One of the major aesthetic and philosophical frameworks that has been used to represent and think about the modern environmental crisis is the sublime. This chapter traces how a tradition of the sublime traceable directly to Romantic literature and culture has been used to conceptualize both the forms of nature that we should cherish, such as particular landscapes, and the forms of nature that we should shrink from, such as extreme weather events. The chapter also addresses how in the twenty-first century the sublime, and specifically a ‘Romantic sublime’ based mainly on Kant’s writings, has been condemned as an aesthetic that assumes a distance between human and nonhuman, and which creates a false impression that humans can transcend or solve the environmental crisis. Finally, the chapter considers whether a Romantic eco-sublime might still have a useful role in helping us to think about the nonhuman world and our relationship with it in a time of crisis.

The georgic in English is often said to have receded after the 1770s. This chapter argues that in the Romantic period the georgic does not disappear, but assumes a new form: the ‘rural complaint’, a lyrical lamentation on social conditions in the countryside. Georgics in a more conventional didactic and descriptive form continued to be written, such as Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy and James Grahame’s British Georgics, but these incorporated rural complaint interludes. At the same time, standalone rural complaint poems, following Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, consistently alluded to, and situated themselves within, a classical and neoclassical georgic tradition. Understanding the Romantic rural complaint as a form of georgic (rather than, or in addition to, pastoral) sheds light on the generic choices of poets such as Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth and John Clare.

Cowley’s lines describing the nunc stans in Book 1 of the Davideis are introduced with a reference to the spatial as well as temporal infinity of heaven: ‘Nor can the glory contain it self in th’endless space.’ In his note to this line Cowley reflects on the relationship between subject-matter and poetic length, acknowledging the three extra syllables: ‘I am sorry that it is necessary to admonish the most part of Readers, that it is not by negligence that this verse is so loose, long, and, as it were, Vast; it is to paint in the number the nature of the thing which it describes.’ In his ‘Life of Cowley’ Samuel Johnson objected to this logic affiliating a long line with great space: ‘Verse can imitate only sound and motion. … I cannot discover … why the pine is taller in an alexandrine than in ten syllables.’ There is an absurdity in the implication that three extra syllables can better represent ‘endless space’, but this is not the basis of Johnson’s objection. By Johnson’s logic, poetic length can represent a long length of time (by imitating motion), but not space. Cowley’s reference to lines ‘painting’ space, however, suggests that unlike Johnson he conceives of his poem as a spatial form. This is corroborated by his going on in the note to extract lines from ‘divers other places of this Poem’ to illustrate his principle, reading them independently of their immediate context in the organisation of the poem. The fact that this note immediately precedes the note on Boethius’s theory of the nunc stans further suggests that his idea of spatial form builds on this theological groundwork. The nunc stans permits time to be mapped onto space and vice versa; a long time and a wide space implicitly represent one another. While Cowley’s ‘Eternal Now’ is contained within a neat pentameter line, his theory of the mimetic potential of poetic length applies equally to the length of a whole poem as to a line, so it is no leap to consider that a poem of epic length is for Cowley the fit vehicle for communicating the vast time and space that the nunc stans embraces. Every line, every word in the poem is, like every moment or event, both a time and a place in a vast spatio-temporal prospect.

In his 1781 ‘Life of Thomson’, Samuel Johnson remarked:

Here Johnson makes several of the points that Joseph Frank was to make nearly two hundred years later: not only that a text can depict things that exist simultaneously, but that in doing so its parts lose the ‘rule’ of narrative time that gives meaning to the chronological order in which the poet has arranged them. Johnson states this more explicitly in his commentary on Pope’s ‘Windsor-Forest’: ‘the scenes, which [descriptive poems] must exhibit successively, are all subsisting at the same time, [so that] the order in which they are shown must by necessity be arbitrary, and more is not to be expected from the last part than from the first.’

In his 1807 lecture on Thomson, Percival Stockdale quoted Johnson’s above assessment and remarked that it ‘is absolute nonsense’. In ‘Summer’, Stockdale argued,

Even the interpolated tales, he claims, do not disrupt the flow of the poem: ‘The most admired poems have their episodes, which by no means destroy, or confuse, the order of the principal fable.’ As for the lack of suspense or expectation, Stockdale retorted, the mind reading The Seasons ‘proceeds with a delightful expectation; for it expects to meet with most excellent poetry; and it is never disappointed; with poetry which flows, in a natural, and easy succession of sentiments, and imagery’.

Thomson’s first biographer, Robert Shiels, had made a similar comment to Johnson in his 1753 life of the poet, observing that within each book of The Seasons, ‘There appears no particular design; the parts are not subservient to one another; nor is there any dependance [sic] or connection throughout; but this perhaps is a fault almost inseparable from a subject in itself so diversified’.

