1 Daemonic Allure: Material Experiences in Nineteenth

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DAEMONIC ALLURE: MATERIAL EXPERIENCES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY

A dissertation presented

William Bond

to The Department of English

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

In the field of

English

Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts April 2021

DAEMONIC ALLURE: MATERIAL EXPERIENCES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY

A dissertation presented

William Bond

ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the College of the Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University April 2021

Abstract

This dissertation examines a neglected “proto-aesthetic” strain of nineteenth-century American poetry. The major authors of this project – John Neal, Margaret Fuller, Adah Isaacs Menken, and

Sidney Lanier – articulate both an attraction to nature and an awareness of how the material world exceeds human powers of conceptualization. Their work is the core of a tradition of

American poetry in which the contemplation of nature results in ambivalent and ephemeral experiences of attraction while the asymmetry between material nature and the human mind is foregrounded. This tradition represents a departure from the Romantic organicist aesthetics of

Transcendentalism. In tracing this poetic current, Daemonic Allure offers an alternative history of post-Kantian American aesthetics. I examine the relationship articulated by these writers between the a-conceptual contemplation of nature and experiences of autonomy from aesthetic consensus. In contrast to Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetic theory, these poets imagine encounters with the alterity of nature that are unshareable. The a-conceptual reflective encounter with nature grounds not a disinterested subject position and model for universal experience (as it does for Kant), but a mode of a-social experience, freed from aesthetic theory’s demand for assent. I argue that this a-social nature-aesthetic has been largely invisible to Americanists and

Romantic scholars because of the prevailing influence of organicist and post-organicist models for nature-representation. In the counter-Romantic poetry examined in Daemonic Allure, the unmooring of the aesthetic contemplation of nature from the demand for social agreement has two consequences. Nature’s innate nonhuman value becomes visible and a critique of the naturalization of social relations is instigated.

Acknowledgements

My doctoral work has only been possible because of support I have received throughout the process from numerous colleagues, mentors, and friends. In the first place, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my dissertation committee. I am enormously grateful to Theo Davis, my dissertation chair – for her sustained mentorship, guidance, generosity, and belief in the project, and for reading numerous chapter drafts. I must thank Elizabeth Maddock Dillon for her critical insight as well as for her advocacy on behalf of graduate student labour. I want to sincerely thank Sari

Altschuler for her unwavering support and guidance throughout the writing process.

This research began during a fellowship centered on the Margaret Fuller Transnational

Archive. The support and critical engagement of my colleagues at the MFTA, Sonia DiLoreto,

Sarah Payne, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, and Ryan Cordell, was crucial in the formative stages of this project. I am especially indebted to the dialogue and critical feedback afforded me by the community of scholars at the 2018 Futures of American Studies Institute, and especially to

Colleen Glenney Boggs and Sean Pears for their generous and incisive feedback on early chapter drafts. I owe huge thanks to Lori Lefkowitz and the fellows at the Northeastern Humanities

Center who have been an inspirational and supportive community during 2020-2021: thank you to Heather Streets-Salter, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Elicia Cousins, Bilge Erten, Rachel

Rosenbloom, Shalanda Baker, Danny Faber, and Laura Kuhl.

I also want to extend my gratitude to the English department at Northeastern – I am lucky to have been part of a large and dynamic community of scholars, critics, friends, and writing partners while working on this dissertation. Special thanks to Arsalan ul Haq, Nicole Keller,

David Medina, Liz Polcha, Param Ajmera, Greg Palermo, Eric Sepenoski, Jonathan Osbourne, and Kate Simpkins, all of whom contributed to my thinking about this project through dialogue,

4 critique, and friendship. I want to thank the English department’s American Literatures and

Cultures Group for generous feedback on an early version of the second chapter. Thank you also to Heather Hardy and Melissa Daigle for their consistent support throughout the dissertation process.

Support from outside of Northeastern has been critical to the composition of this dissertation. I want to thank Dorri Beam whose mentorship and encouragement early in my graduate career was fundamental to my decision to pursue American studies. I want to thank

Lynde Folsom whose support through several stages of the project was critical to its development. Thank you to Michael Kalisch and Chris Stoj whose insights along the way have proved crucial to my thinking about American Romanticism. Thank you also to Patrick Riedy whose generosity and expertise on American poetics have been a key influence on this work.

Finally, I want to thank Stephanie Lamprea for her support and belief in the project which have been fundamental.

Lastly, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my parents and family, whose love and support throughout the dissertation process has been unwavering.

Table of Contents

Abstract...... 3

Acknowledgments...... 4

Table of Contents...... 6

Introduction...... 7

Chapter One: “The Weight of Prophecy”: Nature and the Nation in John Neal’s Poetry...... 27

Chapter Two: “A Force Feared Yet Loved”: Margaret Fuller’s Daemonic...... 76

Chapter Three: “Let us Live Alone”: Adah Isaacs Menken’s Aesthetics of Genius...... 110

Chapter Four: “Rhythmic Atoms”: Sidney Lanier’s Ecopoetics...... 164

Bibliography...... 214

Introduction

Poetry, as Jonathan Bate puts it, is “ecological in two senses.” On the one hand, poetry is that special kind of language which “restores” us to our home in nature. On the other hand, it consists merely in a “melancholy recognizing”1 that we are trapped in language and alienated from nature. This is Romantic nature poetry’s perennial impasse. Either poetic language can provide the means to overcome what Paul De Man calls the “eternal separation” of the “mind” from “the originary simplicity of nature”2 or, it is merely a self-conscious emblem of the fall into language which alienated the human subject from that “originary simplicity” in the first place. Romantic critics (like Bate) and many of those scholars now engaged in the growing field of ecopoetics have often argued optimistically for the first option: poetry alleviates our modern ailment of alienation and overcomes the separation between mind and nature. Skeptical and deconstructionist critics (like De Man) take the other view: the Romantic claim to make the

“presence”3 of nature in some sense immediately available to us is self-defeating and the project is riven by contradiction.

1. Jonathan Bate, The Song of The Earth (London: Picador, 2001), 281. 2. Paul De Man, “The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism,” trans. Wlad Godzich, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. rev., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 229-245; 239. Bate himself cites this passage from De Man, perhaps surprisingly, as part of his argument in favor of ecopoetics (Bate, The Song of the Earth, 75). What Bate and De Man agree on is that the “separation” between mind and nature is a major cause of Romantic (and, by extension, modern) melancholy and alienation. Where they differ is on the question of whether the separation can be overcome. 3. Paul De Man argues, in his influential reading of Hölderlin, poetic language registers an “ambivalent aspiration toward a forgotten presence.” The aspiration, for De Man is self-defeating because poetic language (like all language) “is always constitutive, able to posit regardless of presence but, by the same token, unable to give a foundation to what it posits except as an intent of consciousness.” (Paul De Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 1-18; 6). The language of presence derives from Heidegger (against whom De Man is writing here). For Heidegger, artworks are distinguished from other kinds of tools because they possess “self-sufficient presence.” Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 1971), 15-86; 28. 7

Daemonic Allure argues for an alternative to this familiar impasse. The poets analyzed here make up a counter-Romantic, sub-canonical tradition of American nature poetry which refuses either to reclaim or mourn a lost unity with nature. The major poets of this tradition –

John Neal, Margaret Fuller, Adah Isaacs Menken, and Sidney Lanier – all posit an incommensurability between mind and nature, subject and world. Their poetry neither laments this separation nor tries to overcome it. Their poems instead stage and celebrate encounters with nature’s alterity – the material world’s dis-correspondence from the mind. When Adah Isaacs

Menken, for example, contemplates the “eternal separation” between mind and nature, she experiences it not as alienation but as a necessary principle of a devotional relationship to nature:

“If my weak puny hand could reach up and rend the sun from his throne to-day, then were the same but a little thing for me to do. / It is the Far Off, the great Unattainable, that feeds the passion we feel for a star.”4 Her poetic speaker is able to worship 5 the sun and stars because of that distance between herself and the cosmos. Closing that gap and ending the “eternal separation” is imagined as an act of violence in which the sun would be displaced from its

“throne.” More importantly, closing the separation between subject and cosmos would be for

Menken basically inconsequential. If it were possible (and she is sure it is not), it would be “a little thing to do.” The tradition of nature poetry I trace here does not aim to unify subject and object – a desire which I argue is central to materialist and posthumanist ecocriticism as well as ecopoetics. Instead, this tradition aims to describe and facilitate the kinds of aesthetic experience which depend upon a consciousness of that separation of mind and world.

4. Adah Isaacs Menken, “Dying,” in Infelicia and Other Writings, ed. Gregory Eiselein (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), 114. 5. In the same stanza that she describes “the passion we feel for a star,” Menken’s speaker describes herself “worshipping so silently” (Menken, “Dying,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 114). 8

Writing against the Romantic and Transcendentalist image of correspondence between mind and nature, the poets in this tradition describe their attraction to nature in ambivalent terms.

Nature for Fuller, Neal, Menken, and Lanier is not a lost dwelling place or a mirror image of the human mind. Rather, what is attractive about the material world is its alterity, its withdrawal from human powers of conceptualization. This withdrawal of nature from the mind frequently precipitates an awareness of the limits of subjective agency. It is not, however, the ecstatic (or humiliating) erasure of subjective power central to the aesthetics of sublimity. The experiencing subject remains intact, conscious of a material world that will not be assimilated to an aesthetics either of beauty and correspondence or of sublimity. Consider, for example, Margaret Fuller’s description of the daemonic (or “daemoniac”), a principle of attraction “coeval” with material nature that appears to attract and repel in equal measure: “we shudder but we approach still nearer and a part of our nature listens, sometimes answers to this influence.”6 There is an equivocation in this encounter. The person who becomes aware of the daemonic is drawn in, yet only a “part” of their nature listens; and it answers to the daemonic only “sometimes.” The human subject is neither triumphant nor defeated. Daemonic encounters with nature are often intimate but such intimacy is always ambivalent and fleeting.

What is actually at stake for writers like Fuller is less the intimacy itself than the recognition that comes with it of nature’s withdrawal and autonomy from the mind’s concepts.

The distinction between “knowledge” and “encounter” made by the ecofeminist philosopher

Freya Mathews is especially relevant here:

Knowledge seeks to break open the mystery of another’s nature; encounter leaves that mystery intact. When I believe I have revealed the inner mysteries of another in the traditional way, my sense of its otherness in fact dissolves, and any possibility of true encounter evaporates. But where I respect its opaqueness, I retain my sense of its

6. Margaret Fuller to an unknown recipient, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Vol. 6, 1850 and Undated, ed. Robert Hudspeth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 141, 142. 9

otherness, and hence the possibility of encounter remains. And while knowledge allows me to predict the behavior of the other, encounter does not: the mysterious other retains its capacity to surprise.7

For Mathews, if we retain the sense of opaqueness and otherness belonging to the nonhuman world, we will be able to detect its “subjectival dimensions.”8 Ultimately she argues for a form of panpsychism, the view that some degree of subjecthood inheres in all material entities. A relationship of respect is made possible by recognizing the subject-status of the entire material world. I am not suggesting that the poets I analyze here are panpsychists (though Fuller’s daemonic might be read as the starting point of a minimal or proto- panpsychism). But rather, their interest in nature is an investment in a kind of non-intrusive encounter, the kind of encounter which allows the natural world to retain its otherness.

In the case of Fuller’s anti-landscape poems and Lanier’s late nature-hymns, this encounter with nature’s opaqueness and otherness is an end in itself and their poetry provides a model for a form of non-appropriative encounter with nature. For Neal and Menken, the encounter with nature’s otherness has slightly different stakes. They are each invested in preserving isolated aesthetic experiences – experiences of nature’s beauty that remain inassimilable to a common or shareable aesthetic standard. The contemplation and representation of nature in their poems provide occasions for consciously a-social experiences. Neal describes the American wilderness, for example, not only as an open vista but as a “cavern,” a secret and

“holy” place, “bestrewed with every brilliant flower that ever bloomed in secret.” This image of nature as hidden – blooming in secret – is tied to Neal’s belief that a work of “genius… must be

7. Freya Mathews, For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 78. 8. Mathews, For Love of Matter, 79. 10 eccentrick and must find enemies.”9 This mode of aesthetic encounter in nature grounds experiences that are so eccentric, so idiosyncratic, they are almost unshareable. These are experiences which cannot serve as the basis of social relation.

What Mathews frames as the physical world’s “capacity to surprise” emerges in this poetic tradition as an experiential aesthetic quality. Material nature is attractive for the way it resists our concepts and predictions as well as our attempts at appropriation for social purposes.

This is a poetics which refuses, for example, what Lawrence Buell calls the “America-as-nature reduction.”10 Nature experienced in daemonic terms undermines our attempts to naturalize any set of social relations or to ground a mode of community in the shared aesthetic experience of nature.

Daemonic Allure tracks the submerged relationship between two distinct elements of poetic history – one central to ecocriticism, the other having to do with aesthetic theory. On the one hand, I try to trace a new answer to a traditional ecocritical question – how might we represent the material world in a way that foregrounds its inherent value and fosters ecological consciousness? On the other hand, I offer an account and a defense of a strain of American aesthetics that has been largely misread and ignored. This is a model of aesthetic encounter which both preserves nature’s “otherness,” and also preserves the experiencing subject’s freedom to make singular aesthetic judgements: it is an aesthetic experience that emerges prior to the spontaneous demand for “universal assent”11 which Immanuel Kant famously attributes to aesthetic judgement. It is Kant’s claim that, in our aesthetic experiences, we can reasonably

9. John Neal, The Battle of Niagara with Other Poems, 2nd ed. (N. G. Maxwell: Baltimore, 1819), 152, xv. Google Books. 10. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writings, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 15. 11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124. 11 expect universal agreement, that has made the aesthetic the Trojan horse of bourgeois ideology deplored by Marxist criticism.12 By analyzing a kind of aesthetic experience which neither makes nor accedes to a demand for collective or universal agreement, I aim to describe an alternative strain of nature-aesthetics which fails to reflect or transmit that “unconstrained unity between citizens,”13 which, according to Terry Eagleton, aesthetic theory is intended to promote.

II.

The model of the aesthetic I am tracing in the work of Neal, Fuller, Menken, and Lanier has been rendered almost illegible by its proximity to the organicist tradition of post-Kantian aesthetics.

Part of the project of Daemonic Allure is to excavate this non-organicist nineteenth-century nature aesthetic and to a differentiate it from canonical Romanticism. This counter-Romantic poetic tradition draws on a pre-organicist understanding of the aesthetic and its relationship to the natural world. I discuss Romantic organicism at greater length in my first chapter. But here, in order to clarify the stakes of this return to a pre-organicist moment, I will briefly outline the origins of Romantic organicism in the early reception of Kant’s aesthetics. The key Anglophone figure in this early reception is Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Coleridge’s notorious definition of organic form in his Lectures on Shakespeare serves a fundamental Romantic impulse regarding poetic creation –the desire to produce a work of art that proceeds according to natural rules and processes rather than the subjective decision-making of the artist. Coleridge writes:

12. Consider, for example, Terry Eagleton’s claim that Kant’s concept of the sensus communis is “ideology purified, universalized and rendered reflective, ideology raised to the second power, idealized beyond all mere sectarian prejudice or customary reflex to resemble the very ghostly shape of rationality itself.” Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1990), 96. 13. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 97. 12

The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; — as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it developes, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms; — each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within, — its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror.14

Coleridge’s preferred poetic form is organic insofar as it is organized by inherent laws in the same manner as natural objects which, he believes, also unfold according to innate laws or ideas.

This is what Amanda Jo Goldstein has recently called “organicism’s teleologically insular ideal.”15 Organicism sees the natural entity as developing towards a pre-ordained telos, which

Coleridge here calls the “perfection of its outward form.” It then looks to identify a similar

“insular ideal” for the work of art. Bluntly, the goal of organicism is to produce natural works of art – works which are free of the subjective and arbitrary decision making of the human artist.

The organic poem is natural not because it represents nature, or the experience of nature, but because its form is innate rather than imposed.

The most famous version of this claim in American Romanticism is Ralph Waldo

Emerson’s description of poetry in his 1844 essay “The Poet,” where he claims that “it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem – a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”16 The “metre-making argument” has often been read as a justification and spur for

American free-verse. It also contains an organicist understanding of form. Poetic form is not

14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare and Some Other Old Poets and Dramatists (London: J. M Dent & Sons, 1914), 46-47. Google Books. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Coleridge_s_Essays_Lectures_on_Shakespea/9yeaAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbp v=0 15. Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 22. 16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 287-306; 290. 13 imposed by tradition or artistic whim, but derives instead from the poem’s ideas – its argument.

There are two important claims here (both of which Coleridge shares). One is that specific ideas correspond to specific poetic forms; the second is that these specific poetic forms are natural objects: the poem is “a new thing” in nature. A key part of the fantasy is that a poem might be a natural being in its own right, rather than a representation of something else.

As Romanticist scholars have long noted, Coleridge’s theory of organic form derives from a misreading of Kant. In Goldstein’s words, Coleridge heard a “remarkable echo, in the third Critique, between the self-sufficient objects of aesthetic judgement that concern its first part

[and] the self-sufficient organisms of natural-philosophical judgement that populate its second.”17 In fact, the idea of organic form depends not only on hearing that “remarkable echo” between self-sufficient organisms and the self-sufficient objects of judgment, but also in a prior misunderstanding of what actually constitutes self-sufficiency for Kant. Coleridge arrives at the idea of organic form – that form which develops according to an innate pre-ordained plan – by misreading Kant’s aesthetic category of “purposiveness without an end.”18 Kant argues that our aesthetic experience of nature consists in simultaneously identifying in natural objects the appearance of purpose (that is, of intentional design) and recognizing that no such purpose actually inheres in the object itself: in other words, self-sufficiency is imposed by judgement upon organisms and aesthetic objects as a way of explaining the appearance of intentional design: “Purposiveness can thus exist without an end, insofar as we do not place the causes of

17. Goldstein, Sweet Science, 16-17. 18. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 111. Earlier translations rendered this term, “purposiveness without purpose.” See for example: Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan 1914), 77. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015003762278?urlappend=%3Bseq=131. 14 this form in a will, but can still make the explanation of its possibility conceivable to ourselves only by deriving it from a will.”19

Organicism works by treating purposiveness as a real feature belonging to natural objects

(rather than to subjective judgement). As Jonathan Loesberg argues, Kant sees purposiveness as a “mental construct that recognize[s] its separateness from the real bases of the object it perceive[s],” whereas Coleridge, “takes purposiveness and attributes it to an integral aspect of nature – organicism.”20 Put simply organicism objectifies the aesthetic. Purposiveness is transformed from being a feature of aesthetic judgement to being an attribute of the object itself.

It becomes in Coleridge the “life” within the object which shapes an object’s “exterior.” For

Emerson, it is the living “thought” which has “an architecture of its own.”

To believe in organicism is to believe we can discover a subjective creative force unfolding within even non-sentient natural objects. The organicist conceit removes the need for the artistic subject to make creative decisions since the form and appearance of the organic artwork is supposedly already determined by its “argument.” It is as though the poem grows according to natural processes without the poet’s intervention. At the same time, however, organic form obeys laws which are, it seems, completely legible and visible to the human subject. As M. H. Abrams in his classic account of organicism puts it, “to Coleridge, the ideas of reason, and those in the imagination of the artist, are ‘living and life-producing ideas, which. . . are essentially one with the germinal causes in nature.’”21 In other words, the removal of the decision-making artistic subject doesn’t remove creative intentionality but just relocates it.

19. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 105. 20. Jonathan Loesberg, A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 6, 26. 21. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 172. 15

Organicism attributes a human-like intentionality to nature, which Coleridge calls “the genial artist.” In this organicist view, natural objects (and by extension, organic works of art) grow or develop according to the same principles which exist in the human mind. Nature’s laws are directly and immediately apprehensible to the mind. A version of this view also lies behind

Emerson’s famous assertion in the 1836 Nature of a “radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts.” The mind mirrors nature and “every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.”22 The theory of organic correspondence proceeds, then, from a reading of

Kant in which purposive “will” is radically reinterpreted. It is not a quality merely posited by the judging subject in the contemplation of nature, but rather a quality discovered in the natural object (or the organic artwork) itself – a creative drive which then manifests itself in the form of the object.

In Daemonic Allure, I analyze how Neal, Fuller, Menken, and Lanier all resist the pull of organicism and, in their different ways, turn to a pre-organicist model of aesthetic experience.

Each poet I argue confronts, more or less directly, the possibility of embracing organicist

Romanticism – in fact, Fuller and Lanier do temporarily pursue an organic formalism on the way to developing their respective poetics of aesthetic encounter. In this poetic tradition, nature is attractive not because natural objects unfold according to laws that resemble and correspond to the human mind, but because nature withdraws from such correspondence. The natural world is not transparent: its principles and laws are barely visible, let alone identical to the ideas of reason. When Lanier in his 1880 hymn to nature “Sunrise” asks of a live-oak, “What logic of greeting lies / Betwixt dear over-beautiful trees and the rain of the eyes?,”23 he is unable to take

22. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in Atkinson, The Essential Writings, 1-39; 15, 14. 23. Sidney Lanier, “Sunrise,” in Poems and Poem Outlines ed. Charles R. Anderson, vol. 1 of The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Press, 1945), p. 145, lines 24-25. 16 for granted an organicist relationship in which the tree would be governed by laws comparable to his own mental faculties. His question addresses not the tree as an object but the structure of their encounter – the “logic of greeting” between human and tree.

I am particularly keen to distinguish the tradition I describe here from organicism’s objectification of the aesthetic because during the posthuman turn of the last decade, a variant of that objectified aesthetic has made a comeback within ecocritical scholarship. In the work of some new materialists and posthumanists, a force like purposiveness is attributed to nonhuman natural objects. Importantly, this posthumanist and new materialist version of the objectification of the aesthetic also leads directly to a remodeling of political agency. We can see a new materialist version of that relocation of the purposive “will” from subject to object in Jane

Bennett’s famous discussion of “thing-power.” Through the notion of “thing-power,” Bennett aims to describe a “vitality intrinsic to materiality,” a principle of “vibrant”24 activity innate to all material things. Bennett emphasizes the vibrance and vibration of this activity because she wants to stress its randomness and non-teleological quality. Thing-power is a vitalist principle but, unlike Coleridge’s “organic,” it does not develop towards a pre-determined telos.

In a similar manner to the organic, however, the theory of thing-power ends up attributing an innate power to the nonhuman object. This is clearest in Bennett’s famous litany of “debris.” I will discuss the rhetorical and poetic use of the object-litany in greater depth in my second chapter. But here I want to note how, for the new materialism, an experience of wonder at the material world occasions a belief about the innate agential power of material things. As in organicist Romanticism, the existence of this innate vital power is asserted as fact. First, we have the encounter and the list of objects itself:

24. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 3. 17

Glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick. As I encountered these items, they shimmied back and forth between debris and thing… In the second moment stuff exhibited its thing-power: it issued a call even if I did not quite understand what it was saying. At the very least, it provoked affects in me: I was repelled by the dead (or was it merely sleeping?) rat and dismayed by the litter.25

This initial encounter with its description of Bennett’s ambivalent affective responses to the debris almost resembles Fuller daemonic encounter with nature. It is at this stage a description of

Bennett’s subjective experience of things. It becomes clear, however, as Bennett elaborates on her argument, that what matters to her vitalist materialism is not really the ambivalent experience of nonhuman materiality, but the reality and agency of that force she calls thing-power. “In being struck,” she argues, “I realized that the capacity of these bodies was not restricted to a passive

‘intractability’ but also included the ability to make things happen, to produce effects.”26 Thing- power, then, is not an element of quasi-aesthetic experience, as it at first appears, but a form of agency belonging to nonhuman objects. We later find that this agency is explicitly political as when, for example, Bennett attributes partial responsibility for an electrical blackout to the

“stream of electrons”27 themselves in the power grid.28

Bennett’s new materialism, then, represents an intellectual descendant of the Romantic organicist desire to locate a vital quasi-subjective will inside apparently inanimate nonhuman objects. The tradition of daemonic poetics I analyze here shares the new materialism’s investment in the uncanny otherness and epistemological intractability of material things.

However, unlike the new materialists, the poets I analyze do not feel compelled to make the shift

25. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 4. 26. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 4-5. 27. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 26. 28. One of the major dangers of attributing political agency to material things (rather than solely to the human subjects who use and instrumentalize those things) is that the human capacity and responsibility to take action in and through the material world is severely delimited. As Andreas Malm argues, in attributing political agency to nonhuman matter, “new materialism veers… towards the ditch where nothing can be done.” It is “powerlessness… [draped] in ontology.” Andreas Malm, The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2020), 153. 18 from epistemological and aesthetic questions to ontology.29 They continue, as it were, to heed the

“call” of material nature without then taking the subsequent (new materialist) step of asserting that thing-power is actually a real feature of objects themselves.

Each poet in this tradition is linked by the rejection of the objectified aesthetics of organicism. In their turn to an aesthetics of encounter, I argue that we can see these poets reversing that initial misreading of Kantian aesthetics. However, my claim is not that they represent an orthodox return to Kant’s model of disinterested beauty. Superficially, the recovery of material nature’s alterity – its withdrawal from the mind – might resemble Kant’s nonconceptual model of beauty. For Kant, the experience of beauty occurs when we encounter an object for which we have no specific concept and instead attribute to it that quality of

“purposiveness.” As Juliet Sychrava argues, this entails attributing to the object the “general quality of being adapted to our thought or subsumable under concepts.”30 The experience of an object as beautiful is characterized in the first place by the lack of a specific concept; but, in the wake of this lack, the object is then treated as though it is – generally speaking – “adapted to our thought.”

For the authors analyzed in Daemonic Allure, experiences of nature do not involve a sense of fit or harmony between mind and world. Material nature doesn’t correspond to specific concepts nor to our thought in general. Additionally, this tradition of nature-aesthetics makes another – and more crucial – departure from Kant’s model of beauty. For Kant, the experience of the natural object which seems as if it is “adapted to our thought” facilitates a disinterested

29. Bennett’s aim is to “shift from the language of epistemology to that of ontology, from a focus on an elusive recalcitrance hovering between immanence and transcendence (the absolute) to an active earthy not-quite-human capaciousness (vibrant matter)” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 3). Daemonic poetry, by contrast, asks us to linger with the experience of recalcitrance. 30. Juliet Sychrava. Schiller to Derrida: Idealism in Aesthetics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 20. 19 subject position. As I suggested above, aesthetic experience in Kant includes the potential for universality. The person making an aesthetic judgement, if it is truly disinterested, can expect

“universal assent.” For Kant, aesthetic experience is always theoretically universal. By contrast, the aesthetic experiences described in Daemonic Allure are rarely if ever imagined as shareable with other people. The experience of nature’s withdrawal from knowledge (from concepts) facilitates here not a disinterested or seemingly universal subject-position, but rather the opposite: these are autonomous, unshared, and possibly unshareable, aesthetic experiences.

Nature experienced through the daemonic lens gives rise to a version of what Rei Terada calls the “proto-aesthetic.” This is a category of experience which remains unassimilated and inassimilable to aesthetic judgement: “Because no one can be imagined to share [proto-aesthetic experiences], no one can be imagined to appropriate, benefit from, or push one to endorse them.

They offer a glimpse not of spontaneous accord but of freedom from the demand for agreement.”31 We can see a desire for this “freedom from the demand for agreement” in the daemonic nature-poetics analyzed here.

This interest in an unshareable “proto-aesthetic” experience is tied to the way in which all four authors I analyze experiment with poetic form and especially lyric address. In some cases, it is as though the goal is not to describe an aesthetic experience but to make clear its idiosyncrasy and unavailability to the reader. Joshua Kotin, in Utopias of One, describes a set of Utopian writers who depict solitary (and temporary) experiences of perfection. These writers imagine “a perfect world that cannot be replicated or shared.”32 They fashion their individual, personal utopias by “ostracizing readers” through “aesthetic difficulty.”33 While acknowledging that the

31 Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 98, 6. 32. Joshua Kotin, Utopias of One, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 3. 33. Kotin, Utopias of One, 11. 20 project of isolated utopianism is “morally ambiguous,” since it “reflect[s] and reinforce[s] the atomization of modern life,” Kotin still frames the project as an expression of freedom, of

“personal autonomy.”34 The poems I analyze in Daemonic Allure frequently appear, in their experimental form, designed to estrange readers in a similar manner; and historically speaking they have largely succeeded. Even Fuller, the most canonical of the four authors I am analyzing here, has been for the most part sidelined as a poet. I do not, however, want to reduce this kind of proto-aesthetic experience to a mere effect of social atomization. Rather I would suggest that, in representing the contemplation of what Rodolphe Gasché calls “cognitively undomesticated nature”35 as an a-social or pre-social aesthetic experience, this tradition works specifically to unmoor our perception of nature from our imagining of society or community.

The effects of positing an aesthetic experience which evades or refutes the “sensus communis” and its demand for universal assent are varied. In Neal’s case, for example, this unmooring of aesthetic experience in nature from the sensus communis contributes to a denaturalized view of national (and specifically American) history. In Menken’s case, by contrast, the possibility of an a-social aesthetic allows for an evasion of the coercive experience of public aesthetic standards. A key secondary current of my argument, then, is that the experience of nature’s otherness – its autonomy from the mind – contributes to an experience of freedom. The recognition of the autonomy of the nonhuman world from the subjective mind emerges alongside the subject’s own experience of a peculiar kind of personal autonomy. This is

34. Kotin, Utopias of One, 3, 12. 35. Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2. “Cognitively undomesticated nature” is Gashé’s term for nature as it appears in Kant’s account of aesthetic experience. For Kant, though beautiful nature is “cognitively domesticated,” it does become, as it were, reflectively domesticated when the observing subject posits a purposiveness in nature adapted to their own general powers of conceptualization. In the daemonic mode of experience I describe here, nature remains both cognitively and reflectively undomesticated. 21 the freedom of the subject from the expectation that our aesthetic experiences will be shareable and will constitute community.

III.

This counter-Romantic tradition of nature poetry foregrounds the unknowable otherness of nature. In contrast to the organicist tradition inaugurated by Coleridge and adapted by Emerson, these writers do not treat the poetic work as a “thing” existing in nature alongside plants and animals. The poem for Neal, Fuller, Menken, and Lanier is a representation of aesthetic experience: their poems are attempts not to create new natural objects, but to represent and describe the obscure “logic of greeting” between the human mind and a material nature that withdraws from conceptualization. I make this point explicitly because I want to distinguish the mode of aesthetics-oriented ecocriticism I am practicing from one of the dominant trends within current ecocritical scholarship. In my view Ecocriticism’s recent turn to ontology in the wake of various posthumanist movements (including the new materialism) reproduces the organicist view of the artwork as a “new thing” in nature rather than as a mode of representation.

Part of my argument here is that in reproducing this ontological gesture (the attention to the poem as quasi-natural object), this posthumanist scholarship ends up with the same view of the poem (and the same impasse regarding our experience of the natural world) as a great deal of traditionally phenomenological36 ecopoetics scholarship. In his seminal account of ecopoetics,

Jonathan Bate argues that a “Romantic poem may be regarded as a model of a certain kind of being and of dwelling.” It is “an image of ecological wholeness which may grant to the attentive

36. Bate argues that the “true importance” of ecopoetics “may be more phenomenological than political” (Bate, The Song of The Earth, 75.) This is because, for Bate, ecopoetry is more concerned with putting readers back in unalienated contact with nature than with arguing for specific environmentalist positions. 22 and receptive reader a sense of being-at-home-in-the-world.”37 Bate’s phenomenological poetics oscillates between two positions: on the one hand, the poem facilitates a kind of experience – the unalienated experience of dwelling. On the other hand, the poem is a “kind of being” in its own right. In his influential definition of ecopoetics, Bate comes close to claiming that the poetic form is a natural entity:

it could be that poiesis in the sense of verse-making is language’s most direct path of return to the oikos, the place of dwelling, because metre itself – a quiet but persistent music, a recurring cycle, a heartbeat – is an answering to nature’s own rhythms, an echoing of the song of the earth itself.38

We can detect here the contours of the organicist position: the poetic form – meter – answers and echoes the song of the earth in an image of correspondence. At the same time, meter appears to be not just a corresponding echo, but an always-already natural pattern, a heartbeat. Poetic meter appears to both echo and exemplify “nature’s own rhythms.” To be clear, according to an organicist logic these functions are not distinct: the same innate laws that govern the natural organism, also govern the poetic work. It is the identity between these laws which allows for the correspondence or echo.

This does leave an important question. If poetic form is already natural, then who or what travels along poetry’s “direct path of return to the oikos.” Bate’s own sentence makes “language” the subject of this return journey. The alienated human subject (the human subject whose

“dwelling” is supposedly to be found in nature) is surprisingly absent from this image. The

“heartbeat” belongs not to a human being but to the poem itself as though the human subject has been removed from the event of dwelling. This is not the explicit goal of Bate’s phenomenological study (elsewhere, he argues that “ecopoetics must concern itself with

37. Bate, The Song of The Earth, 109. 38. Bate, The Song of The Earth, 76. 23 consciousness.”)39 But it is, I would suggest, an effect of treating the poem as a “certain kind of being.” If the poem is considered primarily a natural or nature-echoing “being,” then what matters is not how subjective experience (whether alienated or unalienated) is represented or mediated, but how poetic form (in this case meter) embodies nature’s impersonal rhythms. This kind of formalism, which treats the poem as a quasi-natural body, is typical of scholarship in ecopoetics.40 It is as though the poem itself as an object, rather than the reader or writer, undergoes the alleviation of alienation.

It is not just ecopoetics that celebrates the possibility of treating poems as material objects and organic bodies. Posthumanist ecocriticism, under the influence of the new materialism and object-oriented ontology, looks to salvage materiality – both that of nature and that of the poetic text – from the tyranny of the human mind. In effect, this involves reconceiving poems as material objects or systems. Marjorie Levinson, for example, challenges the definition of lyric poetry as “thought happening” by arguing that if we are to keep that label, it should

[cover] things that are not typically considered candidates for thought: things like star formation, bacterial colonies, chemical reactions, traffic jams, social network effects, and economic recessions (so-called physical-causal systems). Hence the counter-intuitive nature of my wanting to model lyric as a complex self-organizing system.41

39. Bate, The Song of the Earth, 266. 40. Scott Knickerbocker, in Ecopoetics, claims that “poetry itself (and all language) has a body which we call its form.” (Scott Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, The Nature of Language [Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012], 7). He argues that ecopoems “enact through formal devices such as sound effects, the speaker’s experience of the complexity, mystery, and beauty of nature.” In spite of this apparent attention to the “speaker’s experience” of nature, however, he then turns, like Bate, to an image of poetic language itself becoming nature-like and wild: the poem’s “language takes on its own wildness and materiality distinct from but still a response to nature.” (Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics, 13. Emphasis in the original.) Compare this to Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne’s introduction to their recent collection, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. Drawing on Robert Duncan’s concept of “field composition,” they argue that “while poetry composed in a field is not organic material or life itself, it gets as close to the organic as possible without actually becoming it. . . The content of the field poem ‘arises as the living body or form,’ a body conditioned by its organs and systems.” (Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne, “Introduction,” in Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018], 1- 16; 4). Poetic form is a “body” that resembles “organic material.” The poem itself is as close as possible to a natural, wild, and material body. 41. Marjorie Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry: field reports on romantic lyric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 262. 24

The lyric is not a “performance of someone thinking,” 42 but it resembles thought, Levinson explains, because the mind is also “such a system, described for more than thirty years as an emergent global property of the brain.” To imagine the lyric as a “self-organizing system” is to take human experience and intention out of the equation (this is also the point of casting the mind as an example of “such a system.”43)

Poems in this view are manifestations of “self-organization”44 as are nonhuman material entities like chemical reactions and bacterial colonies. Despite Levinson’s claim in a different context that her “interest in Romanticism is the opposite of Bate’s,”45 we have not travelled all that far from Bate’s ecopoetics. For Levinson, poems and bacterial colonies share (and manifest) the force of self-organization. For Bate, they presumably share (and manifest) the impersonal rhythmic patterns that can be heard in the “song of the earth.” My aim here is not to collapse the serious differences that exists between Levinson and Bate. (Levinson, for example, does not aim to overcome alienation from nature.) Rather I want to draw our attention to the fact that what we might call an ontological impulse – a desire to treat poems as kinds of beings or bodies – re- occurs across seemingly quite varied ecocritical terrain. What Bate and Levinson do share is the implicit view that for poetry studies to take the natural world seriously, we have to transplant our object of study – the poem – into nature.

Daemonic Allure, by contrast, explores what happens if we don’t think of nature-poems as bodies or systems, but as mediations of aesthetic experience in nature. Isobel Armstrong

42. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 262. 43. My understanding is that property dualism does not actually position the mind as a self-organizing system. It is the emergent property of the brain (which is a self-organizing system). But as Andreas Malm puts it, this is a relation of “dependence and difference.” The crucial feature of the mind, the subject’s intentionality “is an emergent property that cannot be reduced to the bedrock on which it supervenes, and cannot exist without it.” Malm, The Progress of this Storm, 55, 57. 44. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 262. 45. Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry, 94, n.3. 25 argues that the “artwork considered as a form of mediation tolerates difference and non-closure.”

According to Armstrong, “mediation creates a space for coming to know and knowing about that coming to know, a space inevitably of fracture rather than connection, agonistic, but a space all the same.” Coming to know in this sense differs from the appropriative and dominating knowledge that Mathews sets up in contrast to encounter. Coming to know in Armstrong’s sense involves “discomfort, a frustrated awareness of the non-correspondence of consciousness and the world… Thinking indeed necessitates a tearing apart of thought from sensible objects.”46 While ecopoetics and posthumanist criticism look to elevate the poem as a physical or natural object almost at the expense of analyzing human experience, I refocus critical attention on what it is means to experience that “frustrated awareness” in the face of nonhuman alterity.

Chapter One: The “Weight of Prophecy”: Nature and the Nation in John Neal's Poetry

I. The Sense of Poetry

The lion of the desert would not believe the horse when he came up out of the bleak north and told a story of waters and seas that grew solid, quiet and smooth in the dead of winter. . . The mighty lord of the Numedian desert could not believe – how could he? – in a cock-and-bull story, about ice and snow; for to him they were both as a multitude of such things are to the philosophy of our age, out of the course of nature.

46. Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 60, 62-63, 69. 26

A solid sea and a fluid earth are alike to such as have no belief in what is new or contrary to that of the course of nature with which they are acquainted – whatever that may be.47

This allegory from Rachel Dyer, John Neal’s 1828 novel on the Salem witch-trials, gives an image of nature in excess of our expectations. That which is in fact natural appears to be “out of the course of nature” because it is “new.” This apparent paradox – that nature must include what appears unnatural – can be found throughout Neal’s prose and poetry in the early national period.

To experience something as natural is to feel able to assimilate it to one’s prior conception of the world. Yet the physical universe continues, as Neal repeatedly insists, to present us with novelty and strangeness which we cannot accommodate to any prior conception.

Neal is not well-known for his writing about nature. His critical reputation is now tied to the American literary nationalism which he expressed in his criticism and fiction from the 1820s and which culminated in his 1828 call for “another declaration of independence in the republic of letters.”48 Through the antebellum period, he became vocal advocate for American cultural independence, women’s rights, and the temperance movement.49 For the most part, scholarship has focused on his fiction and its expression of nationalist sentiment in the period following the

War of 1812. I focus in this chapter on Neal’s equivocal representations of nature and its place in his largely neglected poetry from the late 1810s. I analyze how his representation of a natural world that resists our attempts at conceptualization contributes to a denaturalized view of the nation and a view of American aesthetics as characterized by dissent rather than consensus.

47. John Neal, Rachel Dyer: A North American Story, ed. John D. Seelye (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1964), 25. 48. Neal, Rachel Dyer, xviii. 49. On Neal’s reform politics, see: Donald A. Sears, John Neal (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 98-110. 27

In the passage from Rachel Dyer quoted above, Neal represents our experience of nature as fundamentally fraught and contradictory. 50 We expect nature to be familiar and unchanging; at the same time, nature is source of novelty and discovery. Part of the oddity of Neal’s fable of the lion and the horse comes from the fact that Neal actually seems to excuse the lion for being unable to believe in the existence of ice (“how could he?”). Neal’s claim is not just that our grasp of nature is always artificially limited but that, to some degree, this is to be expected. I want to begin by drawing attention to the way in which Neal’s equivocal view of nature resembles that of

Kant’s aesthetics. Neal’s nature appears to be “cognitively undomesticated”51 – Gasché’s term for those natural objects for which we have no concepts and which, in Kantian aesthetics, we consequently judge to be beautiful or sublime. I make this link because Neal’s interest in nature, although framed here in terms of a question of knowledge and belief, is aesthetic in Kant’s sense: he is explicitly invested in what happens when we encounter an object in nature for which we have no prior concept.52

50. Neal’s foregrounding of the contradictory valences of “nature” and the “natural” makes him a surprising precursor to that skeptical strain within the environmental humanities which has argued over the last twenty years for the deconstruction of the concept of nature on the grounds that it limits and hampers ecological consciousness. Val Plumwood, in an influential essays on the critique of the concept of nature, distinguishes between progressive naturalism and conservative naturalism: the latter “seeks to naturalize oppression, invoking nature to universalize and justify, to depict as ‘natural’ and unalterable oppressive arrangements that are actually contingent and quite open to change” (Val Plumwood, “Nature as Agency and the Prospects for a Progressive Naturalism,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 12, no. 4 [2001]: 3-32; 6. 10.1080/104557501101245225). Neal’s critique of the concept of nature does not have same the directly anti-colonial liberatory politics as Plumwood’s, but it is motivated by the same sense that the concept of nature – by taking that which is actually contingent and mutable to be unalterable – has political and juridical implications. By arguing, for example, in the opening chapter of Rachel Dyer, that “A solid sea and a fluid earth are alike to such as have no belief in what is new or contrary to that of the course of nature with which they are acquainted,” he is, in part, cautioning against his readers’ impulse to rule out as impossible or illegitimate the claims of witnesses in the witch-trials to have seen witchcraft. To be clear, Neal is not arguing that witchcraft does exist, but rather that we should not dismiss testimony out of hand on the grounds that a witness has reported something “contrary to the course of nature.” In short, our sense of what is natural is not a reliable guide to what constitutes the real. 51. Gasché, The Idea of Form, 2. 52. Gasché argues that Kant’s “aesthetic judgment is… something of a para-epistemic accomplishment. Where cognition fails, aesthetic judgement ensures a minimal mastery and minimal identification of something for which no determined concepts of the understanding are at hand” (Gaché, The Idea of Form, 4). 28

Central to the experience of Kantian beauty, as I discuss in the Introduction, is the principle of “purposiveness without an end.”53 Neal’s poetry, I argue, reproduces this paradoxical double recognition: wild nature appears designed (as though expressive of intention) and yet we have no reason to believe it is so designed. In one passage in the Critique of

Judgement, for example, Kant writes “the song of the bird proclaims joyfulness and contentment with its existence. At least this is how we interpret nature, whether anything of the sort is its intention or not.”54 Citing this passage Jonathan Loesberg explains that the “judgment that an object is beautiful occurs when, in addition to identifying it, we perceive it as embodying a recognition of natural order and significance, coupled with the recognition that that embodiment may not be an actual feature of the object, may not be intended by it.”55 Neal’s poetry is especially invested in this experience. Nature, in his poetry appears to speak, to sing and – most crucially of all – to prophesy. But these appearances are always ironized. We’re never sure if nature really does express prophetic intention or whether it is merely an illusion.

In a revision of Kant, Neal’s representations of nature particularly focus upon the perception of a kind of nationalist design in nature. The American continent appears as though made for the emerging republic and Neal’s poetry is directly concerned with tracing how this appearance comes about. To be clear, Neal neither endorses nor dismisses this appearance of nationalist destiny in the natural world: he exposes the appearance as unnatural but stops short of completing his own critique of nationalist ideology. Instead his poetry stages “proto-aesthetic” experiences of nature, experiences in which the appearance of purposiveness is held in suspension. One effect is that the reflections on nature staged by Neal’s poems remain

53. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 111. 54. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 181. 55. Loesberg, A Return to Aesthetics, 66. 29 inassimilable to an aesthetics of beauty. This evasion of beauty in his representation of American nature has two major consequences. First his poems facilitate the kind of contemplation of nature in which the contingency of national history becomes visible. Second his poetry facilitates experiences of nature in which the subject’s aesthetic judgement is free of the “sensus communis” and its demand for “universal assent.”56

Poetry, in particular, is fundamental to Neal’s understanding of how we experience nature and how some of us come to appropriate it for nationalist ideological ends. In the preface to his quasi-epic poem, The Battle of Niagara, he proposes that “the treasuries of American poesy. . . will yet prove boundless and inexhaustible as our mines.”57 Poetry is pictured as analogous to a natural resource. But this comparison does not entail a naturalistic view of poetry. As Neal insists throughout the preface, “the language of poetry—the descriptions of poetry—are not those of nature… It is all hyperbole, more highly coloured—and better grouped than nature.”58

Poetry, is artifice not natural spontaneity: “it is not poetry without metaphor, hyperbole, allusion or imagery. Passion is never poetical. One must have leisure, self-possession as well as genius to think poetically.”59

Despite his claim that the “descriptions of poetry” are “not those of nature,” he also suggests that poetry offers a mode of perception comparable in its reliability to our ordinary bodily senses. Immediately following the comparison between American poetry and America’s mines, he admits,

But all this may be an illusion – I may neither know nor understand poetry. . . I have the same confidence in this sense of poetry, for to me it is a sense – as I have in the sense of hearing or seeing. And therefore did I even expect the termination of the dream – and a

56. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 173, 124. 57. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., xxiii. 58. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., lxi. 59. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., lviii. 30

restoration to the sober opinions of mankind, I must, from necessity, continue to judge by such senses as I have. They are my only ministers. . . It may be a delusion – it may. I feel it is possible but when I awaken from it – it will be under the expectation that all I hear and see and feel is but a dream – that Berkeley and Hume are right; that the blessed firmament, the sun, the moon, the everlasting and the infinite, all, all! are but a dream and a vision.60

Poetry, then, is a “sense” comparable to “seeing or hearing.” It is a way of perceiving the world.

What he had called the “treasuries of American poesy” might be illusory but, he contends, they can only be illusory in the same way that the evidence of our ordinary senses can be illusory. If we no longer believe that our sight or hearing correctly report the existence of the external world, we commit ourselves to the subjective idealism of George Berkeley or the skepticism of David

Hume. For Berkeley, the existence of the material world depends upon observation by a subject

(“all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind”61), while Hume famously argued that the senses cannot provide evidence of the continued existence of the material world.62 Neal collapses Hume and Berkeley together: to doubt the evidence of our senses (a possibility that he does allow for) is to suggest that the material world is merely a dream or vision; but the force of the passage is in the claim that to doubt his “sense of poetry” would lead to the same result. If we do not trust our “sense of poetry,” we should doubt the independent reality of the external world altogether.

His argument is that poetry is not visionary or idealistic; it grants us access not to dreams but to reality and it does this in a manner that is just as reliable or unreliable as our other bodily

60. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., xxiv. Emphasis in the original. 61. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principle of Human Knowledge, ed. Thomas J. McCormack (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1910), 32. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t24b2zb96. For Berkeley, “so long as [external objects] are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit” (32). 62. At the end of first book of A Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume argues that the senses cannot give us evidence of the continued existence of an external world: “to begin with the SENSES, ‘tis evident these faculties are incapable of giving rise to the notion of the continu’d existence of their objects, after they no longer appear to the senses. For that is a contradiction in terms, and supposes that the senses continue to operate, even after they have ceased all manner of operation.” David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 1.4, 239. Emphasis in the original. 31 senses. In this way, Neal proposes a kind of poetic realism – that is, he argues that poetry is a medium that makes possible a reliable experience of material reality.63 Again, this is not because poetry offers a way to circumvent or transcend sensory perception (it does not offer a kind of unmediated access to the real in the manner, for example, of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalist poet who “turns the world to glass and shows us all things in their right series and processions,” thus “[standing] one step nearer to things”).64 Rather, for Neal the poetic is itself a mode of perception. Though Neal’s poetic realism will have implications for his understanding of poetic form, this is not in itself a formalist claim. He is not arguing, for example, that good poetry accurately grasps material nature when it is metrically free and unrestrained in a way that corresponds to the boundlessness of America’s landscape. The claim is not really about what poetry consists of at all, but about his orientation to it: he believes in poetry in the same way that he believes in his senses, and by implication, his readers are expected to offer the same degree of belief (and skepticism).

