Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention

By Lily Gurton-Wachter

This book revisits British Romanticism as a poetics of heightened attention. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as Britain was on the alert for a possible French invasion, attention became a phenomenon of widespread interest, one that aligned and distinguished an unusual range of fields (including medicine, aesthetics, theology, ethics, pedagogy, and politics). Within this wartime context, the Romantic aesthetic tradition appears as a response to a crisis in attention caused by demands on both soldiers and civilians to keep watch. Close formal readings of the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, (Charlotte) Smith, and Wordsworth, in conversation with research into Enlightenment philosophy and political and military discourses, suggest the variety of forces competing for—or commanding—attention in the period. This new framework for interpreting Romanticism and its legacy illuminates what turns out to be an ongoing tradition of war literature that, rather than give testimony to or represent warfare, uses rhythm and verse to experiment with how and what we attend to during times of war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Mar 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9780804798761

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© 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

This book has been published with the assistance of University of Missouri Research Council Grants.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gurton-Wachter, Lily, author.

Watchwords : Romanticism and the poetics of attention / Lily Gurton-Wachter.

pages   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9695-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism.   2. Authors and readers—Great Britain—History—19th century—Biography.   3. Attention—Great Britain—History—19th century.   4. Romanticism—Great Britain.   5. Poetics.   I. Title.

PR590.G84   2016

821'709145—dc23

2015034983

ISBN 978-0-8047-9876-1 (electronic)

Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10.5/15 Adobe Garamond

WATCHWORDS

Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention

Lily Gurton-Wachter

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

For Andrew & Oscar

CONTENTS

Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Attention’s Disciplines

1. Reading, a Double Attention

2. The Poetics of Alarm and the Passion of Listening

3. Bent Earthwards: Wordsworth’s Poetics of the Interval

4. That Something Living Is Abroad: Missing the Point in Beachy Head

5. Attention’s Aches in Keats’s Hyperion Poems

Afterword: Just Looking

Notes

Works Cited

Index

FIGURES

1. Heads, representing the various passions of the soul / Attention, published by Robert Sayer, after Charles Le Brun, 1740–1765

2. Attention, from Le Brun Travested [sic], Or Caricatures of the Passions, etched by Thomas Rowlandson, designed by George Moutard Woodward, January 21, 1800

3. Attention, by Robert Mitchell Meadows, after John Raphael Smith, 1791

4. Inattention, by Robert Mitchell Meadows, after John Raphael Smith, 1791

5. A woman paying mild attention to something, by Johann Caspar Lavater and Thomas Holloway, after Nicolas Poussin, 1794

6. Puzzles for Volunteers!! September 1, 1803

7. Search-Night; or State-Watchmen, mistaking Honest-Men for Conspirators, by James Gillray, 1798

8. A woman in a state of attention without interest, by Johann Caspar Lavater and Thomas Holloway, 1789

9. John Bull viewing the preparations on the French coast! by William Holland, 1803

10. Watercolour of Wounded Soldier, Waterloo, by Charles Bell, 1815

11. Watercolour: arm wound, by Charles Bell, 1815

12. The Temporary Elgin Room, by Archibald Archer, 1819

13. Heads, representing the various passions of the soul / Compassion, published by Robert Sayer, after Charles Le Brun, 1740–1765

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE DEEPEST IMPRINT on this book comes from the extraordinary teaching, writing, and guidance of Steven Goldsmith and Kevis Goodman, a dream team of intellectual engagement, brilliance, and kindness, who exemplify the kind of attention that Simone Weil called the rarest and purest form of generosity. They have given endless encouragement, support, and advice, all the while challenging me at every stage to make this the book they thought it could be. The influence of their own thinking and writing permeates these pages like an atmosphere—everywhere and yet impossible to properly document, despite repeated attempts.

I feel incredibly lucky to have close friends who are both brilliant and generous. Andrea Gadberry has read more of this book than anyone else; I owe much in these pages to her persistent pact- and pun-making, her patience with my desperate pleas for help, and her always perceptive, funny, and imaginative feedback. Amanda Jo Goldstein and David Carroll Simon read and responded to chapters with stunning, generous, and incisive commentary. I only met Anahid Nersessian in the final years of writing, but she has quickly become a vital source of advice and inspiration, and this book has benefited from her dazzling editorial comments. Perhaps more importantly, all four of them have brought laughter and friendship to what is often a too serious and lonely pursuit.

