic poem, coming to mind, with a similar quality of paratactic revelation is Mary Robinson’s “A London Summer Morning.” Both poems build up the scene step by step, clause by clause. Appearance is all, along with a color of exuberance at the elements of the revelation. Reynolds’s poem displays the interanimation of boxing, poetry, and leisure and pleasure; the poem is a display, a tableau, a “screen” enlivened at every point by the collective energies of the Fancy. In this poetry of the Fancy the individual lyric subject is happily drawn into the pleasure of the subculture. That the book ends here shows that its life is most genuinely and simply its real subject. The synoptic study and attempted definition of Romanticism, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity (mentioned in my Introduction), characterizes it as fundamentally opposed to the incursions and values of bourgeois capitalism. In this definition no particular attention gets paid to a discrimination between Romanticisms, in particular the Romanticism of the Fancy. It should be clear from this chapter that whereas the Fancy still holds to a critique of the effects of bourgeois capitalism on personality, on social relations, and a predisposition to social repression, an art embodying this critique does not exclude what it does not like or approve of. The lumping together of the domains of the boxing Fancy, poetry, and dandies is a playfully serious slap in the face both to those members of society absorbed in the ideology of the commodity but also to a kind of Romanticism that

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criticizes bourgeois capitalism by pointedly excluding the signs of it from art. Hunt’s invitation to Wordsworth to participate more in the urban world of the marketplace in exchange for his (Hunt’s) becoming more of a rural contemplative envisions a poetry of dialectical synthesis, of inclusion. No contemporary work of Romanticism exhibits a scene of social and cultural inclusion more brilliantly than the work to which I have several times already alluded: William Hazlitt’s 1822 essay “The Fight.” And no one better presents inclusion as a juxtaposition, in this crowded essay, a jostling of elements that challenge modern society bent on social and cultural stratifications, the control of exclusivities by the exercise of economic and political power. In “The Fight” the reader witnesses a master of the control, the modulations, of prose offering an occasion in which the relinquishing of one kind of social control makes room for the overarching control granted by the democratic sovereignty of the Fight itself, the Fancy. It reminds me of Anna Barbauld’s “Washing-Day” in which the day devoted to housecleaning temporarily overthrows the patriarchal structure of the household and family, producing an unstable matriarchal isotope that leaves its trace in the “ponder”ing mind of an observing female child. Both works present their worlds as, from one point of view, messy and disordered, but there is an order, based, however, upon nonhierarchical principles. Whereas “The Fight” is obviously an instance of superb journalistic reportage and narration, it also, in the classical tradition of the essay, is a serious exploration of an abstraction that could have been called “On the Fancy.” Like the fictions of German Romanticism such as Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Lucinde, which strive toward a definition of poetry through a narrative enactment, so “The Fight” journeys through a detailed account of the boxing match between Bill Neate and Tom Hickman (known as the “Gas-Man”) as a unfolding and unique definition of a poetic faculty. In “The Fight” Hazlitt narrates his experience of traveling from London to Hungerford, Berkshire, by coach to see a boxing match (that actually took place on December 11, 1821) between two of the great boxers of the early 1820s, and the coach-ride back to London. The collapsing of two genres into one insists upon the relevance of one genre to the other, and consequently, in this case, of the pugilistic Fancy to the poetic Fancy. Pierce Egan and John Hamilton Reynolds embody the connection but Hazlitt orchestrates it with the high skill of an Orwellian or Benjaminian cultural critic. Hazlitt, in this essay (as in “My First Acquaintance with Poets”16), refuses to separate popular culture from high culture, sport from literature, sport from politics, psychology from politics and morals, and journalism from cultural criticism from “art,” and even Imagination from Fancy. Such juxtaposition may constitute a major contribution to the essay form, not

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only in Hazlitt but in Lamb: compare the latter’s alliterative juxtapositions, “magazines and monarchies, laws and literature.” “The Fight,” in other words, works—through a variety of literary techniques (described throughout my discussion)—at a higher level of intellectual, cultural, and political abstraction and commentary, than do the works of Egan and Reynolds. The climax of the essay, as well as the climax of the fight itself, is a huge blow from the fist of Bill Neate to the face of Tom Hickman: how the theme, the method, and the vision of inclusion squares with this radiating moment of violent victory and defeat is the subject of my account of “The Fight”: the blow, aimed and carried out within the circle of sport, dissolves the boundary between high and popular cultures, proliferates as a series of contiguities, of redefinitions, of generosities. Violence is done only to boundaries and hierarchies. Preference is given to “pluck”—courage, modesty, and cheerfulness combined—and to friendship, community, and the “sunny round” of conversation between citizens; moral judgments are made, but forgiveness ranks higher than judgment. The “tale” of the fight is “tragic only in appearance”; comedy, a word that sums up the above list of values and preferences, rules, as the essayist/reporter/ and fellow-traveler of the Fancy walks home at the end “in high spirits.” The blow ripples backward and forward in time, from the journey to the fight, the fight itself, and then back home afterward. Similarly it spreads out as a geography, a “canvas” of city, stage coach, inn, the fighting ring with attendant, swarming crowds, upper and lower classes, rural and urban citizens, and back on the coach to the city. The “swell” of the crowd with the changing fortunes of boxers at the fight repeats the larger essay-long “swell” of Londoners talking, meeting, drinking, planning to go, to their meeting again at an inn on the way and then erupting, “flowing” into the field of the fight itself, and then slowly dispersing—by implication to all corners of England—into their own multifarious lives; and who knows what effect the fight will have on those lives? Anthologies of Romanticism will at times select only the portion of the essay that describes the fight itself, an act of isolation refusing to acknowledge the principle of inclusion that transforms a brilliant account of a sporting event into a piece of visionary, even speculative, cultural criticism. Hazlitt makes the point clearly as he moves from the fight to describe the trip home: “the interest of the excursion did not flag as I came back.” The essay’s epigraph links the potential implication of the fight’s effect all the way up to the king who, in the Hamlet allusion, becomes a figure both of power and of criminal guilt: —The fight, the fight’s the thing, Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

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“The King” wants boundaries intact and wants control over them: his boundaries fixed with no particular regard for those living on the land. Hazlitt’s revision of Shakespeare offers a wish for his essay that “the king” will hear it, be moved by it in “conscience”—he will realize the divisive, oppressive nature of British monarchy and the contrastively richer life lived by the larger, mixed society of the people. Similarly, there is a literary geography that neatly separates the nation of Shakespeare from that of boxing’s flash language; Hazlitt argues that the fight can break that down too. This community of the Fancy is full of individual consciousnesses: Hazlitt tells the story of himself as (representative) consciousness, one who went to the fight and returned from it, and also one who continues to live it in his own contemporary prose. As a figure in the account, he appears embedded in the local geography: I was going down Chancery-Lane, thinking to ask at Jack Randall’s where the fight was to be, when looking through the glass-door of the Hole in the Wall, I heard a gentleman asking the same question at Mrs. Randall, as the author of Waverley would express it.

Hazlitt is a naif (“It was my first fight”) though not one unacquainted with the Fancy—where they hang out, how they speak, dress, and walk (“with that quick jerk and impatient stride”). He knows where to go for information, and from the beginning he is all nerve ending, all reaction, full of query and confusion, conversation and observation, a participant– witness, at once conscious and vulnerable: “Suddenly I heard the clattering of a Brentford stage, and the fight rushed full upon my fancy.” The pun here suggests Hazlitt’s joyous bewilderment at his absorption simultaneously in the world of boxing and in the domain and freedom of mental vitality. Tom Hickman—knocked out, to his surprise, by Bill Neate—“wakes up” to the truth that swaggering arrogance does not befit the fighter, just as Hazlitt wakes up, as a witness, to the world of the Fancy as it figures in the larger world of culture. The fight, transmuted into an essay, can wake people up to possible beneficial restructurings of their personal and civic selves. The essay acts by means of a complex union of the virtues of “English character” and the poetic faculty of the Fancy, here measured by cheerfulness and compassion. He can say, at once playfully and seriously: “Truly the Fancy are not men of imagination. They judge of what has been, and cannot conceive of any thing that is to be.” The “Fancy. . .is the most practical of all things.” So far, this suggests no particular virtue, but virtue appears to follow this kind of practicality as “modesty” and “courage.” In a brilliant sentence, Hazlitt claims that while the difference in the weight of the two fighters was finally insignificant, “Great, heavy, clumsy, long-armed

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Bill Neate kicked the beam in the scale of the Gas-man’s vanity.” Tom Hickman’s downfall is his arrogance, but the blow from Bill Neate teaches him, with great good nature and cheerfulness, who and where he is by deflating his egotism, but not ungenerously. “When the Gas-man came to himself, the first words he uttered were, ‘Where am I? What is the matter?’ ‘Nothing is the matter, Tom—you have lost the battle, but you are the bravest man alive.’ ” Used to defining himself by an inflated sense of his prowess, he is taught to identify himself with his bravery. For all his veneration of the men of the (boxing) Fancy, however, Hazlitt makes it clear that he is not, finally, one of them. He can say: “How matter presses on me! What stubborn things are facts!” But he shows repeatedly that he lives through the Fancy, the Imagination, and “sentiment.” The shortcoming of English character, here represented by the boxing community, is its narrowness of perspective: “My friend the trainer was confined [my emphasis] in his topics to fighting dogs and men, to bears and badgers; beyond this he was ‘quite chap-fallen’, had not a word to throw at a dog.” The two allusions are to Hamlet and As You Like It respectively— indications, by contrast to the trainer, of Hazlitt’s unconfined imagination. Throughout the essay Hazlitt presents himself in this way—as one at once under the sway of mental faculties and yet capable of and interested in thinking and acting freely in relation to matter and fact. His final identification of Fancy and Imagination does not, however, make him an idealist. His commitment in “The Fight” to the visionary materialism of the world of the Fancy and to its social implications should be obvious; the cheerfulness—the essay’s dominant affect—of fighters and essayists alike appears early on: . . .on my repeating the lines from Spenser in an involuntary fit of enthusiasm, “What more felicity can fall to creature, Than to enjoy delight with liberty?” my last-named ingenious friend stopped me by saying that this, translated into the vulgate, meant “Going to see a fight.”

Hazlitt’s word “enthusiasm” may echo its use three decades earlier as the affect of political radical visionaries (see Jon Mee), particularly with its placement in a cluster of words that includes “felicity,” “enjoy,” “delight,” and “liberty.”17 The use of “vulgate” as sacred text for a vast reading audience points to the transmission of joyous radical sentiment into a community far larger than that cultural aristocracy reading Spenser. But, as he points out elsewhere, his absorption in the classless world of the Fancy does not make him “vulgar,” a word that refers to the unthinking acceptance of

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standard opinion, can occur in any social class, and is precisely the opposite of the complex of participation, witness, and analysis that “The Fight” offers. The extraordinary degree of participation modeled by the narration of “The Fight” extends to the reader to such a degree that there emerges the possibility of this essay of high-energy juxtaposition of literary, political, and popular domains exploding the very frame of literature itself: Reader! Have you ever seen a fight? If not, you have a pleasure to come, at least if it is a fight like that between the Gas-man and Bill Neate. The crowd was very great when we arrived on the spot; open carriages were coming up, with streamers flying and music playing, and the country-people were pouring in over hedge and ditch in all directions, to see their hero beat or be beaten.

Consider this passage that occurs exactly in the middle of the essay, preceded by the build-up from London, the coach ride, the inn, and the arrival at the ring; and followed by an account of the fighters, the fight itself, and the return home. For an instant, the reader seems invited not into the account of the event but to the event itself. The build-up, so full of conversations and personalities, of descriptions and atmosphere, seems at this moment to pour over the boundaries of genre (like the country people pouring in over hedge and ditch in all directions) into the present reality. A good definition for Hazlitt’s version of the poetic Fancy, this suggests that the Fancy projects its outcome on the other side of writing, or poetry—in action, in a new social configuration (a view proposed by Paul Hamilton in Metaromanticism). In this respect, “The Fight” may serve as an embodied analysis of the brief history of literature of the Fancy in, for example, Egan and Reynolds. “The Fight” remained “uncollected” by Hazlitt, almost as if it transcended the category of “essay” to become a historical event, or intervention, in which the reader participates. If German Romanticism sought a “complete” poetry beyond actual poetry, a poetic idealism, Hazlitt in “The Fight” (and in several other essays) sought completeness in a society more generous to the needs and lives of persons. There is a strange insistence in “The Fight” to claim the world of the Fancy at least as full of literary “value” as has literature itself. In a brilliant, but rarely cited essay by the German political thinker C. G. Jochmann, “The Regression of Poetry,”18 poetry achieves its greatness early in history (cf. Vico, and Hazlitt in “Why the Arts Are Not Progressive?”) “regressing” in later periods because as civilizations mature they discover ways of accounting for their world and dealing with their problems (e.g., “Reason”) that take them further along the path to peace

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and an equitable society than can poetry. We should rejoice rather than lament the decline of poetry; but Jochmann can imagine . . .situations more multifaceted and comprehensive than either [the “Old World” or the “New World”], in which human beings would not be required to renounce the treasures of reality, which is all-powerful, but would also be capable of an exercise of imagination at once more rewarding and more intelligent.19

It is not clear whether this new “exercise of imagination” can take literary form, but “The Fight” seems to me a possible candidate—a work that rejects the nostalgia of old literary form and conception, that locates itself squarely in the center of a vibrant classless element in society, and continually takes pleasure in old texts but, at times through juxtaposition with a sign of the society of the Fancy, aggressively but playfully asserts its contemporary relevance and, similarly, takes pleasure in “forgiving” Hickman the sin of egotism, just as in literary criticism Hazlitt forgives Wordsworth and Byron theirs. No “treasures of reality” are renounced in this up-todate exercise of imagination. For Jochmann, as well as for Hunt, Lamb, Egan, Reynolds, and Hazlitt (to say nothing of Keats, Byron, and Shelley), the regression of “poetry” before the advancements of democracy (inclusiveness) produces its own acts of transformed writing that attempt to meet a better world. Magazines and monarchies, Imagination and Fancy, Fancy and the Fancy, all find a place. Not only did “The Fight” remain uncollected during Hazlitt’s lifetime, but it had a difficult road to publication, finally being accepted by the New Monthly Magazine in 1822. Might it have seemed by some editors too hot to handle? The figure of Hazlitt in the narrative could be seen as a constantly and restlessly moving target, a consciousness whom you cannot pin down or locate precisely. And this might apply to all members of the Fancy: instances of free will, of choice—in Blake’s language from “London”— wanderers amidst chartered streets, participant–witnesses relatively free from the mind-forg’d manacles, the atmosphere of the panoptikon, anticipating the “men of the crowd,” the flaneurs of Baudelaire’s Paris, capable of voicing the speech and passions of persons at any given point.

CHAPTER 8 WILLIAM HAZLITT’S POETICS OF THE FANCY IN HIS SELECT BRITISH POETS: A COCKNEY ANTHOLOGY, I

t would be nonsense to question the existence of a book you hold in your hand, but William Hazlitt’s anthology published in 1824, Select British Poets, or New Elegant Extracts from Chaucer to the Present Time with Critical Remarks (hereafter referred to as 1824), for all its considerable heft, its double columns of poems, and its 822 pages, nonetheless, once one knows its strange publication history, leaves one contemplating a vanishing object. It exists as much in inference. Facts, however, suggest that it did happen; copies of the anthology exist, even if in very small numbers: we know from Mary Shelley that Lamb, Hunt, and Barry Cornwall saw it to completion when Hazlitt ran off to France with his new wife Isabella Bridgewater, that Mary Shelley herself looked at the proof sheets, that two or three dozen copies, mostly in North America, do exist (I have seen copies at the University Library at Cambridge, the Bodleian at Oxford, the British Library, the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Berg Collection at the NYPL, the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Mass., and am now the proud owner of my own, which was bound in Albany in 1839). We also know of the claim that its publication was suppressed by order of the court, probably because of the threat of copyright infringements of a “Living Poets” section (about one-third of the whole) and republished the next year (1825) with “Living Poets” omitted in toto as Select Poets of Great Britain (hereafter 1825). That is, the invaluable “Living Poets” section, the first attempt to construct a selection, based on the editor’s judgment of the quality of work, of poems from what is now called the Romantic Period, was suppressed. In its modest afterlife, this shorter volume of 1825 was proclaimed firstrate by Edward Fitzgerald. Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Emerson owned copies of 1824.

I

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In his review of Thomas Campbell’s huge 1819 anthology of British poetry, Francis Jeffrey lamented the absence of a collection of contemporary (i.e., “Romantic”) poetry: the “Living Poets” section of 1824 filled that gap. Both the fact of this anthology (with its “Living Poets” section) and the turbulence surrounding its publication seem to me a momentous event in the history of the reception, dissemination, and canonization of British Romantic Poetry. Scholars such as Geoffrey Keynes, on the other hand, present it with minimal fuss: a copyright problem led to the excision of contemporary poetry from an anthology, which, in the course of the nineteenth century, had apparently little impact. And given that its compiler Hazlitt was publishing, between 1822 and 1826, works such as “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” Table Talk, vol. II, Liber Amoris, “The Fight,” Characteristics, the letter to his son, Sketches of the Principle PictureGalleries in England, The Spirit of the Age, and The Plain Speaker: Opinion on Books, Men and Things, all major accomplishments, it’s natural enough to let go by an aborted anthology particularly since Hazlitt himself, to my knowledge, never mentions it and appears not even to have been in the country either to oversee its completion or to acknowledge the radical disfigurement from its original to its revised condition. But considered as the first judicious selection of the poetry of the early nineteenth century (the section called “Living Poets”), made by one intimately familiar with the poetry and the poets of his day and the period’s most acute, boldest, and most wide-ranging reader of and commentator upon British Literature past and present, 1824 becomes a work of enormous cultural value, and its quick disappearance becomes far more complexly mysterious than it initially seems. The mystery and the desire for solving its publication history increase when one further considers Hazlitt’s contemporary position as one who often alienated the literary and cultural establishment, whose name on almost all of the works of these years cited above was “anon,” and who counted among his friends members and fellow travelers of the “Cockney School,” or those writers sympathetic to the Fancy. In this chapter, after presenting the publication history of 1824, I want to describe the anthology, first as a whole, and then how the book in its entirety helps one understand the principles of selection of the “Living Poets” section. Along the way, I consider Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets (1818), published the same year as Hunt’s Foliage, as a guide to the principles of selection in the anthology. Out of this account, one might see this profile of Romantic poetry compatible with and expressive of my hypothesis that the poetics of the Fancy interpreted broadly—rather than the poetry of the lyric subject—dominated the progressive and most fruitful strain of poetic activity in the early nineteenth century. One can only speculate that the mystery of its publication and the obscurity of the book

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upon its publication and up to our own time may have something to do with its progressive poetics and its critique of a very popular and conservative anthology. Extraordinarily, there is nearly uniform silence about 1824 among Hazlitt and his contemporaries. No one seems to have spoken about the problems of publication, and after the book was published, there is no record of either public notice or reviews. At the same time, the nineteenth century (Hazlitt’s grandson William Carew Hazlitt in Memoirs of William Hazlitt, 1867, and Augustine Birrell in William Hazlitt, 1902) referred with certainty to a breach of copyright, “threatened proceedings,” and that “the edition was rigorously suppressed.”1 Coupled with this, many more copies of 1824 have been found in North America than in England; indeed, the first copy to appear was in the Amherst College Library no later than 1827. For years readers and scholars such as Geoffrey Keynes and P. P. Howe have assumed that immediately after or even during its publication the sudden threat of copyright proceedings for the “Living Poets” section caused the abortive cessation of publication or the destruction of all but a handful of the published copies. But an American bibliophile Payson G. Gates in the 1950s brilliantly speculated that, more likely, the pages were printed in London and bound, “published,” and distributed in North America, and only later a few copies found their way back to England. How might this have come about? Let me summarize the highlights of a complex argument. The “publisher” of 1824 is one Wm. C. Hall, and the place of publication, as stated on the title page, is London. No one, however, has discovered any evidence of a London publisher with this name. Wm. C. Hall was, in fact, a reasonably well-known American importer of noteworthy British books who often bought unbound pages, transported them to Boston, and bound and distributed them in the United States.2 The title page and the frontispiece bear strong stylistic resemblances not to London printing but to Boston printing of the early 1820s.3 What would have led Hazlitt to turn to someone like Hall? If copyright was the primary roadblock, the absence of any international intellectual property in North America, in contrast to that in England, would explain the seeking of an American market. One assumes, furthermore, that Hazlitt had first tried his luck with British publishers. It is known that Mary Shelley and Charles Lamb (and probably Bryan Procter and Leigh Hunt) looked over the sheets of 1824 at the home of the publisher Roland Hunter, very much in the Hunt circle, who had published Hazlitt’s 1817 Characters in Shakespeare’s Plays. One assumes that Hazlitt or a friend would have asked Hunter to take on 1824 and that Hunter refused. The same can be said for Thomas Tegg, who provided the frontispiece to 1824 and who did, in fact, publish 1825. Tegg, one of the two most successful London publishers of

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the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, specialized in republishing out-of-print, out-of-copyright, and remaindered books (as well as publishing some original work). Some people found him, in this regard, parasitic, but he managed to bring a great amount of good writing to a large audience inexpensively. One scenario, then, finds Hazlitt seeking and failing to find a good, known publisher and then, out of desperation, turning to the American importer Hall. Another possibility is that Hazlitt planned the American publication from the beginning: hardly a neophyte when it came to the publishing world, he may have anticipated the copyright problem and chose an American publication as a solution. This, however, seems less likely since everyone in the nineteenth century was clear about the active “suppression” of the book’s publication.4 Finally, he and his friends may have received other forms of powerful negative judgment. There is every indication, as I argue later on internal evidence, that this was to be a “Cockney” anthology. Bryan Proctor, Mary Shelley, Charles Lamb, and Hazlitt himself were at the very least sympathetic to Leigh Hunt’s adversarial position in contemporary culture. A passage in a letter from Mary Shelley to Hunt demonstrates the group’s acquaintance with Hazlitt’s collection: L[amb] said one thing which I am sure will give you pleasure. He corrected for Hazlitt a new collection of Elegant Extracts, in which the Living Poets are included. He said he was much pleased with many of your things, with a little of Montgomery & a little of Crabbe—Scott he found tiresome—Byron had many fine things but was tiresome but yours appeared to him the freshest & best of all. These Extracts have never been published—they have been offered to Mr Hunter & seeing the book at his house I had the curiosity to look at what the extracts were that pleased L[amb]. There was the Canto of the Fatal Passion from Rimini several things from Foliage & from the Amyntas.5

So publication of a major anthology of British Literature on “Cockney” principles and featuring prominently “Cockney” poetry might have riled some member of the cultural police. And is it coincidence that in the same year, 1824, Mary Shelley received such vituperative response from her father-in-law Timothy Shelley over her plans for a posthumous edition of P. B. Shelley’s poetry and that 1824 contains some of Shelley’s most inflammatory poetry? And finally, as I suggested earlier, 1824 can be seen as an ideological polemic against one of the most popular anthologies of the age, Knox’s Elegant Extracts, which may also have caused consternation in some quarters. Could Hazlitt have anticipated a less-troubled reception for 1824 in the United States?

