That poetry and Enlightenment might be allies, that there might indeed be a ‘poetic Enlightenment’ discernible in eighteenth-century thought: this is one wager of this volume, and it is intriguingly and surprisingly taken up by the three essays which follow.

Let me anticipate a question posed by Catherine Packham: ‘Where is poetry in the Scottish Enlightenment?’ Here are some possible answers: ballad collections; conjectural histories; antiquarian dissertations; the progress poem. The careers of Hugh Blair, James Beattie and Walter Scott. Late eighteenth-century British literati, antiquarians and poets allow us to pose Packham's question for a more general, not just a Scottish, Enlightenment. As Packham, Swift and Carboni suggest, poets themselves were vectors of Enlightenment discourse – at times anticipating certain nodes (see Carboni's Thomson forecasting Adam Smith's discourse on Man, sympathy and Nature), while also metabolizing crucial Enlightenment, or proto-Enlightenment, thought (for example, Shaftesbury's). The entanglement of poetry and Enlightenment is everywhere to be found in eighteenth-century British culture, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. Consider the progressively enlightened protagonist Edwin in James Beattie's The Minstrel, tutored first by a balladeering Beldame and then into a sober maturity by a hermit historian. Consider the extraordinary proliferation of discourse around the Ossian poems, a discourse indebted to Scottish Enlightenment historiography. One might note, in numerous conjectural histories and literary-antiquarian essays, the repeated turns to poetry as evidence of a cultural stage. One might observe too the ascendancy and transformation of the progress poem (under which rubric we might include Beattie's Minstrel, John Clare's The Progress of Rhyme, or indeed, Wordsworth's Prelude). Consider Robert Wood's brilliant fusion of empirical and speculative inquiry in An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1769, 1775); or Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802'3), saturated in the discourses of moral philosophy, conjectural history and emergent political economy, as in his salute to ballads as possessing ‘considerable interest for the moral philosopher and general historian’. As these examples suggest, it is only a back-formation of a more rigidly imagined ‘modernity’ (or the strictures of a moth-eaten version of ‘romanticism’) that could ever imagine poetry and Enlightenment as opposed

Preliminaries

Among the questions confronting students of literature in the twenty-first century is the place of the word - and of “letters” - in the era of electronic media. Should university departments of “English” be subsumed into the more general category of “Media Studies”? Are authors mere “content providers” for owners of iPods and computers? Should poetry be shelved next to other forms of audio entertainment in media megastores? In the context of the Age of Information, the so-called “Age of Wordsworth” seems to retreat into the distant past, and to make the concept of a Romantic revolution in poetic language and form seem remarkably quaint. This chapter begins from the quite different premise that Romantic poetry is both strikingly illuminated by, and capable of illuminating, our multi-mediated situation. We suggest, in fact, that the study of Romantic poiesis - poetic making in its broadest sense - belongs as much to media history as to literary scholarship. Defined by its relation to print culture even when it existed in and insisted on oral and manuscript forms, Romantic poetry might even serve as a synonym for what we mean by multimedia. For decades, media theorists and historians have grappled with the impact of new media on our bodies, imaginations, and sensoria; inasmuch as man is the “learning, creating, and communicating being,” new technologies for communication have put pressure on our ideas of “Man” and his or her imaginative ventures, not least poems.

It was, most immediately, the work of his own contemporaries that prompted Percy Shelley to proclaim, at the close of his Defence of Poetry (1821), that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The authority of those poets in the age we have come to call “Romantic,” Shelley explained, derived not from their opinions, with which he often disagreed, but from their capacity to tap into a certain spirit - what he called “the spirit of their age.” Shelley figured this with a metaphor taken from recent developments in the natural sciences: it is impossible to read these contemporaries, he wrote, without being struck by “the electric life that burns in their words.” “Electricity,” for Shelley, is at once a modern scientific discovery and a theme that hearkens back to the ancient myth of Prometheus, the thief of divine fire. The prototypical writer of his age - the “Romantic poet” - thus became on Shelley's account a kind of modern Prometheus, a poet of the electric life of words. This view would not go unchallenged. Indeed, even before it was written down in the Defence of Poetry, Mary Shelley had published Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), a fable of “electric life” and monstrous ambition with more than casual application to her husband's grand schemes. In spite of such challenges, or because of them, a sense of verbal electricity in Romantic poetry has persisted through generations of readers and assured these writings a special place in British literature ever since.

