Michael Nicholson

‘Common Distress’ analyses the visionary connections that John Clare drew between the ostensibly separate physical, formal, pecuniary, and meteorological dimensions of stress and strain. Primarily considering Clare’s first two published volumes, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) and The Village Minstrel and Other Poems (1821), my research explores the connections between harmony and harm as they specifically apply to the tradition of the distressed poet, Clare’s biographical circumstances, and the time of general distress defined by the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre, the effects of the Corn Laws, and the return to the gold standard. In ‘The Poets Wish’, for example, Clare’s poetics of distress encompasses lyric and labour: ‘Invok’d the muse & scrig’d a strain’. To be sure, in the wake of the Age of Sensibility, Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (‘The Eeolian Harp’) represented the body as a lyric instrument whose vibrating nervous fibres could be agitated, soothed, or tuned. Yet Clare’s experiments with poetic stress move beyond representations of the speaker’s body as a working instrument. Far from anomalous, the strains of the distressed poet envision birds, atmospheres, shepherds, and bards as simultaneously under pressure. Taken together, Clare’s first two volumes imagine a new, radically inclusive poetic concept of community defined by common distress.

Inspired by recent studies of Romantic botany and geology, this essay explores the intersection of the rise of the modern science of entomology and the insect poetics of the English laboring-class poet John Clare. Besides the formation of the Entomological Society of London (1833), Clare’s time saw the publication of William Spence and William Kirby’s Introduction to Entomology (1815-26), and John Curtis’s British Entomology (1824-39). Building on the common language that Romantic writers applied to the poetic imagination and the insect world (Coleridge’s “endless variety of form”), Kirby, Spence, and others traced the origins of song to insect sounds; moreover, they associated intention, mind, expression, and reception with insect motion and antennae.

Returning to the poetic entomology of the so-called Northamptonshire peasant, I argue, affords a vision of new nonhuman concepts of affect, language, aesthetics, and intelligence. A natural historian and descriptive poet, Clare builds on Kirby’s and Spence’s insights to account for the ways in which insects mediate between plant and animal kingdoms, local and global natures, and textual and real materials (ink and paper derived in part from insect life during the period). Coordinating the perceptive powers of the nature poet and the entomologist, Clare aligns the size, complexity, and camouflage of what he terms the “insect-world” (The Shepherd’s Calendar, [1827]) with the brevity, subtlety, and opacity of lyric form (Keats, Smith, and Wordsworth also wrote sonnets on insects).

Romantic entomology, which includes Clare’s farsighted poetic vision of weather-wise beetles, signifying grasshoppers, and ant architects, not only revises the “animal claim” that Tobias Menely has recently identified with the poetics of sensibility, but also anticipates present-day scientific discussions of nonhuman forms of rhythm, memory, temporality (the term “beetle” is an archaic word for “clock”), organization, and mass communication. To be sure, buzzing Romantic-era bugs suggest, on the one hand, the swarming clouds of universal pestilence, and, on the other, the juvenile microenvironments of minute ephemera. Simultaneously accounting for human famines and insect victims (the minute and helpless prey of the sporting boys and stalking birds whose songs scholars have more often analyzed), Clare’s insect poetics figures and anticipates a twenty-first century concern: a species capable of simultaneously representing the agent and object of ecological calamity.

Victor Frankenstein fails in his profession because he consistently contravenes three basic tenets of scientific community: observation, repetition, and transparency. Critics of Frankenstein have generally failed to recognize the socially responsible scientific values that Shelley attempts to define through the character of the creature. This article argues that Shelley's novel puts forward the idea of socially responsible science: cooperative forms of experimentation that reimagine the scientist's materials and instruments as agents, involve multiple points of view, and pursue mutually beneficial discoveries. Shelley depicts the creature's trial-and-error tests as the natural and instinctual antithesis of Victor's unnatural and artificial laboratory work; the creature's empiricism satisfies needs and solves specific human problems. Shelley's farsighted fiction promotes this vision in an age when the scientific revolution had made science truly popular. Her fictional experiments with the idea of socially responsible science enable us to read Frankenstein as a work of science fiction that offers both a utopian ethic of intellectual partnership and a critique of singular science. If Shelley's vision of a more open and reflective scientific community aspired to a potentially impossible ideal, it is one toward which she thought her age should aspire.

Mary Leapor, Mary Scott, Joanna Southcott, Lucy Aikin, and their peers collectively articulate what I call women's “superior secondariness.” To counter an eighteenth-century culture that represented man as “primary” (universal and originary) and woman as “secondary” (derivative and dependent), these poets posited the secondary not as inferior or less, but as a necessary, often highly desirable, condition of women's belatedness. Advocating revision and renaming, these writers developed a distinctive feminist poetics of improvement in order to express women's ascendency as the sex that comes second in time, whether as a refined Eve in relation to a rudimentary Adam, or as the revisionary woman poet in relation to the originary masculine classic author. Taken together, their rewritings of Original Sin, human origins, English poetry, and Britain's progress transformed the discourse of secondariness, often used to deride women's verse as inferior in the period, into a feminist position of power. In tracing the ordering function of superior secondariness from 1751 to 1810, the present essay returns to Enlightenment literary form to understand poetry's vital role in inaugurating the feminist projects of historicizing the associations between women writers and theorizing the gender of aesthetic production.