How is it then, if poetry is always composed of self-conscious artifice (including metaphor and hyperbole) that a capacity he calls the “sense of poetry” is just as reliable as his bodily senses? Furthermore, if we grant the analogy between bodily and poetic sense, what does poetry offer that our ordinary senses do not? What experience of material reality can poetry really offer and why does it matter? In short, my view is that Neal takes poetry to be capable of

63. I am using the term poetic realism here to designate Neal’s attitude towards the capacity of poetry to facilitate accurate experiences of the physical world. I want to distinguish my usage of the term from that of Elizabeth Renker who deploys the term in her study of postbellum poetry to describe several “subtypes” or genres of what she calls “realist poems.” These are poems which engage implicitly in the postbellum discourse of literary realism. (Elizabeth Renker, Realist Poetics in Nineteenth-Century American Culture, 1866-1900 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018], 76.) By contrast, Neal’s antebellum framing of poetry as a “sense” should be read as a response to an earlier epistemological tradition and especially to the skeptical position he attributes here to Hume and Berkeley. 64. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Atkinson, The Essential Writings, 296. 32 representing (and making available to experience) what I call the autonomy of nature.65 It is not that poetry can verify the external reality of the physical world (as we have seen, the poetic sense is caught up in the same skeptical impasse as our other senses); rather it foregrounds nature’s autonomy from the subjective mind and – more importantly for Neal’s purposes – the autonomy of the American landscape from American national culture. In particular, Neal’s poetry explores how American nature can appear designed for American national history. He does not endorse this teleological view of nature and the nation; rather his poetry returns repeatedly to the question as to how such an appearance becomes possible in the first place.

In what remains of this opening section, I am going to give an overview of two strands of criticism regarding Neal’s poetics with which my argument is in direct conversation. First, I will distinguish my reading from a Romantic and materialist current of scholarship which has viewed

Neal as primarily interested in using poetry to embody (rather than represent) physical nature.

Second, I distinguish my reading from a recurrent interpretation of Neal which understands the role of nature imagery in his work to be primarily a matter of valorizing American cultural values.

An early Romanticist phase of Neal scholarship reads his poetry as spontaneous and even natural – not the product of artifice and “leisure” but unplanned bodily expression; Donald Sears in 1978 argues that according to Neal, “when gripped by sufficient emotion, all men will naturally rise to poetry which is, he contends, a ‘natural musick’ and the very language of the human heart.”66 Benjamin Lease in 1972 calls this the poetry of the “blood” and claims that “the central problem of authorship, according to Neal, is concerned with the ways in which the writer

65. I want to clarify that this is not the same concept of nature’s autonomy that Andreas Malm describes in The Progress of this Storm. For Malm, nature must be understood as “autonomous” of capital though “capital cannot do without the stranger nature” and so “seeks to subordinate it” (Malm, The Progress of this Storm, 198, 201). By contrast, nature in Neal’s poetry appears autonomous of concepts and of teleological (nationalist) narratives. 66. Sears, John Neal, 29. 33 incorporates into his work qualities analogous to those in nature.”67 This poetry is natural because it is spontaneous and it arises from physical forces the poet does not control: Neal’s own interest, as seen in Rachel Dyer, in how we recognize and misrecognize nature does not arise in these naturalistic readings of his poetics.

In two recent essays on Neal, Paul Gilmore extends and complicates the naturalistic reading of Neal. According to Gilmore, Neal’s 1824 gothic novel Randolph, outlines a “poetics based on a physiological understanding of poetry as grounded in nature and natural processes. . . a rejection of poetic form in favor of natural expression.”68 Whereas Sears and Lease see this poetry of the blood as characteristic of “Neal’s romantic aesthetic,”69 Gilmore reads the same phenomenon in anti-romantic terms: he finds Neal positing a “radical indeterminacy and lawlessness” in nature, and “embrac[ing] the monstrous as defining what is natural and thus as defying the notion of natural law.” Neal’s “monstrous” nature defies a “romantic organicism” which would treat the “universe and consciousness” as two halves of a single whole, “unfolding together through a process of indeterminate but finally harmonious internal laws.”70 On this reading, natural entities, unpredictable and monstrous, cannot be said to unfold according to internal teleological laws, nor is nature commensurate or symmetrical with the human mind.

Neal’s poetics of nature, in Gilmore’s reading, refutes that Romantic organicist orthodoxy derived, as I discuss in the Introduction, from Coleridge, for whom organic form is

67. Benjamin Lease, That Wild Fellow John Neal and the American Literary Revolution (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 73. 68. Paul Gilmore, “John Neal, American Romance and International Romanticism,” American Literature 84, no. 3 (September 2012): 477-504; 485. 10.1215/00029831-1664692. One of the passages Gilmore cites from Randolph significantly resembles the section from Rachel Dyer with which I began the chapter: Neal’s narrator remarks that the “incidents and characters” of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels” affect their readers “because they are unnatural. . . because they are not like anything in the nature of our experience,” and yet at the same time, “in one sense they are natural because we do not see, at once, that they are impossible.” John Neal, Randolph, A Novel in Two Volumes (Philadelphia: For Whom It May Concern, 1823), 2:184. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89042936229, quoted in Gilmore, “John Neal, American Romance and International Romanticism,” 492. 69. Sears, John Neal, 29. 70. Paul Gilmore, “John Neal’s Lightning Imagination: Electricity against Romantic Organicism,” Centaurus 57 (01 December 2015): 156-172; 165, 170. 10.1111/1600-0498.12092 34

“innate,” 71 and teleological. Gilmore frames this anti-organicism in explicitly anti-nationalist terms. Neal’s “poetics,” he claims, “deemphasizes representing national character, in favor the innovative, the exaggerated, the unnatural (or, at least, the unusual). . . it is the unnatural transnational (as in the transcending nation altogether) that defines romance.”72 Furthermore, the poetics of the blood, rather than contributing to an American literary nationalism (as it does for

Lease and Sears) is indicative of a kind of physiologically materialist internationalism: “[Neal’s] notion of a world of literature in which American literature should take its rightful and distinctly different place is based on a deep physiological connection shared by all humanity.”73

I agree with Gilmore that Neal’s conceptions of poetry and nature are not organicist –

Neal, for example, is not confident that nature unfolds according to predictable, teleological laws. However, I don’t think his alternative to organicism is a “physiological” poetics “ground in natural processes” (whether monstrous and lawless or otherwise). Neal as I read him does not in fact take a materialist view of poetry or a physiological internationalist view of politics. This is particularly important because Gilmore’s anti-organicist reading of Neal, with its celebration of

“radical indeterminacy,” is consonant with a recent strain of eco-materialist scholarship on

Romanticism that has sought to recover and celebrate alternatives to organicism’s teleological model of form and nature.74 At stake in the eco-materialist rejection of organicist form is a critique of anthropocentrism and the recovery of material nature in its physical diversity and idiosyncrasy. Amanda Jo Goldstein, for example, describes a Romantic-era relational

71. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare, 46. 72. Gilmore, “Neal, American Romance and International Romanticism,” 492. 73. Gilmore, “Neal, American Romance and International Romanticism,” 493. 74. An important example here is Denise Gigante’s revisionary reading of the organic from which Gilmore borrows the concept of the “monstrous.” Gigante argues that Romantic vitalism is characterized less by innate teleological law, than “the unpredictable vitality of living form, its very liveliness— protean, procreative.” (Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], 4. http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctt1npp92.5) Though she maintains the category of “organic form,” Gigante’s argument reimagines the principle innate to organisms as a vital creative power unfolding without teleology. 35 materialism in which human and nonhuman bodies are “fundamentally tropic, physically enmeshed in multilateral physical transactions of which human poetry of words is but one index and instance.”75 Gilmore’s reading of Neal finds nature unmoored from a unifying teleological law and, like Goldstein, he understands Neal’s non-organic poetics to be in some sense enmeshed in the materiality of nature. A key feature of these anti-organicist materialisms is the description of a “nondualist”76 ontology which would, according to Goldstein, overcome the

“seemingly axiomatic resistance of matter to mind.”77 The mind is neither set apart from the world, nor locked in correspondence with it, but rather is found to follow the same “figural”78 path as the world it seeks to apprehend. In his claim that Neal’s poetry is a physiological and natural expression, Gilmore identifies in Neal an example of this kind of “nondualist” ontology – the claim is that language and nature are inseparable.

Although Goldstein and Gilmore, like many other eco-materialist readers of the

Romantics, position their readings in contrast to Coleridge’s Romantic organicism, their arguments share a key characteristic with his theory of organic form – namely a turn to ontology.

As discussed in the Introduction, Coleridge’s organicism inaugurates a shift within Romantic aesthetics from Immanuel Kant’s focus on the constituent mental elements of aesthetic experience to a description of those features supposedly shared by aesthetic objects and living beings. As Murray Krieger puts it, in the thought of Romantic organicists like Coleridge, the

“metaphor of organicism” pushes “the biological fact of the organic outward into a universal

75. Goldstein, Sweet Science, 8, 9. 76. Goldstein, Sweet Science, 25. 77. Marjorie Levinson, “Pre- and Post-Dialectical Materialism: Modelling Praxis Without Subjects and Objects,” Thinking Through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 95, quoted in Goldstein, Sweet Science, 25. 78. Goldstein, Sweet Science, 26. Materiality in Goldstein’s view is “figural,” that is, prone to protean change, “not because representation fails to capture things-in-themselves, but because things inadvertently collaborate in their perception and representation.” (Goldstein, Sweet Science, 26.) 36 existential projection which also serves as a single ontological ground.” The “organic metaphor,” he observes, “is converted into a universal figure.” For Coleridge as well as his German predecessors, it becomes a model for understanding how change takes place in all kinds of entities – not only in poems and living beings but also in “the character of peoples, powers, and nations.”79 Though critics like Gilmore and Goldstein are able to do away with the teleology of

Romantic organicism, they maintain organicism’s investment in discovering a “single ontological ground,” a “material commonality” shared by words and things. Organicist and anti- organicist theories alike are ontologies – theories of being.80

I follow Gilmore in tracing through Neal’s nature-poetics an alternative to Romantic organicism. However, I read Neal’s paradoxical representation of nature not as a vitalist or materialist ontology, but as a pre-organicist reception of Kant’s account of teleology and aesthetics in the third Critique. What Neal’s poetics offers us is not another example of a

“nondualist” materialism cutting against the grain of nineteenth-century idealism, but rather a reassessment of post-Kantian aesthetics during the early phases of American Romanticism.

Though Neal’s poetry, I argue, does mount a critique of the Romantic concept of nature, it is not an attempt to return us from representation to material reality. His poetry involves not a

79. Murray Krieger, A Reopening of Closure: Organicism Against Itself (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 34. Krieger’s point that the organic is able to serve as the “ontological ground” not just for poetic and biological thought, but for political thought too is relevant here. Gilmore’s claim is that Neal’s turn to a physiological view of poetry allows him to posit an “unnatural transnational” poetics, “based on a deep physiological connection shared by all humanity.” (It is “unnatural” because it is lawless or monstrous, not because it is artificial.) In this reading, then, the same physiological ontology undergirds both Neal’s internationalist politics and his view of poetry as the embodiment of nature. 80. Part of my contention here is much of the materialist poetics scholarship of the last twenty years is operating within the same intellectual framework that Coleridge’s Romantic organicism had inaugurated through its shift from aesthetics to ontology. The continuity between organicist formalism and anti-organicist materialism can be seen in that strain of the new materialism which advocates a vitalist conception of matter. Jane Bennett, for example, though opposed – like Gilmore – to the kind Romantic organicism which would make mind and nature symmetrical and commensurate with one another, draws upon early twentieth-century vitalists (including Hans Driesch and Henri Bergson) whose anti-mechanistic theories of life derive in part from Romantic-era organicism. See, for example: Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 62-93. 37 disavowal of representation and appearance, but a revision of how we understand and orient ourselves towards poetic representation. In contrast to Coleridge’s organicist poetics, I argue,

Neal’s model of nature-representation foregrounds its artifice, so that readers are made aware of a gap between representation and being. Rather than rejecting organic nationalism for a physiological internationalism, he uses his poetry to reveal the unnaturalness of the nation and to trace the process by which the natural landscape is symbolically appropriated for nationalist myth-making.

In contrast to Gilmore, the majority of Neal’s later critical readers have tended to focus on his contributions to literary nationalism after the War of 1812,81 expressed primarily in his novels and criticism from the 1820s. In this critical context, Neal’s representation of nature has generally been treated as part of his attempt to identify the resources with which to construct a distinctively American poetics and American culture. His focus on the natural landscape of the

Americas in the Battle, for instance, is cast by John J. Seydow as an attempt “to set an American scene in American scenery.”82 Seydow cites the following passage which would appear to confirm his view that for Neal, the American landscape is important insofar as it provides an object of national pride, and a symbol of American liberty: “My country! my home! sunny land of my fathers! / Where empires unknown in bright solitudes lie; / Where Nature, august in serenity, gathers / The wonders of mountain, and ocean, and sky: /. . . / Where man is as free as

81. Donald A. Ringe, “The American Revolution in American Romance,” American Literature 49, no. 3 (November 1977): 352-365; Matthew Pethers, “‘I Must Resemble Nobody’: John Neal, Genre and the Making of American Literary Nationalism,” in John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture ed. Watts, Edward and David Carlson (Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2011), 153-182; David J. Carlson “‘Another Declaration of Independence’: John Neal’s Rachel Dyer and the Assault of Precedent” in Watts and Carlson, John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 145-163. 82. John J. Seydow, “The Sound of Passing Music: John Neal’s Battle for Literary Independence” Costerus 7 (1973): 153-182,158. 38 the creatures of air.”83 The nationalist speaker’s pride is made possible by nature gathering together the “wonders” of the landscape and liberty is embodied by the natural (the free

“creatures of air”). On the face of it, Neal seems to be appealing to that early nationalist view of the U.S. as “Nature’s Nation.”

The literary conceptualization of nature during the early national period has long been a major subject of contention for Americanist critics.84 As Howard Horwitz has argued, one key question for this scholarship has to do with whether nature was understood as embodying an accessible “model of virtue” to which nascent American culture could or should aspire, or whether nature was primarily conceived as “remote” from culture, perhaps desirable in its embodiment of liberty, but fundamentally unavailable as a model for the nation in a postlapsarian world. In the latter view, Edenic nature rebukes “culture as disaffected and alienated from virtue.” 85 Francesca Orestano in 1989 reads Neal’s representation of nature in the Battle in the manner of the first trend as a resource for cultural values. She notes the poem’s invocation of Apollo, 86 arguing that while the physical landscape in the Battle appears at first to be “a wild version of the myth of the Garden,” the appearance of the classical god of the arts is

83. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., 74, quoted in Seydow, “The Sound of Passing Music,” 158-159. 84. See for example Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Myth and Symbol (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), Perry Miller, “The Romantic Dilemma in American nationalism and the Concept of Nature,” Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 197-207; and Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). 85. Howard Horwitz, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 9, 11, 10. Both of these positions are versions of what Lawrence Buell calls “the America-as-Nature reduction” (Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 15), the position which treats the American nation as in some sense identical with the physical continent. Even the second thesis, which might seem to refute this “reduction” by opposing authentic, free nature against an artificial self-limiting culture, still ultimately valorizes the physical landscape as the true embodiment of American “virtues” (including liberty and purity). American culture, in this view, turns out to be fallen, flawed, and broken only in relation to the ‘natural’ model. By contrast, the third thesis in Horwitz’s account, “holds that Americans understood the status of nature, and consequently national and individual identity, as an achievement constantly being forged and revised” (Horwitz, By the Law of Nature, 11). This third thesis, which Horwitz finds in antebellum texts as well as in twentieth-century scholarship, is effectively a form of that cultural constructivism which Buell endorses as a means of dismantling and critiquing the reductionist position. 86. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., 102. 39 evidence that “Art has migrated into the New World, choosing the wilderness as its own domain.” Furthermore, the “primitivistic quality of this American pastoral. . . confers genuine native strength upon the ancient, decadent god, who is soon transformed and revitalized, in and by the new landscape, into the American Apollo.”87 America’s “new landscape,” in Orestano’s reading of Neal, redeems classical culture from “decadence,” revitalizing it and offering, in the

“new” continent, an alternative “pastoral” home for the arts.

Writing in 1991, John Seelye, like Orestano, reads the natural landscapes of the Battle in nationalist terms: Niagara Falls and the American eagle, as Neal depicts them, are symbols of national “liberty.”88 But, in contrast to Orestano, Seelye sees Neal pitting the industrial

“improvements” of the early republic (in particular, the construction of the Erie Canal) against the liberty of the American wilderness and especially of Lake Ontario. Citing Neal’s extended apostrophe to the lake – in which he contrasts the “wild luxuriance” of Ontario’s shores against a future in which “commerce will rear her arks,” and the wilderness will be replaced by the “tame honeysuckle” and “gaudy hot-house plant”89 – Seelye reads Neal as a “champion of the natural, the wild, the free. . . at the cost of civilized advance.”90 For Seelye, the poem celebrates the wild in opposition to the “advance” of civilization: American national culture during the early years of industrialization is found wanting in comparison to a natural freedom, embodied – in Horwitz’ terms – only in a “remote” wilderness.

87. Francesca Orestano, “The National Landscapes of John Neal,” in Views of American Landscapes, ed. Mick Gidley and Robert Lawson-Peebles (Cambridge and New York: 1989), 132, 134. 88. John Seelye, Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan 1755-1825 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 354. 89. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., 105. 90. Seelye, Beautiful Machine, 356. 40

Whether the liberty of nature is a model for American culture or a rebuke to it, Orestano and Seelye agree that Neal finds American liberty growing wild in the American landscape.91 In practice they each identify in Neal versions of what Myra Jehlen has famously called “American

Incarnation.” This is the thesis that American cultural values and social structures are to be found not in historical processes but, as it were, already embodied in the physical landscape. America as a nation, in the texts Jehlen analyses, is the product not of history but of nature itself. Political liberty can be found in the US, if at all, not because it has been secured by contingent historical processes (such as the Revolutionary War) but because it is embodied in the wilderness and its natural denizens like the eagle. Historical events (like the revolution) are merely the means by which these embodied values are revealed: “it is [a] truism, therefore, that Americans lack a sense of community. But again. . . the physical place as such, embodies an ideological corrective.”92 In Seelye and Orestano, Neal’s poetry effectively becomes an exemplar of the kind of incarnational imagination that Jehlen critiques.

The aim of New Americanist readings like those of Jehlen and Horwitz is to recover the historicity of US culture – to de-naturalize the nation. Their aim is to expose and dismantle the persistent belief in what Jehlen calls the “entelechy” of American national history: an entelechy, she explains is “a perfect and complete potentiality moving of itself to its realization.”93 This

91. Orestano and Seelye both view nature in Neal as the vessel of American values. In practice, they both read Neal’s natural world as a pristine wilderness (contrasted against the European landscape and against industrialization respectively). They place his interest in nature within a tradition of American wilderness writing that would continue, throughout the antebellum period, to draw an analogy between wildness and the republican liberty. Thomas Cole, for example, claims in his “Essay on American Scenery,” that “the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness” (Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery” American Monthly Magazine 1 [January 1836], 5. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101015921271?urlappend=%3Bseq=15). 92. Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University press, 1986), 14. 93. Jehlen, American Incarnation, 25. Jehlen uses the term entelechy rather than teleology to name that presumption of America’s historical inevitability which persists even in Americanist criticism which explicitly sets out to deconstruct teleological doctrines like that of manifest destiny: 41 mode of ideology critique reveals how the image of American landscape has functioned (not only in early US literature but also in twentieth-century criticism) to place “emerging social structure[s] beyond debate in the realm of nature.”94 Jehlen’s formulation of this reading is particularly useful here since she argues that the idea of American incarnation presupposes “an

America that is already art – the art of nature and nature’s God, but only the more art-like for its all-creative authors.”95 To think of the nation as somehow already in existence in nature is to treat it as a work of art, insofar as any national historical event will then appear intentional rather than accidental, the product of design (for which nature and nature’s God are the designers), rather than chance.

Jehlen’s argument that the belief in American incarnation (a belief that Orestano and

Seelye claim to find in Neal) simultaneously naturalizes the nation and treats it as a work of art is especially important here. To treat something as art-like and natural and to trace within it the unfolding of a pre-determined idea (that which Jehlen calls “entelechy”) is also precisely what organic formalism demands. The nationalist-incarnational readings of Neal which find in his poetic depictions of nature the naturalization of American liberty identify in Neal’s poetics a kind of nationalist organicism. I make this point because as, we saw earlier, Gilmore’s anti- organicist reading of Neal was framed as explicitly transnationalist (it “[transcends] nation

A telos is a once and future thing. But as the course of history inevitably diverges from the founding vision, a potential not for this or that achievement but for achievement as such – for potential as such – has maintained “America” invulnerably present-tense. . . even for critics who decry the American telos. (Jehlen, American Incarnation, 25) 94. Jehlen, American Incarnation, 57. 95. Jehlen, American Incarnation, 41. For sake of clarity and brevity, I have omitted one of Jehlen’s key terms here – discovery: the “concept of discovery posits the inherence of ‘America’ in the new continent” (Jehlen, American Incarnation, 123), and it is specifically this concept of discovery which “projects an America that is already art.” (Jehlen, American Incarnation, 41) The discovery myth presupposes the nation is a work of art because the myth is founded on a version of the American incarnation. 42 altogether” 96). In this way, Gilmore’s anti-organicist, anti-nationalist reading appears the perfect, symmetrical antithesis of those earlier incarnational readings of Neal.

What Gilmore’s anti-organicism shares with Seelye and Orestano is the position that a literary nationalism must involve an incarnational naturalization of the nation (an image of

America-as-organism). If this the case, to discover an anti-organicist poetics in Neal is, by necessity, to uncover at the same time his latent internationalism (as Gilmore claims to do). In contrast both to Gilmore and to Orestano and Seelye, Theo Davis pursues a non-incarnational reading of Neal’s work which continues to position him as a literary nationalist: Davis reads

Neal as part of the associationist tradition of aesthetics, interested primarily depicting “American types,” forms of experience which are broadly available to American subjects in the early

Republic yet which are disconnected from the physical reality of the American landscape: “what

Neal imagines is a literature in which pure fancies are understood as being true even without any specific connection to visible objects.”97 For Davis, “Neal is willing to leave bare (or, unable to conceal) the fundamental break between the reality of American scenes and the network of associations connected to them.” He is a literary nationalist in Davis’ reading but, in contrast to

Orestano and Seelye, Davis finds in Neal an “American literary nationalism” that “does not graft the associations, the constructed interest in the nation, back onto the objective reality of the place itself.” In fact, according to Davis, “literal reality – the material object-world – isn’t what counts as the relevant reality for Neal.” For Neal, the “experience of American objects is quite distinct from the literal observation of them” and the representation of such experience involves

96. Gilmore, “Neal, American Romance and International Romanticism,” 492. 97. Theo Davis, Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 56. For an earlier discussion of the relationship between Associationism and Neal more closely aligned to the traditional literary nationalist interpretation of Neal, see: Lease, That Wild Fellow John Neal, 69-70. 43

“elaborat[ing] associations upon an image which indirectly refers to [the] world” rather than

“present[ing] an actual description of it.”98 Davis focuses for the most part on Rachel Dyer, but her account of the way that Neal attends to “American objects” without either “literal observation” or “actual description” provides a useful framework for approaching Neal’s poetic realism without either reducing it to an incarnational-nationalist poetics or attempting to find within Neal’s literary nationalism an internationalist materialism.

Like Davis, I read Neal as attempting to create a form of literary nationalism capable of facilitating modes of American “experience.” But Neal’s representation of nature as ambiguously inclusive of the unnatural is symptomatic, as I see it, of Neal’s interest in “literal reality – the material object-world.” Additionally, while I join Gilmore in treating Neal’s anti-holistic depiction of nature as central to his project, I do not see in his literary style an attempt to embody physiological “processes” or “natural expression,” and I treat his depiction of a lawless nature as fundamentally tied to his interest in a national literature (rather than a Romantic internationalism).

As I argue in the following sections, Neal’s anti-holistic depiction of nature might – as

Gilmore claims – work to trouble the “status” of the “self and the nation” as “guarantors of meaning and value,”99 but this is not because Neal expresses an internationalist politics. Rather what we see in the Battle of Niagara and his other early poems is a view of American experience as the experience of physical nature, autonomous of symbolic (national) interpretations, but also open and, as it were, available to these interpretations. It is a view which acknowledges, in

Davis’s words, the “fundamental break” between the American landscape and the cultural

98. Davis, Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature, 59. 99. Gilmore, “Neal, American Romance and International Romanticism,” 498. 44 associations applied to it. In Neal’s poetry, however (as opposed to his fiction) the point of acknowledging this break is not to move away from an attention to physical reality, but to explore how nature appears when the relationship between the American republic and the

American continent – between nation and nature – is revealed to be contingent, not necessary.

Through his poetry, nature is revealed in the moment prior to the establishment of national narrative (and it is for this reason that Neal explicitly eschews narrative and plot in his poetry, claiming “to such things I have a mortal aversion”).100 To perceive nature in the moment prior to its assimilation by a nationalist narrative (to perceive, say, the “wild luxuriance” of Lake Ontario prior to its appropriation as a symbol of political freedom), to recognize that any discovery of national culture in nature is the result of interpretation (not incarnation) and to recognize therefore that such a discovery is contingent and mutable is, for Neal, the archetypal American experience.

As I read it, Neal’s poetry does offer an alternative to organicism and organic form’s internalization of teleological law. But this is not because Neal foregrounds nature’s monstrous and material particularities; rather his poetry insists that our aesthetic experience of nature is always attended by an experience as of teleology; that is, nature appears as though developing in accordance with a preordained law. It is as though nature has been designed. To be clear, Neal’s poetry does not present this as a given, but as an element in our experience of natural beauty. The strong implication is generally that we cannot know whether the natural objects of the American landscape are intended or designed (whether by God or some other creative force), but that a key

100 . Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., xxvi. 45 element in aesthetic experience is the presupposition of design. It is in this way that Neal’s poetics deploys a version of Kant’s “purposiveness without an end.” 101

Kant argues that aesthetic judgment finds intention and design in “an object or a state of mind or even an action” not because such an intention actually exists but because the

“possibility” of the object (or mental state or action) “can only be explained and conceived by us insofar as we assume as its grounds a causality in accordance with ends.”102 I argue that Neal applies Kant’s lightly skeptical view of purposiveness to the contemplation of American national history – the nation is not driven by divine will nor is it incarnated in the natural landscape

(though, he insists, this will be appear to be the case). In the first place, we can read this as a rebuttal to those revolution-era poets like Philip Freneau, Timothy Dwight, and Joel Barlow whose epic poetry from the 1790s and 1810s celebrates the founding and expansion of the

United States as the work of divine providence.103

However, I also read in Neal’s poetry a serious divergence from Kant’s aesthetics.

Whereas Kant famously understands aesthetic judgement to be shareable and communicable – the foundation, in fact, of what he calls “sensus communis” – Neal’s representations of nature in

101. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 111. It is not clear that Neal ever read Kant directly. He likely encountered Kantian aesthetics secondhand in August von Schlegel’s Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, which had been translated into English by John Black in 1815. (On Neal’s reading of Schlegel, see: Sears, John Neal, 31, and Pethers, “I must resemble nobody,” 4). Coleridge’s interpretation of Kant has been attributed, as Loesberg notes, to his reading of Schlegel’s Lectures (Loesberg, Return to Aesthetics, 23). Unlike Coleridge, Schlegel sees the apparent purposiveness of the natural object as something imposed by the observer: “the organical unity of a plant or animal consists in the idea of life; and the inward contemplation of life, which is itself uncorporeal, although it appears through the medium of the corporeal world, is brought by us to the individual living object, otherwise we could not obtain it through that object” (August von Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, 2 vols., [London: J. Templeman and J. R. Smith, 1840], 1:344). Organic unity, according to Schlegel, is something brought by us to the natural object. 102. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, §10, 105. 103. Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, A Poem, on the Rising Glory of America (Philadelphia, PA: Joseph Crukshank, 1772; Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership), 26-27, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/N09743.0001.001; Timothy Dwight, Conquest of Canaan: a Poem in Eleven Books (Hartford, CT: Elisha Babcock, 1785; New York: AMS Press, 1971), 253-255, bk. 10, lines 475-564; Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus; a Poem in Nine Books (Hartford, CT: Hudson and Goodwin, 1787; Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership), http://name.umdl.umich.edu/N15823.0001.001. 46 his poetry remain invested in experiences of dissent, disagreement, and confusion. For Kant, aesthetic taste is “a faculty for judging that. . . takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought, in order as it were to hold its judgement up to human reason as a whole.”104 Beauty for Kant is always held in common: my aesthetic judgement of an object necessarily entails the expectation that your judgement of the same object will be identical. As I discuss at the end of the chapter, Neal explicitly celebrates disagreement and dissent among his readers’ aesthetic judgements. This has to do, in part, with the way in which his poetry fixates upon the unreliability of experiences of purposiveness.

Neal’s poems highlight the contingency of nationalist narrative, returning repeatedly to an image of nature just prior to appropriation for teleological purposes. As a result, his poetry gives us nature, as it were, on the cusp of assimilation by aesthetic perception. This means, as I have already suggested, that nature in his poetry is represented as autonomous of a nationalist imagination. It also means that, in Kantian terms, his poetry frames experiences of nature which do not contribute to a common aesthetic sense. These are experiences which are characterized not by a demand for “universal assent,” but by the opposite – an awareness of their own idiosyncrasy and ephemerality. Addressing the readers of the Battle, he writes “don’t trouble your head about what your neighbours think of this poem – if you like it – if you feel any dizziness, any lifting of the heart… give a loose [sic] to your feeling, indulge it, it is innocent, and, like the first kiss of love, never to be experienced but once.”105 In this way, his poetry aims to offer a form of Terada’s “protoaesthetic” or “subaesthetic”106 experience. Terada uses these terms to describe an appreciation of fleeting appearances that “offer a glimpse not of

104. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, §40, 173. 105. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., lxiv 106. Terada, Looking Away, 98, 104. 47 spontaneous accord but of freedom from the demand for agreement.”107 As I argue in the final section of the chapter, Neal’s representation of an equivocal, uncertain purposiveness in nature is calculated to simulate – and even produce – for his readers a comparable freedom from perceptual agreement. This is not an escape from the perception of reality into imagination, however, but rather an experience of nature (and purposiveness in nature) which stops short of what Terada calls the “coercion of fact perception.”108 In Neal’s own terms, these are experiences of beauty in the American landscape which are yet to be subjected or assimilated to either shared or preconceived notions of the “course of nature.”

As I read Neal’s poetry, his representation of nature is not to be lauded as materialist (on the grounds that it refutes a holistic organicism that would subordinate nature to teleology).

Rather, the poetry attends to nature by offering a mode of proto-aesthetic experience. It is not despite, but because of, this qualified aesthetics that Neal is able to propose a poetic realism. For

Neal, the characteristically American experience of nature is one which attempts to discover an intentional national destiny in natural forms, yet which perpetually founders on the recognition of the contingency and artifice of such a discovery.

In the next section I read Neal’s early poem “The Lyre of the Winds” as a reaction against the Aeolian harp tradition of Romantic nature poetry. I distinguish Neal’s use of the figure and my reading of his poetics from both Romantic humanist and anti-Romantic post- humanist readings of the aeolian harp figure (both of which, I argue, remain committed to variants of the naturalistic ontological poetics inaugurated by Coleridge’s organicist formalism).

The aeolian harp, for Neal, is a metaphor not for the human mind (as it is for the Romantics) or nonhuman agency (as it is for post-humanists), but for the aesthetic apprehension of

107. Terada, Looking Away, 6. 108. Terada, Looking Away, 74 48 purposiveness without end in nature. In the final section, I turn to Neal’s quasi-epic poem The

Battle of Niagara, his most fully developed experiment in the poetic representation of the appearance of purposiveness. In the Battle, the image of the aeolian harp is at the center of

Neal’s denaturalization of both the American nation and Romantic concepts of wild nature.

II. Aeolian Lyres and Bardic Harps

Neal’s attempt to depict nature prior to interpretation and aesthetic perception begins with one of his first poems. Published anonymously in 1816 in The Portico, “The Lyre of the Winds” is a brief lyric meditation on the aeolian harp and the aesthetic experience of nature. In short, the

“The Lyre” is directly concerned with an experience of nature on its own terms, and with the relationship between the experience of autonomous nature and the possibility of cultural or literary nationalism. Neal revised the poem for republication in 1819, cutting the second half of the original altogether. Several of the key images and tropes which Neal would later develop in his longer poems are first used in “The Lyre.” Since the poem is not well-known, I am going to briefly survey its formal structure and particularly the differences between its two halves, before analyzing its place within the broader Romantic tradition of aeolian harp poetry.

The poem opens by directing our attention to a sound – “Hark! ‘tis the harp’s wild minstrel tone”109 – produced by an aeolian harp (or wind harp), the “lyre” of the title. The following lines are typical of the first section which is devoted entirely to description of the tone:

“So indistinct these murmurs were,/ They seem’d sometimes still less than air; / Sometimes as if the shrinking strings / Were swept by Frenzy’s burning wings.” The imagery registers the

109. John Neal, “The Lyre of the Winds,” The Portico 2, no. 4 (October 1816): 343-346; 343. Hathitrust. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044089242598?urlappend=%3Bseq=361. 49 sound’s changing intensity, oscillating between literal description and extended simile. Though it is “wild,” the sound also resembles at times a musical strain – “like the flute”110 – and at other times appears supernatural, “as tho’ it told / That some bright spirit had to heaven flown.”111

These extended similes present the sound as, in appearance, meaningful and at one point even prophetic: “And now so full of pomp – so deep – so bold, / so strong, so steady were its numbers roll’d. / As if prediction smote its trembling chords, / And with the weight of prophecy oppress’d them.”112 The simile signals that the harp’s sound only seems to prophesy; but the simile-form doesn’t fully debunk this appearance either (and the poem never confirms outright that the sound is not prophetic). The “weight” of the prophecy is not its meaning – it does not signify any specific content; it is rather, I would suggest, the appearance of “purposiveness,” that “look an object has that makes it appear identical to objects designed according to a purpose.”113 The sound’s weight, depth, and boldness are qualities which make it appear designed to communicate prophetically. The sound appears prophetic not because it seems to communicate a specific prediction about the future but because it is “strong” and “steady”: the aesthetic qualities of strength and “weight” give the impression of prophecy. They constitute, together, the form of prophecy – the features by which we recognize prophecy as such.

The first half of the poem also fluctuates between recounting a recent past (“so steady were its numbers roll’d”; “so indistinct these murmurs were”114) and a dominant repeated insistence that the wild music is heard, in all its variations, in the present moment: “Now bursting on the ear – now gone!”; “And now so full of pomp”; “Now with an unknown spirit speaking, / now ringing fierce and sharp! – now low, / With startling nearness, pealing, now – / Now –

110. Neal, “The Lyre of the Winds,” 344. 111. Neal, “The Lyre of the Winds,” 343. 112. Neal, “The Lyre of the Winds,” 344. 113. Loesberg, Return to Aesthetics, 65. 114. Neal, “The Lyre of the Winds,” 343. 50 distant.”115 It is as though the sound is not modulating over time but occupies instead a single expanded moment, or what Jonathan Culler has called the lyric present, “that iterable time when language can say ‘now.’”116 The different variations of the sound – bursting, ringing, pealing, full of pomp – are heard, as it were, all at once. Who actually hears it, however, is not clarified.

The second part of the poem, which Neal omitted when he republished it in 1819,117 is an extended second person address, beginning “You’ve noted oft a winding stream.” It departs from the poem’s initial focus on a single sound to compare the beauty of music and the beauty of nature in more general terms. The poem ends with an apostrophe to “ye who love th’ Eolian lyre

/. . ./ Come ye and feel its thrill.”118 This final image seems intended to synthesize the address of the second part with the descriptive imagery of the first. Specifically, the goal is to find a desiring second-person subject (“ye who love th’ Eolian lyre”) for the “wild minstrel tone” which, though it had been described in detail in the poem’s first section, had there lacked a listener.

The aeolian harp for Neal is a key metaphor he will rely on throughout his poetry to frame nature and its aesthetic qualities as autonomous. As an instrument that does not require a player, it became in the Romantic era, a popular figure for spontaneous, and even automatic art.119 The music of the lyre is the unintended music of nature, arriving, as Timothy Morton

115. Neal, “The Lyre of the Winds,” 343, 344. 116. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2017), 229. 117. Neal published the shorter version of “The Lyre” in The Battle of Niagara with Other Poems Second Edition, Enlarged with Other Poems, 269-270. 118. Neal, “Lyre of the Winds,” 345, 346. I identify this final address as an apostrophe because, while it is plausible that the reader (or implied reader addressed by the initial second person – “you noted oft a winding stream”) might love the music of an aeolian lyre, the poetic speaker seems to be calling to a new (and possibly collective) audience to attend to the lyre’s music: – Put simply, the phrase “come ye” suggests that the imagined music lover is not present yet. 119. On the aeolian harp as a figure for automation see Timothy Morton, “Of Matter and Meter: Environmental Form in Coleridge’s ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp,’” Literature Compass 5 no. 2 (31 January 2008): 310-335; 321-327. 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00520.x 51 notes, “from nowhere.”120 (The grammar of Neal’s first line – “Hark! ‘tis the wild minstrel tone”

– asserts merely the sound’s presence, ignoring the question of origin.) I read Neal’s “Lyre” as an example of this interest in spontaneous, authorless art. His aim, though, is not to present his own poem as in some sense actually authorless, but to focus on what it means to experience nature as authorless art.

Before I discuss the poetics of Neal’s “Lyre” further, I am going to outline how the aeolian harp was used in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Romantic poets writing about nature. I am then going to briefly trace the treatment of the trope in Romanticist scholarship, humanist and post-humanist. I will finally return to Neal’s “Lyre” to argue that his use of the trope anticipates certain elements of the post-humanist reading; Neal is ultimately concerned not with the decentering of the human subject, however, but with the possibility of an experience of natural beauty in which the presupposition of intention and design is suspended or bracketed.

The aeolian harp, already a stock poetic trope by the late eighteenth-century, would go on to feature centrally in several canonical works of British and American Romanticism.121 What distinguishes Romantic from earlier uses of the trope is the idea that the harp’s transformation of the wind into music resembles the mind’s reception of external stimuli. Coleridge in his 1796

“Effusion XXXV,” famously describes the thoughts which “traverse my indolent and passive brain, / As wild and various as the random gales / That swell and flutter on this subject lute!” before wondering whether the whole of nature might not actually be “organic Harps diversely

120. Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2009), 41. 121. As Timothy Morton puts it, by the end of the eighteenth century, “there was already a mass-produced poetics of the Aeolian. It was quite common to describe Aeolian harps as bewitching and enchanting, as evoking other worlds while at the same suggesting an absolute lack of artifice.” “Of Matter and Meter,” 323. On the popularity of instrument itself in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, see Stephen Bonner, Aeolian Harp, vol. 2, part 1, The History and Organology of the Aeolian Harp (Cambridge: Bois de Boulogne, 1970), 18-20. 52 framed, / That tremble into thought” as they are touched by God’s “intellectual breeze.”122 In similar fashion, Percy Shelley, in his 1820 Ode to the West Wind, demands of the wind, “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.”123 Then in 1840, in the “Defense of Poetry,” Shelley expands the image, claiming that “man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre,” before explaining that “there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings” which creates not just “melody” (like a wind harp), but also “harmony.”124

Romantic humanist scholarship has tended to read the wind harp as a metaphor for the poet’s unalienated relation to nature, offering, in M. H. Abrams’ words, an “analogue of the poetic mind, the figurative mediator between outer motion and inner emotion.”125 According to this view, the aeolian harp models an ideal relationship between human subject and external nature in which, as Emerson, in one of his own contributions to the genre, puts it, “nature to the

122. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Effusion XXXV,” in Poems on Various Subjects (London: G. G. and J. Robinsons, and J. Cottle, 1796), 98-99. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/poemsonvarioussu01cole/page/n9/mode/2up. “Effusion XXXV” was republished in 1817 as “The Eolian Harp.” For a discussion of the composition and publication history of “The Eolian Harp,” see Henry J. W. Milley “Some Notes on Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp,’” Modern Philology 36, no. 4 (May 1839): 395-375. Neal was familiar with much of Coleridge’s poetry, referring to him in passing in several works (see, for example, John Neal, Wandering Recollections of a Somewhat Busy Life [Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869], 160, 188. Hathitrust. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.c055252249). It is possible that the “The Lyre of Winds” was composed in direct response to “Effusion XXXV”: Neal’s “Lyre” produces “witching strains” and the sound, he claims, resembles a “silvery sob, as of, Elf-babe straying” (“The Lyre,” 346, 344). The imagery recalls Coleridge’s description of the harp’s “the long sequacious notes” which “Over delicious surges sink and rise, / Such a soft floating witchery of sound / As twilight Elfins make” (Coleridge, “Effusion XXXV,” 97). My argument does not depend on this direct lineage, but on Neal’s broader familiarity with the way that the aeolian harp had been deployed to represent the possibility of authorless, even natural, art in the period. 123. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 859-861; 861. 124. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry (Boston: Ginn, 1890), 2. Hathitrust. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.49015000809880?urlappend=%3Bseq=34 125. M. H. Abrams, “The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor,” in The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York and London: Norton, 1984), 25-43; 26. Abrams concludes that “air-in-motion” is central to the High Romantic lyric because “the moving air lent itself to the aim of tying man back into the environment. . . [nature’s breezes] are themselves inhaled into the body and assimilated into its substance” (“Correspondent Breeze,” 25, 42). The wind harp (and the Romantic mind of which it is the analogue) organizes external nature, then, in order to assimilate it, alleviating the alienation of “man” from “environment.” 53 soul is moored.”126 The wind harp is a figure for a Romantic organicism that sees nature organized aesthetically and teleologically by the same principles or laws that govern the human mind. It serves, as such, as a figure for the organic correspondence between nature and the subject. By contrast, recent posthumanist scholarship has, in several striking instances, taken the aeolian harp as a figure for all objects in nature (not just the human mind). Timothy Morton, in a defense of object-oriented ontology (OOO), argues that Shelley’s use of the image “transcends anthropocentrism,” and he suggests that “we can go even further than Shelley. If a sentient being is like a wind harp, and if, moreover, sensation and thinking are ontologically similar to one another, then we can invert the image. Wind harps are like sentient beings.”127 Evan Gottlieb, in his application of speculative realism to the interpretation of Romanticism, similarly finds in

Coleridge’s use of the trope a realization that “there is no meaningful distinction between nature and humanity, subject and object.”128

The key idea for the post-humanist reading is that the aeolian harp serves the Romantics not only as a figure for the subject responding to external stimuli but also as a figure (and a literal example) of how all material objects – sentient and not – relate to each other: “when one object influences another one, it does so by translating that object” and when we listen to the aeolian harp, “we hear the wind’s translation of the strings.”129 The harp’s reception of the wind is as, Abrams’ humanist reading suggests, comparable to the Romantic poet’s contemplation of nature; but according to the post-humanist reading, this is actually because thinking is

126. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Harp,” Poems: Household Edition (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1895), 206. 127. Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 205- 224; 205. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0018 128. Evan Gottlieb, Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 72. 129. Morton, “Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” 206. 54

“derivative of a physical process,”130 and as such is no different from any other physical process.

My thinking (or writing) about an object, according to this view, is no different from other kinds of relationships between inanimate objects. Shelley’s speaker in the “Ode” hopes to mediate the wind in the same manner as the forest. From the post-humanist view, this is possible because harp-wind relations, human-wind relations, and forest-wind relations are ontologically identical.

The aim of these post-humanist readings of the wind harp is to decenter the human subject and to find at the core of the Romantic canon a “nondualist” or “flat” ontology.131

Whereas the Romantic humanist finds in the aeolian harp an image of organic correspondence between the human mind and nature, the post-humanist finds there an image of the human mind as indiscernible from other objects in the material world. Neal’s interest in poetry as a “sense” capable of apprehending reality makes his “Lyre,” on the face of it, a good candidate for a post-humanist or even object-oriented interpretation. In fact, I would argue that its publication history facilitates this view up to a point. As I mentioned above, it was first published anonymously in 1816 and then republished in 1819 in the second edition of the Battle.

In the 1819 version the whole of the second half of the poem, with its address to the reader and its final apostrophic invitation (“ye, who love th’ Eolian lyre / Whose breath can fan or lull desire

/ Come ye! and feel its thrill”132) is omitted. The final version of the poem consists only of the initial layered and varied descriptions of the “wild minstrel tone.” Aside from the opening syllable (“Hark!”) which directs our attention to the harp’s music, there is in the final version, no trace of a second person address at all. One outcome of this is that the Aeolian music is described

130. Morton, “Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” 205. 131. The term “flat ontology” is widely used by scholars and theorists of the post-human turn, and especially by the proponents of speculative realism, including Manual Delanda, Graham Harman, and Levi Bryant: “flat ontology refuses to privilege the subject-object, human-world relation.” Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011), 246. 10.3998/ohp.9750134.0001.001. 132. Neal, “Lyre of the Winds,” 346. 55 without a listening subject. It is “strange and lone: / Now bursting on the ear – now gone – / Now piping ‘mid the breeze.”133 The sound bursts on “the ear” but, while we may think at first the ear represents a witness, it turns out to be displaced and disconnected from any listening subject. The parallel syntax in the following line – “piping mid the breeze” – prompts us to draw a comparison (and even an equivalence) between “ear” and “breeze,” “bursting” and “piping”: both the human ear and the wind mediate and “translate” the harp’s sound and neither is elevated above the other (as the subject or agent of the sound). Without the final hailing of a listener who explicitly loves the “Eolian lyre,” the shorter poem does not present us with an experiencing subject at all; without a subject, there is no confirmation that mind and nature, subject and object are in harmonious correspondence. Instead we are left with the various ways that the sound is

“translated” by the air, the unclaimed ear, the sky, and the sea.

In cutting the address to the reader as well as the final apostrophic address, Neal gives us a lyric present but not as the perception of a lyric subject. 134 We might then be tempted to react to this effacing of the lyric subject by placing the “Lyre” in a post-humanist tradition of aeolian

133. Neal, “Lyre of the Winds,” 343. 134. Neal’s revision of the poem gives us the momentary temporality typical of the lyric, but not the lyric subject whose perception is conventionally understood by lyric theorists to anchor and organize the varied features of the moment. In the poem’s insistence on its lyric present (“now bursting”; “now piping”; “now ringing”), we can see what Sharon Cameron calls the lyric’s “desire to frame the present in the stasis of perception” (Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and Limits of Genre [Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979], 207). But we are given this static present without a perceiving subject. That is, we have the stasis associated with the perceiving lyric subject but no actual perceiving subject. Jonathan Culler also links to the stasis lyric present to the unifying figure of the lyric subject, though rather than perception, he cites apostrophe as the formal structure which constitutes the lyric present in a poem: “the bold wager of poetic apostrophe is that the lyric can displace a time of narrative, of past events reported, and place us in the continuing present of apostrophic address, the ‘now’ in which, for readers, the poetic event can repeatedly occur.” (Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 226). The first effect of poetic apostrophe, as Culler notes elsewhere, is to posit the existence of an experiencing subject (the addressee). In practice, however he notes, this positing of subjectivity often involves an “internalization” which “works against narrative and its accompaniments: sequentiality, causality, linear time, teleological meaning.” (Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 225). Culler observes that in practice, the extension of subjectivity central to poetic apostrophe is accompanied by a disturbance in linear temporality. The kind of exploration of subjective depth (whether in the first or second person) that the lyric poem conventionally performs cannot be bound, then, by linear temporality. 56 harp poetics.135 But, as I suggested above, I don’t intend to do this, and I think it would be a misreading. In cutting the apostrophe and the address to the reader, Neal’s revision does aim, I argue, to separate the music of nature from the human subject, but this is not because he is primarily interested in decentering the subject or in developing a nondualist ontology. In fact, what stands out in Neal’s “Lyre” when it is read beside Coleridge and Shelley, is the absence of a comparison of any kind between mind and lyre, human and harp. Such a comparison is central to both humanist and post-humanist readings of the image. The post-humanist reading attempts to eject the mind from its position of privileged symmetry with nature; but, on closer inspection, the post-humanist mode of experience – what Morton calls “translation” – is not all that different from organicist correspondence. If what has changed is that organic unity has been replaced with a flat ontology, what has remained the same is a sense that the mind is embedded in immediate contact with the natural world. It’s just that for the post-humanist OOO, this is true of all nonhuman entities as well.