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I have no answers to these questions, nor does the lack of correspondence and reviews help. It would be gratifying to imagine that an Emerson or a Longfellow responded precisely to the contents and selection of the anthology.6 But in what follows I make the argument for an anthology based loosely on (Cockney preferences for) a poetics of the Fancy. Just as poetry itself often reacts and responds to work that has come before it and consequently becomes a critique of the original, so Hazlitt’s anthology is a full-scale critical response to what was one of the most popular anthologies of the preceding four decades (23,000 copies sold between 1796 and 1824), the Rev. Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts: or Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Youth in Speaking, Reading, Thinking Composing; and in the Conduct of Life (1784). This work was proudly dedicated, by means of a careful selection of poems, to the successful accommodation of young people to an eventual place in the growing society of bourgeois capitalism with all its attendant economic and social privilege. The production of “growth and development” of this sort in readers suggests an experience with poetry marked by characteristics that I have demonstrated throughout this book: maturation through acknowledgment of the supposedly bedrock tragic or elegiac perspective on life and an acceptance of the world as given as opposed to a belief in its potential transformation, the chaste and conventionally religious as opposed to the erotic, the representation of social homogeneity as opposed to heterogeneity, and finally consolation as opposed to mental stimulation, play, and freedom. (In this sense, the politics of poetry and its institutionalization in educational anthologies may have led to or contributed to the rocky or, at the very least, unconventional, publication history of 1824.) I turn briefly to an account of Elegant Extracts, its purposes and assumptions in the history of the anthology in England, before describing Hazlitt’s revision.7 Knox’s “selection” of passages of poetry points to a precise ideological function. And, as Leah Price observes, Knox’s anthology, as was typical in the eighteenth century and contrary to present-day anthologies, was driven by the presumed needs and nature of its audience. She further observes that Knox himself effaced his own presence as maker of conscious editorial decisions, alluding instead to the collectivity of a “plebiscite” of consent as to what constitutes the most famous and popular poetry. The canon, that is, already exists in the minds of English men and women, simply needing to be made manifest in the anthology. The contradiction of Elegant Extracts lies in this supposedly editor-less, disinterested selection. Knox covers the contradiction with the fantasy of an autonomous “Orphic” accumulation of a literary history, inaugurating a tradition continuing to the present day and expressed, for example, by John Hollander and Frank Kermode 200 years later in their Oxford Anthology of English Literature: “English literature has

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generated its own history.”8 This is a history in which Hazlitt’s Select British Poets has no appreciable place given the overwhelming presence of editions of Knox in the education of the commercial class and the near uniformity of poems memorized by its members. Although history (recall chapter 1) has located the origins of the hierarchization of the Imagination and the Fancy with the work of philosophers, it also must learn to recognize that one part of the hierarchy, the “immature” Fancy, appears and functions powerfully in Knox’s “schoolbook” Elegant Extracts. This anthology supports perfectly the thesis of John Guillory’s Cultural Capital,9 that the political purpose of poetry—and the establishment of the canon—is to model a “complacence” or acceptance of middle-class growth and empowerment at the expense of the lower classes. For Knox, young people should be offered poetry as a valuable step in their maturation into adults (“many of the most illustrious worthies in the church and in the state”) who learn to accept the middle-class status quo to which they will be, at most, amenable to “gradual” change. As they grow up, the need for poetry will be supplanted by “reason and judgement,” whereas the young engage the world through their unthinking fancy, their naturally “sportive,” unserious selves. From the opening sentence of the Preface, Knox associates poetry with regulation: “Since Poetry affords young persons an innocent pleasure, a taste for it, under certain limitations, should be indulged” (my italics). Poetry is potentially dangerous, leads to forms of excess both erotic and intellectual, unless it is titrated properly. The editor’s act of regulation, as I have said, lies not in the selection (which, he claims, belongs to Britain’s collective judgment), but in the “design” of the book, which he insists is not an act of judgment but more a gathering of flowers in a bouquet in which the best arrangement is the most “natural.” A glance at the Table of Contents, however, makes this metaphor of a “garland or nosegay” for the young look disingenuous: the anthology divides into four sections: I. Sacred and Moral, II. Didactic, Descriptive, Narrative and Pathetic, III. Dramatic, and IV. Sentimental, Lyrical, and Ludicrous. Is it an accident that Guillory’s Exhibit A for bourgeois canonization, Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” appears early in the first section of Elegant Extracts (Sacred and Moral), that is, in a section that would encourage a severe imaginative rectitude? Indeed, the message of the Preface, that poetry provides openly the Horatian dulce to the young and only osmotically the utile required in adulthood, would seem often harshly, even sadistically, contradicted by the content of the many religious poems with images of the grim wasteland of “the world” and one’s later necessary if resigned attitude toward it. The title page depicts three young boys reading and reclining against the base of an old tree, their fishing pole

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unattended, in the smooth-gliding stream before them. This acts like a metaphor of the smooth lines and verses of poems that eschew juxtapositions of apparently incompatible elements that wake one up to the meaning of their incompatibility, that encourage critical consciousness. In the background and to the side three other boys play cricket and behind and above them, imposing even its visual silence, looms the country church. Under this engraving is a line from Gray’s Eton College Ode slightly misquoted: “Theirs is the Sunshine of the Breast.” The rest of Gray’s stanza, not quoted, installs the Fancy as the age-appropriate faculty for people whose life is still a leisurely holiday before the real work of life begins, with all of its resignation, sacrifice, and mindfulness of death as a limit to lively thought: Gay hope is theirs, by fancy fed, Less pleasing when possest; The tear forgot as soon as shed, The sunshine of the breast.

The next stanza contextualizes the appropriate life of the Fancy in the larger pathway of adulthood: Alas! Regardless of their doom, The little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come, Nor care beyond to-day;. . .

Fancy in youth is associated with thoughtlessness (“the thoughtless day, the easy night”); and at the end of the poem “thought” is equivalent to disenchantment, helpless before everything but the heavenward gaze: Thought would destroy [the children’s] paradise. No more—where ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise.

Guillory’s idea, with which I agree, would be that this presentation of the Fancy and of poetry itself defends against the view of the Fancy presented in my book, that it is thoughtful, that it awakens the mind to the lively— sometimes desirable, sometimes shocking, but always compelling—world around one, that it expands consciousness in the face of empathic acknowledgment of social conditions regardless of their appeal. This turning outward that the Fancy facilitates is precisely not what Knox envisions in aesthetic education: “The Book, it is hoped, will be particularly agreeable and useful

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in the private studies of the amiable young student, whose first love is the love of the Muse, and who courts her in his summer’s walk, and in the solitude of his winter retreat, or at the social domestic fire-side.” Hazlitt’s Select British Poets can be seen as an intervention in Knox’s school- and ideology-driven anthology. In my reading of 1824, Hazlitt not only “designs” his anthology differently but insists openly upon the necessary judgment (in this case, along the lines of the Fancy) of the editorial selection, which is, to be sure, mediated by public opinion and the collective popularity of poems, but finally chosen by him. At first glance Hazlitt’s anthology does not appear unusual, but if one considers it a direct response to Knox, Select British Poets is indeed striking both for its “innocent” usefulness as a collection of fine poetry and as a confrontation. It is set out simply enough: the title page and frontispiece containing images of Britain’s illustrious dead poets is followed by a Preface, a “Critical List of Authors” (a few sentences of description and evaluation of each poet), 565 pages of poets of the past beginning with Chaucer and ending with Cowper, 230 pages of “Living Poets,” and 19 pages of “Songs, etc. chiefly from the Ancient Dramatic Authors.” The bulk of the poetry exceeds what the page count may suggest, since each page is double-column with the poems presented in a small font. After the defeat of perpetual copyright in 1774, anthologies focused exclusively on poetry from the past, so Hazlitt’s inclusion of a massive “Living Poets” section was a slap in the face at what had by 1824 become an honorable tradition and what was apparently perceived as illegal. Unlike the arrangement of poems in Elegant Extracts foregrounding its instructional content, the chronological arrangement of 1824 calls attention to the poems themselves and, Hazlitt says in the Preface, to the “progress” of poetry. The progress includes most recently the Living Poets, which means that the stream of English poetry flows unbroken from the canonized greats like Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Pope to contemporaries such as the aggressive radicals Leigh Hunt and Percy Shelley, the latter having recently being sued for libelous publications. This “progress” reminds one of the progress of poetry defined by Robert Merry and Mary Robinson that led from the earliest great poets in England to the provocative Della Cruscan ones of the present. 1824, moreover, contains two large unexpected curiosities. The poetry of Robert Burns who died in 1796 appears at the end of the “Living Poets” section; and the volume ends with a selection of “Songs” from primarily Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and a few anonymous ballads, thus breaking the “progress”ive movement of the collection. This structure of 1824 reveals some of its principles laid out in the Preface and embodied in the “Critical List,” the latter itself an unusual feature.

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1824 is what has been called an “expressive anthology,” one that has an agenda shaped openly by the editor. The selections, although he says he has included “the most admired” poems, line up closely to those quoted and discussed by Hazlitt throughout his writing and are poems that he has judged superior. Although Hazlitt says at the beginning of the Preface that 1824 is “an attempt to improve upon” Knox’s anthology, more accurately it is a dramatic recasting, in principle and content, of the earlier work. “I have brought together in one view (to the best of my judgment) all the most admired smaller pieces of poetry in the language, and the most striking passages in larger works, which could not themselves be given entire” (p. ii). The “Critical List” is nothing if not descriptive judgment and evaluation. Of course, one could call Knox “expressive” since it definitely follows an agenda, but the claim is for disinterestedness and for the English collectivity over time as a judge. Hazlitt’s criterion of selection is based not on applicability for instruction of the young in skill and conduct, but on sheer quality of poetry. He departs, in fact, from the association of anthologies, youth, and education: implicitly he edits for adults, in the sense that mature judgment has determined the selection for an equally mature audience. Improvement upon Knox means a more “severe” process of selection in order to exclude the “refuse or ‘baser matter’ ” that inundates the earlier anthology. Getting at the essence of a poet serves the larger aim: to show the world the high quality of the “Body of English Poetry,” in which England can be justifiably proud. Whereas this has its characteristically nationalistic side, it also exhibits the more laudable side of acknowledgment: “I have made it my aim to exhibit the characteristic and striking features of English poetry and English genius; and with this view have endeavored to give such specimens from each author as shewed his peculiar powers of mind and the peculiar style in which he excelled, and have omitted those which were not only less remarkable in themselves, but were common to him with others, or in which others surpassed him, who were therefore the proper models in that particular way” (p. iii). Given the enormous quantity and range of poetry written and published in English, particularly in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Hazlitt could be thought of as performing a singularly valuable service of collective self-recognition. Behind Hazlitt’s principles of selection, to make a leap, is an anthology based loosely on a poetics of the Fancy that makes no reference to a “stage” of life. In the very brief notations about the poetry of poets in the “Critical List,” the Fancy appears as a feature of twenty-five out of the sixty poets in 1824. Hazlitt’s use of the term “Fancy” echoes that of “modern” poets from Mary Robinson to John Keats. It’s a word that can take any number

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of modifiers and associations. For example: Chaucer has “little fancy, but. . .great wit, humour,” etc. Spenser excels in “invention and fancy.” In Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, “There is some fancy in the poem, but little general interest.” Suckling “has fancy, wit, humour, descriptive talent, the highest elegance, perfect ease, a familiar style and a pleasing verification.” Milton has “fancy, learning, vividness of description, stateliness, decorum.” Cowley’s fancy “is quaint.” Marvell’s poems “are full of a lively, tender, and elegant fancy.” Dryden has “very little fancy. . . .” Rochester’s “fancy is keen and caustic, not light and pleasing.” Pope has “high invention and fancy of the comic kind. . . .” Collins, whom he admires enormously, has a fancy that “is glowing, vivid, but at the same time hasty and obscure.” Young has “false wit, false fancy, false sublimity and mock-tenderness.” Campbell “has equal [to Rogers] elegance, equal elaborateness, with more power and scope both of thought and fancy.” Coleridge, in “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter” has “grotesqueness of fancy.” Wordsworth has “no fancy, no wit, no humour, little descriptive power, no dramatic power, great occasional elegance . . ., but he is sublime without the Muse’s aid. . . .” Byron has “great wildness of invention, brilliant and elegant fancy, caustic wit, but no humour.” Moore’s “fancy is delightful and brilliant.” Shelley “was chiefly distinguished by a fervour of philosophic speculation which he clad in the garb of fancy, and in words of Tyrian die.” Keats “displayed extreme tenderness, beauty, originality and delicacy of fancy.” From this one concludes that the Fancy is an essentially poetic attribute, both in the sense of poetry as animation or liveliness and poetry as supplement. Some good poetry, such as Wordsworth’s, can do without it, but usually fancy signifies a poetic vitality, part of poetry’s essence. At the same time “vitality” takes any number of forms or manifestations (from “caustic” to “delicate” to “delightful” to “grotesque”).

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The predominance of the word “fancy” in the Critical List, however, does not mean that the poetics privileged in 1824 conforms precisely to that described throughout this book. Hazlitt makes no place in his anthology either for women poets or for the Della Cruscans. The massive omission of women poets cannot solely be attributed to his view of their poetics, even though some of the most prominent one can describe as poets of the Fancy. (Hazlitt begins his 1818 lecture on the Living Poets with praise for Barbauld, More, and Baillie.) Hazlitt did not like the Della Cruscans, seeing them as too imbued with fashion and artifice. He clearly preferred poets of, or with affinities to, “nature,” a word that here probably should be given a Huntian inflection: of the essence of poetry, energetic, spiritual. Many selections in Select British Poets come right out of the specimens for discussion in the Lectures on the English Poets of 1818. It is plausible to think that 1824, of which watermark evidence exists that he initiated the project in 1819, grew quickly out of the Lectures but—for personal reasons (the death of his father in 1820, his divorce from Sarah Stoddard and wild infatuation with Sara Walker), political reasons (his battles with the Tory press), and publishing reasons (the extraordinary number of his works written between 1818 and 1824)—moved very slowly toward completion. Because of the intimate link between these two productions, one can (cautiously) use some of the principles of poetry evident in the Lectures to account for the selections in 1824. In the same year that Hazlitt gave and published the Lectures on the English Poets, Leigh Hunt published Foliage. The Lectures espouse a view of the best poetry similar to Hunt’s and taken largely from Hunt’s sense of the virtues of the “Lake School” in its earlier (ca. 1795–1805) years: that good poetry tends to be anti-egoistic and therefore like an object in nature and returns one to a “green” integrity of mind, sense, and affect. (See the chapters on Hunt’s poetry and on “Cheerfulness.”) Both Hunt and Hazlitt find that “nature” in poetry means “animation” and energy (although Hazlitt also has a predisposition for the sublime). For both writers the capacity of poetry to recover a natural and integrated state does not preclude a “metaromantic” critical consciousness. The poetry of the Fancy during the period of Hunt and Hazlitt is primarily nonnarrative and “lyric.” Against an overtly ideological use of poetry, Hazlitt, in the Lectures, finds that narrative often ideologically places premature closure upon reality. The following, from the Lecture “On Dryden and Pope,” could have written by either Hazlitt or Hunt: “Lyrical poetry, of all others, bears the nearest resemblance to painting: it deals in hieroglyphics and passing figures, which depend for effect, not on the working out, but on the selection. It is the dance or pantomime of poetry”

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(V, p. 81). Four features of a poetry of the Fancy appear in this observation: play, movement, juxtaposition, and the inclination toward the spatial and nonnarrative. He singles out some of Chaucer’s extended similes as reinforcing the “downright reality” of his poetry. A simile of “Cressid’s first avowal of her love” to the singing of a nightingale is “so true and natural, and beautifully simple, that the two things seem identified with each other.” Or that of Constance in The Man of Law’s Tale, when she is condemned to death: Have ye not seen sometime a pale face (Among a prees) of him that hath been lad Toward his deth, wheras he geteth no grace, And swiche a colour in his face hath had, Men mighten know him that was so bestad, Amonges all the faces in that route; So stant Custance, and liketh hire aboute.