Noah Heringman welcomed me warmly to the Beachy Head club of Missouri, and read chapter drafts with care, insight, and rigor. I am grateful for Anne-Lise François’s startlingly perceptive comments on early drafts of this project that, along with her own writing, have motivated me throughout. Judith Butler gave crucial support during my years at Berkeley—this project began to take shape in writing I did for her about Celan, Benjamin, and Weil, and I continually return to her generous feedback on this work. I am thankful for Mary Favret’s enthusiastic support, and for her own work, which has been an important inspiration to this project.

I am grateful for the warm guidance and encouragement of my colleagues at the University of Missouri, especially to Elizabeth Chang, Stefani Engelstein, Sean Franzel, Joanna Hearne, Seth Howes, Martha Kelly, Emma Lipton, David Read, and Alexandra Socarides. Jonathan Kramnick and Devoney Looser gave decisive help pushing the manuscript toward publication. Thanks to Rachel Feder for her generous brainstorming of many possible titles for this book. So many friendships, near and far, have lightened the weight of writing; thanks to Kathryn Crim, Katrina Dodson, Ian Dreiblatt, Ezra Feinberg, Paul Haacke, Alex Kitnick, Linda Langness, Jenn Lechevallier, Jack Lewis, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Zoe Lister-Jones, Tom McEnaney, Rose Metro, Hillary Miller, Rebecca Poretsky, Beth Rota, Jenni Spitulnik-Hughes, Tristram Wolff, and Betsy Wright. I still feel lucky to have found Tom Keenan and Marina van Zuylen at Bard College, who taught me how to read literature closely and encouraged me to keep doing it, and to Nancy Leonard and everyone in the Language and Thinking program for support and inspiration. I’m especially indebted to Marie Regan, Chris Schmidt, and Matt Longabucco, who made long days spent writing in New York much richer. My students at Bard, Berkeley, and Missouri have made many contributions to these pages, especially those in my Romantic Poetry and Politics graduate seminar in the spring of 2012 and my William Blake undergraduate seminar in the spring of 2015. This book also benefited from helpful conversations during ACLA seminars on Critical Divestment, in New York, and Figural Evasions, in Seattle.

I am grateful to Emily-Jane Cohen and her assistant, Friederike Sundaram, at Stanford University Press for their interest in and support of this project. The two anonymous readers gave sensitive and insightful readings of the manuscript that pushed me to make this a much stronger book. Many thanks to John Feneron for moving the book through the production process swiftly and carefully, and to Jeffrey Wyneken for his vigilant copyediting.

Work on this book was supported by the University of Missouri Research Council, which gave me a summer travel grant to do research at the British Library, provided a generous subvention, and covered the image permissions, and the University of Missouri Research Board, which provided a grant for the 2013–2014 year that allowed me to finish the manuscript.

My parents have given endless love and support from the beginning. My mother, Laura Gurton, taught me how to pay attention to other people, and how to care about art. My father, Gary Wachter, is generous, wise, and steadfast, always ready to help when I need him. My sister, Anna Gurton-Wachter, is a constant source of laughter, poetry, and knowing glances. Thanks to Alan Greenhalgh, Jon Leland, Carol Ott, and Ellen Simon for their support and generosity, and for not minding when I couldn’t explain what this book was about, or when I might finish it. Ahndraya Parlato has been my best listener and inspiration in many things for over fifteen years; it is fitting that her photograph graces the cover of this book. This book is for Andrew Leland, who manages to infuse our most quotidian moments with deep reserves of love, enthusiasm, and hilariousness, and for Oscar Leland, who has given me a more undiluted joy, awe, and love than I ever could have imagined.

An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as Ever on the Watch: Wordsworth’s Attention in Studies in Romanticism 52.4 (Winter 2013). I am grateful to the Trustees of Boston University for permission to reprint. Parts of Chapter 4 were published as ‘An Enemy, I Suppose, that Nature Has Made’: Charlotte Smith and the Natural Enemy in European Romantic Review 20.2 (2009). Thanks to Taylor & Francis for permission to reprint it here.

