My dissertation, Lyric Ear: Romantic Poetics of Listening, turns from a centuries-long critical focus on the “lyric voice” to consider instead what I am calling the lyric ear, or the speaking ear. I offer case studies in four nineteenth-century British and American poets, exploring how each develops poetics of listening that open up authorship, agency, and singularity—into unknown collaboration, receptive action, and multiplicity. By focusing on how lyric constructs the ear, rather than the voice, I argue that poetry expands participation to include bodies, objects, and surroundings that share physical space, rather than simply those who have the agency or the privilege to speak. Although the trope of the speaking ear works differently for each poet, certain characteristics remain constant: 1) the speaking ear involves a description of listening, which goes so far in its intensity or detail that it explicitly or implicitly figures the poem itself as an ear; 2) the construction of the poem-as-ear intensifies into a moment of apparent paradox, in which the actions of the mouth and the ear become interchangeable; 3) the descriptions of listening that extend into imaginations of the poem-as-ear propagate formal repetitions, which in all four chapters include refrain, repetition, and rhyme. The speaking ear makes an organ of receptivity also an instrument of speech, which demonstrates how the body and its parts work in unexpected, unpredictable ways. Unknowable collectivities of listeners construct alternative participations in speaking and in listening, vibrating across registers of music and noise, sharing verbs even as they share the space of a soundscape.

My first chapter, on Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales, posits gossip as a means of conceiving the speaking ear par excellence. According to gossip’s understudied generic conventions, the speaker is most importantly a listener. Gossip is collaborative, both in its construction and in its reception. Passed from ear to ear, gossip shares authors, just as it spreads in unpredictable ways. Throughout Robinson’s Lyrical Tales, the figure of gossip works to multiply and generalize the speaking voice and its affects, giving the impression that the story at hand is not authored by a single identity, but rather that it approximates and synthesizes the shared impressions of a community. My second chapter, on John Clare’s bird poems, picks up on the collaborative possibilities of the speaking ear to challenge authorship and brings these possibilities into the non-human world. Through poems that variously invite listening attention, and perform poetic impressions of birdsong, Clare asks what the terms of engagement are when there is no common language. In my third chapter, on perversity, occultism, and slow violence in the poetry of Edgar Alan Poe, I trace how the repetitious, inanimate “bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells” in Poe’s eponymous poem destabilize the environments they simultaneously enliven. I consider poetic effects such as rhyme and repetition as passive or barely-perceptible agents of quiet (but decidedly sonic) violence. My final chapter considers Emily Dickinson’s poem, “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear,” as a prompt to the question: what, then, is the unconscious ear? To say that the Spirit is the Conscious Ear does not isolate the ear’s listening, but expands the ways the ear can work. Through the punning deictic here (hear), Dickinson turns the poem into a speaking ear, an organ of receptivity with diverse capacity for sounding and sensing, and strange powers of speech. The poem, like the ear, is a body for sound, a body of sound. I argue that Dickinson’s vibrational poetics are necessarily permeable, conducting an interpenetration between senses and sounds. By parsing differences between listening and hearing, I argue that the unconscious (in)attention of the dreaming body invites new and slippery ways of understanding how the sonic skips and disjunctions of puns, recurring rhymes, syntactic discontinuities, and fragmentary sound-bites illuminate Dickinson’s poetry and letters more broadly.

Carrying Over reconsiders the widely held Romantic-era belief in poetry as a universal form by arguing for the centrality of linguistic and cultural translation within early Romantic poetics. It traces Romantic encounters with Eastern genres alongside an emerging imperial sense of the world in eighteenth-century British systems of knowledge, including philology, pedagogy, and biblical criticism. Expanding recent postcolonial accounts of world literature’s colonial origins, I show how Romantic works responded to a mounting scholarly effort to codify literature within England and its colonial peripheries. While Orientalist philologists like William Jones claimed to demonstrate “what true poetry ought to be” through their translations of Oriental works into familiar genres like the lyric and the romance, Romantic adaptations of non-Western forms (such as the Arabian Nights tale and the proverb) suggested what poetry could be once detached from these dominant modes. Indeed, I claim that these engagements with Oriental forms transfer, or “carry over,” problems of translation into issues of interpretation—moments of unintelligibility in which the poem appears as an agent of translation rather than its object. In doing so, these poets revise the world-literary assumption that locates poetry in European modes of expression, suggesting instead that poetry’s displaced origin precedes and lies outside of national forms.

