Home Search Every Field Editorial Search Authors' ROMANTICISM'S OTHER MINDS: POETRY, COGNITION, AND THE SCIENCE OF SOCIABILITY Responses By John Savarese (Ohio State, 2020) viii + 192 pp. Guidelines Reviewed by Mark J. Bruhn on 2021-01-12. For Click here for a PDF version. Reviewers Click here to buy the book on Amazon. About Us Masthead In just under 170 succinctly argued pages, John Savarese's first monograph gives a surprisingly copious account of poetry's instrumental role in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theories of humans' socio-cognitive endowment Feedback and development. While Locke, Hume, and Kant conceived the individual mind as an essentially private realm of sensational, passionate, and rational experience, Savarese shows that a broad countercurrent of cultural-anthropological conjecture about linguistic and literary origins led to alternative models of the human mind "that variously emphasized the impersonal, the intersubjective, and the collective" (4) and that accordingly prefigure today's "4E" model of the embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended mind. This cognitive historicist study builds on two productive decades of related research, including Alan Richardson's British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001) and The Neural Sublime (2010), Nancy Yousef's Isolated Cases (2004), Noel Jackson's Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (2008), Amanda Jo Goldstein's Sweet Science (2017), and Richard Sha's Imagination and Science in Romanticism (2018). As Savarese explains, cognitive historicism is "a method that looks to contemporary cognitive science as a way to strengthen the historicist project rather than challenge it"; thus, "the book's primary commitment is to the historical discourse" and in particular to the ways "that Romantic writers made physiological approaches to the mind the basis for an array of contingent, culturally embedded accounts of cognition" (12- 13). Like the books just cited, this one treats "poetry, cultural history, and natural philosophy as fundamentally overlapping discourses and as occupying the same shared interdisciplinary spaces" (77). Savarese's leading example of this interdisciplinary overlap is the discourse of literary antiquarianism, in particular its use of ancient and popular poetry as evidence for conjectural histories of literary origins within and across cultural and proto-national folk traditions. Because those origins are oral and prehistoric, antiquarians could not sample them directly but only conjecturally, by reading ancient written poetry for traces of still more ancient orality or, alternatively, by analyzing "universally" appealing ballad poetry such as "Chevy Chase," which, as Joseph Addison suggested, evidently had "some peculiar aptness to gratify the mind of man" despite wide differences in historical situation and social station (25). These two lines of poetic evidence, however, did not converge in a coherent picture either of literature's origins or of the capacities of human cognition that make literature possible. Books such as Thomas Blackwell's Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735), Robert Lowth's Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1754), and Hugh Blair's "Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian" (1763) construed ancient poetry as indexing "the earliest stages of cognitive life" in "precultural" sensation and passion (21). But this essentially lyric conception of the primitive mind was challenged by an implicitly narrative model derived from the native ballad traditions. While ancient verse was said to voice essentially private experience in an overheard poetry of imagery, feeling, and figure, ballad verse such as Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Joseph Ritson's Ancient Songs (1790) appeared more intrinsically social both in its cognitive foundations and its expressive functions. The competing claims for lyric and narrative minds and kinds, Savarese observes, persisted through and well beyond the Romantic period, resurfacing in everything from J. S. Mill's tendentious ranking of lyric above narrative in "What is Poetry" (1833) to contemporary cognitive literary studies, which likewise attribute different cognitive origins and functions to the different genres (5-13). Recounted in chapter 1, this antiquarian debate sets the context for the four case studies that follow, beginning with James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760). Thanks to his education at the University of Aberdeen, Macpherson would have been exposed both to Blackwell's primitive poetics of sensation and feeling and to Thomas Reid's commonsense philosophy of intellectual powers, including the early-developing ability to read "natural signs" of others' thoughts and feelings through their facial expressions, gestures, and intonations (58). In light of this background, Savarese "frames the Ossian project as an intervention in then-current theories of ancient poetry, which made the ancient text the site of information about the primitive mind" (44). While Blackwell, Lowth, and Blair construed the primitive mind as fundamentally personal, private, and pre-social, Savarese argues that Macpherson stressed instead its embodied sociability. "In Macpherson's hands," he writes, "ancient poetry carries with it primitive models of relationships between minds," in particular their folk-psychological ability to attribute beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions to others "not as an act of primitive, animistic projection but by bodily observation [...] as an act of reading" (58, 65). The distinction between animistic projection from the inside out and embodied reading from the outside in is forcefully exemplified by the fragment narrating Morna's death. Quite inauthentically and therefore pointedly, Macpherson's mimesis of first-person lyric orality gives way here to a clearly scripted form of third-person narrative perspective-taking that functions as "the equivalent of free indirect discourse" by representing one mind reading the embodied but otherwise unvoiced intentions of another (64). While "Macpherson's experimentation with refashioning ancient poetry," Savarese writes, "consistently pushes toward new models of an embodied and embedded mind" (43), that mind's innate sociability nevertheless remains a mysterious given. In the poetry and prose of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, to which Savarese next turns, related materials (e.g., Reid's "reliabilist" philosophy, 85) and methods (including Ossianic verse form) contribute to a more explicit model of mind in which native social capacities are developmentally scaffolded by material artifacts and sociocultural practices. According to Savarese, Barbauld unites a "moral sense" foundationalism derived from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson with a more constructivist view derived from Hartley and Priestley, who admit the bootstrapping effects of caregiving, education, religious practice, and other "prejudicial" forms of social transmission, including poetry (72, 87). For Barbauld, then, poetry functions not as a mirror of the primitive mind but as a nurturer of the socially progressive mind, in keeping with Priestley's Course of Lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar (1762) and with her brother and co-collaborator John Aiken's Essays on Song-Writing (1772). Thus, Savarese contends, Barbauld's poetry and especially her pedagogical experiments in Ossianic "measured prose" (e.g., "Seláma" and Hymns in Prose) illustrate in practice what is argued in principle by her essays "On Monastic Institutions" (1773), "endorses" (1798), and "On Prejudice" (1800): that poetry is "less an origin point, or a mark of the 'natural' mind's original ways of thinking and feeling, and more a scaffolding technology, a mark of a still 'barbarous' mind's gradual, incipient development" (92). If Macpherson represents the mind as socially embodied and Barbauld represents it as socially embedded, Savarese argues in his third case study that Wordsworth extends the conception of the social mind beyond individual bodies and shared technologies to the natural world itself. While Barbauld's socially scaffolded care-giving, education, and religious and poetic practices require an intentional and "labored process" to support "individual acquisition" (128), Wordsworth's extended mind works more easily, drinking in moral wisdom ready-made from nature rather than arduously acquiring it through disciplinary toil and trouble. Wordsworth stages a conflict between these two externalist modes of socio-cognitive formation in "Expostulation and Reply" and "The Tables Turned." But elsewhere he admits that by itself, nature's ready- made wisdom cannot ensure the healthy development of the social mind; in a letter of March 6, 1804 he advised a young De Quincey to "love Nature and Books; seek these and you will be happy." Wordsworth is not a primitivist. Though he indulges the antiquarian method of conjectural history to project this natural-constructivist theory onto the "primitive" mind of his own early childhood, Savarese suggests that, in terms of his poetic practice, Wordsworth's love of nature follows from his love of mankind rather than leading to it. Throughout Lyrical Ballads and even as late as "The Leech-gatherer," Wordsworth is said to have primarily engaged with "debates about rustic language" and "the collective scaffolding of the ordinary mind" (108). Primitivist claims in the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads notwithstanding, he effectively endorses the Coleridgean position that the "best