INTRODUCTION

Attention’s Disciplines

WE TEND TO TALK confidently about attention as though it were obvious just how and to what one ought to pay it, but what do we spend and what do we gain when we pay attention? Despite the implicit sense that attention is part of a neat economic exchange in which one could simply pay it and be done, the word attention contains its own difficulty: from the Latin ad and tendere, to stretch to, attention suggests a stretching or bending of the mind toward an object, though not too far, lest one get lost in the object itself.¹ And yet this activity also requires a precarious passivity, one Samuel Johnson identified with the French meaning of attend, to wait for.² Neither fully active nor passive, neither wholly voluntary nor involuntary, attention again and again evades definition and categorization, and thus escapes our attention. It is extremely difficult, it turns out, to pay attention to attention.³

This book takes up that challenge, though not through the cognitive approaches that have become increasingly familiar in both science and literary study.⁴ Instead, I investigate how a variety of people at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain—poets and philosophers, teachers and theologians, politicians and physicians—conceptualized and described attention, how they demanded it of others or complained about its deficits, how they strategized to command it in individuals or to situate it within broader fields of study. This was, I argue, a particularly troubled and rich moment for attention. Before modern psychology became a distinct discipline of study or a profession at the end of the nineteenth century, attention both distinguished and put into curious alignment the seemingly disparate fields of medicine, aesthetics, theology, poetics, pedagogy, ethics, politics, and rhetoric, all of which, we might say, were competing for attention—competing, that is, for readers, and for the authority to define just how and to what one ought to pay attention to begin with.⁵ Though attention is a term, often a command, used to discipline students and soldiers alike, attention during the years known in literary studies as the Romantic period was exceptionally undisciplined, moving between and interlacing these various fields. In resisting categorization, attention was unpredictable and uncontrollable, never a wholly effective tool of either discipline or security.⁶

The Romantic period, falling directly between the two periods scholars typically look to for psychological or philosophical definitions of attention—namely, the Enlightenment and the Victorian era—was a volatile interdisciplinary moment in attention’s history, coming in Europe just prior to the development of psychology, a field that would try to adopt attention as its own. Psychological definitions of attention, though, proved complicated as well: in 1905, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus would complain that attention is a real embarrassment to psychology.⁷ Most accounts of attention skip over, perhaps with a similar sense of embarrassment, the turn of the nineteenth century, typically locating the origin of our modern struggle with attention considerably later. Jonathan Crary’s pivotal study of the history of attention, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, pinpoints the emergence of attention as a problem in the 1870s and 1880s, when Crary identifies a uniquely modern distraction as an effect and a constituent element of multiple attempts to produce and maintain attentiveness in human subjects.⁸ Recent shifts in this history have noted that the late nineteenth-century mania for attention borrowed and revived a quieter concern from a century earlier, linked to early eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy of mind and new concepts of scientific observation.⁹ Indeed, throughout both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, psychologists, philosophers, and physicians argued over whether attention was voluntary or involuntary; whether it was an act of the will or an irresistible and spontaneous reflex of the mind; a quality of mature, adult concentration, or of a child’s wonder. They debated the distinctions between attention, reflection, and consciousness; the possibility of attending to more than a single object at once; whether we can refuse to hear or see by withholding our attention; whether attention to a passion rather than to its object increases or diminishes the passion; whether forgetting is always or only caused by inattention; and whether it is possible to attend to attention itself. Before psychology arrived to discipline it, attention oscillated widely and wildly from theology to pedagogy, from ethics to medicine, and from poetics to politics. Attention is therefore a rich site for understanding how different disciplines intersected and intertwined in the period, as they competed with each other for the authority to define the experience that now seems as basic and minimal as how we pay attention.

The poetry of this period, I submit, was not just one of these forces competing for attention. This book will argue that in trying to apprehend how their own readers paid attention, Romantic poets grappled with a variety of other disciplines also vying for those readers’ notice. Romanticism is thus exemplary of an interdisciplinary thinking that understands itself as constituted by the modes of attention that it also criticizes. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy famously define Romanticism as neither mere ‘literature’ nor a theory of literature, but rather "theory itself as literature or, in other words, literature producing itself as it produces its own theory."¹⁰ I would amend that definition here to suggest that Romanticism names a literature that produces itself as inextricable from both the diverse modes of attention cultivated by other disciplines and the alternative modes of attention it makes possible for its own readers. The Romantic texts I focus on use poetic form to experiment with an attention that always comes to bear on, but is never entirely limited to, the experience of reading. This book traces a poetics of attention that thus understands what and how readers notice as constituted and transformed by the modes of scrutiny, focus, watchfulness, and concentration developed in and by other discursive arenas. These include aesthetics, politics, ethics, theology, natural history, pedagogy, medicine, botany, history, rhetoric, and—most controversially, as I will reveal throughout—the strategy and practice of war.