To use the aeolian lyre, a passive receptacle of natural forces, as a metaphor for the mind is to frame the mind as a passive receptacle in direct contact with nature. Whether we then configure such contact as symmetrical correspondence, or as a-symmetrical “translation” will not affect this initial presupposition of a kind of immediacy. The reason, I would suggest, that these humanist and post-humanist models’ uses of the figure look so similar is that both, at bottom, equate an immediate – even unalienated – experience of nature with the discovery of what

135. Gilmore reads Neal's passing use of the aeolian harp image in his 1822 novel Logan as image of the complexity and irreducible depth of the human subject: “Where the Aeolian harp in much British romanticism contrasts with machinery as a figure of the organic harmony of the poet's mind with Nature, Neal's allusions indicate the inadequacy of analogies to machines or a scientifically ordered nature to determine or predict the intricate workings of the mind.” (Gilmore, “Neal, American Romance and International Romanticism,” 497). The point of Logan’s anti-organic version of the aeolian harp for Gilmore is that it represents how complex and unpredictable the human mind is. Like Morton in his OOO-reading of the harp image in Shelley, Gilmore’s reading rejects the humanist organic interpretation, but still takes the image to be a figure for the human mind. My argument here is that in his poetry the harp image doesn’t represent the mind, but rather a kind of suspended aesthetic experience.

Krieger calls “a single ontological ground.” Neal, by contrast, does not invoke the Aeolian harp as a metaphor for the mind or for matter, but as a figure for the way we experience nature aesthetically. I take Neal’s decision to cut all forms of address (beside the initial “Hark”) from the “Lyre,” and thus to remove all grammatical traces of a lyric subject, to be deliberate. His revision is a kind of anti-lyric re-reading of his own poem, a reversal of the process of lyrical reading Paul De Man famously described in his classic critique of lyric theory.136 The effect is not the production of a flat ontology, but an image of nature as unmoored from any intentional subject.

Neal’s aim in the “Lyre” is to begin to represent nature as autonomous of the intentional subject, as existing prior to interpretation. As Morton notes in an early (pre-OOO) work, aeolian sound gives “a sense of processes continuing without a subject or an author. . . It comes ‘from nowhere,’” and it “provokes anxiety, because built into it is a hesitation between an obscure source and no source at all.”137 It is a variation of this hesitation that we can hear in the “Lyre” in

136. I am referring here, not to the ongoing critique of lyric reading by Historical Poetics scholars like Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson, but to Paul De Man’s use of the term “lyrical reading” in his 1984 essay “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric.” De Man argues that Baudelaire’s apostrophic “Obsessions” is a “lyrical reading” of his earlier sonnet “Correspondances,” a poem that contains “not a single negation, interrogation, or exclamation, not a single verb that is not in the present indicative, nothing but straightforward affirmation.” In “Obsessions,” by contrast, the natural objects that make up the imagery of “Correspondances” are addressed in the second person. This address effectively casts the natural objects as subjects; and, as De Man puts it, we are forced to read this apostrophizing as an “interiorization.” In fact, “we read ‘Obsession’ as an interiorization of ‘Correspondances,’ and as the negation of the positivity of an outside reality.” (Paul De Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 239-262; 254, 243, 257). A “lyrical reading,” according to De Man then, consists of an interiorization performed by the grammar of the second person apostrophe. By recasting the natural world as subjective (as being worthy of second-person address), Baudelaire assimilates the world to his own subjecthood. I am calling Neal’s revision of the “The Lyre” an anti-lyric reading because, in stripping away the apostrophe and address to the reader, he pares back the poem to its declarative, descriptive imagery: what remains, to borrow from De Man, is “condemned to the repetition of its superfluity.” (“Anthropomorphism,” 252) 137. Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 41, 43. In Ecology Without Nature, Morton uses the term “Aeolian” to refer not just to the music of the aeolian harp, but to all aesthetic forms which give this impression of authorless art. He treats the Aeolian as part of the repertoire of “ambient poetics” (41) – that attempt by writers and artists to give the impression of direct access to nature. We are encouraged to view the Aeolian, like all features of ambient poetics, skeptically: his point is that it cannot really offer such access to the real. “Ambience compromises ecomimesis because the very processes that try to convey the illusion of immediacy and naturalness just keep dispelling it from within” (77). The Aeolian dispels the illusion of immediacy because it produces that hesitation over origins (is the 58 that equivocation over whether the harp’s tone is prophetic or not: if it really is prophetic, this means that nature is ordered by an intentional subject (presumably God or at least a divinely inspired prophet). We see such a view in the Airs of Palestine (an 1816 poem by Neal’s friend,

John Pierpont, to which Neal briefly compares his own “Lyre.”)138 In the Airs, Pierpont presents natural beauty as evidence of God’s design: the wind is “tameless music . . . / Airs of the Power that bids the tempest roar, / The cedar bow, the royal eagle soar; The mighty Power, by whom those rocks were pil’d, / Who moves unseen and murmurs thro’ the wild.”139 This is the Christian version of Abrams’ “correspondent breeze.” Whereas Romantic organicism will locate this

“mighty Power” within each natural organism (treating it as an innate property of living things),

Pierpont continues to attribute such power to God. In fact, the musicality of the wind signals not only an unalienated relationship with nature but also with God Himself: when Pierpont has the prophet Elijah hearing the voice of God as music “softer than Æolian lyres,”140 any equivocation over the question of origin or intention is settled: nature is art-like – orderly, musical, and beautiful – because God is the ultimate author responsible for Creation.

author nonexistent or merely obscure?). By contrast with this critical view of the aeolian trope, Morton’s later reading of the aeolian harp (in Shelley), inflected by the object oriented ontology, aims almost to defend the possibility of immediacy: if the wind harp is an accurate model of the mind which demonstrates that thought is merely a spontaneous physical translation of external nature (just as the harp’s music is an automatic translation of the wind), then there really is the possibility of a type of thinking (“translation”) that can grasp nature in its immediacy. Morton’s later reading of Shelley reproduces the very ambient poetics that he exposes and dismantles in Ecology Without Nature. 138. Neal makes the comparison between the “Lyre” and Pierpont’s Airs in a review of John Milton Harney’s 1817 narrative poem, Crystalina, a Fairy Tale. Neal celebrates “three native American poets,” whose works share several “resemblances.” The three poets are Harney, Pierpont, and himself (he refers in the review only to the then- anonymous author the “Lyre of the Winds.”) John Neal, review of Crystalina, A Fairy Tale, by an American, by John Milton Harney, The Portico 3, no. 1 (January 1817): 23-28; 24. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433081659645?urlappend=%3Bseq=35. Though he celebrates the fact that all three poets are American-born, and though he even goes so far to claim that Piepont’s poem “has given the same independence to the genius of our country, that the revolution did to its government” (25) there is in fact little explicitly American nationalist content in any of these poems. 139. John Pierpont, Airs of Palestine, A Poem (Baltimore: Published for the Author by B. Edes, 1816), 11. Google Books. 140. Pierpont, Airs, 12. 59

Neal, by contrast, represents the music of nature ambiguously – as, in appearance, bearing prophetic meaning yet shorn of any subject capable of intending that meaning. The multiple extended similes (one of Neal’s favorite poetic techniques) suggests that what matters in the “Lyre” is not an anxiety about intention (as to who made the sound or where it comes from), but that prophetic intention is a possible mode of experience. One way, among others, to perceive the “wild minstrel tone,” and to perceive nature generally, is to perceive it as intentional, as bearing meaning and order. Neal’s 1819 revisions to the “Lyre” present nature unmoored from the subject, and yet as open still to such an experience of meaning and order.

The apparent contradiction here – whereby nature appears intentionally organized yet shorn of an intending subject – is that of Kant’s “purposiveness without end.” Loesberg argues that Kant’s theory results from an attempt to reckon with David Hume’s dismantling of natural theology and the argument from design in the second half of the eighteenth century: Kant’s account of purposiveness in aesthetic judgement is, he claims “a quite conscious attempt both to define a mode of perceiving design without a designer and to stay clear of the obvious fallacy . . . of presuming such a thing to be an actual feature of objects.”141 Whereas Pierpont is quite willing to continue to attribute the appearance of aesthetic design in nature to God, Neal traces the appearance of design without either identifying an intending subject (whether God or the poet- speaker), or redefining design in organicist terms as vital principle internal to natural objects.

For Neal, then, the aeolian harp’s wild music is subject-less, spontaneous, and apparently multivalent, drawing to itself various metaphorical meanings. These apparent interpretations, to be clear, are mostly unspecific and abstract. We hear about the “weight of prophecy,” for example, but not the prophecy’s content; a little later, we hear “so indistinct these murmurs were,

141. Loesberg, Return to Aesthetics, 51. On Hume’s critique of the design argument, see: Loesberg, Return to Aesthetics, 45-53. 60

/ They seemed sometimes still less than air; / Sometimes – as if the shrinking strings / Were swept by Phrenzy’s burning wings / – Now with an unknown spirit speaking.”142 The tone is

“indistinct” and, though it resembles speech, it is the unspecified speech of an “unknown spirit.”

Neal’s goal in the poem is to present the sound as appearing to bear meaning itself without moving us beyond the raw fact of this appearance (the specific information it might convey is less important than the apparent capacity it possesses to convey it in the first place). He is interested, in other words, in the phenomenal quality of meaningfulness – what it is like to encounter meaning and intention, rather than meaningless matter.143 This is one of the effects of poetry which leads Neal to what I called his poetic realism – his view of poetry as a “sense” capable of grasping reality as reliably as other bodily senses. Poetry is that medium of experience whereby we see the wind’s prophecy for what it is – a design without a designer.

Neal’s poetics diverges, however, from Kant’s account of judgement here in a crucial aspect – the specific appearance of design in nature that most interests him has to do with national history. In the middle of one of the poem’s extended similes, we find

And now – a lightly shouting strain As if across the slumbering main,

142. Neal, “The Lyre of the Winds,” 344. 143. What I am calling the phenomenal quality of meaning here could also be called its experiential quality: it is that quality which is present in our recognition of certain objects as meaningful signs. The quality essential to the experience of that recognition is not to be confused with the information gathered from correctly understanding a meaningful sign or sets of signs (this is the difference between recognizing the sound as a potential prophecy and understanding a particular event to have been prophesied). The analytical philosopher Galen Strawson defines the experiential quality of meaningfulness as “understanding-experience”: For a being to have understanding-experience is just for things to be for it, in one central respect, as they can be for us, experientially, when we hear utterances that we understand – or think consciously or realize something in silent words. Note that misunderstanding involves understanding-experience as much as genuine understanding does, for understanding-experience is experience as of understanding and need not be veridical. (It could be called ‘meaning-experience.’) Galen Strawson, Mental Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 6-7. The abstract similes of Neal’s “Lyre” points towards the possibility of having an “understanding-experience” in the contemplation of nature (in this case, of the wind being blown through the aeolian harp). These are examples of potential understanding-experience without the confirmation of veracity: the sound, that is, seems prophetic or seems like the speech of an “unknown spirit,” but whether either of these semblances is true is not the concern of the poem. 61

Green Erin’s bards, a shadowy train – Were tuning all their harps again.144

Neal invokes the figure of the harp-playing Irish bard. The harp, which had been used in both

Irish and English-colonial representations of Ireland since the sixteenth century,145 had by 1816 become a complex figure for Irish nationalism, associated especially with the failed 1798 rebellion of the United Irishmen. Whether or not we are to read Neal’s bards as revolutionary figures, tuning their harps, as one United Irish poem has it, “in the cause of our country,”146 the

“Lyre” offers an identification between the nationalist bardic harp and the aeolian harp, between the music of nationalism and the music of nature.

Though Neal was familiar with the poetic tradition of Irish nationalism, and even published his own bardic lament on the destruction of Shane’s Castle in County Antrim in

1816,147 his own “Lyre” is, as we have seen, primarily an experiment in aeolian poetics. The invocation of a cultural nationalism sets it apart though from the tradition that includes Coleridge

144. Neal, “The Lyre of the Winds,” 344. In the 1819 version “Green Erin’s bards” is capitalized. 145. For a history of Irish harp iconography, see Mary Helen Thuente, “The Harp as a Palimpsest of Cultural Memory,” in Memory Ireland, edited by Oona Frawley (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 52-65. For a discussion of the figure of the bard and its place within the anti-imperial Irish, Welsh, and Scottish nationalisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see: Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 146. The first lines of the anonymously composed “Triumph of Truth” are “Paddy, dear boy my heart and joy, / Tune up your harp in the cause of our country.” “The Triumph of Truth,” in Paddy's resource. Being a select collection of original and modern patriotic songs compiled for the use of the people of Ireland. To which is added, Arthur O'Connor's Address. (New York: R. Wilson, 1798), 4, lines 1-2, Text Creation Partnership, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/N25792.0001.001. Between 1795 and 1803, the United Irishmen (who had taken the harp as their symbol along with the motto “It is New Strung and Shall be Heard again”) published a series of five songbooks including the New York Paddy’s Resource. The last two of these songbooks had titles referring to the “Harp of Erin, Attuned to freedom.” For further detail on the publications of the United Irishmen, see Mary Helen Thuente, The Harp Re-Strung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Irish Literary Nationalism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994), Appendix A, 233-235. 147. Neal’s 1816 “Castle Shane,” an elegy on the burning of the Shane’s Castle in Ulster, opens as a nostalgic lament for the Irish nation as a whole: “Farewell! Silent Erin — farewell to thy glory! / It has leap’d from thine altar, the watch-tow’rs of Shane.” The poem’s point of address shifts frequently and ambiguously, turning from Ireland to the castle itself: “Thou art gone, Castle Shane! but hast vanish’d in splendor, / And full swell our harps, with their light’ning-wrapt strings, / To greet thy bold spirit – O nothing could bend her, / For those shadowy guards were the ghosts of her kings.” John Neal, “Castle Shane,” The Portico 2, no. 2 (August 1816): 179-180; 179, 180. In his memoir Neal discusses the composition of “Castle Shane” and raises but then dismisses the thought that he might be descended from the O’Neill clan, whose ancestral home was Shane’s Castle (Neal, Wandering Recollections, 13, 187-188). 62 and later Shelley: rather than suggesting, as they do, that the harp’s transformation of wind into aesthetic form might serve as a model for human thought or even for relations between nonhuman objects, Neal posits that the seeming spontaneity and authorless autonomy of aeolian sound actually resembles an identifiably nationalist artform – bardic harp music.148

I read the invocation of “Green Erin’s Bards” as a reframing of the “weight of prophecy.”

The introduction of the bards tuning their harps signals that the apparent prophecy pertains to national history. It is not, to be clear, that nature really does predict some national future, but only that this appears possible. Throughout his career, Neal remains interested in the way that what he calls here the “weight of prophecy,” is detected and interpreted in nature. The “Lyre of the Winds,” then, repurposes the figure of the aeolian harp. Whereas canonical Romantic poetry and criticism will treat the harp as a means of representing the relationship between mind and world, Neal’s “Lyre” aims to represent (and revise) the relation between nation and nature.

III. American Experience

Before turning to Neal’s later poetry, where he explores further how nature appears prophetic and designed for national ends, I am going to briefly examine his understanding of American revolutionary history as articulated in his contribution to Paul Allen’s 1819 History of the

American Revolution. Part of what interests Neal is what he perceives to be the tendency among

148. To call the harp’s wild tone “minstrel” is to draw a comparison between aeolian music and poetic creativity, but it is not the Romantic lyric model of private creation. Rather, as Erik Simpson argues, the harp-playing bard or minstrel offers in Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century an alternative image of public – and even communal – poetic authorship: “to emphasize the interiority of the poet’s compositional process as the source and proper subject of good poetry is to push minstrel writing aside. . . minstrel writing presents the poet observed, interacting with a live audience, at a moment of simultaneous inspiration, performance and reception.” In contrast to J. S. Mill’s famous definition of the lyric as overheard, “minstrel writing stages the heard mode of poetry.” (Erik Simpson, Literary Minstrelsy, 1770-1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish and American literature [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008], 3). The wild tone of Neal’s lyre recalls this public role of the bard: it is wild and yet seems expressive of a national culture. To the extent that the “wild minstrel tone” resembles the post-humanist aeolian, it does so not because it erases human-nonhuman difference, but because, in the manner of bardic poetry, it eschews the interiority of the Romantic subject.

American revolutionaries (as well as later generations) to read the events of the revolutionary war as first, inevitable and necessary (rather than historically contingent), and, second, as prophetic of the ultimate success and prosperity of the nation.

In Neal’s description of the Declaration of Independence, for example, we see his ambivalence towards the teleological view of American history as well as an interest in the way that historical events come to be understood as prophetic. The Declaration “was hailed as a prognostick,” he claims, despite the fact that the real effects of the Declaration, as he sees them, were not foreseen at the time and ran contrary to what the Declaration actually predicted:

Whatever may now be thought of the vast political foresight of those who first planned this confederacy, it is certain that, at the time, it was regarded as a temporary association. To understand the principles of attraction and adhesion which first brought together and then united such discordant materials, it will be necessary to forget what happened after their union, and go back to its first cause. . . The Colonies adopted certain precipitate measures, the consequences of which were not foreseen at the time, by which they were so entangled, that they could not be separated.149

Neal’s argument is that the Declaration is misinterpreted in his own era (as having correctly predicted the permanent union of the colonies) as well as at the time (when it was first taken to be “prognostick”). In fact, the permanence of the union, Neal claims, is rooted precisely in those consequences of “temporary association” which “were not foreseen at the time.” He is especially conscious that, in order for us to understand how the colonies came to be united in the wake of the Declaration, we should “forget what happened after their union.” Neal’s understanding of national history, then, is informed by a sense that it could have been otherwise – that the victory

149. Paul Allen, John Neal, and Tobias Watkins, A History of the American Revolution: Comprehending all the Principal Events both in the Field and in the Cabinet, 2 vols., (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins, 1819), 1:353, 354. Hathitrust. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hwb3ga. Though the History was published under Allen’s name, in fact he wrote only the preface. The majority of the text was written by Tobias Watkins while Neal contributed, in his own words, the section “from the Declaration of Independence to the end of the first volume” (Neal, Wandering Recollections, 204). For an account of the composition and publication of the History (and an explanation of its authorship), see: Neal, Wandering Recollections, 201-204. 64 of the revolutionaries was not guaranteed or divinely ordained150 – and that the United States of the 1810s is not the nation imagined by the Declaration of 1776.

He is keenly aware of the way the Declaration appears from the vantage point of the early nineteenth century to have been both prophetic and impelled by natural law: the Declaration itself “is now considered so much a matter of course, as a proceeding so necessarily required by the situation of affairs, and so naturally growing out of them, that few will be made to understand its boldness and importance.”151 Neal is aiming in the History, to recover a sense of historical contingency – a sense that the declaration and the revolution were not inevitable or natural. But what I want to focus on here is his account of the way that American revolutionary history was experienced from the beginning as loaded with the “weight of prophecy.” It seemed to be

“prognostick” at the time not because it really did anticipate the future but because of the impression it gave of unanimity: it “appeared as unanimous” to the “publick mind,” as much “as a similar declaration would have done had it been adopted and signed by the whole population,” despite the existence of what Neal calls the “formidable minority” who opposed it, and the fact that, in reality, he claims, “there was no common head to give stability and uniformity to the measures of the confederacy.”152 Even to the eyes of the British government, he argues, “the unanimity thus exhibited in this moment of unparallelled [sic] trial, was justly regarded as portentous not only of the nature, but of the termination of the contest.”153 The appearance of unanimity allowed for the impression that the “Declaration” was a portent. In Neal’s telling, this is a double misreading by the British government. First, they saw unanimity where, in fact, there

150. At one point, he even outlines an alternative scenario in which the initial proposal of the Declaration at the Second Continental Congress was rejected: “Let it be supposed, for a moment, that it had been rejected. How different would be the present situation of America! France would have had no confidence in a people that had none in themselves; and to this hour America might have been a part of the British Empire” (Allen, Neal and Watkins, History of the American Revolution, 359). 151. Allen, Neal and Watkins, History of the American Revolution, 359. 152. Allen, Neal and Watkins, History of the American Revolution, 353, 354. 153. Allen, Neal and Watkins, History of the American Revolution, 356. 65 was dissent; second, they treated this apparent unanimity as portentous – as evidence that the revolutionaries would be successful. Although he says this interpretation of the appearance of unanimity was “just,” he is not suggesting that the appearance actually reflected reality (As he makes clear, in order to believe the impression, all parties had to somehow forget the

“formidable minority” in the thirteen colonies who opposed the Declaration.)

In order to properly understand the revolutionary war, according to Neal, we must strip away any residual belief that the events of the revolution were essential or natural, as well as the assumption that they were prophetic of what was to come. His understanding of causality in national history is aleatory, emptied of “necessity and teleology.”154 But he also believes that a sense of the prophetic and providential – that is, of history unfolding visibly towards a pre- established destination – was fundamental to the way those events were experienced by

American colonists at the time.155 In addition, this belief in the prophetic and providential quality of the Declaration was itself premised on a belief – albeit a mistaken one – in the unanimity of public opinion in the colonies.

154. Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987, ed. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London and New York: Verso, 2006) 168. 155. Neal consistently holds that the mistaken interpretation of revolutionary history as inevitable (and of the Declaration as prophetic) was not merely an error of his own nineteenth-century peers, but of those at the time (revolutionaries and royalists) as well: whatever may now be acknowledged to have been the natural law, which brought these several parts into such intimate connexion, and afterwards supported that connexion, it will be granted that, at the time, these effects were attributed to principles materially different. The weakness of the coalition was forgotten; its tendency to separation was disregarded; patriotism and virtue were considered as ligaments capable of counteracting these natural propensities. The declaration of independence was received as the unanimous resolve of the thirteen Colonies. (Allen, Neal and Watkins, History of the American Revolution, 356) Even if, after the fact, his readers recognize the “natural law” which made the union of the colonies durable (and he is not taking for granted that his contemporaries will get this right), American colonists at the time could not see it. Note that, though he had earlier intimated he would analyze the “first cause” of the Declaration, here – as elsewhere in the History – he is far more interested in how it was “received” at the time. We should also note, when he uses the term “natural law” he is not referring to an extra-historical or teleological law, but to a material historical process. He explains the union lasted because of “necessity” born out of the colonies having become “entangled”: “Many of them would have withdrawn before the confederacy was agreed upon; even before the declaration of independence was published, but for the earlier measures with which they had entangled themselves, their characters, their popularity and resources” (356). His point is that such an entanglement was not (and could not) have been predicted and that it had nothing to do with “patriotism” or “virtue.” 66

The Battle of Niagara, Neal’s longest and most well-known poem, first composed in

1818 and then extensively revised in 1819, is in part an attempt to represent in America in the manner of the History, shorn of the trappings of divine providence, natural law or necessity. As in the “Lyre,” Neal presents the appearance of providential design, framing it as a possible mode of experience rather than given fact. His aim in writing the poem, he claims in the preface, was to “leave some proofs of the illumination that an American can experience, when gazing upon the wonders of American history.”156 What Neal means, however, by the “wonders of American history,” is not immediately intuitive. Neal doesn’t focus very much in the poem on the details of historical events. The Battle of Lundy’s Lane, which inspired the poem, is depicted in broadly impressionistic terms.157 The strategic significance of the battle within the War of the 1812 is ignored altogether. Paul Allen in a review of the poem for the Journal of the Times observed that

“here and there we discover groups of warriors engaged in mortal combat, but these forms are so inconsiderable and so casually represented that we almost wonder why they should occupy that place.”158 I would suggest that, in fact, what Neal expects his reader to “gaze” upon in these poems are not historical events but rather images of historical contingency. This is why a poem which we might expect to follow the conventions of a historical epic like The Columbiad in fact consists primarily of images of natural scenery, climate, and aeolian music.

156. Neal, “Battle,” xxiii. 157. On Neal’s decision (inspired by John Pierpont) to write a poem about the Battle of Lundy’s Lane (also known as the Battle of Bridgewater), see: Neal, Wandering Recollections, 5. On the historical significance of the battle itself, see: Donald E. Graves, “The Battle of Lundy’s Lane,” Canada’s History 94, no. 3 (June/July 2014): 46-51. http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.neu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=a9h&AN=96792187& site=ehost-live&scope=site&custid=s5071636 158. Paul Allen, “For the Journal,” Journal of the Times 1, no. 18 (January 9 1819): 277-278; 277. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044089261655?urlappend=%3Bseq=283. This piece from January 1819 was actually Allen’s second article on the “Battle” (his first was published in September 1818) and was written in response to E. T. Channing’s much harsher review published in December 1818. 67

In the fourth (and penultimate) canto of the poem, just before the beginning of the eponymous battle, we have an extended simile recalling the imagery of the “Lyre.” A strain of authorless aeolian music is presented (somewhat ambivalently) as an omen for the coming battle:

Now the rising air brings The faint touching of strings, From caverns — where harpers have never been heard As if – in each green silent place, Where ancient bards had been interred, Their spirits rose again to trace, In low — prophetic murmurings, Just like the soft approach of wings, The fate of yonder host that come — Unhallowed — to intrude — With banner – blade – and horn and drum — Upon their charmed solitude:

As if each seated on his tomb, And stooping o’er his shadowy lyre — With trembling fingers tore away The tendrils that ran wild in bloom, Encumbering each golden wire — And faultering — touched the awful lay —159

The sound on the “rising air” appears, as though from nowhere and, like the “wild minstrel tone” of the lyre, it is presented without a listener. We are caught in the paradoxical aesthetics of nationalist purposiveness: what sounds like the prophecy of bardic harpers, arrives from “caverns

– where harpers have never been heard.” Despite the image opening with this caveat – this confirmation that the music cannot be that of bardic harpers – the simile expands into a lengthy description of the figurative (and absent) bards now seemingly woken from sleep: “As if – in each green silent place, / Where ancient bards had been interred, / Their spirits rose again to trace, / In low — prophetic murmurings, / Just like the soft approach of wings, / The fate of yonder host that come.” The syntax, with its multiple digressive clauses, is calculated to defer the

159. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., 150. 68 grammatical object of the bard’s musical tracing (which turns out to be the “fate” of the US army marching towards Niagara Falls). One effect of this is that we are forced to linger with the initial image (of bardic music) while waiting for grammatical closure. Even though we are told at the start that there have never been bards here – that the image of harpers can only be figurative – the stanza’s enjambement and grammatical suspension as well as the multiplication of the simile’s figurative layers gives a concreteness and level of detail to the figurative appearance which is denied to the literal tenor of the image (the “faint touching of strings”).

The effect is further intensified when, in the next stanza, the simile-structure is reiterated in the image of the bards freeing their harp-strings from the encroaching wilderness: “As if each seated on his tomb,/ And stooping o’er his shadowy lyre —/ With trembling fingers tore away /

The tendrils that ran wild in bloom, / Encumbering each golden wire.” Twice, we have what appears to be an antagonistic opposition between art and nature. First, the “murmurings” of the waking bards undercut the image of the “green silent place.” Second, the harpers are described tearing away flowers in “bloom” from their harp strings in order to play. The paradox here is that the aeolian sound emitted from nature without a designer or author not only appears – like a piece of bardic music – to have been structured by intentional design; but this appearance of design also marks it out as seemingly destructive of nature.

By placing the imagery of providence and prophecy within a simile structure designed to ironize it and reveal its status as appearance, Neal denaturalizes the experience of national history (in this case the “fate of yonder host”). But in the same gesture, he also aims, as it were, to denaturalize the colonial-Romantic conceptualization of nature in the Americas as an empty a- historical wilderness (a “green silent place”). The disturbing of nature’s silence by the noise and action of national history (here the “horn and drum” of the US army) is a recurrent motif in the

69 representation of the American wilderness in the early national period.160 But here, that contrast is presented not as literal description, but as a figurative reference: it is as if we can hear the prophetic music of harpers who have been awakened in the silent wilderness by the encroaching army. Not only the transplanted harpers but also the green silent place are elements on the figurative side of the metaphor, features of the appearance of design which remains, in Neal’s poem, ironized and suspended.

One of Neal’s objectives in his poetry, then, is to turn our attention to the way in which nature is experienced figuratively even in cases which emphasize those qualities of the landscape which seem rhetorically opposed to artifice and culture (including silence and wildness). This is what poetic realism looks like in practice. I suggested that Neal is interested in representing nature in its autonomy from assimilation to cultural narrative and aesthetic perception: this means that nature conceived as empty or Edenic wilderness is revealed to be just as constructed as the appearance of prophetic purposiveness. Throughout the poem, images of wild nature are ironized, as in this example, within extended similes. The representation of nature – the “green silent place” and wild blooming “tendrils” – as figurative raises certain questions regarding

Neal’s poetic realism. If wild nature is not a literal object in Neal’s poetry but part of a figurative appearance (part of the appearance of a purposiveness that includes the nation’s “fate”), which we are invited to view skeptically, then to what extent does the poem fulfil its role as, in Neal’s terms, a “sense”?

The question as to how we should read the poem’s representation of nature, and whether we should read it as literal, also exercised contemporary reviewers who complained that the

160. For further discussion of the colonial and antebellum conception of nature as a vacant wild space, see: Smith, Virgin Land, 3-44; Kolodny, Lay of the Land, 3-9, 26-132. 70 poem’s figurative imagery was “vague and indistinct.”161 E. T Channing, in The North-American

Review, found that, in the poem’s frequent extended similes, “the string[s] of similitudes” became “substitutes instead of auxiliaries. . . few distinct pictures are received from the description, but the fancy is perpetually drawn off and, for a time, amused by sparkling collateral beauties, to the almost entire desertion of the matter in hand.” Neal substitutes “sparkling collateral beauties” for literal objects of description. Neal himself comes close to concurring with this observation, admitting that the poem is “full” of “obscurity, extravagance, and entanglement of metaphor and imagery, heaps upon heaps.”162 As Channing sees it, the consequences of this style are disastrous for the poem: the reader, whose fancy is perpetually “drawn off” and distracted from the literal object of description, is left unable to distinguish between reality and imagination. He takes particular aim at the poem’s aeolian imagery: “There is strange music everywhere, whether of the air or earth, whether in the ear or fancy, it is not easy to determine.”163 Neal quotes this line from Channing in his own preface to the 1819 edition and remarks sardonically that “if he knows enough to keep himself out of fire and water, one would think he could tell, if he burnt his fingers, whether the fire wasn’t in his fancy or his touch – or if he heard musick, that it wasn’t in his ears, merely.”164 As Neal sees it, Channing is being disingenuous – it simply isn’t believable that he cannot decide which images are literal.

However, in spite of Neal’s retort, I would suggest that Channing’s complaint helps illuminate the peculiarity of the way the poem represents nature. As we saw above, rather than focusing on the literal features of the landscape or even of the “strange music” emerging from nature’s

161. Paul Allen, Review of “Battle of Niagara, A Poem,” Journal of the Times 1, no 3 [September 26, 1818]: 43-46; 44. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044089261655?urlappend=%3Bseq=49 162. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., xlii. 163. E. T. Channing, Review of “Battle of Niagara, a poem without notes, and Goldau, or the Maniac Harper,” The North-American Review and Miscellaneous Journal 8, no. 22 (December 1818): 142-156; 142. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25121407. 164. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., xlvi, fn. 71

“caverns,” Neal heaps up his “strings of similitudes,” suggesting ways in which nature might appear, while reminding us repeatedly that such appearances cannot be trusted.

Channing correctly intuits, I would suggest, that Neal’s poetry deals primarily in these equivocal, even dubious, appearances. They are dubious insofar as their reality is called into question. While Channing reads this as a reason to ask whether the poem is tending towards subjective idealism (a world in which the perceptions of the ear are indistinguishable from the creations of fancy), I think we should see here Neal’s attempts to facilitate experiences of

American nature unmoored from the pressure of the “sensus communis.” Another way to put this is to say, drawing on Terada, that Neal presents appearances in the American landscape (“strange music” that might or might not be prophetic) which are too equivocal and ephemeral to become objects of shared perception or shared aesthetic judgement.

In his account of the Declaration of Independence, we see Neal argue that a belief in the providential force behind American revolutionary history was rooted in the view (which he regards as mistaken) that the Declaration represented a unanimous position among the colonists.

He takes aim at an equivalent unanimity in the poem’s preface: “I would not give sixpence to choose between having [The “Battle”] universally praised and universally damned. . . One amounts to about as much as the other. A work of real merit never was universally, and sincerely, and rationally admired.”165 Universal praise is only evidence, he suggests, that a work has not actually been read. This is even true of classical writers like “Homer and Virgil”:

Not one in a thousand of those who affect to be transported out of their senses at the mention of their names, has ever read either. . . their very unanimity proves that they speak without judgement or understanding. It is impossible for many persons to agree on a subject they understand. It is impossible for men of judgment to have the same opinions on any subject of mere taste; therefore it is impossible, because all mankind are

165. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., xiv-xv. 72

unanimous in their admiration of Virgil and Homer – that they should understand them.166

Unanimity is anathema to proper judgement in Neal’s view. In fact, he thinks it is “impossible” for there to be universal agreement on a matter of “taste.” For Neal, universal assent, far from being a necessary condition for aesthetic judgement (as it is for Kant), derives from “tyranny, conquest, and education.” It undermines the honest judgement of individual readers and betrays an inability of readers to think for themselves. “We have,” Neal suggests, “inherited the prejudices with the property of our forefathers.”167 On its own, we might read this merely as a defense of the private freedom of the post-revolutionary liberal subject (for whom “freedom is defined in terms of an infinite interiority”168). But, recalling the link which Neal draws in the

History between the belief in unanimity and the belief in providential history, this attack on unanimous aesthetic judgement takes on a new significance. That unfounded belief in a national purposiveness, described in the History, is an aestheticization of the nation: the U.S., viewed as though it were driven by teleological law, becomes, in Jehlen words, a work of art, “the art of nature and nature’s God.” In Neal’s account, however, this aestheticization of the nation – this view of the nation as an object of aesthetic contemplation – specifically requires unanimity,

“universal assent.” The Declaration only appears “portentous” because it first appears unanimous. The Battle is calculated to undo this unanimity. It is a poem, Neal claims, about the

166. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., xv. Emphases in the original. 167. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., xv. 168. Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 41. Pease traces the American variant of this model of freedom to the cultural reception of the revolution in the new republic in the years following its conclusion: “The Revolution had indeed secured the nation’s freedom from an oppressive past. The mythic associations accruing to this historic event subsequently made freedom synonymous with liberation from an oppressor. And this negative freedom granted cultural authority to a variety of breaks from an equally variable series of oppressors” (8). Pease goes on to argue that this “revolutionary mythos” was lifted from its late eighteenth-century context by Americanist critics during the Cold War (especially Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, and Garry Wills) who then imposed it upon the mid-nineteenth-century canon of the American Renaissance. For those critics trying to revive the revolutionary mythos dissent is defined merely “in terms of an opposition to group will” (40). 73

“illumination an American can experience” when contemplating American history. But, this illumination, it turns out, will not be a collective experience – let alone a universal one. It will not be an aesthetic experience at all in Kant’s terms, since it will be characterized by the absence of shared judgement or unanimity.

The figurative excess of the poem with its “sparkling collateral beauties” – habitually distracting the reader from its literal objects of description – should be seen, I would argue, as an attempt to facilitate a sub-aesthetic experience of the American landscape. The use of extended simile, whereby the literal tenor is overwhelmed by multiple figurative layers approximates the experience of a natural object which is inassimilable to shared aesthetic perception. While lingering over that “heap” of “similitudes,” the reader is expected, as Neal suggests in the preface, to “judge as you please of it.”169 It is possible of course that, with Channing, the reader will find all layers of the simile equally fanciful and ephemeral – mere “sparkling collateral beauties.” But it is the capacity to discern among these appearances which I think Neal is aiming to draw out.

In particular, the Battle is concerned with the possibility of experiencing the American landscape as purposeful or designed (to national ends) without endorsing the validity of such an experience. The view of the nation as divinely ordained and incarnated in a physical landscape

(which then sings aeolian prophecies of the nation’s destiny) remains in the poem but only in the provisional form of a “collateral” proto-aesthetic and pre-collective mode of experience.

169. Neal, Battle, 2nd ed., xvii. 74

Chapter Two: “A Force Feared Yet Loved”: Margaret Fuller’s Daemonic

I. Outward Things

In Margaret Fuller’s 1833 lyric “Meditations,” the speaker describes a failure to experience the natural world intimately. The clouds leave “their deepest tints upon yon range of soul-alluring hills,” and birds sing “notes of praise.” The speaker, however, remains detached from the landscape: although her “sense” receives the “freshened beauty” of the scene, her “heart / sends back a hollow echo to the call / Of outward things.”170 Later in the poem she recalls “I loved to see the lightnings flash athwart/ The stooping heavens. . ./. . .; for I thought/ ‘Tis thus man’s

170. Margaret Fuller, “Meditations,” in Life Without and Life Within; Or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems, ed. Arthur B. Fuller (1860; repr., Upper Saddle River: Literature House, 1970), 381, lines 2-3, 7, 10, 11, 16-18. 75 flashing fancy doth enkindle/ The firmament of mind.” Now, though, she explains, “the proud delight of that keen sympathy is gone.”171 The experience of “keen sympathy” with “outward things” consists of a structural resemblance between nature and mind (lightning flashes across the sky in the same way that fancy flashes across the mind). This is the apparent fit between mental structure and the object of perception which Kant, in the third Critique (1790), describes as central to the experience of beauty.172 The experience recorded in “Meditations,” of a “want of harmony” 173 between interiority and the external world is typical of Fuller’s writing in the 1830s and early 1840s. For Fuller in this period the post-Kantian model of aesthetic experience as dependent on a correspondence between mind and world becomes inadequate. However, this sense of a loss of sympathy and fit with nature does not lead Fuller to an experience of alienation from the nonhuman. Rather, in her poetry and poetics we see Fuller beginning to develop a new theory of encounter with the nonhuman, not reliant on the aesthetics of correspondence, sympathy, or harmony.

I explore Fuller’s new strategies for imagining and representing the encounter with nonhuman natures through readings of her landscape and quasi-landscape poetry. I examine her

“Trenton Falls” poems (1836), the anti-lyric “Drachenfels” (1836), and then finally “Ganymede to his Eagle,” an embedded poem from Summer on the Lakes (1844). In “Drachenfels” and

“Ganymede,” Fuller develops a poetics of negation and absence as part of an attempt to represent

“outward things” in their alterity and autonomy. At the same time, Fuller also retheorizes how aesthetic experience of the material world works. She adapts Goethe’s idea of the “daemonic” to reimagine the experience of matter without the reliance on an alignment between mind and

171. Fuller, “Meditations,” 382, lines 45-49, 53-54. 172. For Kant, “natural beauty. . . carries with it a purposiveness in its form, through which the object seems as it were predetermined for our power of judgment.” Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 129. 173. Fuller, “Meditations,” 382, line 42. 76 nature. The daemonic is ideal – unavailable to sensory experience – at the same time that it is non-subjective. As such it troubles a conventional binary within Fuller scholarship and American

Romanticism more broadly between an idealist belief in the priority of the mind and the creative subject and a materialist commitment to the priority of external physical forces.

Through much of the twentieth century, scholars have approached Fuller’s attention to

“outward things” in terms of what Harry Slochower, in a 1932 essay, calls her “sense of activity” and “political interests.” Slochower contrasts Fuller’s sociopolitical interests against her description of highly personal interior experiences which he reads primarily as an indulgence in

“musings and visions.”174 This opposition between political commitment and visionary musing has been central to many readings of Fuller throughout the twentieth century. In Ann Douglas’ influential formulation, for example, Fuller disavows “fiction for history, the realm of ‘feminine’ fantasy for the realm of ‘masculine’ reality,” 175 and ultimately this disavowal culminates in

Fuller’s participation in the 1848-9 Roman revolution. Julie Ellison, in her 1990 Delicate

Subjects, challenges the narrative of disavowal, whereby Fuller is said to escape a romantic idealism for the “realism of a radical and almost modern engagement with history.” She argues that Fuller’s later “turn to a new kind of action does not imply a newfound skepticism toward romantic subjectivity.”176 But Ellison maintains the view that Fuller’s work should be understood in terms of the relation between “romantic subjectivity” and “social realism.”177

In contrast to the twentieth century’s social realist reading of Fuller, scholars such as

Dorri Beam and Vesna Kuiken have focused on Fuller’s interest in the materiality of language and the body. In Beam’s reading, Fuller aims to “to keep in play both body and spirit, both the

174. Harry Slochower, “Margaret Fuller and Goethe,” Germanic Review 7 (April 1932): 130-144; 134, 131. 175. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1998), 262. 176. Julie Ellison, Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 220, 223 177. Ellison, Delicate Subjects, 224. 77 material and ideal” and Fuller mediates the ideal – both fantasy and spirit – through her “highly wrought style.”178 By contrast, Kuiken describes a more thoroughly materialist Fuller: in her mystical experiences “the ideal, spiritual quality of self” dissolves in favor of a “pull to become one with the world.” Kuiken sees the mind threatening to expand “appropriatively into more space”179 so that Fuller’s ecstatic dissolutions of self can be seen as attempts to save materiality from appropriation. Like Beam and Kuiken, I treat Fuller’s attention to “outward things” as an interest in physical reality. But I don’t read Fuller as a materialist. Rather, I trace Fuller’s interest in the way a non-subjective category of the ideal – the daemonic – mediates experiences of materiality. Fuller evokes the daemonic not through her florid style or poetic embodiments of sensory excess. Rather, the experiences of material allure I trace in her poetry are experiences of deflation, withdrawal, and even negation.

Fuller develops a mode of what Kate Rigby calls “negative ecopoetics.”180 Fuller’s ecopoetry represents experiences of nature which, in a seeming paradox, do not depend on sense perception. This allows her to represent nature without relying on the imagined symmetry or

178. Dorri Beam. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 52, 30. For Beam, Fuller’s adaptation of flower language in her sketches, “Yuca Filamentosa” and “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” is a “type” of “quasi-materiality,” (Beam, Style, Gender, and Fantasy, 30) which undermines specific referential relations in favor of an excess of multivalence: with her “florid” style, Fuller “rejects a logic of substitutions, of emblems, but rather keeps a sense of the flower’s sensual immediacy and of its life.” (Beam, Style, Gender, and Fantasy, 5, 53) By refusing the “logic of substitutions” Fuller’s florid style allows for multiple possible meanings to remain in play, rather than eliminating the referential capacity of language altogether. Beam argues that, through her florid style, Fuller attempts “to enliven a principle she locates in nature, one that articulates the grammar of nature, self and spirit… a principle of difference rather than unity,” which, though it is “spirit,” can be experienced sensuously through baroque “style” (Beam, Style, Gender, and Fantasy, 57). The daemonic is also a principle Fuller locates in nature but, unlike the spirit Beam describes, it is characterized by a withdrawal from sensory perception and from representation. Rather than becoming palpable through stylistic and referential excess, daemonic is registered in negation and through felt absence.

179. Vesna Kuiken, “On the Matter of Thinking: Margaret Fuller’s Beautiful Work,” in American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron, ed. Branka Arsić. (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 120. 180. Kate Rigby, “‘Come Forth into the Light of Things’: Material Spirit as Negative Ecopoetics,” in Material Spirit: Religion and Literature Intranscendent, ed. Gregory C. Stallings, Manuel Asensi, and Carl Good (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 111-128; 111. See also: Catherine E. Rigby, “Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis,” New Literary History 35, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 427-442. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2004.0045 78 alignment between external nature and mental structure. In other words, Fuller embraces the

“want of harmony” between matter and mind described in “Meditations.” The mind, then, in

Fuller’s account is no longer aligned harmoniously with nature. However, Fuller is not rejecting all kinds of thinking about nonhuman nature. She specifically resists the correspondence or organicist model of aesthetic experience. Rejecting the correspondence of human subject and external matter does not for Fuller entail a suspicion of human subjectivity in general. What is suspicious is the idea that the mind is commensurate with the world. This distinction is crucial.

As Timothy Morton shows in Ecology Without Nature, attempts to purge the presence of the experiencing human subject from the representation of nonhuman nature invariably fail. The human subject re-emerges and reasserts itself: “dark ecology tells us that we can’t escape our minds.”181 Fuller acknowledges this and embraces the presence of the human subject in the representation of nonhuman nature even as she finds that nature and the human subject are not aligned symmetrically or harmoniously. In her poetry and poetics from this period, the alterity of nature is understood to be available to human experience without being subsumed or appropriated. Nature is incommensurable with the human mind, an intuition Fuller shares with

Neal. Unlike Neal, however, Fuller in her early poetry, represents an encounter with the alterity of nature itself. Whereas for Neal nature is always on the cusp of aesthetic assimilation, Fuller’s poems stage a mode of experience in which nature appears almost to assert its autonomy from the mind.

This is possible because, for Fuller, the experience of nonhuman nature is mediated and facilitated by the daemonic. The daemonic is an ideal – that is, immaterial – principle, yet it is non-subjective: it precedes any specific mind. As I read it, Fuller’s daemonic is an example of what Elizabeth Grosz calls the “incorporeal,” the “frame by which materiality comes to act as

181. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 201. 79 well as be acted upon... [that which] subtends matter, that makes materiality locatable, changeable, meaningful and capable of being spoken about.”182 Fuller’s daemonic is a kind of incorporeal “frame,” in this sense, for the experience of material nature. For Grosz, the appeal of the incorporeal is that it allows her to “bypass epistemological questions in favor of a focus on an ontology sensitive to and engaged with the realities of space and time, of events and becomings, not just things and their knowable determinable relations.”183 In my reading of Fuller’s incorporeal daemonic, however, I don’t aim to bypass questions of knowledge or experience. For

Fuller the daemonic is important because of what it reveals about the way materiality becomes available for experience in its non-correspondence with the mind. Fuller’s poetry disrupts the symmetrical dualism of the correspondence aesthetic, then, by insisting on the influence of a third element, neither mind nor nature: the daemonic facilitates aesthetic experiences of nonhuman materiality which, rather than establishing harmony with nature, foreground the alterity of the nonhuman.

II. “Journey to Trenton Falls” and the Kantian Aesthetic

In her sonnet sequence, “Journey to Trenton Falls,” (1836) Fuller adopts the Romantic conventions of landscape beauty and the post-Kantian model of aesthetic experience dependent on the apparent fit between one’s mental faculties and the perception of the external world. The sonnets describe the speaker’s picturesque and beautiful landscape-encounters. In “Catskill,” for example, the speaker first describes the mountains viewed from a distance, and then the view from the summit:

182. Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 251. 183. Grosz, The Incorporeal, 4. 80

How Fair at distance shone yon silvery blue, O stately mountain-tops, charming the mind To dream of pleasures which she there may ﬁnd, Where from the eagle’s height she earth can view! Nor are those disappointments which ensue; For though, while eyeing what beneath us lay, Almost we shunned to think of yesterday, As wonderingly our looks its course pursue.184

The speaker begins by commenting that the view of the distant “mountain-tops” prompts the observer’s mind to “dream” of the prospects visible from the summit. Halfway through the opening octave, we have a preliminary volta – “Nor are those disappointments which ensue.”

Yesterday’s dreams are not mere fantasies, but, in some sense, premonitions corresponding to the real view she has from the mountain-top: this is why the speaker is not disappointed “while eyeing what beneath us lay.” It is not that the dream resembled the next day’s perception in its forms or features, but that the speaker’s experience was psychologically identical in each case:

“as wonderingly our looks its course pursue.” The quality of wonder is equal in both experiences. This parallelism is reinforced by the line’s subtly ambiguous syntax, a characteristic of much of Fuller’s poetry. From the summit the speaker can see the river Hudson. This is the conventional referent of the phrase “its course.” But, if we read the sentence as a single unit, “its course” actually agrees grammatically with “yesterday.” That is, visible from the mountain-top is the “course” – the trajectory – of yesterday’s dreaming fantasies.

