Category Archives: Individual Reading

Teaching with Social Media and Digital Technologies

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At New York University, Professor Clifford Siskin has required students to create wikis to accompany class presentations (example). Professor Michael Wesch posts videos for other academics on how to use Twitter, YouTube videos, collaborative Google Docs to replace traditional lectures in the classroom. The Wired Campus has run a series of articles on the use of Twitter as a teaching tool (check the links here). Casting Out Nines ran an article on how teachers can use Facebook. And recently, Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning developed a multimedia classroom tool called “MediaThread” which “connects to a variety of image and video collections (such as YouTube, Flickr, library databases, and course libraries), enabling users to lift items out of these collections and into an analysis environment” where they can be “clipped, annotated, organized, and embedded into essays and other written analysis” (http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/mediathread). These are just a few examples of the ways in which digital technology and social media are entering the classroom environment.

Personally, I’ve not yet used anything more advanced than Blackboard course pages and Powerpoint presentations in my teaching. My favored form of technology in the classroom is the blackboard. I might occasionally embed a video clip or demonstrate how to use a database, but none of that is particularly sophisticated. I tend to use digital technology in lecture as a means to gain student attention, or to make a specific point for which I think the medium is well suited. I know that this technology, particularly social media, has the capacity for more than entertainment, but I remain uncertain of its value in the classroom.

Some professors have argued against incorporating digital technology and social media in the classroom, arguing that flashy tech distracts already highly distractable students from the lesson, and that attention to including new tech may distract teachers from the point that tech was meant to reinforce. Others claim that using social media and other innovative digital technologies will assist teachers in reclaiming students’ attention, and when I see students disregarding a valuable lecture in favor of texting, tweeting, updating Facebook, and searching the web, I want to believe that jumping on the tech bandwagon will draw them back into the classroom.

So I’m asking for advice: how do you use digital technology in your classroom? Or do you? Why or why not? What drawbacks have you encountered, and what successes? How do the technologies you employ affect your pedagogical practices? Perhaps together we can sort out the most effective ways to integrate modern forms technology into our teaching practices.

~Veronica Goosey

Defining Romanticism

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Defining Romanticism has long been a conflicted endeavor, with one scholar after another proclaiming the task’s impossibility and offering new definitions. In his book, Romanticism: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010), Michael Ferber attempts a definition of Romanticism:

“Romanticism was a European cultural movement, or set of kindred movements, which found in a symbolic and internalized romance plot a vehicle for exploring one’s self and its relationship to others and to nature, which privileged the imagination as a faculty higher and more inclusive than reason, which sought solace in or reconciliation with the natural world, which ‘detranscendentalized’ religion by taking God or the divine as inherent in nature or in the soul and replaced theological doctrine with metaphor and feeling, which honored poetry and all the arts as the highest human creations, and which rebelled against the established canons of neoclassical aesthetics and against both aristocratic and bourgeois social and political norms in favor of values more individual, inward, and emotional.”

We are interested in our readers’ thoughts about Ferber’s ambitious attempt. Please submit your own caveats, challenges, and definitions for discussion.

Percy B. Shelley and Jonathan Bate: Poetry and the Problems of Mediation

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In his chapter, “What are poets for?” from The Song of the Earth (Harvard University Press, 2002), Jonathan Bate argues that poetry is a special “speech” that reanimates “primary experience” within the “environment of the imagination” (281). It can open an abstract “disembodied zone of possibility” that, in Bate’s reference to Heidegger, “brings forth” or “reveals” an unmediated experience of nature. The medium of the special speech creates an existential immediacy as a Song of the Earth recalling the Heideggerian pure presence and being, an opportunity to experience das Ding an sich and in der Welt sein. Techne and poiesis, Bate believes, bridge the gap

between speaking and writing, a dichotomy instigating a hermeneutical circle that has long boggled postmodern theorists. Because poetry enables this ontological immediacy for auditors and readers alike, he describes it as a phenomenological “medium” that resists questions about the specific forms and media that work to reanimate consciousness (260).

Bate’s theory about the meaningful interconnectedness of the environment, poetics, and being in the world is undeniably provocative, but it also raises some questions. If poetry is “not merely language” but a super language evoking “conditions such as dwelling and alienation in their very essence,” does poetry transcend the linguistic forms encountered through print, manuscript, or speech? Is the occasion for experiencing the semantic and non-semantic properties of poetry, in his estimation, a silent or audible affair? Or is it both? As a “special speech,” does poetry preexist its oral or written instantiation as Wordsworth and Coleridge have reflected upon?

