Sweet Science : Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life

Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In Sweet Science , Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry. Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology , and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon De rerum natura for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry’s role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism. Introduction: “Sweet Science” 1 a. Tingeing the Cup with Sweet 1 b. Undisciplined Romantics 10 c. The “Poetry of Life” 15 d. Matter Figures Back 24 e. Chapters and Scope 31 1 Blake’s Mundane Egg: Epigenesis and Milieux 35 a. Into the Egg 35 b. The Missing Baumeister 41 c. From Epi- to Autogenesis 48 d. Epigenesis and Milieux 56 e. Beholding 62 f. Epigenesis, an Epilogue 68 2 Equivocal Life: Goethe’s Journals on Morphology 72 1. Goethe and the Equivocal Matter of De rerum natura 75 a. Endlessly Small Points, 1785– 86 75 b. Life Is Not a Power 78 c. Equivocity 82 2. Obsolescent Life 90 d. Going to Dust, Vapor, Droplets 90 e. Trying Not to Think about Sex 91 f. Natural Simulacrum 95 g. Writing Decadent Life 97 3 Tender Semiosis: Reading Goethe with Lucretius and Paul de Man 100 1. Phenomenality and Materiality in Goethe and Lucretius 101 a. The Skins or Signs of Things 101 b. Another “Rhetoric of Temporality” 107 c. Atoms, Letters, Figures 115 2. Tender Empiricism 124 d. Kant’s Immodesty 126 e. Active like an Object 130 4 Growing Old Together: Lucretian Materialism in Shelley’s The Triumph of Life 136 a. Prologue: Montaigne’s Face 136 b. Morphology and Shelley’s “Shapes” 137 c. Shelley, Wrinkled 141 d. Life, Triumphant 144 e. A Thousand Unimagined Shapes 149 f. What Shares the Air 157 g. Atmospheres of Sensation 160 h. Historical Material 162 5 A Natural History of Violence: Allegory and Atomism in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy 166 a. “The Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester” 169 b. Ghastly Masquerade 171 c. Events Take Shape 175 d. Material Poetic Justice 182 e. Atomic Prehistories for The Mask of Anarchy 185 f. Getting Didactic 189 g. As Nature Teaches 193 h. Pedagogy of Knowledge- Power 198 i. The Power of Assembly 202 Coda: Old Materialism, or Romantic Marx 209 Acknowledgments 221 Notes 225 Bibliography 295 Index 321 Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In 'Sweet Science', Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry. Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake's poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe's journals 'On Morphology', and Percy Shelley's "poetry of life," back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J.G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius's 'De rerum natura' to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon 'De rerum natura' for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry's role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, 'Sweet Science' opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx's coming historical materialism Contents 8 Introduction: “Sweet Science” 10 1. Blake’s Mundane Egg: Epigenesis and Milieux 44 2. Equivocal Life: Goethe’s Journals on Morphology 81 3. Tender Semiosis: Reading Goethe with Lucretius and Paul de Man 109 4. Growing Old Together: Lucretian Materialism in Shelley’s The Triumph of Life 145 5. A Natural History of Violence: Allegory and Atomism in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy 175 Coda: Old Materialism, or Romantic Marx 218 Acknowledgments 230 Notes 234 Bibliography 304 Index 330