Abstract
Along with mock-heroic’s divided awareness, the ode’s rapt focus on the encounter of calling voice and invoked object, and nocturnal poetry’s experiments with sense-specific attention, eighteenth-century poems also probe the relationship between attention and time. Poets explore the possibility that prolonged attention to a scene—particularly to a landscape—occurs in discrete stages and follows a predictable trajectory. The perusal of landscape is of course an occupation of keen interest in the eighteenth century. As Tim Fulford observes, “‘English nature,’ that scenery of rolling hills, oak trees, green pastures, country houses, and churchyards overgrown with moss, is a creation of the eighteenth century.”1 Such a creation does not materialize instantly and intact but rather is composed piecemeal over multiple encounters and renderings. This bucolic terrain and the process of observing and describing it become a major pursuit of English poets in the eighteenth century. Although earlier poetry—the classical genres of pastoral and georgic and, more recently and locally, the country house poem and topographical poem—represented landscape, eighteenth-century poetry devises rapt and rigorous new methods of scrutiny. Eighteenth-century poets experiment with varied applications of attention to a natural scene, from fleeting impression to lengthier and more studied contemplation.
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Notes
Tim Fulford, “‘Nature’ poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. John Sitter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 109–31; 109.
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s Opticks and the Eighteenth-Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 36.
John Barrell argues in 1972 that contemplation of landscape, a growing interest among eighteenth-century painters and poets, is seldom disinterested or haphazard but, rather, demands a “proper procedure, which involved recognising the stretch of land under your eye not, simply as that—as an area of ground filled with various objects, trees, hills, fields—but as a complex of associations and meanings, and, more important, as a composition, in which each object bore a specific and analysable relationship to the others. This recognition of the formal structure of a landscape was not a purely passive activity—a considerable amount of jockeying for position, of screwing up the eyes, of moving back and forth, of rearranging objects in the imagination, had to be gone through before a view came right.” See John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 5.
Barrell emphasizes that such painters and poets approach landscape as always already pictorial. Indeed, he points out that “There is no word in English which denotes a tract of land, of whatever extent, which is apprehended visually but not, necessarily, pictorially” (1). Viewers impose a prearranged form even on a wild setting; they attend to the particulars so as to substantiate that form. For my purposes it is also significant that this contemplation follows a precise procedure—and requires the viewer’s effort and patience. Barrell argues that these poems prompt readers to take their perceptual cues from the poet: “a descriptive poem does not simply present us with an image, but, through the energy and disposition of its verbs especially, it can imitate the way in which the poet has perceived relationships between the objects he describes, and between those objects and himself” (17). Thus, he suggests, the description is not simply a catalog of physical landscape features but a set of techniques for apprehending landscape—what I would term techniques of attention. For a more extended account of eighteenth-century landscape painting, see Ann Bermingham’s Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
The ideological dimension of landscape contemplation is, for Barrell, the viewer’s tendency to manipulate and control the prospect: “The features of the landscape are, certainly, active themselves—they can snatch the eye towards them—but at the very same time they are being so thoroughly controlled by the poet’s eye that they cannot impose themselves on him or demand any more of his attention than he is prepared to concede” (22). Barrell argues that aesthetic control of landscape authorizes material control of landscape: “I think it is pos sible to make a connection between the attitudes to land I have so far been describing, and the attitudes to it which emerge as part of the Agricultural Revolution” (61). Description thus becomes a form of occupation. Another early treatment of eighteenth-century landscape discourse, Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), argues that the period’s pastoral heralds and sanctions landowners’ increasing domination over the English countryside: “an ideology of improvement—of a transformed and regulated land—became significant and directive” (61). Williams traces this transformation in eighteenth-century poetry: “the idealisation of the happy tenant, and of the rural retreat, gave way to a deep and melancholy consciousness of change and loss, which eventually established, in a new way, a conventional structure of retrospaect” (61).
John Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–2. To the conversation about landscape poetry’s authorization of political and economic power, Goodridge adds the insight that landscape and rural poetry satisfy a range of needs for readers: “In the eighteenth century, the demand was not so much for realism as for what might be termed ‘responsibility.’ Pastoral poetry could justify its existence, and the reader’s attention, if, in addition to its traditional ability to satisfy the imaginative need for ideal simplicity it could also, to use a modern phrase, ‘earn its keep,’ by teaching and moralising, by being ‘useful.’ The English mixed georgic poem offered just such a combination” (3). Goodridge stresses the capacity of eighteenth-century landscape poems to engage with local rural surroundings and thus to engage local readers. In part, because Goodridge considers how poets as different as Thomson and Duck, for example, debate the initiation of labor or respites from labor, he characterizes the resulting poetic conversations as earthier, more spontaneous, and less conservative. For fuller accounts of laboring-class poetry in the eighteenth century,
see Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
and William Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001).