Percy B. Shelley addresses some of these concerns—including the tensions between the ineffable power of poetry and issues of mediation—in his Defence of Poetry. In one instance, he explains that Homer’s verse unveils the “truth and beauty of friendship and patriotism” when “read[ing] . . . his verses.” The modern reader (note Shelley’s mention of Homeric text as literal rather than oral) becomes ensconced in art as truth and beauty are “unveiled to the depths.” At another instance, “poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” Uncovering beauty, it destabilizes meaning through defamiliarization of its object (this idea recalls his take on the origins of language as “vitally metaphorical” and resembles Russian Formalist concerns of the 20th century). At a later moment, however, Shelley describes how poetry “veils” the vanishing apparitions that “haunt,” making immortal what is best and most beautiful. No longer exposing beauty, poetry participates in covering or obscuring disagreeable elements.

On the one hand, he describes poetry as uncovering and reanimating the “truth” and “beauty” of things (similar to Bate’s formulation). On the other hand, poetry acts as a concealing agent that lifts and covers ambiguous “veils” between the artistic object and its beholder, reader, or auditor—as if some dialectic between revealing beauty and concealing the disagreeable emerges. In both cases, Shelley fails to disambiguate the “unveiling” agent; is it the poet or poetry itself implicated in the performative act? Overall, Shelley explains that poetry “spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil.” Through a performance of “spreading” or “withdrawing,” poetry guides us toward aesthetic objects of pleasure and pleasantry—in sync with the harmonious and agreeable. Shelley does not clarify, though, when and how poetry “elucidates” or “covers.” Nor does he hint that the poetic experience occurs as immediate as Bate believes.

Shelley complicates the tensions between poetry and mediation even further, I believe. When he describes Dante’s writings as “awakening” an “entranced” Europe, the poet depicts Dante’s words as “pregnant with lightning which has yet found no conductor . . . veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning [of Dante’s poetry] may never be exposed.” Two important issues arise here. First, “high poetry” requires a “conductor” through which it assumes form and becomes uttered in its full “truth” and revealed in its full beauty. In this way, poetry loses the power of “the lamp” itself, as it were in an Abrams sense, that he had described earlier; it no longer exposes beauty. Second, layers of “veils” exist between the high poetic product and its recipient. In the poetic act of enunciation and reception, the “veils” obstruct the organic link to beauty. Not only, then, do we lose the meaning of how exposition of beauty occurs but we encounter the glaring inconsistencies across Shelley’s various “veils,” as well. Does this alternating “veiling” effect return us to the hermeneutic circle from which Bate tries to remove us? Though “the creation of poetry is often wholly unalloyed,” Shelley suggests its final iterations aren’t always pure. Only the “feeble shadow” of the poet’s original inspiration remains in its production (similar to Wordsworth’s celebration of the “spontaneous overflow” of poetic inspiration whose tranquil recollection turns into a precarious act of recovery).

These reflections from Shelley and Bate bring us back to the age-old question of “what is poetry?” along with considerations of creation, production, consumption, media, and mediation. If, according to Bate, poetry arrives as a moment of creative existentialism, then how are we to reconcile the material and immaterial considerations of its substance (or lack thereof)? Shelley doesn’t seem to offer a clear answer to this, either. Does the poet/poem offer the occasion for participating in unmediated and mediated experiences simultaneously? Does poetry have the ability to exempt us from the Nietzschean “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms”? I think it’s worth considering further the occasion of poetry as an act of production and consumption as well as its attendant mediations, the power of eco-poetics, and other consequential theories and properties not yet brought into this inquiry.

-Omar F. Miranda

Works Cited:

Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Shelley, Percy B. “The Defence of Poetry.” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002. Print.

“Name not his name”: Poetic Identity and the Legacy of “Byron”

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Many of our posts have engaged with issues of media and mediation. Oftentimes, we set out to explore the relationship between the location of a given Romantic era text and the connection between that location and the work’s meaning. In the era following Kittler’s Discourse Networks, Paul Magnuson’s Reading Public Romanticism, and Siskin and Warner’s This is Enlightenment Volume, scholars are asking where we find a text, or “in what” does it occur.

With this brief frame in mind, I want to remobilize some of the questions currently being asked by scholars of the Romantic period in order to examine Lord Byron’s celebrity. In Elizabeth Barret Browning’s 1824 elegy “Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron,” the young poet explores the nature of poetic identity. This post will suggest that Barret Browning’s work shows another use, or perhaps a way to re-purpose, the larger issues currently being explored by scholars. Where does Barret Browning locate “Byron”? In what does his legacy reside? What work does “Byron” allow a young female writer to do?