In Thomas Love Peacock's novel Melincourt (1817), the seventh chapter, entitled “The Principle of Population,” features a sustained conversation between the Malthusian Mr. Fax and the Shelleyan Sylvan Forester. As is typical of Peacockian style, “conversation” becomes the mode for the elegant display, dramatization, and contestation of ideas. In this as well as his other novels, Peacock's characters range widely and easily among a variety of political, intellectual, and artistic topics. Fax and Forester, in this scene, anatomize and dispute the state of human society. Among the many topics they discuss is the “principle” Malthus made infamous, the principle of population. As the following excerpt suggests, Fax and Forester address this principle, and its calculability, quite differently:

In his 1797 essay “Of an Early Taste for Reading,” William Godwin announced that “Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.” Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus – boldly dedicated to “WILLIAM GODWIN, Author of Political Justice, Caleb Williams, &c.” – may be read as a critique of her father's pronouncement. Shelley's corporeally indeterminate but eccentrically literate monster asks us to consider whether literature – taken in all its bearings – was or is indeed a useful “line of demarcation between” human and animal. The fate of the monster suggests that proficiency in “the art of language” (110), as he calls it, may not ensure one's position as a member of the “human kingdom.” Shelley shows us how a literary education, so crucial to Godwinian perfectibility, presupposes not merely an educable subject but a human being. Read through Godwin's dictum, the trajectory of Frankenstein's creature offers a parable of pedagogic failure – specifically a failure in the promise of the humanities, in letters as a route to humanization. The novel demonstrates, perhaps against itself, that acquisition of “literary refinement” fails to humanize the problematic body – the ever-unnamed monster.

One way to re-state the inquiry of the preceding chapter would be to ask, what do dead poets have to do with immortality? Or, to frame the question discursively, what did poetry and moral philosophy have to do with immortality in this period? To address each of these questions, I will turn yet again, this time the last, to the moral-philosophical text I have so often invoked in this project, Malthus's 1798 Essay. For it is in Malthus's Essay that we may discover a surprising case of the use and abuse of poetry for immortality.

A reader of Malthus's 1798 Essay on Population may not be surprised to find included in the essay such data as Dr. Price's tables of births, burials, and marriages. These tables, with their formidable columns and shining official numbers, tend to reinforce the mathematical – that is, the tropologically “real” – foundation of Malthus's thinking. Yet in several quotations Malthus shows himelf fluent in another kind of discourse than the demographic, the arithmetic, or the moral-philosophical. At two critical junctures of his argument, Malthus seals his conclusions with poetic allusions. And these allusions are not to any contemporary poet but rather to Alexander Pope. Within the text of population, then, we find the trace of poetry; this mobilization of poetry is, unsurprisingly, in the service of Malthusian ideology. Moreover, these citations of poetry serve to clinch Malthus's arguments against the conjectures of Godwin and Condorcet.

In 1800, William Wordsworth defended the “experiment[s]” of his Lyrical Ballads as a new “species of poetry … which is genuine poetry.” Fifteen years later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was still assessing the impact of this supposedly new species. Taking Wordsworth's poetry, and his defense of it, as exemplary literary cases in the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge mounted an extended critique of the claims – linguistic, anthropological, and moral – of Wordsworth's poetic species. Chapter xvii features his most sustained analysis, which he introduces as follows:

Coleridge's objections to Wordsworth's theory begin with his rejection of “rustic life” as a suitable ground for a “human diction.” Coleridge thus marks a gap between the “rustic” and the “human,” whereas Wordsworth in 1800 had offered the rustic as a human prototype. Coleridge took very seriously Wordsworth's ambition to write from the real language of men.”

Any particular academic monograph in the humanities appears as a creature whose species is known in advance. Whether we choose to classify it via “the system” or “the method,” as Michel Foucault distinguishes the taxonomic procedures of natural history, nevertheless the particular kind of thing before us tends to display all or some of the following characteristics: an impressive array of footnotes (scholarly and/or discursive), an extensive bibliographic apparatus, a statement on method, acknowledgments, a title page, chapters. All this above and beyond “the argument” or the body of the thing, which itself of course must simultaneously internalize, disguise and yet manifest the requirements of those regimes – intellectual, institutional, interpersonal, economic, ideological – that variously sponsor (even as they impede) the production of academic things.

Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” still stands as perhaps the representative English Romantic lyric. Less well known to non-specialists is Percy Shelley's powerful, disturbed response to Wordsworth and to Wordsworthian immortality, the long allegorical poem “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude.” In Shelley's poem, a Wordsworthian spirit of solitude, in the person of a self-involved but sincerely questing poet, meets a bad end and goes to an “untimely tomb” (50). Whereas Wordsworth's Immortality Ode enacts the complex movements of a consciousness variously dejected, exultant, sobered, yet ultimately solaced by “the faith that looks through death” (187), Shelley's allegory polemically depicts a spirit permanently alienated, a poet prematurely yet decisively dead. From Wordsworth, intimations of immortality recollected from early childhood; from Shelley, a critical death, an insistence on mortality unredeemed and unredeeming.