Abstract
References to attention abound in eighteenth-century English poetry. Often they are made admiringly, as when Christopher Smart praises his Cat Jeoffry’s acoustic precision: “For his ears are so acute that they sting again. / For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention”;1 or when William Cowper wittily commemorates the sparrows who associate a Trinity College warning bell with the chance to beg a few crumbs from passersby:
Sagacious list’ners to the sound
They flock from all the fields around,
To reach the hospitable Hall,
None more attentive to the call. (17– 20)2
Poetic references sometimes depict attention as pleasurable, as when Mary Leapor authorizes one of the first stops on her tour of Crumble-Hall with this enticement: “The sav’ry Kitchen much Attention calls”3 (56); or when James Thomson advises fly-fishermen to monitor their lines: “With Eye attentive mark the springing Game” (Spring, 410).4 Conversely, poets like Stephen Duck point out that not all attention is leisurely, as when the farmer summons his threshers to their task: “Around we stand, / With deep Attention waiting his Command” (“The Thresher’s Labour,” 19– 20).5 These and the many other perceivers who populate eighteenth-century poems—the “Careful Observers” of Swift’s City Shower, Anne Finch’s nocturnal “Wand’rer,” the chronicler of the natural world in Thomson’s Seasons—practically embody alertness.
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Notes
See Christopher Smart, “Jubilate Agno,” in The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Karina Williamson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), fragment B, 1:89.
See William Cowper, “Sparrows Self-Domesticated in Trinity College, Cambridge” (1799–1800). All references to Cowper’s poetry will be cited by line number as presented in The Poems of William Cowper, vol. 3, eds. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 223–24.
See Mary Leapor, “Crumble-Hall” (1751), in The Works of Mary Leapor, eds. Richard Greene and Ann Messenger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 206–11.
All references to James Thomson’s poetry will be cited by line number as presented in The Seasons and the Castle of Indolence, 2 vols., ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981).
Stephen Duck, “The Thresher’s Labour,” Two Eighteenth-Century Poems, eds. E. P. Thompson and Marian Sugden (London: The Merlin Press, 1989).
See William Congreve, “On Mrs. Arabella Hunt, Singing” (1692) in The Works of William Congreve, ed. D. F. McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2:300–302.
See, for example, Margaret Doody’s discussion of eighteenth-century poetry as “a seedsman’s catalogue” in The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 28–29;
Blanford Parker’s claim that eighteenth-century poetry invents the literal in The Triumph of Augustan Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Cynthia Wall’s book The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006);
and Patricia Meyer Spacks’ chapter on “The Power of Detail: Description in Verse” in her Reading Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
See David Fairer and Christine Gerrard, eds., Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
John Sitter, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1.
David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century 1700–1789 (London: Longman, 2003), 50.
Barbara Maria Stafford, “The Remaining 10 Percent: The Role of Sensory Knowledge in the Age of the Self-Organizing Brain,” in Visual Literacy, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2008), 31–57.
Barbara Maria Stafford, “Neuroscience and the Future of the Art Museum” (lecture, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, March 2007).
William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 1:403.
See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 227.
See Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language in which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers (1755; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1967).
Harold E. Pashler, The Psychology of Attention (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 2. Pashler is wary of “folk psychology,” which he says naively “postulates a kind of substance or process (attention) that can be devoted (paid) to stimuli or withheld from them” (2).
Raja Parasuraman, The Attentive Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 4.
Gregory J. DiGirolamo and Michael I. Posner provide this helpful gloss on selection: “Central to human cognition and performance is the ability to selectively enhance the processing of a salient stimulus, relative to less important aspects, in a complex scene.” See the introduction to section 5 on attention in The New Cognitive Neurosciences, 2nd ed., ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 621–22.
A recent textbook on attention begins (humorously, to my ear): “The study of attention is concerned with how people are able to coordinate perception and action to achieve goals such as successfully flying an aircraft.” See Addie Johnson and Robert W. Proctor, Attention: Theory and Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2004), 1.
David LaBerge, Attentional Processing: The Brain’s Art of Mind-fulness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 8–11. Interestingly, LaBerge notes that sustained processing confers less immediate adaptive benefit than accuracy or speed: “Possible remote benefits of sustained attention to pleasurable activities are elevated mood states that could promote more adaptive responses tin someone faced with a challenging problem. For a great many people, however, the prospect of devoting prolonged attention to gratifying, esthetic, or contemplative experiences at the end of a workday motivates their toleration of routine and drudgery in their jobs” (11).
Michael Posner, “Cumulative Development of Attentional Theory,” in American Psychologist 37, no. 2 (February 1982): 168–79; 168. More recently, Posner has reiterated this inclusive point of view: “Attention is being studied at the cognitive, neurosystem, cellular, synaptic, and genetic levels. No one of these levels provide an analysis of attention that both illuminates its role in tasks of daily life and prepares the way for a remediation of conditions. Only successful links between these levels can allow attention to be viewed as an organ system with its own anatomy, circuitry, functions, and deficits.” “Progress in Attention Research,” in Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention, ed. Michael I. Posner (New York: Guilford Press, 2004), 3–9; 3.
John Goodridge, preface to Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xi.
My manuscript pioneers a link between eighteenth-century poetry and the burgeoning field of cognitive literary criticism. Recent scholarship has brought cognitive science to bear on eighteenth-century texts, but most of this work has focused on the novel. Acclaimed examples include Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005) and her more recent Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008),
as well as Blakey Vermeule’s The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) and her new Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
Mark Turner offers this lovely justification for bringing cognitive science to bear on literary criticism: “Scholars of literature and art are highly attuned to the intricate workings of creativity, invention, language, visual representation, and the construction of meaning. They offer superb and illuminating examples that often make the intricacies of mental operation somewhat easier to see. They have well-trained intuitions about the intricacies of mental and linguistic phenomena, and they have ideas about meaning and form. These intricacies and these ideas have, for the most part, not yet penetrated cognitive neuro-science’s field of vision. They are part of what scholars of literature and art have to offer cognitive neuroscience.” Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 18.
Joseph Addison, “Spectator No. 412,” The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 3:538.
Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), ed. Derek R. Brooks (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 57.
Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, facsimile (1792; repr., New York: Garland, 1972), 24.
Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (London: Penguin, 1976), 61.
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© 2012 Margaret Koehler
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Koehler, M. (2012). Introduction. In: Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313607_1
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