Name not his Name

“ — I am not now

That which I have been.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning turns to these lines from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in order to begin her elegiac poem “Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron”.  While Barrett Browning’s poem re-contextualizes these lines from Childe Harold, it is also keenly aware of the impact grammatical intricacies can have on the construction and presentation of self.  As E.W. Orr points out, in this new context, Byron’s own words describe his “passage from this life”.[1]  However, Barrett Browning’s epigraph does far more than simply mourn the death of a fellow poet; it frames a work which can be seen as a meditation on the nature of poetic identity.  Barrett Browning, who was a young woman beginning to find her poetic voice at the time of composition, blurs the line which separates Byron the man from the “fictitious personage” he created: “He was, and is not!  Græcia’s trembling shore, / Sighing through all her palmy groves, shall tell / That Harold’s pilgrimage at last is o’er-”.[2]  Jane Stabler’s recent work claims that this passage reveals that, for Barrett Browning, Byron represents a “violent collision of presence and absence”.[3]  That is, the first line of the poem recognizes the ways in which Byron both occupies and distances himself from his work.  While it is indeed tempting to analyze the claim that Lord Byron “was” and “is not”, Barrett Browning complicates such a reading by suggesting that Childe Harold, not Byron himself, may be the referent for “He”.  Harold, as the imaginative creation of Byron the poet indeed “was” and “is not” alive in the same manner as Byron.  Yet, the idea that “Harold’s pilgrimage at last is o’er” brings Byron and his creation closer together.  I believe that Barrett Browning does not use these lines to state that Harold’s pilgrimage has ended because of the author of his journeys is now dead, but, rather to make a much larger point about Byron’s shifting identities – his “absence and presence”.

While Barrett Browning begins by linking  Byron and Childe Harold, the second and third stanzas move away from the discussion of the relationship between Byron and his poetic creations.  Within the second stanza, Barrett Browning recasts the poet as the champion of Greek independence.  The speaker calls upon the Greeks to mourn “That generous heart where genius thrill’d divine, / Hath spent its last most glorious throb for thee”.[4]  It is this selfless heart which spent “its last most glorious throb” fighting for the Greeks that the third stanza attempts to draw attention to: “Britannia’s Poet!  Græcia’s hero, sleeps! / And Freedom, bending o’er the breathless clay, / Lifts up her voice, and in her anguish weeps!”[5]  These lines simultaneously depict Byron as Greek freedom fighter and “Britania’s poet!”.  Despite his permanent departure from England in 1816, after his separation proceedings, as well as his desire to “shake the dust of England from his shoes”,[6] Barrett Browning attempts to renationalize Byron.

In the fourth and final stanza, the speaker begins to find the tenor of the poem too much to bear and describes the journey of Byron’s body back to England for burial: “Soon, ’midst the shriekings of the tossing wind, / The ‘dark blue depths’ he sang of, shall have bore / Our all of Byron to his native shore!”[7]  The emphasis on the term “all” reinforces the importance of Byron’s name and his physical body.  These lines mark the first and only time that “Byron” actually appears in the text.  However, as the previous stanzas and the varying identities which they describe reveal, Byron has already been embodied as a creation of his own imagination, as Greek liberator, and as the poetic voice of Britain.  Byron’s name and physical body – as well as his body of work – become sites of meaning which are susceptible to and, at times, court numerous different identities.

Barrett Browning’s interest in Byron’s name emerges again in“Stanzas Occasioned by a Passage in Mr. Emerson’s Journal, Which States that on the Mention of Lord Byron’s Name, Captain Demetrius, An Old Roumeliot, Burst Into Tears”.  This lengthy title performs two key functions.  First, it reveals just how far Byron’s fame spread.  Second, and more importantly, the title reveals Barrett Browning’s distance from the event which her poem attempts to capture.  That is, the poem is “occasioned by” her reading Emerson’s description of an old sailor’s reaction to the mention of Byron’s name.  Although Barrett Browning assumes the role of Captain Demetrius, the reader must recognize that she is still present within the poem.  Or, in other words, she is both present and absent.  The opening of the poem emphasizes the importance of “Byron”: “Name not his name, or look afar – / For when my spirit hears / That name, its strength is turned to woe – / My voice is turned to tears”.[8]  The speaker attempts to capture Captain Demetrius’ sentiments and expresses a desire to avoid emotional trauma by convincing others not to utter Byron’s name.  However, “Byron” holds so many significations precisely because the poet himself has been named.  Similarly to the numerous identities present in “Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron” describes, the speaker associates Byron with poetry, Greek independence, and British glory. In other words, “Byron” has become a designation that stands in for Byron the poet, Byron the Greek liberator, and Byron the celebrity.  Together the two poems show that Byron seems to have “become a name”.[9]