After an introduction that explores the early Romantic revision of translatio studii, the first chapter considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fascination with the Arabian Nights against the backdrop of eighteenth-century empiricist pedagogical literature by John Locke, Anna Barbauld, and Maria Edgeworth. I show how the opaque and supernatural tales of the Nights precipitated a shift in early Romantic reading practice—from reading as a self-possessed act to a recursive and involuntary process—and offered a model for the enigmatic form of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. In chapter two, I read William Blake’s use of proverb form in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell alongside an empiricist insistence on knowledge’s demonstrability, as articulated through eighteenth-century biblical criticism and colonial pedagogy. I argue that Blake’s resuscitation of the proverb form in the “Proverbs of Hell” posits a mode of unfinished knowledge, in which incompletion is converted from a mark of error into a sign of knowledge’s deferred but eventual recognition. My third chapter looks at the dream of the Arab in William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, a vision of an itinerant Arab-knight saving poetry from destruction, to trace how this split figure embodies and unsettles the eighteenth-century belief in the primitive origin of poetry. I claim that the Arab-knight shows how poetry’s inheritance depends on its translation—its literal movement across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The dissertation concludes with a coda that explores the relationship between cultural translation and poetics in Walter Benjamin’s and Édouard Glissant’s different writings on translation.

This dissertation on late Enlightenment poetics and the history of the biomedical sciences unfolds a lapsed possibility near the historical beginnings of the division of labor between literary and scientific representation. Against the pressure, then and now, to treat the culture of science as context or antithesis to literary production, I recover a countervailing epistemology that cast poetry as a privileged technique of empirical inquiry: a knowledgeable practice whose figurative work brought it closer to, not farther from, the physical nature of things.

In his late life science, Morphology, Goethe mischievously re-signified "objectivity" to mean an observer's vulnerability to transformation by the objects under view: "every new object, well seen, opens up a new organ in us." Such a gesture at once opens the scene of experiment to the agency of objects, and shifts biology's question from the life force within beings, to the metamorphic relations between them. From Wordsworth's call for a "science of the feelings," to Blake's for a "sweet Science," and Goethe's for a "tender Empiricism," my project argues for a series of late Enlightenment attempts to re-invent empiricist methodology - and to do so with the resources of verse and figure. These revisionary poetic sciences, I argue, challenged early biological and aesthetic protocols to countenance the mutual, material influence between the subjects and objects of experiment; to represent `bare' sensation as itself vulnerable to social and rhetorical transformation; and to position vulnerability - to impression, influence, and decay - as central, not inimical, to life.

I show that writers from James Thomson and Erasmus Darwin to Percy Shelley retrieved Lucretius's classical materialism as a model for describing bodies (textual and animal) as porous assemblages, shaped by losses and incorporations of what is not self, and not immediately present. In Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, all things, decaying in time, scatter fine atomic husks from their bodies: simulacra, figurae, imagines. Here `figures' are fractions of the real estranged from their sources, and all bodies, not just poets or their language, produce them. Such an epistemology afforded poetry a strong claim upon the real, and proved particularly fit to connect the epochal interest in living bodies to the period's new sense of its own historicity. Poets deployed Lucretius's atomist imaginary in order to make historical experience palpable as what Wordsworth called an "atmosphere of sensation." The material tropes they mobilized to do so, I argue, have been unrecognizable through the symbol-allegory paradigm that controls most rhetorical readings of romanticism.