This apparent match between subjective ideal forms (the dreams produced by the mind) and the external objects of perception (“the earth” as viewed from the peak) is a version of the

Kantian experience of “purposiveness,” whereby the external object appears “predetermined for our power of judgment.”185 Admittedly, for Fuller in “Catskill,” it is not the mind’s power of judgment, but its capacity for fantasy or projection which is shown to correspond with the world.

184. Margaret Fuller, “Catskill,” in Life Without and Life Within, 362-363, lines 1-8. 185. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 129. 81

“Catskill” depicts this experience of fit sequentially, perception following fantasy. But, like

Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature (published in 1836, the same year that Fuller composed the

“Trenton Falls” poems), 186 Fuller adopts the structure of Kant’s idea of beauty – as an experience of general fit between mental faculties and external world – while shifting focus towards the question of imaginative projection. This version of the theory of correspondence whereby the imaginative mind recreates the external world in fantasy also typifies the eighteenth-century mode of landscape experience which centered upon “the reconstructing of the landscape in the imagination.”187 Works of landscape art like “Catskill,” whether neoclassical or transcendentalist, are as much about the creative subject’s imaginative capacities as they are about the representation of external nature.

In certain cases, however, the creative agency of the landscape subject actually begins to resemble a mode of subjective idealism. The final sonnet of the sequence, for example, “Trenton

Falls by Moonlight,” begins with the lines “I deemed the inmost sense my soul had blessed /

Which in the poem of thy being dwells, / And gives such store for thought’s most sacred cells.”188 The lines’ syntactic slippages suggest that both the “sense” and the “speaker’s soul” might be dwelling somehow “in” the waterfall’s “being,” which is at the same time identified as a poem. It is not just that the speaker’s mental response to the waterfall – her “sense” of it – is adequate to the reality of the fall, its “being.” Rather, the two, it seems, are merged together. This merger of sense and being precipitates an assertion of idealism: the waterfall, invested with

“sense,” is a “store for thought’s most sacred cells,” and is configured, in this way, not as an

186. In the 1836 Nature, Emerson claims “the lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in Atkinson, The Essential Writings, 6. 187. John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 6. A related strain of Americanist criticism running from Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land in 1950 to Myra Jehlen’s 1987 American Incarnation has identified the experience of the American landscape in particular as “the setting of self-realization.” Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation,12. 188. Margaret Fuller, “Trenton Falls by Moonlight,” in Life Without and Life Within, 364, lines 1-3. 82 entity in its own right, but as a medium for the subject’s thoughts. The image of the thoughts’

“cells” signals a shift from a dualist alignment (between the mental and the external) to a form of idealism whereby the objects of perception are subordinated altogether to the subject (and their mind-independent reality thrown into question).189

In this way, the aesthetic of alignment between landscape and mind culminates in the

Trenton Falls poems in an idealist appropriation of nature by thought. The tendency of romantic aesthetics to facilitate this kind of appropriation of nature has long been noted and critiqued by ecocritics and materialist scholars. In response those critics have tended to look for modes of representation which aim to avoid the mental appropriation of nature through attention to material particularity.190 But for Fuller the alternative to idealism, counter-intuitively, is not materialism. In the following instance, Fuller seems to explicitly endorse a materialist – or realist

– position and poetics; but this is then qualified when such realist thought becomes difficult to disentangle from its idealist opposite.

Fuller treats both idealist and realist positions as orientations to the world, each of which is inadequate in itself. In a letter written in January 1839 to her friend Caroline Sturgis, Margaret

Fuller comments “these Greeks no more merged the human in the divine, than the divine in the human,” before claiming that the “mere Idealist vexes me more than the mere Realist, because he seems to me never to have lived. he might as well have been a butterfly he does not know the

189. The dissolution of the subject-world divide can tend toward two opposing kinds of flat ontology. As in “Trenton Falls by Moonlight,” it can suggest subjective idealism (the reduction of the external world to mental ideas); but, as in Kuiken’s reading of Fuller’s mysticism, the moment when “the contours of [Fuller’s] self are erased and the distinction between thought and body, between herself and the objective world, disappears,” can also entail the dissolution of the subject into a material “elemental state.” While Kuiken emphasizes the materialist possibilities in Fuller’s “pull to become one with the world,” (Kuiken, “On the Matter of Thinking,” 117, 120). Kuiken’s argument shares a key characteristic with the idealist interpretation. In both cases, difference is sacrificed – for the sake of the extinction of the mind on the one hand, and for the sake of its expansion on the other. I discuss this common ground between subjective idealism and monist materialism in greater depth in chapter four. 190. See for example: Lawrence Buell’s influential argument for nonfiction prose as a vehicle for the representation of place (Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 252-279) and Branka Arsić’s defense of literalism in Thoreau (Arsić, Bird Relics, 1-26). 83 human element.”191 While Fuller appears sympathetic to realism here, the problem she finds with the idealist is not that his description of the world is false, but that “he seems never to have lived.” The idealist and the realist represent for Fuller not competing beliefs or descriptions (of knowledge or of being), but two distinct modes of life (and of relation to the world):

I love the stern Titanic part, I love the crag, even the Drachenfels of life– I love its roaring sea that dashes against the crag– I love its sounding cataract, its lava rush, its whirlwind, its rivers generating the lotus and the crocodile, its hot sands with their white bones, patient camels, and majestic columns toppling to the sky in all the might of-dust. I love its dens and silvery gleaming caverns, its gnomes, its serpents and the tigers sudden spring. Nay! I would not be without what I know better, its ghostly northern firs haggard with ice, its solitary tarns, tearful eyes of the lone forest, its trembling lizards and its wounded snakes dragging to secretest recesses their slow length along. Who can know these and, other myriad other children of Chaos and old night, who can know the awe the horror and the majesty of earth, yet be content with the blue sky alone. . . . and oh ye flowers, ye fruits, and, nearer kindred yet, ye stones with your veins so worn by fire and water, and here and there disclosing streaks of golden ore, let us know one another before we part. Tell me your secret, tell me mine. To be human is also something?192

In taking on the perspective of the realist, Fuller declares her love for the particular and concrete

– for inanimate features of the land, for weather formations and for animals and plants.

Particularity is the hallmark of realism. The variety of the catalogue, though, suggests that her attention – and that of the realist – is almost indiscriminate, a criticism Fuller seems to foresee when she calls the list a “rhapsody which would by the always wise majority be technically denominated ‘stuff.’”193 This ‘rhapsody of stuff’ evokes the world of the realist through a series of concrete phenomena. Against the series of concrete images is contrasted “the blue sky alone,” an emblem (though not an example) of the ideal. The image of the sky foregrounds not the illusoriness of the idealist’s view, but its lack of variety – its singularity.

191. Fuller to Caroline Sturgis, January 27, 1839, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Vol. 2, 1839-1841, ed. Robert Hudspeth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 40. 192. Fuller to Sturgis, January 27, 1839, in Hudspeth, Letters 2: 40. 193. Fuller to Sturgis, January 27, 1839, in Hudspeth, Letters 2: 40. 84

The sense of realism and idealism as distinct modes of attention to the world (rather than as competing belief-systems) finds an influential precursor in Friedrich Schiller.194 In the second half of On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795), Schiller maps his two aesthetic modes, the

“naïve” and the “sentimental,” onto two psychological types– the realist and idealist. In practice, while Schiller’s realist pays attention to particularity, his idealist loses sight of the particular in the pursuit of the general and universal: “because he directs his attention in everything to the universal that finds the common factor in the most varied instances, he can easily neglect the particularity that differentiates them.”195 The idealist attends to commonality between “varied instances” at the expense of an attention to the particularity of those instances.

The realist’s apprehension of “varied instances” serves a different function, however, for

Fuller than it does for Schiller. The realist’s love of variety and particularity appears, for Fuller, to constitute an affirmation of the “human element” (which her idealist lacks). Fuller’s list ends by turning explicitly to the definition of the human: “and nearer kindred yet, ye stones… let us know one another before we part. Tell me your secret, tell me mine. To be human is also something?” The series of apostrophes (“ye flowers,” “ye fruits,” “ye stones”) followed by this request for commonality (the stones are “nearer kindred”) and shared knowledge (“Tell me your secret, tell me mine”) alters the meaning of the passage. It is not merely the celebration of nature’s “varied instances.” Rather, by addressing the stones as “kindred” she defines them by their similarity to her, as though she and the stones shared a common heritage. Her attraction to

194. Fuller was familiar with Schiller’s works by the mid-1830s. In an 1834 letter to Amelia Greenwood, she comments the “hist [sic] and critical work of Goethe and Schiller” formed part of her personal “course of study.” (Fuller to Amelia Greenwood, March 20, 1834, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Vol. 1, 1817-1838, ed. Robert Hudspeth [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 202. For further discussion of the relationship between Fuller’s realist thought and Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, see: Frederick Augustus Braun, Margaret Fuller and Goethe: the development of a remarkable personality, her religion and philosophy, and her relation to Emerson, J. F. Clarke, and transcendentalism, (New York: H. Holt, 1910), 126. 195. Friedrich Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975), 180-181. 85 material objects is, at least in part, then, an attraction to the kind of relationship with those objects (kinship) which would, to some degree, compromise their nonhuman particularity. The paradox here is that the realist’s attraction to kinship would be defined, at least in Schiller’s terms, as idealist. It is Schiller’s idealist after all who “finds the common factor in the most varied instances,” a desire that Fuller expresses in her address to the stones as “kindred.” The realist’s attraction to particularity – when it becomes a desire for kinship and commonality with particular objects – erases the very quality of particularity that is desirable in the first place.

The peculiar convergence of realist and idealist modes of thought in Fuller’s rhapsody is particularly striking given the continued prominence of the rhapsodic list in current materialist and realist theory and scholarship. Fuller’s “litany”196 of concrete nonhuman particulars and the association she draws between that catalogue-form and realist thought anticipates the role of the catalogue in twenty-first-century theory. Consider, for example, Jane Bennett’s list of material objects from the beginning of Vibrant Matter, which I discussed in the Introduction: “Glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick. As I encountered these items, they shimmied back and forth between debris and thing.”197 In Ecology Without Nature, Morton labelled this form of catalogue, common to nature-writing and ecotheory alike, the “Ecorhapsodic list”: “It is as if the narrator turns on a spigot, out of which flows a potentially endless stream of metonymic associations.”

For Morton all strategies of “ecomimesis” – including “ecorhapsody” – necessarily fail in their attempt to provide access to a reality which is “solid, veridical, and independent (notably of the writing process itself).”198 While in his early work, Morton might have critiqued Bennett’s and

196. Ian Bogost calls the lists of nonhuman objects used by Bruno Latour and other scholars of the nonhuman turn “Latour litanies” (Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What its like to be a Thing [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012], 38). 197. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 4. 198. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 61, 55, 31, 30. Morton’s “ecomimesis” is the genre of nature writing which attempts to “break the spell of language” and “go beyond art” altogether (Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 30, 31). 86

Fuller’s lists as sheer ecorhapsody, he later advocated for the specific use of object-lists by

Graham Harman, the founder of OOO. Harman’s “random lists of objects” – rather than standing in for the speaker’s surroundings (an ecomimetic structure that would reassert the presence of the human subject) – consist of “objects encountering one another without people.”199 In practice, the listed objects are not presented as part of Harman’s perceptual environment. In spite of their crucial differences,200 Harman and Bennett both attempt to describe a nonhuman reality – the world as it is prior to its perception and organization by human subjects, prior, that is, to the idealist’s erasure of variety.201

Harman and Bennett both, like Fuller, acknowledge the desirability of real objects.

Harman calls it “allure.” “Allure alludes to entities as they are, quite apart from any relations with or effects upon other entities in the world.”202 Allure suggests not signification but draw and attraction. It is as though the principle which, for Harman, connects the reality of objects “as they are” to their perceivable qualities is the same principle which makes the real attractive, which draws Fuller’s interest in the “kindred” stones. Allure is also a major principle that Harman’s realism shares with Bennett’s materialism. In defending a relational ontology against the OOO, for example, Bennett comments that “earthly bodies” form “working assemblages which are, as much as any individuated thing, loci of affection and allure.” 203 Bennett differs from Harman in

199. Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 163-190. 173, 174. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0163. 200. Harman, for example, rejects the term “materialism” on the grounds that “it either undermines objects from below, reducing them downward to their material underpinnings, or it overmines them from above, reducing them upward to their appearance for human beings.” Graham Harman, “Realism Without Materialism,” SubStance 40, no. 2 (2011): 52-72; 52. https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2011.0011. 201. See Bennett’s response to Harman and Morton in Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: On Vital Materialism and Object-Oriented Philosophy,” in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 224-225. 202. Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 183-203; 187. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0016. 203. Bennett, “Systems and Things,” 233. 87 emphasizing allure’s relational quality, but they share this basic claim that real (or material) objects are sites of allure.

Fuller’s rhapsody of stuff, in linking together the object-list, the perspective of the philosophical realist, and the quality of allure is a predecessor of Bennett’s and Harman’s nonhuman litanies (part of an object-oriented “counter-discourse of Romanticism”204). However, the object-orientation of Fuller’s rhapsody explicitly leads us back to the “human element,” with the interpellation of the stones as “kindred” and her demand that they reveal what it means “to be human.” Fuller’s litany ends, in other words, with the kind of re-centering of the human subject

(and elision of human-nonhuman difference), which ecotheorists like Bennett and Harman aim to avoid and critique. According to Mark Noble, in American Poetic Materialism (2015), we can find this collapse of the binary between idealism and materialism in many expressions of materialist belief. Like Schiller, Noble identifies idealism with the desire to elide differences, while he defines materialism as an “impulse towards particularity or heterogeneity.”205

Noble also notes that materialist and idealist ways of seeing, in practice, frequently converge. He takes, as an example, a passage from William James, where James claims to depict

“the idealist’s catalogue of forms designed to facilitate a ‘monstrous abridgement’ of the physical world.”206 In the quoted passage, James asks “Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the moon and the apple are, as far as their relation to the earth goes, identical.”207 This

“monstrous abridgement” by the idealist (taking apple and moon to be identical), is what Schiller

204. Morton, “Here Comes Everything,” 173. 205. Mark Noble. American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 18. Noble derives this definition of materialism from William James, as well as the definition of idealism as “an instance of psychological solipsism. . . a desire to find in [the] universe ‘no radically alien corner, but an all- pervading intimacy.’” (Noble, American Poetic Materialism, 17). 206. Noble. American Poetic Materialism, 20. 207. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908), 65-66. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/loc.ark:/13960/t6f204h0j?urlappend=%3Bseq=87, quoted in: Noble, American Poetic Materialism, 20. 88 described in the idealist’s elision of “varied instances.” However, as Noble remarks, “James’s prose suggests that enjoying an ideal intimacy with the universe amounts to participation in, rather than a negation of, the tropic heterogeneity of the material world.”208 Heterogeneity is a defining feature of the world as seen by the realist. But as Noble points out, a sense of difference and particularly is also hard-wired into the idealist’s “monstrous abridgement.” This is because the pleasure which James’s idealist takes in the identification of apple with moon is as dependent on the (logically) prior recognition of the apple and moon as distinct entities as it is on the possibility of eliding such a distinction. On a formal level, the need for this recognition of “tropic heterogeneity” manifests in the “catalogue” of particulars. Noble’s idealist also takes specific pleasure in identification with nonhuman objects: “ideal intimacy” is a category of “monstrous abridgement,” whereby the human subject discovers an identity between themselves and the

(nonhuman) objects of their attention, as in “Trenton Falls by Moonlight” where the waterfall becomes a “store” for the poet’s thoughts.

Not only is the idealist dependent for intimacy on the particularity described by the materialist, but the materialist, in turn, also “craves the sensation of intimacy that materialism itself purports to disavow.”209 Materialist and idealist perspectives, then, are interdependent: the one demands the logic of the other, and they share an attraction to the particular object. Noble’s reading of James is useful for my account of Fuller in part because it illuminates the source of the peculiar dissonance in Fuller’s letter to Sturgis: the desire for intimacy expressed at the end of her rhapsody of stuff appears to resist the celebration of particularity (and especially nonhuman particularity) which had been explicit in the passage up to that point. The “keen sympathy” with nature – which Fuller had lost in “Meditations,” and which, in the “Trenton

208. Noble, American Poetic Materialism, 20. 209. Noble, American Poetic Materialism, 24. 89

Falls” poems had led to the idealist reduction – here is central to the realist’s catalogue of objects.

It is not, then, that Fuller fails as a realist; rather her realist rhapsody evinces a fundamental aporia which, as Noble suggests, no realist or materialist position can avoid.210

Fuller’s example is unique because she is not anxious that her desire for commonality with the real might compromise the particularity which makes the real attractive. In other words, Fuller does not engage in the catalogue form naively. As her half-humorous reference to the rhapsody of “stuff” reminds us, she is aware of the catalogue’s realist pose. When she closes the rhapsody with that apostrophic turn to the stones – the demand for kinship which would appear to compromise their nonhuman alterity – Fuller is conscious of the convergence between realist and idealist stances she is enacting.

In that final apostrophe (“ye stones. . . let us know one another before we part. Tell me your secret, tell me mine. To be human is also something?”), Fuller expresses what Barbara

Johnson calls the “Orphic hope of getting a stone to talk.”211 She addresses the stones as subjects, as though they could reply to her final question (“to be human is also something?”). The Orphic fantasy of conjuring speech from stones foregrounds the idealist component of the desire for intimacy with the real by emphasizing the creative role of the poetic subject. As Fuller would later put it, “Orpheus understood nature” and “told her secrets in the form of hymns, nature as seen in the mind of God.”212 The Orphic poet wants the stones to talk but the stones’ voice and animacy is dependent on the power of the poet’s “hymns.” Apostrophe is a “form of

210. Aporia is Noble’s term for the impasse whereby the materialist tries to acknowledge the irreducible particularity of material reality only to re-impose “idealism’s commensurabilities” (American Poetic Materialism, 7). 211. Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 186. 212. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 251. 90 ventriloquism”: it “throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee.”213 It signifies not only the subject’s desire for intimacy, but also her will and poetic capacity to create that intimacy by lending her voice to the otherwise inanimate object. This is perhaps the most “monstrous” of the idealist’s abridgements: the stone is rendered an interlocutor and potential speaker only through the poet’s initial act of speech.

Fuller’s Orphic apostrophe, then, in combining attraction to the discrete object with ventriloquism, is the lyric embodiment of the convergence of idealist and realist desire. By acknowledging this convergence with the concluding turn to Orphic apostrophe, Fuller’s catalogue anticipates and supersedes the critique of ecomimesis and the litany-form in Morton’s early work: “the more convincingly I render my surroundings, the more figurative language I end up with” and “the more of a fictional ‘I’ I have.”214 Fuller’s final demand of the stones that they reveal her “secret” demonstrates that she knows the catalogue-form produces an experience of the “human element” (a sense of what it is “to be human”). Fuller acknowledges that the catalogue-form is a celebration of human attraction to the nonhuman and of desire for kinship with the material.

III. Encountering the Alterity of the Real

Fuller’s rhapsody of stuff appears at first calculated to avoid the subjective idealism implicit in the aesthetic of correspondence we saw in the “Trenton Falls” poems. But it then registers a convergence between idealist and realist desires when it culminates in Orphic apostrophe.

However, the rhapsody also contains the trace of an earlier formal experiment Fuller made in the

213. Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 185. 214. Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 30. 91 representation of the real, in the reference to “the Drachenfels of life.” “Drachenfels”215 (German for ‘dragon rock’216) is the title of an 1836 poem in which Fuller revises her landscape poetics and attempts to represent an experience of external reality not as “kindred,” or as pre-adapted to the speaker’s sympathy, but as thoroughly other.

In the poem’s opening stanzas, the speaker is “Awestruck” by the “desolation” and

“loneliness”217 of the scene, caused by the absence of humanity: “not only common life/ But human interest from this spot is far” (lines 5-6). The next two stanzas recall and revise the landscape prospect from “Catskill.” In “Catskill,” the speaker dreamt of the view to be seen

“from the eagle’s height,” before then describing the actual view of the river Hudson which, from the summit, “seems but a thread.”218 Here, in “Drachenfels,” the speaker claims:

On other heights I’ve stood And traced with curious eye the haunts of Man Seen to a thread shrunk the wide rolling flood, Cities to specks – Existence to a span.

And felt the moment proud: The mind, dilating with the wider view Faintly presaged through Earth-bred mist and cloud Our joys when Eagle-winged we shall our youth renew. (lines 9-16)

215. “Drachenfels” was not printed during Fuller’s lifetime; to my knowledge, the only time it has been printed is in the appendix to Christel-Maria Maas’s 2006 work Margaret Fullers transnationales Projekt. Fuller also refers to Caroline Sturgis having recently read the “little poem of Drachenfels” in a letter written on the 24th November 1839 (Fuller to Emerson, November 24, 1839, in Hudspeth, Letters, 2: 98). Though references to the poem being read are concentrated in Fuller’s letters from 1839, a manuscript of the poem written by Emelyn Story during the 1840s, dates the poem to 1836. (“Margaret Fuller manuscript poems, 184-?,” Margaret Fuller Papers. Ms. Am. 1450 [145], Boston Public Library. Digital Commonwealth). The manuscript I have been working from is an undated version in Fuller’s own hand: “Drachenfels: autograph manuscript poem, undated.” Margaret Fuller family papers, MS Am 1086, [9], Pages 242-243. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library. 216. Jeffrey Steele notes that “the Drachenfels, Fuller knew from her research of Rhine Ballads, was a legendary mountain on which maidens were sacrificed to a dragon.” Jeffrey Steele. Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 98. 217. Margaret Fuller, “Drachenfels: autograph manuscript poem, undated.” Margaret Fuller family papers, MS Am 1086, [9], Pages 242-243. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, lines 1-3 (hereafter cited in-text with line numbers). 218. Fuller, “Catskill,” lines 4, 11. 92

In “Catskill,” the aesthetic experience derives from the alignment of perception and an earlier flight of fantasy. In this re-telling, the diminishment of the scene (configuring the river as a

“thread”) is framed as part of a broader experience of “desolation,” whereby every element of the view is contracted, “cities to specks – Existence to a span.” The desolation then fuels the speaker’s pride. This is the paradoxical structure of the sublime– “the feeling of a momentary inhibition to the vital powers and the immediately following and all the more powerful outpouring of them.”219 An absolute loneliness, enforced by the diminishment of distant scenes plays the role of the “momentary inhibition” and is followed by a dilation of mental power and a vision of youthful renewal. These stanzas, then, revise the landscape vision of “Catskill” as sublime, rather than beautiful.

Jeffrey Steele reads “Drachenfels” as a whole in terms of sublimity, arguing that Fuller associates the “apprehension of a sublime landscape with the uncovering of an equally sublime psychological depth” and that consequently she “elicits a powerful emotional response that reaches down into the unconscious, the site of a hitherto unsuspected power.”220 I argue, however, that we cannot read this “power” as identical with the sublime dilation of the speaker’s mind. The experience of mental invigoration the speaker describes occurred in the past, “on other heights.” Back in the poem’s present moment, the speaker remarks: “no aspiring hope,/ No eager joy, nor rich remembrance here/ Could bless me” (lines 17-19). The experience of the

“Drachenfels” itself is not beautiful or sublime– the mind neither corresponds to the external world in a relation of sympathetic fit nor is it empowered by a feeling that the correspondence

219. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 128-129. 220. Jeffrey Steele, “Freeing the Prisoned Queen: the Development of Margaret Fuller’s Poetry,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1992): 142. 93 has broken down.221 In an undated letter (written after “Drachenfels”), Fuller defines this

“unsuspected power” which the poem will identify only as a “force feared yet loved” (line 35) and a “power which life cannot disown” (line 44), as the daemonical: “As to the Daemonical, I know not that I can say to you anything more precise than you find from Goethe... I intimated it in the little piece on the Drachenfels.” The daemonical (or daemonic) she claims is

“unconscious.” 222 But it is not, as this might imply, solely a mental faculty. Rather Fuller suggests we also “trace” the daemonic in “volcanic workings, in a boding position of lights, in whispers of the wind, which has no pedigree, in deceitful invitations of the water, in the sullen rock which never shall find a voice.” She claims, “we speak of a mystery, a dread; we shudder, but we approach still nearer, and a part of our nature listens, sometimes answers to this influence.”223 The lights, winds, stone and “volcanic workings” – all processes and objects of nonhuman nature – manifest a “mystery” which compels the speaker to “approach still nearer.”

We can even hear an echo of Neal’s aeolian poetics in that attraction to the “wind that has no pedigree.” The experience of the daemonic, like the experience of the aeolian, comes with an ambivalent sense that inanimate nature is somehow motivated, that there is some intentional will at work even where there is no designing subject in the rocks, or water, or “volcanic workings.”

The claim that some part of human nature “listens” and responds to the mystery of the daemonic is a version of the impulse for intimacy with the real which Fuller will express in the rhapsody of stuff. However, here Fuller’s account of the daemonic recognizes the rock’s silence

(whereas in the rhapsody, she hails stones as potential speakers). The daemonic awakes a “part

221. The invocation of the sublime and its felt absence in “Drachenfels” prefigures Fuller’s disappointment at her experience of Niagara Falls in Summer on the Lakes. Christina Zwarg argues that Fuller “appears to have experienced the blockage usually affiliated with Kant’s mathematical sublime as she stood before the natural might of the falls, but little of the compensatory pleasure” (Christina Zwarg, Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading, [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995], 100). 222. Fuller to an unknown recipient, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Vol. 6, 1850 and Undated, ed. Robert Hudspeth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 141. 223. Fuller to an unknown recipient, in Hudspeth, Letters 6: 141, 142. 94 of our nature” shared with nonhuman nature and compels human subjects towards the nonhuman and inanimate world; but kinship with the nonhuman is never attained. The deceit of the water and sullenness of the rock are symptoms of the daemonic’s refusal of intimacy, which culminates when we hear that “if it could meet you on the highway and be familiarly known as an acquaintance, [it] could not exist”224 Though it is able to affect the subject through material objects it is never known in itself.

According to Kate Rigby, “ecopoetry” is “that kind of writing which responds to, without being able to replicate, the experience of entering into the light of things.” In attempting to represent the daemonic allure of matter without demanding an experience of intimacy or sympathy with the speaker, “Drachenfels” exemplifies Rigby’s “negative ecopoetics.”225 The poem responds to the draw of the daemonic, while registering the impossibility of fully comprehending it. In one image, daemonic power appears to belong simultaneously to human interiority and to the rocky crag (in a manner reminiscent of the idealism at the beginning of

“Trenton Falls by Moonlight”):

Home of the Dragon brood! None shall thy secret penetrate, save he Who from their laughing demon mystery The phantoms of his being daring wooed.

And, seeking Truth alone, While he the angel in his being feels, Shrinks not from what reveals Another power which life cannot disown. (lines 37-44)

The “secret” of the crag is, in some sense, available to experience only via introspection.

However, the speaker represents the experience as one of obscurity and difficulty: introspection here consists not of immediacy but of an encounter with “laughing demon mystery.” One

224. Fuller to an unknown recipient, in Hudspeth, Letters 6: 142. 225. Kate Rigby, “Material Spirit as Negative Ecopoetics,” 124, 111. 95 implication of the need to woo internal “phantoms” is that this experience of the crag’s secret is non-sensory, proceeding via reflection rather than sense perception.226 In “Drachenfels,” though, the non-sensory route leads to “mystery” rather than to the smooth appropriation of matter as a mere extension of thought (as in “Trenton Falls by Moonlight”). This is a non-sensory mode of experience, but it is one that seems to challenge, rather than affirm, the mind’s agency.

Crucially, the lyric’s speaker does not claim this introspective experience of mystery for herself but displaces it onto an imagined and absent subject – “he” who must woo the “phantoms of his being.” The conceit is not just that the crag’s “secret” is mysterious, but that it is not subject to experience at all within the lyric present of the poem; our speaker does not apprehend it. As an object of experience, then, the secret of the crag is displaced from the poem’s environment. This displacement is made explicit a couple of stanzas earlier:

A high mysterious mood Breathes from the scene like that which might be known To some keen spirit from the shackles flown Of human flesh and blood,

New to its present lot A moment poised in space Where, known terrestrial laws prevailing not It finds not yet its place. (lines 21-28)

Here the daemonic “mood” of the scene is imagined as comparable to something a newly disembodied spirit would recognize. Again, the speaker avoids certainties (it is only “like that which might be known” by the spirit) and the term “mood” connotes both private, subjective experience, and something shared like atmosphere. The spirit has escaped from “human flesh and blood” but “finds not yet its place.” One implication of these images of disembodiment and

226. In its withdrawal from sense-perception, the daemonic differs from Beam’s reading of spirit in Fuller’s flower sketches and Woman in the Nineteenth-Century which is “sensuous” (Beam, Style, Gender, and Fantasy, 57) but which like the daemonic is also impersonal: it “actively re-formulates the world at its most basic material levels” (98). 96 displacement is that the spirit lacks orientation towards the external world. It is dislocated, almost a subject, but without a mode of relation to the world. The paradox then is that the

“mysterious mood” (daemonic allure) is recognizable – available – to an imagined figure who is incapable of relation and experience. Daemonic allure appears here as a subjective state (a

“mood”), and yet independent of the experiencing human subject. The “semantic opacity”227 of this image – its embrace of paradox and resistance to resolution – is part of what differentiates

“Drachenfels” from the Trenton Falls poems. But the specific content of the paradox is important: the fit between mind and world in “Catskill” is replaced with an admission that the force of attraction felt before the landscape prospect, evades – even as it overpowers – the landscape subject. The daemonic here grounds an experience of matter without intimacy, an experience which preserves the alterity of the real by resisting correspondence between mind and matter.

As in the rhapsody’s closing apostrophe, the speaker of “Drachenfels” directly addresses the crag. But this apostrophe is not Orphic – it does not hail the crag as an interlocutor. Instead it presents a turn in the poem, away from questions of perspective – how and by whom the crag’s mood or secret might be known – and towards a theory of the daemonic (as inextricably entwined with the material):

Like thee, O crag, that power, When all material forms shall pass away, Melting in heavenly day At the dread trumpet-hour;

‘Neath the all-seeing Eye Mysterious no more, like vapor driven Before the eye of this our visible heaven Shall yield with all time’s fabrics to eternity. (lines 45-52)

227. Rigby, “Material Spirit as Negative Ecopoetics,” 123. 97

Fuller presents the comparison between the “power” and the “crag” in a single sentence across two stanzas, with the predicate “shall yield… to eternity” only arriving in the final line. This yielding to eternity is what the “power” and the “crag” share (they are both temporal, rather than eternal); however, the effect of foregrounding the comparative phrase – “Like thee” – while hiding the predicate in the final line is to suspend the fulfillment of the simile. In other words, we don’t know in what precise way power and crag are alike until the very end of the poem. The several intervening clauses (lines 47-51) are also made to agree grammatically simultaneously with “thee” (the crag), “that power,” and “all material forms.” As a result, it could be the

“power,” the crag, or matter in general which is “mysterious no more” under the “all-seeing Eye” of judgment. On a narrative level, this conflation and ambiguity is inconsequential since the claim being made is that the power will “yield” like everything else “to eternity.”

However, the effect of the conflation on our understanding of what the daemonic consists of is significant. If it cannot be grammatically untangled from materiality in general this parallels the fact that it cannot be metaphysically untangled from matter either: the daemonic and the material are co-extensive and co-terminus. They share a fundamental temporality: the daemonic will melt away when all materiality, including the crag, melts away. While the daemonic precedes the experience of materiality and is not itself material, it cannot be isolated from matter and it will not outlast materiality in the manner of an immortal soul.

The daemonic is not in itself material but, as Fuller comments in her gloss on the poem, it is “indissolubly linked with the existence of matter.”228 As an immaterial and immanent principle which accompanies materiality, the daemonic is “incorporeal,” an emanation of that “dimension of ideality that suffuses all things, enabling them to signify and generate representation.” Grosz’s account, the incorporeal “binds together ideality and materiality… in terms of their thorough

228. Fuller to an unknown recipient, in Hudspeth, Letters 6: 142. 98 interplay and accompaniment,”229 and I would argue that the daemonic is “incorporeal” in the sense that it precedes and brings into contact the subject and the material object of their experience.

Fuller draws her concept of the daemonic from Goethe’s infamously ambiguous description of the term in the twentieth book of his autobiography, Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Warheit). In an 1841 essay on Goethe, published in The Dial, Fuller translates a portion of this description:

The boy believed in nature, in the animate and inanimate, the intelligent and unconscious, to discover somewhat which manifested itself only through contradiction, and therefore could not be comprehended by any conception, much less defined by a word. It was not divine, for it seemed without reason; not human because without understanding; not devilish because it worked to good; not angelic because it often betrayed a petulant love of mischief. It was like chance in that it proved no sequence; it suggested the thought of Providence, because it indicated connexion. To this, all our limitations seem penetrable; it seemed to play at will with all the elements of our being; it compressed time and dilated space. Only in the impossible did it seem to delight, and to cast the possible aside with disdain. This existence, which seemed to mingle with others, sometimes to separate, sometimes to unite, I called the Dämonisch, after the example of the ancients and others who have observed somewhat similar.230

Readers of Goethe have often commented on the ambiguity of Goethe’s definition of the daemonic. Kirk Wetters, for example, asks “What if [the demonic] is not a term or a concept but only a metaphor, an image, a stand-in for variable unknowns and, by extension and personification, for the unknown?”231

229. Grosz, Incorporeal, 250, 251. 230. Margaret Fuller, “Goethe,” in Life Without and Life Within, 23-60; 32-33. For discussion of Fuller’s translation and interpretation of Goethe’s works, see: Colleen Glenney Boggs, Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773-1892 (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 91-110; and Christina Zwarg, Feminist Conversations, 59-96. 231. Kirk Wetters, Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 3. Wetters draws here on Hans Blumenberg’s argument that Goethe’s “demonic” refers to the “unresolved remainder of his experience” and consequently has given rise to an “interpretive eagerness” among his critics, a desire to interpret and explain a term which seems to resist interpretation. Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 401. 99

It is true that, among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics, Goethe’s daemonic has been taken to represent such a variety of contradictory ideas, that the term can appear almost fundamentally ambiguous. However, for Fuller the importance of the daemonic is not simply that it refers to the unknown or unapproachable. It refers, rather to a necessary condition of the two

(seemingly opposed) modes of knowledge and attention, realist and idealist. We can perhaps see in Goethe’s characterization of the daemonic, as that “which seemed to mingle with others, sometimes to separate, sometimes to unite,” a figure for the convergence of realist and idealist modes. The daemonic is responsible for particularizing (and therefore insisting upon realist difference) as much as for uniting disparate entities (and therefore abridging that difference).

Fuller’s use of the term to describe an incorporeal principle, grounding both the realist’s experience of alterity and the idealist’s experience of identity, bears an important resemblance to one arguably isolated twentieth-century interpretation of the daemonic. The political theorist Eric

Voegelin, in his 1933 History of the Race Idea, identifies Goethe’s daemonic as part of the emergence in German thought of a post-Christian definition of human being; the daemonic, in

Voegelin’s History, belongs to the Romantic vitalist discourse of organic life. According to

Voegelin, the Christian “image” of the human is dualistic, consisting of an immaterial rational soul located within a material body (“By virtue of his soul, man is united with the divine pneuma; by virtue of his body […] he partakes of transitoriness”232). Influenced by the natural hisotrian Friedrich Blumenbach’s vitalist concept of the “formative drive”233 (bildungstrieb), late eighteenth-century philosophers, starting with Kant, began to shift towards a tripartite understanding of the human. As well as a mechanistic material body and a rational soul,

232. Eric Voegelin, History of the Race Idea from Ray to Carus, trans, Ruth Hein, ed. Klaus Vondlung, vol. 3 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 4. 233. Voegelin, History of the Race Idea, 123. 100

Voegelin identifies in Kant (and then in Schiller and Goethe) the emergence of a third term, neither wholly material nor immaterial – organic life. In Kant, he claims,

[we] find the strictest separation of the eternal rational substance, which he sees as the true human nature, from the sensory dimension, which he considers a subordinate, evil realm, and, contrary to this devaluation of what is natural, we get the first full view of the phenomenon of organic life as an autonomous realm between mechanistic nature and the realm of reason.234

Organic life is the drive which determines and facilitates the organization and maintenance of the body. It is the force which organizes the growth of the individual body according to the individual’s membership of a particular species. It is the human version of this drive – rather than the possession of reason – which distinguishes the human being from other animals.

Voegelin points out, however, that in the work of the Schiller and Goethe, the idea of the organic drive is transformed into the concept of the daemonic, and re-envisioned as the force which distinguishes specific exceptional individuals from other human individuals. For Goethe and Schiller, the daemonic is a drive (present only in perfected individuals) which unites the sensory apparatus of the body with the free rational power of the soul; while for Goethe,

Napoleon best exemplified the daemonic man, for Schiller and others, it was Goethe himself who seemed to manifest the daemonic:

The spring of beauty flows unsullied from the purity of his “demonic” nature. And the demon in his unity of the supreme human-being [Mensch-Sein] is the model of the “beautiful life” that can be led only by the “beautiful soul,” in which sensory nature and morality are united.235

For Voegelin, then, the demonic is the intellectual descendant of Blumenbach’s “formative drive,” and it is one term in a history of classification and distinction. Specifically, it represents the transformation of a distinction between species (and the definitive quality of the human species) into the distinction between exceptional persons and merely ordinary imperfect people.

234. Voegelin, History of the Race Idea, 6. 235. Voegelin, History of the Race Idea, 161. 101

For Voegelin, the daemonic’s capacity to ground ontological difference in this way is ultimately important as an intellectual precursor to the racial theory of Carl Gustav Carus. In Voegelin’s account, the daemonic represents a subcategory of that innate, vitalist force which – as we saw in the Introduction – is central to organicist Romantic poetics.

For Fuller, however, the daemonic is not organic nor is its significance primarily ontological. Fuller’s use of the daemonic to describe a principle which is “indissolubly linked” with matter does seem to prefigure Voegelin’s placement of the demonic within a tradition of mediatory terms for life (poised between soul and body). Fuller and Voegelin both emphasize what Wetters and other readers of the daemonic tend to downplay: the daemonic is a response to the philosophical problem of the relationship between matter and mind. However, unlike

Voegelin, Fuller does not see the daemonic as a means of ontologically distinguishing the human from other species or for making racial distinctions among people. For Fuller, the daemonic is not, in fact, an organicist or vitalist principle. (Part of what is remarkable for Fuller about the daemonic is that it grounds ambivalent experiences of attraction to inanimate matter.236)

The daemonic provides Fuller with the grounds for a theory of relational experience, rather than the ontological grounds for making distinctions among human beings. It is a quasi- aesthetic category – not, strictly speaking, an ontological category. The daemonic is the incorporeal mechanism of realist “allure.” In this way, Fuller’s daemonic represents a departure

236. Fuller claims that the daemonic “has given rise to the fables of wizard, enchantress, and the like; these beings are scarcely good, yet not necessarily bad. Power tempts them. They draw their skills from the dead, because their being is coeval with that of matter, and matter is the mother of death” (Fuller to an unknown recipient, in Hudspeth, Letters 6: 142). Attributing the daemonic to nonhuman world in general, then, is not tantamount to a vitalist materialism. Rather, materiality in Fuller’s account is, by definition, not alive. This is especially important for current Romanticist ecocriticism since so many variations of the recent posthuman turn to ontology proceed according to a vitalist logic (the discovery of life where we thought there was merely nonlife) directly inspired by Romantic theories of the organic. Fuller insists, by contrast, that to experience the weird allure of the daemonic is not to experience something living. The “sullen” rock may appear to be alive in its capacity to affect, attract, repulse us, but to believe this is true would be a mistake. As with Neal’s return to an equivocal purposiveness in nature, Fuller’s daemonic makes the appearance of intention palpable without confirming its reality (and without transforming that appearance into an innate, vital force). 102 from vitalist discourse and a shift from vitalist ontology towards an account of quasi-aesthetic experience. It is worth returning here to one of the lines from Goethe in the passage Fuller translated for The Dial: the daemonic “was like chance in that it proved no sequence; it suggested the thought of Providence, because it indicated connexion.” The daemonic allows us to believe we are simultaneously in the presence of “Providence” and of mere “chance.” In the way that it conjures (and yet undermines) the feeling of providential design, Fuller’s daemonic recalls Neal’s “weight of prophecy.” Fuller is more invested than Neal, however, in the way that the nonhuman alterity of nature becomes palpable in these moments of perceptual equivocation.

This is why I suggested we read “Drachenfels” as an example of “negative ecopoetics.” Fuller tries explicitly to represent an experience of attraction to nature that is neither beautiful nor sublime, but rather foregrounds an awareness of material nature’s evasive alterity.

Drachenfels, then, registers the draw and attraction of the material world. But the poem’s form eschews the detail-rich particularity we saw in the ‘rhapsody of stuff.’ “Drachenfels” offers an alternative to ecorhapsody. It attempts to address the nonhuman, non-subjective mechanism by which experience of the material (and, specifically, an attraction to the material) occurs. It is, as it were, a representation of reality as it precedes realism – of reality as it precedes and pre- exists the realist’s desire for particularity. It is for this reason that “Drachenfels” sets up a landscape prospect and yet doesn’t describe the features of a visible landscape. It is a deliberate negation of both the idealist poetics of identity and the realist poetics of particularity; “material forms,” distinct from one another, exist independently of any subject-observer. But it is the daemonic “power,” equally inherent in all material forms, that makes the quality of particularity or discreteness available to experience.

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IV. The Poetics of Substitution

Embedded in chapter three of Fuller’s 1844 Summer on the Lakes, “Ganymede to his Eagle” develops the revision of the landscape form begun in “Drachenfels” beyond the poetics of negation. The poem revises the classical myth of Ganymede, a Trojan prince abducted by Jove

(in the form of an eagle) and taken to be the Gods’ immortal cupbearer on Olympus.237 The poem, “composed on the height called the Eagle’s Nest, Oregon, Rock River July 4th, 1843,” is presented in place of a landscape prospect. Fuller begins by establishing the beauty of the scene, commenting “Wo to all country folks that never saw this spot, never swept an enraptured gaze over the prospect that stretched beneath.” But rather than describing the prospect, she turns to the

“height” itself, remarking on the flowers which “decked” the “bluff,” including a “dark flower, whose cup rose lonely on a tall stem. . . Here I thought, or rather saw what the Greek expresses under the form of Jove’s darling, Ganymede, and the following took form.” The poem itself follows with the explanation that it is “Suggested by a Work of Thorwaldsen’s,”238 a reference to

Bertel Thorvaldsen’s sculpture, “Ganymede and his Eagle,” which Fuller had probably seen in

1839 at the Boston Athenaeum.239

We can see in “Ganymede to his Eagle” Fuller’s renewed attempt to represent material nature in its alterity, unmoored from the demands of intimacy or kinship. In formal terms, the decision to invoke a landscape perspective (on the “bluff” of the “Eagle’s Nest”) without depicting (as in “Catskill”) the particular discrete objects of the prospect is a negation of the

237. See: Homer, Iliad, 20.232; Plato, Phaedrus 255c; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.152 238. Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes. In Steele, The Essential Margaret Fuller, 101. 239. Martha L. Berg and Alice de V. Perry notes that Thorvaldsen’s statue of Ganymede was “first exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum Gallery in 1839.” (Martha L. Berg, Alice de V. Perry, and Margaret Fuller, “‘The Impulses of Human Nature’: Margaret Fuller’s Journal from June through October 1844,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 102 (1990): 38-126; 71, n. 62) See also: Margaret Fuller, “Athenaeum Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture,” Dial 1 (October 1840), 260-264; 263. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.31924007287968?urlappend=%3Bseq=279. 104 landscape aesthetic comparable to that in “Drachenfels.”240 But whereas the apophatic poetics of

“Drachenfels” tended towards abstraction (for example, the reference to unspecified “material forms”), the poetic strategy in “Ganymede” is substitution. The poem’s dramatic monologue stands in for the landscape view, and Fuller frames the poem explicitly as a remediation, both of the myth and of Thorvaldsen’s sculpture. In “Ganymede” Fuller develops a mode of “semantic opacity”241 rooted not only in ambiguity and the erasure of particularity (as it is in

“Drachenfels”) but in the foregrounding of mediation itself.

The poem recalls the loss of “keen sympathy” we saw in “Meditations” as Ganymede describes his experience of nature before having met the eagle: he claims “My starlike eyes the stars would fondly greet, / Yet win no greeting from the circling blue.”242 The correspondence between subject and world is established in the echo between “starlike eyes” and “stars” and dramatized in his offering of a fond “greeting.” But the greeting is not mutual and Ganymede’s desire for intimacy with nature is rebuffed. The next stanza offers renewed hope of intimacy, however, when he claims the “lightning births my nature seemed to share, / They told the secrets of its fiery frame” (lines 49-50). As in “Meditations,” lightning signifies the structure (here, the

“frame”) shared by nature and the speaker’s interiority alike. This image of intimacy is undermined though as the speaker continues: “They answered me, then left me still more lone, /

They told me that the thought which ruled the world / As yet no sail upon its course had furled”

(lines 55-57). While “Meditations” looks back nostalgically to a point when the speaker felt sympathy with nature, Ganymede remembers alienation. We should read Ganymede’s desire for

240. Christina Zwarg and Robert E. Abrams have shown that Fuller finds traditional landscape aesthetics (and especially the sublime) inadequate throughout Summer on the Lakes. For these critics, the subversion of neoclassical and romantic form is tied to Fuller’s partial sense of “indigenous perspective” (Robert E. Abrams, Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance: Topographies of Skepticism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 98). See also: Christina Zwarg, Feminist Conversations, 97-124. 241. Rigby, “Material Spirit as Negative Ecopoetics,” 123. 242. Margaret Fuller “Ganymede to his Eagle,” in Summer on the Lakes. In Steele, The Essential Margaret Fuller, 102, 41-42 (hereafter cited in-text with line numbers). 105 the return of the eagle – which for Fuller is not Jove but Ganymede’s “brother friend” (line 7) – as a desire in part for transcendence. He claims that on first seeing the eagle he knew it “must upbear my earthlier form into the realms of air” (line 69). He sees the eagle then as a means of direct access to the “thought which ruled the world,” Jove’s transcendent law which the lightning had seemed to reveal. In this sense, the drive for transcendence is also a desire to reclaim the lost intimacy with physical nature.

At the end of the poem, Ganymede returns to the desire for transcendence (hoping that the eagle will “bear him often to the serene heights” [line 98]), and for direct contact with the divine. Daniel Malachuk reads Fuller’s Ganymede as a model of a kind of personal growth

(“bildung”) enabled by the poem’s pastoral “middle landscape” and he treats Ganymede’s

“realization of the Divine in the human,”243 facilitated by the eagle, as a success. In the poem’s present setting, however, the eagle is absent and Ganymede pines after it: “Hast thou forgotten earth, forgotten me,” he asks. It is “only with” the eagle, Ganymede claims in the third stanza, that he “can know that peaceful pause / In which we catch the flowing strain of love, / Which binds our dim fates to the throne of Jove” (lines 17, 20-22). Though Ganymede later asks for transcendence, in this earlier image the eagle appears to have more modest powers. Ganymede’s actual experience of the eagle is earthly: it facilitated only a “pause” in which together they hear a “strain” that “binds” them to Jove. The image juxtaposes several layers of mediation between

Ganymede and Jove. The eagle mediates between heaven and earth; but despite Ganymede’s desire for “rapture” (line 101) the eagle does not deliver him to the gods, and the poem leaves him on earth: the “realization of the divine” has not been achieved.

243. Daniel Malachuk, “Green Exaltadas: Margaret Fuller, Transcendentalist Conservationism, and Antebellum Women’s Nature Writing,” in Toward a Female Geneaology of Transcendentalism, ed. Jana L. Argersinger and Phyllis Cole (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 255, 258, 260. 106

The eagle facilitates a relation of desire (the “strain of love”) in a manner that recalls daemonic allure; but whereas in “Drachenfels,” the daemonic receives neither name nor emblem, in “Ganymede,” Fuller explicitly casts the eagle as a “sacred sign” or “omen” (lines 74 and 75).