[1] Orr 34

[2] Stanzas to Lord Byron, lines 1-3

[3] Stabler Byron, Poetics and History pg 2

[4] Barrett Browning lines 16-17

[5] Barrett Browning lines 19-21

[6] Stabler Byron, Poetics and History pg 1

[7] Barrett Browning lines 30-32

[8] Barrett Browning Stanzas Occasioned lines 1-4

[9] Tennyson, Norton Critical Edition line 11

Reconsidering Allusion

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I’ve been thinking about allusion; specifically, about how allusion may function satirically in verse and prose of the Romantic period. Consider the work of Susan Ferrier (1782-1854), a Scottish writer who anonymously published three comic novels with Blackwood. The first, Marriage (1818), shows promise, but The Inheritance (1824) shows greater narrative skill, while her final novel Destiny (1831) emphasizes the moralizing element present in all three. Although Leah Price discounts Ferrier’s allusivity, suggesting that the common literary culture her novels invoke leaves “no space for scholarly ingenuity,” Price’s interpretation of Ferrier’s allusivity fails to acknowledge how deftly these allusions are intertwined with Ferrier’s plot, themes, and characterization. However, Angela Esterhammer’s article “Susan Ferrier’s Allusions: Comedy, Morality, and the Presence of Milton” (2000) examines how Ferrier’s Miltonic allusions in Marriage combine comedy and morality through hyperbole. Esterhammer argues that the Miltonic allusions “augment the moral resonances of her plots, but also, and sometimes simultaneously, create comic hyperbole” through the irony generated by the juxtaposition of his elevated discourse and her description of rural Scottish manners.
While I find Esterhammer’s argument regarding the epigraphs in Marriage persuasive, I see Ferrier using allusion in several distinct ways throughout her fiction. Allusion is a stylistic feature shared by many women writers of the Romantic era, often used to enrich a passage or to support the writer’s credentials by referencing a shared literary history. However, several of these writers, including some of Ferrier’s most influential models, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, also use allusions to facilitate satire. Although Ferrier’s references range from Ann Radcliffe to James Thompson and Thomas Grey, she more commonly relies on such generally known authors as Shakespeare and Milton to carry her satiric commentary, since she must rely on her readers’ recognition of her allusions for her satire to succeed.
By alluding to canonical texts not only in a game of literary one-upsmanship but in a satiric mode as well, Ferrier and other women writers oppose the political opinions normally associated with various canonical authors. That is, these writers employ allusions for several satirical purposes; literary allusions are often used to ironize otherwise conventional characters and situations in their novels, but allusions can also be employed to satirically reinflect the language of the author being alluded to, as Ferrier’s epigraphs from Milton’s Paradise Lost do in Marriage. By satirically alluding to a canonical text, a writer can appropriate the text and subvert its customary message.
Usually Ferrier indicates the satire behind a character’s allusion through the narrator. In the following example, Lyndsay (our hero) deliberately uses an allusion to Milton to chastise Delmour (the false suitor) and instruct Gertrude, and Delmour extends the allusion in an attempt to negate Lyndsay’s didactic endeavor. Lyndsay’s use of Milton allows him to expose the faults of his target—Delmour—for the benefit of his audience—not only Gertrude, but Ferrier’s readers. In an attempt to interrupt an asinine discourse on lighting large spaces, Delmour begins the allusive conversation in which Lyndsay satirizes Delmour’s motives for courting Gertrude:
‘Yes, it is a sort of Pandaemonium light,’ said Colonel Delmour, scornfully.
‘The mind it its own palace, you know, Delmour,’ said Mr. Lyndsay; ‘and in itself—’ he
stopped and smiled.
‘Go on,’ cried Colonel Delmour, in a voice of suppressed anger; ‘pray, don’t be afraid to
finish your quotation.’
Mr. Lyndsay repeated,—‘can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’
Colonel Delmour seemed on the point of giving way to his passion; but he checked himself, and affected to laugh, while he said—‘A flattering compliment implied, no doubt, but if I am the Lucifer you insinuate, I can boast of possessing his best attributes also, for I too bear a mind unchanged by place or time, and in my creed, constancy still ranks as a virtue.’ He looked at Gertrude as he pronounced these words in an emphatic manner. (76)
Lyndsay, whose Christian morality is established by his admiration for Milton, does not unintentionally misquote him; the shift from Milton’s “The mind is its own place” (1:254), to Ferrier’s “palace” is a reference to Delmour’s previous allusion to Satan’s palace in hell, Pandemonium. Lyndsay hopes to warn Gertrude about his true character by comparing Delmour to the devil. Ferrier’s explicit reference to Milton allows her to borrow his cultural authority while clarifying the relationships among Lyndsay, Gertrude, and Delmour by comparing them to the relationships between Milton’s Adam, Eve, and Satan. This comparison between the devil and Colonel Delmour is exaggerated by Delmour’s own comments.
Delmour’s affronted anger reveals the aptness of Lyndsay’s hit, and when Delmour responds by claiming “I too bear a mind not to be changed by place or time,” he explicitly compares himself to Milton’s Satan, who said, “hail / Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell / Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings / A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time” (1:250-53). Like the devil, Delmour boasts consistency of character; he intends to turn Lyndsay’s comparison into a compliment to himself, but the similarity he admits reveals the hypocrisy he shares with the devil. Satan spoke those words to his fellow fallen angels, “Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair” (1:126). The devil’s boast of consistency hid his despair over being banished from heaven, and Delmour’s boast is similarly intended to disguise from Gertrude that his only consistency is in deceit. Delmour attempts to negate the didactic impact of Lyndsay’s revelation on Gertrude with a significant glance, as the end of the passage notes, trying to persuade her to accept him as an authentic lover.
But the instructive intent of Lyndsay’s satire of Delmour is not wholly mitigated by Delmour’s recuperation of his relationship with Gertrude. Lyndsay, as model of Christian behavior, is also Ferrier’s moral arbiter and tool for instructing her readers. While her narrator is often caustic, it is also morally conservative and openly didactic. The moral lessons conveyed by the narrator are reinforced by Lyndsay’s language and behavior. And while Delmour might successfully re-deceive Gertrude as to his intentions, never after this conversation can he successfully deceive readers, most of whom would have been as familiar with Milton as are Gertrude’s suitors, and who could be depended upon to follow the implied comparisons. The conversation between Delmour and Lyndsay at the Rossville celebration demonstrates the effectiveness of allusion as a technique for conveying satire both within a fiction and for the instruction of an audience.
Though she is not as skillful a stylist as Edgeworth or Austen, whom she read, her use of allusion to convey and conceal her satire is quite sophisticated. Stephen Parrish describes satiric powers at work in Wordsworth’s poetry as “a chorus of satiric voices.” In Ferrier’s novels, that satiric chorus is provided not only through the voices of the narrator and various characters, but through the language of canonical male writers accessed through allusion, and it is the interaction of voices in this chorus which allows Ferrier to subtly produce an ironic, and often satiric, commentary on her society.
Tracing allusions, however, is often difficult or tedious work—and as may produce nothing more useful than a writer’s literary credentials. How might scholars revitalize such a task? What tools could be used to identify allusions to texts no longer in circulation? How might we as instructors teach our students to appreciate the literary connections and interaction taking place through allusion, when so many of them lack the background to recognize similar allusions?

