UC Berkeley

My dissertation, Mechanical Powers: Engineering and Romantic Poetics in the Early Anthropocene, retrieves how poetic and technological making converge at the onset of industrial modernity to produce an early industrial consciousness of humanity’s terrestrial agency. One of the proposed start dates for the Anthropocene is James Watt’s 1784 steam engine design, widely taken to mark the emergence of humankind as a geomorphic force with the Romantic advent of engineering and fossil capitalism. Contrary to Anthropocene narratives identifying this planetary power solely with the detrimental effects of industrial capitalism that we have remained unconscious of until the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Mechanical Powers unearths how Romantic poets and engineers in fact developed an early form of Anthropocene consciousness of humankind’s newfound planetary powers as ones that should not be applied for industrial capitalist ends. Dismantling critical narratives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as unreflexively capitalist and unconscious of humankind’s newfound planetary powers, and of poetry as anti-instrumental and anti-industrial, I show how Romantic poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth, Blake, and Byron came to re-envision poetic making in relation to the worldmaking powers of machinery to reckon with the emergence of humankind as a geomorphic force and counteract industrial capitalism’s planetary damages. If today we no longer expect poetic and technological making to intersect, what allowed for this early industrial confluence was the fact that poetry (from poiesis, making) and engineering both came to stand in for humanity’s terrestrial agency as a whole.

Chapter 1, “Blake’s Industrial Revolutions,” begins by recovering a critically neglected confluence between Blake’s poetics and Romantic era industrial socialists, the Owenites and Mechanics Institutes, who attempt to develop forms of industry outside of industrial capitalism. In the final chapters of The Making of the English Working Class, best known for documenting industrial capitalism’s damage to labor, E.P. Thompson turns to the Romantic era radical traditions that developed the first forms of industrial socialism. Such radical movements, Thompson writes, applied machinery’s “force to the context of working-class struggle” to fight industrial capitalism for socialist industry. Thompson laments the loss of this radical Romantic era tradition, and its failure to come into contact with Romantic poetry: “After William Blake, no mind was at home in both cultures nor had the genius to interpret the two traditions to each other… In the failure of the two traditions – to come to a point of junction, something was lost. How much we cannot be sure, for we are among the losers.” What we have lost is the possibility of thinking industry outside of capitalism. Yet Blake and the radical elements of the Mechanics Institutes were far closer together than Thompson realizes, even coming into direct contact and sharing a desire to scale up the labor power of machinery for socialist industry. Rejecting the emergence of capitalist factories, Blake develops an industrial poetics that prefigures what he calls a “sweet industry” after capitalism, in which even the labor of making and using heavy machinery such as the mill would be poetic, pleasurable, and lyrical, and the benefits of the worldmaking powers of industry would be extended to “every population over the world” rather than unevenly distributed and extracted from the earth.

Chapter 2, “Wordsworth’s Green Industry,” recovers how railway and steamship earthworks prompted Romantic poets and engineers to develop an early Anthropocene consciousness of the human power to shape the earth as a geological force. Against railway capitalists who advocated for blasting through the earth to construct railway earthworks such as viaducts and tunnels as cheaply as possible regardless of ecological cost, William Wordsworth and an environmentally conscious group of railway engineers pioneer a strain of steamboat and railway poetry to develop ecologically sustainable forms of earthworks. Wordsworth and Romantic engineers came to reject the ecological devastation of fossil capitalism, instead imagining alternative forms of green industry figured in the earth’s image. Rather than reading Wordsworth’s persistent naturalization of poetic and industrial technologies as a symptom of productivist ideology, the nineteenth-century belief in the seamless continuity between nature and industry that fueled the ecological crises of industrial capitalism, I argue that this ecocritical drive of Wordsworth’s poetics fuels his attempt to envision a form of green industry over his poetic career realized most fully in his late steamboat and railway poetry. Even in protesting the expansion of the Windermere Railroad into the Lake Distinct, often considered one of the nineteenth-century origins of the environmental movement, Wordsworth cites his steamboat and railway poetry as evidence that he is not against the railway but rather against fossil capitalism’s disfiguring the environment, one year after the utopian-socialist Chevalier imagined the railway as a means of “universal association” between humanity and nature. Protesting the ecological crises of industrial capitalism, Wordsworth prefigures forms of green industry that anticipate the eco-socialist hopes of the Green New Deal.

Chapter 3, “The Rise of Thermodynamics: Mechanical Engineering and Byron’s Poetic Machinery,” charts the first history of Byron’s and Romantic engineers’ attempts to grapple with how the new concept of energy that emerges out of the steam engine did not in fact merely fuel industrial capitalism’s visions of limitless steam power – as existing critical narratives assume – but radically erodes it, as Romantic era engineers discover that the universal dissipation of energy through friction sets strict material constraints on any mechanical power. Excavating the Romantic rise of thermodynamics in early nineteenth-century engineering and its impact on Romantic aesthetics, I show how Byron develops an engineering poetics directly influenced by early nineteenth-century engineering, calling his poetic vocation “my post as an engineer” and pioneering a new thermodynamic form of poetic machinery. Romantic poetry and engineering shared a mutual question fueling their thermodynamic aesthetics: what work can mechanical powers achieve under strict constraints of perpetual energy loss and unavoidable physical attrition? This question continues to bear on how we approach poetry and machinery today, and what we might anticipate from poetry and engineering in the industrial age we share with Romanticism. As Byron explores through his engineering poetics, although the endless loss of energy erodes capitalist visions of limitless steam power, it can also provide tools for combating planetary scale dissipation in a time of climate change.

A final coda, “Geopoetic Futures,” considers the fate and futures of Romantic industrialism. While by the late nineteenth century, this early form of Anthropocene consciousness where Romantic poetry and engineering intersected was eclipsed by the Victorian consolidation of industrial capitalism, it persists in a counter-modernity that runs from Romantic industrialism to contemporary Green New Deal and eco-socialist movements. This final coda also considers the promises and limits of Anthropocene narratives, and of an all too white and male strain of engineering that becomes bound up with the consolidation of industrial capitalism over the nineteenth century. Romantic poets and engineers begin to envision how the abolition of this white male strain of engineering is necessary for dismantling industrial capitalism. Turning from the metropole to the peripheries of British industrialization to the colonial subjects excluded from Anthropocene history, I show how Romantic poets and industrial socialists such as Robert Southey, Robert Owen, and George Numa Des Sources envision industrial socialist projects of global abolition to dismantle the plantation form that structured the dependency of British industrialization on slavery and sugar. Romantic poets and industrial socialists prefigure how to decolonize industrial modernity by abolishing the racialized logic of industrial capitalism, with its constitutive white industrialism and black other, forgotten Romantic possibilities which Victorian liberals such as Samuel Smiles work to suppress. Finally, I turn to Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace’s rejection of Charles Babbage’s narrowly masculinist and capitalist application of early computing machinery. Lovelace pioneers a “poetical science” between Romantic poetry and engineering that repurposes the worldmaking powers of poetry and machinery for progressive-gender political ends. Romanticism anticipates one of the most pressing theoretical questions of our own late moment in Anthropocene history that lives on in contemporary critical theory and eco-socialist projects like the Green New Deal and environmental justice movements: how to remake industrial modernity to combat our planetary crises by and for the sake of those whom capitalism has denied or excluded from having any such worldmaking powers in the first place. Returning to this early moment of Anthropocene history where Romantic poetry and engineering intersect provides access to imaginative tools to develop forms of human agency outside capitalism that might renew rather than exhaust the planet.