Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry

Abstract

Romantic poets, notably Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge and Keats, were deeply interested in how perception and sensory experience operate, and in the connections between sense-perception and aesthetic experience. Noel Jackson tracks this preoccupation through the Romantic period and beyond, both in relation to late eighteenth-century human sciences, and in the context of momentous social transformations in the period of the French Revolution. Combining close readings of the poems with interdisciplinary research into the history of the human sciences, Noel Jackson sheds light on Romantic efforts to define how art is experienced in relation to the newly emerging sciences of the mind and shows the continued relevance of these ideas to our own habits of cultural and historical criticism today. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of Romanticism, but also to those interested in the intellectual interrelations between literature and science.

Social minds in Romanticism

“…A good deal of affect's power came from the way that it seemed to match early Romanticism's discomfort with the most familiar enlightenment model of inter‐mental relation – sympathy – and offered in its place less internal and ratiocinative modes of social encounter with greater ties to the external, the interactive, and the shared. It is noteworthy, then, that the two books Favret included as pointing to affect studies' future – Kevis Goodman's Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism () and Noel Jackson's Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry () – both returned to the specifically inner character of sensation and subjectivity, and rather than seeking ways around it sought to socialize it to the core. Much of the work that has developed out of affect studies has followed a similar logic: like Jackson, to turn to the sciences of inner life and social awareness; and like Goodman, to make immediacy and “ordinary” cognition look a good deal stranger than it might initially seem.…”

Romantic electricity: Fields and currents in recent research

“…Several other critics and historians note the association between electrical science and politically radical figures such as Franklin and Priestley in the late 18th century, and build on this association to assert the revolutionary valence of electrical science. Noel Jackson () in Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry notes that the use of electrical language in discussions of revolution “was more than a merely accidental metaphor in an era in which the political careers of natural philosophers such as Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley were helping to fortify a popular association of electrical science (and natural philosophy generally) with radical politics” (p. 47) . As we have seen in the example of Darwin, the image of Franklin as an innovator was especially fruitful for celebrations of electrical communication.…”

“…To a greater extent than Byron and Keats, Shelley uses the language of electricity to account for the properties of writing, especially poetic writing, itself. As Jackson () notes, Shelley draws on a physiological idea, the notion of electricity as a vital spirit, and compares “the animating spirit of poetry to the workings of electricity” (p. 58). As Rudy stresses, Shelley's use of electric language suggests that like Byron he finds something enabling in the way that electrical phenomena resist quantification or even classification, as poetry too resists such taxonomy.…”

Romantic Evolutions: Introduction

“…In recent years, the field of Romantic science has emerged as a vibrant and diverse area of inquiry for studies of Romanticism, with compelling works by McLane, Richardson, Roe, Heringman, Jackson, Allard, Gigante, Kelley, Mitchell, and Fulford, Lee, and Kitson, amongst many others.…”