Veronica Goosey

Gentlemanly Furnishings and Textual Liberation

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In our previous post, Veronica Goosey asked what place cleverness or scholarly play had in academic writing. As my title indicates, I have decided that play should have a more prominent role in my scholarly endeavors.

This post picks up issues of scholarly practice and continues the blog’s larger discussion of media by examining Percy Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo.

The central philosophic debate and its interruption by the figure of the maniac in Shelley’s poem have been the topics of much scholarly commentary. Raymond D. Havens argues that the argument is indeed forgotten and “although the poem continues for a hundred lines after the madman has ceased to speak,” there is “no word concerning the subject of discussion” (649). Charles Robinson claims that the poem displays the poets’ contrasting views regarding the human condition but does not pick a winner. I want to suggest that a close examination of the physical spaces of the poem alters how we are to adjudicate the central debate. The fatalistic Count Maddalo believes that the madhouse functions as a symbol of humanity’s fate. In order to assist the maniac, Maddalo offers gifts that attempt to recreate his own gentlemanly estate. Maddalo provides the maniac with the trappings of a gentleman in the hopes that he will be able to participate in gentlemanly discourse. Julian, on the other hand, offers the maniac something quite different. The narrative account of the maniac captures the madman’s words, allows them to circulate to a wider audience, and provides a type of textual liberation. I hope to show that the maniac’s interruption in Julian and Maddalo should be read as cautionary tale for poets like Maddalo/Byron.

Maddalo’s description of the madhouse plays a crucial role in understanding the central debate regarding free will and freedom in general. Looking out on the madhouse and its tolling belfry, Maddalo says, “And such . . . is our mortality / And this must be the emblem and the sign / Of what should be eternal and divine” (l. 120-122). As Robinson accurately points out, these lines echo Byron’s famous 1816 poem Prometheus. In Byron’s work, Prometheus the demigod functions as an “emblem.” Byron’s speaker calls Prometheus “a symbol and a sign / To Mortals of their fate and force; / Like thee, Man is in part divine, / A troubled stream from a pure source” (l. 45-48). Here, the concept of a divine and predetermined “fate” is at odds with the “force” that mortals possess. In Byron’s poem, Jupiter punishes Prometheus for taking knowledge to Earth and for refusing to tell him the secret of his downfall. The demigod emerges as a powerful representative of fallen mankind because he clings to his mortal “force,” his will. Byron’s speaker closes by claiming that the will can endure torture and never can be killed. Ultimately, the will becomes “Its own concenter’d recompense, / Triumphant where it dares defy, / And making Death a Victory” (l. 57-59). Despite being chained to a rock and tortured, Prometheus’s unwillingness to concede to the demands of Jupiter makes even “Death a Victory.” In Shelley’s poem, Maddalo projects the description of Prometheus onto the madhouse. It is important to recognize that his description comes before the reader has been introduced to the figure of the maniac. Therefore, there is not yet a representative for the madhouse. Instead, the characteristics of Prometheus are part of a particular space. Like the chains that bind Prometheus to the rock, the madhouse and its walls, for Maddalo, represent the “fate” of those who exert their mortal “force.”