Even armed with psychology’s organizational tools, late-nineteenth-century thinkers found attention baffling. In Matter and Memory (1896), Henri Bergson complains that an adequate definition of attention cannot be found, lamenting that no matter how we attempt to locate it, we always come back to a metaphor.¹¹ Similarly, French psychologist Théodule Ribot’s The Psychology of Attention (1888) calls attention an attitude of the mind, a purely formal state.¹² Though these descriptions of the formal and figural nature of attention are meant to signal frustration, they are also suggestive of why poetry, particularly concerned with form and figure, might have found in attention’s frustrations an aesthetic opportunity.

THE FIDGETS

Twenty-first-century scientists have recently traced the first documentation of the disorder that we now call Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to a medical text published in London in 1798, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement, by the Scottish physician Alexander Crichton.¹³ Crichton, who would later become physician to the Imperial Russian court, devotes an entire chapter to the morbid alterations to which attention is subject, one of which he describes as the incapacity of attending with a necessary degree of constancy to any one object and an unnatural or morbid sensibility of the nerves, by which means this faculty is incessantly withdrawn from one impression to another.¹⁴ Contesting the assertion that, in the words of Thomas Reid, attention is a voluntary act requiring an active exertion to begin and to continue it, Crichton notes a shift in how people were beginning to understand attention at the close of the century.¹⁵ His studies insist that attention is often involuntary and that to believe otherwise would be considered, by the 1790s, quite unphilosophical (257). Moreover, Crichton suggests that paying too much attention can prove hurtful, and he gives a lengthy account of one man whose attention was constantly kept on the stretch, and was continually shifting from one subject to another (270). Following one such intense stretch, the man tries to write a simple note but cannot find his words (289). He has such a morbid case of what Crichton earlier called the fidgets that he cannot even speak (272). This overlooked text in the history of attention marks the first medical attempt to understand what Shakespeare had called the malady of not marking as in fact an actual malady for doctors to diagnose.¹⁶

Seventeen ninety-eight is also the year of a more well-known event in the history of attention, though it has not yet been thought of in this context: namely, the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which was accompanied two years later by Wordsworth’s complaint in the volume’s Preface about a degradation of attention among British readers more pervasive and general than that Crichton described. Wordsworth’s famous diagnosis of the state of almost savage torpor in the minds of British readers—minds altered by the speed and pace of reading daily newspapers and frantic novels—is a complaint about attention, and an explicit indictment of his own readers’ organs of attention, or lack thereof.¹⁷ The fact that Wordsworth blames this communal attention deficit disorder on the great national events which are daily taking place and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies, suggests not just that poetry and newspapers competed for readers’ attentions.¹⁸ Rather, Wordsworth’s point is that the political and social transformations of the period, in conjunction with the new media that documented them, altered how people paid attention altogether.¹⁹ Indeed, the caricaturist G. M. Woodward’s parody (Figure 2) of Charles Le Brun’s depiction of Attention (Figure 1) as one of the Expressions of the Passions of the Soul suggests that in the year 1800 attention could not be conceptualized as distinct from the eager listening of what Woodward calls a newsmonger. As the nineteenth century began, gone was any reliable distinction between a seemingly neutral physiology of attention and the uneasy passions that emerged from reading the newspaper.²⁰

Figure 1. Heads, representing the various passions of the soul / Attention, published by Robert Sayer, after Charles Le Brun, 1740–1765 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 2. Attention, from Le Brun Travested [sic], Or Caricatures of the Passions, etched by Thomas Rowlandson, designed by George Moutard Woodward, January 21, 1800. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org. Reprinted with permission. The captions reads: This Passion is strongly express’d in a News-monger listening to the contents of a Gazette, it is therefore selected for this second of Le Brun Travested.

The great national events taking place daily in Britain in the 1790s and 1800s—the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the sedition trials, and the indefinite suspension of habeas corpus are only a few of the convulsive repercussions of the French Revolution—not only served as the content of the news that readers craved. The events themselves, to invoke Walter Benjamin’s story about Baudelaire’s modern urban shock experience, so drastically altered the structure of experience that a poet could no longer count on readers willing and able to pay attention to his words.²¹ One crucial change in the structure of experience, I will argue, came with the militarization of attention that emerged in the years of the first total war, a war that brought mass arming on an unprecedented scale that was so consuming that it had to be fought through its civilians’ senses.²² As Mary Favret shows in her pivotal study of Romanticism and war, the pervasive sense of war at a distance in the Romantic period meant the transformation of society not by warfare per se, but by a militarization of institutions, social systems, and sensibilities, a transformation by which war invades thought itself.²³ In focusing on attention, this book dilates one especially eccentric way that war can invade thought, and expands the important conversation Favret and others have begun toward issues as far-ranging as scientific observation, reading, sympathy, surveillance, pedagogy, affect, medicine, and prayer—all of which converge in the unruly and undisciplined movement of a Romantic attention pressured by, but not limited to, the demands of war.²⁴ Whereas Favret shows how a number of Romantic concerns were affected by the pervasive sense of war at a distance, this book shows how one central wartime concern—attention—quickly and necessarily expands outward onto a wide variety of issues, since attention itself, even when the military tries to discipline it, resists containment.

