Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Tobias Menely
Willamette University

Since when has public debate—about the state’s responsibility for the indigent, about foreign wars and homeland security, about the regulation of international commerce—been so thoroughly informed by issues of financial speculation and public debt? Since the eighteenth century, argues Robert Mitchell, when the parasitic greed of speculators and the dangerous expansion of national debt were the subject of plays and poems, pamphlets and speeches. Mitchell describes his ambitious, fascinating, and timely book Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era as an example of a “new economic literary criticism” (206). Literary critics, he maintains, have as much to teach us as economists do about finance capitalism, a phenomenon (as we have recently learned) that reflects the exigencies of social psychology and imaginative speculation no less than the materialities of production and consumption. Mitchell links the development of a theoretical language of sympathetic identification with the crises in state finance that periodically rocked Britain in the century and a half after the establishment of the Bank of England. Elaborating on Thomas Haskell’s seminal work, “Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility,” Mitchell shows that financial speculation, social sympathy, and humanitarian reform politics share a cognitive style defined by its “open sense of the future” (vii).

Ever since Benedict Anderson identified the eighteenth-century rise of the nation with “homogeneous empty time,” the steady forward movement and social simultaneity of newspaper reading, scholars have been drawing our attention to the period’s other forms of time consciousness. In Mitchell’s account, the eighteenth-century present was bound by promises made and debts accrued in the past just as it was oriented by speculations about what was to come. Finance capitalism relied on “investment instruments that located value in the future” (14), but there was also a parallel sense that communities mediated by imaginative sympathy are themselves lived in the future tense. This open relation to futurity was enabled by a novel conception of “society” as a contingent and variegated “system” of relationships. Britons perceived an increasingly intricate and extensive collective life, in which the economy, the government, and “collective psychology” were growing more inseparable as they grew more complex. Mitchell argues that social systems, and particularly a financial system in which shared opinions establish value, became acutely visible during economic crises. Financial calamity and constraint turned people’s attention to the mediating forms that undergird collective belief, as they sought means of reflecting on and intervening in economic systems (5). Moreover, the writers studied by Mitchell—David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, the antislavery poets of the 1780s, William Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley—drew on the speculative temporality and systemic contingency of finance capitalism in order to reconceive the social order.

Renaissance thinkers, Mitchell reminds us in Chapter One, would have been perplexed by the modern idea of imagination as a form of cognitive projection that produces virtual community by enabling a self to enter another’s situation. Before the eighteenth century, imagination was “a quasi-corporeal faculty that mediated between animal spirits and intellect,” only producing social factions of a dangerously enthusiastic or otherwise aberrant nature (29). It is, Mitchell argues, only with the financial crises of the early eighteenth century, and particularly the South Sea Company stock panic of 1720-1, that imagination came to explain “affective relationships between individuals” (29). This etymological shift is paralleled by a new interest in the relation between the circulation of images through mass media and the collective sentiments that determine stock prices and the availability of public credit. While political economists soon turned away from the problem of imagination, moral philosophers did not, because imaginative speculation offered a way of conceptualizing the formation and maintenance of social systems. In the second half of the chapter, Mitchell argues that David Hume identified the specific imaginative mechanisms of sympathy as a way of explaining how “social stability” is possible without “epistemological certainty” (48). For Hume, sympathy—the self’s capacity to speculate about another’s speculations about itself—produces the intersubjective domain, a kind of affective gift economy in which we come to know ourselves. Mitchell distinguishes Hume from conservatives like Bolingbroke, who attributed social cohesion to the sedimenting influence of past experience. Hume defines two temporalities of social formation, one linked to the closed futurity of “the promise,” which is dependent on the continuity of convention, and one linked to the open futurity of speculative acts that inaugurate “new forms of sociability” and new systems (55).
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Reviewed by
Jonathan Mulrooney
College of the Holy Cross

A concern with “maturity”—psychological, social, poetic—has informed critical discussions of Keats more than those of any other English poet. For much of the twentieth century, the concern was framed biographically: how is it that one so young could have developed so quickly? In 1988, Marjorie Levinson’s shattering Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style turned that question upon itself, claiming that profound cultural dispossession rather than transcendent formal mastery constituted the most radical element of Keats’s poetry. Measuring as it does the psychological (if not the psychoanalytic) valences of the poet’s verses, Levinson’s study continues to serve as a salutary counter to the historicisms that have illuminated Keats studies over the last three decades. As the social and material conditions within which the poems were produced and circulated have been recovered, we have recognized a serious political dimension to Keats’s aesthetic project. Yet Keats’s Life of Allegory reminds us that the formal standards by which we came to value Keats’s lyric form—and the lyric persona they enact—have not, even by virtue of Levinson’s inversion of them, been discarded. In short, Keats’s formal achievement endures in a way that historicism cannot entirely explain. We might reframe my opening question: how is it that an historically informed criticism might attend to matters such as stylistic and psychological “development” without embracing once again an exhausted Romantic ideology?