The eagle is a “sign” of Jove’s law, the “thought which ruled the world.” The lightning had once suggested to Ganymede that a direct apprehension of this natural law (and a consequent intimate correspondence with that world) was possible. But now the eagle stands as a “sacred sign” of natural law, rather than a means of intimacy with nature. As a sign or omen, it is a substitution for the experience of intimacy or sympathy with nature. Colleen Glenney Boggs argues that in

Summer on the Lakes, Fuller anticipates Paul de Man’s account of “allegory” which “designates primarily a distance in relation to its own wording, and. . . prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self.”244 Allegory foregrounds a relation of nonidentity between word and object and thus of nonidentity between self and other. The eagle functions allegorically in that its key referent (the experience of natural law) remains absent from the poem. Additionally – in a pattern that recalls Neal’s repeated re-interpretations of nature’s aeolian music – Ganymede re-reads and misreads the eagle throughout: it is a facilitator of the “peaceful pause,” an agent of transcendence, and finally a vehicle of “rapture.” In its referential excess, Ganymede’s eagle resembles Fuller’s adaptation of flower language which, in Beam’s reading, exceeds “a lexical economy of signs and their definition.” 245 The figure of the eagle – over-interpreted, multivalent, yet absent from the poem’s present scene – oscillates between the poetics of allegorical excess and the poetics of negation. The eagle as an omen, then, signifies Jove’s natural law through substitution, without granting immediate intimacy with nature. In the same way, the poem as a whole functions as a substitution for the landscape prospect. The poem is Fuller’s remediation of

244. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight, 187-228; 207, quoted in Boggs, Transnationalism and American Literature, 104. 245. Beam, Style, Gender, and Fantasy, 42. 107 the “dark flower” she finds at the bluff of the Eagle’s Nest. Her attention to the flower rather than the prospect emblematizes her turn away from the egocentric aesthetics of landscape. The poem then embodies her alternative to that aesthetic, combining allegory with the strategy of negation that she had used earlier in “Drachenfels.”

“Ganymede to his Eagle” and “Drachenfels” are both ecopoetic experiments. At these sites of potential landscape prospect, Fuller rejects the form of ecomimesis and ecorhapsody in favor of a poetics of withdrawal on the one hand and of allegory and remediation on the other.

Both poems respond to the allure of nonhuman nature – the ground of the realist’s desire for particularity and the idealist’s for intimacy. At the same time, both poems recognize the alterity of nonhuman nature, its opacity and autonomy. Ganymede’s eagle in particular represents the means of intimate relation with the landscape (with nature’s “stars” and “lightning births”). But its absence from the poem cautions us against optimism. Like daemonic allure, the power signified by the eagle may well be ideal (that is, spiritual or immaterial), but it refuses the subject’s control. Fuller finds in nature an ideal principle – “the thought which ruled the world”

– that seems to draw the attention and desire of the human subject from without. It precedes and facilitates the attraction to landscape. In conventional landscape aesthetics, however, this impersonal ideal is subsumed and lost in the correspondence of mind and nature. “Ganymede to his Eagle” and “Drachenfels” by contrast offer a poetics of dis-correspondence. They do not celebrate unity or harmony with nature. Instead they foreground the opacity of the nonhuman, its alterity, and its ability to exceed our comprehension.

Chapter Three: “Let us Live Alone”: Adah Isaacs Menken’s Aesthetics of Genius

I. Introduction

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While drafting her biography in the early 1860s, the actor, poet, and essayist Adah Isaacs

Menken remarks, “I have always believed myself to be possessed of two souls, one that lives on the surface of life, pleasing and pleased; the other as deep and as unfathomable as the ocean; a mystery to me and all who know me.” The first soul, she explains, expresses itself in her theatrical career, for which, by the time of her death in 1868, she would become an international celebrity: “the one, of the surface, enables me to infuse its very breath into the dance.” It is this surface soul which “[plays] the coarsest farce, and the broadest vulgarisms of comedy and melo- drama, until the whole city may exclaim: ‘What soul! what earnestness and fire!’”246 This “soul” and “earnestness” was visible, she recalls, especially in what would become her most famous stage role: as the hero of Henry Milner’s Mazeppa: or The Wild Horse of Tartary (an 1831 stage adaptation of the poem by Byron), Menken was tied, apparently naked, to a horse which would then be made to gallop up “mimic mountains”247 at the back of the stage.248

When performing, Menken comments, “as long as the piece lasts, I see and hear nothing else. I feel nothing but the character I represent.”249 This first soul, then, motivates a form of art

(theatrical performance) that transfixes the gaze of her audience, while also wholly occupying her own capacity for experience (so that during the performance, she sees, hears, and feels

“nothing but the character”). Stage acting, then, transfixes Menken’s attention in the same way it

246. Adah Isaacs Menken, “Some Notes of her Life in Her Own Hand,” in Infelicia and Other Writings, ed. Gregory Eiselein (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), 199-220; 203. Menken sent the “Notes” to her friend Augustin Daly who published them in the New-York Times after her death in 1868 (199). 247. Menken, “Notes,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 203. 248. On Menken’s performance in Mazeppa, see: Renée Sentilles, Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 90-114. For an analysis of Milner’s Mazeppa in relation to other dramatic works and to nineteenth-century theatre, see: Lucy Barnes, “A Crowded Stage: The Legitimate Borrowings of Henry Milner’s Mazeppa,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42, no. 1 (2016): 50-65. https://doi.org/0.1177/1748372715616795; and Tiziana Morosetti, “From Byron to Byron: Mazeppa and the Tartars in Nineteenth-Century British Theatre,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42, no. 2 (2016): 228– 245. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748372716636550. 249. Menken, “Notes,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 203. 109 does her audience’s attention. Counter-intuitively, Menken represents her own perception of the

“character” she is performing as though she is spectator.

By contrast, her second soul “breathes” through her poetry in a manner that is mysterious both to audiences and to herself:

I have written these wild soul-poems in the stillness of midnight, and when waking to the world next day, they were to me the deepest mystery. I could not understand them; did not know but what I ought to laugh at them; feared to publish them and often submitted them privately to literary friends to tell me if they could see a meaning in their wild intensity. They were received by the New-York Sunday Mercury, whose literary editor, Mr. R. H. Newell, was pleased to term me the greatest and most original poetess of the day. All poems were widely copied, and many translated into the German and French. They are strange and beautiful to me, for as I read them, I do not see in them a part of myself; they do not seem at all familiar to me. And yet I know that the soul that prompted every word and line is somewhere within me, but not to be called at my bidding – only to wait the inspiration of God.250

She asks friends if they can see a meaning in the “wild intensity” of her poems which she cannot detect herself. The poems are unfamiliar, apparently uninterpretable (though they are “widely copied”), and this is part of their attraction: they are “strange and beautiful.” The final sentence is especially telling: the poems are strange “And yet I know that the soul that prompted every word and line is somewhere within me, but not to be called at my bidding.” We can hear an unresolved oscillation in that double disjunction between a sense that these poems are her own and a belief that they proceed from some divine source she doesn’t control.

My reading of Menken’s poetry begins by taking seriously her decision here to draw a stark distinction between her poetry and her theatrical performances. In particular, what interests me here is the way that Menken’s poetry – in her own characterization – appears to resist a reading audience, so that not only do they present a “mystery” to Menken herself but she even feels some reticence about publishing them. I am interested not in the literal claim that she might have decided not to publish, but in the idea that the poems come to represent for Menken a type

250. Menken, “Notes,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 203-204. 110 of private – even unshareable – experience. Although Menken published poetry during the late

1850s while living in Texas and then in Cincinnati,251 it wasn’t until 1860 after she had moved to

New York and joined the Bohemian community associated with Pfaff’s Tavern that she began writing the experimental free-verse which she published in the Sunday Mercury – the works she refers to here as her “wild soul-poems.” In the late 1860s, Menken planned to republish her free- verse poems in a single volume. The result was the collection, Infelicia, published in August

1868, a week after her death.252

I focus in this chapter on these free-verse poems, and in particular, on what I take to be

Menken’s cultivation of an asocial poetics – a kind of poetry characterized by its resistance to being read. My central aim is to trace the relationship between Menken’s withdrawal from a communal or shareable model of aesthetic experience – like that famously theorized by

Immanuel Kant as the “sensus communis”253 – and her representation of a form of dis- correspondence between mind and nature like that we saw in chapter two in Margaret Fuller’s poetry. My contention is that the resistance to an aesthetic of correspondence is fundamental to her withdrawal from the demands of the sensus communis.

Although I argue that Menken in her critique of the aesthetics of correspondence develops a poetic mode of dis-correspondence comparable to that we saw in Fuller’s poetry,

Menken is far less interested in nature itself than Fuller. Her poetry presents a form of “negative ecopoetics”254 without an explicit emphasis on the love of nature. Menken’s ambivalence about

251. For an account of Menken’s life before her move to New York, see: Renée M. Sentilles, Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 22-49. 252. For details regarding Menken’s plans for the publication of Infelicia, see her letters to her publisher, John Camden Hotten, reprinted in Eiselein, Infelicia and Other Writings, 240-241. 253. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 173. 254. Rigby, “Material Spirit as Negative Ecopoetics,” 111. 111 nature can be seen in a passage from her longer poem, “Dying.” The poem relates the speaker’s distress as she contemplates her own death:

I should have wrapt up my breathing in the naked bosom of Nature, and she would have kissed me back to sweetest comfort, and I would have drawn up from her heart draughts of crusted nectar and promises of eternal joys. Oh! it is not the glittering garniture of God's things that come quivering into the senses, that makes our lives look white through the windings of the wilderness. It is the soul's outflow of purple light that clashes up a music with the golden blood of strong hearts.255

The first line imagines intimacy with Nature along sentimental lines – intimate contact with nature would give comfort and possibly also some hint at religious consolation: the phrase

“promises of eternal joy” suggests that the comforts of this intimacy with nature foreshadow a heavenly meeting with God. The image of nature then changes. Nature is suddenly recast as the

“glittering garniture of God’s things that come quivering into the senses.” The image suggests that the created world is as aesthetically appealing as ornamental decoration – “glittering garniture” – but the speaker doesn’t endorse this aesthetic appeal, saying instead that it fails to make “our lives look white through the windings of the wilderness.” The poem never fully explains what this latter image refers to, but it does seem to be the case that the speaker is dissatisfied with the aestheticization of nature.

To be clear, I don’t think Menken gives up on the attraction to nature altogether. Rather, she gives up on the desire for an intimacy with nature premised on an experience of the natural world as “glittering garniture.” A certain kind of aestheticization of nature is the problem. As I suggested above, Menken’s poems present a resistance to aesthetic experience insofar as that experience is defined by communal standards of taste. Although this is not stated explicitly in

“Dying,” I would suggest that the problem with the “glittering garniture of things” is that it belongs to an aesthetics of spectacle which imposes a predetermined perception of beauty on the

255. Adah Isaacs Menken, “Dying,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 111- 115; 114. 112 experiencing subject. The alternative to this imposition is an assertion of individual aesthetic creativity – what she calls in the last line of the above passage, “the soul's outflow of purple light.” We should read the “soul’s outflow of purple light” as akin to the “wild soul-poems” she discusses in her autobiographical “Notes.” If we read the description of her poems in the “Notes” in conjunction with this imagery from “Dying,” we start to see an association between her poetry’s withdrawal from the communal aesthetics she locates in the theatre and her dissatisfaction with the aestheticization nature.

I suggested above that the image of nature as a source of comfort and a site of piety was a sentimental image. As Renée Sentilles points out, Menken’s poetry combines “sentimental symbols and language” with “romantic themes and styles.”256 I want to clarify that Menken’s critique of the aesthetics of correspondence effectively involves not only a rejection of

Romanticism’s organic unity between mind and nature, but also, in places, a rejection of sentimentalism’s nature tropes. In effect Menken does not discriminate between sentimentalism and Romanticism. The target of her critique is the post-Kantian aesthetic theory which underpins the Romantic understanding of nature. But, as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon argues, the same aesthetic theory shares a great deal with sentimentalism, including a fundamental concern with the possibility of universally communicable experience.257 As such, Menken’s a-social poetics involves as much a withdrawal from traditional sentimentalism as from canonical Romanticism.

In what remains of this first section of the chapter, I give an overview of the critical scholarship on Menken, which has tended to read her poetry as fundamentally social: for the

256. Renée M. Sentilles, Performing Menken, 70. 257. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon argues that “It is the subjective feeling of freedom and personhood that eighteenth- century aesthetic theory links to the ideal of human freedom and the (putatively) universal rights of man that are central to liberal political theory. In related terms, sentimentalism links the capacity of individuals to feel deeply (often, to suffer) to an essential, shared humanity.” Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Sentimental Aesthetics,” American Literature 76, no. 3 (September 2004): 495-523; 500. It is, in part, the framing of the “subjective feeling of freedom” in terms of the primacy of a capacity for shared experience which Menken resists in her free-verse poetry. 113 majority of Menken’s recent readers, her poems are attempts both at self-representation as well as the representation of other voices. In contrast to this lyric reading of Menken, I argue that we can see in her poetry an adaptation of the aesthetic concept of genius. Menken adopts the figure of the isolated and eccentric genius as a way of representing aesthetic experience which refuses to become shareable or communal. In the second and third sections of the chapter, I analyze

Menken’s poetics of dis-correspondence in depth and situate it in relation to her experimentation with lyric temporality.

Although I locate in Menken’s poetry a withdrawal from the scene of public reception which Menken herself associates with theatre, I am not suggesting that her poetry articulates a kind of unconstructed or essential truth. Sentilles has warned against such a view explicitly, arguing that Menken used poetry to give the impression of revealing essential truths about herself as a way of marketing her stage persona: the “performance of a private self was a necessary part of celebrity; there had to be a private self worth knowing or the public would lose interest.”258 Sentilles’ reading of Menken’s poetry as the performance of private interiority is in part a response to the history of biographical scholarship on Menken (especially the work of

Allen Lesser and Wolf Mankowitz) which has focused on excavating a true or authentic identity for Menken, treating it in Lesser’s terms as a “mystery”259 to be solved.

As Daphne Brooks argues, this biographical pursuit of essential identity has often revolved in particular around attempts to discover Menken’s “‘authentic’ racial past.”260

Throughout her career, Menken narrated varying accounts of her ancestry and family. At

258. Renée M. Sentilles, Performing Menken, 140. 259. Allen Lesser, Enchanting Rebel: The Secret of Adah Isaacs Menken (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1947), 241. See also: Wolf Mankowitz, Mazeppa: The Lives, Loves, and Legends of Adah Issacs Menken (New York: Stein and Day, 1982). On the title page, Mankowitz refers to his account as a “biographical quest.” 260. Daphne A. Brooks, “The Deeds Done in My Body: Black Feminist Theory, Performance, and the Truth about Adah Isaacs Menken,” Recovering the Black female body: Self-representations by African American women, edited by Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 43. 114 different points, she identified her parents and grandparents as Jewish, African American, Irish, and Spanish,261 and her biographers have long tried to pin down Menken’s various claims about her racial and cultural background.262 For Brooks, these biographers reduce the interpretation of

Menken’s life and work to a scene of unveiling like that which Menken performed in Mazeppa:

“the biographical obsession with ‘uncovering the secret’ of Menken’s cultural and racial genealogy has paradoxically obscured her subjectivity in the work of many scholars who collapse a reading of the ‘truth’ of her identity into the scene of corporeal unveiling in her professional work.”263 In contrast to this biographical scholarship, Brooks argues that Menken, in her dynamic performance of racial and gender identity on stage and in her autobiographical writing, “continuously [changes] the representational terms of her body.”264 For both Brooks and

Sentilles, Menken actively resists attempts (whether from twentieth-century biographers or her contemporary audience) to discover an unconstructed or essential truth about her identity in part because her work demonstrates the ways in which identity is performative.

Brooks focuses on Menken’s embodied performance, rather than her poetry, while

Sentilles reads Menken’s poetry only briefly and purely as a means of shoring up her celebrity status (through the “performance of a private self”). In recent years, however, scholarship on

Menken’s poetry has grown. For the most part, critics have focused on questions concerning

261. For an account of Menken’s claims to various different racial and cultural backgrounds, see especially Sentilles, Performing Menken, 11, 272-286; and Renée M. Sentilles, “Identity, Speculation and History: Adah Isaacs Menken as a Case Study,” History and Memory 18, no. 1 (Spring/ Summer 2006): 120-151. 262. See: Lesser, Enchanting Rebel, 11-14, 241-251; Mankowitz, Mazeppa, 29-46; Barbara and Michael Foster, A Dangerous Woman: the Life, Loves, and Scandals of Adah Isaacs Menken, 1835-1868, America’s Original Superstar (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2011), 9-19. 263. Brooks, “The Deeds Done in My Body,” 43. 264. Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 206. For Brooks, Menken is not just adept at performing multiple racial and gender identities; her famous performance in Mazeppa actually works to reveal the inherently performative and constructed nature of race and gender: “Menken used tropes of whiteness to temper her ethnic drag. . . We might read the display of the bodysuit as yet another form of racial drag at the very moment in which masculine drag appears to come undone. From this standpoint, Menken. . . ‘unmasks the performative nature of whiteness,’ and ‘expose[s]’ the construction of racial and not just gender (im)purities.” Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 181. 115

Menken’s poetic voice. Her poetry in these readings is a mode of liberatory self-representation.

These readings primarily treat Menken as a kind of lyric poet since the recurring question is whether and how her poems “lend phenomenal form” 265 to subjective voice.

Eliza Richards, for example, argues that Menken, responding to Whitman’s Leaves of

Grass, “experiments with what it means for a woman. . . to assume the position of democratic bard.” For Richards, “Menken recognizes that. . . she cannot begin to speak for herself until she can legitimately represent others; and yet she cannot represent others unless she can legitimately speak for herself.”266 Richards argues that Menken “locates the source of her troubles in her embodied performance.” The “fantasies” and “objectifying gaze” of Menken’s spectators

“displace her sense of reality to the extent that she can no longer assert her existence except in terms of its absence.”267 In place of a “sympathetic audience,” to and for whom she might speak,

Menken’s poetry anticipates an audience that fetishizes and objectifies her: “The lack of a sympathetic audience stifles articulation,” and the result is that Menken’s poetic speakers cannot

“constitute a persuasive identity.”268 In Richards’ reading, then, Menken’s poetry exemplifies the gendered limits of Whitman’s democratic model of poetic self-representation.

In contrast to Richards, scholars including Shira Wolosky, Dane Barca, and Julie

McCown all find in Menken’s poetry successful attempts at self-articulation: For Wolosky and

Barca, Menken’s dramatic monologue, “Judith,” is an exercise in forthright self-representation.

According to Wolosky, the poem “glorifies Judith herself in self-proclaimed identity and self-

265. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 35. 266. Eliza Richards “Whitman and Menken, Loosing and Losing Voices” in Whitman Among the Bohemians, edited by Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 192-212; 196. 267. Richards, “Whitman and Menken,” 198. 268. Richards, “Whitman and Menken,” 208, 205. 116 naming,”269 while, for Barca, it “persistently reiterates the threat of the possibility of a female voice... each line bursting over the previous with the possibility of self-representation commingled with the threat of violence.”270 In contrast to Richards who argues that Menken’s lack of a sympathetic audience effectively makes the articulation of self impossible, Barca traces how, in poems like “Judith” (as well as in her stage career), Menken “resisted and manipulated the filters through which her body and voice were read.”271

Like Wolosky and Barca, McCown views Menken’s poetry as a successful exercise in self-articulation. She takes on Richards’ reading of Menken as a failed “democratic bard,” arguing that Menken actually “adopts and opens up Whitman’s mission to... ‘identify and release voices, both the poet’s and the people’s’.’” She claims that “Menken’s writing expands this mission to include those voices that are full of unhappiness, rage, and despair and stand at odds with Whitman’s often celebratory voice.”272 However, although McCown reads Menken as a successful lyric poet (as do Barca and Wolosky), she shares Richards’s view that Menken’s embodied performance, in some sense, represents a barrier to self-articulation which must then be negotiated in her poetry: “Menken risks being defined by reductive understandings of her corporeality as a woman, and she works to create a space in her poems in which the mind can become disembodied and rise above the marginalized body.”273

269. Shira Wolosky, “Poetry and Public Discourse, 1820-1910,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 4: Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 1800-1910, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004; online publication: 2008), 145-480; 232. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521301084. 270. Dane Barca, “Adah Isaacs Menken: Race and Transgendered Performance in the Nineteenth Century,” MELUS 29, no. 3/4 (Fall/ Winter 2004): 293-306; 302. https://doi.org/10.2307/4141856. 271. Barca, “Adah Isaacs Menken,” 304. In effect Barca identifies in Menken’s poetry the “politics of opacity” (Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 137) which Brooks finds in her embodied performance: by manipulating how she is “read,” Menken “confuses and confounds any attempt to phenotype her body.” (Barca, “Adah Isaacs Menken,” 304) 272. Julie McCown, “Celebrating and Singing, Bleeding and Pining: Embodiment and Emotion in Walt Whitman and Adah Isaacs Menken,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 38, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 337-355; 339. 273. McCown, “Celebrating and Singing,” 346. 117

For Barca, Wolosky, and McCown, Menken’s poetic voice is a rebuttal to the heteropatriarchal constraints of nineteenth-century domestic ideology and the “cult of true womanhood,”274 most often associated with sentimental fiction. Menken’s dramatic monologue

“Judith” is central to these readings of her liberatory feminist poetics.275 As a first-person dramatic monologue, with a well-established Biblical persona and narrative plot, “Judith” is unique among Menken’s poems. I make this point because, while I agree that in “Judith”

Menken experiments with a liberatory form of self-representation, the presentation of voice and character we see in “Judith” is rare in Menken’s poetic work. In fact, most of her poetry eschews narrative and persona, often instead complaining of a voicelessness like that which Richards documents. For Richards, Menken’s attempts at self-representation fail because she knows that she is objectified by a predominantly male audience who refuse to hear her voice. Her expression of freedom and subjectivity, in Richards’ view, is reliant on her being recognized and heard by an audience.276 Although Barca and Wolosky never say so explicitly, I think their readings share this premise. When Menken’s Judith asks “See ye not what is written on my forehead? / I am

Judith!”277 we can see how what Barca calls the “possibility of self-representation” involves

274. McCown, “Celebrating and Singing,” 340. 275. Barca and Wolosky do not discuss any other poems by Menken; McCown analyzes a range of Menken’s poems and concludes that “Judith’s expression of emotions shows Menken at her most powerful and authoritative.” (McCown, “Celebrating and Singing,” 350). 276. Richards argues that her reading of Menken’s search for self-expression via a sympathetic audience she can’t find is “different from Cheryl Walker’s idea that nineteenth-century American women poets are so mired in expectations of mediocrity that they lack the strength to find their own voices.” (Richards, “Whitman and Menken,” 206). However, it is worth comparing Richards’ argument to Walker’s characterization of the “poetess” using the image of the nightingale from the myth of Philomela and Procne: “As the nightingale, [Philomela] becomes the type of the poetess, who must use her ingenuity to overcome exile and mutilation.” According to Walker, the myth “records the burden of woe the nightingale carries and the peculiarly autobiographical emphasis of her art, an emphasis not lost on another woman.” (Cheryl Walker, The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982], 22. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/nightingalesburd00walk. I think we should read Richards’ view of Menken’s struggle to take on the role of the bard as a variation of Walker’s theory of the Nightingale poetess. Unlike most other readers of Menken, Richards stresses struggle for expression registered in Menken’s poems. 277. Adah Isaacs Menken, “Judith,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 50-52; 52. 118 explicitly imagining, if not a “sympathetic” audience, then at least an audience willing and able to read and recognize the expression of selfhood.278

Whether focusing on the successful self-representation of “Judith” or the voicelessness and failed self-articulation of Menken’s other poems, these readings take for granted that the assertion of lyric voice, audible and recognizable by a public, is Menken’s primary objective.

What do we do, then, with Menken’s own definition of her poems in her autobiographical

“Notes”? There, she claims her poems are strange and unfamiliar – almost uninterpretable. On

Menken’s own account, the experience of being recognized by a “sympathetic audience” seems to belong, not to her work as a poet, but to her stage career. She claims not only that her vast audience – “the whole city” – is captivated by her acting, believing that “she plays with her very soul,” but that she is, as it were, captivated herself. Her claim is that her attention is completely occupied by her own performance to the extent that she seemingly shares the experience of the audience and perceives nothing but the theatrical piece: “My attention cannot be turned to any subject but the stage as long as the piece lasts. I see and hear nothing else. I feel nothing but the character I represent. To be so intense requires soul.”279 Stage acting constitutes for Menken in this sketch not objectification, but rather an extreme kind of intersubjectivity.

278. This is in part a question of the difference between a conventional dramatic monologue and Menken’s much less easily categorized experimental lyrics. I have been arguing that McCown, Barca, and Wolosky all read Menken as a successful lyric poet not because I think “Judith” is a lyric poem, but because – in focusing on its capacity to give form to subjective expression – these critics have tended to treat it as lyric. An alternative way to read the empowering potential of a dramatic monologue like “Judith” is to insist on the difference between dramatic and lyric expression. Isobel Armstrong has argued, regarding nineteenth-century British poetry, that the “mask” or “persona” used in dramatic monologue is “peculiarly necessary for women writers. The adoption of the mask appears to involve a displacement of feminine subjectivity, almost a travestying of femininity, in order that it can be made an object of investigation.” For Armstrong, the dramatic monologue doesn’t actually refuse objectification but, in a striking reversal, takes ownership of it: “by using a mask, a woman writer is in control of her objectification and at the same time anticipates the strategy of objectifying women by being beforehand with it and circumventing masculine representations.” Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, poetics and politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 325, 326. 279. Menken, “Notes,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 203. 119

Her poetry as described in the “Notes” would appear, then, to offer not an expression of liberated subjectivity in opposition to objectification, but the withdrawal of the subject from the scene of excessive intersubjective experience. Insofar as this is a model of subjective freedom it is not the freedom of self-expression but rather a freedom from shared experience. In fact, I read her description of her “wild soul-poems” as “strange and beautiful,” as an account of an aesthetic experience without intersubjectivity – that is, an account of aesthetic experience freed from the social and coercive pressures built into Romantic-era aesthetic theory.

Specifically, I read the sketch of her “two souls” as a variation on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourse of genius. Genius is usually defined within neoclassical and

Romantic aesthetic treatises as an idiosyncratic creative power that wells up spontaneously within certain individuals. The Swedenborgian mystic Samson Reed, who was a key early influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson, argued in 1821 that genius is “the link of the finite with the infinite, of the divine with the human.”280 Menken, in claiming that her poetry comes from God, is drawing on this idea of genius as divinely inspired. Part of what is important about Menken’s poetry is the way that, like Fuller before her, she upends the traditional gendering of genius as masculine.281 We can see in Menken’s poetics the outlines of a feminist critique of artistic genius’ putative universality (like that seen in what McCown calls “Whitman’s masculine universal voice”282). An important element of this critique of genius’ claim to universality is visible in her assertion that her poems, beautiful and strange, remain a mystery to herself.

280. Samson Reed, “Genius,” in Transcendentalism: A Reader, ed. Joel Myerson (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 21-25; 22. 281. On the gendered history of genius, see: Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004), 29-31. On Fuller’s account of the relationship between gender and genius, see Ellison, Delicate Subjects, 231-240, 269-271. 282. McCown, “Celebrating and Singing,” 339. 120

Kant, in the third Critique, explains that the mystery of genius is a necessary effect of the nature of beauty (and specifically of the fact that our judgement of the beautiful is not grounded in our understanding).283 He calls genius the “inborn predisposition of the mind. . . through which nature gives the rule to art.”284 It is crucial for Kant that this “rule” is not a plan or concept the artist themself knows, learns, or postulates. It arrives from nature, via genius, and

“originality must be its primary characteristic.”285 Since beauty is not derived from a concept which could be taught or learned, it defies understanding and the “author of a product that he owes to his genius does not know himself how the ideas for it come to him, and also does not have it in his power to think up such things at will or according to plan.”286 Menken’s account of her poetic process, her own inability to understand her poems, and her report of Newell’s comment that she is the “the most original poetess of the day” belong to the Kantian genius tradition.

It is significant that Menken contrasts her poetic soul to the intersubjectivity made possible by her stage acting. This is where Menken departs from Kantian aesthetics. Genius in

Kant’s view is always finally accountable to the community of taste or “sensus communis.” 287

As Robert Lehman notes, for Kant, beauty in art is derived “not from the gift of genius alone but

283. That a person’s judgement of beauty in an object cannot be derived from the application of a concept adequate to that object is fundamental to Kant’s aesthetics: “The concept of beautiful art… does not allow the judgement concerning the beauty of its product to be derived from any sort of rule that has a concept for its determining ground, and thus has as its ground a concept of how it is possible” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 186. Emphasis in the original). 284. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 186. Emphasis in the original. Unlike Menken, Kant names nature rather than God as the source of genius’s creative power, but the effect is the same: the origins of the creative process are located beyond the subjective control of the artist. As Robert Lehman puts it, Kant “treats the artistic genius as a vessel through which something impersonal – in this case, nature – legislates.” Robert S. Lehman, “Original Nonsense: James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, and Modernism’s Genius,” Modernism/ modernity 27, no. 2 (April 2020): 339-360, 340. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2020.0026 285. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 186. Emphasis in the original. 286. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 187. 287. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 173. 121 from taste, from the power of judgment, which sets limits on this gift, makes hard decisions.”288

Taste, Kant argues, is “the discipline (or corrective) of genius, clipping its wings and making it well-behaved or polished…. by introducing clarity and order into the abundance of thoughts it makes the ideas tenable, capable of an enduring and universal approval.”289 Works of genius may arrive unpredictably and from eccentric individuals but, if they are beautiful, this will be evident in their attainment of “universal approval.” Taste – as the representative of aesthetic standards shared by the community – is the ultimate arbiter of beauty in the work of art. Taste clips the wings of genius to make it, in Rodolphe Gasché’s words, “beautiful and hence capable of eliciting universal assent.”290 The disciplining effect of taste is crucial to Kantian aesthetic theory because the experience of beauty is always theoretically shareable and universal. In contrast to

Kant, Menken differentiates between two kinds of aesthetic experience. She locates shareable aesthetic experience specifically on the stage and not in her divinely inspired poetry. Her account of her two souls effectively separates the shareable experience of taste (which she locates in her the theatre) from the experience of divinely inspired genius which belongs to her poems.

Acclaimed by the “whole city,” her acting is an object of almost “universal assent.”

Menken frames her poetry, by contrast, as private work: though she does publish the poems eventually, she claims that she is afraid to do so, emphasizing that she only sends her poetry to friends “privately.” In this way, Menken presents her poems as examples of what Kant calls

“original nonsense,”291 works of genius which do not submit to the discipline of taste, and which,

288. Lehman, “Original Nonsense,” 342. Though Kant’s theory is one of the most influential, the pairing of genius and taste predates him and is central, for example, to the aesthetics of Hugh Blair (See: Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres [Dublin: Whitestone et al., 1783], 44-45. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004786433.0001.001/1:6?rgn=div1;view=fulltext) 289. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 197. 290. Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 107. 291. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 186. 122 as Lehman puts it, “serve neither as a standard for judging nor as an example for emulation.”292

There is, then, a fine line between beauty and nonsense: “while the artist must not succumb to nonsense,” writes Michael Haworth in a discussion of Kant and Jacques Derrida, “the only way this originality can emerge is by risking failure and tarrying with senselessness.”293 Menken’s own invocations of genius in her poetry are frequently accompanied by a sense of the possibility of this kind of poetic failure,294 and I think this lies behind her recurring interest in the imagery of voicelessness.

Menken’s sketch of her “double-life,” I argue, provides a framework through which to interpret her poetry and the difficulty readers have had in approaching it. One contemporary reviewer of Infelicia, for example, argued that the poems were “nonsensical,” and complained of

Menken’s “pseudo-imagination,”295 a term that signals how the experience of reading her poems is not simply strange or difficult but actually seems to break the rules of aesthetic experience (as though her poems, with their striking free-verse and blend of allegory and monologue, simply couldn’t reflect an actually existing imagination). With the exception of “Judith,” her free-verse poetry reprinted in Infelicia is characterized by obscure metaphor and allusion, dramatic shifts in

292. Lehman, “Original Nonsense,” 342. 293. Michael Haworth, “Genius Is What Happens: Derrida and Kant on Genius, Rule-Following and the Event,” British Journal of Aesthetics 54, no. 3 (July 2014): 323-337; 331. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayu030 294. Haworth argues that “In the act the artist works on faith: a faith without foundation that the results will not be mere nonsense.” (Haworth, “Genius Is What Happens,” 331). It is perhaps significant that Menken’s expressions of religious faith are also often defined by a lack of foundation; and Menken’s poetry sometimes even expresses an approach to the world comparable to Søren Kierkegaard’s “absurd,” the mechanism by which the subject of faith experiences “delight” not in God, but “in everything he sees, in the human swarm, in the new omnibuses, in the water of sound.” (Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. and ed. Walter Lowrie [Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013], 72, 82.) For Kierkegaard, faith is a capacity to commit oneself to the meaningfulness of everyday worldly experience even in the knowledge that the finite experience of the world is meaningless, “a bottomless void” in which there is “no sacred bond” to unite “mankind.” (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 45). The point of the “absurd” is to mediate between these two opposed poles, to allow a return to the world as though it were meaningful without compromising our clear awareness of the void. 295. “New Poetry,” The Athenaeum (29 Aug. 1868), in Eiselein, Infelicia, 242. The reception of Infelicia was often hostile, with one reviewer claiming that the poems are “unpolished, crude in matter,” and another that “language is thrown about wildly” in the collection. (“New Publications,” The New-York Times [21 Oct. 1868], in Eiselein, Infelicia, 246; “Miss Menken’s Poems,” The London Review. Rpt. in Every Saturday [12 Sept 1868], in Eiselein, Infelicia, 244) 123 tone and subject of address, and a multivocal lyric subject often impossible to locate in a specific scene. If it appears at times “incoherent”296 or “eccentric,”297 as reviewers and critics have claimed, this is because Menken’s intention is to produce experiences of beauty inassimilable to the sensus communis of aesthetic theory – her poems risk (and perhaps even at times pursue)

“senselessness” in an effort to escape the strictures of a shareable aesthetic standard.

While in her depiction of her “surface soul” the idea of an intersubjective experience shared with spectators is celebrated, it is represented in her poetry as coercion and alienation. In her poem “My Heritage,” from June 1860, for example, she writes: “‘My Heritage!’ It is to live within/ The marts of Pleasure and of Gain, yet be / No willing worshipper at either shrine; / To think, and speak, and act, not for my pleasure, / But others’.”298 To be an actress is to experience a kind of alienation in which not only her speech and actions but her very thoughts as well are determined by the pleasure of her audience.

In this way, Menken’s poetry, I argue, makes visible something which is only latent in her autobiographical “Notes” – the coercive effect of defining aesthetic pleasure in terms of a theoretically communal experience (the putative experience of the “whole city”). Menken’s poetry openly registers what Kim Hall calls the “the violence at the heart of the sensus communis.”299 This violence has two distinct aspects. On the one hand, there is the fact of coercion built into Kantian aesthetic judgement. As Hall puts it, “to say something is beautiful is to have the right to expect agreement from everyone else.”300 This is the critique levelled at

296. “Table-Talk,” Putnam’s Magazine (Nov. 1868), in Eiselein, Infelicia, 249. 297. Paula Bernat Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800-1900 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 20. 298. Adah Isaacs Menken, “My Heritage,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 48-50; 48. 299. Kim Hall, “Sensus Communis and Violence: A Feminist Reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgement,” in Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, ed. Robin May Schott (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 257-272; 261. 300. Hall, “Sensus Communis and Violence,” 261. 124 aesthetic theory by Marxist critics like Terry Eagleton.301 On the other hand, Hall argues, Kant’s sensus communis propagates a “racist and sexist ideology” in which women and people of color are “absent from the community of judging subjects.”302 Menken’s poetry exposes and resists the experience of both coercion and exclusion, positing instead an aesthetics of genius not determined (whether through assimilation or exclusion) by the communal standards of taste.

Menken’s response is not to condemn the aesthetic out of hand as a mere instrument of ideology, but to look for modes of what Rei Terada calls “subaesthetic”303 experience, perceptions so “suspensive, illusory, or ephemeral” that they cannot be shared and as such cannot be assimilated to “Kant’s proto-communitarian beauty.”304 Menken’s revision of the genius- aesthetic works, then, as a way of freeing the experience of beauty from the demand of

“imaginable shareability” 305 (the feeling that all experiences of beauty could theoretically be universally shareable). I read Menken’s attempt to represent unshareable experiences of beauty as a radical revision of genius’ claim to universality. In this way, I join Richards and McCown in their reading of Menken’s poetry as a feminist corrective to “Whitman’s attempt at a universal persona.”306 However, I differ from their readings in arguing that Menken’s solution is not self- representation, but rather the framing of aesthetic experiences characterized by ephemerality, and interested in avoiding rather than eliciting, universal assent.307

301. Terry Eagleton, for example, calls the aesthetic “an internalized repression.” Aesthetic judgements – which are made, as it were, both freely and in accordance with universal standards of taste – model a kind of conformity to social norms. Aesthetic theory, as such, marks a “movement coercion to hegemony.” Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 28, 236. 302. Hall, “Sensus Communis and Violence,” 261, 264. 303. Terada, Looking Away, 104. 304. Terada, Looking Away, 22, 23. 305. Terada, Looking Away, 105. 306. McCown, “Celebrating and Singing,” 348. 307. Menken’s development of her own sub-aesthetic mode in contrast to Whitman’s universalizing poetics is particularly important in light of the fact that Terada’s examples are all male and canonical: she notes that “the texts of phenomenality and dissatisfaction are usually written by men… I’m not sure I can make this impressionistic observation into something more definitive, or that I know enough about noncanonical nineteenth-century literature 125

I identify in Menken’s poetry an investment in what Terada calls “phenomenophilia,” an attention to “particularly ephemeral perceptual experiences, perceptions that seem below or marginal to normal appearance.”308 This attention to the ephemeral, Terada argues, provides the subject “fleeting relief from the pressure to endorse what Kant calls the world ‘as is.’”309 Central to this experience is a shift from “fact perception” to “object perception”: “perceiving an object

(it passes across my field of vision) isn’t the same as perceiving the fact of the object (I recognize that it’s there; what it is).” 310 To perceive objects rather than facts is to withhold oneself from the collective affirmation of the given world as necessary or good: “for as long as object perception refrains from fact perception, the teleology of judgement is eluded, and the world feels lighter.”311 To clarify, the key distinction here is not between truth and fiction but between socially determined experiences (fact perceptions) and experiences which are yet to be determined (object perceptions). “Fact perceptions,” Terada notes, “stand within the social” and the “imperative to affirm fact perceptions constrains social relation.”312 To look away from the given world, in Terada’s sense, and to attend instead to fleeting unshareable appearances, is to attempt to withdraw temporarily from the world as experienced by other people.

Unlike the “proto-aesthetic” 313 poetry we saw Neal experimenting with in chapter one,

Menken’s “sub-aesthetic” doesn’t aim to facilitate disagreement among readers, but a withdrawal from the reader. Menken’s sub-aesthetic, in this way, is more like the estrangement of the reader

to have a chance of doing so.” (Terada, Looking Away, 27). Part of the aim of this chapter is to address this gap Terada points to, and to trace a version of the sub-aesthetic through the work of a noncanonical woman poet. 308. Terada, Looking Away, 3. Emphasis in the original. 309. Terada, Looking Away, 4. 310. Terada, Looking Away, 15. 311. Terada, Looking Away, 15-16. 312. Terada, Looking Away, 3, 39. 313. Terada uses the terms proto-aesthetic and sub-aesthetic almost interchangeable. I have found it useful to distinguish between them and specifically between Neal’s description of an experience which appears always, as it were, just prior to aesthetic assimilation (the “proto-aesthetic”) and Menken’s description of a deliberate withdrawal from aesthetic assimilation after the fact (the “sub-aesthetic”). 126 which Joshua Kotin identifies in the work of writers who creates “utopias of one.” These authors, he claims, “create perfect worlds by refusing or failing to present models of perfect worlds.”314

Menken is not trying to create a perfect world in her poetry, but her descriptions of beauty do often seem to involve a refusal to make the experience of beauty replicable.

Menken’s poetry is consciously invested in facilitating this kind of relief from the pressure to endorse a shared experience of the “the world ‘as is.’” Her poetics of genius ultimately undergirds an investment, then, in perceptual freedom. Terada’s categories of phenomenophilia or subaesthetic experience are particularly important to my analysis of Menken because as Terada argues, phenomenophilia is not an outright disavowal of the “given world” in favor of a belief in an invisible world of spirit or Platonic ideals. Menken’s poems often contemplate a renunciation of the material world in favor of a future spiritual state, an apocalyptic heaven on earth, “when this world shall fall like some old ghost” and “the purple- and-gold of our inner natures shall be lighted up in the eternity of truth.”315 However, this future

“fall” of the “world” is always deferred; in its place – in her poems’ lyric present – Menken offers what she calls, in “Dying,” the “moveless steppings back to the world.”316 I read this as a figure for the kind of shift in perception through which, to borrow Terada’s terms, “the world feels lighter.” Like the shift from fact perception to object perception, this is a change in the subject’s perceptual relation to the world. It is not, to be clear, that the subject of Menken’s poems bypasses representation altogether, moving closer to material reality itself (as some ecomaterialist thinkers might hope),317 but that the representations of the world facilitated by

314. Kotin, Utopias of One, 2. 315. Adah Isaacs Menken, “Myself,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 68-70; 70. 316. Menken, “Dying,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 113. 317. The shift to object perception is a turn to materiality or ontology. It does not, for example, involve passing through what Branka Arsić calls the “curtain of metaphors to reach the material itself” (Arsić, Bird Relics, 8). Object perception is not any more invested in the material being of the object than fact perception would be. Relevant here is Terada’s reference at one point to the phenomenophilia of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as an “antiontological 127

Menken’s poems are characterized by an ephemerality designed to be inassimilable to an aesthetics of beauty.

In the following section, I will analyze several poems in which Menken explicitly invokes genius. Starting with “My Heritage” (June 1860), I analyze how Menken construes

Genius as, paradoxically, a counter-aesthetic force, pushing against the “corrective” demands of the sensus communis. Then, in “Miserimus” (September 1861), I analyze how Menken presents the relationship between her a-social model of genius and her own version of the aesthetic dis- correspondence we saw in Fuller’s poetry in chapter two. Menken repeatedly describes an inability to experience Transcendentalist correspondence with nature. Though she laments this lack, I argue that we can also detect in these poems an alternative non-appropriative relationship to nature modelled on allegory rather than correspondence.

In the chapter’s third section, I examine Menken’s experimentation with lyric temporality. In poems like “Into the Depths” (August 1860) and “Myself” (February 1861),

Menken locates her experiences of phenomenophilia between the present of the given world

(which she associates with the spectatorial experience of her audiences) and a distant inaccessible future characterized by apocalyptic revelation. Within this liminal temporality, she develops an asocial orientation to the material world.

II. Genius, Allegory, and the Poetics of Dis-correspondence,

attitude” (Terada, Looking Away, 63). Phenomenophilia is antiontological because it doesn’t valorize a distinction between appearance and being; it addresses instead differences within the realm of appearance – specifically the difference between shared (or shareable) and unshared (or unshareable) appearances. 128

First published in June 1861 in the Sunday Mercury, “My Heritage” is generally reckoned to be the first of Menken’s major free-verse poems composed between 1861 and 1863.318 The poem was initially printed with an epigraph taken from a letter Menken had received from her friend

John Overall. According to the epigraph, Overall suggested that she “Forget the world – laugh at poverty. Be glad and happy with your heritage of genius.”319 The poem opens with Menken’s lament at her experiences of poverty and alienation. Then in the second half of the poem, she turns allegorically to the figure of genius: the creative power of her genius, as she describes it, is stultified and ruined by her experiences, as an actress, of alienation and coercion. This, in turn, leads specifically to an experience of alienation from the natural world.

Her first rebuttal to Overall comes in the opening lines of the poem when she writes “‘My

Heritage!’ It is to live within/ The marts of Pleasure and of Gain, yet be / No willing worshipper at either shrine; / To think, and speak, and act, not for my pleasure, / But others’.”320 In these lines, Menken describes the experience of alienated labor in fairly explicit terms. What is crucial here is that Menken asserts the fact of this alienation as something she experiences directly. As

Herbert Marcuse puts it, in “the ‘normal’ development,” the alienated worker “lives his repression ‘freely’ as his own life: he desires what he is supposed to desire.”321 The apparent paradox whereby the individual seems to “freely” choose that which alienates them has often been read as a product of aesthetic theory. As Eagleton argues, the aesthetic is “internalized repression.” It is simply the means by which the subject experiences coerced action as though it

318. Sentilles sees “My Heritage” as Menken’s first break from the “sentimental format,” (Sentilles, Performing Menken, 73); while Barbara and Michael Foster remark that it is the “first instance in which we hear the poet’s mature voice” (Foster and Foster, A Dangerous Woman, 98). For a full bibliography of Menken’s poetry, see: Peter Dollard, “A Bibliography of the Poems and Essays of Adah Isaacs Menken,” Bulletin of Bibliography 58 (2001): 255-258. I have relied on Dollard for all details regarding the initial publication dates of Menken’s poems. 319. John W. Overall, qtd in Allen Lesser, Enchanting Rebel: The Secret of Adah Isaacs Menken (New York: The Beechhurst Press, 1947), 65. 320. Menken, “My Heritage,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 48. 321. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1974), 46. 129 were freely chosen. From this point of view, the aesthetic is “no more than a name for the political unconscious: it is simply the way social harmony registers itself on our senses, imprints itself on our sensibilities.”322 In Menken’s experience, however, alienation – the misalignment between her thoughts, speech, and action on the one hand and her own desires on the other hand

– is palpable. It hasn’t been sublimated. This point is important because Menken herself, in the second half of the poem, turns explicitly to the question of aesthetics. First, she imagines the possibility of an unalienated experience of work, configuring it as part of an experience of natural beauty that remains yet unavailable to her. Finally, she turns explicitly to the figure of genius, allegorizing her experience of alienation as one of incapacitated genius.

Mid-way through “My Heritage,” then, Menken gives us an image of natural beauty grounded in an experience of harmony or correspondence with nature:

Mine to stand on the brink of life One little moment where the fresh'ning breeze Steals o'er the languid lip and brow, telling Of forest leaf, and ocean wave, and happy Homes, and cheerful toil; and bringing gently To this wearied heart its long-forgotten Dreams of gladness.323

In this “little moment,” nature speaks directly to her “heart.” The breeze is not simply comforting but familiar: the pleasure it gives is of “long-forgotten gladness” as though in some sense it already belonged to her “heart” and only needed to be remembered. We can see here a variation on the kind of correspondence between subjective interiority (“heart”) and nature which, as we saw in chapter two, is the hallmark of the post-Kantian model of landscape beauty. Not only is it an image of fit between mind and nature but it is also one of sublimation: the breeze speaks to her of “happy homes and cheerful toil.” This is aesthetic experience configured specifically as

322. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 28, 37. 323. Menken, “My Heritage,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 49. 130 successful sublimation. The whole image is framed however as a momentary illusion: in the following lines, Menken’s speaker writes “my eyes look to the sky, where I send up my soul in thanks. The sky is clouded—no stars—no music—the heavens are hushed. / My poor soul comes back to me, weary and disappointed.” 324 There is no breeze speaking to her, and nature appears opaque.

