Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Diego Saglia
University of Parma, Italy

Although published six years apart, these two volumes belong in the same multifaceted critical mosaic. Both studies address the distinctive concerns which have been central to Susan Wolfson’s critical practice since the 1980s—her preoccupation with gender, her focus on literary form, and her indefatigable search for an increasingly detailed, as well as historically attuned, approach to the stylistic materiality of literary works. As with her previous works, these books require us to read intensively into texts, and we cannot escape this demand as we gradually explore their largely shared literary terrain: Hemans and Byron, mostly, but also Wollstonecraft, the Wordsworths and Keats. Wollstonecraft, in particular, plays a major role in Wolfson’s presentation of her argument in the earlier Borderlines, and its discussion of the continuities and discontinuities within Romantic-period gender debates between the 1790s and the 1830s.

Both books perform a series of distinctive critical gestures to which the author has accustomed us over the years. They stand on solid, clearly laid out theoretical and methodological foundations, which Wolfson constantly tests, revises and updates. One of the mainstays in these volumes is, of course, the neo-formalist agenda that Wolfson has been promoting through such contributions as Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (1997) and “Reading for Form” (MLQ, 2007). Both books present repeated instances of what may be defined as an invigorating form of wrestling with different intersecting textual layers. In addition, these books convey a general impatience with established, conventional “Eng Lit” stylistic registers and lexicon. This translates into a penchant for neologisms which never allows us to sit back into the lull of ready-made phrases. In fact, some of these neologisms may not be to everyone’s liking, but they undoubtedly contribute to Wolfson’s corrective critical approach.

These volumes also share common structural features. Borderlines is divided into an introductory chapter; a section on women (Felicia Hemans; the “Masculine Woman”; Maria Jane Jewsbury); one on men (Byron and Keats); and a final coda on sex in souls. Romantic Interactions presents an introductory chapter; a section on women and poetry (Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith); one on the “two Wordsworths,” that is, on William’s and Dorothy’s “interactions”; and a third on Byron and those interactions in which he took part directly (in his own life and works), and those through which he influenced the lives and works of other (especially female) authors.

Wolfson locates both volumes within the narrative of her own development and growth as a critic. And more explicitly so in the preface to Borderlines, where she places herself and her book within the critical trajectory that gradually led to the renovation of Romantic-period scholarship in the US and Britain from the early 1980s on. This volume, in particular, makes plain Wolfson’s intention to take stock of this itinerary and reflect on its origins, current status, and further evolutions. Taking up the cumbersome inheritance of Romantic-period gender criticism in order to set it on a new course, Borderlines paints a panorama of interrelations between “he-texts” and “she-texts”. It delineates a map of shifting gender categories in order to cast new light on their textual manifestations and cultural significance. Wolfson’s aim is to capture the formally specific coordinates of these categories—their being-in-the-text—that enable us to perceive their presence and agency in their times, yet also to verify their continuing activity in our own. In this respect, Wollstonecraft stands at the beginning of a tradition of debate that her works continued to enrich well after the waning of 1790s radicalism. And Wolfson’s reconstruction and discussion of later reprises of Wollstonecraft is undoubtedly one of the most striking and valuable offerings in this book. Readers will be particularly delighted to find a chapter on the brilliant and combative Maria Jane Jewsbury, one of the most fascinating of Wollstonecraft’s disciples, as well as one of the most unjustly sidelined writers and intellectuals in the later Romantic period.
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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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Reviewed by
Susan J. Wolfson
Princeton University

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” That may be, as Keats’s ironizing odist insists, all we know on earth, and all we need to know, but the tautology is as enigmatic as it is alluring. And so the dust jacket of Stanley Plumly’s extraordinary biography reads, in small print at the top, a personal biography, then, more largely declared, Posthumous Keats. But the title page within inverts the order: Posthumous Keats, a personal biography. Which came first, the personalizing of a biography that, by generic agreement, is supposed to be about the other person, the biographized? Or Posthumous Keats, an epithet that feels like a personal biography, even though the poet-biographer outlives poet-Keats, who dies not even a third of the way into his twenty-sixth year, by decades–more than twice and half Keats’s mortal span?

What is “personal” about this? Is it the persona of “Keats”—the mask for thinking as Keats in camelion sympathy? Is it “personal” in the sense of relating to or being affected as a Plumly-private individual, in the persona of a public biographer? Is it a reciprocal relationship, a personal interviewing? Is it an intense engagement in one’s person, belonging to oneself, and self-directed? A personal biography plays in all these registers, with a Keatsian flexibility of imagination. To reverse Michael Corleone, writing Posthumous Keats was not business, it was personal, so Plumly-personal that the impulse seems simultaneous with wanting to think hard about what it was to be Keats, who in his mortal body of less than 10,000 days on earth had a lifetime of mortal experience: the death of both parents, a beloved brother, the loss of another brother to America; the heartbreak of a romance that was everything and nothing, all absorbing and fated to go nowhere; the heartbreak of an adored friend whose limitations couldn’t help but betray Keats in his last half year of life, abandoning him to a foreign clime and a bewildered acquaintance.

Just a month into his twenty-sixth year, on 30 November 1820, with less than three months left of life, Keats writes to this fugitive friend, Charles Brown:

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been–but it appears to me– however, I will not speak of that subject.¹

This letter, the muse of Plumly’s project, is a formation in striking syntax, its “having past” tensing the expected “passed” into a pained epitaphic sigh (what Plumly terms a “posthumous tense” [294]), in relay with the persistent, even insistent, present tense “I am leading” and that “I have an habitual feeling”–as if always on the pulse, and all sensations summed in that present absence, absent presence of the stunning oxymoron, “posthumous existence.” It’s a diminishing existence instead of a life, at once agonized by a prospect, now only hypothetical, of “how it would have been,” and pained into a tenacious sensation of presence–“it appears to me”–a relay into this life turned a ghost of itself, then an insistent speaking of what the will says it won’t do: “I will not speak of that subject.” Like patience, to prevent that murmur, “posthumous Keats” is oxymoron turned into expressive syntax–Keats’s own poetic forte of unheard melodies and cold pastoral. Keats writes in both a refusal to pain himself and Brown, and a refusal to decline to speak the refusal. Pain is never done. And so he ends his letter, wrenchingly:

Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister–who walks about my imagination like a ghost–she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.
God bless you!
JOHN KEATS

George, Tom, sister (Fanny), Brown: all were, in effect, ghosts by this point of existence, and so the posthumous past tense in the antonym of eulogy: “I always made an awkward bow”–what Christopher Ricks has termed the least awkward bow ever made. Even the tense is curious. Rollins gives it as this past-reflective (Keats Circle 2: 86), and so does Milnes (2: 84), but one reader of the manuscript thinks the verb is still present, and not posthumous: “I always make an awkward bow” (KC 2: 86n). The ambiguity is the perfect oxymoron, hovering, as Coleridge would say, between possibilities, between, even, plausibilities. Keats performs to an audience that is only imagination, in a formality that feels like a gracious haunting, a leave-taking of something already left, and slightly, poignantly self-parodic, another Keatsian performative forté.
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