The projection of Promethean features onto the madhouse alters the manner in which we should read Maddalo’s gifts to the maniac. Maddalo believes that a change in environment has the potential to improve the maniac. According to Kelvin Everest, “Maddalo attempts to alleviate the maniac’s suffering by creating the illusion of a gentlemanly normality” (682). By providing the maniac with the accoutrements of a gentleman, Maddalo hopes to foster the maniac’s inner gentility: “I fitted up for him / Those rooms beside the sea, to please his whim, / And sent him busts and books and urns for flowers” (252-254). The “busts,” “books,” and “urns for flowers,” can help the maniac enter into the type of gentlemanly discourse that Maddalo and Julian represent. In actuality, however, the gifts seem to allow the maniac to play the part of a Byronic hero. Julian and Maddalo first encounter the maniac “sitting mournfully / Near a piano” in his room that overlooks the sea (l. 273-274). Further more, when the maniac starts to speak to himself, Julian claims that “his words came each / Unmodulated, cold, expressionless; / But that from one jarred accent you might guess / It was despair that made them so uniform” (l. 291-294). As the wind howls and a “gusty storm / Hissed through the window,” the maniac’s words acquire a type of uniformity thanks to his “despair” (l. 295-296). Despite the kindness of Maddalo’s gifts, nothing that he offers removes the maniac from the “emblem and the sign” of man’s degraded condition. Rather, Maddalo’s gifts help the maniac better play the part of the brooding and isolated Byronic hero.

If Maddalo gives the maniac the furnishings of a gentleman, what then does Julian offer the slighted lover? Julian’s gift to the maniac is a bit more difficult to locate. I want to suggest that Julian offers the poem itself, thus enabling the maniac’s words to circulate and reach new audiences. In other words, while Maddalo offers material objects to alter a problematic space, Julian’s narrative offers a type of figurative liberation. According to Everest, “The maniac has two audiences in the poem; the absent ex-lover that his speech is addressed to, and the unseen Julian and Maddalo who overhear him” (681). Julian and Maddalo the poem, on the other hand, has the potential to reach a much wider audience. Publication of the poem also undoes some of the maniac’s melancholic proclamations. The maniac can no longer speak his soliloquies or “hide” beneath “words like embers” (l. 503-504). Instead, his story circulates beyond the confines of the emblematic madhouse and functions as a type of cautionary tale. But who, then, is the target audience for Shelley’s words of warning? Interestingly, the largest clue comes from Maddalo. It is Maddalo who provides the concluding summation of the encounter with the maniac. After returning home, Maddalo says, “Most wretched men / Are cradled into poetry by wrong, / They learn in suffering what they teach in song” (l. 544-546). Maddalo seems to be describing a poet who, at least in part, resembles Byron. A poet who would compose a work that, like Prometheus, treats fate and the human will as competing forces and imagines confinement as fallen mankind’s inevitable lot. The maniac exhibits traits and inhabits a space that better reflect Maddalo’s situation than that of Julian.

Julian’s pledge to discover himself by studying Maddalo seems to collapse the two figures together and challenge the suggestion that the maniac’s story is a warning to poets like Maddalo/Byron. Everest argues that Julian chooses to “aspire” to “the life of Maddalo” rather than the life of the maniac (683). However, Julian’s final decision is not a simple binary with the maniac and Maddalo providing two different ways of proceeding. Before he makes his pledge to find himself in his friend, Julian imagines himself staying in Venice because “books are there, / Pictures, and casts from all those statues fair” (l. 554-555). It is important to recognize that this list of items is similar to the gentlemanly gifts that Maddalo gives to the maniac. Julian goes on to picture himself sitting alongside Maddalo in his “great palace” (l. 559). Julian does not simply want to emulate Maddalo but rather learn his ways in order to “reclaim him from his dark estate” (my emphasis, l. 574). In other words, Julian wants to remove Maddalo from the type of environment that he currently occupies. He believes that his presence and conversation have the potential bring about some change and “reclaim” Maddalo from his “dark estate.”

Maddalo offers gentlemanly gifts that simply recapitulate his own situation. While the markers of gentlemanly status help spruce up the maniac’s environment, they do not remove him from the confines of the madhouse. Julian, in contrast, creates a poem that allows the maniac’s words to escape the walls of the asylum. The poem transforms the maniac’s soliloquies into poetry and allows his words to circulate to a much wider audience. The absent ex-lover and the hidden Julian and Maddalo are not the only ones who are able to hear his woeful words. Julian sees the maniac’s story not as a warning against his own theories, but an exaggerated endpoint of Maddalo’s fatalism. Ultimately, Julian seeks to liberate both the maniac and Maddalo from the confines of their respective situations.

Works Cited

Everest, Kelvin. “Shelley’s Doubles: An Approach to Julian and Maddalo.” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman & Neil Fraistat. New York: Norton, 2002. p. 675-683.

