THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SENSATION POETRY AND SOCIAL IMAGINATION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY MICHAEL HANSEN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2016 Copyright © 2016 Michael Hansen. All rights reserved. Contents Abstract………………………..…………………………………………………………..v Acknowledgments…………….……………………………………………………...….vii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Keats’s Hazlitt: Dream Skepticism and Disinterested Imagination………….17 Chapter 2: On Cockney Coupling: Keats’s Form of Identity………………...………….55 Chapter 3: Arthur Hallam’s “Characteristics of Modern Poetry” and Pleasure’s Moral Sense……….……………………………………………………………..90 Chapter 4: Sterling English and Sources of Southern Phraseology: Anacreontic Tennyson…………………………………………………......…...126 Bibliography……………………………………………………………...…………….169 iii for my Mother Abstract “Sensation Poetry and Social Imagination” unearths a vital but forgotten chapter in the history of British aesthetics, through neglected writings of four major figures: William Hazlitt, John Keats, Arthur Hallam, and Alfred Tennyson. Claims in modern criticism for the social value of aesthetics, like the claim that aesthetics is an ideology enabling exploitation, tend to rely on terms that have evolved from 1890s aestheticism. This dissertation joins other recent attempts to recover a more textured account of Romanticism’s many and competing ideals of the beautiful in nature and art. It tracks the development of eighteenth-century moral philosophy into early physiology, and reveals surprising motivations behind certain “extreme” or “immature” Romantic experiments with the resources of verse history. Arthur Hallam coined the phrase “sensation poetry” in his famous 1831 Tennyson review to describe poems by Hunt, Keats, Shelley, and the young Tennyson that use novel formal design to emphasize the sensorial effects of reading. From Yeats to Isobel Armstrong, this review has been held up as an anticipation of art-for-art’s-sake ideals, but I contend that Hallam’s theory engages ethical debates that extend back through Hazlitt, Adam Smith, Hartley, Hume, and Shaftesbury. As the belief in innate moral sense became widely challenged in the later decades of the eighteenth century, moral philosophy’s oldest and most vexing question returned with renewed urgency: how can self-interest and benevolence be reconciled? In writing a poetry that, in Keats’s words, must be “proved on the pulses,” sensation poets attempt to show that we are bound together by something more basic than selfhood: the nervous system, and immersion in a shared social world. Hazlitt claimed that our capacity for action—the imagination of future pleasure or pain—also makes it natural to empathize with others in the present. This argument not only contributed to Keats’s theories of poetic imagination, in which the mind is “continually v informing and filling some other body,” but also licensed his most radical formal improvisations. My first two chapters show how Keats developed these theories, testing them through thought experiments on dream skepticism, in which the mind cannot distinguish sense from sense-simulation, and through innovations of Augustan couplet style in his longest and most important dream poem, Endymion (1818). My third chapter uses Hallam’s lesser-known writings to show that his famous advocacy of sensation poetry is part of a broad Christian materialism and history of rhyme, which he was developing at the time of his premature death. In Chapter 4 I examine Tennyson’s early imitations of Anacreon, the Greek poet of wine and love. These imitations transpose Italian rhyme contours against eighteenth- century norms for English Anacreontics as a way of affirming Hallam’s belief that enriched English must draw on the sensuous “sources of Southern phraseology” exemplified by Tuscan poets. By placing sensation poetry in a revised history of moral philosophy, and by specifying the resources of verse history this poetry attempted to recover and sustain, my project challenges longstanding assumptions about Romantic aesthetics and the Victorian Aestheticism it inspired. The conceptions of poetry and art I highlight in Hazlitt and Hallam, and in the practices of Keats and Tennyson, return us to a moment before Aestheticism simplified the terms of artistic judgment and moral feeling, and separated art from social life. They represent roads not taken that can help us forge a more sensitive and historically discriminating criticism today. vi Acknowledgements I’m deeply grateful to my dissertation committee: Elizabeth Helsinger (Chair), Frances Ferguson, Simon Jarvis, and John Wilkinson. Beth has been a steady mentor