In an 1817 letter to Benjamin Bailey, John Keats recalls Leigh Hunt asking why poets should ‘endeavour after a long Poem’. Keats offers two answers to this question. The second, that a long poem is the ultimate test of a poet’s ‘Invention, which I take to be the Polar Star of Poetry’, is often quoted. Less remarked upon is the first answer Keats gives to Hunt’s question, about the value of a long poem not for the poet but for the reader:

For Keats, a long poem is not something to ‘read through’, from beginning to end, in one sitting. It is a space in which to wander, and within which any direction can be taken. Parts may be extracted at the reader’s whim, read out of order, and read and reread again. (Elsewhere Keats writes that ‘I long after a stanza or two of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence’.) On the other hand, Keats – on whose insights into the long poem I will draw a number of times in this book – is keenly aware of the poet’s ‘management’ of a long poem, their arrangement of parts into a structure that rewards reading in chronological order. In his annotations to Paradise Lost, he notes the effects of coming to the opening of Book 3 after the first two books:

Nature possesses variety both spatially and temporally, which allows Thomson to obscure the dimension in which he is moving, rendering the temporal relation between the elements of nature that he describes ambiguous. In spite of The Seasons’ important status as a non-narrative long poem, however, it does contain passages that more overtly embrace narrative and therefore seem to depend upon a linear timeline of before-and-after, and to depict a process that is clearly a movement from one point in time to another rather than (though sometimes in addition to) across space. In this chapter I will examine those parts of The Seasons that do appear to depend on narrative time. I look first at the interpolated tales, the stories of people undergoing change, and then in more detail at one specific tale, the Damon and Musidora piece in ‘Summer’. I show how it encouraged its own reception – in the form of illustrations, adaptations and even authorial revisions – as a collection of isolated images as well as an unfolding narrative. The poem contains other depictions of its own processes of inspiration and composition, too, which I examine in the final section of this chapter. As we will see, even in these seemingly narrative or quasi-narrative parts of the poem, the onward progression of time is complicated by pauses and returns, so that identifying where the change, turn or development occurs is more difficult than it first appears. Thomson develops a picturesque treatment of narrative in order to accommodate sentimental tales within The Seasons without affront to his non-narrative form.

The most obviously narrative parts of the poem are the interpolated tales; Celadon and Amelia (Su.1169–222), Damon and Musidora (Su.1269–370), and Palemon and Lavinia (Au.177–310) are the most extended narratives, but there are also the miniature tales, such as those of the man struck by lightning ([1727] Su.771–87), the desert caravan covered by a sandstorm (Su.959–79), the horseman in the bog (Au.1145–64) and the swain frozen to death (Wi.276–321). It is necessary to address these to see how they fit into Thomson’s conception of cyclical time, in which no moment can truly be said to come ‘before’ or ‘after’. Even in these moving narratives, Thomson finds ways to hint at the isolation of each moment.

Between Satan’s landing on Mt Niphates at the end of Book 3 and the start of his prospect poem address to the sun in Book 4, Milton inserts a troubling acknowledgement that Adam and Eve could have been warned more explicitly about the approaching danger:

In this passage, Milton apprehends each moment – that of Adam and Eve in innocence, the Fall, the age of John the Apostle, the post-lapsarian time in which he writes, the apocalypse – as past, present and future. The two perspectives of time that God enjoys from his nunc stans prospect are condensed into those four words: ‘now / While time was’. All times are ‘now’ and all times are ‘while’ (that is, meanwhile with one another, simultaneous); yet the tension in these lines comes from the fact that this ‘now’ is also a past time (‘was’) in relation both to the Fall and to the seventeenth century in which the poet is stuck. ‘The enjambment’, Herz writes of ‘now / while’, ‘drops the narrative present now into time already past’, placing ‘the poet within the text, enabled, he claims, by the Muse to imagine a before as if it were present, and as a result, by force of desire, that is to say, poetry, to attempt to hold back the present’. Milton’s initial wish is for the heavenly ‘warning voice’ which in Chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation warned John that the devil was coming to earth, but the second expression of the wish, ‘that now …’ opens the call out to any warning voice, including that of the poet. But the attempt to hold back the present is futile, and the desire thwarted.

