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Ecologies of Contemplation in British Romantic Poetry City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center 2-2021 The Lodge in the Wilderness: Ecologies of Contemplation in British Romantic Poetry Sean M. Nolan The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4185 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] THE LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS: ECOLOGIES OF CONTEMPLATION IN BRITISH ROMANTIC POETRY by SEAN NOLAN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2021 © 2020 Sean Nolan All Rights Reserved ii The Lodge in the Wilderness: Ecologies of Contemplation in British Romantic Poetry by Sean Nolan This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________________ ____________________________________ Date Nancy Yousef Chair of Examining Committee _______________________ ____________________________________ Date Kandice Chuh Executive Officer Supervisory Committee Alexander Schlutz Alan Vardy Nancy Yousef THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT The Lodge in the Wilderness: Ecologies of Contemplation in British Romantic Poetry by Sean Nolan Advisor: Nancy Yousef This dissertation argues that contemplation is often overlooked in studies of British Romantic poetry. By the late 1700s, changing commercial and agricultural practices, industrialism, secularization, and utilitarianism emphasizing industriousness coalesced to uproot established discourses of selfhood and leisure, and effected crises of individuation in Romantic poetry and poetics. Closely reading poems and writing about poetry composed between the 1780s and 1830s by William Cowper, George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Stuart Mill, I probe the relationship between aesthetic, ethical, and emotional responses to depictions of toil, idleness, and leisure. I argue that ecologies of contemplation champion poetry as essential to a modernizing culture rethinking the conditions and meaning of everyday life. Drawing not only from discourses in literary criticism and theory, political philosophy, economics, psychology, and theology, this dissertation’s interdisciplinary approach stresses the broader significance of robust academic debate on the role of culture and the stewardship of art and nature in periods of social crisis. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To fully register my gratitude to the mentors, colleagues, friends, and family who have encouraged and supported me during my doctoral studies, especially as I’ve worked on this dissertation, I need more space and time than the brief list of names and debts laid down here. Writing these acknowledgments further serves as a way of acknowledging that this phase of my scholarly career is over, but I will be thanking those named here (and those I missed) many times over and for years to come. Foremost, I want to thank Nancy Yousef, who took me in during my second year at the Graduate Center in 2014 and showed me a home in Romanticism at a time in my academic life when I was unsure where to turn. Her patient, sympathetic guidance as my committee chair has instilled lessons about scholarship, professionalism, and life that I will carry with me always. I have been fortunate to learn from Alan Vardy and Alexander Schlutz, the other members of my committee, for whose vigilant readings energetic support in meetings, conferences, seminars, and informal gatherings, I am eminently thankful. Thanks also to Josh Wilner, who oversaw one of my reading lists in preparation for my oral examination before the shift to dissertating, and who taught me by example that a close reader can never read closely enough. Without the enduringly appreciated support of Tim Fulford and Michael Tomko, who helped guide my first two publications into print, this dissertation would look nothing like its present form. I am grateful for the many colleagues and friends who, in seminars, conferences, and elsewhere, have served as unequivocally supportive critics and encouraged me to share my half- formed ideas, drafts, lamentations, and jubilations, especially Rose Tomassi, Paolo Pellecchia, v Elly Weybright, Amelia Greene, Catherine Engh, Charles Rowe, Sophia Sunseri, Kaitlin Mondello, Lucas Corcoran, and Emma Soberano. To Paul Mariani, one of the first Graduate Center alumni, who helped guide me as I applied to doctoral programs, I owe a special debt. To my bandmates in Good Looking Friends: Zach Fischer, Adam Rossi, Nick Kwas, and Shelley Washington, and to all my friends in the Brooklyn DIY music scene, “the proverbs of you thank you.” Gratitude, finally, to my family, for instilling in me the fortitude to keep going. vi THE LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS ECOLOGIES OF CONTEMPLATION IN BRITISH ROMANTIC POETRY INTRODUCTION: The Lodge in the Wilderness: Romanticism, Poetry, and Contemplation.….1 CHAPTER TWO: “Legs without the man”: Georgic, Acedia, and the Topography of Attention in William Cowper’s The Task……………………………………………………..………29 CHAPTER THREE: “Dexterous gleaner”: George Crabbe, Skilled Engagement, and Contemplative Description...…………………………………………………………….65 CHAPTER FOUR: “The task that leads the wilder’d mind”: Robert Bloomfield, Georgic Duty, and “studious leisure”…..………………………………………………………………103 INTERLUDE: In the Headlands: Common Ground and Common Language…………………135 CHAPTER FIVE: “So fully lounded”: Lodging, Self-Enclosure, and “Outness” in Coleridge’s Crisis Writings of 1801-1802…………………………………………………………...151 CODA: John Stuart Mill and the Utility of Poetic Contemplation…………………………..…187 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………198 vii INTRODUCTION THE LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS: ROMANTICISM, POETRY, AND CONTEMPLATION Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumour of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful or successful war, Might never reach me more! My ear is pained, My soul is sick with every day’s report Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled. There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart, It does not feel for man. —William Cowper, The Task (1785), Book 2, lines 1-91 O for a lodge in a Land, where human Life was an end, to which Labor was only a Means, instead of it being, as it [is] here, a mere means of carrying on Labor.—I am oppressed at times with a true heart-gnawing melancholy when I contemplate the state of my poor oppressed Country.—God knows, it is as much as I can do to put meat & bread on my own table; & hourly some poor starving wretch comes to my door, to put in his claim for part of it. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letter to Thomas Poole, 23 March 18012 The ethics of contemplation, or of the contemplative life, necessarily come under scrutiny during periods when social upheaval and political crises call for urgent engagement. Such is the case in Britain during the Romantic period, when fears—real and imagined—of societal decline, disappearing values associated with agrarian traditions, rural depopulation, exploitative modern 1 The Poems of William Cowper, vol. 2, edited by John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, Clarendon P, 1995. 2 Collected Letters, vol. 2 (1801-1806), edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, Oxford: Clarendon P, 1956, p. 709. 1 labor practices, vagrancy, revolt, ill-begotten wars abroad, censorship, and invasion by revolutionary and then by Napoleonic France, dominated the attention of the populace and contributed to radically innovative responses in literary aesthetics. Varied, often ambivalent efforts to define the generative possibilities of contemplation in British Romantic poetry are at the core of my dissertation. What does contemplation mean to a Romantic poet composing at the end of the rational and secular eighteenth century, and what does it look like in representation, in theory, and in practice? What is the place of contemplative retreat (the lodge in the wilderness) in a sociocultural environment that seems only to reward action and the active life? And how does poetry offer new examples and modes of contemplative experience in conjunction with the poetics of the everyday? I propose an approach to reading Romantic poetry as secularized iterations of contemplative attention or prayer rooted in a new emphasis on particularized descriptions of stillness, silence, solitude, a sense of continuity between the mind and the physical world, especially in rural, wilderness, or sublime landscapes. In recent years, scholars of Romanticism have shown increasing interest in the poetics of attention, often framing Romantic attention as a commons threatened by the effects of population shifts from the country to the city and an unsettling of the traditional cycles balancing labor and leisure.3 The expanding marketplace of the printed word, led by the rise of the novel and 3 One of the pioneering works in this scholarly tradition is Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1961), which critiques the conventions of British pastoral writing, especially the nostalgia for a lost Golden Age after the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Williams notes the migration of displaced and dispossessed rural laborers to urban industrial centers also
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