and friend since my first year of graduate school. She made every page of this project better. Frances kept me honest, and offered the kind of unconventional wisdom that only those who have been lucky enough to have her as a reader will understand. Simon gave me bracing encouragement and critique from across the Atlantic and in pubs on both sides of the sea. John reminded me that I am a poet as well as a scholar, and challenged me to do justice to both vocations. I also thank my graduate student colleagues at Chicago, especially Josh Adams, Stephanie Anderson, Bobby Baird, Jim Bassett, Joel Calahan, Josh Kotin, Patrick Morrissey, Andrew Peart, Eric Powell, Sam Rowe, Chalcey Wilding, and Johanna Winant. My undergraduate mentor, Neil Arditi, is continues to be a wonderful example to me as I grow into my own teaching career. Numerous Chicago faculty encouraged and advised me during the years I worked on this project; special thanks to Bradin Cormack, Elaine Hadley, Robert von Hallberg, Oren Izenberg, Heather Keenleyside, Boris Maslov, Benjamin Morgan, Chicu Reddy, Joshua Scodel, and Richard Strier. Meredith Martin and Naomi Levine gave me useful comments on Chapter 3, as did two anonymous reviewers at Modern Philology. The Nicholson Center for British Studies made it possible to travel to England for research at The British Library and the Tennyson Research Center in Lincoln. A Tillotson Travel Award enabled me to spend time with the Endymion fair- copy draft at the Morgan Library. vii I also thank my extraordinary parents, Ray and Susan Hansen; my siblings, Tiffany, Lisa, Amy, and Matthew; Nick Rolf; Jim Fenton; Cathleen Shrader; Ezra Nielsen; Tim, Camille, and Lars Erickson; and my first teacher and dear friend, Joel Long. Finally, above all, my love to Kelly and our beautiful sons, Julian and Samuel— into the future! viii INTRODUCTION “Sensation Poetry and Social Imagination” unearths a vital but forgotten chapter in the history of British aesthetics, through neglected writings of four major figures: William Hazlitt, John Keats, Arthur Hallam, and Alfred Tennyson. Hallam coined the term “sensation poetry” in his famous 1831 review, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson,” to describe poems that use intricate formal design to heighten sensory effects. I argue that this poetry and the critics who championed it were responding to ethical dilemmas brought about by the rise of physiology, which presented a picture of the mind (and of action) in purely material terms. This picture brought new urgency to moral philosophy’s most vexing question: how can natural self-interest and benevolence be reconciled? Sensation poetry answers that we are bound together not by abstract moral precepts, but rather by the nervous system, and immersion in a social world. The narrative I outline here bears little resemblance to those that have made Romantic poetry, and especially the lush and sensuous poetry of someone like Keats, a common starting point for ideology critique. My project aims to reopen these narratives. It is at once a revisionary history and a call for critical self-examination. The 1 identification of aesthetics as an ideology masking painful social reality too often gives transhistorical weight to a definition of aesthetics that emerged only in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is more than a historical side-note that aesthetic did not become a common word in the English lexicon until this point, and that this new word carried connotations that prior British writings on “taste” had not.1 The absence of a dominant, systematic philosophy of the beautiful in Romantic England has often made it tempting to supply its terms retrospectively. Alexander Baumgarten defined aesthetics in 1735 as the “science of sensuous cognition,” but with further specifications that indicate the development of an enterprise distinct from the philosophy of sensation (from the Greek aesthesis) broadly: “Aesthetics (as the theory of liberal arts, as inferior cognition, as the art of beautiful thinking, and as the art of thought analogous to reason) is the science of sensuous cognition.”2 Core questions in modern aesthetics are already contained in this first modern definition: how is beautiful thinking like rational thinking? how do we know that one kind of thinking is subordinate or inferior to the other? Baumgarten’s speculations were developed by German philosophers through the end of the eighteenth century into a form we now take for granted—that is, aesthetics came to refer primarily to art, and also to the independent faculty for judging it.3 1 See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985), p. 31–33. 2 Baumgarten first defined