UC Davis

“The Book of Nature: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Poetry & the Poetics of Earth System Design” argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry’s inheritance of and elaborations on natural theological design prefigures the development of artificial interventions in the Earth System and the aesthetic theorization of planetary-scale geoengineering. Between the 1790s and the 1880s, the concept of “design” teetered between its natural theological origins and an industrialized future in which human designs began to demonstrate their ability to intervene in and alter natural systems on a planetary scale. I claim that the natural theology and early Earth sciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occasioned the development of a poetics of Earth System design able to account for the unseen, yet material, effects of human designs as they both shape and are shaped by planetary systems.   While the poets that anchor my four chapters—Erasmus Darwin, Charlotte Smith, William Blake, and Gerard Manley Hopkins—engage in artificial human intervention to disparate ends, they collectively constellate human design’s contradictions and consequences as they unfold across heterogenous modes and materials, including mechanical contrivances, pencil drawings, watercolors, and architectural acoustics as well as poetry. Each chapter of this project follows natural theology’s argument from design through the mediations among one poet, one medium, and one Earth subsystem as it assembles a poetics that is at once audacious and cautious: a human process of figuration that both recklessly usurps the responsibilities of planetary-level design and, when inevitably confronted with the systemic repercussions of its own design failures, hesitates or revises itself. The poetics of Earth System design is a poetics that is ambivalent about its own existence, attentive to the destruction that its own implementation will necessitate.