Romantic Ekphrasis and the Intellectual Culture of Sensibility by Jennifer Emily O’Kell A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate English Department University of Toronto © Copyright by Jennifer Emily O’Kell (2016) Romantic Ekphrasis and the Intellectual Culture of Sensibility Jennifer Emily O’Kell Doctor of Philosophy Graduate English Department University of Toronto 2016 Abstract This thesis examines the intersection of poetry about art, the culture of sensibility, and eighteenth-century aesthetic thought in Romantic literature. These converging discourses allowed poets to suggest insights into the necessary conditions of sympathetic exchange, and the limits of what sympathy can accomplish. This thesis proposes ambitious changes to our understanding of Romantic ekphrasis in order to offer a subtle but crucial change to our understanding of the culture of sensibility. It considers a broad range of Romantic ekphrases – some well-known poems by Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, and some largely unstudied poems by Cowper, Mary Russell Mitford, Henry Hart Milman, Barry Cornwall, and others – reading these texts against multiple historical contexts. One of these contexts is the eighteenth-century idea that the visual arts represent only a single, “pregnant” moment, whereas literature represents successions of events. Moral philosophy and the philosophy of the sister arts are bound up with one another throughout the eighteenth century; David Hume’s formulation of sympathy as instinctive and visual comes to be associated with painting and sculpture, while Adam Smith’s formulation of it as an imagined reconstruction comes to be associated with literature. Another key context is the ekphrastic tradition, especially its understudied eighteenth-century portion. This thesis is the first study to adequately investigate the archive of eighteenth-century ekphrasis. In the light of these contexts, it argues that Romantic ekphrasis was a site of ongoing intellectual activity within the culture of sensibility. Romantic thinkers inherited a set of questions about the role of emotion and affect in ethical conduct, and about the role of the arts, not only in producing emotion, but also in shaping how we grapple intellectually with emotion. This thesis brings to light some of the intellectual tools that early nineteenth-century poets brought to bear on these questions. ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my excellent supervisory committee, Deidre Lynch, Malcolm Woodland, and most especially Karen Weisman. On anecdotal evidence, I would venture that supervisory practices in the university are far from consistent, and that I have been more than usually fortunate. I know of no other supervisors who read their students’ work so attentively and productively – let alone any who consistently do so in less than a week. Karen is a model that I hope other faculty will strive to emulate. I could not have finished this thesis without the unwavering love and compassion of Aaron Yale Heisler, or without the support of my parents, Arlene Young and Robert O’Kell. I am also immensely indebted to the colleagues who helped me along the way, especially (in chronological order) Kailin Wright, Laurel Ryan, Tony Fong, Chris Pugh, Laura Clarridge, Christine Choi, and Elisa Tersigni. Behind the scenes, good scholarship is always collaborative, and these have been my chief – though not my only – collaborators. This project was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ vi 1 Introduction Sister Arts and Sister Feelings: The Interrelation of Sensibility and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century ........................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Criticism and Methodologies .............................................................................................. 4 1.1.1 Sensibility ............................................................................................................... 4 1.1.2 Ekphrasis ............................................................................................................... 11 1.2 The Sisterhood of Sensibility and Aesthetic Thought ...................................................... 14 1.2.1 The Philosophy of Sympathy ................................................................................ 15 1.2.2 The Philosophy of the Sister Arts ......................................................................... 24 1.2.3 Storytelling, Stasis, and Sympathy in Romantic Ekphrasis .................................. 37 1.3 Argument and Plan ........................................................................................................... 41 2 William Cowper and the Ekphrastic Tradition ........................................................................ 46 2.1 Why Study the Ekphrastic Tradition? ............................................................................... 46 2.2 Eighteenth-Century Ekphrasis .......................................................................................... 51 2.3 Cowper’s Reworking of Eighteenth-Century Conventions .............................................. 66 2.4 Poetry about art in the early nineteenth century ............................................................... 94 3 Ekphrasis and Public Discourse in the Annals of the Fine Arts ............................................... 96 3.1 The Cultural Context of the Annals .................................................................................. 98 3.1.1 Discourse about Art: The Artist ............................................................................ 98 3.1.2 Poems from The Artist ........................................................................................ 100 3.2 The Annals of the Fine Arts ............................................................................................ 103 3.2.1 Description .......................................................................................................... 103 3.2.2 The Role of Poetry in the Annals ........................................................................ 109 iv 3.3 Sympathy and the Posture of Public Reviewing in Ekphrastic Poems ........................... 120 3.3.1 “Sonnet to Mr. HAYDON on a Study from Nature, exhibited at the Spring Garden Exhibition, 1817.” .................................................................................. 122 3.3.2 “On the Monument to be placed in Lichfield Cathedral to the Memory of two only Children. By F. L. Chantrey, Esq.” ........................................................... 131 4 Sympathy and Fixity in Keats and Shelley ............................................................................ 141 4.1 Temporal and Instantaneous: The Anachronism of Assuming Lessing’s Influence ...... 146 4.2 “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: Art Beyond the Limits of Sympathy ...................................... 151 4.3 “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci”: Sympathy Beyond the Limits of Sentience ... 175 5 Sympathy, Self-Spectatorship, and Self-knowledge in Wordsworth and Keats .................... 209 5.1 A Spectator of Oneself: Self-Figuration and Sympathetic Self-Sufficiency .................. 214 5.2 An Obtuse Spectator of Oneself: Self-figuration and Misrecognition ............................ 239 6 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................. 256 6.1 Ekphrasis and Sensibility After 1820 ............................................................................. 256 6.2 L.E.L. in 1825: A Test Case ........................................................................................... 258 6.3 L’Envoi ........................................................................................................................... 267 Works Consulted ......................................................................................................................... 270 v List of Figures Figure 1: William Cowper’s “The Tears of a Painter” and a modern translation of Vincent Bourne’s “Lachrymæ Pictoris,” re-lineated for ease of comparison. Page 67. Figure 2: Vincent Bourne’s Latin original “Lachrymae Pictoris” and modern translation by Paul Franz. Page 69. vi 1 1 Introduction Sister Arts and Sister Feelings: The Interrelation of Sensibility and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century One might not think that John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has anything left to tell scholarship. This most studied of poems, however, has something left to tell us about how the Romantics addressed questions that matter now more than ever: questions about the role of emotion and affect in ethical conduct, questions about the role of the arts, not only in producing emotion, but also in shaping how we grapple intellectually with emotion. In the sphere of politics, in the sphere of popular culture, in the sphere of “the arts” as traditionally conceived, and in the sphere of humanistic study that is under relentless