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T H I N K I N G T H RO U G H P O E T RY
Thinking through Poetry
Field Reports on Romantic Lyric

MARJORIE LEVINSON

1
 1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Marjorie Levinson 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962498
ISBN 978–0–19–881031–5
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
This book is for my children. First and last and midst and without end.
Olivia Anne Harris
Cecily Gwyn Harris
Daniel Levinson Harris
 Acknowledgments

Earlier forms of the following chapters have previously appeared in print or online.
Chapter 2: Rethinking Historicism, ed. Marjorie Levinson (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989), 1–63 by permission of Wiley; Chapter 3: ‘Romantic Poetry: The State
of the Art’, MLQ, Vol. 54:2, pp. 183–214. Copyright 1993, University of
Washington. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Duke
University Press; Chapter 4: Cultural Critique 31 (1995), 111–27 by permission of
the University of Minnesota Press; Chapter 6: ELH 73:2 (2006), 549–80.
Copyright © 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permis-
sion by Johns Hopkins University Press; Chapter 7: What’s Left of Theory, ed. Judith
Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas, English Institute Essays (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 192–239; Chapter 9: Studies in Romanticism 46 (2000), 367–
408; Chapter 10: Studies in Romanticism 49 (2010), 633–57 by permission of the
Trustees of Boston University; Chapter 11: Romantic Circles, Praxis Series (2013);
Appendix: PMLA 122 (2007) 557–69.
Permission was granted to quote excerpts from the following texts: Remnants of
Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan
by Ulrich Baer. Copyright © 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford
Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Stanford
University Press, sup.org; ‘The Poems of Our Climate’ in Collected Poems by
Wallace Stevens (2006), Faber and Faber Ltd.; Romantic Weather: The Climates of
Coleridge and Baudelaire by Arden Reed (1983), for Brown University Press by
University Press of New England; Foucault by Gilles Deleuze (2006), Continuum
Publishing, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

The largest share of my personal thanks goes to Richard Harris for all the reasons
he knows and some that I hope this note may convey.
The colleagues and dear friends who have been with me and for me throughout
are Geoff Eley, Andrea Henderson, Alice Levine, Jerome McGann, Anita Norich,
David Simpson, and, coming on later but no less dear, Sonia Hofkosh.
I offer thanks beyond measure to the many graduate students who kindled to
my ideas, as I to theirs, from 1978 to 2018. A few who count for many are Rachel
Feder, Rebecca Porte, and Adam Sneed. If thanks can be wishes, let mine be for the
survival of a discipline as intellectually serious and therefore as inspiring and life-
sustaining as this one has been for me. And in that discipline of the mind in the
world, let the scholars of this generation find their proper, honored place.
To Walter Cohen, who pushed me to finish this book and whose confidence in
me made that happen, the thing speaks for itself.
 Contents
List of Illustrations xi

1. Introduction: Crooked Lines and Moving Targets 1

PA RT I . T H E O RY: M AT E R I A L I S M A G A I N S T I T S E L F
2. The New Historicism: Back to the Future 33
3. Romantic Poetry: The State of the Art 67
4. Pre- and Post-Dialectical Materialism: Modeling Praxis without
Subjects and Objects 93
5. A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza 105
6. What is New Formalism? 140

PA RT I I . C R I T I C I S M : F I E L D T H E O R I E S O F F O R M
7. Of Being Numerous 169
8. Notes and Queries on Names and Numbers 193
9. Parsing the Frost: The Growth of a Poet’s Sentence in
“Frost at Midnight” 208
10. Still Life without References: or, The Plain Sense of Things 235
11. Conclusion: Lyric—The Idea of this Invention 254

Bibliography 297
Index 319
 List of Illustrations

1. Frost (Ieva Geneviciene/Shutterstock.com; Gheorghe Popa/

Shutterstock.com). 214
2. Speech balloon script from International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). 219
3. Diagram of the opening sentence of Paradise Lost. 230
4. Lines 24–43 of “Frost at Midnight.” 231
5. Sentence diagram from Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog by
Kitty Burns Florey, pp. 4–5. By permission of Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt. 232
6. Dendrite stones (Matteo Chinellato/Shutterstock.com;
Zbynek Burival/Shutterstock.com). 233
7. 18th-c fire grate, journal page, musical staff,
window frost, Aeolian Harp. 234
 1
Introduction
Crooked Lines and Moving Targets1