Herman Melville’s first published story, “Fragments from a Writing Desk” (1839; released in two parts in the Democratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser), reimagines nineteenth-century American narratives of disabled female figures. In the first installment, Melville’s amorous narrator, L.A.V., quotes extensively from British romantic books of beauty, anthologies that gathered the best works from famous authors. In the second, Melville critiques L.A.V.’s exuberant citations, cultivating an alternative aesthetic we term “silent eloquence.” This essay argues that Melville’s early diptych reimagines deformed texts and disabled bodies by means of a deaf woman called “Inamorata.” Inspired by emergent deaf American communities, institutions, and forms of expression, and literary works by an array of deaf and hearing writers from James Nack and John R. Burnet to Washington Irving and Sarah Josepha Hale, Melville’s first fiction presents an early account of the communicative power of difference. Inamorata’s various, artful modes of expression—handwriting, signing, gestures, and expressions—put literary beauties and disabled bodies in conversation. Presenting nineteenth-century American readers with a new aesthetic vocabulary, “Fragments” simultaneously anticipates aspects of Melville’s major works and develops a concept of beauty capable of encompassing multiple senses, modes of address, experiences, and ways of knowing

In their earliest works, Horace Walpole (Fugitive Pieces in Verse and Prose, 1758) and Lord Byron (Fugitive Pieces, 1806) built a queer temporality of fugitive time out of the occasional pieces and sporadic readers that Samuel Johnson first theorized in The Harleian Miscellany. These juvenile poets aligned several forms of fugitive print—loose scraps, detached fragments, burned books, and encoded secrets—and fugitive figures—political exiles, queer aristocrats, runaway slaves, and amateur poets (often themselves). Walpole and Byron redeem both carefree and imperiled fugitive lives by engaging two antithetical discourses of disappearance: languid, idle ease, and sudden, active flight. This discontinuous eighteenth-century poetics becomes increasingly racially coded as it crosses the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. Fugitive pieces linked Old World flights of fancy and New World runaway slave advertisements, collected works and secure colonial property, and literary selections and sugar cane extracts. In their surprising affirmations of an intermittent, occasional time that allies irregular idlers, miscellaneous fugitives, asylums for poetic pieces, and abolitionist accounts of disabled bodies, juvenile poets moved beyond their era’s straight narrative of imperial progress.

The present essay examines how the extraordinarily itinerant lyric “I” of the late Romantic poet John Clare constitutes a historical revision of the critical narratives of lyric containment and immediacy that consolidated from Victorian era onward and have recently been contested by lyric theorists of address, apostrophe, and history. Yet because Clare’s poetry critiques a particular historical moment when Britain saw itself as an enclosed island of enclosed estates, his work presents speakers whose irrepressible, traveling energies are not easily defined by any of today’s current theories of lyric. Clare’s revisionary “I”s stem from his sense that he had become as displaced, forgotten, and superseded as the unenclosed common greens of his childhood. Yet Clare’s alienation from the present moment of his writing also results from the neglect of his peasant poetry and his emotional sufferings as a semi-literate subject who experienced mental illness and was committed to an asylum. Together, these intense struggles against the historical, poetic, and personal pressures of enclosure positioned his work as out of sync with the chronologies and concerns of modernity. Clare transforms the poetic “I” into a haunting anachronism, an untimely vehicle that equally unsettles our ideas about lyric enclosure, apostrophe, and address.

A critically neglected short poem that focuses on the ancient custom of stone giant building in Cumbria, William Wordsworth's “Rural Architecture” avoids the monumental permanence and transcendent universality so often associated with Lyrical Ballads. An expressly opaque “local lyric” that refuses to preach, this poem reimagines the provincial form of the Cumbrian riddle to figure the habitual rebuilding of these giants as an emblem of regional resistance. At a time when Cumbria was increasingly depicted as an uncolonized remnant of a savage English past, “Rural Architecture” marshals Cumbrian dialect, tradition, architecture, temporality, and history to question both the exploitation of the Lake District's natural resources and the British Empire's developmental narratives relating to industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, and militarization. While emphasizing the difficultly involved in capturing an authentic understanding of the Cumbrian custom of giant building, the poem also attempts to relay this local practice intelligibly to a metropolitan reading community whose only likely knowledge of the region's traditions in the early 1800s came from eighteenth-century architectural studies and tourist guides. The enigmatic qualities of this lyric, however, have frequently made it hard for readers unacquainted with Cumbrian culture to recognize the ethical significance of the turbulent local history that informs the apparently inconsequential regional practice that the poem depicts. Paying close attention to the persistence of a Cumbrian custom that has undergone considerable mutation over the centuries prompts us to rethink “Rural Architecture” itself as a local phenomenon whose distinguishing character rests in its anachronistic desire to survive in a hostile imperial framework.

https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/books/news/2020-05-06-new-frontiers-for-art-in-the-age-of-covid-19-the-montreal-international-poetry-prize/#

A newspaper article on the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize competition, sponsored by McGill's Department of English and co-directed by Profs. Miranda Hickman, Eli MacLaren, and me.