“The beauty, the pathos here does not seem to be of the poet’s seeking, but a part of the necessary texture of the fable. He speaks of one who relates what has happened to himself, or has had the best information from those who have been eye-witnesses of it. . .. He dwells only on the essential” (V, pp. 20–21). The notion of poetry as ornament or supplement, in this case of the independence of the figure, is only valuable if it serves reality. Thus his sense of metaphor as proximate to the tenor is classical, but the emphasis on observation, witness, and material reality places him in the modern zone of poets such as Mary Robinson. Hazlitt and Hunt agree with the manifesto polemic of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that poetry needs to return to its roots, which lie in the “green” energies of Chaucer and the aristocratic prophetic mode of Milton and epic song. Lectures on the English Poets and Select British Poets fulfill that earlier injunction; and all these situate the revival of the poetic against the “artificial style” and “inferior class” of poetry practiced by Dryden, Pope, and the other neoclassical poets. Having in effect aligned himself with Wordsworth, however, Hazlitt distinguishes Wordsworth from Burns in his Lecture “On Burns and the Old English Ballads,” the latter fulfilling the potential of lyric in a way that Wordsworth didn’t but should have appreciated. Wordsworth, he claims, criticized Burns’s moral character as a way of criticizing his poetry: “with different personal habits and greater strength of mind, Burns would have written differently, and almost as well as he does.” (p. 129). Why, Hazlitt asks, cannot Wordsworth praise Burns for his great and unique strengths? He should have recognized that Burns acknowledges “the opposite calls of business and fancy” as both a torment to Burns but also

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a condition of poetic reality in the modern world that the Scottish poet of the people brilliantly and heroically faced. Then he contrasts the work of the two poets in a way that doesn’t praise one at the expense of the other but rather defines two pathways of modern lyric: “Nothing can be more different or hostile than the spirit of their poetry. Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry is the poetry of mere sentiment and pensive contemplation; Burns’s is a very highly sublimated essence of animal existence” (p. 131). Clearly Hazlitt celebrates Burns for the materiality of his poetry, its erotic energies, its rootedness in the people, that it locates itself in their reality and finds a language proper to it, and that all of this is manifest in song: the “essence” of poetry unmediated and unlimited by the ego. It is a short leap to Hazlitt’s praise of the “old English ballads”: There is in them a still more original cast of thought, a more romantic imagery—the thistle’s glittering down, the gilliflower on the old gardenwall, the horseman’s silver bells, the hawk on its perch-a closer intimacy with nature, a firmer reliance on it, as the only stock of wealth which the mind has resort to, a more infantine simplicity of manners, a greater strength of affection, hopes longer cherished and longer deferred, sighs that the heart dare hardly heave, and “thoughts that often lie deep for tears.” We seem to feel that those who sung them (the early minstrels) lived in the open air, wandering on from place to place with restless feet and thoughts, and lending an ever-open ear to the fearful accidents of war or love, floating on the breath of old tradition or common fame, and moving the strings of their harp with sounds that sank into a nations heart. (P. 140)

This is an extraordinary definition of “lyrical ballad”—in the poem’s capacity to evoke, through essential images, a world of close-knit relationship, expressive of the knowledge and respect for the earth. The poets themselves are imagined as having a “wandering voice” (Wordsworth’s cuckoo), not precisely of the air, but one in which thought and footstep are propelled by the same nervous energy of attention to human affairs and ancient traditions of music and words. Here is for Hazlitt the “essence” of poetry, and one clearly linked to definitions of the Fancy. Considering that much of the poetry discussed in Lectures and presented in 1824 is “minor,” that is, short or lyric, I find it at first odd that Hazlitt discusses epic and dramatic poetry and the novel and allegory in “On Poetry in General.” How does the emphasis in that essay introduce the reader to, for example, the poetry of Collins or Burns or Coleridge? Or, why doesn’t he speak of the short poem when theorizing about poetry? One possible answer is that he, like Shelley and the German Romantics and the Victorians, wants to isolate “the poetic,” the special energies that visionary writing embodies in itself and evokes in the reader, and that can

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best be isolated as moments of high, quintessential intensity in a long poem. “Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It defines the flowing, not the fixed.” “Poetry is that fine particle within us that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being: without it ‘man’s life is as poor as a beast’s’.” One sees versions of this in Shelley, Friedrich Schlegel, Stendhal, Pater, and Hopkins in discussions of “poetry” not limited to the formal poem and at times of “the Romantic,” not limited to a historical period. A second possible answer lies in that Hazlitt may find essential for his anthology what is specifically “poetic” in epic, drama, and the novel— the nonnarrative elements of narrative art. A form of acknowledgment of the other, as Hazlitt instances in example after example, works against narrative as such even though it requires narrative to establish a context: Hazlitt’s scenes anticipate Adorno’s assertion of the inherently social nature of all lyric. The great epic and dramatic works contain “lyric” within them. Speaking of Clarissa, Hazlitt observes: “There is infinite truth and feeling in Richardson; but it is extracted from a caput mortuum of circumstances: it does not evaporate of itself. His poetical genius is like Ariel confined in a pine-tree, and requires an artificial process to let it out.” (V, p. 15). In this sense, “poetry,” which is lyric, he may best define through that which is not lyric, the nonnarrative is best defined by or through narrative. Poetry has a lyric, nonnarrative essence (often extracted from narrative) that animates and excites the mind beyond its ordinary comforts, both in the speaker and in the reader, toward transformed ways of seeing. Hazlitt, again in the spirit of the Fancy, insists upon a poetry that can overcome the resistance of the ordinary and the familiar, which he calls the “reduction” of the language of poetry to “the stand of common sense and reason.” One requires an excess of passion and of the fancy to resist ideology. In Romanticism, poets often represent excess as the flight across domains: poetry and the Fancy have wings. Society perceives such traversings as transgressions, and winged poetry becomes a danger to hegemonic power, which is often defined, narrativistically, as “progress.”; (lyric) poetry, in Hazlitt’s “On Poetry in General,” thus stands precipitously against “the police” that wants to reduce the winged freedom of the former: The progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. The province of the imagination is principally visionary, the unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things to their natural boundaries, and strips them of their fanciful pretensions. Hence the history of religious and poetical enthusiasm is much the same; and both have received a sensible shock from the progress of experimental philosophy. It is the undefined and uncommon that give birth and scope to the imagination; we can only fancy what we do not know. . .

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Society does what it can (cf. Foucault’s panopticon) to limit imagination’s scope: . . .the police spoils all; and we now hardly so much as dream of a midnight murder. . . .Society, by degrees, is constructed into a machine that carries us safely and insipidly from one end of life to the other, in a very comfortable prose style (V, pp. 8–9).

Poetry, then, combats the policing of life into a prose style of comfortable reduction of the mind’s potential extent. In the world of the Panopticon, for poetry to acknowledge mind in its capacity for expanding, rarefying, and refining itself is a social critique. Hazlitt praises Wordsworth as a poet of the mind: “He is the poetry of mere sentiment. . . .He can give only the fine tones of thought, drawn from his mind by accident or nature, like the wounds drawn from the Aeolian harp by the wandering gale” (V, p. 156). And, in this context, when he praises the “detached pieces in the Lyrical Ballads” over and against “the larger poems” of The Excursion, he is defining the juxtaposition of “lyric” poetry of mind with the characterization of a person from, usually, another social class, a mind, full of the “spirit of life and motion in the universe,” responding openly to an instance of the deficiencies of the current social system. “Poetry then is an event of nature, but the imagination and the passions are part of man’s nature.” Lyric, for Hazlitt, casts the mind free and at play, yet fully engaged with the world around it. Or, “The poetical impression of an object. . .strives. . .to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy” (V, p. 3). * * * Let me now open 1824 and sketch its contents from the beginning, highlighting what might have appealed to the progressive poets of the Regency decade and the early 1820s. A note of a nonhierarchical attitude toward British poetry appears immediately—across from the title page a frontispiece, after a design by the prolific Thomas Stothard, announces the preeminence of seven British poets, presented in a rough oval shape: Chaucer at the top (there, presumably, because he’s earliest), Spenser below to the right, Burns below to the left, Milton in the middle of the oval, below whom is Shakespeare to the left, and Young to the right, and at the bottom is Cowper. Thick, leafy ornate vines of presumable gold and heavy ribbon twine around the oval portraits; two naked boys sit on a pedestal (supported on the portrait of Cowper) and support Milton and the whole upper half of the frontispiece, a swan with wings unfurled sits over the portrait of Milton and just under

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that of Chaucer. Intentionally or not the arrangement of poets in an oval and in their placement recalls the “ordering” or hierarchy of poets in Hunt’s Feast of Poets—namely, there is no hierarchy; no single poet gets crowned with the only laurel, but a whole feast of poets, a cluster of them, are celebrated. Here, too, aside from Chaucer at the top (the earliest?) and Milton in the center, the placement and inclusion seems arbitrary: Shakespeare in the lower left, Burns at Spenser’s and nearly at Chaucer’s level, Young included at all. This may, of course, reflect not only the work but the thought, or the sense of poetic popularity, of someone other than Hazlitt, but a more or less “republican” aura is cast over the whole. Given that Hazlitt in his lectures “On Dryden and Pope” assigns neoclassic urban satirical poetry to a second or inferior class, it is surprising to find so much of it represented here: the heroic couplets of Dryden, Pope, Gay, and Swift remind one that Cockney School poets tended to prefer the heroic couplet to the blank verse of Coleridge and Wordsworth (again, Milton, Thomson, and Cowper are well represented in blank verse), and urbane satire to domestic poetry of meditation, perhaps because of a more acute sense of the utopian fantasy of a poetry that privileged a (socially privileged) free-standing meditation. In that sense, preference for song (Ariel freed from his pine tree), with its open acknowledgment that song occupies a domain different from ordinary consciousness, is more compatible with the mixed, contrary, conflicted consciousness of urban poetry. Hazlitt, in 1824, adds to the number of lyric poems by both Marvell and Collins that he discusses in his “Lecture,” anticipating their later reputation as brilliant “minor poets.” Lyrical pastoral join long blank-verse poetry (Thomson, Akenide, Cowper) in the post-neoclassical eighteenth century (none of the biblical visionary poetry of Christopher Smart). In 1825 this first section of the anthology ends with Burns. But in 1824 Cowper concludes it, to be followed by the “Living Poets” section. Burns, like an Ariel, flies strangely free in 1824: In the Critical List he appears, appropriately, as the final poet among the “illustrious dead.” But his poetry concludes the “Living Poets” section: a mistake? or unconscious slip? a way of defining the unmoored nature of true lyric? Hazlitt’s Critical note reveals his own confusion with positioning Burns: Burns concludes the series of the ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD; and one might be tempted to write an elegy rather than a criticism on him. In naivete, in spirit, in characteristic humour, in vivid description of natural objects and of the natural feelings of the heart, he has left behind him no superior.

Burns here embodies for Hazlitt the quintessential definition of lyric, part of which must be lyric’s embrace of the present, a voice that concentrates

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reality and opens it to the fully participating reader: lyric as aperture, reinforced by the list of excessively redundant operative words: naivete, spirit, humor, vivid, natural, natural feelings. His poems are events of nature. The selection includes Burns’s narratives—The Two Dogs, Tam O’Shanter, and The Cotters’ Saturday Nights—but the note emphasizes lyric elements and effects. And wanting to write an “elegy” on Burns rather than a “criticism,” Hazlitt reinforces his feeling that the Scottish poet’s work encourages participation, the “interest” evoked by work of Living Poets, rather than the search for “meaning” (criticism) that the closed oeuvre of the dead allows. Hazlitt’s selection of Burns’s poems, only nineteen of them but including narrative, lyric, and song, is as good as any I have seen of that length. It conforms perfectly to the description he gives except that he doesn’t note the presence of Scots dialect in almost all the selections; indeed he underscores the Scottish identity of the poetry with two of the last three poems, “Caledonia” and “John Barley Corn” with their Scottish folk and mythic elements. Not only, therefore, does the anthology proper (before the “coda” of “Songs”) end with lyric but it asserts the value of dialect, of the nondominant British culture, as if lyric’s very tendency takes it beyond hegemonic borders. At the same time, the brilliant lyrics “To a Mouse” and “To a Mountain Daisy” (apostrophes to the weak and unacknowledged—”Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie”) insist upon the fundamentally social and political energies of lyric and song. By pairing these latter two poems, Hazlitt reinforces the Fancy’s transformative function in poetry, a voice of acknowledgment of the weak, the invisible, that gets cut down, thinkingly or unthinkingly, by “power” (“man’s dominion”), in which the speaker—a plowman who has just destroyed a mouse and a flower—includes himself. Burns, furthermore, stamps the essence of lyric otherness in a linguistic one, the Scots dialect. Burns, “living” or “dead,” the quintessential poet of the lyric, marks the transition to Part III, “Songs, etc. chiefly from the Ancient Dramatic Authors,” which concludes and frames the anthology. (That is, in 1824 Burns precedes Section III by concluding the “Living Poets” section; in 1825—with no Living Poets—he precedes Section III by concluding the major section of nonliving poets.) Beginning with thirty-eight sonnets by Shakespeare, this section continues with “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” songs from Shakespeare’s plays, followed by songs and poems from Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Lyly, Jonson, Drummond, Marlowe, Raleigh, Shirley, Lovelace, Burton, Browne, Carew, Herrick, and King, and ends with two Scottish ballads. Other than the sonnets, the core of the section is songs from plays, once again stating that essential poetry resides within the dramatic and the narrative. Even the sonnets “extract” lyric from

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the loose narrative of the sequence. Indeed, the entire section could be said to fulfill Hazlitt’s definition of the meaning of “elegant extracts,” not only with their sense of refined essence but also juxtaposing the archaic and anonymous with the refined elegance of London poets. Poetry, implies Hazlitt, at its essence is both very “new” and very “old,” at the periphery of the social voice, what Keats called a “new old song.” Hazlitt’s superb selections here together not only remind one that the height of lyric composition in English may have been reached in the Renaissance but that these poems synthesize a compelling manifesto of lyric. Hardly the genre of the social given and its critique (i.e., neoclassical poetry) Renaissance lyric celebrates the far precincts of the mind and imagination, mind’s capacity for transformation of perception, the acknowledgment of “other” voices (lyric is the genre of the other mind), the proximity of beauty and death, the precariousness of the truly poetic faculty in the face of ideological constraint and psychological inertia, and the consequent preciousness of the beautiful when it appears and is noted. The voice of love in poetry, powerful in its concentrated thinness, reminds one of the riskiness in the declaration of love (will it be reciprocated? will it last?). And this in turn calls to mind the short line of lyric, at once vanishing to the zero point through the pressure of white space and, contrarily, rising out of silence into speech: “Hark! hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings / And Phoebus ‘gins arise. . ..” Renaissance lyric reminds us that poetry is a dawn phenomenon. But also lyric can be transformative, sorrow and loss being reborn under the sign of song. Section III ends with two Scottish ballads of lost love—the sadness of lyric, its isolated, exiled voice, exiled by country and by the anonymity of its author, and exiled from any literary and cultural aristocracy. That is, the section ends with a further refinement of Hazlitt’s definition of contemporary lyric in which voice itself has been catapulted from familiar, normative domains. It is here that Hazlitt’s “progress of poetry” has found its final landing place: out of time, urgent voices and yet supplemental; urgent and supplemental but somehow independent of the ego, even the mind, to the point that one can ask about poetry’s main quickening power: “Tell me, where is fancy bred. . .?” Now I turn to the unstable isotope of Select British Poets, the second section called “Living Poets.”10 It is likely that the impetus for SBP began with the idea of a Living Poets anthology, in particular one that demonstrated that Living Poets belong or culminate in the “progress” of British poetry. In his 1819 review of Thomas Campbell’s Specimens of the British Poets,11 Francis Jeffrey proposes: We wish someone would continue the work, by furnishing us with Specimens of our Living Poets; it would be more difficult, to be sure, and more dangerous; but, in some respects, it would also be more useful. The

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beauties of the unequal and voluminous writers would be more conspicuous in a selection; and the different styles and schools of poetry would be brought into fairer and nearer terms of comparison, by the mere juxtapositions of their best productions; while a better and clearer view would be obtained, both of the general progress and apparent tendencies of the art, than can easily be gathered from the separate study of each important production. The mind of the critic, too, would be at once enlightened and tranquillized by the very greatness of the horizon thus subjugated to this survey; and he would probably regard, both with less enthusiasm and offense, those contrasted and compensating beauties and defects, when presented together, and as it were in combination, than he can ever do when they come upon him in distinct masses, and without relief and softening of so varied an assemblage. On the other hand, it cannot be dissembled, that such a work would be very trying to the unhappy editor’s prophetic reputation, as well as to his impartiality and temper; and would at all events, subject him to the most serious imputations and unfairness and malignity.

Jeffrey has a clear idea of the value of such a collection: one could understand and appreciate one’s contemporaries in a selection that would place the best of one poet in relation to the best of the others: his terms “juxta-position” and “combination” sound like the language of experimental modernism, where definition of one object occurs only in relation to others—a “constellation” of poems that imparts some kind of permanence or reality to the shifting uncertainties, the ephemeral quality of judgment of one’s contemporaries. Moreover, these juxtapositions would reveal the sense of collective tendencies, implying the double energies of a poem at once within its internal relations and its communal and cultural reverberations. A certain calm would descend over critics because the given relational presentation would prevent factionalism, paranoid confrontation of group against group, and consequent distortion. Although there is no definitive, external evidence, Hazlitt seems to have taken Jeffrey’s proposal to heart, at once acknowledging the difficulties of selecting the Living Poems of the Living Poets, but recognizing the generosity of such a task as well as its usefulness. As I observed earlier, Hunt, Lamb, Barry Cornwall, and Mary Shelley seem to have had a hand in the final stages of the volume, which has definitely imparted the “character” of the Cockney School, or, the Fancy. To take just a few examples: the Shelley selections, particularly the “Revolt of Islam” and “Rosalind and Helen” passages, are Hunt favorites, as were Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Hyperion; and one cannot help but notice substantial selections from Hunt, Lamb, and Cornwall. As Jeffrey Cox has argued, the Cockney School put forward a collaborative model of composition: the character of “their” anthology exhibits that same communal tendency, one that Francis Jeffrey does not seem to have anticipated.

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The Living Poets included in 1824 are, in order: Samuel Rogers, Thomas Campbell, Robert Bloomfield, George Crabbe, S. T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, James Montgomery, Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Thurlow, John Keats, Henry Milman, William Lisle Bowles, Barry Cornwall, and Robert Burns. Near the point of going to press, Shelley and Keats died, a point acknowledged in the Critical List. Burns, as I have previously shown, is the obvious anomaly, twenty-eight years dead and yet concluding, framing, the Cockney-selected Living Poets. As with the notes on the earlier poetry, these are characterized largely by observations of style rather than of content; more precisely he makes reference to the particular animating principle of the poetry and its effect on readers; for example, Scott: “He has great bustle, great rapidity of action and flow of versification, with a sufficient distinctness of character, and command of the ornaments of style.” Or Shelley, who “was chiefly distinguished by a fervour of philosophic speculation, which he clad in the garb of fancy, and in words of Tyrian die.” The categories “natural,” “inventive,” “elegant,” “fancy”-ful are the same with the Living Poets and the first poets Chaucer and Spenser. The phrase from Gray associated in the Critical List with Byron, “thoughts that breathe, words that burn,” apply— along with the principle of animation—generally to Hazlitt’s characterization of poetry. The “expressive” nature of 1824 emerges, of course, not only in the choice and ordering of poets but also in the selection of poems. The Coleridge and Wordsworth pieces belong almost exclusively to the “radical” period of those poets, 1796–1807, as if to insist upon the standard second-generation judgment that with the political apostasy has come, in the case of Coleridge, a failure of all poetic speech and act and, with Wordsworth, a failure to produce good poetry. As a result, there is no Kubla Khan or Christabel; Hazlitt justifies his Coleridge who “has shewn great wildness of conception in his Ancient Mariner, sublimity of imagery in his Ode to the Departing Year, grotesqueness of fancy in his Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, and tenderness of conception in his Genevieve.” These along with “Fears in Solitude” make up the Coleridge selection. In contrast to the modern Coleridge canon, blank verse appears only in overtly political poems (as opposed to “Frost at Midnight” or “This Lime-Tree Bower”). Indeed, from Hazlitt’s selection one would not be inclined to separate the extravagant “supernatural” poetry from the domestic “conversation” poems from the political poems. A similar focus on a more radical poetry distinguishes Hazlitt’s selection from Wordsworth and Shelley. Hazlitt ranked the lyrics from Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes very highly, pieces of which dominate his

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Wordsworth choices. “Laodamia” is the only “later” poem in the group. A similar lyric concentration appears in the (probably Hunt-influenced) Shelley selection: passages from Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, and Rosalind and Helen, and the fancy-driven “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Ozymandias,” “An Exhortation,” “Camelions feed on light and air,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and “To a Skylark,” all poems in which the lyrically extravagant and the radically political weave back and forth. Although most of these selections appear in Mary Shelley’s contemporary volume of Shelley’s poetry, the overall effect of the latter emphasizes lyric as opposed to political, whereas Hazlitt’s brief selection proposes the identity of the two poetic domains.12 Indeed, throughout “Living Poets” Hazlitt emphasizes poetic and thematic extravagance, poetic eroticism, and left-wing politics. The poets and the poetry, in this regard, do not only represent the middle classes, but include the disenfranchised (Wordsworth and Crabbe), the rural and urban (Bloomfield and Crabbe), the suburban (Hunt and Keats among others), the wealthy (Lord Thurlow), the fashionable (Rogers), and the Scottish and Irish (Burns, Scott, and Moore). Again, the massive omission is the women poets. To have included them, as anthologies in our own time have finally begun to do, would have meant a step that neither Hazlitt personally nor his age apparently could tolerate. Although attuned to the poetry and fiction of women and occasionally willing to acknowledge women authors in his critical writing, he reveals, by omission of women’s poetry in 1824, his profound personal ambivalence toward them. This simply must have reinforced the convention for anthologies to this point in literary history to keep the writing of men by and large separate from the writing of women. While therefore recognizing this powerful limitation to the Fancy’s principle of “inclusiveness” (as I similarly argued with reference to Hunt and the Cockney school), one must applaud the equally powerful and highly conscious advance made by Hazlitt in “opening up the canon.” “Living Poets” creates the context in which each individual poet receives his meaning and evaluation. Similarly Select British Poets provides the context for evaluating “Living Poets”—an atmosphere characterized by liberal selections from Chaucer and Spenser and the Neoclassical poets, all Cockney favorites. It is worth noting, again in contrast to our modern privileging of the “greater Romantic Lyric,” that “Living Poets,” particularly in the company of Burns and the songs and ballads of the final selection, is not weighted toward a blank-verse poetry of reflection and subjectivity, but includes plenty of heroic couplet, rhymed tetrameter couplet, and other (mostly simple) stanza forms—all in keeping with 1824 as a whole. Have we “proven” that Hazlitt’s anthology intervenes in the politics of bourgeois aesthetics carried out with strict ideological intentions in Knox’s

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Elegant Extracts? Have we proven that the poetics driving Hazlitt’s selection is consistent with the poetics of the Fancy? Given its almost immediate vanishing from sight and the nearly universal silence upon its publication by anyone either in Britain or North America, it is impossible, unless other evidence emerges, to pronounce upon its effect. Moreover, could Hazlitt separate himself from the principles of poetics in relation to politics found, say, in the Quarterly Review? How successfully (to generalize) can we read poetics as a “code” for a politics?—there is often a gap between politics and literary form and content. I have gathered together a constellation of inferences (not the least significant of which is Hazlitt’s own clear political position, registered throughout his career, with regard to culture), which leads to a particular conclusion. The relationship between, say, the presence of rhymed tetrameter couplets appearing in the “enclosed” space of a poem and a larger habit of mind that can operate in the domain of the contested public sphere has about it a wonderful mystery that drives even deeper than the mystery of 1824’s nearly unobservable half-life. Yet, in the language of Hemans, the value of Hazlitt’s vision of contemporary poetry, given his immense general perceptiveness, increases with its “expiring” condition.