1
Thinking through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric is intended for two
audiences. First, it addresses readers familiar with the field of Romantic study
and interested in its development. Nearly every chapter—but especially those in
Part 1—considers the field’s changing ideas and methods and ponders the relation
between the two at various moments from the late 1980s through the present. In
addition to assessing these critical movements, each chapter invites viewing as a
kind of physical deposit left by a definable era of that thirty-year fieldwork. Like a
geological core sample of that field—a deep-drilled cylindrical section of a his-
torically layered domain—the book as a whole indexes an intellectual evolution
rather than narrating it. Perhaps at a slight cost of overall stylistic consistency,
I have retained the original voice and critical gestures of each chapter as markers of
its place within a thirty-year history of a disciplinary sector. Second, however, inso-
far as Romanticism has often served as the profession’s laboratory for research and
development of new topics, methods, and critical aims, Thinking through Poetry
can claim a degree of synecdochal status with respect to broader disciplinary work
in literary study. My own shift from a historical to an ontological materialism,
from epistemic to metaphysical interests, from a notion of literary production
reflecting and resisting regimes of commodity production to a more complex and
dynamic systems theory framework (wherein text and context, entity and environ-
ment, and therefore form and history are seen ceaselessly to engender and redefine
one another) dovetails with movements of thought in the field of Romantic studies,
which anticipates ideas and methods now current in the discipline at large. Similarly,
the themes that this book explores—for example, nature, agency, thought, singu-
larity, form—can lay claim to an independent general interest. Although these topics
arose from and, in each case, remain anchored to my readings of particular poems

1 “If there are obstacles, the shortest line between two points may be a crooked one.” Bertolt Brecht,
Life of Galileo (New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1980), 106. Brecht’s phrase is, for me, a
double allusion—the more proximal reference being the title of my beloved colleague’s work: Geoff
Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2005). It was Geoff ’s intellectual presence within Michigan’s interdisciplinary work-
shop—Comparative Study of Social Transformations (CSST), 1987–2001—that shifted my lifeworld
from Philadelphia to Ann Arbor. It is Geoff’s friendship that, more than anything else, has enriched
my life here for nearly thirty years.
2 Thinking through Poetry

(in all cases but one, British Romantic poems), my treatment of them speaks to a
general readership, or solicits this way of reading by specialists in other periods and
perhaps other languages as well.
Thinking through Poetry accordingly has two independent sources of coherence.
One is the narrative arc, spanning, as I have noted, some thirty years of study in
the field of British Romanticism. That narrative traces the migration of theory from
philosophy, politics, and linguistics to the sciences. My subtitle—Field Reports on
Romantic Lyric—with its resonance to both natural history and to physics, seeks
to capture the book’s conceptual center of gravity, its other source of coherence.
Indeed, one way to specify the migration I reference is from one kind of field to
another: from a field that is organized on a vertical model of relational dynamics
wherein the depth term exercises structural and genetic priority, to a model based
on part–whole and entity–environment relations, with field conceived as a surface
favoring recursive and self-organizing dynamics.
This conceptual structure (exemplified primarily in Part 2: Criticism: Field
Theories of Form) follows from the book’s core problematic. I use that term in its
classic sense, derived from French structuralist thought,2 where it means a matrix of
(a) topics, (b) axioms, and (c) either interests or aims that generates a distinctively
organized and interrelated field of problems or questions. All of these (topic, axiom,
aim) may be understood by reference to the migration of theory just summarized.
The key topic within the problematic of Thinking through Poetry is materialism,
conceived as both a philosophical term and as a widely shared desideratum for the
dominant strains of literary and cultural criticism of the past thirty years. Closely
related to the topic of materialism is that of nature (or rather, natures), in the sense
of constructs of materiality and otherness enabling (and more recently, and in real
time, so to speak, disabling) projects of human self-fashioning.
The key axiom is that the material (and/or nature)—its provenance, locus, con-
tent, and effects—is neither an essence nor a social construction (as in, either a
hegemonic or consensual projection) but a historically conjunctural phenomenon
in the sense of an objective convergence of historical forces. That being the case,
every act of materialist critique must first labor to determine what matters (which
is to say, how matter materializes) within a given conjuncture. As prolegomenon
to the work of reading, one asks what sphere, scale, and organization of life and
thought does the category-work of materiality at that moment and for that exer-
cise. What makes this a conjunctural rather than a presentist exercise is a concept
of the punctual intertwining of particular presents with particular pasts (a historical
logic tracing to Benjamin, taken up as a topic in Chapter 2). Although a quasi-
mystical aura sometimes attaches to that notion in Benjamin, in this book the sudden
conjuncture is seen as a function of uneven historical development, unexpected
convergences, and time-release effects.
The key interest making up this three-fold problematic is poetry: more narrowly,
lyric poetry and more narrowly yet, the kind of lyric that crystallized as the norma-
tive instance of that form in the Romantic period and that continues to dominate