The year 1798, that of Crichton’s Inquiry and of Lyrical Ballads, marked, as Jerome Christensen reminds us, "not only the annus mirabilis but also the thunderous dawn of the Napoleonic invasion threat and the heyday of Pitt’s repression."²⁵ From 1792 until 1815, the years that historians now refer to as the Great Terror, war and the constant threat of invasion put immense pressure on the cognitive capacities of British civilians, who were continually exhorted to watch and remain vigilant for an always imminent (though never successful) French invasion.²⁶ In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary finds the first written indication of Attention! as a military command in the publication in 1792 of the first official military field manual issued by the British War Office, Rules and regulations for the formations, field-exercise, and movements, of His Majesty’s Forces.²⁷ This text marks the first public, written attempt to use attention to regulate and systematize the movements, postures, and exercises of the British army, preparing forces for the exact uniformity required in all movements.²⁸ The manual instructs:

On the word, Attention, the hands are to fall smartly down the outside of the thighs; the right heel to be brought up in a line with the left; and the proper unconstrained position of a soldier immediately resumed.

When standing at ease for any considerable time in cold weather, the men may be permitted, by command, to move their limbs; but without quitting their ground, so that upon the word Attention, no one shall have materially lost his dressing in the line. (6)

The manual provides a precise example of those small techniques of discipline that Michel Foucault describes as the panopticisms of the every day.²⁹ The unprecedented militarism in these years made this disciplining an urgent and ubiquitous demand, since it was the first war that involved the complete mobilization of a society’s resources to achieve the absolute destruction of an enemy, with all distinction erased between combatants and noncombatants.³⁰ Thus, not just soldiers but all civilians, each of whom was considered a half-soldier, were asked in popular pamphlets and broadsides to keep watch and wait, providing a kind of prehistory to the slogan of twenty-first-century America: If you see something, say something.³¹ This militarization was so widespread, as Anne Secord has remarked, that even a quaker pacifist could advocate a system of education in which ‘every one, like a soldier, must be upon the alert—& like soldiers, all at the same moment—thus the attention is kept in constant exercise and no idlers can live amongst them.’³² Though a fixed alertness is certainly always crucial for military movement—Milton wrote of force united with fixed thought and Jonathan Crary has recently described the twenty-first-century search for a drug that will allow soldiers to remain awake for seven days at a time—the Romantic period marked a newly explicit attempt to describe, regulate, and standardize attention for military purposes.³³

Broadsides warning the British of an imminent French invasion asked for the contribution of all civilians’ loyalism, weapons, and—central to a consideration of attention in the period—their senses, exhorting everyone to strain every nerve in defense of our native land.³⁴ Alarmist broadsides often linked national security with a communal and constant watchfulness that enhanced one’s sense of danger, asking with reference to the potential invasion, How . . . are we to avert such horrors? and responding with the imperative: by feeling the full extent of your danger.³⁵ These texts directly linked the security of the state to a stretching and bending of its inhabitants’ nerves and senses, as though a communal feeling of safety itself would cause the nation’s political and military vulnerabilities, and as though indulging the feeling of alarm and fear—that rational sense of danger—might do some good.³⁶ Coleridge’s enigmatic wish to excite in every part of the British empire, THE SENSE OF DANGER, WITHOUT THE FEELING OF FEAR reveals the urgent yet confused demands on the senses during the period.³⁷ War, these pamphlets reveal, feeds off of an attention defined by the deadening of some kinds of watching in favor of others.³⁸ Romanticism, I will argue, sought to derail that process and reappropriate a mode of attention that, it turned out, was always more mobile and erratic than the state wanted it to be anyway.