Such a view of the period's philosophy of life differs from a more frequent argument, whereby romantic poetics and early biology converge in the ideal of organism or artwork as self-sufficient whole, "both cause and effect of itself" - and the ideal of life or imagination as the "power" productive of such wholes. This Kantian and Coleridgean ideal of "organic form," I argue, has overshadowed our critical understanding of what the late Enlightenment poetics of life might have sought to do. Working through the tense collaboration between the Poet and the Man of Science in Wordsworth's 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads and in Blake's notion of "sweet Science" (The Four Zoas,1797), my introduction extracts two critical lenses - "matter figures back," and "atmospheres of sensation" - with which to discern the rival epistemology described in the dissertation's four body chapters. In chapters that center on, and move outward from, Goethe's poetic biology (1-2) and Shelley's "poetry of life" (3- 4) I show how a neglected strain of materialist natural curiosity sought to uncouple professionalizing biology and subject-centered aesthetics from their rhetoric of agency, autonomy, and power.

In my first chapter, "Composite Life," I translate previously unavailable pieces from Goethe's microscopy logs (1785-6) and On Morphology periodicals (1817-24) as emblematic of the broader contemporary interest in studying living beings as composite, rather than organic forms. Here, each "seeming individual" is as a "being-complex," a fractious "assemblage of independent beings." Morphology, moreover, redirects biological inquiry from the question of new life (generation) around which the discipline had coalesced, to the biology and poetics of decomposition and senescence - or, as Goethe names one essay, "Going to Dust, Vapor, Droplets." What, this essay begins to ask, might life look like from the perspective of the non-reproductive, but communicative, effluvia that mediate between beings? What arts of discomposure would be adequate to this view? Focusing on an experiment in which a cut mushroom "draws" its own image in spores, I argue for the credibility in the period of non-human acts of representation: that is, for material (neo-Lucretian) images that emanate not just from agents, but from things.

My second chapter, "Thinking Like an Object, Contra-Kant" concerns the aesthetic and poetic stakes of the experimental method Goethe calls "tender Empiricism," an approach to composite life that I read as a sly critique of Kant's durable accounts of aesthetics and organism. From Goethe's perspective, Kant's celebrated epistemological modesty - his concern that a man not "presumptuously ... tack a whim ... to the objects" (Goethe's paraphrase) - screens a more significant hubris: the presumption that a person could produce whims without objects and a sensing body; and, more basically, that what is important about a subject is the way in which he is not a natural object. Re- valuing the passive quality of tenderness as an epistemic virtue, Goethe experiments in "objectively active thinking," permitting the way the self is (also) an object to re-enter natural and aesthetic philosophy. The chapter culminates in a re-reading of the didactic poem Dauer im Wechsel ["Durance in Change"] from the perspective of objective figuration, centering on a neo-Lucretian simulacrum that, I argue, Paul de Man consequentially mistook for a symbol.

In Chapter Three I move from Goethe's poetic morphology to Shelley's "poetry of life." "Growing Old Together: Composite Physiognomy in The Triumph of Life" examines the way Shelley's Triumph revives Lucretian corporeality in order to rebuke the markedly triumphalist rhetoric of both contemporary vitalist physiology and post-Waterloo historiography. Offering a new account of the face-giving trope of prosopopeia in the poem, I argue that Shelley mobilizes Lucretian simulacra in order to think through the way personal bodies produce and integrate passages of historical time. Representing aging faces as mutable registers of the "living air" of a post-Napoleonic interval, The Triumph depicts senescence as the unintended work of multitudes, pressing towards a biology and epistemology of transience that holds rhetorical, vital, and historical materialisms together.

In Chapter Four, "The Natural History of Violence: Atomist Pre-Histories for Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy," I continue the increasingly historical trajectory of the dissertation's materialism by turning to Shelley's poetic representation of the 1819 "Peterloo Massacre." Here, I attempt to put the dissertation's valuation of epistemological "sweetness" and "tenderness" to the test of an event in which subjects' vulnerabilities were tragically violated. Focusing on the The Mask's preoccupation with the way wrongly spilled blood enters geological and meteorological cycles, I argue that the poem, which Shelley called "wholly political," is also a form of natural history. I recruit Erasmus Darwin, William Cowper, and James Thomson as well as Walter Benjamin to argue for a didactic natural historical mode in which a poem speaks polemically for bloodstained materials that do not, in themselves, disclose their provenance. In this way I suggest that, despite its reputation, pre-Darwinian natural history - and especially its poetry - is anything but a-historical or a-political.