2 Especially from the writings of Louis Althusser. See n. 12 below.

 Introduction 3

the cultural field. That lyric kind might be summarized as a drama of interiority
(of feeling thinking and of thinking feeling) figured as both combat and collusion
between, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “the mind of man and Nature,” with both of
those master-categories made present, exclusively so, in the verbal and rhetorical
fabric of the text.3 Here as throughout the book, I treat Wordsworth’s poetry as a
paradigm instance of this lyric kind, in hopes of contributing to knowledge that
may in addition prove useful in the study of other poetic or literary kinds. In biol-
ogy, such instances are called “model systems,” defined as “an object or process
selected for intensive research as an exemplar of a widely observed feature of life or
disease.”4 What the model-system method forfeits in sampling breadth it seeks to
balance out in depth of focus and in historical depth, in the sense of data accumu-
lation about one well-defined subject over a long period of time. Wordsworth satis-
fies both criteria; no modern poet has been the subject of critical study—particularly
of a formalist, rhetorical, and, as it were, grammatological kind—for as long and
as intensively as Wordsworth, and no other single-author set of lyrics concentrates
within itself as many of the defining features of the genre (of that lyric “kind”
described above) as Wordsworth’s.
A number of questions arise from the problematic just stated and circulate
throughout in the following chapters. They treat of: (1) dialectics (especially nega-
tive dialectics)5 as a model of individuation and as a method of inquiry; (2) pre-
modern pictures of mind and matter (in Spinoza’s terms, thought and extension)6,
and of the many and the one; (3) constructions of entity and environment, mind and
body, part and whole, and cause and effect developed in the physical, biological, and
computational sciences of the twentieth and twenty-first century; (4) the aesthetic
as a category of both resistance and absorption; (5) constructs of the human and of
the subject that are not defined by labor, desire, reflective self-awareness, or sociality
(in the sense of either the polis or its cultural and demographic subdivisions,
e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality); (6) the uses and status of models and metaphors
for exploratory purposes (over and above their explanatory function); (7) the
relevance of analytic scale (and of relations between different scales) to interpretive
validity; and (8) the concept and conduct of immanent critique.
The results of those inquiries coalesce as an argument—an argument for the kind
of thinking enabled by lyric poetry. This argument represents a strong, sharp alter-
native to what might, on the face of it, seem like a kindred study: namely, Simon
Jarvis’s 2007 monograph, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. For Jarvis, poetry’s special
resources for thinking lie exclusively in its acoustic and sensuous properties, its “song”
as he puts it.7 He argues that this body language, unique to poetry, properly repels

3 Wordsworth, The Five-Book Prelude, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), “Appendix 1:
The Analogy Passage,” l. 28.
4 Mary Poovey, “The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001),
408–38 (quote on p. 408).
5 In the sense developed by Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:
Continuum, 1973).
6 For Spinoza, see Chapter 5.
7 Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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