Kleinneiur, Joann (Author)
My dissertation offers a new reading of romantic poetry based on a compositional poetics. I focus my analysis on Erasmus Darwin, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, all of whom had extensive knowledge of chemistry. Chemical motion follows the pattern of combination and change; this pattern was called "elective affinity" in the eighteenth century. In this period, chemists, linguists, and poets elaborated the analogy between elements of matter and elements of language. In the 1780s, interest began to shift from human nature to nature, which, in the case of chemical matter, could "act" by itself without human intervention, even though the matter was neither living nor sentient. The romantic poets sought a way to bridge the analogy between the changing forms of matter and the changing forms of language. The poets began to focus on the process of poetic creation and to imitate in their poetic process the pattern of elective affinity. By imitating the process of motion found in nature, the poets attempted to put their poetry in motion literally. Erasmus Darwin believed the literary trope called "comparison" was most like elective affinity because comparison brought together entities of language with resemblance to one another. Erasmus Darwin invented a poetic technique based on analogy, in which analogical ideas combine and change one another. William Blake closed the gap between matter and language through his chemical method of production, in which his poetry is literally produced by the chemical reaction between nitric acid and copper during the etching process. One of the most important chemical phenomena for Coleridge was crystallization. Crystals are matter that has organized itself from the inside out, so that form is not imposed on the matter, but organically co-evolves with it. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and "Frost at Midnight," we see Coleridge comparing the work of meter to the work of the frost, as his poems also crystallize by following a natural pattern of motion. I conclude with a discussion of Shelley's experimentation with an elective affinity of sound, through the medium of breath, or the taking of air into the body, in "Ode to the West Wind" and Prometheus Unbound .
...MoreDescription “I focus my analysis on Erasmus Darwin, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, all of whom had extensive knowledge of chemistry.” (from the abstract) Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/09 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3281872.
Thesis
Goldstein, Amanda Jo;
(2011)
“Sweet Science”: Romantic Materialism and the New Sciences of Life
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Amanda Jo Goldstein;
(2017)
Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life
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Jackson, Noel;
(2008)
Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry
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Gigante, Denise;
(2009)
Life: Organic Form and Romanticism
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Dahlia Porter;
(2018)
Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism
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Book
Amanda Jo Goldstein;
(2017)
Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life
(/isis/citation/CBB817048513/)
Thesis
Rispoli, Stephanie Adair;
(2014)
Anatomy, Vitality, and the Romantic Body: Blake, Coleridge, and the Hunter Circle, 1750--1840
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Sam George;
(2014)
Carl Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward: Botanical Poetry and Female Education
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Marshall, Ashley;
(2007)
Erasmus Darwin contra David Hume
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List, Julia;
(2009)
Erasmus Darwin's Beautification of the Sublime: Materialism, Religion and the Reception of The Economy of Vegetation in the Early 1790s
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Article
Sommer, Marianne;
(2003)
The Romantic Cave? The Scientific and Poetic Quests for Subterranean Spaces in Britain
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Thesis
Joseph Fletcher;
(2016)
Quid's Pantheism: William Blake as Natural Philosopher
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Book
Holmes, Richard;
(2008)
The Age of Wonder
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Book
Priestman, Martin;
(2013)
The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times
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Article
Bate, Jonathan;
(1996)
Green Romanticism
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Article
Brooke-Smith, James;
(2013)
“A great empire falling to pieces”: Coleridge, Herschel, and Whewell on the Poetics of Unitary Knowledge
(/isis/citation/CBB001253051/)
Thesis
Bridget E. Kapler;
(2016)
Gendering Scientific Discourse from 1790-1830: Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Beddoes, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Marcet
(/isis/citation/CBB101715752/)
Chapter
Elliott, Paul;
(2012)
Erasmus Darwin's Trees
(/isis/citation/CBB001421358/)
Article
Budge, Gavin;
(2007)
Erasmus Darwin and the Poetics of William Wordsworth: “Excitement without the Application of Gross and Violent Stimulants”
(/isis/citation/CBB001032680/)
Book
Fara, Patricia;
(2012)
The Ingenious Dr. Darwin: Sex, Science, and Serendipity
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