Havens, Raymond D. “Julian and Maddalo.” Studies in Philology 27.4 (Oct. 1930), 648-653.

Lord Byron. Lord Byron: The Major Works. Ed. Jerome McGann. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

Robinson, Charles. Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1976.

Shelley, Percy. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman & Neil Fraistat. New York: Norton, 2002.

R. A. Sessler

Coleridge, Plotinus, and the Materials of Poetry

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This post examines the scholarly implications of the unique circulation history of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Specifically, this post asks what is lost when we privilege the material history of poetry? What role should the recitation history of a work like Kubla Khan play in our readings of the poem? What does the act of recitation represent to Coleridge himself?

In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge relies upon Plotinus to describe the labor of the philosopher. Addressing the concept of philosophical creation, Coleridge quotes from Plotinus’s Third Ennead, “My contemplation creates what is contemplated, as the geometricians draw figures as they contemplate. But it is not in drawing figures but in contemplating that the lines of the forms are settled” (144). Coleridge agrees with Plotinus’s claim that “contemplation” gives rise to “the lines of the forms.” The lines exist in the mind of the geometrician before they are put onto paper. The paper, for Plotinus as well as for Coleridge, becomes simply the means through which the contemplation of the geometrician can have material existence. The excerpt that Coleridge chooses speaks to Plotinus’s concept of the hypostases, or stages of emanation. In The Enneads, Plotinus describes a central, unified divinity called the One that emanates outward to become part of all things in existence. However, some things are closer to and more intimately connected with the One. The human soul, for example, is much closer to the One than material objects. In fact, according to Plotinus, material things are at the greatest possible distance from the One. Yet, all art must exist in something. The sculptor, painter, and poet all must rely upon material in order to express what they contemplate. Plotinus’s Fifth Ennead provides a context for better understanding what the transformation of an immaterial speech act to a printed text means for Coleridge.

At the start of The Fifth Ennead, Plotinus describes the current condition of humanity.The philosopher asks, “What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, andthough members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It?’ (Mackenna 1). Despite the fact that human souls are “members of the Divine,” humanity has forgotten its own divinity as well as the source of that divinity, God. Plotinus argues that exertion of “self – will” leads human souls away from “the Divine” (Mackenna 1). It is this distance from the source of all divinity that hinders the development of individual souls: “ A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature” (Mackenna 1). Souls fail to develop properly because they do not recognize their own worth. Rather than admiring their own inherent divinity, souls “misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves” (Mackenna 1). Plotinus believes that the soul must study itself in order to once more recognize its connection to the One. Plotinus posits that the One is “all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not all things; all things are its possession – running back, so to speak, to it – or, more correctly, not yet so, they will be” (Mackenna 16). The One is the source and owner of all things. It does not belong to or have the characteristics of anything in the world but everything in the world exhibits, to a greater or lesser degree, some aspects of the One. According to Plotinus, the soul who wishes to regain the honor of her rank will begin “running back” to its divine source, back to the One.

The philosopher goes on to argue that there are three initial hypostases or stages that proceed outward from the One. The first, and therefore the closest to the One, is the “Divine Intellect” (Mackenna 16). Plotinus locates the “Divine Intellect” not in the sensory of material world, but in “what Plato calls the Interior Man,” or the soul (Mackenna 14). For Plotinus, the intellectual part of the soul remains pure: “The reasoning phase of the soul, needing no bodily organ for its thinking but maintaining, in purity, its distinctive Act that its thought may be uncontaminated – this we cannot err in placing, separate and not mingled into body, within the first Intellectual” (Mackenna 14). In this passage, there is a clear division between the sensory world and the pure realm of “the first Intellectual.” “The reasoning phase of the soul” needs “no bodily organ for its thinking” because the One has already bestowed upon it, in the words of M.H. Abrams, the “totality of the fixed Platonic forms” (Abrams 147). The forms are, for Plotinus, the “permanent Right” that guides that “reasoning in our soul” (Mackenna 14). The Soul, the second hypostasis, springs from the Divine Intellect: “The Soul arises as the idea and act of the motionless Intellectual – Principle” (Mackenna 16). The Soul “takes fullness by looking at its source,” namely the Intellectual – Principle or Divine Intellect. Abrams rightly points out that, “These hypostases descend along a scale of ever increasing “remoteness” from the One” (147). That is, the divine intellect directly springs from the One and the Soul in turn springs from the Divine Intellect.