CHAPTER 9 SELECT BRITISH POETS, II: FANCIFUL READINGS OF CANONICAL ROMANTICISM

have a two-fold intention for this book: first to open up to view the nature and the manifestations of a poetics of the Fancy in the British Romantic Period, and second (following upon the first) to encourage a reading practice of Romantic poetry sensitive to the features of the poetics of the Fancy. I believe that reading according to the Fancy will affirm the fundamentally political content of poetic language and form while it will approximate the visionary intentions of politically progressive poets. In the tradition of most experimental writing, this poetry consistently attempts to intervene in the ideologically quiescent minds of passive citizenry in the coercive society of the early nineteenth century: poetry of the Fancy, like the various twentieth-century experimental poetries it anticipates, reacts to Hazlitt’s notion that “the police spoils all” and to Blake’s hearing the “mind-forg’d manacles.” As I have shown, however, the response of the visionary poet often seems—in terms of the overt political content of its intentions—strikingly indirect: cheerfulness? expiration and waste? lists and parataxis? the witness and a poetry of the referent? The link between poetry and politics may be occasionally direct, but more typically it evokes acts of mind in the reader that disrupt its complacency, its habits, or, as Wordsworth says, “custom,” a term that he does not specifically identify as belonging to the social and political world; the centrifugal tendency of the Fancy encourages one to read it in relation to a larger social reality. Reading according to the Fancy assumes the immediate and necessary interanimation of consciousness and the social world. Having, I hope, demonstrated the centrality of a Fancy-poetics for Romantic poetry,1 I want now to consider a few “specimens” from the Romantic canon read through that poetics. Obvious choices for such readings would be the poetry of Blake on the one hand and the poetry of Byron on

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the other. But I wish to stay within what, in terms of the power of traditional readings, would seem the most recalcitrant to a revised, visionary reading: the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats. Drawing primarily on selections made by Hazlitt in Select British Poets, I ask how Hazlitt’s placement of certain poems in his anthology help determines a reading of them. The discussion of Wordsworth is meant to be suggestive rather than comprehensive: with Keats I provide a close reading of the “Ode to a Nightingale.” The way of reading proposed in this book is not arbitrary; nor is it one of many ways. It is one of two, and thus it indicates a choice for the reader: how to perceive the signs of the text? Milton’s “L ‘Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” for example, propose viewing the world under the sign of cheerfulness or under the sign of contemplative melancholy. And in a far more complex way Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience elaborates engaging the world through these two visionary categories. Blake, in fact, could be said to advocate a choice of reading practices in his prophetic works, such as Milton where the figure of Milton at one point observes himself as “lost” while simultaneously the poem demonstrates his being under the protective guidance of the Eternals.2 One can also divide the categories of poetic reading into the “normative” or naturalized and the uncanny. The Russian modernist poet Marina Tsvetaeva explores these two reading perspectives, with particular reference to Romantic poetry, in her brilliant brief essay, “Two Forest Kings,” comparing Goethe’s gothic ballad “Erlkonig” with a very popular midnineteenth-century Russian poetic translation of it.3 For Tsvetaeva, the original is a poem of the uncanny in which the Erlking, a seductive nature daemon acting upon a child riding through the forest in his father’s arms, lures the boy away from his father and from life. For the translator Zhukofsky the Erlking manifests the effect on the child’s diseased mind and body of the wind in the trees—the father here the conduit of “mature” reason and naturalistic explanation. The contest of the poem, between the view of uncanny reality and a normative explanation of reality, gets played out between poet and translator and eventually between two types of readers, one who seeks to understand the poem in terms of the one reality of the scientific and psychological explanation, and one who accepts two realities: that of the human world of father and child and that of the daemonic world of the Erlking. Wordsworth’s “Moods” and His Poetry of the Fancy How do we read the poems of Wordsworth in their context in 1824, according to the principles of the Fancy? Here is Hazlitt’s descriptive

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evaluation of “Mr. Wordsworth” in his “Critical List”: Mr. Wordsworth’s characteristic is one, and may be expressed in one word;—a power of raising the smallest things in nature into sublimity by the force of sentiment. He attaches the deepest and loftiest feelings to the meanest and most superficial objects. His peculiarity is his combination of simplicity of subject with the profundity and power of execution. He has no fancy, no wit, no humour, little descriptive power, no dramatic power, great occasional elegance, with continual rusticity and baldness of allusion; but he is sublime without the Muse’s aid, pathetic in the contemplation of his own and man’s nature; add to this, that his style is natural and severe, and his versification sonorous and expressive.

The longest of the entries on the Living Poets, this one characterizes, in our terms, a poet of the Fancy who, problematically for Hazlitt, “has no fancy,” that is none of the familiar figuration and obvious extravagance associated with it. Hazlitt brilliantly declares: “he is sublime without the Muse’s aid,” or in his Spirit of the Age piece says that Wordsworth “takes a personal interest in the universe.” The Muse signifies the poet’s acknowledgment of his mortal limitation of vision before the cosmos (the Other) and before death, taking him past the horizon of normative consciousness and mortal sight. (Recall how often Wordsworth’s Spots of Time dramatize the engagement with the horizon.) In terms of the social character of the poet, Hazlitt finds this quality egotistical, but as a characterization of a poetry, I believe, he finds it mysterious and wondrous, the most “original” poetry of the present, the least to be dispensed with. A visionary poetry, according to Hazlitt, requires the mediating instrumentality of poetic devices—fancy, with metaphor and simile, dramatic narration, and so on—all elided in Wordsworth, a fact that often seems to bewilder and frustrate Hazlitt. At the same time he calls attention to Wordsworth’s accomplishments in a visionary poetry of the Fancy: finding value in the “small” or “mean,” the juxtaposition of the “simple” (unpoetic) subject and the aristocracy of form (“execution”): Wordsworth’s is a poetry of transformations and defamiliarizations, which has apparently bypassed “poetry.” There is a sense that this too is a juxtaposition or “combination” of contradictory elements—profoundly poetic function without typical poetic instrumentalities. And yet what Hazlitt finds missing in Wordsworth’s poetry is what modern experimental poetics has in fact purposely rejected. Hazlitt doesn’t really have a language for Wordsworth’s experimentalism. Donald Wesling, however, does have the language: “Especially since the generation of Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the renewal of [poetic] devices has taken a particular turn toward the prosodic structures of thought itself, and of the English sentence.

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Thinking exists independent of poetry; so does grammar. In the innovative prosodies this fact is emphasized as grammar tends to supplant versification,” and, one can add, figuration itself. Another sentence reinforces my point that Hazlitt’s reading of Wordsworth’s poetry in this regard anticipates modern experimentalism: “Modern poetic techniques tend rather to accelerate than to contradict Romanticism.”4 Furthermore, our standard view of Wordsworth’s poetry and of ways of categorizing modern lyric, that poetry divides into one of disenfranchised persons on the one hand and into a poetry of “the self,” that poetry tends toward emphasizing either the middle-class lyric subject or the referent, is of little interest to Hazlitt. He focuses on the underlying function— applicable equally to “meanest flowers” and forsaken Indian women—of acknowledging the invisible or suppressed elements in nature and society, a view far from the prevailing one of a poetry of the lyric subject. In keeping with the principle of this book, that a progressive politics would encourage less a poetry of the lyric subject and more a visionary poetry (of the Fancy), it isn’t surprising to find Hazlitt’s selections coming from the progressive Wordsworth of the 1790s and early 1800s long before he became a government employee. His selection of early poetry appears even more striking when one realizes that he was working with Wordsworth’s 1820 edition of collected poems. With the by then huge number of poems to choose from, he apparently categorically selected poems originally published in 1798, 1800, and 1807. The selection has the quality of a “deformation,” since Hazlitt, as he picked and chose, maintained the exact order of 1820, as if—to allude to Blake—he was burning away the “finite” Wordsworth to get to the “infinite” or essential poetry. Hazlitt presents Wordsworth as a poet of the visionary, transformative imagination. The opening four poems in order—“We Are Seven,” “The Pet-Lamb,” “The Idle Shepherd Boys,” and “To H. C. Six Years Old”— are visionary pastorals that feature the playfulness of a child’s imagination, or of an adult imagination under the influence of childhood and pastoral nature. “We Are Seven” constructs two imaginations juxtaposed and incompatible: the Wordsworth selection, in other words, is introduced by the concept of poetry as a non-egocentric vision. In “To H. C.” the consciousness of a child again (and anticipating the Immortality Ode that concludes the entire sequence) has a distant origin: “Oh thou! Whose fancies from afar are brought.” This poem, one of the few of Wordsworth’s unreservedly admired by Blake, signals an important feature in Wordsworth’s poetry, unacknowledged in the tradition of reading him as a poet of consolation, that it is a poetry of mind. Thus, the climactic observation of the speaker in the Immortality Ode is the discovery that the growing person retains not the “innocence” of early childhood but the capacity for “obstinate

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questionings,” the mind ceaselessly in motion in relation to the freezing “custom” imposed by society upon that mind. Read from this perspective, Wordsworth’s poetry portrays a mind continually struggling with and finding value where value is presumed not to exist. The next group of poems that includes “The Female Vagrant,” “ ‘Tis said, that some have died for love,” “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman,” “The Last of the Flock,” and “Michael,” are dramas (at times dramatic monologues) from the lives of the lower classes that bring those otherwise unacknowledged lives into visibility. The focus is on “raising” up the referent from “meanness” into visibility and value. The power of this selection, however, follows Hazlitt’s prescription that refers less to a subject matter and more to an act of juxtaposition and transformation resulting in a change of valuation. One is confronted with the contiguity of the disenfranchised and an aristocratic woman of the Trojan War (“Laodamia”) and further with “To the Daisy,” “The Waterfall and the Eglantine,” “The Kitten and the Falling Leaves,” and “To the Cuckoo.” These last poems “raise” into prominence elements of nature and what Wordsworth in 1807 called “Moods of My Own Mind.” Although these poems are typically read as the quintessential lyric voice that conflates the speaker with the poet-in-history, a place where “sincerity” merges with “authenticity,” it is more proper to think of them as versions of the “small” or “mean” referent, or speaker as referent, given prominence, anticipating Rimbaud’s famous “Je est un autre.” The OED, in fact, shows that the history of the word “mood,” while obviously acknowledging its place in the domain of mind and subjectivity, has defined it as curiously objective, or “other.” A synonym for “mood,” “disposition,” means “turn of mind” but also refers to an arrangement or an ordering. A mood is a “frame” of mind. At the same time it is an inclination or a desire. The phrase “turn of mind” suggests a particularity of mind or affect, but also, spatially, a turning away from an ordinary or nondescript mental state, an entering into a special domain (such as the space of happiness, melancholy, anger). This, furthermore, leads to its use in logic, syntax, and music (e.g., the subjunctive mood, the Dorian mood, or mode), which brings us to Milton’s famous line in “Lycidas”: “That strain I heard was of a higher mood,” pointing toward the idea of genre (in Milton’s case, and harking back to Virgil’s “Eclogue IV”—“paulo majora canamus”—the higher epic versus the lower pastoral). The “mood,” at this point in literary history, belongs to the category of small or mean acts of mind, a condition of mental “waste” or “idleness.” But I sense that Wordsworth, taking on the acute awareness of genre and the interest in the 1790s and shortly thereafter in creating new poetic categories (such as Coleridge did with the “effusion”), would have fully

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intuited the larger generic possibilities of the “mood.” A mood could, along with becoming a curious phenomenon, wed itself to larger mental and spiritual implications:5 to “see into the life of things” by means of a mere mood, would be to grant to a casual, “wasteful” event of mind considerable, nearly shamanistic power. By definition a mood would be a genre of ephemeral, changeable states of mind, as Emerson later observed in his essay “Circles”: There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. . . .Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I say a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.6

“Moods of My Own Mind” announces, therefore, a new genre in poetry, a representation of the unstable and ephemeral and private and at the same time stable (i.e., a formal abstraction as poetry) and communal. A recent essay by Wayne Koestenbaum, “A Brief Defense of Private Poetry,” beautifully describes the unsettling power of the representation of the private in modern art. The private, he argues, is about as far away from the marketplace as you can get and paradoxically becomes that which most clearly defines the democratic. Poetry of the private allows for a refiguring of the limitations of the allowable in our society. “Let us, in private, practice poetry in order to unrepresent and complicate our sense of who represents us. . . .A democracy needs the listening, self-scrutiny, and restlessness that poetry promotes. . . .Poetry makes it difficult to know when the speaking voice is solitary and when it is communal. Poetry uncovers the imaginary dimensions of that Pause of Space [Emily Dickinson] we call the social contract. Once we realize that a contract is imaginary—pause—we can begin to rewrite it.”7 This seems to me an excellent rationalization for Wordsworth’s poems of Moods and actually for his “Poems of the Fancy,” a category in his collected poems of 1815 that includes many of the poems grouped as “Moods of My Own Mind.” An apostrophe to a daisy or a cuckoo inscribes itself in a space of a mood, untouched by labor, the market, and power, a space marked out by the “reclining poet”: A hundred times, by rock or bower, Ere thus I have lain couched an hour, Have I derived from thy sweet power

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Some apprehension; Some steady love, some brief delight; Some memory that had taken flight; Some chime of fancy wrong or right; Or stray invention.

The reclining position encourages a list—each of the ten stanzas after the opening one works as an element in a list of attributes of the daisy or of the mind in response to it, just as this stanza lists a series of “apprehensions.” In fact you could call each stanza an apprehension; but the poem shows that in the daisy’s presence apprehensions proliferate, a characteristic of poetry of the Fancy. Actually including “To the Daisy” in the “Poems of the Fancy” section of 1815, Wordsworth in stanza one associates his daisy experience and thus the Fancy, in contrast with the conventional association, not with childhood but with his maturity: In youth from rock to rock I went, From hill to hill, in discontent Of pleasure high and turbulent, Most pleased when most uneasy; But now my own delights I make,— My thirst at every rill I slake, And gladly Nature’s love partake Of thee, sweet Daisy!

Childhood life anticipates adulthood in that both are characterized by motion, the difference being that significant motion as an adult concentrates less on physical movement through a landscape and more upon movement of mind guided by the senses: the movement of apprehensions. And unlike the earlier encounters, turbulent and broken even if exciting, the recent ones gratify and complete: a comedy of mind, a “cheerful” “gladness.” In light of Hazlitt’s selection and the interpretations of poems it encourages, the blank-verse entries—“Michael,” “Yew-trees,” “Tintern Abbey,” “Lines Left upon the Seat of a Yew-Tree,” and “Animal Tranquility and Decay” scattered throughout the whole group—do not stand out as representations or expressions of the poet/speaker-in-history (as, say, a collection of Coleridge’s blank-verse poems do) but rather as a cluster of voices “going out of one’s own nature” or even disembodied. This is certainly true of “Yew-trees,” for example, but even a staple of the self in meditation such as “Tintern Abbey” assumes no privileged position. It is placed between “Hart-Leap Well” (Hazlitt’s favorite in Lyrical Ballads and perhaps

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in all of Wordsworth’s short poems through 1807) and a selection of sonnets, the first a decasyllabic lyrical ballad and the latter emphasizing public, Miltonic speech. Consider, by contrast, that Matthew Arnold, in his 1879 edition of Wordsworth’s poems, canonized “Tintern Abbey” in a category of “Reflective and Elegiac Poems”: I suspect that readers have been subliminally influenced by Arnold to see the poem as an elegy for that humanity as well as an elegy for his past (“Five years have past”). And even if my suspicion is incorrect or incomplete, it is true that the history of criticism of this central, characterizing poem of Romanticism, the “greater Romantic lyric,” has repeatedly interpreted “Tintern Abbey” in the language of loss, dislocation, displacement, compensation, evasion and elision, exclusion, and betrayal, whether the presiding persuasion is New Critical, deconstructive, psychoanalytic, or historicist. That all of these instrumentalities have led to greater understanding of the poem is undeniable, but behind them lie a poetics of compensation and monumentality, of the idea of a compensatory permanence, and—to use the word Arnold made famous—a compensatory disinterestedness in both speaker/poet and in the “lover of poetry” (Arnold’s Preface); the experiential center of the poem has passed, leaving the poet reflective and “elegiac.” “Tintern Abbey,” in Arnold’s selection resides among some other blank-verse poems, including “Yew-Trees,” “There Was a Boy,” and the ice-skating episode from The Prelude Book I; particularly in the last two the speaker is left mentally and emotionally quiet in a surrounding stillness that exudes a cosmic melancholic stateliness. All of these atmospheres have rubbed off on the reading of “Tintern Abbey,” but much in the poem indicates that it reacts to the unnamed adversities behind it in the mode of the Fancy, that is, in the mode of generativity, erotic excitement, immersion in the present of the poem, and cosmic expansiveness. Returning to Select British Poets, the Wordsworth sonnet section begins with this relatively unfamiliar 1806 poem that highlights the major issue of visionary poetics—narrow versus expanded consciousness: Though narrow be that Old Man’s cares, and near, The poor Old Man is greater than he seems: For he hath waking empire, wide as dreams; An ample sovereignty of eye and ear. Rich are his walks with supernatural cheer; The region of his inner spirit teems With vital sounds and monitory gleams Of high astonishment and pleasing fear. He the seven birds hath seen, that never part; Seen the Seven Whistlers in their nightly rounds, And counted them: and oftentimes will start— For overhead are sweeping Gabriel’s Hounds,

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Doomed, with their impious Lord, the flying Hart To chase for ever, on aerial grounds.

The speaker writes (implicitly) responsively to all readers, dissuading them of their assumption that the “narrow” cares of the old man produce a corresponding narrowness of vision and outlook. “Rich are his walks with supernatural cheer.” This poem is followed by the four “Personal Talk” sonnets, again arguments for a life of removal from “personal talk,” conversation in the social as opposed to the collective and cosmic scale, the former being narrow or “mean”: Whose mind is but the mind of his own eyes, He is a slave: the meanest we can meet!

The mind that expands beyond the horizon of the familiar turns out not only to find more pleasure but also to be able to confer value on “the low”; expansion is figured as winged, as an effect of the Fancy: Wings have we,—and as far as we can go We may find pleasure: wilderness and wood, Blank ocean and mere sky, support that mood Which with the lofty sanctifies the low. . . .

One could view “Personal Talk” as raising and then resolving a perceived crisis of the subject, hovering on the boundary between “ego” and “self,” between limits of ordinary perceptions and perception that includes other domains of being. Just as in the previous sonnet he evokes old age with approval, here he promotes the vision of the child: figures at the extremes of mortal life have easier access to privileged states of expanded consciousness. It is no accident that Resolution and Independence and “Animal Tranquility” as well as “Though Narrow Be That Old Man’s Cares” appear in Hazlitt’s selection, complemented by many poems that feature children. These extremes are, according to Allen Grossman, the natural domain of poetry, as opposed to the “strong” consciousness of “middle life,” where of necessity social discourse and the ego rule. A “normative” reading of the “Personal Talk” sonnets would see the speaker promoting that haughty, elitist contemplative position of which Apollo in Hunt’s Feast of the Poets accuses Wordsworth. Hazlitt would agree, when speaking about the personality of the poet-in-history. In these poems, however, the speaker challenges the prevailing preference for normative, social consciousness, pointing out its limitations both for pleasure

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and for beneficence; from this perspective they are superbly unsettling poems. And the more familiar sonnets that follow—“Westminster Bridge,” “The World Is Too Much with Us,” “Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland,” the two London 1802 sonnets, and “Great Men Have Been among Us”—can be said to fulfill the promise of the citizen who, paradoxically, emerges from his reclusiveness: Great men, in a time of national weakness, need to be able to “act and comprehend.” But it is worth noting that the speaker argues for reclusiveness and against “personal talk” by “talking” to others with the opposite view: the poems engage social consciousness in order to criticize it (not unlike Hazlitt’s own “On Going a Journey” that celebrates walking in solitude by arguing for it). Wordsworth’s visionary poetry doesn’t simply “dwell” in prison but engages the “border comedy” (Hejinian) of acknowledging the “narrow” position. The admonitory blank-verse poem, “Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree” (included in 1824) equates narrowness of vision with a refusal, simply, to acknowledge and praise the creation: Stranger! Henceforth be warned; and know that pride, Howe’er disguised in its own majesty, Is littleness; that he who feels contempt For any living thing, hath faculties Which he has never used; that thought with him Is in its infancy.