Readers of The Prelude have, like readers of Paradise Lost, tended to privilege certain parts of the poem over others. There has been greater consensus over which parts should be favoured than in the case of Milton’s poem, however. Who wouldn’t prefer the Boy of Winander passage to the reflection on education that precedes it? Wordsworth provides his reader with a vocabulary, the term ‘spots of time’, for labelling these preferred parts, and a model in his own autobiographical practice for selecting them: ‘I have singled out / Some moments’ ([1805] VIII.174–5). And whereas readers of Paradise Lost have often privileged either the earlier or later books, the most frequently and intensely read parts of The Prelude are scattered throughout its length (the first two books, however, contain the greatest density of such parts). The result is that The Prelude’s popular, critical and pedagogic reception has been one of fragmentation. Its scattered spots of time are, if not extracted wholesale, identified as ‘dominating’ other parts and drawing the reader’s attention away from the flatlands in between the peaks. But Wordsworth, I have been arguing, was trying to return narrative to the long poem. Just as the experiences related in the supposedly contained spots of time open out into wider prospects of space and time, and derive their significance from longer processes, so the spots of time as parts of the poem derive at least some of their significance from the whole, and their specific place within it. The reader of The Prelude, like Wordsworth himself, enjoys moments of seeming kairos, but must then recover the more subtle and effortful rewards of chronos, of the long reading experience over time, and appreciate what has ‘flowed in between’.

Wordsworth famously conceived not only of The Prelude but of his entire corpus as a space, the parts of which exist simultaneously: The preparatory poem is biographical, and conducts the history of the Author’s mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently matured for entering upon the arduous labour which he had proposed to himself; and the two works have the same kind of relation to each other, if he may so express himself, as the Antechapel has to the body of a Gothic church.

‘The topic of human constructions of temporality’, writes Roland Racevskis,

It is via ‘the unpredictable angles of approach provided by the aesthetic activity of figuration’, Racevskis suggests, that many of the complexities and fundamental paradoxes of time (as it is encountered and perceived by humans) can be apprehended. I hope that I have shown how productive the varied angles of approach available to the long poem can be in exploring the multiple ways in which humans can construct temporality. The capacity of the long poem, more than any other type of text, to act simultaneously as a spatial and as a temporal form – as a region in which to wander and as an unfolding process – enables it to ‘figure’ in its very form multiple constructions of temporality, and to recreate these in the reader’s experience. Add to this the other ‘angles of approach’ that literary texts use to think about time – theme and content, revision, allusion – and the long poem is uniquely positioned to address the topic. The ‘questions of intellectual history’ about time that long poems have been used to address include questions about free will, scientific or religious understandings of nonhuman nature, and the continuity of human identity. Whether the poems I have been looking at provide ‘answers’ to these questions is debatable, but they do make visible the temporal paradoxes inherent in such questions.

Accordingly, I have been treating these poems both as parts of a continuum and as individual entities. Each constructs its own characteristic temporality according to the priorities of its author and the intellectual debates of its contemporary moment, but each also forms a part of a longer tradition. The long poem certainly did not disappear in the nineteenth century, in spite of Edgar Allan Poe’s notorious proclamation:

The inspiring spirit who, for Milton, ‘Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss / And mad’st it pregnant’ (PL, I.21–2), for Wordsworth will not sit still long enough to hatch him a ‘great argument’ (PL, I.24):

There is a similar moment in Wordsworth’s ‘Stanzas written in my Pocket-copy of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence’. Wordsworth depicts himself as a Thomsonian figure enjoying the present, the time of which is imagined as a space in which to linger: ‘Here on his hours he hung as on a book; / On his own time here would he float away.’ But his wish to relish the present is confounded by his vocation, in terms that recall the Miltonic dove driven through the groves (and similarly refer to the poet in the third person): ‘But Verse was what he had been wedded to; / And his own mind did, like a tempest strong, / Come to him thus, and drove the weary Man along.’

The driving question of Wordsworth’s long poem The Prelude is ‘was it for this?’ It is a question with numerous literary sources including Virgil’s Georgics, Milton’s Samson Agonistes and Thomson’s Seasons, but it is also the question that, in the above examples, drives his difference from Milton and Thomson. It is a question about causation: did, and how did, my experiences shape the person I am today? Did, and how did, the past cause the present? Milton and Thomson, as we have seen, are able to sustain a balance between the necessity of ongoing time and the independence of each moment; I aimed to strike an equivalent balance in my analysis of their long poems. But Wordsworth’s autobiographical imperative, his need to ‘trace / Our Being’s earthly progress’ (II.233–4), tips the balance in The Prelude. I do not wish to deny the importance of the concept of the single epiphanic moment for Wordsworth, but due to existing critical emphasis on this kind of time in his poetry, and due to what I see as the temporality that ultimately triumphs in The Prelude, in this section of the book I will take a more partisan position.