Rachel Crawford offers an expanded understanding of prospect in her recent study Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), which looks beyond the prevalent eighteenth-century discourse of expansion to contained and vernacular spaces. She argues that such contained spaces, particularly town and kitchen gardens, also define the prospect-view: “Contained spaces began to receive the attention of the architects of space: building designers, gardeners and agriculturists, even poets” (5).
An early critic of eighteenth-century landscape poetry, C. V. Deane, offers an alternate perspective on the sudden shifts into attentive immediacy in eighteenth-century poems. Examining a passage from William Shenstone’s “Rural Elegance” (1750), Deane notes that “The evident capacity for detailed observation disclosed in these lines should at least cause us to ask whether the mingling of fresh and stock imagery has not been deliberately sought after, in order to convey an agreeably diffused effect—such as it apt to persist when amidst the placid and mellow profusion of an English pastoral landscape, the attention is arrested by some transiently striking scent or colour” (12–13). Although Deane is distinguishing between stylized, conventional imagery and sudden, vivid imagery, he shares my emphasis on the eruption of arresting moments in eighteenth-century nature poems. See Deane, Aspects of Eighteenth Century Nature Poetry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1935).
Theodore Reik, Listening with the Third Ear: The Inner Experience of a Psychoanalyst (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Company, 1949), 158–59.
Sigmund Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing PsychoAnalysis,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 356–63; 357. Freud’s reference “as I have called it” traces back to the 1909 case of Little Hans: “For the present, we will suspend our judgment and give our impartial attention to everything that is there to observe”
(see Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–1974 (10. 3–150) p. 23).
Karen Horney, “The Quality of the Analyst’s Attention,” in Final Lectures, ed. Douglas H. Ingram (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 15–32.
Robert J. Sternberg and Todd I. Lubart, “The Concept of Creativity: Prospects and Paradigms,” in Handbook of Creativity, ed. Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7.
See Sternberg, ed., Handbook of Creativity; Steven M. Smith, Thomas B. Ward, and Ronald A. Finke, The Creative Cognition Approach (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995);
and Patrick Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2003), especially chapter 3, “The Author: Maestros and Geniuses,” 59–86.
Colin Martindale, “Creativity and Connectionism,” in The Creative Cognition Approach, eds. Steven M. Smith, Thomas B. Ward, and Ronald A. Finke (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 259.
Roger L. Dominowski, “Productive Problem Solving,” in The Creative Cognition Approach, eds. Steven M. Smith, Thomas B. Ward, and Ronald A. Finke (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 79–81.
Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1926). Wallas first lists the stages on 80–81 but discusses them throughout chapter 4, “Stages of Control,” 79–107.
See, for example, Gerald A. Mendelsohn, “Associative and Attentional Processes in Creative Performance,” Journal of Personality 44, no. 2 (1976): 341–69.
Margaret Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 28.
See Ambrose Philips, “A Winter-Piece” (1709), in The Poems of Ambrose Philips, ed. M. G. Segar (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1937), 90–91. This poem was originally titled “To the Earl of Dorset.”
William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All,” The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, eds. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 1:183, lines 22–23.
In “From Classical to Imperial: Changing Visions of Turkey in the Eighteenth Century,” Katherine S. H. Turner comments on the dual strategies of Montagu’s Turkish embassy letters, which she says, “allow Montagu simultaneously to appreciate the exotic otherness of Turkish women and to evade the more problematic issues of freedom and happiness within the harsher realities of Turkish women’s experience” (117). See Turner’s essay in, Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed. Steve Clark (London: Zed Books, 1999).
See also Jill Campbell’s essay “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Historical Machinery of Female Identity,” in History, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994);
Elizabeth Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
and Isobel Grundy, “The Barbarous Character We Give Them” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 2 (1992): 73–86.
See Andrew Carpenter, ed., Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), 77. All references to Ward’s poetry will be cited by line number as presented Ward, “Phoenix Park” in Carpenter’s edition (77–79).
See John Dyer, “Grongar Hill” (1726), in English Poetry 1700–1780, ed. David W. Lindsay (London: Dent, 1974), 88–91.
John Dyer’s “A Country Walk” (1726), in Poetry of Landscape and the Night: Two Eighteenth-Century Traditions, ed. Charles Peake (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 93–98.
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).
W. B. Hutchings, “Can Pure Description Hold the Place of Sense?,” in James Thomson: Essays for the Tercentenary, ed. Richard Terry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 35–65.
Ralph Cohen, The Unfolding of the Seasons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 16. Thomson refers to lines 11–47 of “Winter.”
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© 2012 Margaret Koehler
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Koehler, M. (2012). Landscape Poetry I. In: Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313607_6
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