The protagonist’s narrowness of vision, a moral as well as perceptual failure, is also, as Hunt would say, a failure of sociality, both of which are described as immaturity. By contrast to the crisis of openness to the world, in blank-verse poetry, the speakers in the many tetrameter (i.e., shorterline) lyrics have already traveled to a visionary position: And ‘tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. . . .

The lyric subject that emerges from Hazlitt’s selection, colored by his note in the Critical List, is a very fluid entity, completely defined by responsiveness—or by, as poets today might say approvingly, “attentiveness”—to occasions, immersed in challenges to his perceptual field amidst waves of desire. The poems insist upon this radical mobility, part of which features the silencing of the lyric subject altogether in the case of poems such as “The Female Vagrant” and “The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman.” The designation that seems best to approximate the consciousness permeating these poems is “witness”—at times silent, at times vocal, at

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times absorbed in narration, at times displaced into form itself. In “The Female Vagrant” the formal aristocratic elegance of the Spenserian stanza could be said to register the disturbing otherness of the witness in relation to the always shocking collapse of the human subject of the poem. We cannot forget the relevance of Hazlitt’s view of Wordsworth’s poetry—that it raises up the small and mean into sublimity, combines the simple with the profundity and power of execution—as an act of transformation of perception, of defamiliarization, of liberation. Not only vagrants and forsaken persons are thus liberated; but the (middle-class) speaking subject is liberated from the “frozenness” and narrowness of custom, familiarity, and comfort. This, I believe, is the real point of the Immortality Ode with which Hazlitt (like Wordsworth in many of his collections) concludes the selection. It is no accident that the “Ode” ends with a couplet summarizing Hazlitt’s description of Wordsworth’s poetry: To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears—

not as a consoling, but as a transforming, perception. A final observation. In the conventional wisdom of the poetic faculties, the Fancy stands for childish fantasy and for a playfulness incapable of recognizing reality, death, and limit; and therefore “maturity” is the capacity for such recognition. Mainstream poetries demand that such recognition be accompanied by a shift away from the vital transformative energies provided by the Fancy. In Lyrical Ballads and 1807, and in particular in the selections made by Hazlitt, the poems show that his speakers are not compelled by childish notions of limitlessness and the merging of self and other when “otherness” is at stake. For Hazlitt, Wordsworth, like Keats, as I show later, in the “Ode to a Nightingale,” does not interpret the visionary, expansive, transformative drive of the Fancy as a projection or rescue fantasy. This acknowledgment of limits is not “Romantic skepticism” or resignation but rather a vision of mind that, in that very acknowledgment, remains active, sympathetic, serious, and playful. In fact, we might call it sheer acknowledgment of the other, what Blake labels “forgiveness,” even when forgiveness leaves people in isolated, compromised positions. The desire to save or convert people from their tragedy or their error is often announced but not allowed. Martha Ray in “The Thorn,” one of the harshest poems in Hazlitt’s selection, remains unreachable by the superstitious society that wonders about her tragic neglect from her fiancé and death of her infant. Hazlitt’s selection of Wordsworth can allow us to extend our discussion of Wordsworth’s poetry of the Fancy into other instances of his poetry. Consider first a relatively unacknowledged sonnet, composed by Wordsworth

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sometime between 1802 and 1804, years (beginning in 1798) when he seemed particularly preoccupied with the disposition of his poetics: How sweet it is, when mother Fancy rocks The wayward brain, to saunter through a wood! An old place, full of many a lovely brood, Tall trees, green arbours, and ground-flowers in flocks; And wild rose tip-toe upon hawthorn stocks, Like a bold Girl, who plays her agile pranks At Wakes and Fairs with wandering Mountebanks, When she stands cresting the Clown’s head, and mocks The crowd beneath her. Verily I think, Such place to me is sometimes like a dream Or map of the whole world: thoughts, link by link, Enter through ears and eyesight, with such gleam Of all things, that at last in fear I shrink, And leap at once from the delicious stream.

Wordsworth told Henry Crabb Robinson in 1812 that this poem was “almost the only one [of his poems] of pure fancy.” Presumably he said this as an indication of its “trifling” nature, an instance of, as he says in another sonnet, “errant Fancy” (the word “saunter” here in the second line changed from the manuscript reading of “wander”). The sonnet section of this Wordsworth’s first collection of poems (not including the thematic unity of Lyrical Ballads) begins with “Nuns fret not” as a Prefatory Sonnet and then is followed, as an introduction to Miscellaneous Sonnets, with “How Sweet It Is.” The two sonnets together reinforce the view of the sonnet as a poem composed “In sundry moods,” as a “pastime,” perfect for those “Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,” and can “find short solace there, as I have found.” Here the sonnet performs the function of compensation, a necessary fiction of the world and mind as bound, a comic vision created and accepted out of a conscious artifice of limitation. “How Sweet It Is” follows naturally from this poem; but it is possible to read it against the grain so that the Fancy as a poetics emerges as a crisis of desire but becomes the road not taken. What if—the poem does not but very well could ask—the principles of the Fancy took over completely, the sundry mood became the most authentic stance for poetry to follow, the dispersive language of the mother (the semiotic) replaced the more controllable language of the father, the body and the senses led the mind; what would a poetry of true and wholly committed sauntering (or wandering—a more “errant” movement) be like? What if one allowed the (metonymic) “link by link” of thought leading, transforming linearity outward to a map, a set of correspondences

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about the entire world—a poem in which the private sundry mood became the entire world, the personal of lyric becoming the political? What if one allowed language to be less secondary and more primary, more “streamlike” instead of inscriptive, and followed sensuous desire, Fancy’s delicious pleasure, into a poetry of bliss? This is the path—our contemporary experimental poetics could not be formulated more accurately—that Wordsworth maps out but rejects and shrinks from. Interestingly, he leaps out of, not into, the delicious stream. I am reminded of Robert Bly’s phrase “leaping consciousness,” to describe the most vigorous of poetic gestures, the expansion of consciousness by leaping across domains: Wordsworth describes a leaping that is a shrinking of consciousness, from many linkages back to one. His sonnets, he is proposing, ought to refuse these expansions; indeed the form embraces without conflict this scanty plot of ground. The difference between this poem and “Nuns Fret not” is that “How Sweet It Is” confirms the principle of a poem functionally designed for limited imaginative ambition by forcibly rejecting another, bolder and more delicious principle. The “Miscellaneous Sonnets,” in other words, gain their equanimity by means of a sacrifice of a poetics of aperture, a sacrifice of a poetry of participation for one of monumental closure. At first glance “How Sweet It Is” seems less a poem of the Fancy, as Wordsworth declared it, and more one about it; yet—and perhaps this is why it has had so little play in discussion of his poetry—it is an intensely private poem, and severely honest, a confession of sorts, of weakness. He imagines poetic thought—nonhierarchical, a genuine wandering that is true to the human condition of participation in the world, not a disinterested perspective upon it, the linkage of thought with bodily sensation and the sensuous nature of poetic language, and finally leading to a certain poetic holiness: “such gleam / Of all things” (recall the centrality of the gleam in the “Intimations Ode”). This is the stance and the language of a poetry intent on accounting for the “precious” in all things, the “life of things.” But the axiom of visionary poetry is that the precious in the world can only be noted if the poet enters the very stream in which the object resides. Wordsworth’s utterly authentic intuition about this goes counter to his poetic “morality” (comparable to Blake’s understanding of Milton’s access to visionary poetry compromised by his Christianity) and produces at times a poetry of aperture within the severer strictures of his version of a poetry of closure. We need to read his poems of the Fancy with his ambivalences in mind in order not to fall into the trap of his own and his culture’s and literary history’s making: the trivialization of the fancy, which, I believe, means the trivialization of lyric poetry’s visionary potential. The comedy of the Fancy belongs emphatically to the spring, to the season of nurturance and the initiation of life; but for visionary poetry,

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springtime fecundity has its imaginative correlate: the birth of the apparition. Unreality is the greatest reality. Personification (of daisies, linnets, cuckoos, celandines, etc.) might be deemed a vernal figure in that the human is born out of the nonhuman. A beautiful Lyrical Ballad (1800 edition) “A whirlblast from behind the hill,” that Wordsworth placed in the Poems of the Fancy, locates the visionary moment in a bower (“A fairer bower was never seen”): From year to year the spacious floor With wither’d leaves is cover’d o’er, You could not lay a hair between: And all the year the bower is green. But see! where’er the hailstones drop The wither’d leaves all skip and hop, There’s not a breeze—no breath of air— Yet here, and there, and every where Along the floor, beneath the shade By those embowering hollies made, The leaves in myriads jump and spring, As if with pipes and music rare Some Robin Good-fellow were there, And all those leaves, that jump and spring, Were each a joyous, living thing. (Lyrical Ballads 1800)

The Fancy finds life amidst the withering of life, the fundamental visionary drive of poetry. The poem tries to rid the bower of signs of natural life, for example, no breath, yet sees, in the pounding of hailstones, the leaping of dead leaves. Surely Wordsworth anticipates the following superb instance of twentieth-century visionary lyric by Charles Reznikoff in an urban setting (New York City): These days the papers in the street leap into the air or burst across the lawns— not a scrap but has the breath of life: these in a gust of wind play about, those for a moment lie still and sun themselves.8

Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” Forlorn! The very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well

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As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? Poetry is something People do In response to An obscure demand: (“Sweet bird, Sing”) Allen Grossman9

A canonical work has over time surrounded itself with a history of axiomatic, unchallengeable truths about the work, about art, and about the relationship between art and the world. The “Ode to a Nightingale” has received from criticism many versions of this ritual activity, perhaps none more succinctly stated than that by the most canonical supporter of canonical Keats, Helen Vendler: “The entry into intensity in The Ode [to a Nightingale] is followed eventually, as we know, by an ultimate disappointment.”10 It’s the “as we know” that presents the trajectory in the poem from entry into intensity to ultimate disappointment as axiomatic, as so deeply grounded in collective agreement that it can be gestured at in a mere parenthesis. With respect to this particular poem, Vendler reiterates the entire history of the case against the Fancy, a history so deep in the literary consciousness of the past quarter millennium that her reiteration becomes less an argument and more a rehearsal of a familiar agon having a familiar outcome. The lines: Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam’d to do, deceiving Elf!—

have, in a sense, always already been in the poet/speaker’s consciousness, a “q.e.d.” of his achieved maturity, an acknowledgment of life’s tragic core, an acceptance of this but also acceptance of his “errant” fancy as a vibrant stage, to be welcomed, embraced, and finally let go in the face of a more compelling reality. The line is an endorsement, ready at hand with decades of support from eighteenth-century German and Scottish philosophers and, of course, from the one-two punch of current establishment poetics, Wordsworth’s Preface to the Poems of 1815 and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. The line comes, as Keats had said about poetry itself, like leaves to a tree—naturally and without question or comment.

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Drawing on the history and interpretation of the Fancy presented in this book, I argue for an antithetical reading of Keats’s “Ode.” Put as schematically as possible, in the traditional reading, the Fancy, and thus the trajectory of engagement in most of the poem, is discovered to be a delusion, so that the speaker’s triumph at the end is skeptical: I have recognized the Fancy for what it is and accept “ordinary” reality. In the reading according to the Fancy, the speaker discovers that he has been deluded into thinking that the nightingale itself and its forested domain would embody a rescue fantasy. But the solution is not the return to a consoling, familiar reality; instead it is the extraordinary discovery that the vital act of mind, laboring among fantasies and more outward perceptions and growing in consciousness, is the strong Fancy that has been guiding the poem since the beginning and shows no sign of dwindling. If the poem features self-discovery, the latter comes about by recognizing the truer, more powerful essence of the Fancy, which the poem practices: the experiential energy of the poem in this sense is, like much visionary poetry, partly intellectual and theoretical. The essay shows just how much of Keats’s efforts of early 1819 called upon the Fancy as an instrument of simultaneously responding to personal trauma (the death of his brother Tom) and being drawn to the “liberal side of the [political] question.” He practices a poetry that rejects the idea that, no matter how appealing, in poetry or in life one should search for a salvation in an object outside the self; to the degree that the Fancy looks like it fosters such a search, he rejects it, but at the same time, he cultivates a belief in the life of the Other. For him to commit to the properties and power of the Fancy (which he has done most of his writing life) is to commit to a poetry of mind. This requires as well a formal commitment to image and celebrate the mind as a constantly proliferating, questioning, lively instrument. “The Ode to a Nightingale,” the sonnets, and other Odes of Spring 1819 (in keeping with the poetics of the Fancy practiced or discussed by Hunt, Reynolds, Byron, and Hazlitt) reveal instances of a nonhierarchical poetics. The perversity, as it were, of my reading begins by considering the line not as natural and seamlessly part of the welling up of Keats’s tragic affirmation, but as an intrusion, an interruption, a surprising intervention in a poem, which, although involving poetry and the poetic and the rhythmic, does not anticipate reference to an aesthetic category, particularly at a momentous juncture. Whereas the word “fancy” appears frequently in, for example, the poetry of Mary Robinson and the Della Cruscans, rarely does it arrive with such technical force and conjecture as it does here at the end of the “Ode to a Nightingale.” Looked at with this kind of willed naivete, one becomes open to asking a series of questions: who speaks the lines about the Fancy, and what do the lines actually say? What place did the

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Fancy have in Keats’s poetry and thought in spring 1819? How does his comment fit with the Imagination–Fancy controversies of the Regency decade? How is this poem, with its declaration about the Fancy, situated within the suite of “minor” poems published in his 1820 volume? What place does the Fancy have in Keats’s formal experiments with sonnet and ode? And finally, does attending to the Fancy alter substantially the way one engages the poem? Who speaks the lines about the Fancy? Tradition would say it is the same person who has become disappointed or disillusioned with the ecstatic mode and consequently (as Vendler says quoting Keats elsewhere) has journeyed homeward to habitual self. So the line following the trajectory of thought is a reduced (forlorn, sole) consciousness, shorn of the errant absorption of a quest. The homeward tendency, sad and yet accepting, settles in the “anchor-pull” of the familiar and the material, which is also the real. It is possible, however, that the Fancy-lines erupt from a person not as much disillusioned as catapulted into a state of openness to discovery about a new, as opposed to the “famed” or traditional, notion about the Fancy. The speaker is thinking, thinking throughout, in the midst of, in spite of, the language and drama of engagement. What Dorothy Van Ghent brilliantly proposed for the “Ode on Melancholy” applies here as well: “By its dramatic approach, it places anxiety under the aspect of experiment—that is, as not merely a static condition of suffering but as a theater of exploratory action and of revelation through stress and conflict.”11 The speaker at this point, in other words, may be making a declaration through a freedom from stress and conflict based upon a breadth of knowledge. The poem does not say that the protagonist and his speech are sunk under the weight of forlorn-ness; indeed, with the word’s repetition, attention perhaps to sound at least as much as to sense, to the signifier (“the very word”) that word-consciousness may have freed him from the heat of ecstasy and allowed him to see that something not only remains but is reenergized. In this last stanza, speech and thought are openly and vigorously, even cheerfully, receptive to theory (i.e., querying the definition of the Fancy), to observation (with the ear), to imaginative construction of a scene, and to questioning, just as the speaker of “To Autumn” rejects the absorptive yearning for “songs of spring” for the songs of autumn, which he vigorously and imaginatively constructs. The imaginative constructing of scenes, which occurs in all the Odes, brings me back to the word “fam’d,” which in the early draft given to J. H. Reynolds read, according to Richard Woodhouse, “feign’d,” a fascinating variant given the centrality of the word in the “Ode to Psyche” (“. . . which all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, / Who breeding flowers would never breed the same”). The string of associations continues: one

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variant in the “Ode to Psyche” has “frame” instead of “feign.” So, the cluster links public reputation, or ideology, with deceptions, and then with construction: fam’d, feign’d, frame, fane. “Fancy,” then, is constructed. Can this be Keats’s point?—”The fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do.” According to the thesis of my book, yes. In typical readings of the “Ode,” which accord with the notion of the Fancy as escape, “reality” is often pictured as Keats’s tragic circumstances: the death of parents, the sickness and death of his brother, and the world of pains and troubles; he learns by the end of the poem how to “accept” all of this. In the view of the “Ode” according to the Fancy, however, the enemy of the speaker is not sorrow and disease but numbness, forgetfulness, dullness: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:. . . Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget. . . . Though the dull brain perplexes and retards. . . .

This condition (not unlike the mentally as well as physically listless Titans in Hyperion, newly defeated by the Olympian gods) could be considered an elemental starting point. A “response to an obscure demand” is a necessary point of engagement for much visionary poetry: an anticipated failure or stilling of mind immediately challenges the poet to break the fetters of dullness. For a politically progressive poet writing in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre (1819), pained by the kind of oppression that Keats’s hero Hazlitt wrote about in the previous year, that we moderns are hardly allowed to dream of a midnight murder, the fetters of forgetfulness, numbness, and dullness take on an acute historical significance. It is the Fancy that must be “let loose”: “Break the mesh / Of the Fancy’s silken leash; Quickly break her prison string. . .” (“Fancy”). The aim of the poem is continuing, active, observing consciousness producing a poem of mind. From the beginning of the “Ode” to the end the speaker breaks the prison string of the Fancy but in a confusion that replicates the theoretical confusion about the Fancy from the eighteenth century on. If the speaker is seeking to escape pain and sorrow and disease, he imagines traveling to a domain (“beaker full of the warm South”) or to an object (the Nightingale: “Away! away! for I will fly to thee”) each of which works as a rescue fantasy. Even poetry is implicated in this rescue fantasy (“fly to thee. . .On the viewless wings of Poesy”). But if he chooses “escape” as an effort to unfetter the mind from the dullness of ideological constraint, then the

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notion of Fancy-as-escape takes on a different meaning and announces a much more vigorous, reality-centered act of mind. But how would one know the implications of an escape until one experimented with it? Escape also contains within it the impulse of visionary poetry: to break beyond the strictures of limited vision, and this implies that mobilization by the Fancy is a crucial human, poetic decision. No better gloss on this function of poetic escape exists than Charles Bernstein’s in his poem-manifesto “Artifice of Absorption” (Language Poetry theory has strong roots in visionary Romantic poetics): But escape can be an image of release from captivity in a culture that produces satisfactions as a means of exploitation or pacification. The problem with “escapist” literature is that it offers no escape, narratively reinforcing our captivity. To escape, however, if only trope-ically, is not a utopian refusal to encounter the realpolitic of history: it is a crucial dialectical turn that allows imaginal place outside history as we “know” it, in order to critique it, an Archemidian point of imaginative construction, in which we can be energized, our resources shored.12

This is a perfect gloss on the escape impulse in the “Ode” from the point of view of the Fancy. Keats’s speaker takes on the burden of working through the two possible meanings of Fancy, the two meanings of escape, in order to get outside history as we “know” it for an imaginal construction of the real. We can see Keats’s own confusion about the Fancy, as well as his final decision about how to proceed with it, in a fascinating manuscript variant. At the bottom of the second page of the manuscript, upside down, is written “Small, winged Dryad.”13 His editor Jack Stillinger plausibly understands this as a rejected beginning of the poem: Keats turned the sheet upside-down and began again: “My heart aches. . .,” in an upending of the poem’s intention. Instead of beginning with an apostrophe to nightingale as mythological tree-god, with—at the same time—a naturalizing adjective “small” creating an oxymoron of nature and myth, he initiates the experiment with observation of his own body as organs of the senses expanded into conscious feeling. This sets up a crisis of odal speech: can one speak out beyond the “body-in-pain” as well as outward from its sensations per se? This revised focus on the poem of Fancy as exploratory of expansive mind itself stands at one pole of the dialectical relationship between

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“absorptive” and “impermeable” poetics, which the “Ode to a Nightingale” dramatizes: here to begin the poem apostrophically, “Small, winged Dryad” is to anticipate a poem of absorption—to address the bird is to anticipate envisioning it as ultimately salvific, roughly what happens in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Such pressure placed upon the nightingale corresponds to the cheating “fame” of the Fancy, a rescue fantasy written in psychocultural parameters. One can read back from this Ode to the “Ode to Psyche” where the “moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep” in order for the gardener Fancy to take over with his endlessly proliferative creative powers. “Small, winged Dryad,” lying now on its back, is similarly laid to sleep, the Fancy consequently set loose from the shackles of drowsy numbness. The Nightingale of the poem receives the speaker’s changing characterizations of it first as an object to save the speaker from the pains of life and second as a facilitation of the speaker’s renewed confidence in his unfettered and continuously observing and perceiving mind. Finally naming the bird an “elf” signals his acknowledgment that the Nightingale as a daemonic spirit facilitates his crossing of thresholds (like Hermes, the favorite god of Keats and Shelley) in a ceaseless activity of exploration and new encounter. What is an elf in this poem of the Fancy?—a daemonic presence, hardly one that plays by the rules but one that does have a hold upon a liminal world of spirit. In a line between tales in The Canterbury Tales that Chaucer the poet tells, the host calls the poet “elvish,” one who extends perception and thought past orthodoxy. The “elfin storm from faery land” howling at the end of The Eve of St. Agnes (significantly “medieval”) transforms the expectation of control and punishment at the hands of the sinister patriarchal family of the castle into an opportunity for a life full of love and happiness: it “cheats” the orthodoxy by “deceiving it.” The Nightingale in Keats’s poem is akin to Hermes in the Paolo and Francesca sonnet closing the eyes of the policeman Argus, or Shelley’s Mercury in his translation of the Homeric Hymn, or the latter’s daemonic witch of Atlas, who is dedicated to the loosening of the bonds of convention and expectation in people made miserable by their constricted view of their world. This dedication, of course, applies as well to the Fancy itself, and thus it is no surprise that the apostrophe to the Nightingale as a deceiving elf is simultaneously, in a brilliant act of poetic compression, an appositive for the Fancy. We need now to look at the contributions of the elf—Fancy or Nightingale—to the speaker’s fate, which begin at the beginning of the poem. The elf facilitates speech where speech is unlikely and observation in the world where observation may seem to be beside the point. Both indicate a new freedom of mind as a response to the two crises in the poem: one at the outset and the second at the poem’s close. First, as a question, can sensation, consciousness, and speech arise amidst the tendency of

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numbness, forgetfulness, and silence? This chiasmus (stanza I) is very old in poetry, the speech-producing condition of opiated drowsy numbness, anticipated by Sappho’s words to her beloved in which speech is about the inability to speak: Once I look at you for a moment, I can’t speak any longer, but my tongue breaks down, and then all at once a subtle fire races inside my skin. . . . ( Jim Powell, trans.)