The image of the soul returning from a starry heaven “disappointed” is a recurring feature of Menken’s poetry. In the final passage of the poem, we find it again. We should read this disappointment as a figure for the speaker’s failure to find the fit or correspondence with nature necessary for the experience of natural beauty. The trope of the poetic soul or imagination in flight is a common trope of neoclassical and Romantic poetry. Edward Cahill calls it “poetic kinesis.” Flight, Cahill notes, represents the “mind’s capacity for expansion, swiftness, and pleasure.”325 It is an image of “roaming subjectivity,”326 creative power, and the freedom of the imagination to traverse the material world. In Menken’s poems, however, the flight usually falters. In the final fifteen lines of the poem, Menken presents this failed flight as a failure of genius. She introduces this concluding section by repeating the poem’s opening exclamation:

“My heritage!” The shrouded eye, the trampled leaf, wind-driven and soiled with dust—these tell the tale. Mine to watch The glorious light of intellect Burn dimly and expire; and mark the soul, Though born in Heaven, pause in its high career, Wave in its course, and fall to grovel in The darkness of earth’s contaminations, till Even Death shall scorn to give a thing So low his welcome greeting!327

324. Menken, “My Heritage,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 49. 325. Edward Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 75. 326. Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination, 88. 327. Menken, “My Heritage,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 49. 131

The “light of intellect” apparently takes flight, then, only to “expire” and fall back to earth. The mind or soul is unable to assert its power over material nature in the manner of neoclassical poetic kinesis. If, as Cahill suggests, poetic kinesis usually functions as an image of the subject’s freedom and “pleasure,” we can read the failed flight of the soul here as a corollary of the opening experience of alienation and coercion (in which Menken’s speaker not only acts and speaks but thinks for the pleasure of others). I am referring to these images as corollaries of one another in part because the repetition of that opening exclamation (“My Heritage!”) seems intended to give the impression that these passages are descriptions of the same experience.

The experience of being alienated and the failure of the poetic imagination to reach the heavens are two sides of the same coin. She continues by asking:

Who would be that pale, Blue mist, that hangs so low in air, like Hope That has abandoned earth, yet reacheth Not the stars in their proud homes? A dying eagle, striving to reach the sun? A little child talking to the gay clouds as they flaunt past in their purple and crimson robes? A timid little flower singing to the grand old trees? Foolish waves, leaping up and trying to kiss the moon? A little bird mocking the stars? Yet this is what men call Genius.328

The poetic soul that takes flight only to then fall back to earth is here refigured as a “pale blue mist” hanging between earth and heaven, unable to assert its creative or perceptive power. We have a reiteration of that image of the soul’s inability to reach the stars. The metaphor is then extended through a series of images which appear to mock the earlier figure of natural beauty

(the “breeze” that speaks to her “heart” of “cheerful toil” in nature). That earlier picture of pastoral ease is replaced by images of failure in nature – the “dying eagle” that strives but cannot

328. Menken, “My Heritage,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 49-50. 132 reach the sun and “the foolish waves” that are unable meet the moon. If we place them beside the figure of the breeze that speaks directly to her heart, these images also come to look like depictions of failed or unreciprocated intimacy.

Menken then glosses the series of metaphors for the soul by declaring “Yet this is what men call Genius.” On the face of it, this looks like an evaluation – an ironic condemnation of clichéd sentimental nature imagery; but if we read the line in the context of the discourse of genius I discussed in the introduction, it doesn’t seem ironic at all. The metaphor for the creativity of the poet’s mind or soul as a kind of flight is already commonly applied to genius by aesthetic theorists. In fact, in Kant’s account, we should recall, the flight of genius is that which taste is employed to contain and control: taste “is the discipline (or corrective) of genius, clipping its wings and making it well behaved or polished… capable of an enduring and universal approval.”329 In Kant’s metaphor the point of taste is to hinder the flight of genius by clipping its wings. With this in mind, we can see the conclusion of “My Heritage” as a critique of the orthodox Kantian position regarding genius: “what men call genius” is a poetic soul that tries, to fly but finds it cannot and “falls[s] to grovel in / The darkness of earth’s contaminations.” The problem is not that “men” have misnamed “genius” – it is not that she is exposing a misevaluation of natural beauty – but that the failed flight of the soul accurately represents the state of genius in an aesthetic regime which subordinates genius to taste. As we saw in the poem’s opening lines, Menken experiences the demands of the community of taste as coercion in which she loses autonomy even over her own thoughts (which are determined by the pleasure of

“others.”) Menken’s claim in “My Heritage” is that such an aesthetic model, in which the

329. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 197. Emphasis added. 133 community of taste always finally trumps individual inspiration (as, for Kant, it must),330 participates in the experience of alienation rather than the sublimating it. Like Kant, Menken views genius as existing in “conflict”331 with taste, but it is a conflict that she wants genius to win.332

I am going to turn now to Menken’s 1861 poem “Miserimus,” in which the demand for aesthetic conformity once again produces an experience of dis-correspondence between mind and nature and therefore undercuts the experience of natural beauty. However, I argue that here, unlike in “My Heritage” we also see the possibility of recuperating this experience. Latent in her description of her failure to attain an experience of correspondence is the trace of an alternative non-appropriative way of imagining the relation between mind and nature.

In “Miserimus,” first published in the Sunday Mercury in September 1861, we see

Menken once again explicitly invoke the aesthetics of genius – this time, in the context of a complaint regarding the power of Romantic nature poetry. The poem consists of two numbered stanzas. In the first the speaker complains that “bards” have lied to her and that she is unable to experience correspondence with nature like that which is central both to the aesthetics of natural beauty and to Emerson’s transcendentalist poetics. The second stanza continues in the same vein:

Menken’s speaker depicts her own imagination as a quivering soul which, in another image of failed “poetic kinesis,” takes flight only to fall into the sea. Superficially, the poem appears not

330. Describing the relation between taste and genius, Kant writes that “if anything must be sacrificed in the conflict of the two properties in one product, it must rather be on the side of genius: and the power of judgement. . . will sooner permit damage to the freedom and richness of the imagination than to the understanding.” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 197). 331. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 197 332. As she makes clear in another poem entitled simply “Genius,” published November 1860, she views artistic creativity as a “power” that “cannot be suppressed any more than the earthquake can be smothered.” (Menken, “Genius,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 79-82; 79, 80). The poem begins with an image of genius as “the power that grasps in the universe, that dives out beyond space, and grapples with the starry worlds of heaven.” This is an image of successful – albeit antagonistic – correspondence between mind and stars. It is, however, peculiar among Menken’s poems since it is not framed as a description of the poetic speaker’s own creative capacity. 134 to move beyond the initial complaint about the failure of a poetics of correspondence; however, I argue close reading reveals a sublimated alternative to the correspondence-aesthetic hiding, as it were, in plain sight, in the allegorical imagery of the second stanza.

The poem opens with the initial complaint addressed to an imagined poetic establishment:

O Bards! weak heritors of passion and of pain! Dwellers in the shadowy Palace of Dreams! With your unmated souls flying insanely at the stars! Why have you led me lonely and desolate to the Deathless Hill of Song? You promised that I should ring trancing shivers of rapt melody down to the dumb earth. You promised that its echoes should vibrate till Time’s circles met in old Eternity. You promised that I should gather the stars like blossoms to my white bosom.333

The speaker’s complaint here has to do with her expectations regarding the power of poetry to animate nature. She had expected to sing to the “dumb earth” and yet can’t. We should recall here Fuller’s apostrophizing to the stones in her realist rhapsody. As we saw with Fuller, poetic speech addressed to inanimate matter functions as incantation. It always involves the implied hope or expectation of response – what Barbara Johnson calls the “Orphic hope of getting a stone to talk.”334 As scholars like Johnson and Jonathan Culler have argued, the apostrophic address which gives “voice,” “life,” or “human form”335 to inanimate matter and which, in doing so, demands “the potential responsiveness of the universe,”336 is the distinctive and essential feature of the lyric as a genre. Menken’s poem is apostrophic, but she is addressing the bards who have broken their promise, not the earth itself. Rather than actually apostrophizing the earth, she merely imagines the possibility having done so through poetry. The melody she imagines singing to the earth would have been “trancing,” she claims, a term that signals both the mystical,

333. Adah Isaacs Menken, “Miserimus,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 85-86. 334. Barbara Johnson. “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 186. 335. Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 188, 189. 336. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 190. 135 incantatory quality of lyric address and the way in which apostrophe involves a kind of subordination of nature. As Johnson puts it, “apostrophe is a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee.”337 As the term,

“ventriloquism” implies, the subject-status newly granted to apostrophized nature is only sustained as an effect of the poet-speaker’s apostrophic attention to nature.

We can see how this poetic subordination of nature might have looked in the comparison of stars to flowers: “You promised that I should gather the stars like blossoms to my white bosom.” The broken promise concerns a metaphor whereby stars become, in the poet’s hands, identical with “blossoms.” Poetry, the speaker imagines, should have given her the power to hold the stars to her body – to see and treat them as flowers. The poetic identification of stars and flowers is a recurrent image in Transcendentalist aesthetics. According to Emerson, the poet is the person who “knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars… for in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.”338

For Emerson, the correspondence between natural objects (stars and flowers) reinscribes the “radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts,”339 and we can see this stronger form of correspondence implied in the first stanza of “Miserimus.” The bards themselves, who had promised Menken’s speaker the orphic power to ventriloquize the earth, also fail as poets, their “unmated souls flying insanely at the stars!” We should hear in that image of the bards’ souls as “unmated,” the felt absence of correspondence with nature (which Emerson

337. Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 185. 338. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Atkinson, The Essential Writings, 296. 339. Emerson, Nature, in Atkinson, The Essential Writings, 15. 136 also calls a “marriage”340). The bards would, if they could, experience the organic correspondence between soul and stars, subject and cosmos; but their efforts, like those of the speaker here – and the speaker in “My Heritage” – fail.341

The first stanza of the poem, then, makes a similar claim to that we saw in Fuller’s

“Meditations.” The speaker fails to achieve correspondence (which for Fuller ungirds the experience of “keen sympathy” between nature and mind.) The second stanza reiterates the complaint:

O lonely watchers for the Light! how long must I grope with my dead eyes in the sand? Only the red fire of Genius, that narrows up life's chances to the black path that crawls on to the dizzy clouds. The wailing music that spreads its pinions to the tremble of the wind, has crumbled off to silence. From the steep ideal the quivering soul falls in its lonely sorrow like an unmated star from the blue heights of Heaven into the dark sea. O Genius! is this thy promise? O Bards! Is this all?342

The bards here are “lonely watchers for the light” while the speaker describes the failure of poetic power as a kind of blindness, asking “how long must I grope with my dead eyes in the sand?” It is as though in this second stanza we see the speaker again trying and failing to fulfil

340. Emerson, Nature, in Atkinson, The Essential Writings, 38. For Emerson, the experience of a correspondence between the soul and nature is a kind of marriage because it relies on a union between self and nature. But since nature is already defined by the way it corresponds to the subject or spirit (to the extent that Emerson even raises the “doubt… whether nature outwardly exists” [“Nature,” 24]), such a union should really be understood not as a relationship between self and other, but as a property belonging to the self alone: “the reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand as perception.” (“Nature,” 38.) 341. Arguably, Menken is foregrounding a theme already latent in Emerson’s own poetics of correspondence. In “The Poet,” for example, amid descriptions of the ideal poet’s capacity to achieve correspondence between mind and nature, he remarks that in his own experience, poetic flight usually fails: describing the experience of reading an inspirational poem: “I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live,—opaque, though they seem transparent,—and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations.” However, as he goes on, it becomes clear this is an ideal yet to be fulfilled: “Such is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then leaps and frisks about with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens. . . I tumble down again soon into my old nooks.” Emerson, “The Poet,” in Atkinson, The Essential Writings, 291-292. 342. Menken, “Miserimus,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 86. 137 the promises of the bards from the opening: the rapt melody, for example, turns out to be

“wailing music” which “crumbles to silence.” Then the image of the bards’ “unmated souls flying insanely at the stars” is reinvoked. This time, it is a singular soul, apparently the speaker’s:

“From the steep ideal the quivering soul falls in its lonely sorrow like an unmated star from the blue heights of Heaven into the dark sea.” As I suggested above, on first reading, this looks like a reformulation of the same complaint in allegorical terms, with the poet’s failure to attain or perceive correspondence between mind and nature construed as an Icaran fall.343

However, I read the second stanza’s fragmentary line on genius as an indication that this stanza should be read slightly differently from the first: “Only the red fire of genius, that narrows up life’s chances to the black path that crawls onto the dizzy clouds.” Since the image directly follows the speaker’s question as to whether she must grope blindly in the sand, it seems at first like it might offer some solution – as though, for example “Only the red fire of genius” could illuminate the speaker’s “dead eyes.” But the line leaves us in grammatical suspension and doesn’t actually offer consolation. The phrase “the red fire of Genius” is the subject of the line, but it lacks a predicate. We are not told, in other words, what it is that genius achieves here.

I would suggest, however, that the invocation of genius does illuminate Menken’s reference to the “bards.” Emerson, in “Self-Reliance,” defines genius in post-Kantian terms as a mode of creativity that attains universal acclaim, while also being truly original and, therefore, independent of the cultural tradition represented by “bards and sages”:

to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius. Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense. . . A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.344

343. On the fall of Icarus, see: Ovid, Metamorphoses, 8:222-229. 344. Emerson, “Self-Reliance” in Atkinson, The Essential Writings, 132. 138

Emerson’s genius we should note is not in danger of expressing merely original nonsense: it succeeds in attaining universal acclaim even though, as he makes clear, it is defined by originality – by rejecting the established tradition represented by the “firmament of bards and sages.” Menken’s complaint about the promises of the bards signals that she is also eschewing imitation and convention. However, in “Miserimus,” the speaker herself seems to find the Orphic entrancement of nature by poetry just as hard or impossible as do the bards. The invocation of genius in “Miserimus” places us, then, in the same impasse as it did in “My Heritage.” To identify genius as in conflict with a communal or universal standard of taste – whether represented by the bardic tradition or by contemporary theatre-goers – is not in itself sufficient to free creative power or aesthetic perception from those strictures. Recognizing the coercive power of aesthetic norms is not in itself enough to resist or break from those norms.

In the final image of the soul’s fall, however, I think we can hear an alternative to the aesthetics of correspondence and Orphic trance promised by the bards: the soul “falls in its lonely sorrow like an unmated star from the blue heights of heaven into the dark sea.” As I have already suggested, in one sense, the image merely restates what we already know– the poetic soul fails in its attempted flight, its attempt, that is, to attain correspondence with the stars. This is also a failure to demonstrate the figural power of the mind– the poet’s capacity to remake nature through metaphor, to treat stars like blossoms. However, in these final lines the soul in its failure is compared directly to the star: it falls in its solitude “like an unmated star.” This change in the imagery (and in the figurative relationship between soul and stars) is slight but crucial.

Whereas the bards’ souls in the first stanza fly “insanely at the stars” and yet fail to achieve correspondence, the speaker’s “lonely” soul here manages a kind of negative or ironic correspondence: the poet’s soul discovers its likeness to the stars, but this discovery occurs only

139 through finding it cannot reach or attain them. Only through the failure to attain correspondence

(or “keen sympathy”) between mind and nature does any kind of similarity between mind and nature arise.

In other words, we are presented with a paradox here whereby a kind of likeness becomes visible only in unlikeness. We can explain the paradox by reading the soul-star simile as a kind of allegory, in the sense that Paul De Man uses that term. De Man distinguishes allegory from

“symbol” which “postulates the possibility of an identity” (Transcendentalist correspondence is symbolic in this sense): “allegory,” by contrast, “designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin… it prevents the self from an illusory identification with the nonself, which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as a nonself.”345 In “Miserimus,” as elsewhere in Menken’s poetry, nature and the material world is firmly established as “the nonself.” In “Miserimus,” the self (or soul) is denied identification with nature – the “earth” and the “stars” – from the beginning. The final allegory is important, then, not as a refutation of Romantic symbolism or correspondence-poetics (the first stanza has already accomplished this), but because it revises how we evaluate the failure of such correspondence. For De Man, allegory saves us from the illusory identification offered by the Romantic symbol. For Menken, such identification is not a possibility (it has already been revealed to be impossible). Allegory instead represents an alternative mode of relation to nature – not just a negation of the symbol, but an alternative form of perception in its own right.

Menken’s use of allegory in “Miserimus” functions as a form of Kate Rigby’s “negative ecopoetics”: “only to the extent that the work of art is self-canceling, acknowledging in some way its inevitable failure to adequately mediate the voice of nature, can it point us to that which

345. Paul De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., rev. ed. (University of Minnesota, 1983), 187-228; 207. 140 lies beyond its own enframing.”346 In the soul-star allegory we have an attempt to describe a relation of likeness to nature while foregrounding the failure of poetic imagination to ventriloquize nature. In foregrounding the difference between mind and nature here, Menken’s poetry – like Fuller’s – offers a departure from a Transcendentalist poetics which would subordinate nature to the human subject. This is not, however, a conscious concern of Menken’s.

What matters to Menken here, I would suggest, is that a minimal likeness between soul and star is achieved in the wake of the failure of Transcendentalist correspondence-aesthetics. This minimal likeness is not determined by the communal aesthetic standards represented by the

“bards.” The bards’ souls do not fall but continue to fly “insanely.” It is only in that isolated fall

– in that giving up of the Romantic project – that the soul’s likeness to the stars becomes visible.

Menken’s image of the soul’s star-like fall, though it superficially resembles the failures of the bards, should actually be read in contrast to them: the soul’s fall offers a fleeting likeness and figurative closeness to nature. Such a fleeting experience is the product of genius, the power which “breaks with precedent, rules, formulae,”347 but it is not the confidently universal genius of Emerson. This is the genius of Menken’s “wild soul-poems,” which tarries with senselessness and remains unconcerned by the need to win “universal assent” or by the Kantian demand that aesthetic experience be shareable.

As I suggested above, the difference between the opening stanza’s description of the bards’ poetic failure and the second stanza’s description of our speaker’s qualified poetic failure is barely visible without close reading. I make this point because Menken’s poetry is not simply obscure in the sense of being difficult or incoherent as some of her early reviewers would claim.

Rather, a recurring feature of her poetry is the unannounced (or barely announced)

346. Rigby, “Earth, World, Text,” 437. 347. Haworth, “Genius is What Happens,” 334. 141 transformation – the change in the speaker’s experience, perception, or mood which occurs sometimes almost imperceptibly and often without a description of motive or cause. In the case of “Miserimus,” I’ve already suggested that Menken’s speaker finds a kind of likeness between soul and nature not by opposing or reversing the failed methods of the bards she criticizes but by making the same mistake and by re-experiencing almost exactly the same failure. The weird fragmentary line on genius in the second stanza is the closest thing we have to an explicit indication that a change will take place (in this case the solitary poet’s dissent from poetic precedent). To put this another way, at the level of form, “Miserimus” – like many of Menken’s poems – proceeds by repetition (rather than, say, narrative development). I read the repetition in

“Miserimus” as one of Menken’s “moveless steppings back to the world.” It is “moveless” insofar as the second stanza restates the failure of the first stanza – the subject’s position in relation to nature appears to be identical. The shift to allegory, as I have been arguing, re-inflects that relationship (between mind and nature) without alleviating the initial sense of failure.

Menken’s “moveless” return here consists in a perceptual reorientation to the world, which looks, superficially, like no change at all. This is a recurring feature of Menken’s poems, as I will discuss in the next section, and I read it as a deliberate strategy. Part of what makes so many of Menken’s poems difficult to interpret is the absence of clear voltas. In “Miserimus,” the shift is unannounced as well as slight. The effect is an uncanny poetic style that can leave the reader second-guessing whether an apparent shift in mood or imagery marks a substantial change in lyric utterance or merely continuity. Moments like the ironic soul-star allegory in “Miserimus” are intended, I would suggest, to “dwell in the space before the acceptance of any perceived fact.”348 This is how Terada describes those subaesthetic experiences that withdraw from the

348. Terada, Looking Away, 5. 142

“imaginable shareability”349 of aesthetic judgement. In making unannounced, “moveless” turns in her poems, Menken denies her readers the assurance that they are sharing in her aesthetic perception.

I read the “moveless stepping” of “Miserimus,” whereby Menken reasserts the dis- correspondence of soul and star while slightly altering her use of poetic figure, as a kind of

“negative” – and almost accidental – ecopoetic gesture. It is a way of imagining a relation to nature without subordination to the mind, which also evades assimilation by a shared aesthetic judgement. The interpretive problem created by Menken’s “moveless steppings” is comparable to that regarding what Anne-Lise François calls “reticent assertion.”350 This is François’ term for a gesture she finds throughout both nineteenth-century fiction and Romantic lyric. It is gesture

that would be more than mere inaction, more than the indefinite avoidance of taking of positions of power… a double turn in the lock of nonpossession, a pointing that would give notice of an unrealized x and, just as swiftly, put it irretrievably ‘off limits,’ beyond development.351

The allegory of “Miserimus” is “a double turn in the lock of nonpossession” in this sense: the poem opens by lamenting the nonpossession of nature and the poem’s minimal shift far from reversing this situation, only confirms it. Crucial to Francois’ argument is the claim that literary criticism frequently attaches excessive ethical value to the disclosure of knowledge and the discovery and fulfillment of potential through action.352 I would argue that the relatively outsized

349. Terada, Looking Away, 105. 350. Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), xix. 351. François, Open Secrets, 36. 352. François argues, for example, that a “tendency to attach guilt to unused powers or uncommitted acts – to insist on the trauma of having had the power to do x and not having done it, or having seen x and not having made it available to others – marks. . . the new historicist criticism of Romantic lyricism.” (François, Open Secrets, 30). For François, by contrast, “the ethical act is not a decisive intervention but an announcement ‘qui n’aura point de suite’ (of which nothing will come), made not so as to pursue desire but to assert one’s freedom to then set it aside” (François, Open Secrets, 131). Menken’s poems frequently register changes in perception and mood which are, as it were, unmotivated, presented without cause. It is not always that her poetry sets desire “aside,” but that we rarely encounter a “decisive intervention” in her poetry. The appearance of repetition and the absence of clear lines of 143 critical attention given to Menken’s poem “Judith,” with its clear dramatic narrative and assertion of voice, manifests this critical trend. By contrast, the majority of Menken’s other free- verse poems express something more like François’s “double turn in the lock of nonpossession.”

Francois’s argument is especially important to my reading of Menken because Menken’s poems are often, superficially, invested in the description of unrealized and unfulfilled power

(especially poetic power). However, as I read Infelicia, I don’t think the poems only lament failure. Throughout her poetry we have moments like that in Miserimus where a poetic failure that is initially lamented appears suddenly to be converted and re-inflected into a new (and in some cases recuperative) experience.

The minimal re-inflection of poetic failure which occurs between the stanzas of

“Miserimus” confirms the “dumb” earth’s silence – the failure of a Romantic correspondence- poetics – however, as we have seen, a slight or “reticent” change in relation to nature does occur all the same.353 The shift to a negative allegory in “Miserimus” is reticent in this way and as such to facilitate and simulate the evasion of aesthetic perception and judgement.354

III. The Depths of the Real

Although, as we saw in her autobiographical “Notes,” Menken presents her poetry as the product of divine inspiration, her poems frequently express an ambivalent attitude to religious belief.

Often Menken will invoke the kind of suffering – including poverty and exploitation – that she

cause and effect in her poems exemplify what Francois calls “narrative waste,” the “readiness not to make event x a cause for a subsequent event y” (François, Open Secrets, 21). 353. Another of François’s terms that is relevant here is “lyric inconsequence.” In the poetry of William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Hardy she describes “figures who return to the scene of an original epistemic or moral lapse, yet they return to do nothing; they come back only to confirm the inevitability of a silence that once promised to be broken and to continue indefinitely a slightness of address that once seemed temporary.” (François, Open Secrets, 131). 354. I am conscious of the irony of framing a poetics built around the liberation of genius in terms of reticence. The reticence I identify in Menken’s poetry is specifically a reticence to share perceptions that are clearly legible in the manner of her theatrical “surface soul.” 144 laments in “My Heritage,” before imagining relief and consolation in the form of eschatological contemplation. Menken frames apocalypse, drawing on the Book of Revelation both as a desirable disclosure of truth and as the instigation of justice. However, her poems never purport to stage the present experience of religious revelation. It is always something to be waited for, deferred beyond the lyric present. In the poems where traditional religious experience is deferred what takes its place is another form of the experience of dis-correspondence. Menken locates these poems in a position between the temporal world of mere mortals and the heavenly world to come. This liminal temporality is almost entirely solitary – it is a withdrawal not just from recognizable religious experience but from all shared experience.

We can see the deferral of divine revelation explicitly in two poems:– “Into the Depths” and “Myself.” The two poems – published five months apart yet placed together when reprinted in Infelicia – echo each other in ways that suggest they should be read as a pair. Both represent an apocalyptic encounter with God as a means of escape from worldly suffering. However, in each case, the escape is deferred or rendered impossible. The implication is that our speaker chooses instead to reorient themselves in relation to the material world (rather than disavowing or renouncing it altogether). This reorientation consists of turning away from the “world ‘as is’” and towards “perceptions that seem below or marginal to normal appearance.”355

“Into the Depths,” initially published in August 1860, is another of Menken’s longer free-verse poems, consisting of five stanzas of unequal length. It exemplifies what Julian

Levinson has called the “prophetic phase” of Menken’s poetry. As Levinson notes, the theology visible in much of Menken’s poetry “inhabit[s] a shadowy territory between Jewish and

Christian discourses, but the poems themselves forcefully proclaim their allegiance to the

355. Terada, Looking Away, 4, 3. 145

Jewish/ Israelite divide.”356 As Levinson argues, Menken’s “prophetic” poetry deploys the

“language of Biblical eschatology, most commonly a mixture between the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation” to create a kind of “Biblical pastiche.”357 In “Into the Depths” she describes her despair apparently at being denied a place in Heaven: “Lost – Lost – Lost! / … / To me forever the Kingdom of Heaven.” Heaven is framed here in eschatological terms, suggesting this is the apocalyptic Heaven on Earth, the New Jerusalem described in the Book of

Revelation.358 Menken’s speaker claims “I have pleaded to the seventh angel for the little book. /

But he heedeth me not,”359 recalling the lines from Revelation in which the “seventh angel” appears before John carrying a “little book.”360 The seventh angel’s speech, we are told in

Revelation, will signal the climax of God’s judgement..361 The angel asks John to eat the “little book” before telling him, “Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.”362 Menken quotes this line directly – “I prophesy before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and Kings” – and later complains that she finds herself “talking to people, nations, tongues, and kings that heed me not.”363 She compares herself to St. John, then, as a prophet, though her prophecies are ignored, while also claiming that the Kingdom of Heaven is, in some sense, unavailable to her.

356. Julian Levinson, “‘The Seventh Angel Woke Me’: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Return of Israelite Prophecy,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) 33, no. 1 (2014): 147-165; 148. https://doi- org.ezproxy.neu.edu/10.5325/studamerjewilite.33.1.0147. After her marriage to Alexander Menken in Cincinnati in 1856, Menken became closely associated with Cincinnati’s Reform Jewish community and became good friends with Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, one of the leading lights of American Reform Judaism. Although she didn’t formally convert to Judaism while in Cincinnati, she would continue to identify as Jewish for the rest of her life, long after leaving Cincinnati and divorcing Alexander. On Menken’s relationship to the Cincinnati Reform Jewish community, see Sentilles, Performing Menken, 34-49. Levinson suggests that, without “official recognition,” Menken “may have arrived at a kind of homespun Jewishness based on inner conviction alone.” (Levinson, “The Seventh Angel Woke Me,” 151). 357. Levinson, “The Seventh Angel Woke Me,” 160, 161. 358. On the New Jerusalem, see: Rev. 21:1-14. 359. Adah Isaacs Menken, “Into the Depths,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 71-74; 71. 360. Rev. 10:2 (King James Version). 361. Rev. 10:7. See also: Rev 16:17 362. Rev. 10:11. 363. Menken, “Into the Depths,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 71, 72. 146

Menken’s prophetic voice is depicted as unheeded here. She is ignored by people and nations. We should recall Richards and McCown’s claims that Menken’s poetry demonstrates her inability to speak in the role of the “democratic bard,”364 to and for all people. This inability to become a prophet and to speak to and for the people, is framed as part of her being shut out from the divine revelation of Judgement Day. What happens in the rest of the poem is crucial for her poetics of genius. In brief, she embraces the experience of non-revelation. Before we get to this embrace of private withdrawn experience, the speaker contrasts the divine justice of heaven

(from which she feels barred) against the injustice of the temporal world.

The speaker of “Into the Depths” is shut out of heaven and seemingly condemned to remain in the temporal and material world: the angels, she claims in the second stanza, “heed me not. / But point to the whirlpool called the world. / Must the warm, living, loving soul a wanderer be?”365 She describes her suffering in the “world” in metaphorical terms: “Malice and Envy,” she claims, “tear the white flowers from my brow, and the olive leaves from my breast, and soil with their blood-marked hands the broidered robes of purple beauty.”366 An important biographical context here is that from January 1860 through 1861, Menken was embroiled in a national scandal in which she was forced to publicly defend herself against accusations of bigamy in the press.367 “Malice” and “Envy,” which here “soil” her “broidered robes” might well represent the

364. Richards, “Whitman and Menken,” 196. Although Richards doesn’t frame Menken’s failure as a failure of prophecy, the role of bard which Menken finds she cannot embody sounds a lot like the role of the prophet imagined by John in Revelation. Richards refers to Edward Whitley’s description of Whitman’s “awareness of the symbolic value that came with speaking for the nation from the fringes of national culture,” (Edward Whitley, American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press], 3, qtd. in Richards, “Whitman and Menken,” 201), and she argues that “Menken strenuously and ostentatiously attempts the same project, only to document what she casts as her spectacular failure.” Richards, “Whitman and Menken,” 201. 365. Menken, “Into the Depths,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 72. 366. Menken, “Into the Depths,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 73. 367. In September 1859, after the breakdown of her marriage to Alexander Isaac Menken (who remained in Cincinnati), she moved to New York. In January 1860, she claimed in New York Tribune that she was married to the nationally renowned prizefighter John Camel Heenan (who was then travelling to England for what would be the first world heavyweight championship boxing match). Menken’s claim was almost immediately and publicly denied 147 misogynistic attacks she endured from journalists and editors, some of whom seemed intent on ruining her public reputation. The opening three stanzas contrast the cruelty and injustice of her worldly and public experiences against the implied divine justice of Judgement Day and the

Kingdom of Heaven which yet remains, for an undisclosed reason, unavailable to her.

The poem’s fourth stanza registers a radical shift in the speaker’s experience. But it is a shift that arrives almost out of nowhere and without explanation:

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord! Weeping all the night-time. Weeping sad and chill through the lone woods. Straying 'mong the ghostly trees. Wandering through the rustling leaves. Sobbing to the moon, whose icy light wraps me like a shroud. Leaning on a hoary rock, praying to the mocking stars. With Love's o'erwhelming power startling my soul like an earthquake shock. I lift my voice above the low howl of the winds to call my Eros to come and give me light and life once more. His broad arms can raise me up to the light, and his red lips can kiss me back to life. I heed not the storm of the world, nor the clashing of its steel. I wait—wait—wait!368

The opening line of the stanza borrows from the Psalms to apostrophize God directly.369 What follows is a series of present participles: she is “weeping,” “straying,” “wandering,” “sobbing” and “leaning on a hoary rock.” In the image of her “praying to the mocking stars” we should hear an echo of the soul’s failed flight to reach the stars in “My Heritage” and a foreshadowing of the same image in “Miserimus.” We then arrive at the stanza’s rupture: “With Love’s o’erwhelming

by George Wilkes, a newspaper editor close to Heenan. In February 1860, Alexander Menken claimed publicly that they had never actually divorced and that therefore, if she were married to Heenan, she had broken the law by committing bigamy (Sentilles, Performing Menken, 55-56). The accusation that she had invented the marriage to Heenan followed by the accusation of bigamy created, in Sentilles’ words, a “scandal that entertained the nation for weeks to come and irrevocably shaped Menken’s public image.” (Sentilles, Performing Menken, 51.) For an extended discussion of the scandal surrounding Menken’s marriage to Heenan, see: Sentilles, Performing Menken, 50-90, 121, 138-141. 368. Menken, “Into the Depths,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 73. 369. Ps. 130:1. 148 power startling my soul like an earthquake shock.” The effect of stacking together several present participle fragments is to create a weird uncertain temporality. It is as though weeping and wandering do not occur in sequence but are almost super-imposed upon each other. The stakes of this intensified lyric present are raised when we discover love’s “power,” which is also framed in the same continuous present temporality: when we encounter love, it is already in the course of “startling” the speaker’s soul. The effect is to push against sequential linearity and to present these experiences as belonging to the same lyric “moment.”370 The first mention of

Love’s “earthquake” power reads – because it is framed in the continuous present – as though its effects are already ongoing, already being felt. It is as though her experience of love’s power is co-temporal with her suffering in the world – her “weeping” and “wandering.” The oddity is that love is also presented as the solution to her suffering: Eros gives her “light and life.”

The appearance of “Love” or “Eros” in the poem functions like a volta. Menken claims, once Eros has arrived, “I heed not the storm of the world,” asking in the next stanza “How can I live so deep into the depths with all this wealth of love?”371 The difficulty with reading the appearance of Eros as a traditional volta first has to do with the peculiar use of lyric temporality we saw above. When we first encounter love, it is as though love is already being experienced. I want to emphasize the importance of Menken presenting love as “startling her soul.” She frames it as something she is experiencing in the ongoing present. It is not, then, that love was somehow always immanent but only discovered now by the speaker – rather it is the discovering of love which is represented as already ongoing. My point here is that Menken appears determined not to present us with the epiphanic or revelatory moment – the moment when love becomes available,

370. Sharon Cameron argues that “the moment is to the lyric what sequence is to the story,” (Cameron, Lyric Time, 204.) For Cameron lyric as a genre is distinguished by its attempts to escape sequential temporality by concentrating “many moments… into one,” thus giving the impression of having produced a “unitary phenomenon” (Cameron, Lyric Time, 207). 371. Menken, “Into the Depths,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 73. 149 revealed, and startingly palpable. The reason for this, I would suggest is that Menken is not merely choosing a secular revelation of love over a religious revelation of divine justice. Rather she is trying to find an alternative to the very logic of revelation.372

The poem ends with the speaker embracing Eros and imagining an experience of passion and pleasure that is private. It is not, however, the performance of the private self that Sentilles warns us to be skeptical of, but rather a consciously allusive and allegorical picture of withdrawn experience. In the allegory, Menken’s withdrawal from the public’s malicious gaze is represented as a soldier returning from battle:

Grand, beauteous Love! Let us live alone, far from the world of battle and pain, where we can forget this grief that has plunged me into the depths. We will revel in ourselves. Come, Eros, thou creator of this divine passion, come and lay my weary head on your bosom. Draw me close up to your white breast and lull me to sleep. Smooth back the damp tangled mass from my pale brow. I am so weary of battle— Take this heavy shield. I am so weary of toil— Loosen my garments. Now wrap me close in your bosom to rest.373

This conclusion allows a relief from the “world” not through access to God or the Kingdom of

Heaven, but through an experience of isolation. The isolation which is lamented at the poem’s start (“It is I alone of all God’s creatures that am shut out”) is taken up, and repeated with a slight

372. This refusal of the logic of revelation is different from François’s description of the “naturalization” of revelation in the literature of the “open secret.” For François, the “open secret… implies a shift in the kind of attention that ‘revelation’… demands, an attenuation of revelation’s stakes, a license to take the revealed for granted” (François, Open Secrets, 8). In the unannounced, volta-less appearance of Eros in “Into the Depths,” there is almost a sense that we might take secular love for granted: Eros, like grace, simply appears. (The pagan god is not invoked, sought after, or called to by the speaker before his appearance.) However, the appearance of Eros is characterized by a temporal obscurity that makes it impossible to locate in time. The moment of love’s appearance is absent from the poem, so that we are invited not to take revelation for granted but to abandon revelation as a modality for the experience of love altogether. 373. Menken, “Into the Depths,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 74. 150 but crucial revision: “Let us live alone… we will revel in ourselves.” I think we should read the ending of the poem as a whole as a revised version of the same experience described in the opening. She is still shut out from Heaven and her prophesying – her attempt to speak for the nation – is still ignored. Her isolation is not ended but reframed. No longer an experience of deprivation, it is an opportunity for the private experience of passion. The desire for access to

God’s throne and divine judgement is not fulfilled but rather redirected in her address to “Eros, thou creator of this divine passion.”

The embrace of Eros is presented equivocally, then, in terms which seem intended deliberately to echo and revise the divine love and place in Heaven desired at the poem’s beginning. The kind of solution Eros offers, however, is not transcendence of the unjust temporal and material world – nor does the encounter initiate the apocalyptic end of time. Instead, it reorients her relation to the temporal world. She asks: “How can I live so deep into the depths with all this wealth of love?”374 She initially experiences the “whirlpool called the world” as a kind of immersion. The figure of Eros seems to offer, implicitly, a lighter and less immersive mode of perceiving the material world. That image of the speaker and Eros “[reveling] in ourselves” provides a key site of comparison with poems like “My Heritage” and “Miserimus” which critique the normative demands for “imaginable shareability” placed on experiences of pleasure and beauty. The encounter with Eros presents an undetermined and asocial experience of desire and beauty – Love is “grand” and “beauteous” but not public or shared: it is experienced “far from the world of battle and pain.” Love escapes immersion in the “whirlpool” of public life, not because it seems to offer transcendence from the world or apocalyptic transformation of the world, but because the experience is free of what in “My Heritage” was called the “pleasure” of “others.”

374. Menken, “Into the Depths,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 73. 151

Describing the experience of attraction to ephemeral perceptions, Terada argues that the

“discourse of mere phenomenality stops short of objection: it only registers a wish to be relieved for a moment of the coercion to accept whatever one does not dispute.”375 Outright “objections” or “derogations of the given world” tend to come, as she argues, elsewhere, from religious believers – “believers in another reality.”376 The speaker of “Into the Depths” begins by expressing not just belief in “another reality” in this sense, but desire for it – for Heaven on

Earth. By the end of the poem, we have moved to a new position closer to that “wish to be relieved.” The transition here is not from social isolation to recognition as a prophet, but from lamenting isolation to celebrating it as “grand” and “beauteous,” as an a-social, “proto-aesthetic” pleasure. In the mutation of desire for Heaven into desire for Eros, we can also see in François’s terms, a “suspension of the impulse to take revenge on the given and decry transience as deprivation.”377 The image of “suspension” here is particularly relevant. Whereas the speaker’s initial eschatological desire seems to involve the hope that divine justice takes revenge on the forces of “malice” and “envy,” the poem’s weird non-volta simply suspends this hope. The speaker’s attention shifts and doesn’t return to the earlier lament except to say that its causes will be forgotten – “Let us live alone far from the world of battle and pain, where we can forget this grief.”378

At first sight, “Into the Depths” seems less invested than “My Heritage” and “Miserimus” in the experience of nature. The fact that love is introduced to us as part of a series of images reminiscent of pastoral elegy – “lone woods,” “ghostly trees,” “rustling leaves,” and “icy light” – is important, however. Freya Mathews, in her analysis of the classical myth of Psyche and Eros,

375. Terada, Looking Away, 3. 376. Terada, Looking Away, 24. 377. François, Open Secrets, 21. 378. Menken, “Into the Depths,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 74. 152 argues that Psyche in falling in love with Eros, seeks “not a lover, but love itself. Psyche sets out to win Eros as an attitude, an orientation, a way of being in the world, an aspect of herself. She seeks ‘in-loveness’ as a permanent modality.” 379 Mathews notes that in the myth of Psyche, as told by Apuleius in the Golden Ass, Psyche (whose name is Greek for self or soul) is only able to win Eros with the help of the natural world (in the shape of an eagle, a colony of ants, and the nature god Pan).380 For Mathews, the myth ultimately represents a panpsychist approach to nature, which attributes a “subjectival dimension”381 to all material things as a way of avoiding the appropriation or domination of material nature. Mathews also calls this an “erotic approach to reality.”382 I am not suggesting that we read Menken as a panpsychist; however, I do think the description of the love for Eros as a pursuit of a certain “orientation” or “modality” is relevant to

Menken’s poetics. “Into the Depths” describes a reorientation to the material world as such – not just nonhuman nature, but everything that isn’t divine or angelic. The poem is interested in facilitating a new non-immersive modality of experience in the here-and-now, as an alternative to a belief (in this poem, made to seem futile) in otherworldly or eschatological salvation.

The appearance of the god Eros in a muted, slightly gothic encounter with nature recalls the ambivalent force of Fuller’s daemonic, which manifests itself in an equally hostile natural environment of “sullen rock” and “deceitful” water.383 Like Fuller’s description of her encounters with the daemonic, there is a basic ambivalence about nature in “Into the Depths.”

Nature seems hostile and inhospitable – the forest is “lone” and “icy” and the image of the

“mocking stars” recalls the impossibility of correspondence described in “Miserimus” and “My

Heritage.” Here responsibility for dis-correspondence is attributed to the stars themselves as

379. Mathews, For Love of Matter, 116. 380. Mathews, For Love of Matter, 118-119, 141-143. 381. Mathews, For Love of Matter, 73. 382. Mathews, For Love of Matter, 117. 383. Fuller to an unknown recipient, in Hudspeth, Letters 6: 141. 153 though nature doesn’t really want or need the speaker’s attention. Nature in this moment does not become a sympathetic interlocutor, nor does it offer the consolation of correspondence.

It is not that she gives up Judeo-Christian belief,384 then, in favor of neo-pagan nature- worship. Nor is she turning from Christian eschatology to a version of Romantic or Emersonian correspondence with nature. In fact, as Alan Hodder argues, Emerson’s belief in correspondence between mind and nature draws directly on the motif of the “divine marriage” central to the

Book of Revelation.385 The total disclosure of hidden truth on Judgement Day becomes in

Emerson the transparency of nature before the human mind (which he also presents as the remit of poetry: “the poet turns the world to glass and shows us all things in their right series”386).

Whereas Emerson’s famous turn from scripture to the Book of Nature consists in replacing one form of revelation with another, Menken gives up on revelation altogether, whether that of St.

John or of Transcendentalist correspondence. The experience of non-immersion – of relief from the “depths” of the world – involves no longer valorizing revelation of any kind.

The arrival of Eros in the inhospitable woods – where the stars only mock her – participates in the same poetics of dis-correspondence we saw in “Miserimus” and “My

Heritage.” The encounter with Eros emblematizes a mode of experience that is not characterized by revelation or transparency, but which remains, like the “original nonsense” of genius, opaque and resistant to appropriation or replication. Nature in its daemonic mode – icy, mocking, lone – is not an occasion for universally shareable perception as it is, for example, in “The Poet” where

Emerson claims the poet’s “words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.”387

384. In this chapter I use the term “Judeo-Christian” not to imply the existence of a single holistic religious culture shared by Judaism and Christianity but as an acknowledgement of what Julian Levinson calls the “shadowy territory between Jewish and Christian discourses” which Menken’s poems occupy (Levinson, “The Angel Woke Me,” 148). 385. Alan D. Hodder, Emerson’s Rhetoric of Revelation: Nature, the Reader, and the Apocalypse Within (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 25, 25-32. 386. Emerson, “The Poet,” in Atkinson, The Essential Writings, 296. 387. Emerson, “The Poet,” in Atkinson, The Essential Writings, 299. 154

Rather, this daemonic contemplation of nature becomes for Menken an occasion for an experience defined by withdrawal from the world of public taste characterized by “malice” and

“envy.”

When reprinted in Infelicia, “Into the Depths” was placed immediately after a poem entitled “Myself” (initially published in February 1861, under the title “Now and Then”). The placement looks deliberate since “Myself” seems to consciously engage the imagery and themes of “Into the Depths.” “Myself” is, like “My Heritage” a poem about Menken’s experiences of work as an actress. As in “My Heritage,” she feels the coercive pressure of what Brooks calls the

“gaze of the normative spectator.”388 However, in “Myself,” Menken contrasts this against a state of freedom and justice which will be inaugurated by the apocalyptic judgement of God. As in the case of “Into the Depths,” the poem doesn’t seem wholly confident in the probability of

God’s return. The poem places the reader in a peculiar liminal temporality – poised between the present of the given world and a distant inaccessible future characterized by apocalyptic revelation.

In the first stanza of “Myself,” the speaker claims, “Away down into the shadowy depths of the Real I once lived. / I thought that to seem was to be,” and then that “through my earnest pleadings for the True, I learned that the mildest mercy of life was a smiling sneer.”389 Sentilles, argues that the opening lines are intended to “suggest she has never had a strong hold on reality or understood or her own identity.”390 However, I would argue that the speaker’s complaint is not that she lacks a hold on reality but rather that she has felt in the past something like an excessive immersion in reality: the real here consists of “shadowy depths” (and the double adverbs – “away down” – which open the poem intensify the sense of depth). In this state of

388. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 137. 389. Menken, “Myself,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 68. 390. Sentilles, Performing Menken, 138. 155 immersion, the speaker claims, she “thought that to seem was to be.” On the one hand, this is a critique of her audience who equate her stage persona (how, that is, she “seems”) with her real identity.

However, if we read the equation of seeming and being in relation to her having “lived” in the “shadowy depths of the Real,” the critique she is making seems even more extensive. To be immersed in reality is to believe appearance (seeming) is identical with being. Part of the strangeness of this image derives from the complex way Menken is using the term “Real.” She contrasts the mistaken equation of seeming and being against her own “earnest pleadings for the

True.” Menken here is evoking the contrast Elizabeth Renker describes in her study of postbellum “realist poetics” between realism’s conception of facticity (rooted in everyday experience and scientific inquiry) and a competing idealist model of truth as something transcending everyday experience. The latter is especially associated, as Renker puts it, with “the general temper of hegemonic Christianity in the U.S. at this time”: the “idealist conception of

‘Truth’ designated not the truth of fact – the realists often claimed ‘fact,’ or had it attributed

(often derogatorily) to them – but, rather, a form of transcendent truth that derived its meaning from beyond the world of material circumstance staked by the realists.”391

Superficially, then, Menken is taking the position of the idealist poet who scorns the

“material circumstances” of the world (including, for example, the “jewels and lace,” the

“gaslight’s glare,” and the “purple wine”392 which appear a little later in the poem) in favor of a spiritual truth that transcends mere appearances. To be clear, I don’t think this interpretation accounts properly for Menken’s engagement with the idea of the Real and True here; Menken is far more interested in the “material circumstances” (not the “depths” of the “real,” but perhaps its

391. Renker, Realist Poetics, 5. 392. Menken, “Myself,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 69. 156 surfaces) than the idealist interpretation would allow. In brief, like the speaker of “Into the

Depths” who embraces an experience of non-revelatory love discoverable only in the “lone woods,” the speaker of “Myself” defers Christian revelation to a distant future and in the present of the poem outlines her withdrawal from publicly shared experience.

At the end of the poem, after several times contrasting performative public life (the

“business of the world”393) against private interiority (“the minor keyed soul”394), the speaker asserts that her true identity will be revealed at Judgement Day through the divine Revelation:

When these mortal mists shall unclothe the world, then shall I be known as I am! When I dare be dead and buried behind a wall of wings, then shall he know me! When this world shall fall, like some old ghost, wrapped in the black skirts of the wind, down into the fathomless eternity of fire, then shall souls uprise! When God shall lift the frozen seal from struggling voices, then shall we speak! When the purple-and-gold of our inner natures shall be lighted up in the Eternity of Truth, then will love be mine! I can wait.395

In this last stanza of “Myself,” then, we can see Menken once again drawing from what Julian

Levinson calls the midcentury “apocalyptic strain in Antebellum American Protestantism.”396

This is explicit in the prediction that God will “unclothe” the world, revealing authentic identities, “inner natures,” and eternal “Truth,” while the world of the “Real” like “some old ghost” will “fall” away. This divine revelation, it seems, will refute the mistaken notion that appearance and being are identical by stripping away appearance and revealing only inner natures. This final stanza imagines an apocalyptic future in which the hypocrisy of the world that forces the speaker to project a false public persona will be punished and she will be seen and

393. Menken, “Myself” in Infelicia, 68. 394. Menken, “Myself” in Infelicia, 69. 395. Menken, “Myself” in Infelicia, 70. 396. Levinson, “The Angel Woke Me,” 149. 157 known as she really is. This articulation of her true self can only come when the world of the

“Real” in which she “once lived” has been stripped away.

On the face of it, then, the final stanza configures a Christian idealist resolution to her pursuit of “Truth.” However, the poem as a whole, I would suggest, stops short of endorsing this apocalyptic vision. The poem works by suspending us between two poles. The very last line defers the moment of Revelation: “I can wait.” But the speaker is not waiting for idealist revelation while immersed in the material appearances of the “Real.” The opening line casts that immersion in the Real in the past tense: she “once lived” down in the Real’s “shadowy depths.”