In the dissertation's Coda, "Marx's Sensuous Science" I pick up this materialist current at the start of the historical materialism more familiar to present-day critics: Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation on classical atomisms. I link Marx's reception of Lucretius to the idea of natural history that emerges in his "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844," which paraphrase Goethe on tender empiricism, and argue (like Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley) that any sensation-based science needs to countenance the senses' susceptibility to historical re-configuration. The Manuscripts strain, very much in the tradition my chapters lay out, towards what Marx calls a "sensuous science." Like Goethe and Shelley, Marx presses past the biology of organicism in order to adumbrate "man's inorganic body," a body neither contemporaneous nor coincident with itself and whose life is traversed by and contingent upon innumerable others. In the Coda I take this cue to compare Marxian and neo-Lucretian ideology critique, asking how the embodied impressionability valued in "tender," "sweet," and "sensuous" sciences may run, but may also outrun, the risk Marx named "reification."

Pale Light: Natural Difficulties and Poetic Epistemology in the Enlightenment explores the relationship between natural history and poetry, considered as rival sciences during the Enlightenment, and it explores the environmental ground out of which eighteenth-century aesthetics arose. Focusing on poetic treatments of the strangely ubiquitous phenomenon known as the ignis fatuus or will-o-the-wisp, I describe the development of a distinct poetic epistemology that valued a way of knowing paradoxically attentive to the permanence and power of the unknown. Tracing the numerous treatments of the ignis fatuus as a phenomenon that marked the limits of scientific confidence, I show how eighteenth-century poets constructed a distinct epistemology within the context of the New Science and the problems inherent in its protocols, such as the limits and distortions of the senses and the provisional nature of knowledge derived through inductive accumulation. Natural history in the British Enlightenment is characterized at once by an interest in these problems and by a waning attention to the ways in which objects like the ignis fatuus fracture the foundations of knowledge. In this context, the widespread poetic appropriation of difficult natural historical cases illustrates that eighteenth-century poetry not only attends to these fissures but also comes to lodge and develop in the niches they provide. I contend that a central experience of the Enlightenment was not knowing but rather not-knowing and that, by making palpable the limits and dilemmas of knowledge, poets cultivated an active form of negative epistemology.

My use of the ignis fatuus as a representative case highlights the predicament posed by the very use of cases as building blocks of general knowledge. I draw attention to the critical issues raised by the case study’s inductive procedures both as they relate to epistemological anxieties in the long eighteenth century and as they bear on my own methodological practices. These methodological reflections reveal how literary history’s adoption of the case study – and, with it, the ability to make connections between any particular literary artifact and larger formal categories or cultural processes – carries with it a specific set of epistemological problems as part of its Enlightenment inheritance.

My first chapter explores the central role of the faculty that Francis Bacon labels the “suspension of judgment,” – an ability to remain in a state of attentive uncertainty –within the New Science. In a detailed reading of natural historical treatments of the ignis fatuus across two centuries, ranging from essays in the Philosophical Transactions to lessons in pedagogical chapbooks, I show how the suspension of judgment, once a central methodological tenet of the New Science, became in practice an unspoken and often neglected epistemological state.

Chapter Two examines the ways that Abraham Cowley, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and John Milton employ verse as a form of guidance and correction within the destabilized epistemological landscape of the late seventeenth century. Each poet deploys the ignis fatuus, counter-intuitively, not simply as a figure for the threat of vulgar superstition but as a sign of more unexpected dangers: learned authority (in Cowley), rational thought (in Rochester), and the very possibility and value of stable knowledge itself (in Milton).

