UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations

UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Bad Seeds: Inhuman Poetics in Nineteenth-Century America Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0629g1j0 Author Osborne, Gillian Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Bad Seeds: Inhuman Poetics in Nineteenth-Century America By Gillian Kidd Osborne A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Samuel Otter, Chair Professor Anne-Lise François Professor Robert Kaufman Fall 2014 Copyright Gillian Kidd Osborne 2014 Abstract Bad Seeds: Inhuman Poetics in Nineteenth-Century America by Gillian Kidd Osborne Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Samuel Otter, Chair Plants sprout, vegetate, flower, and molder pervasively across nineteenth-century American literature and yet, like most roadside weeds today, are largely ignored. My dissertation demonstrates that, far from mere stylistic ornamentation, this profusion of vegetation was a means of imagining literature and humanness as inhuman: responsive to otherness outside of texts as well as at the core of a composing subject. Applied to aesthetic agents and objects, plant metaphor unsettled more rhetorical claims during the period for genius or formal convention as self-contained or individuated. The inhuman poetics I trace reveals ways in which poetry in nineteenth-century America was defined not only by genre and print conventions, but also by attempts to make literature responsive to what stands outside of texts: nature, history, and experience. I show how, by directing attention to literary texture and to the extra-literary, plant metaphors model ways of dialectically thinking through the relationship between humans and nature. Rather than view this relationship as monistic or unmediated, I argue that literature offers an essential tool for registering the human’s desire, and failure, to transcend or obliterate itself. Although, like many cultural forms in nineteenth-century America, this poetics drew on sources outside of the United States (particularly works of German and British Romanticism), attention to plant-life in America was necessarily localized. This common attention engaged many of the most canonical authors of the day. I undertake immersive readings of plant-life across the careers of Dickinson, Thoreau and Melville to offer new insight into some of their more under-studied works and to deepen understandings of what “poetry” meant to each. My work contextualizes these readings by demonstrating intersections between these authors and Romantic theory and biology, popular botany in ante-bellum New England, and sentimental poetry on friendship and flowers. Relating my findings to contemporary debates about poetics and crises in the humanities and in the environment, I demonstrate how historical particularity sheds light not only on the past but also on present attempts to theorize poetry’s relationship to the social and ecological. 1 BAD SEEDS: INHUMAN POETICS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA Introduction: Genius as a Bad Seed ii Organic Form & Organic Agency The Impersonal & the Inhuman Literature & “Life” Historical Poetics & Eco-poetics 1: The Merge: Grass, Trees, Author, Text 1 Grass as a receding signifier Deaths of the author The Merge Textual…Material 2: The Barest Books 24 Bare Reading Blank Flowers & Common Names Poems & Charts Books Out of Doors 3: Transcendental Vegetation 41 Vegetating Vegetable Mourning Vegetable Memory Mind & Matter 4: Melville & His Mosses 62 Plants before Hawthorne Shock & Correspondence Plants in Pierre Ruins & Plants: Form & Decay 5: The Flowers of Literary Form 87 Memory & Intertextuality Authorship & Inutility: Poetry & Prose Willows & Lilacs Clover & Roses Coda: Seeing through Emerson 113 Transparency The Smell of Pines The Pain of an Alien World On Attention Notes 128 Bibliography 147 i INTRODUCTION: GENIUS AS A BAD SEED There is something which is called genius, that carries in itself the seeds of its own destruction. —Sampson Reed, “Oration on Genius” (1821) This introduction sets out to answer two primary questions. First, why plants? (This small question incorporates others: why organic form, why nature, why the inhuman?) Second, why are the seeds of this study’s title “bad”? Although these two questions are related—as anything wandering toward vegetable metaphor tends to be about relation—the second has the beginnings of a straightforward answer with Sampson Reed, and so I will begin with him. Except for his influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson, literary critics and historians have largely forgotten Reed. Sometimes described as a proto-Transcendentalist, Reed nevertheless grew to find Transcendentalism repugnant, differentiating himself from what he saw as that movement’s “sensualism” in strident terms in the 1836 edition of his Observations on the Growth of the Mind. Reed’s differences from Emerson are therefore just as important as the ways