If she lived in the Real “once” but not now and is still waiting for the revelation which will unclothe the world’s surface-appearances, then when is the poem being uttered? The grammar of the first line (“I once lived”) creates suspension which is never relieved (we are left waiting for the contrastive clause that never comes: ‘I once lived in the Real…. but now I know the truth’).

The poem’s lyric present is also poised in an uncertain temporality between a prior state of ignorance (“I thought that to seem was to be”) and a future disclosure of knowledge (the

“Eternity of Truth”).

My contention is that Menken intends the poem to take place in a liminal zone between ignorance and disclosure. In this between-space, she refashions her relation to the real not as an immersion in it, but as an attention to its surfaces that is defined in contrast to public shareable experience. Specifically, I think we should read her admission that in the past she mistook seeming for being not just as the idealist’s condemnation of an excessive belief in worldly appearances; but more specifically as a critique of the way collective public perception works.

When she complains in the same stanza that the “business of the world” is to “crush out things

158 called souls,”397 this should be read as an extension of the mistaken equation of seeming with being: to “crush out” souls suggests a denial of the existence of private interiority and therefore of private experience: it is a denial of the existence of that which is not given, not available to public perception. To be immersed in the “shadowy depths of the Real” is to have one’s perception, one’s subjectivity, wholly determined by this collective and public gaze – to experience only collective perception.

One possible alternative to this experience of perception over-determined by the “world” is introspection; but the poem with its fraught depiction of the uncrushed soul – “jealous,”

“starving,” “lizard-like”398 – doesn’t advocate this. Instead, the speaker describes her work as an actress: “Now I gloss my pale face with laughter …/ Decked in jewels and lace, I laugh beneath the gaslight's glare, and quaff the purple wine.”399 The content of the poem’s lyric present is not the triumphant disclosure of the soul’s truth but an image of laugher configured as mere appearance – mere “gloss.” The revelation of inner truth is deferred in that final stanza into the distant apocalyptic future. In place of revelation, the speaker describes her ironic relation to the surface trappings of her work as actress in a way that (in contrast to her “Notes”) consciously divorces her experience from that of her audience.

In the next stanza, we hear “Still I trim my white bosom with crimson roses; for none shall see the thorns. / I bind my aching brow with a jeweled crown that none shall see the iron one beneath.”400 Rather than reading this imagery of surface ornamentation (gloss and trim) only as a demonstration of her need to perform a false persona, I suggest we read it as a direct contrast and corrective to the opening image of depth: this later emphasis on that which is literally

397. Menken, “Myself,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 68. 398. Menken, “Myself,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 69. 399. Menken, “Myself,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 69. 400. Menken, “Myself,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 69. 159 superficial (belonging to surfaces) does not offer the transcendent alternative to immersion in the

Real which the speaker in the final stanza is still waiting for; but it does offer a non-immersive relation to the material world. The dramatic irony whereby she appears to perform for spectators only to confound them without their knowing – wearing “crimson roses” that hide her “thorns” is crucial to this central thread of the poem: ornamentation here signals a means of experiencing material objects in a manner that consciously diverges from public and collective experience.

In spite of the poem’s idealist undercurrent then (the soul “waiting for God”401), I read these images of ornamental materiality as ends in their own right which Menken chooses to indulge. When we reach the final stanza, her speaker remarks “When I dare be dead and buried behind a wall of wings, then shall he know me!” In spite of the final line’s image of passive patience, then, the apocalyptic revelation is here framed as something Menken chooses to defer – something that arrives not by grace but by daring. In this context, her ornamental experience in the liminal space of the poem’s central stanzas has to be seen as something she chooses (not just something she is forced to rely on while waiting for divine justice).

Menken’s free verse in my reading shows an attempt to describe experiences that are genuinely free of the constraints of taste. They both represent the withdrawal from shared experience (as expressed in the dramatic irony of “Myself”) and attempt to develop a poetic form which is itself freed of the demand for emulation that Kantian aesthetic theory places on works of genius. Of course, I am not arguing that Menken’s poetry is actually unreadable. But I do think that many of her free verse poems are deliberately resistant to superficial reading. As I suggested above regarding “Miserimus,” Menken’s poems, by design, leave the reader second- guessing their interpretations. These are poems which largely refuse to stage a lyric exchange between reader and writer. They rebut our desire to celebrate poems as vehicles of social

401. Menken, “Myself,” in Eiselein, Infelicia, 69. 160 cohesion or sites of empathetic communion. Especially in the context of the encounter with Eros in “Into the Depths,” which is celebrated even as it withdraws from the logic of revelation, we are left to ask why we expect or want poems to be sites of disclosure between persons at all.

Chapter Four: “Rhythmic Atoms”: Sidney Lanier’s Ecopoetics

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I. Poetry and Experience

Tell me, sweet burly-bark’d, man-bodied Tree That mine arms in the dark are embracing, dost know From what fount are these tears at thy feet which flow? They rise not from reason, but deeper inconsequent deeps. Reason’s not one that weeps. What logic of greeting lies Betwixt dear over-beautiful trees and the rain of the eyes? Sidney Lanier, “Sunrise”402

In the opening stanzas of Sidney Lanier’s 1880 “Sunrise” – the last of his famous “Hymns of

Marshes”403 – the speaker adopts the language of romance to describe and address a live-oak.

Calling the tree “my beloved,”404 he embraces it, and weeps. Writing about Lanier’s tree-hugging in 1933, Robert Penn Warren remarked that “the most charitable pronouncement on this as on much of Lanier’s poetry, is that it is absurd.” For Warren, “Lanier’s emotionalism was a species of self-indulgence which probably accounts for the fact that he was able to communicate nothing.”405 The speaker’s professed attraction to the tree and his weeping while embracing it is merely an absurd indulgence which does not (and cannot) mean anything to a reader. Warren connects this failure to “communicate” to what he calls Lanier’s “feeble capacity for seeing anything... he referred to Nature as a vague embodiment of his private agitations, his desire for marriage with the all.” He lacked a “capacity for aesthetic perception” so that in his poetry an

402. Sidney Lanier, “Sunrise,” in Poems and Poem Outlines ed. Charles R. Anderson, vol. 1 of The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), 145, lines 19-25 (hereafter cited in-text by line numbers). 403. Lanier composed “Sunrise” in December 1880 during a fever (Anderson, Introduction to Lanier, Poems and Poem Outlines, lxiv). Hymns of the Marshes was the title of the volume of poetry Lanier was planning in that period – in the months just before his death. On Lanier’s plan to complete the Hymns of Marshes, see his letter to William H. Ward, Baltimore, Md., December 6, 1880, in Sidney Lanier, Letters 1878-1881, ed. Charles R. Anderson and Aubrey H. Starke, vol. 10 of The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), 274-275. 404. Lanier, “Sunrise,” 144, line 15. 405. Robert Penn Warren, “The Blind Poet: Sidney Lanier,” review of Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study, by Aubrey Starke, The American Review (November 1933): 27-45; 44. 162

“idea is never realized; it remains abstract; it does not achieve the status of experience.”406 The other southern New Critics agreed – Allen Tate, for example, concurs with Warren on Lanier’s indulgence in his “romantic ego” and his “incapacity to set forth a clear image.”407 Robert H.

Ross, writing in 1961, draws directly on Warren’s argument for his reading of Lanier’s “The

Marshes of Glynn,” and comments that the poem’s symbols “must emerge crystal clear and consistent if the reader’s understanding of the poet’s experience is not to be vitiated.”408 For

Ross, as for Warren and Tate, Lanier fails to make his “experience” understood. There are two key complaints here then. On the one hand, Lanier’s poetry is excessively sentimental, overburdened by “emotionalism”; on the other hand, it is oddly abstract, failing to communicate anything precise, or to mediate any specific experience.

From the perspective not only of the New Critics, but of the lyric theorists in the second half of the twentieth century, this is a fundamental failing on Lanier’s part. Consider, for example, Allen Grossman’s claim that “a poem is an occasion for loving exchange of perceptions… Poems pitch persons toward one another full of news about being, about personal life.”409 By failing to realize ideas and by failing to have those ideas attain the “status of experience,” Lanier’s poems fail to perform the social function which lyric theory has come to expect of poetry in general. They do not provide, in other words, an occasion for intersubjectivity

(for the “exchange of perceptions” and the sharing of “personal life”).

406. Warren, “The Blind Poet,” 44, 37, 38. 407. Allen Tate, “A Southern Romantic,” review of Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study, by Aubrey Starke, New Republic 76 (30 August 1933): 67-70; 68, 69. Aubrey Starke, whose biography of Lanier Warren and Tate were both reviewing and criticizing, responded to their reviews with an article of his own: “The Agrarians Deny a Leader,” American Review 2 (March 1934): 534-553. See also John Crowe Ransom’s riposte to Starke’s response in the same issue of the American Review: “Hearts and Heads,” American Review 2 (March 1934): 554- 571. 408. Robert H. Ross, “‘The Marshes of Glynn’: A Study in Symbolic Obscurity,” American Literature, 32, no. 4 (January 1961): 408. 409. Allen Grossman, “Summa Lyrica,” The Sighted Singer (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 284 #30. 163

While the critique of Lanier’s emotionalism is a recurrent feature of twentieth-century scholarship on his work,410 we can also detect in a few twenty-first-century readings an echo of the New Critics’ more incisive claim – that his poetry neither communicates ideas nor mediates experience and so fails as lyric. John Kerkering, for example, argues that Lanier, in his 1880 prose work, The Science of English Verse, develops an Anglo-Saxon racial poetics. For Lanier,

Kerkering claims, poems in English embody a racial content which is identical across historical time and cultural space. Specifically, it is “Lanier’s assimilation of poetry to music that enables a poem’s Anglo-Saxon identity.” As Kerkering points out, this means in effect that all Anglophone poems have the same (Anglo-Saxon) significance: “Standing aloof from changing conventions, a rhythmic pattern arbitrarily designated as the embodiment of a language’s identity allows that language to appear to be one self.”411 The attention to an arbitrarily imposed rhythmic pattern shifts our “focus from the meanings [poems] convey to the sounds—and thus the races—they embody.”412 Though his concern with racial poetics differs enormously from Warren’s account of Lanier’s aesthetic failure, Kerkering also finds in Lanier’s work a poetics which deliberately aims not to communicate “meanings.” English poetry, in Kerkering’s reading of Lanier, neither communicates ideas associated with English or Anglo-Saxon identity, nor does it mediate

English or Anglo-Saxon “experience.” The claim is that English poems simply embody the racial identity itself through sound.

410. On Lanier’s representation of intense emotion (and his belief in the moral value of feeling – which Warren dismisses as his “emotionalism”), see Jack De Bellis’s 1972 Sidney Lanier. De Bellis argues that Lanier is indebted to a “tradition he called the moral sentiments tradition,” derived from James MacIntosh, who “proposed a theory of innate moral feelings” Jack De Bellis, Sidney Lanier (New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1972), 20, 21. Shira Wolosky argues that Lanier derives his sentimental “courtly” diction from the tradition of “Southern genteel romance” (Wolosky, Poetry and Public Discourse, 61). 411. John D. Kerkering, The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 123. 412. Kerkering, The Poetics of National and Racial Identity, 116. 164

This view of Lanier as writing (or at least as imagining) an inexpressive non-experiential poetry can also be seen in the work of Yopie Prins, one of the founding theorists and scholars of the Historical Poetics. Also writing about Lanier’s theory of rhythm in the Science, she comments that Lanier “conceives of a poetry without a speaker. For Lanier, the voice does not really belong to a person but is better understood as a musical instrument.”413 Since, for Lanier, the human voice is a kind of instrument, poems are understood not as vehicles for meaning but purely as sounds (and in fact, as both Prins and Kerkering discuss at length, Lanier actually prints the poems he discusses in the Science on musical staves). Prins’ reading participates in the broader anti-lyric tradition of the Historical Poetics and she recuperates Lanier’s theory precisely because he does not want or expect poetry to be a vehicle for subjective lyric expression – poetry is not a vehicle of lyric subjectivity if it cannot communicate ideas or provide the medium for particular kinds of experience.

For Prins and Kerkering, Lanier’s poetry foregrounds sound and rhythm at the expense of meaning. Their readings provide an explanation for what the New Critics had identified as the basic flaw in Lanier’s poetry – its failure to transmit particular ideas and experiences. These later arguments suggest that what had appeared to be an aesthetic failing might actually have been intentional: Lanier actually understood poetry to be primarily non-communicative – the embodiment of mere sound rather than a vehicle for the transmission of ideas or mediation of experiences between subjects. In short, these readings share the view that Lanier developed a non-lyric poetics.414

413. Yopie Prins, “Historical Poetics, Dysprosody, and The Science of English Verse,” PMLA 123, no. 1 (January 2008): 229-234; 232. 414. Along with Prins, several other scholars of “historical poetics” have argued for a history of nineteenth-century poetry which is not oriented around the genre of the lyric. In its strongest form, this argument takes the lyric to be an anachronist imposition by twentieth-century readers onto nineteenth-century poems. Virginia Jackson, in Dickinson’s Misery provides the framework for (and major example of) this anti-lyric argument. She argues that the subject imagined by lyric reading is abstracted from the “densely woven fabric of social relations,” in which poetry 165

The pure sound reading of Lanier’s work – in both its evaluative and constructive forms – has a lot of merit. But it leaves an important question unanswered: if Lanier was not aiming to communicate ideas or mediate experience, how are we to read his late nature poetry, in which the speaker appears to detail various highly charged personal encounters with nature? Warren’s answer is to read it as a failure (as he sees it, Lanier failed to perceive or represent particular entities in nature and so ended up reducing the whole of nature to a “vague embodiment of. . . his desire for marriage with the all”). For Warren, Lanier certainly desires to mediate specific intimate experiences of nature through poetry, but he is unable to. In other words, he would have been a lyric nature-poet, had he been capable of it. By contrast, for Prins and – implicitly – for

Kerkering, his poetics is deliberately and definitively anti-lyric.

If we take the latter view that Lanier himself actually understands poetry primarily to be non-lyric (concerned, that is, with the embodiment of sound rather than the mediation of subjective states or the achievement of “the status of experience”), how do we read the questions which Lanier poses to the live-oak at the beginning of Sunrise? “From what fount are these tears at thy feet which flow? / They rise not from reason, but deeper inconsequent deeps. / Reason’s not one that weeps. / What logic of greeting lies / Betwixt dear over-beautiful trees and the rain of the eyes?” In these lines, Lanier is describing a singular experience (part of what Grossman would call his “news about being”); but he is also going further, asking about the source of the experience and the rules (the “logic of greeting”) which govern the experience. Lanier is interested, as elsewhere in “Sunrise” and “The Marshes of Glynn,” not simply in a description of

is written and read. As a result, the lyricized nineteenth-century poem becomes the vehicle for a kind undefined transhistorical subjectivity which allows the reader to identify themselves with the speaker of the poem: “saying ‘I’ can stand for saying ‘you’ . . . the poet’s solitude stands in for the solitude of the individual reader.” Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 90, 128. Lyric reading positions poems as mobile vehicles for subjective experience. If, as Warren claims about Lanier’s poetry, a poem’s content does not “achieve the status of experience,” it cannot be read lyrically. 166 his personal experiences, but rather in a relational account of the experience – an account of the

“greeting.” It appears he wants to understand how the tree is involved in constituting the experience: it is as if he is aiming to avoid an account of the experience which would subordinate the tree to his own idealizing projections. It is not the emotional state that the weeping signifies which matters, but the “logic” – the principle or rule – which makes him weep in the first place and which and makes the “greeting” with the live-oak possible. My contention is that, by 1879

(and the composition of “The Hymns of Marshes”), Lanier is aware of the danger of appropriating nature to his own “private agitations” (Warren’s term). But this awareness does not lead him to attempt to detail the particularity of material nature in the form of “ecomimesis” or

“ecorhapsody.”415 Rather, these poems explore and try to represent the underlying capacity for experience – the “logic of greeting” which makes the intimate and yet non-appropriative experience of nonhuman nature possible.

This is why – as I argue in the fourth section of this chapter – Lanier’s imagery in his late poetry fails to achieve the “status of experience.” He isn’t simply attempting the “loving exchange perceptions” – the communication of subjective experience central to lyric poetry as understood by Grossman as well as the New Critics. Rather, he is investigating the pre-subjective ground of that experience. In this way, Lanier’s “Hymns of the Marshes” exemplifies what Oren

Izenberg has called “poetry in the general sense,” poetry understood, that is, “not as a kind of object, performance or practice but as intending a knowledge or capacity.”416 For Izenberg this kind of poetry offers an alternative to the lyric poetics of subject formation and intersubjectivity.

Poetry in the “general sense”

415. Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 54. I discuss both of these concepts in greater detail in chapter two. 416. Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 12, 15. 167

is in search of some real quality on the basis of which persons can be said to be a priori associated – to be and to be numerous – rather than a practice of association though the channels of reading, circulation, conversation or sympathy. In so doing it posits a distinction between “subjects” and “persons”: if subjects (as poems conceive them) are understood to possess qualities (voices, histories, features, bodies, genders, attachments, as well as rights and obligations, etc.), the persons intended by the poetic principle are defined by their possession of value – the sheer potential to be integrated into whatever social system.417

Poetry’s “real quality” is to be distinguished from “channels of reading, circulation, conversation or sympathy.” In other words, this poetic quality will not consist of the “crystal clear” presentation of a subject’s perceptions. For Izenberg, this tradition of poetry makes palpable certain capacities which, he argues, are universally applicable to all persons, regardless of particular identities or experiences. Lanier’s longer nature poetry also aims to make such

“capacities” for experience (rather than the experiences themselves) palpable. However, Lanier is specifically interested in the capacity to experience the alterity (and what Lanier himself will the “individuality”) of nonhuman nature. This capacity, I argue in the fourth section of the chapter, he locates in rhythm. Rhythm, in in his later poems is relational. It is a medium of experience, through which subjects (poets, readers, and others) experience objects; but it is also a quality belonging to the objects of experience. Lanier’s theory of rhythmic encounter allows him to represent encounters with nonhuman nature in its alterity without having to posit an impossible removal or erasure of his own subjectivity.

In my reading of the “Hymns of the Marshes,” then, the later Lanier is not a lyric poet

(failed or otherwise), but he is also not the poet of “pure sound” we might imagine from The

Science of English and from Kerkering’s and Prins’s interpretations of that work. In part I am arguing that there is a divergence between Lanier’s “Hymns of the Marshes” and the pure sound

417. Izenberg, Being Numerous, 23. 168 poetics.418 However, I don’t argue that we should treat Lanier’s poetic theory as wholly divorced from his interest in nature. In fact, before Lanier begins to experiment with his theory of rhythmic encounter in nature in poems like “Sunrise” and the “The Marshes of Glynn,” he developed a theory of nature-poetry which, like the theory of pure sound, treats poems as objects and largely elides the question of experience. In his 1872 essay “Nature-Metaphors,” Lanier presents poetic metaphor as the vehicle for the expression of human love for nature. However, he claims that this expression of love functions not because the “nature-metaphor” is an effective form of representation but because it embodies a certain kind of being. In its treatment of poems, as objects, the poetics of “Nature-Metaphors” is reminiscent of the Romantic organicism of the early nineteenth century as well as much of the ecopoetic theory of the twenty-first century.

What “Nature-Metaphors” makes explicit, however, is the confluence between an ontological view of the poem and anthropomorphic view of nature.

In that essay, Lanier treats the nature-metaphor as a sacrament which embodies the marriage between human and nonhuman beings. This “marriage” is grounded not in a relationship between two distinct entities (human and natural), as it at first appears, but on the assertion of an ontological continuity between human beings and nonhuman nature. The poet who loves nature, according to the essay, identifies with it and reveals a fundamental and ontological commonality between human and nonhuman being. At the heart, then, of “Nature-

Metaphors,” at the point where intimacy with nature is declared, we actually find an erasure of human-nonhuman difference and an assertion of anthropocentrism at the level of being. In the

418. Jane S. Gabin, in her book on Lanier’s musical career, argues that Lanier’s poetic theory (specifically in The Science of English Verse) is “far less interesting than Lanier’s poetry,” and she argues the prose is compromised by “exaggerations and inaccuracies” anyway. In fact, she suggests Lanier couldn’t really have believed in the theory of pure sound he proposes at the beginning of The Science of English Verse: “what he actually meant was that the sense of a poem should lie within its sound.” A Living Minstrelsy: The Poetry and Music of Sidney Lanier (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985), 156, 151, 154. 169 third section of the chapter, I examine how this poetics of identification with nature is put into practice in his 1877 nature-poem “A Florida Sunday.” I then return to Kerkering’s reading of

Lanier’s racialized poetics of pure sound and argue that there is a fundamental structural (if not thematic) parallel between Lanier’s assimilationist racial poetics of Anglo-Saxon sound and the anthropocentric poetics of identification with nature. In the fourth section of the chapter, I then explore how the poetics of identification comes under strain and is finally replaced in his later nature-poetry by the poetics of rhythmic experience.

This chapter, then, primarily traces a tension between two competing ecopoetic models, an ecopoetics of identification and embodiment and an emergent ecopoetics of rhythmic experience. Lanier’s example has direct and serious consequences for how we understand ecopoetics and ecocriticism today. Lanier’s earlier theory of poetic embodiment resembles and anticipates the recent ontological turn in ecotheory in that it elevates being (and materiality) over representation. This twenty-first-century turn to ontology (exemplified by the new materialists, object-oriented ontologists, and others) is intended to combat and avoid appropriative anthropocentrism and to recover the particularity of the nonhuman material world. However, as

I argue in the second and third sections of this chapter, the turn to being in Lanier does not avoid but rather re-inscribes anthropocentrism. By contrast his later experience-oriented ecopoetics, though it foregrounds the human subject, does so partly in order to highlight the distinct autonomy of the nonhuman. Rhythm becomes a means of establishing relation while acknowledging (and making palpable) the alterity of the nonhuman.

II. Ontology and the Poetics of Identification

170

Sidney Lanier’s 1872 essay “Nature-Metaphors” is a defense of the use of anthropomorphic metaphor in modern poetry. In the beginning of the essay, Lanier claims that “metaphors come of love rather than thought,” and that “All loves. . . primarily and immediately demand some sort of union, some sort of marriage between the two parties.” The essay focuses in particular on “the love of man for physical nature and of that strange and manifold transfusing of human nature into physical nature which has developed the most interesting phasis of modern culture.”419 This transfusion of the human into “physical nature” is expressed, he claims, in the poetic form of the nature-metaphor. Lanier gives a list of quotations from The Tempest for evidence, most of which are instances of personification (for example: “To cry to the sea that roared to us: to sigh/ To the winds whose pity, sighing back again,/ Did us but loving wrong”420). Human love for nonhuman nature is expressed through poetic figures which attribute subjective human characteristics

(thought, willpower, consciousness, personality) to nonhuman entities.

Lanier’s argument is a response to a contemporary debate over the status and value of metaphor. He claims that readers who enjoy anthropomorphic metaphor “cannot free themselves from the haunting recollection that the ascendant criticism of the day regards nature-metaphors rather in the light of ‘fancies.’”421 The “ascendant criticism” Lanier refers to here derives from

John Ruskin’s Modern Painters: “violent feelings,” Ruskin claims in the third volume, first published in 1854, “produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘Pathetic Fallacy.’” The falsehood he focuses on is the

419. Sidney Lanier, “Nature-Metaphors,” Tiger-Lilies and Southern Prose, ed. Garland Greever, vol. 5 of The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), 306. “Phasis,” according to the OED, is a rare variation of “phase” and refers specifically to “first appearance of the new moon.” Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “phasis, n.,” June 2019, https://www-oed- com.ezproxy.neu.edu/view/Entry/142283?redirectedFrom=phasis&. 420. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.149-151. Quoted in: Lanier, “Nature-Metaphors,” in Greever, ed. Tiger-Lilies, 315. 421. Lanier, “Nature-Metaphors,” in Greever, ed. Tiger-Lilies, 307. 171 attribution of “life,” “will,” and “choice”422 to inanimate nature. Pathetic fallacy, then, is the emotional state which leads us to use and enjoy nature-metaphors. For Ruskin, the person who believes that waves can be “cruel” or that leaves choose to “dance”423 has misapplied subjective qualities (which, properly speaking, belong only to human beings and God) to impersonal objects. To illustrate the point, Ruskin compares modern and ancient depictions of nature.

Homer does not anthropomorphize nature, Ruskin argues, because he believes that any apparent capacity for thought or agency belongs not to material nature itself but to a deity associated with nature: “Homer had some feelings about the sea. . . But all this sense of something living in it he separates in his mind into a great abstract image of Sea Power. . . he says there is somewhat in, and greater than, the waves, which rages, and is idle, and that he calls a god.” This “god,” he continues “I must not confuse with the waves which are only its body.

They may flow hither and thither, increase or diminish. That must be indivisible – imperishable – a god.”424 The ancient Greek, in other words, does not believe in the animacy or interiority of material nature, attributing those qualities instead to spirits and gods.

For Ruskin, a key implication of this is that the Greek poet only feels “sympathy or fellowship. . .for the spirit in the stream and not for the stream; always for the dryad in the wood, not for the wood.” By contrast, the modern thinker (who believes that the “willful fountain sings and the kindly flowers rejoice”) is bewildered by contradictions, “puzzled, and yet happy: pleased and yet ashamed of being so; accepting sympathy from nature which we do not believe it gives, and giving sympathy to nature which we do not believe it receives.”425 Early in his career

422. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3 (New York: Wiley and Halsted, 1858), 159, 161. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.c047145189 423. Ruskin, Modern Painters, 3: 159, 160 424. Ruskin, Modern Painters, 3: 174, 176. Emphasis in the original. 425. Ruskin, Modern Painters, 3: 182. 172

Lanier had admired Ruskin, but by the 1870s his view had changed.426 Although he doesn’t mention Ruskin by name in “Nature-Metaphors,” it becomes clear that he is responding to the argument of Modern Painters when he also contrasts the modern love of nature (expressed in the nature-metaphor) with that of the ancient Greeks:

Now nothing strikes the thoughtful observer of modern literature more quickly or more forcefully than the great yearning therein displayed for intimate companionship with nature. And this yearning, mark, justifies itself upon far other authority than that which one finds in (for example) the Greek nature-seeking. Granted the instinctive reverence for nature common to both parties: The Greek believed the stream to be inhabited by a nymph, and the stream was wonderful to him because of this nymph; but the modern man believes no such thing. One has appeared who continually cried love, love, love – love God, love neighbors; and these “neighbors” have come to be not only men-neighbors, but tree-neighbors, river-neighbors, star-neighbors. The stream – to carry on the Greek parallel – has acquired so much individuality independent of any inhabiting nymph, that men may love it, may be neighbors to it and neighbored by it, and may live life with it in the finest harmony.427

Like Ruskin, Lanier identifies the difference between Ancient and modern attitudes towards nature in the role of spirits and demi-gods. As Lanier would later put it, the modern subject feels

“himself in direct and personal relations with physical nature (not in relations obscured by “the vague intermediary hamadryads and fauns of the Greek system”).”428 While Ruskin argues that the confused modern thinker feels a puzzled “sympathy” for material nature, Lanier suggests that this is a positive, even liberating experience: the modern subject is able to neighbor – and be

426. In a letter from 1870 Lanier claim that Ruskin had been corrupted by “flattery and swift praise.” Sidney Lanier to Virginia Hankins, Macon Ga., ante June 20, 1870, in Letters 1869-1873, ed. Charles R. Anderson and Aubrey H. Starke, vol. 8 of The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), 79. 427. Lanier, “Nature-Metaphors,” in Greever, ed. Tiger-Lilies, 306. 428. Sidney Lanier, “The English Novel,” in The English Novel and Essays on Literature, ed. Clarence Gohdes and Kemp Malone, vol. 4 of The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), 9. Lanier also suggests that the Greek’s mediated experience of nature is a hold-over from what he calls the “old inexorable pre-Promethean enmity of nature towards man. . . when nature as if in a nightmare swarms with the great Saurians and grotesque forms that make terrible the air and the oozy earth.” Because of the “shadow” of this “enmity,” he claims “the Greek cannot go directly to his vine, his mountain his stream, his tree, but can approach these only through the intermediary Bassarid, the Oread, the Hamadryad, the Nymph.” (“The English Novel,” 119, 120).

173 neighbored by – the trees, streams and stars, no longer hampered by “intermediary” gods and spirits.

Fundamentally, Lanier agrees with Ruskin’s view that the difference between modern and ancient attitudes has to do with the moderns’ “direct” apprehension of material nature. The crucial difference between the two (and that which facilitates Lanier’s defense of modern metaphor against Ruskin’s critique) is Lanier’s ascription of “individuality” to material objects.

By the nineteenth-century, Lanier assures us, the stream “has acquired so much individuality independent of any inhabiting nymph, that men may love it” in itself. Recall Ruskin’s claim that for Homer, the sea may “increase or diminish” but the god in the sea “must be indivisible – imperishable.” The point of Ruskin’s argument that the god rather than the sea itself is

“indivisible” and “imperishable” is that this allows him to claim that Homer attributes agency and life to an individuated (and irreducible) subject. Ruskin is unwilling to attribute agency or subjectivity to anything except a human being or a god because only gods and persons are

“indivisible” individuals. Lanier, by contrast, is willing to attribute “individuality” to the nonhuman (and non-divine) world. Trees, streams, and stars have distinct individuality which the modern subject is able to recognize: they are neighbors in their own right, not merely objects, but implicitly also subjects of the “love” which Lanier claims is felt in the modern era among human and nonhuman beings alike.

On the face of it, then, Lanier’s “Nature-Metaphors” is a defense of the peculiar modern love of nature. In Lanier’s view, this love is made possible by the modern recognition of material

“individuality,” a quality which had formerly been attributed (in Ruskin’s view, correctly) only to spiritual entities and people. For both Lanier and Ruskin, then, one key function of nature- poetry is to identify real yet nonhuman individuals (for Ruskin, gods, for Lanier, trees and

174 streams). We should read Lanier’s revision of Ruskin within the context of the public debate over the meaning the ‘the real’ and its relationship to poetry, which as Elizabeth Renker argues was central to American poetic discourse in the decades following the Civil War. Some poems,

Renker argues, “embrace reality categories as a corrective to idealism, others bemoan them, and still others adhere to a prior ontological model that holds the ideal to be ‘the real.’”429 In positing a world of material individuals which “neighbor” human beings without help from spirits and gods, Lanier is embracing the category of material reality as precisely a “corrective” to the spirituality which Ruskin relies on. For Ruskin, it is more conceivable that there are spirits and gods living in the sea and the wind than that the sea or wind is conscious or agential. 430

Meanwhile, for Lanier, the direct focus on the material world itself (at the expense of “vague intermediary” gods and spirits) allows one to see and appreciate reality and to recognize (and love) the material individuals which constitute that reality – our “tree-neighbors,” “star- neighbors,” and “stream-neighbors.”

Lanier’s defense of “nature-metaphors,” then, aimed to intervene in a contemporary argument over the relationship between poetry and reality. We should, however, also hear in

Lanier’s defense of nonhuman “individuality” an early version of the strong trend within modern

Americanist ecocriticism, exemplified by scholars including Lawrence Buell, Laura Dassow

Walls, and Branka Arsić, which identifies and celebrates works that aim to “recover the

429. Renker, Realist Poetics, 35, 36. 430. For Ruskin, Homer’s representation of nature is not actually metaphorical since he believes in the gods he is describing. As a result, Ruskin seems to endorse the coherence and sincerity of Homer’s religious beliefs while judging the same beliefs to be, in reality, untrue. The English poet and MP Roden Noel picked up on this in a widely reprinted 1866 article for the Fortnightly Review, “Does Mr. Ruskin mean that Homer’s was a more correct mode of embodying that animation than was the metaphorical mode of Keats? Are we to believe in the Pagan nature- divinities? Because if not, and if yet Mr. Ruskin admits the animation in question, it is hard to see why he praises Homer and deems the metaphor of Keats a pleasant falsehood and a characteristic of the vicious modern manner.” “On the Use of Metaphor and ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ in Poetry,” The Eclectic Magazine 4 (November 1866): 621-631; 624. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/iau.31858055207165?urlappend=%3Bseq=652. 175 particular” 431 in nature. We can place Lanier’s ethic of neighboring in this tradition: it is only when we encounter the stream in its “individuality” – that is, as a discrete particular – that we can be neighbored by it.

However, there are at least two major caveats to be made here. First, many materialist ecocritics align the defense of materiality with a critique of metaphor and a defense of nature as a

“place of literal reference.”432 Second the critique of metaphor is understood as a materialist gesture, a despiritualizing of our understanding of nature. The connection between the critique of metaphor and the defense of materiality against spirit can be seen most explicitly in Arsić’s argument that “literalization” cancels the work of both metaphors and concepts. Arsić claims that

“a concept emerges as a result of the cancellation of the real difference among singular cases under its jurisdiction.” Literalization, then, is an attempt to reverse this cancellation of difference, and thus to “recover the particular.” Thoreau, she claims, wants “to ‘read the Nature right’ by despiritualizing it. . . by passing through the curtain of metaphors to reach the material itself.” 433

Lanier by contrast, although he aims to recover the particular entities of nonhuman nature, frames this recovery as part of the work of metaphor. Additionally, though he ejects from his poetics the gods and spirits central to Ruskin’s theory, he does configure the nature-metaphor as a “transfusing” of “human spirit” and “physical nature.” On the face of it, this sounds like a description of precisely the problem which literalist ecocritics find with metaphor – that it imposes non-material categories (whether mental or spiritual) onto material reality. However I

431. Branka Arsić, Bird Relics, 11. See also: Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 264; Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 4. 432. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 85. Compare Walls’s claim that the ecological writing of Thoreau and Darwin worked by “literalizing” (Walls, Seeing New Worlds, 194) certain metaphors for natural change. 433. Arsić, Bird Relics, 11, 8. 176 argue that, counter-intuitively, the transfusion of human spirit into nonhuman nature in Lanier derives from the same source as the modern ecocritical argument for literalization: both are responses to the desire to do away with mediation. Lanier rejects the “intermediary fauns and hamadryads” while modern eco-materialism celebrates an attention to literal matter without mediation by concepts.

The nature-metaphor, then, not only expresses human love for nature, but, in some sense, also embodies an unmediated continuity between human and nonhuman. His characterizations of the nature-metaphor as a “transfusing of human nature into physical nature” or as a “harmonious union of body and soul” 434 are not only figurative ways of describing an anthropomorphic mode of representation (as in the example from The Tempest), but also a metaphysical claim about reality. Lanier claims that when “matter” and “spirit”

come together and a beautiful One is formed; when that is a nature-metaphor is made, in which soul gives life to matter and matter gives Antaean solidity to soul, each complementing the other’s significance, each meaning the other, in such will-o’-wisp transfigurations as the mind cannot easily analyse – one must confess that here is something more than a mere “frothy fancy.”435

This passage hinges on the slippage here between the definition of metaphor as a poetic form

(which merely expresses human love for nature) and the definition of it as a kind of being – a combination of physical nature and human spirit.

This ambiguity runs throughout the essay, and results in the striking claim that the original nature-metaphor was not a work of poetry at all, but the constitution of the human being as created by God: “Clay informed with a soul, this is a type of the nature-metaphor. . . Man is clay informed with a soul. It is therefore only a seeming stretch of language to say that man is the first metaphor.” The human being is a nature-metaphor not because it communicates something

434. Lanier, “Nature-Metaphors,” in Greever, ed. Tiger-Lilies, 321. 435. Lanier, “Nature-Metaphors,” in Greever, ed. Tiger-Lilies, 308. 177 or even because it expresses love, but because it is “a union of the physical and the spiritual.”436

As for the Romantic organicists, poetic metaphor is not a form of representation but the manifestation of an ontological relationship (between clay and soul).

According to Lanier, the ontological constitution of the human being (the combination of

“clay and “soul”) is itself the archetypal metaphor. Poetic nature-metaphors derive not from trees, or streams, or stars, but from human ontology – the “marriage” of clay and soul. Lanier’s theory of the “nature-metaphor” effectively anthropomorphizes organicism’s objectified aesthetic, which as we saw in the Introduction treats the poem as a “new thing” adorning nature.

The poetic “new thing” in nature turns out to be an ontological copy of the human being. The idea that metaphors of personification, in particular, imply an ontological relation – rather than merely a semantic one – is discussed by Paul De Man in his influential late essay,

“Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric”:

“anthropomorphism” is not just a trope but an identification on the level of substance. It takes one entity for another and thus implies the constitution of specific entities prior to their confusion, the taking of something for something else that can then be assumed to be given. Anthropomorphism freezes the infinite chain of tropological transformations and propositions into a single assertion or essence, which as such excludes all others. . . tropes such as metaphor (or metonymy) and anthropomorphisms are mutually exclusive.437

The transfusion of human and physical nature which Lanier finds expressed in the nature- metaphor would not, for De Man, count as a trope or metaphor at all. To personify nonhuman nature, rather, is to make an assertion on “the level of substance” or “essence.” Lanier claims, just after the description of the “beautiful One,” that all nature-metaphors are “noble by divine lineage since God has decreed the correlative intersignificance of man and man’s earth.”438 This

“intersignificance” of different metaphors is ‘frozen,’ as De Man would have it, by the assertion

436. Lanier, “Nature-Metaphors,” in Greever, ed. Tiger-Lilies, 308. 437. De Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” 241. 438. Lanier, “Nature-Metaphors,” in Greever, ed. Tiger-Lilies, 309. 178 of anthropomorphism. That is, all nature-metaphors, whatever their potential valences ultimately take their structure from the basic (human) archetype – “clay informed with a soul.”

This strand of the essay necessarily alters how we read the image of mutual neighboring among people, trees, and streams. Rather than the recovery of the nonhuman, Lanier’s essay presents a thoroughly anthropocentric poetics: the image of nonhuman nature, individuated and animate – freed from subordination to an unnecessary spiritual ancillary – is now understood ultimately to refer back to the ontology of the human. The implication is that we can only represent and perceive the vitality and individuality of the nonhuman through reference to the human being. In fact, our formal lens through which we encounter nature – the nature-metaphor

– does not only refer back to the human but actually re-embodies the first human being.

We might argue that Lanier’s apparent subordination of all nature-metaphors to the archetypal human metaphor is simply a result of his inability to fully de-spiritualize: he has done away with the dryads and nymphs of the “Greek system,” but not the human “soul.” However, my contention is that Lanier’s anthropocentrism in this essay might be the result not of too little de-spiritualizing but too much. His claim appears to be that human beings love trees and streams and stars by experiencing them without mediation – without “the intermediary hamadryads and fauns.” Such an unmediated experience turns out to be not perception – not really experience in the ordinary sense at all – but, in De Man’s vocabulary, an “identification on the level of substance.” In imagining the erasure of mediation between human and nonhuman, Lanier is not looking for a means of loving experience but for a common identity. The goal is not experience of nature but identification with nature. Poetry in this view embodies an ontological identification between the modern subject and the natural world. To be clear, this view of the nature-metaphor is consistent with the pure sound poetics which Kerkering and Prins find in

179

Lanier’s Science: despite the essay’s description of the modern love for nature and the modern desire to neighbor nature, the view of nature-poetry it presents has nothing to do with communicating or mediating experiences. Lanier in 1872 might even have agreed with Warren and the New Critics that his poetics is not interested in achieving the “status of experience.” His nature-poetics, counter-intuitively, is concerned with achieving the status of being – human being. Part of my argument here is that this anthropocentric erasure of human-nonhuman difference proceeds not from some late Romantic flowering of the egotistical sublime (although as we shall see Lanier does indulge this), but from a desire, common to own twenty-first century ecocriticism, to remove mediation from our relationship with nonhuman nature.

III. Unity with Nature and the Politics of Reunion

The desire not to encounter or experience nature but merely to identify with it “on the level of substance” – to find ontological continuity with it – feeds Lanier’s anthropocentricism in this earlier essay. Lanier puts the poetics of identification into practice in his 1877 poem, “A Florida

Sunday.” Composed during a visit to Florida for his health, the poem is a celebration of the natural world and the speaker’s all-embracing identification with nature and God. Lanier begins by addressing a “Gray Pelican”: “I sail with thee, / Thy Pelican’s self is mine.” He is able to identify like this with the pelican because God, he says, “Hath wrought that every soul, this loving morn, / Into all things may be new-corporate born.”439 Lanier can claim the “Pelican’s self” because his soul is able, in some sense, to be re-incarnated (“new-corporate born”) into the pelican. Lanier continues with an ecorhapsodic litany of sea-scape features and marine wildlife, all of which the speaker repeatedly insists “are mine”: “yea, silver Sea. . . all thy fishes, ripples,

439. Sidney Lanier, “A Florida Sunday,” in Poems and Poem Outlines ed. Charles R. Anderson, vol. 1 of The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), p. 95, lines 33, 34-35, 39-40, 37-38. 180 bights. . . Shells, wrecks and wealths are mine; yea, Orange-trees. . . Mine is your green-gold universe.”440 Towards the poem’s conclusion, Lanier broadens the scope of the catalogue to account for the whole cosmos (“All riches, goods and braveries never told / Of earth, sun, air and heaven. . . I am ye / and ye myself,”) before finally addressing God: “Thee in my soul, my soul in Thee, I feel / Self of my Self, Lo through my sense doth steal / Clear cognizance of selves and qualities, / Of all existence that hath been or is.”441 Identification with nature and finally with

God leads Lanier to “clear cognizance,” of “all existence.” This all-embracing identification, then, entails a complete clarity and knowledge: nature and God are wholly legible and accessible to him. “A Florida Sunday” dramatizes the transfusion of human spirit and physical nature described in “Nature-Metaphors.” The initial address to the pelican makes explicit that this is not a question of knowing the pelican or even of loving it or being neighbored by it, but of being incarnated in it. The poem makes explicit what is latent (though never fully articulated) in

“Nature-Metaphors.” To see the poetic form of the nature-metaphor as a re-embodiment of dualist human ontology (spirit married to clay) leads to a view of nature itself as an embodiment of human ontology: the pelican incarnates the speaker’s human soul just as the orange tree, the earth, and the sun all do.

Critics have tended to read “A Florida Sunday” as the product of Emerson’s influence on

Lanier. The “essential kinship of each and all”442 and the “transcendental synthesis”443 which

Lanier celebrates in the poem recall Emerson’s famous depiction of the idealist subject in

Nature: “all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the

440. Lanier, “A Florida Sunday,” in Anderson, ed. Poems and Poem Outlines, 95, lines 40-50. 441. Lanier, “A Florida Sunday,” in Anderson, ed. Poems and Poem Outlines, 96, lines 81-84, 84-90. 442. Charles R. Anderson, Introduction to Poems and Poem Outlines, lvi. 443. De Bellis, Sidney Lanier, 110. See also: Aubrey Starke, Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1933), 274. 181 currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”444 Like

Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” Lanier identifies with the whole cosmos and with God. At the same time, he claims an expansive and even divine knowledge of that world (a “clear cognizance” of it). In spite of Lanier’s efforts, in “Nature-Metaphors,” to configure his poetic theory as a compromise between idealism and materialism,445 “A Florida Sunday” reveals a basic confluence between transcendental idealism and the poetics of ontological identification. One of the crucial effects of idealism is achieved even within a philosophical framework which insists on the reality of physical nature. This because subjective idealism, at its core, is a gesture of identification: the subject identifies the world with their own mental being. In Lanier’s case, the world does consist of materiality and spirit, but this only confirms his view that the dualist

Christian ontology of human being (as “clay informed with a soul”) is the archetype of all being.

The very end of “Florida Sunday,” however, qualifies the poem’s idealist identification with nature, by acknowledging and dramatizing what had been the fundamental paradox in

“Nature-Metaphors:

…Oh, to me All questions solve in this tranquility: E’en this dark matter, once so dim, so drear, Now shines upon my spirit heavenly-clear: Thou, Father, without logic, tellest me How this divine denial true may be – How All’s in each, yet every one of all

444. Emerson, “Nature,” in Atkinson, ed. The Essential Writings, 6. In a letter written after returning to Georgia from Florida, Lanier describes having read Emerson “all the winter,” during the period that he composed “A Florida Sunday.” Emerson, he claims, “gives me immeasurable delight because he does not propound to me disagreeable systems and hideous creeds but simply walks along high bright ways, where one loves to go with him” Lanier to Bayard Taylor, Macon, Ga., May 25, 1877, in Letters 1874-1877, ed. Charles R. Anderson and Aubrey Starke, vol. 9 of The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), 446. 445. Lanier concludes “Nature-Metaphors” by claiming that “idealism, as a sole theory of life, is no better than materialism, and each is bad if dissociated from the other,” before suggesting that a “harmonious union of soul and body, of spirit and nature, of essence and form, is promoted by the nature-metaphor which reveals with wonderful force how these two, united from of old, still have new points of sweet and thrilling contact.” (“Nature-Metaphors,” in Greever, ed. Tiger-Lilies, 321). 182

Maintains his Self complete and several.446

What Lanier calls the “divine denial” here is the paradox whereby he is able to identify with all natural objects indiscriminately and yet can also perceive each of them as a distinct “self” – the pelican, the orange-tree, the earth, and the sea. Lanier’s “divine denial” expresses a fundamental tension in his desire for identification with nature: to identify with nonhuman nature is to erase the alterity and discreteness of individual natural objects; but for “A Florida Sunday,” those discrete individual objects are manifestly real. The resolution of the paradox must then be displaced onto God.

The importance of this paradox for an ecocritical reading of Lanier is that despite his anthropocentric appropriation of the natural world through the mechanism of the nature- metaphor – his appropriation of all material nature as a potential body into which his soul “may be new-corporate born” – it is still clear that Lanier conceives of his project as a recovery of nature. Lanier is not alone among ecological thinkers in encountering this impasse. The paradox whereby the seemingly environmentalist desire to recover nature leads to an assimilation of nature to the human self re-appears infamously at the heart of one of the most influential midcentury movements in eco-philosophy: deep ecology. The founder of deep ecology, Arne Naess argues for a radical ecological world-view which overcomes exploitative anthropocentrism through what he calls “self-realization”: “human nature is such that with sufficient allsided maturity we cannot avoid ‘identifying’ ourself with all living beings, beautiful or ugly, big or small, sentient or not.” By identifying with other nonhuman beings, we are able then to extend our self-interest to them, and to ground a conservationist ethics in self-love: “through identification [people] may come to see their own interest served by conservation, through

446. Lanier, “A Florida Sunday,” in Anderson, ed. Poems and Poem Outlines, 97, lines 107-110. 183 genuine self-love, love of a widened and deepened self.”447 The key point, for Naess, is that we breakdown the anthropocentric hierarchical division between human and nonhuman natures by insisting on the identification between the two.

Naess’ deep ecology asks that we must reach a point where our conception of “self” includes the whole natural world so that our self-interest and self-love can constitute a love of all

“living beings.” When, at the climax of the catalogue in “A Florida Sunday,” Lanier calls God

“Self of my self,”448 the image reflects the influence of transcendentalism, but it also reveals the importance of an expanded concept of “Self” for Lanier’s ecopoetics of identification. In his attraction to the possibility of total identification with nature, Lanier develops a proto-type of

Naess’s theory of self-realization and it is not a stretch to say that, combined with Lanier’s declared love of nature in its unmediated authenticity, “A Florida Sunday” is a deep ecological anthem before its time.

Of the many critiques levelled at deep ecology, one of the most important and influential is that of ecofeminist Val Plumwood who notes that the deep ecologists’ “widening of [self- interest] is obtained at the expense of failing to recognise unambiguously the distinctness and independence of the other.” The effect is that nature is reduced to human ego. Identification with the other undergirds not respect or love but exploitation and mastery: “one may not without arrogance assume that one is that other. . . that the other is transparent and encompassable by self without residue. Acknowledging the other’s boundary and opacity of being is part of respect for the other.”449 Lanier’s speaker in “A Florida Sunday” celebrates transparency when he describe

447. Arne Naess, “Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World,” The Trumpeter: Voices from the Canadian Ecosophy Network 4, no. 3 (Summer, 1987): 35-42, 35, 36. 448. Lanier, “A Florida Sunday,” in Anderson, ed. Poems and Poem Outlines, 96, line 88. 449. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 180, 178. 184 the “clear cognizance of all selves and qualities, / Of all existence that hath been or is.”450 I read

Lanier’s poetics of identification, then, as a form of what deep ecologists call “self-realization.”