Scholars such as Robert Kauffman and Jacques Khalip have in different ways responded to this dilemma by exploring how Keats’s formal imaginings represent and enact a “negatively capable” poetics. For Khalip especially, Keats eschews the idea of development—subjective or historical—in favor of a lyric persona posited rhetorically around the rejection of self mastery. By contrast, Richard Marggraf Turley’s provocative and engaging study Keats’s Boyish Imagination extends Levinson’s critique in the other direction, taking development as its central interpretive concept. Rather than imagining a lyricism whose experiential engagements resist the concept of the progressive self, allowing no settled identity to cohere, Turley’s Keats performatively disrupts his maturation at particular points of incompletion. In the book’s five thematically focused chapters, Turley gives us a Keats who employs a “deliberate use of immaturity” (2) as a “potent weapon against conservative ideology” (7). Performed immaturity thus becomes the primary political strategy of Keatsian poetics, the constitutive action of what Keats called “the Poetical character.” Providing fresh and imaginative readings of poems ranging from the little considered Calidore to the canonical “To Autumn,” Turley’s meticulous attention to the poems’ language yields remarkable insight into how the Keatsian lyric responded to the vicissitudes of its historical moment.

At its best, the book argues convincingly for the indispensability of “boyishness” to understanding Keats’s representations of poetic authority. Turley’s cogent introduction makes the case concisely, taking the late Cap and Bells not as a descent from Keats’s mature greatness but rather as the culmination of an “unapologetic involvement in the forms and language of childhood” (7). That involvement registers throughout Keats’s career, as the poet’s anxiety about reception manifests itself through a procession of “unstable signs” which threaten normative representations of physical and social maturity (37). Often these signs are fetishized body parts denoting the qualities Keats most lacks: in Chapter One feet substitute for the absent phallus of manly authority, in Chapter Three the larynx produces the broken voice of adolescent boyhood, in Chapter Five clinically describable but socially unimaginable “c—nts” haunt the poet’s every mention of women. The book’s first chapter, “‘Strange longings’: Keats and feet” illustrates both the strength (suggestive interpretations based on keen close reading) and weakness (a narrowing of critical vision) of this thematic approach. As Turley states explicitly to open the chapter, he is primarily interested in feet “found on the end of legs, not the metrical variety” (11). The argument then develops along conventional Freudian lines: the “phallic anxiety and genital aversion” (20) marked by the poems’ “foot episodes” destabilizes conventional early nineteenth-century notions of sexuality, manliness, and authority—offering instead “a ‘boyish’ erotics that is voyeuristic, fetishistic, and deferred” (13). In Endymion and The Fall of Hyperion, a fascination with feminine feet—Diana’s and Moneta’s, respectively—sublimates the poet’s castration anxieties. Turley’s treatment of Diana’s first descent is exemplary: Keats offers us “her hovering feet, / More bluely vein’d, more soft, more whitely sweet / Than those of sea-born Venus” (Endymion 1.624-6), even as (in Turley’s words) “the Latmian shepherd boy quite literally looks up the skirt of a goddess” (15). Feet, then, stand in for that which Keats most desires and that which he cannot name or possess. In the later epic, Moneta’s status as a “phallic mother” (Turley 24) occasions a similar podiatric veneration: “‘Shade of Memory!’/ Cried I, with an act adorant at her feet” (The Fall of Hyperion 1.282-3). Revealing all too much of herself to the poet as she “casts aside her maternal veils” (Turley 24), Moneta forces the boyish poet to again “retreat into the fetish” (24). For Turley, though, this retreat is not simply a childish flight, but the representation of a “libidinal economy” in which boyishness takes on real poetic currency (20).

As throughout the book, Turley supports his claims about these scenes with detailed attention to the poems’ language. He seizes cannily, for example, on Keats’s use of the word “sweet” to describe Diana’s feet—vis-à-vis the invocation of Venus’s salty limbs (she having just emerged from the sea)—as an instance of the “preoccupation with orality” accompanying Keats’s sensuality (17). Here we see bodiliness, speech, and poetic craft come together in a vividly Keatsian way. Yet the relentless focus that energizes this kind of reading at times obscures evidence that might complicate the book’s exacting psychoanalytic agenda. Feminine feet and their association with the absent phallus invoke Keats’s authorial anxieties: fair enough. But how, then, can the chapter entirely overlook the poet’s own explicit connection of the metrical with the bodily foot:

Let us find out, if we must be constrain’d,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of Poesy -
Let us inspect the Lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gain’d
By ear industrious, and attention meet. (4-9)

There are other omissions, but this is the most glaring: in “If by dull rhymes our english must be chain’d,” Keats not only genders the “Muse” feminine, he represents his crafting of new poetic forms as sandals that will at once bind and free her feet. Surely this association, and the explicit call for aesthetic maturity it suggests, warrants at least a mention in Turley’s discussion?
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