that Emerson, as one nineteenth-century commentator put it, “developed and applied” Reed’s “seeds, some of which rose to stately flowers in his own garden, and thus attested their inherent value and vitality” (qtd. Reed “Biographical Preface” x-xi). But Emerson and Reed actually had different understandings of the “seeds” that fed intellect. Reed’s ideas were shaped by his deep commitment to Swedenborgianism, which he discovered while studying at the Harvard Divinity School, and which subsequently made it difficult for him to find employment in Congregational and Unitarian Boston. As a result, Reed spent most of his adult life working as a druggist. Though he served for a time as the editor of two separate Swedenborgian journals—the New Jerusalem Magazine and New Church Magazine for Children—Observations on the Growth of the Mind remained his only major publication, though this went through multiple editions, from 1826 until 1889. The timeline of this book’s life mirrors the timespan of my project: beginning with Reed’s first works and ending with Melville’s late poetry in 1891. Through the course of Observation’s multiple editions, we can see the appeal of the ideas Reed lays out about genius, plant-life, matter and memory in the first half of century persisting toward the century’s end.1 In his “Oration on Genius,” first delivered as a talk at his graduation from the Divinity School in 1821, Reed celebrates ideas reminiscent of the “vegetable genius” M.H. Abrams identified as a defining figure of German Romanticism.2 Despite the fact that Reed’s central concern is intellectual growth—a topic he takes up even more directly in the first version of “Observations on the Growth of the Mind” five years later—much of Reed’s language is also symptomatic of what mid-twentieth-century American critics from Cleanth Brooks to F.O. Matthiessen would later recuperate from Coleridge as “organic form.” Like Coleridge’s definition of organic form, Reed’s account of genius emphasizes self-formation: “There is something in the inmost principles of an individual, when he begins to exist,” Reed writes, “which argues him onward.” This vision of genius is insular and independent: “The mind of the infant contains within itself the first rudiments of all that will be hereafter.” Brooks later stressed this hermetic aspect of organic form: the poem sealed off from history and psychology, yet possessing an inner dynamism of its own. In keeping with most articulations of organic form within the nineteenth-century, however—not only Coleridge’s, but Schlegel’s, on which Coleridge drew, and the many articulations these two authors ii inspired—Reed’s description of genius is not so much a singular organ as a composite and extensive vegetable: the infant’s mind “needs nothing but expansion,” just “as the leaves and branches and fruit of a tree are said to exist in the seed from which it springs” (21). Interpreting Reed’s “Oration” as just another articulation of organic form during a period saturated with other instances of literary plant-life, however, overlooks the strangeness of the fact that Reed’s primary concern is not the growth or interpretation of literature, but rather, human development outside of willfulness or even inspiration. The main feature of Reed’s account of genius that sets him firmly outside of typical discourse surrounding organic form, is that Reed’s genius not only develops and blossoms, but also, quite shockingly, yet completely predictably, rots. “There is something which is called genius, that carries in itself the seeds of its own destruction,” Reed states (22). The seeds from which genius sprouts are “bad.” In Reed’s telling, genius cannot vegetate forever (though Thoreau would contest what Reed saw as an inevitable push toward intellectual fruition); nor can it linger forever in flowers, resting on laurels (as Melville knew, after finishing Moby Dick, when he confessed to Hawthorne a feeling of coming “to the inmost leaf of the bulb,” and anticipation that “shortly the flower must fall to the mould”) (Correspondence 193). Although Melville would concur with Reed that the seeds of genius are destined for flowers as well as decay, the reasons these two men would give for genius’s inevitable rottenness are distinctive. While Melville remained a skeptic until the end of his life and worked out his own relationship to genius in a distinctly human and literary field, Reed believed that genius was destined for inevitable destruction because it springs from the divine. Under the duress of divinity, individuality, and thus individual genius, dissolves; the mind grows “not when the man thinks he is God, but when he acknowledges that his powers are from God” (Reed 22). The distinction between intuiting oneself as a god and feeling one’s being as composed and directed by god is one that Emerson would trouble persistently, and which he also figured as a point of connection between human and vegetable life.

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