Lanier’s representation of nature erases particularity and imposes a human “type” onto all entities in nonhuman nature. However, the “divine denial” at the close of “A Florida Sunday” suggests his residual awareness that the erasure of nonhuman difference compromises his desire to neighbor the natural world. He can almost detect the problem which Plumwood raises with regard to “Self-realization”: that it is an intimacy with nature achieved only at the expense of the

“denial of difference.” 451

The “denial of difference” in “A Florida Sunday” is a result of Lanier’s desire to do away with mediation in his contact with nature – it is the result of his attempt to make poetry a mode of embodying being rather than the means of mediating experience or ideas. I suggested above that this identification with nature accords with the “pure sound” reading of Lanier in Kerkering and Prins. This is because, as Kerkering and Prins describe it, Lanier’s objective in his theory of pure sound is to produce a new non-lyric poetics which deliberately refuses to mediate ideas or states of experience. Kerkering specifically looks at the way Lanier racializes his theory of poetic sound in his 1880 work The Science of English Verse. The central project of the first and longest part of the Science is to argue for a musical treatment of poetic rhythm. In effect, Lanier tries to

450. Lanier, “A Florida Sunday,” in Anderson, ed. Poems and Poem Outlines, 96-7, lines 88-90. For extended accounts of the relationship between Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology see: Karen Warren, “Ecofeminist Philosophy and Deep Ecology,” in Philosophical Dialogues: Arne Naess and the Progress of Ecophilosophy, ed. N. Witoszek and A. Brennan (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 255-269, Christian Diehm, “Arne Naess, Val Plumwood, and Deep Ecological Subjectivity: A Contribution to the ‘Deep Ecology-Ecofeminism Debate,’” Ethics & the Environment 7, no. 1, (Spring 2002): 24-38, Deborah Slicer, “Is there an Ecofeminism-Deep Ecology ‘Debate’?” Environmental Ethics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 151-169, and Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 451. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 165. 185 demonstrate that rhythm in English poetry depends on “quantity” rather than “accent.”452 This means that poetry is measured by the relative lengths of syllables in a line rather than by the number of feet or distribution of stress. Almost all English poetry, Lanier claims, consists of units of three musical eighth-notes. That is, the lengths of the different syllables in a single phrase will add up to the equivalent of three musical eighth-notes. The claim is not that syllable- lengths are fixed, but that they relate to one another within fixed proportions. An individual line of English poetry will then consist of varying numbers of these complete phrases, or bars, of poetry.

The thread which Kerkering focuses on is Lanier’s claim that the “ordinary English reader” will recognize the quantitative measure of a line of English poetry because the measure itself is English. Despite not understanding Anglo-Saxon, for example a modern English reader would recognize an Anglo-Saxon poem as English because – Lanier suggests – the quantitative structure of its verse is musically and therefore racially English. Describing the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Maldon, Lanier comments that “the poem. . . counts with perfect confidence upon the sense of rhythm which is well-nigh universal in our race”; on The Wanderer, another

Anglo-Saxon poem, he remarks that “even those who understand no word of Anglo-Saxon must be deeply impressed by the tender [song] which goes along through all the poem,” and then, placing examples of nineteenth-century poetry (by William Morris and A. C. Swinburne) on a stave in 3/8 time, he claims “nothing can be more suggestive than the evident tendency of these latest rhythms to return to the precise rhythmic forms of the fathers.”453 As Kerkering points out, the rhythmic pattern Lanier claims is inherent to all English poetry is chosen entirely

452. Sidney Lanier, The Science of English Verse, in The Science of English Verse and Essays on Music, ed. Paull F. Baum, vol. 3 of The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), 77. 453. Lanier, “The Science of English Verse,” in Baum, The Science of English Verse and Essays on Music, 113, 123, 124. 186

“arbitrarily.” As a consequence of this, Kerkering argues, reading is understood as an attention not to the “meanings” of individual poems, but to the “sounds—and thus the races— they embody.” Poems don’t communicate or mediate ideas or experiences: they simply embody racial identities through sound. In Kerkering’s reading of this theory, all poems in English become, for

Lanier, interchangeable vessels of the same racial structure: a “rhythmic pattern arbitrarily designated as the embodiment of a language’s identity allows that language to appear to be one self.”454 The English language appears as “one self,” a single unchanging racial entity (“Anglo-

Saxon”) which persists through time and space. Lanier’s implicit view of race in the Science, then, is essentialist: race is an unchanging “self.” Additionally, since he understands sound to be physical, the theory of racial sound is a materialist essentialist account of race.

There is a parallel here between the poetics of “Nature-Metaphors” and “A Florida

Sunday” and the racialized poetics of the Science. The latter configures the language of English poetry as a single “self.” In a “A Florida Sunday,” Lanier’s transfusion of soul into material nature constitutes a gesture of “self-realization” in which natural objects are subsumed into the speaker’s growing sense of a cosmic and divine “Self.” Crucially, however, the expanded model of “Self” in each of these cases is, as it were, a self without subjectivity. English poetry embodies the “Anglo-Saxon” race, as Kerkering points out, without communicating specific ideas, just as

“nature-metaphors” re-embody the archetypal metaphor (the clay-soul duality of the human being) and thus assert an ontological continuity and fundamental identity between human and nonhuman nature. In each case poetry is called upon to perform an ontological function – to embody a kind of being – which supersedes poetry’s communicative potential.

As Kerkering points out, this poetics of Anglo-Saxon sound is part of Lanier’s response to the politics of Reconstruction and Reunion in the late 1870s. Lanier begins to experiment with

454. Kerkering, The Poetics of Racial and National Identity, 123, 116, 123. 187 the idea of racial sound in his “Centennial Meditation of Columbia” composed for the 1876

Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The “Meditation” was accompanied by music from the

Connecticut composer Dudley Buck. This “collaboration between North and South was intended to symbolize the national unity which Reconstruction had so far failed to restore.”455 Lanier, however, consciously writes the Centennial Meditation only in what he calls “sharp, vigorous

Saxon words.”456 As Kerkering suggests, this decision looks ahead to the poetics of pure sound and also signals his investment not in national but racial – Anglo-Saxon – reunion: in

Kerkering’s reading, his production in the “Meditation” of an Anglo-Saxon “pure sound” poetics allows him to “replace the regional conflict of Reconstruction with the supposed racial unity of

Redemption.”457 In other words, Lanier’s pure sound poetics contributes to an explicitly racialized reunion which replaces Reconstruction of the former slave-holding states and the union with the reconciliation of white Americans. As David Blight and others have argued, it is the drive for reunion between white Americans during Reconstruction which undercut

Reconstruction’s promise of racial justice and the egalitarian vision of a political settlement that would include African Americans and white Americans together.458

Lanier’s apparent preference for racial rather than national reunion in the “Meditation” and the Science is important for our understanding of his ecopoetics: in both cases what matters to Lanier is poetry’s capacity to embody a state of being. Towards the end of “A Florida Sunday”

(before the revelation of the “divine denial”) Lanier celebrates the peace which his totalizing identification with nature has achieved by claiming:

Each borders each, like mutual sea and shore,

455. Kerkering, Poetics of National and Racial Identity, 113. 456. Sidney Lanier, “The Centennial Cantata,” in Baum, The Science of English Verse and Essays on Music, 272. 457. Kerkering, Poetics of National and Racial Identity, 129. 458. David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 188

Nor aught misfits his neighbor that’s before, Nor him that’s after – nay, through this still air, Out of the North come quarrels, and keen blare Of challenge by the hot-breathed parties blown; Yet break they not this peace with alien tone, Fray not my heart nor fright me from my land, –I hear from all-wards, allwise understand, The great bird Purpose bears me twixt her wings, I am one with all the kinsmen things that e’er my Father fathered.459

The tranquility afforded by the speaker’s identification with nature is here contrasted to the

“quarrels” and “keen blare” of “hot-breathed parties,” likely a reference to the electoral crisis following the election of 1876, which prompted popular fears of another Civil War (and would eventually precipitate the end of Reconstruction and the triumph of the white supremacist politics of reunion).460 “A Florida Sunday” offers not simply a pastoral retreat from this political crisis but a model of unity – “I am one with all the kinsmen things” – which deploys the same logic as the assertion of white racial unity which, as Kerkering argues, is expressed in the

“Centennial Meditation.” As Kerkering suggests, the poetics of Anglo-Saxon sound contribute directly to this politics of reunion; but “A Florida Sunday” suggests that the poetics of reunion is also expressed through identification with nature’s “kinsmen things.”

My point here is not that Lanier consciously or deliberately racializes his ecopoetics. He does not, for example, posit a special Anglo-Saxon or Germanic affinity with nature like that which characterized ecofascist thought in Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century.461

But his view that poetry can be the embodiment of an identification between human self and

459. Lanier, “A Florida Sunday,” in Anderson, ed. Poems and Poem Outlines, 97, lines 93-103. 460. On the 1876, electoral crisis, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution: 1863-1877, updated ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014), 564-587. 461. See: Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience (Porsgrunn, Norway: New Compass Press, 2011). For a further discussion of this kind of ecofascist thought, see footnote 494. 189 nonhuman nature depends on the same logic of identification and erasure as his view that

English poetry will embody Anglo-Saxon racial identity. Poetry in each case is understood ontologically – as a kind of being rather than as a mode of experience or communication. The poetics of identification (whether racial and exclusionary or nature-oriented and all- encompassing) depends on this ontological and anti-lyric treatment of poetry.462

We have seen two forms, then, of what I call Lanier’s poetics of identification. This is also a poetics of embodiment insofar as what concerns Lanier in these texts is the way in which poetry embodies certain modes of being. In other words, then, the poetics of identification is concerned not with identity in the lyric sense (that is, with the voice of a subject) but identity as an assertion of sameness. On the one hand this is the sameness of “all the kinsmen things” of nature (all assimilated to the speaker’s divinely expansive “Self”); on the other, it is the sameness of all English poems, reduced to an “arbitrarily imposed” rhythmic pattern. Kerkering rightly points out that Lanier’s “Centennial Meditation” outlines a history of the US which completely excludes African Americans and other racial minorities from the narrative. This said, Lanier’s racialized “pure sound” poetics (with its imposition of a set musical pattern onto all English poems) works primarily not to differentiate but to assert homogeneity. Lanier in the Science of

English Verse projects onto potential readers an Anglo-Saxon identity just as he asserts an

462. The non-lyric poetics of identification in “A Florida Sunday,” effectively serves a double function. It facilitates both the expression of a proto-deep ecological “self-realization,” (an ultimately anthropocentric claim to unity with the whole of nature which erases differences within nature), and an echo or re-inscription of the logic of white racial identification undergirding the contemporary politics of reunion. In this way, it signifies the “concomitant racial and ecological hegemony” which Jeffrey Myers argues arises from “physiphobia,” or “a fear of the threat of erasure by the primacy of the natural world.” Myers argues that physiphobia results from the metaphysics of the “Euroamerican self” which “must constantly display its mastery over the material world.” (Jeffrey Myers, Converging Stories: Race, Ecology and Environmental Justice in American Literature [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005], 16). However, in the case of “A Florida Sunday, it is not a fear of being overwhelmed or erased by nature, which leads to the anthropocentric subordination of nature to the human subject, but an active desire to merge with it; this is not a desire to erase the physical world, but to be “new-corporate born” into it, and thus to erase human-nonhuman difference through new nonhuman embodiments. Equally, Lanier’s picture of the Anglo-Saxon racial “Self” in the Science is not dependent on the “mastery of the material world,” but on a materialist physics of sound. The racism and anthropocentrism of Lanier’s poetics of identification is not linked then to a denigration of materiality, but to an embrace of it. 190

Anglo-Saxon identity onto all poems in English. I make this point to clarify that although

Lanier’s poetics of identification emerges out of, and contributes to, the racist anti-

Reconstruction politics of reunion, it is not configured as a mechanism of differentiation (racial or otherwise). Rather, like the argument of “Nature-Metaphors,” the racial poetics of pure sound asserts homogeneity of identity at the expense of difference and particularity.463

IV. Rhythmic Atoms, Rhythmanalysis, and a “Logic of Greeting”

In my introduction to this chapter, I suggested that the New Critics who accused Lanier of failing to mediate ideas or experience in his poetry were partially correct. This is because, in his theories of “pure sound” and of the “nature-metaphor,” Lanier really did conceive of poetry as inexpressive and non-communicative – as the embodiment of certain kinds of being. However, despite the anthropocentric poetics of “Nature-Metaphors” and despite the racialized and racist poetics of his theory of Anglo-Saxon sound – almost, as it were, in spite of himself – Lanier also develops an alternative ecopoetic model which treats poetry as a medium of experience, and which, crucially, attends to the alterity of nonhuman nature, without asserting ontological identity of any kind.

Despite his tendency towards idealist and assimilationist thought, Lanier was occupied at several points in his career by what he calls in one lecture, the “radical unaccountable inevitable

463. David Lloyd argues that the apparent paradox whereby imperialist racism uses the language of assimilation rather than differentiation) derives from racism’s reliance on the “identity principle”: “it is not in the first instance the antagonistic recognition of difference which constitutes the discourse of racism, but the subordination of difference to the demand for identity.” For Lloyd, “racism elevates a principle of likening above that of differentiation such that its rhetorical structure is that of metaphorization.” The “rhetorical structure” of racism is “metaphorization” because, Lloyd argues, metaphor is “the process of subordinating difference to identity.” David Lloyd, “Race under Representation,” Oxford Literary Review 13, no 1/2 (1991): 62-94; 71. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43973711. Lloyd’s view of metaphor as an assimilationist erasure of difference illuminates the way in which Lanier’s account of Anglo-Saxon poetics in the Science, though it claims to define a specific racial identity, also seems to echo the cosmic all-encompassing universalism of his “Nature-Metaphors.” 191 difference”464 between human subjects. That he calls this fact “radical” and “unaccountable” is symptomatic of that impulse we see in “A Florida Sunday” to conceive of perceptions and experiences as acts of appropriation by the idealizing self. He claims that the “marvelous separation which we express by the terms ‘personal identity,’ ‘selfhood,’ ‘me’”465 is what entitles individuals to “privacy,” that is, private interiority. This “unaccountable” fact of “difference” makes, he argues, “every man scientifically a human atom, yet an atom endowed above all other atoms with the power to choose its own mode of motion.”466

We saw in “Nature-Metaphors,” in the assertion that modernity had attributed

“individuality” to natural entities, an early futile attempt to find this “marvelous separation” in nonhuman nature. Ultimately, in that essay, Lanier foils his own effort by insisting on the ontological continuity of human and nonhuman nature. However, in one of his lesser known works, the 1879 Johns Hopkins lecture series on Shakespeare, we see Lanier taking up the figure of the atom as a way of describing a non-appropriative encounter with nature. In these lectures, the image of the atom, with its connotations of both irreducibility and aggregable sameness, is central to Lanier’s discussion of poetic rhythm. In this final section I explore how, in these lectures, rhythm figures for Lanier not as the basis for racial identity, but as a mediatory category between subject and object, both an experiential lived quality and measurable external pattern. I then look at how for Lanier, considering the natural world as a field of rhythmical relations allows him in his 1880 hymn “Sunrise,” to redefine and recuperate the individuality of natural objects.

464. Lanier, “The English Novel,” in Gohdes and Malone, eds. The English Novel, 5-6. 465. Lanier, “The English Novel,” in Gohdes and Malone, eds. The English Novel, 6. 466. Lanier, “The English Novel,” in Gohdes and Malone, eds. The English Novel, 7. 192

In the last of his 1879 “Johns Hopkins” lectures, then, Lanier sets out to examine how

Shakespeare represents the “relations of man to Nature” 467 in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

Hamlet, and The Tempest. The central claim is that both Shakespeare’s ability as a playwright and his personal morality (regarding his attitude towards nature) improve and mature over time.

His representation of nature evolves from the earlier depiction of nature as “a debonair type of physical life” 468 in the Dream, to an image of Nature as “riotous with death” in Hamlet and finally to a mature synthesis of the two perspectives in The Tempest. In the latter, nature is

“Janus-faced,” depicted as both the “mother of life” and “mother of death,”469 in a manner,

Lanier claims, that anticipates Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. 470 Lanier then argues that this evolution of Shakespeare’s understanding of nature towards a modern Darwinian position is paralleled by an ethical awakening that can be seen in the contrast between the description of the hunt in the Dream and the scene of the mock-hunt in The Tempest (in which

Prospero’s spirits play the roles of the hounds).471 “Theseus’ hunt is the sport of the young man in that barbarian time of youth which recks not nor thinks at all of the pain of lower creatures,” and “it could not be long before Shakespere [sic.] would emerge into a life that looked with tenderness and reverence upon all creatures of Nature less in degree than himself; it could not be long before he would become incapable of any pleasure that hinged merely on the pain of

467. Sidney Lanier, “Johns Hopkins Lectures,” Shakspere and his Forerunners, ed. Kemp Malone, vol. 3 of The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), 392. 468. Lanier, “Johns Hopkins Lectures,” in Malone, ed. Shakspere, 396. 469. Lanier, “Johns Hopkins Lectures,” in Malone, ed. Shakspere, 397, 398, 397. 470. To illustrate his claim, Lanier quotes a passage from Darwin opening with the claim that “nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult . . . than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: D. Appleton & Co., 1877), qtd. in Lanier, “Johns Hopkins Lectures,” in Malone, ed. Shakspere, 397. 471. See: William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.107-131, and The Tempest, 4.1.281-295. 193 whatever brute beast.” 472 Lanier’s Shakespeare undergoes a transformation between the Dream and The Tempest, in which he begins to care for the suffering of animals.

Finally, Lanier also claims that – alongside this improvement in Shakespeare’s understanding of nature and care for the animal world – we can detect a transformation in

Shakespeare’s use of rhythm and meter. Whereas the Dream is “palpably stiff” in its adherence to iambic pentameter, The Tempest allows much greater metrical variety, “regularity nobly relieved with irregularity.” 473 Just as the play oscillates in its representation of nature (as

“mother of life” and “mother of death”), so in its rhythmic form we see an oscillation between the regular and the irregular: the “genius” which is able to “adjust in harmonious proportions all these esthetic antagonisms of verse, surely that is the same genius which in the heat and battle of life will arrange the moral antagonisms with similar self-control.” Lanier wants to argue, in other words, that Shakespeare’s capacity for varied rhythms springs from the same source as his capacity to dramatically represent a variety of ideas and ideals. Departing from the analysis of

Shakespeare, Lanier then suggests that all human beings consist of rhythmic oscillations between opposing ideas and modes of experience: “when we look upon man, vibrating between these oppositions, what is he more like, each in his little life making his little round of moral rhythm, than one of these tone-colors, one of these tunes, one of these rhythmic elements, here in the verse?” 474 The implication here is that the parallel Lanier draws between the “moral antagonisms” and the “esthetic antagonisms” in The Tempest applies equally to all human beings. The human is defined poetically, but not as a blend of clay and soul, nor as an originary archetype. Rather the human becomes just one example of the pattern of oscillation which also characterizes the rhythmic “tone-colors” of a play like The Tempest. The human being is a

472. Lanier, “Johns Hopkins Lectures,” in Malone, ed. Shakspere, 400. 473. Lanier, “Johns Hopkins Lectures,” in Malone, ed. Shakspere, 404, 405. 474. Lanier, “Johns Hopkins Lectures,” in Malone, ed. Shakspere, 406, 407. 194

“rhythmic element,” but in contrast to the “pure sound” poetics of the Science, Lanier does not move to racialize rhythm here or to prescribe a specific rhythmic mode. The vision of rhythm here is far broader than that of the “pure sound” poetics: it refers seemingly to all forms of

“vibration” between “oppositions.”

This redefinition of the human in terms of rhythm looks at first like a departure from

Lanier’s analysis of Shakespeare’s nature-representation. However, he then concludes the lecture with an anecdote directly concerning the role of rhythm in the experience of the natural world.

He describes riding along the coast in Georgia one summer and coming across a swarm of silver- winged gnats:

They were dancing in the light, just in front of me, immediately above a shrub which is their home. This singular gnat-dance seemed — and I believe that is the conclusion of naturalists — to be simply for pleasure; and it was most curious to note the general outline of the figures formed by the myriads of tiny silver creatures in the sunbeam. Apparently in response to the commands of some leader, this general outline would change every moment: sometimes the swarm would suddenly extend upward and make a quite perfect column; then it would contract into a lozenge-shaped figure; then swell into a circle; then form a square; and so on — each of these outlines being formed by minute variations in the direction of flight of each individual gnat, for each was vibrating rapidly in his own little independent round; and as each extended his excursion this way or that, the main figure of the entire swarm would result. Each gnat was, in short, a rhythmic atom.475

Lanier observes the movements of the swarm and the various shapes it assumes – column, circle, square, lozenge. The differences in the shapes depend, he remarks, on the “minute variations in the direction of flight of each individual gnat, for each was vibrating rapidly in his own little independent round.” Each gnat’s repetition of its own “independent round” is partially responsible for the “general outline” of the swarm, and for this reason Lanier claims that each

475. Lanier, “Johns Hopkins Lectures,” in Malone, ed. Shakspere, 407-8. 195 one is a “rhythmic atom.” He celebrates the variations in these “rhythmic round[s],” 476 which, cumulatively, alter the overall figure of the swarm.

The anecdote (and the designation of the gnat’s movements as rhythmic) appears to have two aims. On the one hand it is to suggest that the gnats, as “rhythmic atoms,” are similar in their being to humans, earlier described as “rhythmic elements.” On the other, it is to suggest that the experience of the “gnat-dance” is similar to the experience of a work in verse (like The Tempest).

The gnat-dance, Lanier claims, “was a moving tune,” able to make “rhythm visible to the eye” 477 in a manner comparable to the pattern poems of the Renaissance. In the first place, then, the argument is ontological: the “moving tune” is an image of gnat-being which (like human being) consists of rhythmic movement. Drawing on Edgar Allen Poe’s claim in his 1848 essay Eureka that “matter exists only as attraction and repulsion,” and that the universe is repeatedly “swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the heart divine,” 478 Lanier claims that “the great swarm of gnats had its systole and diastole, and beat like the pulse of the worlds” 479 (Lanier would later expand on this point in the Science, drawing on Poe as well

Herbert Spencer’s First Principles).480 If the whole universe is reduced to rhythmic motion, then the gnats are simply obeying the “primordial” principle of nature in pulsing rhythmically.

On the face of it, Lanier’s claim about rhythm is once again ontological. Everything that exists exists rhythmically. There is, however, another way to read Lanier’s encounter with the gnat-dance – as a model of a certain kind of attention and experience. The phenomenon which arrests Lanier’s attention in his encounter with the gnats is the relationship between the

476. Lanier, “Johns Hopkins Lectures,” in Malone, ed. Shakspere, 409. 477. Lanier, “Johns Hopkins Lectures,” in Malone, ed. Shakspere, 408. 478. Edgar Allen Poe, Eureka: a Prose Poem (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997), 34, 134 479. Lanier, “Johns Hopkins Lectures,” in Malone, ed. Shakspere, 409. 480. See part one, chapter 9 of the Science, “Of Rhythm Throughout All Those Motions which We Call ‘Nature’” (Lanier, “Science of English Verse,” in Baum, The Science of English Verse and Essays on Music, 192-195). 196 individual gnats (each one a “rhythmic atom”) and the shape of the swarm as a whole. As the flight of each “rhythmic atom” changes, so the swarm’s form changes, from a “column,” to a

“lozenge,” to a “square.” The phrase “rhythmic atoms” signals a revision of Lanier’s earlier interest in the “individuality” of nonhuman nature. Whereas in “Nature-Metaphors,” the recovery of individuality and particularity was compromised by a desire to identify with nature, Lanier’s approach to the gnat-dance is more nuanced. The term “atom” reflects the irreducibility, discreteness, and distinctness of each gnat; but it also suggests the way in which each individual is aggregable and assimilable, a subordinate unit which contributes to a whole. Lanier’s experience of the gnats oscillates between an attention to individual creatures and an attention to the swarm. Though the whole cosmos might be an expression of natural rhythm, Lanier resists subsuming the individual gnats within his account of the “gnat-dance.” He focuses instead on the unresolved oscillation between the individuality of each gnat and its assimilation by the swarm.

His focus on rhythm in this anecdote can be read as a claim not just about the nature of reality but about the nature of mediation and experience. This is possible because rhythm occupies an uneasy middle-ground between a measurable feature of the external world and a subjective experiential quality. Henri Lefebvre, in his 1992 work Rhythmanalysis claims: “the classic term in philosophy, ‘the object’, is not appropriate to rhythm. ‘Objective’? Yes, but exceeding the narrow framework of objectivity by bringing to it a multiplicity of (sensorial and significant) meanings.”481 Rhythm is objective but not an object: “the passage from subject to object requires neither leap over an abyss, nor the crossing of a desert. Rhythms always need a reference; the initial moment persists through other perceived givens.” 482 Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis is a mode of analyzing the world in terms of rhythm, but more precisely it also

481. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 41. emphasis in the original. 482. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 46. 197 consists in attending to rhythms themselves in relation to one another. This is what Lefebvre means by the claim that rhythm needs a reference and that the initial experience of rhythm only persists “through other perceived givens.” The other “perceived givens” are other rhythms. In other words, in rhythmanalysis, the medium and the object of analysis are the same kind of thing.

This is why rhythm is not exactly an object: when we experience it, we do so by automatically detecting and comparing its relationship to other rhythms.

Rhythmanalysis is always referential, comparative, and relational: “We know that a rhythm is slow or lively only in relation to other rhythms (often our own: those of our walking, our breathing, our heart)… each must appreciate rhythms by referring them to oneself, one’s heart or breathing, but also to one’s hours of work, or rest, of waking and of sleep.”483 Like

Lanier, Lefebvre sees the human being as well as all other kinds of beings as constituted rhythmically. What he makes clear which I think is latent in Lanier is what this means for experience and for encounters between individuals. An encounter with the other, even the nonhuman other, is always potentially an experience of rhythmanalysis. The “rhythmanalyst”

hears the wind, the rain, storms, but if he considers a stone, a wall, a trunk, he understands their slowness, their interminable rhythm. This object is not inert . . . it is only slow in relation to our time, to our body, the measure of rhythms. An apparently immobile object, the forest, moves in multiple ways: the combined movements of the soil, the earth, the sun. Or the movements of the molecules and atoms that compose it (the object, the forest).484

The seemingly slow or immobile entity is only slow or immobile “in relation to our time” but this does not lead Lefebvre to give up on the human subject as a measurer and observer. The opposite in fact is true: the rhythmanalyst must become attuned to their own “eurhythmic body,” their own “bundle of rhythms.”485 For Lefebvre, everything from the human to the forest is a

483. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 20. 484. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 30. 485. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 30. 198 bundle of rhythms, of “combined movements.” More importantly, since each encounter involves paying direct attention to the relationship between different rhythms, every encounter involves participation in a new combination or bundle. Every experience of rhythm is an experience of being embedded within a “polyrhythmia.”486

Lanier’s experience of the “gnat-dance” as a “moving tune” and of the gnats as “rhythmic atoms” is an example of polyrhythmic encounter. Lanier has already called the human observer a rhythmic element before describing the rhythms of the gnats. But what Lefebvre helps to show us is that the ubiquity of rhythm does not ground an ontology. We are not left with a sense that

Lanier experiences identity or kinship with the gnat-dance born from a sense of shared being.

Instead a form of rhythmanalysis allows him to notice the gnats’ relationships to one another and to the swarm. Since the rhythmic perception which Lefebvre theorizes is determined by relationships between different rhythms, every meeting between two rhythmic patterns is the site of a potential rhythmic experience. Even where there is no subject, as in the example above of the forest, Lefebvre is willing to posit a potential perspective – a site of rhythmic interaction which, at least implicitly, could be occupied by a rhythmanalyst. Lefebvre is careful, however, not to project anthropomorphically, even when imagining these potential perspectives: “what,” he asks, “does the midge perceive, whose body has almost nothing in common with ours, and whose wings beat to the rhythm of a thousand times per second? This insect makes us hear a high-pitched sound, we perceive a threatening little winged cloud that seeks our blood.”487

Lanier’s swarm is aesthetically pleasing rather than threatening, but he is equally attentive to the difference in scale between the flight of an individual gnat and the movement of the swarm.

486. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 25. 487. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 20. 199

Understanding rhythm as a mode of experience redefines the “individuality” which

Lanier had wanted to recuperate in “Nature-Metaphors.” Attending to the gnats as “rhythmic atoms” allows Lanier to consider both the individuality of each gnat and the individuality of the swarm. In his attention to the relationship between these two rhythms, each manifested on a different scale – the “little independent round” of the gnat and the reshaping of the swarm’s

“general outline. . . every moment” – Lanier takes on the role of rhythmanalyst. However, in his encounter with the gnat dance, we don’t see Lanier explicitly referring or comparing the gnats’ rhythms to his own rhythms. He has not yet, then, become what Lefebvre calls “a measuring- measure.”488 I am going to conclude by returning to the poem with which I opened the chapter,

“Sunrise,” in which we see Lanier further exploring the possibility of rhythmic experience in nature. In this poem, we see Lanier’s awareness of his own bodily rhythms as well as an attention to the organic and diurnal rhythms of the sea, the tidal marsh, and the forest. In this late work, the speaker describes himself as a measuring-measure. as a site of rhythmic encounter – rather than incarnational identification – with nature. In practice, it is the metrical form of the poem itself which is able to record and reproduce this encounter.

The speaker of “Sunrise” describes an attraction to nature (first the trees, then the marsh and sea, and finally the sun), but also a sense that the natural world exceeds his knowledge of it and thwarts the “clear cognizance” which he had claimed in “A Florida Sunday.” As we saw in the passage I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, “Sunrise” opens with the speaker embracing a live-oak and asking, “From what fount are these tears at thy feet which flow? / They rise not from reason but deeper inconsequent deeps. / Reason’s not one that weeps. / What logic of greeting lies / betwixt dear over-beautiful trees and the rain of the eyes?” Versions of this question re-occur throughout the poem: what is the “logic of greeting” between nature and the

488. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 18. 200 nature-loving poet? What circumstances – what kind of relationship – facilitate the speaker’s loving encounter with the tree? There is no equivalent question asked in “A Florida Sunday” or

“Nature-Metaphors.” In fact, along with his other famous late poem, “The Marshes of Glynn,”

“Sunrise” signals a departure for Lanier from the poetics of identification. The confidence with which, in “A Florida Sunday,” he had asserted his appropriation of the “pelican’s self,” is replaced here with an equivocation over the question of how nature comes to be experienced, loved, or known intimately at all. His later poetry is concerned not with declaring his oneness with nature – not with assimilating nature to a deep ecological “Self” – but with investigating how the intimate experience of nature proceeds in the absence of such assimilation. Before analyzing Lanier’s experiment with “rhythmic encounter in “Sunrise,” I am going to briefly survey the poem’s description of the speaker’s ignorance in the face of nature. Whereas “A

Florida Sunday” had asserted and celebrated “clear cognizance” of all things, “Sunrise” attempts to outline the forms of an experience in nature which acknowledges its own limits, its ignorance, and its lack of clarity or transparence.

The speaker loves and neighbors the live-oak, then, in the opening stanzas of “Sunrise.”

But unlike in “Nature-Metaphors,” this love is not premised on identification with the tree.489

489. Though the tree is “man-bodied,” this apparent anthropomorphism is qualified by the phrase “burly-barked.” The poem attributes not humanness to the live-oak, but masculinity; and, crucially it is a masculinity rooted in the tree’s own physiognomy (its bark). We should read this image then not as an anthropomorphic appropriation of the tree but as a revision of the claim in “Nature-Metaphors” that love for nature should be expressed through metaphor because metaphor embodies a “marriage between. . . two parties.” Here, the heteronormative marriage structure is deliberately upended. The speaker uses the language of courtly love addressing the tree as his “beloved,” and thus taking for himself position of lover. But the conventional gender roles of courtly romance are cast out when the “beloved” is revealed to be the masculine tree. It might be tempting to read this image as a sublimation of Lanier’s same-sex desire, but if we take that route, we lose the possibility that the poem registers a real erotic attraction to the tree and a sincere sense that there is something “burly” about the live-oak. As Timothy Morton points out, “Tree- hugging is indeed a form of eroticism. . . to contemplate ecology’s unfathomable intimacies is to imagine pleasures that are not heteronormative, not genital, not geared to ideologies about where the body stops and starts” (“Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125, no. 2 [March 2010]: 273-282; 280). I read Lanier’s love for the live-oak as, among other things, an expression of desire for a masculine body (a “man-bodied tree”) for which the attribute of masculinity is defined not by genital anatomy (or any human or animal anatomy) but by a botanical feature – the tree’s bark. Compare Walt Whitman’s “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing,” in which Whitman’s speaker takes home a 201

The speaker doesn’t try to assimilate the tree to his own subjectivity as in “A Florida Sunday.” In fact, we find that the speaker’s own subject-position is one of relative ignorance. We hear that

“reason” is not the source of his feeling towards the tree, and that his tears derive, in some sense, from “inconsequent deeps.” Like the daemonic “phantoms” revealed in Fuller’s “Drachenfels,” these “deeps” appear to be simultaneously interior and yet somehow unavailable to the subject’s knowledge and intention. The term “inconsequent” here suggests that, though the tears “rise” from unconscious depths, they cannot be said to have been caused by these depths. The image posits and yet simultaneously withholds the possibility that the emotional encounter is rooted in the speaker’s interiority.

In the next stanza, the speaker’s awareness of the limits of his own will and knowledge in relation to nature is heightened. In this state, he experiences the trees’ leaves as capable of creating aesthetic impressions independent of his own mind (or judgement). Aesthetic experience does not, in other words, involve assimilation or correspondence of the natural object to the observing mind here, but almost the opposite:

O cunning green leaves, little masters! like as ye gloss All the dull-tissued dark with your luminous darks that emboss The vague blackness of night into pattern and plan, So, (But would I could know, but would I could know,) With your question embroid'ring the dark of the question of man, — So, with your silences purfling this silence of man While his cry to the dead for some knowledge is under the ban, Under the ban, — So, ye have wrought me Designs on the night of our knowledge,– yea, ye have taught me, So, That haply we know somewhat more than we know. (lines 26-38)

“twig” from the live-oak that, he says, “makes me think of manly love” (“I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing,” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon [New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002], 108, line 10). The live-oak in both cases embodies a masculine quality, though, whereas Whitman’s twig is a token which has him recollect “manly love,” Lanier’s live-oak is it itself the speaker’s “beloved.” 202

Lanier draws a comparison here between two relationships: the leaves organize the night aesthetically, transforming “dull-tissued dark” into “pattern and plan” in a manner comparable to the way they also – in some sense – augment and decorate the speaker’s ignorance by

“embroid’ring” and “purfling” the “dark of the question of man.” The image aims to blend vehicle and tenor – “ye have wrought me/ Designs on the night of our knowledge.” The leaves give the real night “pattern” because they give it form, but in what sense do they lend “designs” to the metaphorical “night of our knowledge”? What it does it mean to lend form to ignorance?

The next stanza gives us a conventional moral interpretation of the image – “Teach me the terms of silence – preach me the passion of patience” (lines 49-50) – but staying with the initial analogy (between the leaves’ relationship with the night and their relationship to human ignorance) reveals an important element of Lanier’s late ecopoetics. The leaves actively ornament the night: they gloss, emboss, embroider, and purfle. They determine aesthetic forms

(pattern and plan) without being subsumed by those forms. That they possess a range of ornamental effects is part of what allows them to retain their particularity. Lanier’s speaker, then, registers these ornamental effects from a position of ignorance. The leaves “embroider the dark of the question of man.” Rather than answering a question, nature is depicted ornamenting the absence of an answer. The leaves provide form (pattern) not only to the real night but to the speaker’s ignorance, the “night of our knowledge,” as well. My point is that this form-making does not alleviate the speaker’s ignorance or offer a “clear cognizance” of nature. Rather, these natural forms become available to experience while the speaker remains, as it were, in the dark.

He does not name or hail nature here as he had done with the gray pelican. He resists the impulse to assimilate nature to himself.

203

It is not simply that Lanier now finds nature beautiful whereas in “A Florida Sunday” he had found it transparently knowable, but rather that he now attends to the way that nature acts independently of him, actively (though not consciously) bringing about aesthetic effects (in this case, the leaves’ ornamenting of the night). The speaker’s aesthetic experience of nature emerges in “Sunrise” as an alternative to the “clear cognizance” which had played such a central role in the assimilation of nature to the self in “A Florida Sunday.” The aesthetic draw of nature described in “Sunrise” inheres not in its transparency, but in its capacity to determine and alter our experience while remaining obscure. This is why he calls the leaves “cunning” and “little masters.” He is forced to cede control of the experience to them. His recognition of nature’s capacity to ornament is central to this type of aesthetic experience. As Theo Davis argues, ornamentation is a mode of relation in which one attends to an object without representing it or posing a concept adequate to it: ornamentation concerns the way “an object carries and even carries out human attention (one approaches and touches something by ornamenting it, which is quite different from expressing an idea about it).”490 In “Sunrise” the leaves work not only to draw the speaker’s attention to the night, but to make that very attention possible in the first place: they “gloss” the “dull-tissued dark” with “luminous darks,” which in turn then function ornamentally (they “emboss the vague blackness of night into pattern and plan”). Nature’s ornamental quality allows Lanier’s speaker to attend to the pattern of “luminous darks.” He is able to pay precise attention to the night’s specific forms while remaining silent: his attention does not then mutate into identification or appropriation.

In the poem’s second section, the image of silence is developed further. Silent tranquility is explicitly linked to an erasure of human-nonhuman difference like that seen in “A Florida

490. Theo Davis, Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson and Whitman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 19. 204

Sunday.” The marsh, we are told is an “Old Chemist, rapt in alchymy, / Distilling silence —lo, / that which our father-age had died to know — / the menstruum that dissolves all matter” (lines

59-62). The silence of the marsh “solves us all: man, matter, doubt, disgrace, / Death, love, sin, sanity, / Must in yon silence’s clear solution lie. / Too clear! That crystal nothing who’ll peruse?” (lines 65-68). Like the tranquility attained at the end of “A Florida Sunday,” silence here is achieved through a merger of distinct entities: “man” and “matter” are dissolved together.

The image turns on the double-meaning of solution: it is both the result of different physical substances being dissolved together into a single substance and, more abstractly, it refers to resolution. Peace in nature offers a resolution to the speaker’s doubt and disgrace; but this experience appears to depend on the former kind of solution – the loss of difference between

“man” and “matter,” the speaker and nature. Whereas such an image serves as the climax in “A

Florida Sunday,” in “Sunrise” it is revealed to be insufficient: the apparent merger of human and nature in the silent marsh is merely a “crystal nothing.”

In the following stanzas, Lanier then describes the disturbance of this silence as the dawn begins. In my view, however, this section of the poem is less concerned with the movement from silence to sound than with a shift from an assertion of oneness (all things dissolved together in silence) to the discovery rhythmic pattern (and the consequent experience of differentiation which had earlier been facilitated by ornamentation): “Oh, what if a sound should be made! / Oh, what if a bound should be laid / To this bow-and-string tension of beauty and silence a-spring, —

/ to the bend of beauty the bow or the hold of silence the string!” (lines 86-89). The rhyme on

“sound” and “bound” is important since the breaking of silence here signifies not only noise but differentiation, the emergence of form – “pattern and plan” – out of the “dull-tissued dark.”

“Bound” here refers to the boundaries between distinct forms in nature. Without these

205 distinctions, to be clear, there is no experience at all – only “a crystal nothing.” As the lyric theorist Susan Stewart suggests, poetry “wrests forms from nature,” thus “freeing us from the very burden of immediacy.”491 In Lanier’s rendering of this idea, the breaking of silence is an act of differentiation, freeing the poem’s subject and the marsh itself from a “crystal nothing” into which they have both been dissolved. This creation of distinctions – bounds and pattern – makes experience itself possible.

This central passage of the poem in which the speaker anticipates the dawn chorus is as much about the re-emergence of the possibility of experience in general as it is about sonic experience in particular. The speaker remarks that he fears the silence will break like “a bubble that broke in a dream, / If a bound of degree to this grace be laid / Or a sound or motion made”

(lines 95-97). It is not, then, merely noise disturbing the quiet, which the speaker anticipates, but motion disturbing stasis, and, in particular, rhythmic motion. In the following stanza, the marsh becomes the site of a polyrhythmic encounter between speaker, leaves, flood-tide, and the birds that inhabit the marsh:

But no: it is made: list! somewhere,— mystery, where? In the leaves? in the air? In my heart? is a motion made: ’Tis a motion of dawn, like a flicker of shade on shade. In the leaves, ’tis palpable: low multitudinous stirring Upwinds through the woods; the little ones, softly conferring, Have settled my lord's to be looked for; so; they are still; But the air and my heart and the earth are a-thrill, — And look where the wild duck sails round the bend of the river, — And look where a passionate shiver Expectant is bending the blades Of the marsh-grass in serial shimmers and shades, — And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting, Are beating The dark overhead as my heart beats, — and steady and free Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea — (lines 98-111)

491. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 12, 3. 206

The complex mixed meter of the poem here reflects the different rhythmic patterns and scales of the marsh. In particular, the speaker’s heart-beat is compared with various nonhuman rhythms.

We see this towards the end of the quoted passage, for example, in the lines “And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting,/ Are beating / The dark overhead as my heart beats, — and steady and free / Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea.” We find not only two nonhuman rhythms depicted here – the beating of wings and the flowing of the tide – but also the transition of the poet’s attention between them. The phrase “as my heart beats” suggests a similarity between heart and wings; at the same time, the line ends with the opening of a new sentence,

“and steady and free.” Though this refers to the “ebb-tide” (as is clear on the next line), the decision to break the sentence over two lines allows for the impression that “steady and free” describe the speaker’s heart. The effect is to make the heart appear, as it were, to agree both with the beating wings and the tidal flow.

However, the phrase “as my heart beats” also disturbs and interrupts the stanza’s meter.

After its staccato opening lines, the rest of the stanza (from “’Tis a Motion of Dawn” onwards) consists of a mixture of anapestic, iambic, and amphibrachic feet. Despite the variety, there are certain consistent rules. No line begins with a stressed syllable and no two stressed syllables are juxtaposed on the same line, except, that is, here: “the dark overhead as my heart beats, — and steady and free.” Both “heart” and “beats” are stressed: the effect is to interrupt the expected pattern and to draw our attention to the image and its relation to the rhythms being described.

The poem is not in fact depicting an easy merger or agreement of human and nonhuman rhythms, or an assimilation of bodily and natural rhythm to a single poetic meter. Rather the poem becomes Lefebvre’s “measuring-measure”: we are aware of the ebb-tide’s pulse and the beat of the wings of the flying ducks not because the speaker inhabits or appropriates those other

207 patterns, but because his bodily tempo meets them and enters into tension with them. The poem is not a site of aesthetic unity or correspondence, then, but dynamic disunity. As Caroline Levine reminds us, to recall that rhythm derives from the body (in the heart-beat), can often, somewhat deceptively, make rhythm “seem uninhibited, effortless—conveying ‘existential freedom’ and expressing ‘presence and pleasure.’”492 This pitfall is avoided in “Sunrise” because the invocation of the speaker’s heart-beat (a recurring motif in the final part of the poem as well) signifies an awareness of the variety of relationships available to the speaker in nature, each characterized by multiple conflicting rhythms and tempos.

“Sunrise,” as I read it then, is a poem about experience in nature, though it is not a lyric aiming to deliver the subject’s perceptions of nature accurately; rather it is a meditation on the way in which close and intimate experiences of nonhuman nature come about at all.

Polyrhythmic encounter is one example the poem gives us of a “logic of greeting” between the human and nonhuman. It offers an alternative model of ecopoetics from that we saw in “Nature-

Metaphors” and “A Florida Sunday.” The poetics of identification, with its “denial of difference” and its total ambivalence towards experience as a primary concern for poetry, is replaced in

“Sunrise” with an attention to the way that human experience of nature becomes possible in the first place: the speaker recognizes human-nonhuman difference as a reality, and attends to it through the medium of poetic rhythm.

Through a poetics of polyrhythmia and ornamentation, Lanier’s “Sunrise” offers an experience of nature that foregrounds human-nonhuman difference, rather than assimilating nature to the subject in the manner of “Nature-Metaphors” and “A Florida Sunday.” This is a shift from an ontological poetics (a poetics interested in asserting a literal substantial continuity

492. Caroline Levine. Forms: Whole Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 49. 208 between human and nonhuman being) and towards a poetics invested in experience, specifically the experience of natural forms and rhythms. “Sunrise” is, however, contemporary with Lanier’s racialized extension of that ontological poetics in the Science. “Sunrise” is not so much a new liberatory episode in his career, as it is a fleeting glimpse of an alternative to that ontological poetics which sustained his racist and anthropocentric fixation on questions of essence and being.

Matthew A. Taylor has recently outlined the direct, almost “genetic,” 493 link between late nineteenth-century hylozoist ontologies which posited a “universal vitalism” and the development of eugenics and racial science in the 1890s and at the turn of the century. Lanier, even in “Nature-Metaphors,” is not quite an avowed vitalist. However, his ontological poetics does offer the same image of an ontologically flattened world in which human and nature are indistinguishable, and boundaries between living and nonliving, conscious or unconscious matter are lost. Lanier’s speaker in “A Florida Sunday” identifies with pelican but also the orange trees and the ocean. “Sunrise,” by contrast depicts not an ontological continuity but a series of aesthetic experiences that make natural alterity palpable. 494

493. Matthew A. Taylor, “Life’s Returns: Hylozoism Again,” PMLA 135, no. 3 (May 2020): 474-491; 475. 494. An instructive contrasting example is D. H. Lawrence’s 1922 study in psychoanalysis, “Fantasia of the Unconscious,” in which Lawrence configures his attraction to the Black Forest in Germany not in aesthetic terms but in terms of shared being – specifically, shared blood. Lawrence describes writing in the shadow of “full-blooded trees, with strange tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming.” His attraction in part is grounded in the trees’ having “no faces, no minds.” (D H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconsciousness [New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922], 43, 45. Sitting between the tree-roots, he claims “I come so well to understand tree-worship. All the old Aryans worshiped the tree. My ancestors.” Furthermore, “the true German,” he suggests “has something of the sap of trees in his veins even now: and a sort of pristine savageness, like trees, helpless, but most powerful, under all his mentality.” (Lawrence, Fantasia, 43, 45.) Lawrence imagines his intense feeling of intimacy with the trees to be grounded on a racial relationship: what he thinks of as the blood of his “ancestors” has “something of the sap of trees” in it. The trees around him beat with his blood. Crucially he configures his attraction to the forest as non-mental, even sub- mental: the trees don’t possess minds, he is happy to tell us, and the sap running in the veins of the “true German” is “under all his mentality.” The heavy implication is that the relationship Lawrence desires and feels between himself and the Black forest does not require thought or any effort of mind: we might even go a step further and stay it is not a description of an experience of any kind, but merely of material continuity (between sap and blood). This, I would suggest, is a model of nature-worship consonant with the racialized ontological poetics of Lanier’s Science and “A Florida Sunday.” By contrast, “Sunrise” draws no equivalence between sap and blood and explicitly invokes what Lawrence would call “mentality” – that is: conscious, differentiating thought. The experience of coming to an awareness of distinct forms and relations is fundamental to the Lanier’s depiction of the marsh at dawn. It is 209

I read in “Sunrise,” then, something like a defense of the aesthetic. In that poem, it is a kind of aesthetic experience which saves nonhuman difference from assimilation by the appropriative human subject. “Sunrise,” when treated as a form of Lefebvre’s “measuring- measure,” offers an alternative to those modes of environmental imagination which foreground a flattened ontology. One reason the poem offers for taking this alternative seriously is that the experiences of ornamentation and of polyrhythmic encounter can accommodate differences among nonhuman forms as well as one’s attraction to those distinct forms without fear of an appropriative assimilation. It offers a recuperation of aesthetic experience in nature while distinguishing the aesthetic from a transcendentalist “clear cognizance” that would assume the subordination of nature to mind.

precisely that kind of coming to consciousness that Lawrence is trying to escape in his proto-fascist communing with the “preconscious trees” (Lawrence, Fantasia, 45). 210

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