In Chapter Three, I read James Thomson and Oliver Goldsmith, two poets not usually associated with epistemological disruption, in close proximity to the presence and power of not-knowing expressed in works such as William Collins’s “Ode to Fear” and “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands.” Doing so brings into focus each poet’s use of verse not only as a space for exploring the problems surrounding how and what one knows but also a means by which such problems might be transformed into a practice of mobile attention. I argue that this mobile attention, which provides both the freedom and security found in the suspension of judgment, comes to characterize an increasingly distinct poetic epistemology.

Chapter Four focuses on the ways in which Anna Letitia Barbauld’s and Erasmus Darwin’s poetry unexpectedly complicates their own stated pedagogical intentions. I read their verse in relation to didactic texts for children and popular audiences in which treatments of the ignis fatuus are used to expunge rather than to induce states of suspended judgment, and I argue that while Darwin’s and Barbauld’s poems share many features of these popular didactic texts they also, often unexpectedly, revel in the experience of not-knowing.

In Chapter Five, I turn to a group of poets who actively embraced forms of epistemological disruption by seizing upon the figure of the ignis fatuus. Here I trace the use of the figure from Robert Burns’s humorous letters and poetry to John Keats’s disorienting Endymion, and from Keats’s remarks on the nature of poetry to John Clare’s poetry and prose. The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century adoption of the phenomenon, often as a figure for poetry itself, and the increasingly explicit engagement with its epistemological stakes helps us to see Romantic poetry not as a radical departure from earlier orientations toward knowledge but as a means of preserving the epistemological self-consciousness that was once vital to the British Enlightenment. My epilogue uses Leigh Hunt’s essay “Fictions and Matters of Fact” (1825) as a final lens for viewing changing notions of poetry’s place in the wake of the Enlightenment.

The Appendix catalogues visual representation of the ignis fatuus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and includes paintings, etchings, satirical prints, and book illustrations.

This dissertation identifies the production of a theory of aesthetic evolution--a belief that the higher faculties of taste and sympathy emerged from the feelings of savages and animals--which resulted from the collaborations between evolutionary science and poetic theory and practice in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British writing. Even as the theory enabled authors to naturalize taste, sympathy, and social progress, it also permitted them to interrogate the category of the human and to unfold an immanent critique of the physical and psychic violence that attends modern development. Using Wordsworth's influential definition of poetry not as metered verse but more broadly as the "history or science of feelings," I find attempts to historicize and restore embodied sensibility in a variety of literary and non-literary texts, from Anna Barbauld's anti-slavery verse and William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads to Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, as well as in a variety of genres, from Erasmus Darwin's scientific poetry, to Charles Darwin's popular voyage narrative, to the most lyrical of Thomas Hardy's novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

In each chapter, I aim to understand not only particular texts but also the century-long investment in poetic practice by major British authors who linked natural and social history in diverse forms of writing. The first chapter explores the intersection between poetic practice, evolutionary theory, and political engagement in the anti-slavery verse of Erasmus Darwin and Anna Barbauld, who attempted in different ways to activate the reader's organs of sympathy--the eye and hand--yet, in Barbauld's case in particular, also acknowledged the limits of sympathy as a form of redress. Chapter Two reads some of Wordsworth's best-known verse from Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude within the context of his engagement with the transmutationist writings of Erasmus Darwin and Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in order to argue that Wordsworth's proto-evolutionary poetry sought to advance human progress while also registering the costs of development and the threat of regression. Chapter Three argues that Charles Darwin made significant contributions to poetic practice and aesthetic philosophy throughout his career: his Journal of Researches promoted natural science as a discipline that inherits poetry's function of humanizing readers, and his later Descent of Man posited that disinterested feeling and aesthetic judgment are products of evolutionary development. Like other proponents of aesthetic evolution, however, the later Darwin also recognized that modern society degrades, as much as cultivates, human taste and sympathy. The final chapter follows this dialectic of aesthetic evolution into the fiction and poetry of Thomas Hardy. Aesthetic evolution and its immanent critique culminate in Hardy's analysis of civilization's return to savagery and ignorance in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and in his poetic practice, which incorporated scientific knowledge toward the "betterment" of the body and the restoration of sympathetic capacity.