Abstract
Economides builds a case for wonder’s central importance within romanticism, arguing that its political ethos reflects values associated with the beautiful rather than the sublime in aesthetic theory of the period. Moreover, she takes issue with Philip Fisher’s assertion that wonder is unavoidably elegiac in romantic literature by contrasting the status of this aesthetic in William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s writing. Although Wordsworth typically associates wonder with lost childhood innocence, Coleridge’s association of wonder with an open-ended quest for knowledge leads him to emphasize its enduring importance within adult perspectives on art and politics.
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things. (229–233)
—John Keats, “Lamia”
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Notes
- 1.
All references to Coleridge’s poems (unless otherwise indicated) are taken from Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, edited by Nicholas Halmi.
- 2.
For examples of failed sublimity in Coleridge’s verse, see poems such as “Lines Written in the Album at Elbingerode, Hartz Forest” and “Dejection: An Ode.” In the former, the poet describes his anti-climactic experience on top of Mount Brocken (the highest peak in North Germany). What should have been a Wordsworthian moment signifying the unity of the poet’s imagination with a sublime natural phenomenon is, instead, a blank: Coleridge perceives a panoramic “surging scene,” but it is one that only underscores his alienation within a foreign environment. Likewise, in “Dejection” the poet’s incapacity to “feel” the sublimity he can “see” in a winter landscape (II: 37–38) precipitates a creative crisis much like that described in its conversation poem, Wordsworth’s “Intimations” ode, but without the latter’s sublime compensations.
- 3.
In the 1790s, Coleridge was impressed by David Hartley’s Associationist theories of cognition. Hartley’s account expanded upon Locke’s materialist model of the mind in an attempt to explain how sensory impressions could become linked with a subject’s moral development. According to Hartley, over time sense impressions can become “associated” with moral ideas, indicating the importance of environmental factors on cognitive development. In particular, Hartley emphasized the importance of nature as a primary environmental force which he believed shaped morality. As Ian Wylie puts it, Hartley’s “Observations on Man is an important essay on the correspondence between the natural and moral world, for it shows how the impressions of nature can influence an individual’s progress as a moral being” (76). Although Coleridge later critiqued Hartley’s materialist determinism, “The Eolian Harp” reflects the influence of Associationism insofar as its speaker’s moral insights are closely linked with his phenomenological experiences of nature.
- 4.
Coleridge and Southey’s co-authored verse play, “The Fall of Robespierre” (1794) illustrates Coleridge’s anxieties regarding mass revolution, particularly its effects on family life and privacy. In contrast to Pantisocracy’s small-scale utopianism, France’s revolutionary masses are represented as violent, destructive “mobs” that are readily manipulated by demagogues such as Robespierre. In Act I of the play (written by Coleridge), Madame Adelaide, wife of one of the major revolutionaries, laments that “every blandishment of private life” has been “sacrificed to liberty’s wild riot” (200–202).
- 5.
In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari explore many ways in which postmodern subjects can evade what they characterize as the “molar” state’s attempts to stabilize flows of desire via recourse to Oedipal, capitalist and religious semiotic “machines.” “Lines of flight” are “deterritorializations” which subvert society’s dominant desiring machines via recourse to un-thought of “intensities,” including forms of experience that break down barriers between human and non-human life (“becoming-animal”), between human beings and machines, and between hetero-normative and queer sexuality. In “Romantic Individualism, Animal Rights and the Challenge of Multiplicity,” I explore how romantic poets such as Coleridge anticipate “lines of flight” in their poetic explorations of subjectivit(ies) that escape the narrow confines of humanist individualism and speciesism.
- 6.
For a fascinating exploration of miasma as an ecological trope in romantic literature, see Timothy Morton’s “Shelley’s Green Desert.”
- 7.
See “Mont Blanc and the Sublimity of Materiality” in Cultural Critique 61 (Fall 2005).
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Economides, L. (2016). Wonder and Romantic Ecology. In: The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47750-7_2
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