One of the primary dramas of lyric, speech where silence and oblivion are imminent, sets the “Ode to Nightingale” in motion and might be considered a blessed outcome of the Fancy as a principle of affirmation and renovation, a principle that cannot be located in an object. Moreover, the “motion” of the poem appears in the characteristic syntax of the Fancy, parataxis. The “Ode” is full of listings—about wine and Bacchic escape (stanza 2), about the relentlessly diseased city (stanza 3), most magnificently about the flowers of the “seasonable month” (stanza 5), and finally about the pathway of the Nightingale in its “fading” at the end: Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hillside; and now ‘tis buried deep In the next valley glades. . . .

Motion of mind in its associations is also accumulation, a verbal–visual fecundity that, syntactically, could go on forever. Where the fear of opiated dullness was, there is (like the accumulated “music” of “To Autumn”) now an explosive activity and fullness. It is as if the speaker’s mental energies have been surging through his own accounts of reality whereas the longings for escape-from have played themselves out. The longings come to an end exactly at the moment the awareness of the strong Fancy makes itself known: Adieu! The Fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam’d to do, deceiving Elf.

The departure of the nightingale in stanza 8 requires a second crisis, an indication of the Fancy’s saving presence: Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream Up the hill-side, and now ‘tis buried deep In the next valley glades. . . .

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If the nightingale has deceived the speaker into thinking that speech and the coherence of poetic understanding resided in the presence of that bird song, then its departure should render him speechless; but in fact the voice, the mind (when hearing is no longer possible), if anything increases in its perceiving (“guess”ing) acuity in following the bird’s song into a new geography, or domain, constructed as the life-of-the-bird-elsewhere. Notice that what “fades” is the “plaintive anthem,” a double negative that at the end of this poem leaves poetic speech—it has always seemed to me— strangely buoyant, almost “cheerful.” The word “fades,” curiously reverses its expected meaning. We anticipate the use earlier in the poem—“fade far away”—but here the fading is more a fading in than a fading out. It proposes the oxymoronic vividness of the world actually unseen and unknown yet real. Such a build-up of vividness leads to the poem’s final questions that feel like the new, unfamiliar landing place of an exploratory consciousness. Charles Bernstein beautifully captures what could be considered the narrative and the poetics of the “Ode to a Nightingale”: Poetry is like a swoon, with this difference: it brings you to your senses.14

I now provide some more contextual arguments for the privileging of the Fancy in the “Ode.” There is nothing in Keats’s work or the Fancy in early 1819 and in the commentary of Hunt and Hazlitt (in his “Cockney” anthology Select British Poets) to indicate that they valued Keats’s Ode for tragic substitution and visionary skepticism. Consider first the reviews that seem to read the poem as a praise of the Fancy as I do. Hunt’s review of Keats’s 1820 volume15 that chooses to focus on the “Ode to a Nightingale,” although not discussing the Fancy per se, describes the poem over and against “some over-rational critics.” That is, the contentious nature of the poetry of the Fancy, its nearly dialectical relationship to what Hunt calls over-rationalism and what later in the century Dickens (Hard Times, Bleak House) will consider the industrial capitalist aim to value and determine life through quantification and profits emerged with the “Ode’s” first appearance: There is that mixture in it [“Ode to Nightingale”] of real melancholy and imaginative relief, which poetry alone presents us in her “charmed cup,” and which some over-rational critics have undertaken to find wrong because it is not true. It does not follow that what is not true to them, is not true to others. If the relief is real, the mixture is good and sufficing. . . .

From the beginning of its reception, the reality of visionary poetry or the poetic representation of imagining is at issue. As a poet and champion

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of the Fancy, Hunt refuses to prefer the learned virtues of ordinary consciousness and tragic reality or “melancholy.” Instead he describes the poem in terms of mixture, “the twisting and untwisting of thoughts,” which saves all thoughts. At the same time the politics of disease, here linked with that of the adverse criticism Keats received, colors the “relief” that the speaker in the poem achieves in his imaginings: The poem will be the more striking to the reader, when he understands what we take a friend’s liberty in telling him, that the author’s powerful mind has for some time past been inhabiting a sick body, and that in the mean while it has had to contend with feelings that make a fine nature ache for its species, even when it would disdain to do so for itself;—we mean, critical malignity,—that unhappy envy, which would wreak its own tortures upon others, especially upon those that really feel for it already.

Although the poem (the poet a metonym for the poem) yearns for a poetic existence free from the intrusion both of politics and the diseased body, it is characterized by its engagement with both, dialectically, as a mixture. Did Hunt consciously quote the “Ode” when he says that Keats “aches” (“My heart aches”) for those critics of humanity who have vilified them? Here— in the spirit of work by Dorothy Van Ghent, Nicholas Roe, and Alan Bewell—the poem places bodily pain and disease (or physical, mental, and social constraint) in a vital relationship to both a domain of health (the forest) and a mental faculty (the Fancy). The Fancy, once again, is the faculty and, one might say, the visionary technique of mixed realities—subjective and objective, old and new, mental and physical, private and public. Select British Poets gives another authoritative proof that the “Ode” is a poem celebrating the Fancy. Keats is represented by the “Hymn to Pan” and the “Ode to Sorrow” from Endymion, the “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Fancy,” The Eve of St. Agnes, and Clymene’s account of first hearing the music of Apollo in Book II of Hyperion. “Fancy,” hardly one of Keats’s monumental poems, is the centerpiece of this grouping, just as it is in Keats’s 1820 volume. Hazlitt begins with the lines from Endymion that Wordsworth famously dismissed for its Cockney poetics (“a pretty piece of paganism”) with its invocation of the cult of Pan and its Bacchic overtones that are picked up in the final selection from Hyperion and its distinctly Bacchic Apollonianism; the selection is framed with the flavor of Leigh Hunt in the middle and at greatest length stands The Eve of St. Agnes, the most erotic, sensuous, and materialist of Keats’s long poems, oxymoronically a monumentalization in Spenserian stanzas of the erotic ephemerality of the Fancy. In this setting it is hard to square the placement of the “Ode to a Nightingale” with the “fam’d” skepticism of the Fancy as a cheat and a

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delusory deception, something one would want to overcome, to transcend in an act of a mature acceptance of the tragic vision. Even the “Ode to Sorrow,” so-called, comes in a highly lyric, Shelleyan stanza form that reverses the valence of its melancholy subject, or at least “mixes” it up in the lyric buoyancy. Today, by contrast, one would not expect to see even a brief selection of Keats framed by “Bacchic” poetry (from Endymion and Hyperion); Hyperion would be represented by a passage of “monumental” poetry showing Saturn or Thea in the cold, tragic stillness of grand “Miltonic stationing.” But, as we have seen, this reading of the “Ode to a Nightingale” fits well with the intentions of Select British Poets.16 Not only in the “Living Poets” section but from the extensive passages from Chaucer and Spencer and the Neoclassic poets through Burns and concluding with a lavish collection of “miscellaneous” sonnets and songs from the Renaissance, this book definitely offers a landscape of British poetry that would appeal to a “Cockney” literary temperament. The “Ode to a Nightingale” needs to be read as part of, not opposed to, the principles of that alternative poetic and cultural community. And finally, Keats’s own poetry of early 1819 suggests that the cultivation of a vital poetry simply means a continual reiteration of the Fancy as the faculty of reaction to versions of constraint. The traumatic presence of recent death and the growing sense of antipathy to the constrictions of “custom” and ideology bring a poetry of the Fancy into line with his affinity for the “liberal side of the question.” Keats’s commitment to the Fancy as liberating, playful, intense, life giving, is at its peak during the months preceding the writing of the Odes. Just to look at Keats’s epithets for the Fancy (even before 1819) convinces one that the Fancy is the principle of vitality as the poetic mind characterizes and evinces it: “wandering,” “morbid,” “delighted,” “sweet,” “winged,” “faery,” “dreaming,” “believing,” “stronger,” “vain and crude,” “dark”: not merely “cheerful,” the Fancy is confident enough and far-ranging to absorb all affects. Then there are phrases: “some fainter gleamings o’er his fancy shot,” “My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads,” “Fancy is dead and drunken at its goal,” “Inconstant, childish, proud, and full of fancies,” “my own dark fancies err,” “fancy stray’d.” The list could almost have come from Mary Robinson or the Della Cruscans of a previous generation—a given of poetics at once adversarial, sophisticated, and urbane. Given Keats’s general affinity with Hunt’s poetics of the Fancy and of cheerfulness and what we can assume is Keats’s skepticism toward Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s preference for a “mature,” reconciling poetics of the Imagination, it makes sense that he would wave the Huntian banner in his most important poems, and that the “Ode to a Nightingale” would be a signal exhibit in this vein: this, at least, seems to be

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the perception of Hunt himself and of the greatest reader (and anthologist) of contemporary literary culture, William Hazlitt. For Keats in early 1819 several things “dovetailed in [his] mind” about poetry, politics, poetics, and personal experience, in what we might call a five-month “essay,” an experiment in poetic possibility that is simultaneously an essaying or “weighing” of the situation of his private/public world.17 Let us begin with two seemingly unrelated occupants of the dwelling place of his mind in early 1819. First is the effect of his brother Tom’s death in December 1818, surely—with the resonance to the death of his parents and the prolonged unsuccessful nursing of both the mother and brother—a traumatic shattering of filiative and affiliative security and structure, reinforced by the vanishing of his brother George and his sisterin-law Georgiana to the United States, and perhaps subtly by his incipient tuberculosis (“sore throat”); all this acts as an unraveling and a self-protective narrowing of focus. The second occupant would be just the opposite, if James Chandler is correct, an emergent social and political consciousness, evident in his total agreement with Hazlitt’s Letter to William Gifford with its attack on hypocrisy, superstition, imperialism, and the government’s fear of dissent: later that year (October), says Chandler, “Keats betrays an ambition for reshaping the state of the nation.”18 We need to consider the capaciousness of poetry in response to trauma as well as to the world. On the one hand trauma contracts the usable world, but, from the perspective of poetry, by destroying all outward stabilities, it can open the channel for a new construct, a new “feigning.” Keats, as Chandler suggests and Levinson has shown, was quite willing to challenge assumptions of conventional form and figure and of ideology; he was willing to take Hazlitt’s provocative association of imagination and power (“Coriolanus”) and, according to Chandler, experiment with the possibility of a nonhierarchical poetics. He was willing to take even conventional elegiac responses to death, with its focus on inwardness followed by some version of acceptance or transformation of vision into public-centeredness not by directly addressing social or political issues but by insisting (as an acknowledgment of the otherness of the traumatic agent?) on the fact and need to accept otherness and the complete appropriateness of poetry to enact this acknowledgment. Similarly Keats admits into his poetry, from “Fancy” on, the fact of the erotic as part of the dynamics of loss. Strikingly, the two major poems written closest to Tom’s death, “Fancy” and The Eve of St. Agnes, are overtly erotic. 1820, as I have argued in Reception and Poetics in Keats, is basically a volume privileging a poetry of the Fancy. “Fancy” appears pretty much at the center of the shorter poems, and thus its erotic ending, particularly as it is placed next to the “Ode to Psyche,” casts an influence forward and

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backward in the volume. “Fancy” declares its essentially Blakean eroticism that refuses control of the other: Oh sweet Fancy! Let her loose; Every thing is spoilt by use

is reminiscent of: He who binds himself to a joy Does the winged life destroy. He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Anticipating the end of the “Ode to a Nightingale,” Fancy repeats a poetic/imaginative focus on an actual object of erotic desire for a “mistress to thy mind.” The traumatic lesson of Keats (don’t invest too much in the love object—father, mother, brother—who will die) leads to a poetry not of massive compensation or sublimation (a standard reading) but of one compatible with visionary poetics: to keep the mind free and eroticized allows for a real strength in describing a liberated relationship between mind and world. Keats, of course, writes a few months after “Fancy” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” an anti-Fancy poem less about the scariness of women as about death to the imagination from total absorption in the Other. It is interesting to read the major long poem of 1820, The Eve of St. Agnes, in these terms, with its relentlessly delicate management of erotic desire as a success story: the lovers experience sexual fulfillment without all but a momentary absorption in bliss, a kind of kissing the joy as it flies. Each lover, one might say, becomes also a mistress to the other’s mind (“Fancy”), alive until they pass out of the poem; part of their imaginative vitality lies in their ability to outwit the patriarchal dangers in the uneasy sprawl of an imaginative drunken sleep. Finally, “Fancy” begins a sequence in 1820 of four poems in rhymed tetrameter couplets the last of which, “Robin Hood” laments the passing of the precapitalist community of Sherwood Forest. Today, if Maid Marian were to return She would weep that her wild bees Sang not to her—strange! That honey Can’t be got without hard money!

Everything is spoilt by use and the market economy. The Fancy is “the” mental faculty of songs of the free mind in the presence of sites of coercion

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and absorption. But it also resists embodiments of fantasized salvation, such as mistresses, Sherwood Forest, and. . .nightingales. The response to trauma—personal, political, collective—in Romanticism, and the Fancy,19 is relevant here, demands its acknowledgment, which first opens a space of bewilderment and chaos, of void and absence, then leads to an absorptive clinging to the terms of trauma itself (see stanza 3 of “Ode to a Nightingale”) or an attempted ecstasy renewed in its presence (stanza 4). The Fancy takes over, however, when the “Ode” focuses more on the movement of mind in its establishing a “betweeness” of subject and referent accompanied by a thickening or texturing of language (forlorn. . . forlorn!, Adieu. . .Adieu Adieu) and by rich, rhythmic parataxes so typical of Keats’s Odes. The freeing of objects from the fantasy of control paradoxically gives them, in their freedom, more substantiality, just as it allows for the image of the mind’s confirmed vitality past the poem’s closed borders. Keats’s poetry of the first half of 1819 returns again and again to experiments in realizing the mind in its freedom in the presence of a fully acknowledged Other in its freedom. Seen in this light, it is nearly irrelevant to think of the “Ode to a Nightingale” in terms of a failed visionary imagination and the triumph of a sober reality. Rather, in what follows I propose that life of the Other, a fundamental interest of the Fancy, emerges as a preoccupation in Keats’s formal and thematic poetic engagements of spring 1819 leading up to the writing of the “Ode to a Nightingale” His concern for the independent life of the Other in relation to the poet’s desire to control it appears most obviously in the April sonnets to Fame, the sonnet on the sonnet, the Paolo and Francesca sonnet, and the “Ode to Psyche.” I will consider the sonnet’s formal proximity to the Ode stanza in relation to the thematic question, but not before rehearsing the “plots” of these poems. “As Hermes . . .” may be considered a revision of “La Belle Dame” in the sense that with the help of his deserving “idle sprite” he is able to kiss in a dream his Francesca equivalent, feel the melancholy of having entered the death-infused world of images but not having been sacrificed to his absorption within it. The danger of absorption into the Other is the flip side of the desire to control, to “use” the Other. Keats’s sonnets on Fame argue against its pursuit on these grounds, in other terms, on the grounds of a hypertrophied ego (which establishes the connection between Keats’s spring 1819 poetry and Hunt’s, Reynolds’s, and Hazlitt’s critiques of the ego in poetry and society). All of these versions of the Other are female to the male subject, and all are principles of an enlarged psychoreferential realm or cosmos; when “pursued” by the ego, they resist or negate the pursuit, but when allowed their own unfolding,

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they may show responsiveness:20 Make your best bow to her and bid adieu, Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

Rather than trying to control the response, one (like Sappho in her famous Hymn to Aphrodite) gestures—rather formally with a bow—and lets go. In poetry the equivalent of the gesture might be the petition, an apostrophe, of the kind typical of the Odes. The sonnet, and the characteristic Ode stanza evolving from it, seems to have become the formal field (the “bow”) through which Keats hammered out a vision of the freedom of the Other and “meet attention” to it. They have become the formal image of the Fancy “struggling to escape.” And whereas the sonnet has always been figured as a form of constraint, it becomes in Keats more directly linked to imprisonment (“chain’d,” “fetter’d”) in the imagery hearkening back to the French Revolution, recalling Blake (“Poetry fetter’d fetters the human race”) and anticipating Clare’s defense of his unconventional punctuation and capitalization as an unfettering of the mind constrained by conventional language. Noteworthy here is the vision of a possible autonomy of the Other (“the Muse”) through a reworking of form amidst the constraints imposed by form, chains, as if to say, the compulsion to break chains is more self-serving than the ethical need to attend to the freedom of the Other in his/her own setting (reminiscent of those Proverbs of Hell in which Blake praises the conditions in which natural individual expression flourishes in a context that supports, rather than distorts, it: no bird flies too high that flies with its own wings). In the conventional sonnet, the chaining of “our English” by “dull rhymes” limits human realization, distorts through reduction and inattention unless special vigilance and attention is applied to language and form: If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d, And, like Andromeda, the sonnet sweet Fetter’d, in spite of pained loveliness; Let us find out, if we must be constrain’d, Sandals more interwoven and complete To fit the naked foot of Poesy; Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress Of every chord, and see what may be gain’d By ear industrious, and attention meet; . . .

Attention to form yields attention to the Muse, or Other. The word “dull” comes from Wordsworth—“Dull would he be of soul who could pain by a sight so touching in its majesty”—and seem to have preoccupied

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Keats in this poem (“If by dull rhymes”) and the “Ode to a Nightingale”: “some dull opiate,” “Though the dull brain perplexes and retards,” standing opposed to “attention meet,” a watchfulness both of the Other and of form itself. Misers of sound and syllable, no less Than Midas of his coinage, let us be Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown. . . .

Dullness implies an ideological clutter, perhaps what Jerome McGann would call a “pre-reading” of a poem the idioms of which we think we know and thus do not attend to. The proposed sonnet writing, then, will clear away the waste of the old form, a pruning of the dead and a hoarding of the vital will take place for the sake of the Other. This, I believe, is the theory behind the new Ode stanzas, which reduces the sonnet in length while maintaining what Keats thinks are vital elements. The “Ode to Psyche,” the centerpiece Ode of the 1820 volume,21 playfully but grandly proposes to the goddess a life, in the modern world, of freedom not with the speaker but with her beloved Love, thus fulfilling in the Ode form the dicta of the sonnets and “Fancy,” which immediately follows “Psyche” in 1820. This “attention meet” for the independent well-being of the Other manifests the speaker’s vision of generosity and fecundity, embodied in the Fancy: And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same. . . .