The material universe is the third and most remote stage. While there are many issues that Plotinus’s discussion of material raises, I want to focus on the relationship between art and the material that it occupies. Plotinus sets out to understand the ways that the objects produced by intellectual labor can guide individuals back to the One. At the start of On the Intellectual Beauty, the Eighth Tractate of The Fifth Ennead, the philosopher imagines an individual moving through the three hypostases to return to the One: “It concerns us, then, to try to see and say, for ourselves and as far as such matters may be told, how the Beauty of the divine Intellect and of the Intellectual Cosmos may be revealed to contemplation” (174). Through the “contemplation of art,” progress through the hypostases is possible. Plotinus seeks to separate the idea behind a piece of art from the materials that it manifests itself in. According to the philosopher, a sculpture is not beautiful because of the stone that it is made out of but “in virtue of the Form or Idea introduced by” it (174). Although the artist must use materials, the “Idea or Form” that these materials express makes the art objects potentially beneficial. Yet, it is important to recognize that the idea that leads to the creation of art belongs to a higher hypostasis: “Then again every prime cause must be, within itself, more powerful than its effects can be: the musical does not derive from an unmusical source but from music; and so the art exhibited in the material work derives from an art yet higher” (175). A musical derives from music and a poem derives from poetry. The ideal form or idea of each type of art belongs to and resides with the One.

Plotinus’s desire to draw a distinction between objects of art and the ideas behind them becomes more evident as On the Intellectual Beauty progresses. The immaterial idea of a work of art is more beautiful than any embodiment of it: “Now we can surely not believe that, while the made thing and the Idea thus impressed upon Matter are beautiful, yet the Idea not so alloyed but resting still with the creator – the Idea primal, immaterial, firmly a unity – is not Beauty” (176). In this passage, Plotinus emphasizes the action of an artist. While the “Idea” itself rests “still with the creator,” artists must labor to make their materials manifest their Idea. The “primal” and “immaterial” Idea is not beautiful; it is serene and resting “Beauty.” Ultimately, Plotinus concludes that “One way, only, remains: all things must exist in something else” (180). He then attempts to make all matter the result of an Idea. The material world emerges as “an Idea – the lowest – all this universe is Idea and there is nothing that is not Idea” (180). Although the material world is “the lowest” expression of a form or idea, it still has potential. For Plotinus, material that is sculpted, painted, or written on has the capacity to help wayward souls rediscover their value and connection to the One.

Plotinus’s hypostases and thoughts regarding artistic material provide us with a context for interpreting the recitation history of Kubla Khan. Commenting on the attraction to the reciter, Coleridge writes in his Biographia, “For this is really a species of animal magnetism, in which the enkindling reciter, by perpetual comment of looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive faculty to his editors. They live for a time within the dilated sphere of his intellectual being” (283). According to the OED, enkindle means “to cause a flame, to blaze up.” The phrase “enkindling reciter,” then, invites two principal readings. First, the reciter becomes the source, the catalyst that is able to ignite feelings of sympathy in his/her audience. Second, and more important, the reciter is a consuming force. Through recitation, the material object of the poem is consumed and becomes an immaterial speech act. The “enkindling reciter” also utilizes his “looks and tones” in order to perpetually “comment” on the words he/she is speaking and further engage his/her audience. The shift from material object to spoken, “enkindling” performance enables the reciter to lend “his own will and apprehensive faculty to his editors.” The auditory editor is able to become part of the expanded “sphere” of the poet/reciter’s “intellectual being.” Instead of the artist conveying meaning to a passive audience, Coleridge’s framework suggests that artist and auditory editors, at least temporarily, inhabit the same intellectual space. In the context of Plotinus, this shared space means the reciter and the listener contemplate the idea behind the poem together.

The live recitation and publication of Kubla Khan, therefore, result in very different experiences for the audience as well as for Coleridge himself. The “enkindling reciter” consumes the manuscript materials of poetry and turns them into an immaterial speech act. From 1798 to 1816, Coleridge himself functioned as the vehicle through which the poem circulated. The physical presence of the reciter in the room allows for lively discourse and, according to Coleridge, the sharing of intellectual space. In the context of Plotinus, Coleridge and his audience are able to discuss and contemplate the idea or form behind the poem together. The transformation from immaterial recitation to published text exposes the problems inherent in artistic materials. The “lantern of typography” reduces the poem to mere letters on a page. While the recitation of the poem brings “heaven and Elysian bowers” to Lamb, contemporary readers confront what they believe to be “nonsense.” Also, when he recites his work, Coleridge occupies a higher hypostasis. The poet does not rely upon the materials of art and is able to use his “looks and tones” to help guide his audiences to the idea behind his poetry. In other words, there is one less layer of mediation to overcome on the journey back to the divine One. By not relying on the materials of poetic creation, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan can remain “a miracle of rare device.”

Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Ed. George Watson. New York: Dutton, 1962.

______. Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose. Eds Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano. New York: Norton, 2004.

Plotinus. The Divine Mind, Being the Treatises of the Fifth Ennead. Trans. Stephen  Mackenna. Boston: The Medici Society, 1926.

_______. “The Fifth Ennead: Eighth Tractate On the Intellectual Beauty.” The Norton Anthology  of Theory and Criticism. Eds. William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara Johnson, John McGowan, and Jeffrey Williams. New York: Norton, 2001. 171-185.

R. A. Sessler