This militarized attention quickly took the shapes of surveillance, spying, and alarm. What I say unto YOU, I say unto ALL: WATCH was indeed the watchword of the period. Watch and wait, the government ordered, for France of course but also for the subtler, more insidious emergence of French opinion.³⁹ A wartime watchfulness inseparable from fear, surveillance, and suspicion was demanded at all times by a new group of politicians who called themselves, proudly, alarmists. And resistance to this system of alarm, even simply in the form of an attention to something else, transgressed the political rules just as mental derangement disobeyed the discipline of the mind.⁴⁰ Thus Crichton’s diagnosis of the fidgets—that disease of attention from which every impression seems to agitate the person, and gives him or her an unnatural degree of mental restlessness—echoed the political malady of attention that proved so contagious in the 1790s: "the political fidgets. The patient begins with simple scratching, Noah Webster explains, satirically diagnosing what he calls this most dangerous kind of fidgetiness, and soon snarles and bites; he then becomes incoherent; and, in his last ravings, nothing can be heard but congress—treason—election—six dollars a day. All the world cries out, the man is mad! No such thing; he is only fidgety."⁴¹ For anti-Jacobin authorities, calls for political change were best dismissed as a disease of the attentive faculty.

Though the word fidgetiness didn’t arrive in English until 1792, both the medical and political diagnoses of the fidgets draw on the familiar, everyday problem of fidgetiness in readers.⁴² In 1782, the early Romantic poet William Cowper had written about sedentary weavers of long tales who Give me the fidgets, and my patience fails. He explains: At ev’ry interview their route the same, / The repetition makes attention lame.⁴³ Wordsworth’s complaint in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads implies that poetry—more particularly, his poetry—aims to correct and counter the effects of newspapers, urban life, and politics on how readers pay attention. This book will investigate just how this response happens in Romantic poetry, but we will not find here the predictable oppositions between an agitated craving for newspapers and a slower, calmer, less distracted engagement with poetry, or between frantic wartime alarmism and a detached, fearless, apolitical, and self-absorbed concentration on verse. There certainly was plenty of support for poetry’s reputation for demanding a more sustained and heightened absorption than other literary forms, and for its ability to refine or cultivate the attention of its readers. In this vein, for example, Coleridge wrote that there is no profession on earth, which requires an attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of poetry, and in a letter to Schiller in 1797, Goethe suggested that poetry demands, nay, it enforces, a collected state of mind.⁴⁴ And yet even Goethe’s affirmation of poetry’s collecting powers proves more disturbing than rewarding, since it is also poetry that isolates man against his will, . . . repeatedly forcing itself on the attention.⁴⁵ Over the course of this book, I uncover a Romantic poetics of attention that, moving beyond a blanket demand for heightened readerly absorption, uses verse form to explore attention’s conditions and its limits, its forcefulness and its finitude. This poetics experiments with the rhythms of reading and thus with the media and conditions of receptivity; it encourages modes of divided, doubled, and multiplied attention, in which it finds not a liability but a strength; and it courts a rhythm in verse between attention and its relaxation, between watchfulness and its withdrawal.⁴⁶ Furthermore, it does not shy away from attention’s oscillation between disciplines. Rather, the poems I discuss engage attention as a formal problem in which they find an opportunity to reflect both on how they will be read and on their relation to various other shapes attention takes—as affective receptivity or as military defense, as an attitude toward other persons or things, or as a condition for knowledge, sensation, or memory. By paying attention to the divergent ways that attention can be paid, Romantic aesthetics pivots on the possibility that how we watch might alter what we notice.

In taking seriously the affective, political, cognitive, theological, and ethical postures taken up by attention, then, the poems I explore not only experiment formally with the reader’s attention but are also about a variety of modes of attention and an assortment of attentive figures, including collectors, animals, historians, soldiers, shepherds, alarmists, hunters, naturalists, doctors, critics, children, and spies—all of which inform how these poems imagine the figure of their own reader. We might say, then, that they actively theorize the experience of reading in a time of tumultuous national events, when the distinction between how and what one reads, again and again, comes undone. And yet while Romanticism understands itself as molded by these other modes of attention, it also turns to form and figure to carve out alternative modes of attention and inattention. Both borrowing from and critiquing the attentive forces it collects, the poems I focus on offer new ways to imagine attention’s shapes, postures, and attitudes—new geometries of attention.⁴⁷ The Romantic poetics of attention that this book unmasks has many faces: it often dismisses the despotism of the eye in favor of the more precarious epistemologies of the ear;⁴⁸ it replaces a proleptic knowledge of what will arrive with an uncertain phenomenology of the foreign; it turns away from commanding prospect views and toward a more minute observation