Dramatically, it’s hard to see “what’s in it” for the speaker, attempting to seduce someone for her own, different lover. But for Keats the goal is first a modeling of respect for the independent life of the Other, and then unending consciousness, unending proliferation of poetry as a revisioning of possibility past psychological and ideological constraints that dull and numb the brain and the minds of contemporary citizen-readers. Concern moves away (Fancy-like) from the fate of the lyric subject. Unlike that of the other Odes, the stanza form of the “Ode to Psyche,” images a spontaneity of the fecund and excessive imagination. Its stanzaic reference to the sonnet at once deforms and expands the latter into a nearly open form. It has in common with the stanza of the “Ode to a Nightingale”

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the occasional trimeter or dimeter line, an allusion to the voice of the daemonic goddess or bird into which the otherwise earth-bound speakers mimic the songspeech from the domain outside normal consciousness. The Odes emphasize the constructedness (out of the sonnet) of their stanzas, which recalls the language of construction in the poem (“build a fane,” “feign” as to construct a “trellis”). This building occurs in the blank of history between the worship of Greek divinities and the present, an apparent emptiness that implies traumatic origins (the fall of Titans, the French Revolution). “Ode to Psyche,” in other words, does not come as leaves to a tree (as Keats wished poetry would) but with the pleasant pain of construction in new categories (the stars have no names).22 The repeated use of paratactic listings in the Ode stanza suggests the accretions produced by a conscious mind. As these accretions build, they increase the substantiality of the Other. These readings of poems written just before the “Ode to a Nightingale” fully reinforce a comparable reading of the latter Ode—that the speaker, instead of rejecting the vision sustained in the presence of the Nightingale, converts it into an acknowledgment of its presence and independent life in geography separate from his own. This particular and new (for the poem) perception is wholly in keeping with the speaker’s sudden reevaluation of the Fancy as a faculty that helps to maintain and sharpen the sense of the life of the Other at the same time that it defines the capacity of mind to continue its mobile and proliferative activity without (ecstatic) absorption in a desired object. The final stanza merely intensifies mental activity amidst the fact of the bird’s vanishing. Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep?

Closure demands the decay of the Fancy; or does it? Clare ends a sonnet with “coy bumbarrels” beginning to fly “again.” In Clare and here with Keats, formal closure couples with an “open” content. The last stanza is less about “dissolution” of the Fancy in the face of “reality” and more an epiphany about the true nature of the Fancy—the continuation of exploratory, transformative mental activity—which the last lines live out. The end of the poem enacts the juxtaposition of formal ending with continuous speech. This is something that his sonnets had theorized, but it requires the deformed sonnet of the ode stanza to enact it. These stanzas are paradoxically signs of aperture. In other words, the “Ode to a Nightingale” conforms to a model of visionary poetry that refuses to be centered on the speaking subject while it simultaneously refuses absorption into the object. What is “visionary” is

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precisely the enactment of two domains of simultaneous activity. While you are reading or perceiving with the intensity of absorption as if nothing else were happening, something else is, in fact, happening with as much intensity. The acknowledgment of life in more than one domain, the decentering of the subject, is a major property of the domain-changing, threshold-crossing Fancy. The lesson for this Romantic speaker, acting in the same spirit as his contemporaries Wordsworth (“To the Cuckoo”) and Shelley (“To a Skylark”), is that the danger for citizens and poets lies in the drowsy numbness of a too-great absorption, a too great investment in the Other on the latter’s terms. He asks, are you a bird or a spirit: the answer in all cases is that “bird” equals “object as a rescue fantasy”; “spirit” equals object as occasion to acknowledge its own independent life while enacting one’s own independent conscious mental life, allowing the world and the self to expand in their mutual relations. * * * In this book, I have argued that the Fancy defines the vision of Romantic poetry and, finally, the purpose of visionary poetry in general: to expand, to defamiliarize perception, to challenge convention, to express mind-inits-freedom by establishing a playful relationship to language. Once again, “Poetry fetter’d, fetters the human race.” I believe that, allowing for variation in time and place, this definition has a fairly constant application in the history of poetry. It seems to me particularly relevant during the “longRomantic” period, with its obvious vulnerability and responsiveness to social and political change. Given all this, the simple question that must be asked about the “Ode to a Nightingale” can stand for the same question directed toward the entire line of Fanci-phobic apologists for poetry: why would a poet—particularly one with Keats’s energies, his sensuousness, his affinities with the politically and culturally dissident Cockney poets— choose to write a poem skeptical of poetry’s visionary capacity? Clearly his contemporaries saw neither Keats nor the “Ode to a Nightingale” as a poet or poem of retraction, of the recovery of the “habitual self” as a good-sense gesture dismissing the erotic and visionary excesses of the Fancy. Nor does the Ode, generically, and as brilliantly practiced by Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley give any indication that it would regulate the undoing of its own most generative impulses. On the contrary, the “Ode to a Nightingale” and many of the poems presented in this book track the moment for the artist when, acutely alive to the sense of a severe constriction of consciousness, he or she chooses to move beyond that narrowness into an expanded

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account of one’s poetic, personal, natural, and social reality. Less concerned with mourning and accepting our losses than with attending to gains and thus marked by cheerfulness, Fancy’s cup of the world is half full. With such a spirit leading one on, decisions to follow the Fancy are decisions to go forward with poetry as praise, with poetry itself.

NOTES

Introduction: “Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race” 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 304–05. 2. (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2000). 3. There may be a racial dimension to chromophobia, but this is not Batchelor’s point. 4. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds., Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 4. 5. Reviewers reacted violently to the half-rhyme, enjambed heroic couplets in Keats’s 1817 volume of poems as “loose” couplets to go along with the Cockney poet’s “loose” politics. See William Keach, “Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style,” SiR, vol. 25 (Summer 1986), pp. 182–96. 6. Oxford English Dictionary [OED]. 7. Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 116–29; Laura Riding, Rational Meaning (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997). 8. See Steve McCaffery, “Writing as a General Economy,” ed. Christopher Beach, Artifice & Indeterminacy (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1998), pp. 201–21. Or, as Gertrude Stein said approvingly in Reflection on the Atomic Bomb (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973), p. 140: “A book which makes no difference between one jeweler and another.” 9. See, for example, Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon for examples of the early Romantic linkage of the erotic and the democratic. 10. See his poems “Mantis” and “Mantis: An Interpretation.” 11. Discussed by Bob Perelman, “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice,” in The Marginalization of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 59–78. 12. David Antin and Barrett Watten discuss the way that “narrative” (or in Antin’s word “story”) have come to signify a sequence of events already predetermined as meaning and intention; an antithetical poetry, then, puts a stress on a movement of mind through events, with emphasis on the subjective experience rather than the outward sequence of events themselves. A poetry of “non-narrative” (Watten) and “narrative” (Antin) displays a

278

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

NOTES

mind not bound by a predetermined structuring of events. See Barrett Watten, “Nonnarrative and the Construction of History,” in The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), pp. 197–237; David Antin, “Talking Narrative: A Conversation with David Antin,” ed. Brian McHale, Narrative, vol. 12, no. 1 ( January 2004), pp. 93–115. Charles Bernstein’s notion of a poetry of “impermeability,” one in which the mind moves quickly over words and signs, rather than getting “absorbed,” drawn into another domain of images and meaning, stunned by beauty and mystery, is relevant to thinking about the Fancy as a term for the mind (either in the poem or the reader)-constantly-in-motion. See “Artifice of Absorption,” in A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 9–89. David Antin in “Talking Narrative” calls “a poetry of mind” “subjectivity,” by which he does not mean “emotional response” to experience. In distinguishing “subjectivity” from “plot,” he finds in the former those surprising, unexpected, “free” moments of encounter with events of the world rather than with the already prescribed sequence of events called plot. My book Reception and Poetics in Keats: My Ended Poet (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) is in effect a study of Keats as a poet of the Fancy. William Keach, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). See my new book, Wordsworth Day by Day: Reading His Work into Poetry Now (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 2005). “Williams’ description of The Waste Land as ‘the great catastrophe to our letters,’ along with Eliot’s conservatism & the aid & comfort he gave to the academicizers of the 30s and 40s, shouldn’t obscure the actual contribution of his work to more extreme, often subterranean developments up to the present. So, for example, the collage techniques of The Waste Land (worked out in collaboration with Pound) strikingly pointed, circa 1920, to possibilities for holding multiple experiences in the mind as simultaneity &/or reoccurrence: what he elsewhere called the ‘simultaneous existence’ & ‘simultaneous order’ of all poetries of all times.” Revolution of the Word, ed. Jerome Rothenberg (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974), p. 35. See Allen Grossman’s claim that within good “poetry of closure” resides a “poetry of aperture” or participation, in The Sighted Singer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Donald Wesling, The New Poetries (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985); William Keach, “Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style,” SiR, vol. 25 (Summer 1986), pp. 182–96; Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Jon Mee, “ ‘Reciprocal Expressions of Kindness’: Robert Merry, Della Cruscanism and the Limits of Sociality,” in Romantic Sociality, ed. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 104–22; Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and

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279

Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and Their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003); Robert Kaufman, “Red Kant, or The Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 26 (Summer 2000), pp. 682–724; and “Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the AvantGarde,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 27 (Winter 2001), pp. 354–83.

1 Fanciphobia: A History of Skepticism about the Fancy 1. Let me reiterate that this agonistic relationship between Fancy and Imagination, whereas it is symptomatic of a system of excess and corrections that threatens culture from the eighteenth century to the present, can blind one to a more common usage, particularly among poets and artists, of the word “Imagination” as simply a strong, at times visionary, creative faculty. 2. Ed. John Mahoney (Gainesville, Fla.: The University of Florida Press, 1964), pp. 6–7. 3. Anthropologie fur Aerzte und Weltwisse, quoted in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. ci. 4. Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), p. 413. 5. Robert Duncan called one of his late volumes of poems Ground-Work, insisting, in contrast to traditional aesthetics, that the gathering of raw materials (not so much their “shaping” and evaluating) did not precede but was the real work of poetry. 6. Quoted in Engell and Bate, Biographia Literaria, p. cii. 7. On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 8. Ibid., p. 64. 9. “Preface” to Poems, 1815, in Shorter Poems, 1807–1820 by William Wordsworth, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 635–36. 10. “ ‘Nice Arts’ and ‘Potent Enginery’: The Gendered Economy of Wordsworth’s Fancy,” The Centennial Review, vol. 33, no. 4 (1989), pp. 441–67. 11. The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. with an introduction by James Russell Lowell (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1854), p. xxxvi. 12. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (originally published in 1919; reissued New York: Meridian Books, 1955). 13. Lowell, The Poetical Works of John Keats, p. xiii. 14. Lionel Trilling, “The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters,” in The Opposing Self (New York: The Viking Press, 1955), pp. 3–49. 15. Bracketing the work of Abrams and Northrop Frye (the Fall in Romantic Poetry is a Fall into Self-consciousness) were two very influential studies that valorize the “purity” of self-development and its identification with the

280

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

NOTES

extent of a poem, Louis Martz’s study of seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry, The Poetry of Meditation, and Robert Langbaum’s discussion of the Victorian dramatic monologue, The Poetry of Experience. Jack Stillinger, Reading The Eve of St. Agnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 105. As in the case of John Clare’s famous late sonnet “I Am” (see chapter 2), the only one of Clare’s several thousand poems to be anthologized in the first edition of Palgrave. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. I return to Gray’s Eton College Ode in the discussion of Knox’s establishment anthology Elegant Extracts, where a line from the Ode is featured prominently on the book’s title page. Joseph Warton, Odes on Various Subjects (London, 1746), see “Advertisement.”

2

Lyric Subjects in Romantic Poetry

1. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 84. 2. Quoted in Susan Thackrey, George Oppen: A Radical Practice (San Francisco: O Books, 2001). 3. Published in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Anchor Books, 1950). 4. “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” included in Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1970), pp. 201–29. 5. “The Internalization of Quest-Romance,” in Bloom, Romanticism, pp. 3–24. 6. It should be observed that, ironically, Abrams’s essays are in fact historicist in that the Romantic poetry of the lyric subject results directly from a historical situation—“retirement,” from the politically repressive world of cities such as London and Bristol, and carried out with a Godwinian notion that social change must emerge from the imaginative change of individuals. 7. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 217. 8. Romanticism, p. 2. 9. Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 134. 10. Mark Storey, The Problem of Poetry in the Romantic Period (Basingstoke: Macmillan Ltd., 2000), p. 186. 11. Vol. II (4th ed., New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), p. 817. In his famous Golden Treasury, Francis Palgrave initiated this identification of the characteristic and best poetry of Clare’s achievement with “I Am” by including it in the first edition of his anthology. 12. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910–1945 (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 13. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 14. Arthur Rimbaud, quoted in Poems for the Millennium, p. 44.

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281

15. I discuss “The Poet’s Garret” in this regard in the chapter on Mary Robinson and the Fancy. 16. Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 103. 17. Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 151. 18. The passage is reminiscent of the middle section of Wordsworth’s “Nutting,” with its “perchance” and “or” grammars, a technique of throwing narrative into a present-tense exploration in the narrator’s mind. 19. In his recent biography of John Clare, Jonathan Bate, following John Barrell, associates the circular and open form of Clare’s poems with his attempt to recover in poetry the sense of circular openness in the land around his home at Helpstone before the emprisoning “linearity” of enclosure was installed. See Jonathan Bate, John Clare (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2003). 20. The Other Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 11. 21. Ashbery, The Other Tradition, p. 16.

3

Cursory Observations on Poetry and Cheerfulness

1. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 18. 2. Maria Jewsbury, “Why Is the Spirit of Poetry Anti-Cheerful?” in Phantasmagoria; or, Sketches of Life and Literature (1825). 3. Found in Jerome McGann, The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 36–37. 4. Donald Reiman, “Structure, Symbol, and Theme in ’Lines written among the Euganean Hills,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), p. 580. 5. Preface to Christabel, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 187. 6. The Musical Times, and Singing Class Circular (May 1, 1854), VI, pp. 37–39. 7. Vol. I (1822), pp. 81–89. 8. Theodor Adorno, “Is Art Lighthearted?” in Notes on Literature II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 247–53. 9. Yeats, “The Happiest of Poets,” in Essays and Introductions (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961), pp. 53–64. 10. Happily (Sausalito: The Post-Apollo Press, 2000).

4 A Poetry of Mind: The Della Cruscans, Mary Robinson, and the Fancy at the Time of the French Revolution and Beyond 1. In The Poetics of Sensibility, Jerome McGann demonstrates that Gifford’s polemic against the Della Cruscans includes a very accurate, if negatively judged, description of a poetry that prefers “sound” over “sense.”

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NOTES

2. Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself, 4 vols. (London: R. Phillips, 1801), pp. 2, 125; quoted in Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 75. 3. In her fine book Romantic Theatricality, Judith Pascoe recognizes the “overtly political verse” in the Della Cruscans and Mary Robinson and distinguishes between that and the more typical and familiar whimsical and playful poems. I am arguing the opposite: the continuity of the two types of Della Cruscan poetry. 4. Mary Robinson: Selected Poems (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Literary Texts, 2000), pp. 20–21. 5. Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 37–54. 6. Michael Gamer, “ ‘Bell’s Poetics’: The Baviad, the Della Cruscans, and the Book of The World,” Chapter 2, in The Satiric Eye, ed. Steven E. Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 31–53. 7. The recognition of the political possibilities inherent in the poetry of the Fancy in the Della Cruscan mode is picked up by the decidedly non–Della Cruscan Jacobin John Thelwall (1764–1834) in his brilliant book of mixed genres, The Peripatetic (1793), which engages, through a loose fictional scaffolding, issues of race, class, and human rights. His background, his community hardly participates in the fashionable, witty middle class; nonetheless he mentions the Fancy throughout his book. And in a concluding “Epithalamium,” in a language thoroughly “Della Cruscan,” Thelwall establishes the link between marriage (i.e., affection and passion leading to love and permanent relationship) and the larger universal marriage proposed in the radical vision of a reformed society. A few passages show how Thelwall’s transformation of his theme fits completely with the transformations outlined in the Della Cruscans and Mary Robinson (note the similar diction and idiom, the rhymed tetrameter couplets in the first part, etc.): Sportive lyre, whose artless strings, Brush’d by young Affection’s wings, (Nymphs and rustics list’ning round) Whisper’d sweet the varied sound— Sounds which only aim’d to borrow Pathos from the youthful heart,— Thrills of Hope, and Sighs of Sorrow— Fleeting joy, and transient smart!— Sportive Lyre! Ah, once again— Once again, and then no more— Let me wake the youthful strain, And thy playful strings explore. Once again—and then, adieu!— Bolder heights my soul shall try: Bolder objects rise in view— TRUTH and godlike LIBERTY! . . .

NOTES

283

Meanwhile, Io Hymen! Thy triumphs I join,— My Fancy awhile to thy ardours resign:. . . Those ardours by Nature indulgently given To realize all that is look’d for in heaven,— To unite us in bonds of affection and peace, And bid the rude struggles of selfishness cease, Till, heart link’d to heart, all the universe smile, And Social Affection each sorrow beguile, While Sympathy’s touch shall the union sustain, And vibrate alike thro’ each link of the chain. Yes such, if by Nature conducted, and join’d Not by Interest and Pride, but the tie of the mind, Sex blended with sex from affection alone, And Simplicity made every bosom its throne— Such, such are the blessings from Hymen would flow, And this wilderness turn to an Eden below:— An Eden of Mind where each virtue should blow.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

Particularly at the close of this poem are visible the links among Thelwall, the Della Cruscans and Mary Robinson, and the visionary poetry of Blake. John Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Judith Thompson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), pp. 380–81. Cf. perhaps most famously Shelley’s lines from the “Ode to the West Wind”—“Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth / Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!” Is it possible that Coleridge “staged” the drama of enthusiasm and excess unleashed and then curtailed it in order to make evident to readers a paradigm of public repression by current orthodoxies? Gamer, “ ‘Bell’s Poetics.’ ” Pierre Joris, A Nomad Poetics (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), p. 31. As Judith Pascoe says in Romantic Theatricality: “for Robinson, the ‘self’ that claims authorship of the poems is a curious array of free-floating and nontotalized personas” (p. 176). The Dada poet/painter Jean Arp described some poems he wrote on papier dechires, “torn up paper.” In these poems he “gave free rein to reality and chance.” He said that “if you tear up a piece of paper or drawing, you let in the very essence of life and death.” Quoted in Barbara Guest, Durer in the Window, Reflexions on Art. (New York: Roof Books, 2003), p. 4. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990), p. 2. Pascoe makes a similar argument about Robinson’s earlier “Ode to Della Crusca”—that she appropriates Merry’s domain in order to establish a place for her own voice. See Romantic Theatricality, p. 79.

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5

“Affectionate Eternity”: Leigh Hunt and the Poetics and Politics of the Fancy

1. A point made in the Introduction to the anthology Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970, ed. Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). 2. The Englishman’s Magazine, August 1831. 3. Keats may also be revealing a fear of or at least an ambivalence about his own sexuality when he says: “I care not for white busts.” 4. Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. II, 11–13. See also my poem based on this letter: “floridize absorb spin” (privately published, 2002). 5. Poetical Works (London, 1832). 6. Hazlitt, too, typically criticizes Wordsworth for excluding too much of the world and of literature. 7. See Jeffrey N. Cox’s excellent essay, “Leigh Hunt’s Foliage: A Cockney Manifesto,” in Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics, ed. Nicholas Roe (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 58–77. 8. In “Projective Verse,” Charles Olson, Selected Writings (New York: New Directions, 1966). 9. The Indicator, June 25, 1820, pp. 300–01. 10. For Romantic ballooning and the French Revolution, see Jane Stabler, Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, 1790–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 132–35. 11. In Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828), Hunt, in defending Shelley as poet and humanitarian, speaks regarding the criticism of Shelley for his personal excesses: “A greater portion of will among reformers is desirable; but it does not follow that an occasional excess of it (if such) can or does do the mischief he supposes, or furnishes any excuse worth mention for the outcries and pretended arguments of the opposite party. If he will have a good deal of will, he must occasionally have an excess of it. The party in question, that is to say, all the bad systems and governments existing, with all their slaves and dependents, have an infinite will of their own, which they already make use of, with all their might, to put down every endeavour against it: and the world in general is so deafened with the noise of ordinary things, and the great working of the system which abuses it, that an occasional excess in the lifting up of a reforming voices appears to be necessary to make it listen.” Hunt could be writing about some of his own Regency (Examiner) decade poems, such as Foliage, with its green, breathing, geniality, apparently so slight and at times ungainly, trivial. 12. The “reclining poet” topos in eighteenth-century poetry signals a turning away from ordinary social speech, the speech from the world of commerce and exchange, toward the world of reverie and expanded dream-like states of being. Here it stands not for the language of “depth,” meaning, and use, but for the “sacred waste” of dream and the body, and for a new poetry of surfaces and presents: the body touches the ground at many points and

NOTES

285

areas—surface against surface. The poem records the experience of touch, or taste as a form of touch; the bee is the aerial version of the poet’s reclining body, touching point after point of sweet taste, producing when projected into poetic language a poetry of correspondences or sequenced relationships of elements, noted from “now” to “now.” The body’s sinking onto the ground is recorded as the weight of pleasures. . .or is it an anti-weight of “delicious,” “sparkling,” motions (floating signifiers)? 13. Blackwood’s Magazine (October 1819), p. 206; my emphasis. 14. Hunt’s Hermes may have stimulated Keats’s simile of Hermes in his sonnet, “As Hermes Once. . .,” the threshold god whose divinity also may be said to break past the suspicious watchfulness of the cultural police, and provoked Shelley’s beautiful, extended translation of the Homeric Hymn to Mercury, to say nothing of his poem The Witch of Atlas, where the Witch is akin to Hermes’s god of thresholds and transformations. 15. Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 82.

