Abstract: “Listening to the Breeze: The Value of Romantic Poetry in the Anthropocene”
This paper engages with the much-noted prominence of air, winds, clouds, and breezes in British Romanticism in order to rethink the ecological value of Romantic poetry – a medium that authors around 1800 frequently understood as being ‘aeriform’ and ‘atmospheric.’ While my argument is indebted to a scholarly tradition that dates back as far as M. H. Abrams’ essay on “The Correspondent Breeze” (1957), it is particularly inspired by recent work which foregrounds the material-discursive dimensions of Romantic language (cf. Ford 2018; Fulford 2018; Speitz 2019), challenging the longstanding assumption that Romantic art sought to transcend its historical circumstances (cf. McGann 1983). From the vantage point of these recent studies, which highlight intellectual transfer between Romantic-era literature and science, writers around 1800 resorted to the medium of poetry in order to conceptualize atmospheres as ‘zones of indistinction’ (Ford) in which the boundaries between matter and mind, nature and culture, object and subject become cloudy. However, this philosophy entails that Romantic aerial poetry foregrounds the fleetingness of its own historical moment – its tendency to vanish into air and its anxiety to go unnoticed.
Connecting the value of Romanticism to ecological concerns posed by the Anthropocene, I argue that the airy atmospheres co-created by Romantic poetry are, in several regards, better suited to address intersections between verbal discourse and (real) atmospheric changes than the post-Kantian philosophies that followed it. To develop this argument, I examine how Romantic poems respond to changes in the atmosphere brought about by the economy of industrial capitalism. Focusing especially on S. T. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798), I also draw on Nick Hayes’ The Rime of the Modern Mariner (2011), a recent reinterpretation of Coleridge’s ballad. Engaging with one of Romanticism’s most prominent topoi, I enlist Hayes’ graphic novel to suggest that this is how Romanticism continues to speak to us today: as a ‘gentle breeze’ which tells a story of the long-lasting changes to the earth’s atmosphere that were inaugurated by the onset of industrial pollution around 1800. My paper thus considers the breeze as crucial to the ways in which Romanticism negotiates value in ecological terms.
Bio: Justus-Liebig-University, Gießen, Germany
Dr. habil. Alexander Scherr is a postdoctoral researcher in anglophone literatures at Justus Liebig University, Gießen, where he has also worked as a lecturer for ten years. From April 2021 to September 2022, he acted as Interim Junior Professor of Anglophone Literary, Cultural, and Media Studies at JLU; in the summer of 2017, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Alexander’s research interests include narrative theory, essay studies, fictionality studies, literature and science, and Romanticism and the Gothic. He has recently completed his Habilitation degree at JLU Gießen with a monograph that has emerged from his DFG-funded research project on “Essayistic Forms of Life in the Anglophone Novel.”