6

The Poetics of Expiration: Felicia Hemans

1. The Massachusetts Review, vol. xli, no. 3 (Autumn 2000), p. 291. 2. Quoted in Barbara Guest, Rocks on a Platter (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). 3. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 545. All passages from Hemans’s poetry are from this edition unless otherwise stated. 4. The conflict between an act of use (nourishment, holiness) versus an art of the beautiful, liberating, supplement haunted the late friend and poetic agonist of Hemans, William Wordsworth. His 1828 poem “The Gleaner” written near the beginning of the exchange and relationship between the two poets, an account of a painting by James Holmes (1777–1860), shifts its focus from sexually alluring woman and the “excessive” proliferation of odiferous flowers to the sheaf of corn she carries on her lap, with its future, singular, nutritive value: . . .had that charge been idle flowers, Fair Damsel, o’er my captive mind, To truth and sober reason blind, ‘Mid that soft air, those long-lost bowers, The sweet illusion might have hung, for hours. —Thanks to this tell-tale sheaf of corn, That touchingly bespeaks thee born Life’s daily tasks with them to share Who, whether from their lowly bed They rise, or rest the weary head, Ponder the blessing they entreat From Heaven, and feel what they repeat,

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NOTES

While they give utterance to the prayer That asks for daily bread.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

See also my discussion of “The Gleaner” in Jeffrey C. Robinson, The Current of Romantic Passion (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Nanora Sweet, “History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful,” in At the Limits of Romanticism, ed. Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 174. See Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) pp. 210–27. Ibid., p. 222. Ibid., p. 220. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, n.s. June 14, 1847, pp. 359–63. SW, p. 593. Ibid., p. 377. In SW, p. 581. Allen Grossman, The Long Schoolroom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Mary F. Robinson, “Felicia Hemans,” in The English Poets, 1880. “The Rise and Fall of the Improvisatore, 1753–1845,” Romanticism, vol. 6.2 (2000), pp. 195–210. SW, p. 460. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 433. Ibid., p. 462. Ibid., p. 430. Fanny Howe, The End (Los Angeles: Littoral Books, 1992), p. 29. SW, p. 415. SW, p. 571. L.E.L., “Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans,” which first appeared in the New Monthly Magazine, vol. 44 ( July 1835), pp. 286–88. SW, p. 574. “Stanzas Addressed to Miss Landon, and Suggested by her ‘Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans’ ” which first appeared in New Monthly Magazine, vol. 45 (1835), p. 82. Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 5.

7

The Fancy: From Poetry to Boxing and Back

1. Quoted in Technicians of the Sacred, ed. Jerome Rothenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 456. 2. These works anticipate the hybrid, resolutely urban, prose poems of Baudelaire. It may be, in fact, that the great nineteenth-century successes of the Fancy appear in “prose”: the essays of Hazlitt, Lamb, and DeQuincey,

NOTES

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

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the novels of Dickens. It is no accident that the lifeforce hero, so to speak, in Hard Times literally is the Fancy that combats the Gradgrind regime of a sinister market-driven set of values. John Masefield, “Introduction” to The Fancy by John Hamilton Reynolds (London: Elkin Mathews, 1920), pp. 14–15. Richard Willard Armour, Barry Cornwall (Boston, 1935), p. 44. “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess, pp. 119–120. Pierce Egan, Real Life in London (London: Printed for Jones & Co., 1821), p. 392. Ibid., p. 399. Benjamin Haydon’s Regency-decade portrait of Wordsworth curiously presents him with an open collar, as if a bit of Cockney temperament and sympathy had rubbed off on the middle-aged Lake Poet. Perhaps Haydon knew about Wordsworth’s (uncomfortable) affinity for the poetics of the Fancy. In Rhonda Garelick, Rising Star, Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siecle. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 18. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 48. William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (London: Henry Colburn, 1825), p. 125. Rep. in John Hamilton Reynolds, Poetry and Prose, ed. George C. Marsh (London 1928), pp. 183–87. John Clare, as well as the more familiar members of the Cockney group, cultivated a “mania” for the boxing Fancy. Going to the Fives Court in London to see boxing, Clare “caught the mania so much from Rip for such things that I soon became far more eager for the fancy than himself and I watch’d the appearance of every new Hero on the stage with as eager curosity [sic] to see what sort of a fellow he was as I had before done the Poets—and I left the place with one wish strongly in uppermost and that was that I was a Lord to patronize Jones the Sailor Boy who took my fancy as being the finest fellow in the Ring—,” in John Clare by Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), p. 153. The Fancy, p. xiv. Jack Randall was practically worshiped by John Clare. As it is in my essay, “Hazlitt’s ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’: The Autobiography of a Cultural Critic,” in Romanticism, vi, vol. no. 2 (2000), pp. 178–94. For a discussion of the sexual dimension of “The Fight” as well as the place of “sentiment,” see the chapter on Hazlitt’s essay in my The Current of Romantic Passion. “Die Ruckschritte der Poesie,” pub. 1828. In Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 374.

288

NOTES

8

William Hazlitt’s Poetics of the Fancy in His Select British Poets: A Cockney Anthology, I

1. See Payson G. Gates, “Hazlitt’s Select British Poets: An American Publication,” in K-SJ, vol. 35 (1986), pp. 168–82. See also William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 223–24, 606. 2. For example, the Boston Currier of August 12, 1824, carries an advertisement for the sale of “London Books, of the most elegant editions. . .selected by William C. Hall, from the manufactories in England, for Cast, which enables B. H. [Benjamin Hall] to sell them as low as can be purchased in this place.” I have seen no mention here of Select British Poets. 3. My personal copy has a mid-nineteenth-century American binding (not rebinding) rather than one produced roughly at the time of the date of “publication” in 1824; this suggests that text blocks of 1824 may have remained unbound for twenty-five or more years. 4. Curiously, St Clair notes that the 1824 edition of Elegant Extracts included small selections from Wordsworth and Byron (St Clair, 224). 5. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–), I, pp. 378–79. 6. I have seen Longfellow’s copy in the Longfellow House, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The volume is defective, lacking the last ninety-six pages, leading one to wonder about the care with which the sheets were gathered and bound. But this is the only copy I have seen that shows its owner’s use of the book: Longfellow underlined or checked poems sparingly—from Sidney, Drayton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Lamb, and James Montgomery. Among the poets missing in this defective volume are Shelley, Byron, and Keats. 7. This summary of Knox comes in part from Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 67–77. 8. See Price, The Anthology, p. 70. 9. John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 10. A general survey of this section follows; more detailed discussion of canonical poems, the interpretation of which shifts from their placement in 1824 occurs in the next chapter. 11. Edinburgh Review, March 1819. 12. See the next chapter for a more detailed discussion of Wordsworth and Shelley in the context of 1824.

9

Select British Poets, II: Fanciful Readings of Canonical Romanticism

1. Following on the work of Jerome McGann in The Poetics of Sensibility. 2. As when a man dreams he reflects not that his body sleeps, Else he would wake; so seem’d he entering his Shadow: but With him the Spirits of the Seven Angels of the Presence Entering; they gave him still perceptions of his Sleeping Body;

NOTES

289

Which now arose and walk’d with them in Eden, as an Eighth Image Divine tho’darken’d; and tho walking as one walks In sleep; and the Seven comforted and supported him. Like as a Polypus that vegetates beneath the deep— They saw his Shadow vegetated underneath the Couch Of death: for when he enterd into his Shadow: Himself: His real and immortal Self: was as appeard to those Who dwell in immortality, as One sleeping on a couch Of gold; and those in immortality gave forth their Emanations Like Females of sweet beauty, to guard round him & to feed His lips with food of Eden in his cold and dim repose: But to himself he seemd a wanderer lost in dreary night. (Milton, Book I, pl. 15, ll. 1–16) 3. Marina Tsvetaeva, A Captive Spirit, trans. and ed. by J. Marin King (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1980), pp. 237–41. 4. Donald Wesling, The New Poetries: Poetic Form since Coleridge and Wordsworth (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985) pp. 20–22. 5. For example, in “Tintern Abbey”: . . .that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lighten’d:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. 6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles” in Essays: First Series, in The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 282. 7. Wayne Koestenbaum, “A Brief Defense of Private Poetry,” in Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000), pp. 303–08. 8. Charles Reznikoff, from Jerusalem the Golden, in Poems 1918–1936, ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1976), p. 109. 9. Allen Grossman, Sweet Youth (New York: New Directions, 2002), p. 83. 10. Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 83. 11. Dorothy Van Ghent, Keats: The Myth of the Hero, ed. Jeffrey Cane Robinson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 146. 12. Charles Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” in A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 75.

290

NOTES

13. Stillinger, Reading, 652–53. 14. From “The Klupzy Girl,” in Charles Bernstein, Islets/Irritations (New York: Roof Books, 1992), p. 47. 15. Indicator (XLIV, Wednesday, August 9, 1820), p. 345. 16. Keats’s earlier 1817 volume extensively features the poetics of the Fancy: paratactic heroic couplets, a lush mythological eroticism, overt visionary intentions: So did he feel, who pull’d the boughs aside, That we might look into a forest wide, To catch a glimpse of Fauns, and Dryades Coming with softest rustle through the trees;. . . 17. See my more extended discussion of this letter in Reception and Poetics in Keats: My Ended Poet (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 18. James Chandler, England in 1819 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 432. 19. Julie Carlson, “Fancy’s History,” European Romantic Review, vol. 14 (2003), 163–76. 20. As we have seen in a previous chapter, Keats’s attitude in these poems toward the Other is here expressed through his attitude toward Fame in which he shares the views of contemporaries Hazlitt and Reynolds. Similarly he is at one with Hazlitt and Reynolds on the preference for the “old poets” perceived as belonging to a precapitalist and less ego-driven poetics. 21. Is it surprising that the Fancy-promoting “Ode to Psyche” has long been considered the “weakest” of Keats’s major odes in spite of its prominent position in Keats’s own volume? 22. Cf. Keats’s remark that he took “greater pains” with the “Ode to Psyche” than with any other previously written poem.

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INDEX

Abrams, M. H., 36, 51 Adorno,Theodor “Is Art Lighthearted?” 103–105 Agamben, Giorgio, 71, 201 Akenside, Mark “Hymn to Cheerfulness,” 92–93 Antin, David, 278 Arnold, Matthew, 33, 253 Arp, Jean, 284 Ashbery, John, 79, 80 Babbitt, Irving, 34–35 Barbauld,Anna Laetitia, 13 Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 16 “To Mr. S.T. Coleridge,” 67 “Washing Day,” 65–67 Barrett, Elizabeth, 189 Bataille, Georges, 168, 182, 198 Batchelor, David Chromophobia, 5 Bate, Jonathan, 282 Baudelaire, Charles, 201, 287 Beattie, James, 27 Bernstein, Charles, 142, 206, 264, 267, 279 Bewell,Alan, 268 Birrell,Augustine, 225 Blake,William, 7, 11, 174 Auguries of Innocence, 96–97 “The Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Experience), 69–70 “London,” 70–71 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 7, 39, 124

Milton, Book One, 289–90 Milton, Book Two, 62–63, 176 Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 246 Bloom, Harold, 51, 114 Boxing (“The Fancy”), 195–222 Brummell, Beau, 200–202 Burns, Robert, 238–39 Butler, Marilyn, 36 Byron, George Gordon, 202–204, 213–14 Campbell,Thomas, 224 Canetti, Elias, 76 Cavell, Stanley, 83 Celan, Paul, 167 Chandler, James, 270 Cheerfulness, 83–108 Cixous, Helene, 171 Clare, John, 56, 78–81, 288 “Emmonsails Heath in Winter,” 57–58 “I am,” 56–57 “The Eternity of Nature,” 79–80 “One day across the fields I chanced to pass,” 78–79 “There spotted like the sparrows paler grey,” 57 Clement, Catherine, 171 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2 Biographia Literaria, 2, 139 Christabel, Preface to, 100–101 “The Eolian Harp,” 124, 172–73 “Frost at Midnight,” 36

298

INDEX

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor—continued The Nymphs, 155–56 Sibylene Leaves, 154 “The Visit of the Gods,” 101–102 Collins,William “Ode on the Poetical Character,” 43, 95 color, 5–6 constructivism (in poetry), 31, 104 couplets, rhyming tetrameter, 88–101 Cox, Jeffrey, 17, 241 Crystallization (Stendhal), 142 Curran, Stuart, 53 dandy, 200–202 Della Crusca (Robert Merry), 124–25 “The Adieu and Recall to Love,” 94–95 Diversity, 118–19 The Grove of Fancy, 118–20 The Laurel of Liberty, 117 Della Cruscans, 94–96, 111–38, 261 Dickens, Charles and the Fancy, 105, 267, 288 dithyrambics, 101–103 see also Leigh Hunt Duff,William, 26–29 Duncan, Robert, 280 Dyer, George, 60–61 Dyer, John “The Country Walk,” 93–94 “Grongar Hill,” 93–94 Eagleton,Terry, 49 effusion, 171–73 Egan, Pierce Real Life in London, 199–201 Eliot,T. S., 8, 18 Ellison, Julie, 33 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 83, 251 fame (and the problem of the ego and normative poetics), 197, 207 “fanciphobia” (or skepticism about the fancy), 6, 25–48 fancy definitions, 2–15 gender, 15–16

and imagination, 2–5 poetic form, 12–14 Felman, Shoshana, 71 Foscolo, Ugo, 99–100 Fussell, Paul, 88 Gamer, Michael, 119, 125 Gates, Payson, 225 Gifford,William, 112, 119 Gilfillan, George, 170–71 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von “Erlkonig,” 246 “Prometheus,” 120 Gray,Thomas “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” 42–43, 229 Grossman,Allen, 128, 176, 260, 279 Guillory, John, 41, 92, 228 H. D., 173 Hall,William C., 225 Hallam,Arthur, 140 Hamilton, Paul, 17, 222 Hartman, Geoffrey, 52 Hazlitt,William, 14, 147, on Byron 202–204 “Critical List,” on Wordsworth, 247 “The Fight,” 195, 218–23 “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” 200 Lectures on the English Poets, 233–37 “The Living Poets,” 240–43 “On Poetry in General,” 236–37 Select British Poets, 195, 224–45, 246, 268 Hazlitt,William Carew, 225 Hejinian, Lyn, 16 Happily, 106–108 Hemans, Felicia, 87, 115, 167–91 “Corinne at the Capitol,” 180 “Our Daily Paths,” 182–83 “The Dying Improvisatore,” 180–81 “Indian Woman’s Death Song,” 176 “Night-Blowing Flowers,” 183–85 “The Song of the Rose,” 176–79 “To Wordsworth,” 186–88 Hoelderlin, Friedrich, 62, 167 “In the Days of Socrates,” 62

INDEX

299

Hollander, John, 88 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 115 Howe, Fanny “Our Heaven’s Words,” 183 Howe, Susan, 188 Hughes, Harriet, 170 Hunt, Leigh, 14, 83, 139–166 “Epistle to William Hazlitt,” 158–59 “Fancy’s Party,” 151–54 The Feast of the Poets, 144–50, 254 Foliage, 150–66 on Keats 142–43 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, 285 “On Poems of Joyous Impulse,” 101 “Rhyme or Reason,” 102–103 on Wordsworth 146–48

“Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow,” 97–98 Kertesz,Andre On Reading, 118 kitch (and a poetry of cheerfulness), 104–105 Knox, Reverend Vicesimus, 25, 227–31 Koestenbaum,Wayne, 251 Kristeva, Julia, 5

imagination Coleridge’s definitions, 2–4 Immaturity and maturity, 12 improvisatore and improvisatrice, 180–82; see also Felicia Hemans

Martz, Louis, 133 Marvell,Andrew “Bermudas,” 90–91 Masefield, John, 198 Matilda,Anna (Mrs. Hannah Cowley), 126–27 “Ode to Della Crusca,” 96 McCaffery, Steve, 278 McFarland,Thomas, 37 McGann, Jerome, 8, 16–18, 96, 170 McGrath,Thomas, 174 Mee, Jon, 17, 92, 121, 221 Milton, John “Il Penseroso,” 91–92, 246 “L’Allegro,” 91–92, 246 mood, 250–50 Morris,William, 105–106

Janowitz,Anne, 58, 60–61 Jeffrey, Francis, 224, 240–41 Jewsbury, Maria, 84, 86–87, 176, 191 Jochmann, C. G., 222–23 Joris, Pierre, 130 Poems for the Millennium, 8, 62–63 juxtaposition, 13 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 29, 104 Kaufman, Robert, 17, 104 Keach,William, 16 Keats, John, 14, 115 “Fancy,” 271 on Leigh Hunt, 140–41 Hyperion, 143–44 “If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d,” 272 and letters to Fanny Brawne, 33 “Ode to a Nightingale,” 259–75 “Ode to Psyche,” 14, 274–75 “Robin Hood,” 271 sonnets on “fame,” 207

Landon, Laetitia, 87, 188–89 Levi, Primo, 71 Levinson, Marjorie, 16, 141 Lowell, James Russell, 33 Lowy, Michael, 17, 18 lyric subject (voice of the speaker), 13, 49–81

Nelson, Cary, 58–60 Olson, Charles, 14, 32 O’Neill, Michael, 53 Oppen, George, 49–50, 63, 206 Palgrave, Francis, 281 parataxis, 13 see also rhyming tetrameter couplets, 89 Pascoe, Judith, 114–15 Pater,Walter, 127

300

INDEX

Perelman, Bob, 278 Pessoa, Fernando, 111 Platner, Ernst, 28 poetics aleatory, 32 of expiration (Felicia Hemans), 167–91 nomadic (Pierre Joris), 128 Price, Leah, 227 Procter, Bryan Weller (“Barry Cornwall”), 198 Raworth,Tom, 118 reclining poet, 285–86 Reid,Thomas, 10 Reynolds, J. H., on Keats 205–207 The Fancy, 207–17 Reznikoff, Charles, 259 Rimbaud,Arthur, 63 Robinson, Mary, 44, 111–38, 261 Ainsi va le Monde, 117, 121–24 “All Alone,” 70–72 “The Camp,” 97 “January, 1795,” 64, 97 “A London Summer Morning,” 64, 131–33, 217 Memoirs, 113–14, 116–17 “Ode to the Nightingale,” 174 “To the Poet Coleridge,” 67–69, 136–38 “The Poet’s Garret,” 134–36 “Twilight,” 114–16 Roe, Nicholas, 268 Rothenberg, Jerome, 18 Sappho, 68, 173 “Hymn to Aphrodite,” 120, 272 Sayre, Robert, 17, 18 Scarry, Elaine, 29–30 Schiller, Friedrich, 34–35 Schlegel, Friedrich, 127 Scott,Walter, 167–68, 191 Shakespeare,William A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4 The Tempest (Puck’s songs), 89–90 Shelley, Mary, 226 Shelley, Percy Bysshe “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” 120

“Lines Written among the Euganean Hills,” 98–100 “To a Skylark,” 177 Smith, Charlotte, 174, 181 Beachy Head, 76–77 “To Fancy,” 44 “To the Muse,” 45 Stendhal, 127 Stewart, Dugald, 28–29 Stillinger, Jack, 264 Storey, Mark, 37–38, 56 sublime and the beautiful, 29–30 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 40 Sweet, Nanora, 169–70 Swift, Jonathan “A Description of the Morning,” 131–33 Tegg,Thomas, 225–26 Thelwall, John, 113, 283–84 Thomson, Heidi, 68 translations (by Hunt), 148–50, 159–66 Trilling, Lionel, 35–36, 50–51 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 129, 173, 246 Van Ghent, Dorothy, 268 Vendler, Helen, 38, 260 Waldrop, Rosmarie, 182 Warton, Joseph, 43 “Ode I.To Fancy,”45–47 Watten, Barrett, 278 Wesling, Donald, 16, 247–48 Whitman,Walt, 184 “Good-bye My Fancy!” 47 witness, poetry of, 63–73, 129 Wolfson, Susan, 54–55 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 74 Wordsworth,William, 15 1799 Prelude, 67 Collected Poems (1815), 75, 145 “To the Daisy,” 252 “Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg,” 190–91 “The Gleaner,” 286–87 “How sweet it is, when mother Fancy rocks,” 257–58

INDEX

“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” 74–76, 106 “Lines Left upon a Seat in a YewTree,” 255 Moods of My Own Mind, 15, 61, 246 Note to “The Thorn,” 30 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” 175, 256 “Old Man Travelling,” 72–73 “Personal Talk,” 254–55 “Poems of the Fancy,” 251 Preface to Collected Poems (1815), 131, 139

301

Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 61 The Prelude, Book I, 54 “Though narrow be that Old Man’s cares, and near,” 253–54 “Tintern Abbey,” 36, 253, 290 “A whirlblast from behind the hill,” 259 Yeats,William Butler “The Happiest of Poets,” 105–106 Zamora, Daisy, 85 Zukofsky, Louis, 13, 55, 171