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T H I N K I N G T H RO U G H P O E T RY
Thinking through Poetry
Field Reports on Romantic Lyric

MARJORIE LEVINSON

1
 1
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© Marjorie Levinson 2018
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First Edition published in 2018
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This book is for my children. First and last and midst and without end.
Olivia Anne Harris
Cecily Gwyn Harris
Daniel Levinson Harris
 Acknowledgments

Earlier forms of the following chapters have previously appeared in print or online.
Chapter 2: Rethinking Historicism, ed. Marjorie Levinson (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989), 1–63 by permission of Wiley; Chapter 3: ‘Romantic Poetry: The State
of the Art’, MLQ, Vol. 54:2, pp. 183–214. Copyright 1993, University of
Washington. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Duke
University Press; Chapter 4: Cultural Critique 31 (1995), 111–27 by permission of
the University of Minnesota Press; Chapter 6: ELH 73:2 (2006), 549–80.
Copyright © 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permis-
sion by Johns Hopkins University Press; Chapter 7: What’s Left of Theory, ed. Judith
Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas, English Institute Essays (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 192–239; Chapter 9: Studies in Romanticism 46 (2000), 367–
408; Chapter 10: Studies in Romanticism 49 (2010), 633–57 by permission of the
Trustees of Boston University; Chapter 11: Romantic Circles, Praxis Series (2013);
Appendix: PMLA 122 (2007) 557–69.
Permission was granted to quote excerpts from the following texts: Remnants of
Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan
by Ulrich Baer. Copyright © 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford
Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Stanford
University Press, sup.org; ‘The Poems of Our Climate’ in Collected Poems by
Wallace Stevens (2006), Faber and Faber Ltd.; Romantic Weather: The Climates of
Coleridge and Baudelaire by Arden Reed (1983), for Brown University Press by
University Press of New England; Foucault by Gilles Deleuze (2006), Continuum
Publishing, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

The largest share of my personal thanks goes to Richard Harris for all the reasons
he knows and some that I hope this note may convey.
The colleagues and dear friends who have been with me and for me throughout
are Geoff Eley, Andrea Henderson, Alice Levine, Jerome McGann, Anita Norich,
David Simpson, and, coming on later but no less dear, Sonia Hofkosh.
I offer thanks beyond measure to the many graduate students who kindled to
my ideas, as I to theirs, from 1978 to 2018. A few who count for many are Rachel
Feder, Rebecca Porte, and Adam Sneed. If thanks can be wishes, let mine be for the
survival of a discipline as intellectually serious and therefore as inspiring and life-
sustaining as this one has been for me. And in that discipline of the mind in the
world, let the scholars of this generation find their proper, honored place.
To Walter Cohen, who pushed me to finish this book and whose confidence in
me made that happen, the thing speaks for itself.
 Contents
List of Illustrations xi

1. Introduction: Crooked Lines and Moving Targets 1

PA RT I . T H E O RY: M AT E R I A L I S M A G A I N S T I T S E L F
2. The New Historicism: Back to the Future 33
3. Romantic Poetry: The State of the Art 67
4. Pre- and Post-Dialectical Materialism: Modeling Praxis without
Subjects and Objects 93
5. A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza 105
6. What is New Formalism? 140

PA RT I I . C R I T I C I S M : F I E L D T H E O R I E S O F F O R M
7. Of Being Numerous 169
8. Notes and Queries on Names and Numbers 193
9. Parsing the Frost: The Growth of a Poet’s Sentence in
“Frost at Midnight” 208
10. Still Life without References: or, The Plain Sense of Things 235
11. Conclusion: Lyric—The Idea of this Invention 254

Bibliography 297
Index 319
 List of Illustrations

1. Frost (Ieva Geneviciene/Shutterstock.com; Gheorghe Popa/

Shutterstock.com). 214
2. Speech balloon script from International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). 219
3. Diagram of the opening sentence of Paradise Lost. 230
4. Lines 24–43 of “Frost at Midnight.” 231
5. Sentence diagram from Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog by
Kitty Burns Florey, pp. 4–5. By permission of Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt. 232
6. Dendrite stones (Matteo Chinellato/Shutterstock.com;
Zbynek Burival/Shutterstock.com). 233
7. 18th-c fire grate, journal page, musical staff,
window frost, Aeolian Harp. 234
 1
Introduction
Crooked Lines and Moving Targets1

1
Thinking through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric is intended for two
audiences. First, it addresses readers familiar with the field of Romantic study
and interested in its development. Nearly every chapter—but especially those in
Part 1—considers the field’s changing ideas and methods and ponders the relation
between the two at various moments from the late 1980s through the present. In
addition to assessing these critical movements, each chapter invites viewing as a
kind of physical deposit left by a definable era of that thirty-year fieldwork. Like a
geological core sample of that field—a deep-drilled cylindrical section of a his-
torically layered domain—the book as a whole indexes an intellectual evolution
rather than narrating it. Perhaps at a slight cost of overall stylistic consistency,
I have retained the original voice and critical gestures of each chapter as markers of
its place within a thirty-year history of a disciplinary sector. Second, however, inso-
far as Romanticism has often served as the profession’s laboratory for research and
development of new topics, methods, and critical aims, Thinking through Poetry
can claim a degree of synecdochal status with respect to broader disciplinary work
in literary study. My own shift from a historical to an ontological materialism,
from epistemic to metaphysical interests, from a notion of literary production
reflecting and resisting regimes of commodity production to a more complex and
dynamic systems theory framework (wherein text and context, entity and environ-
ment, and therefore form and history are seen ceaselessly to engender and redefine
one another) dovetails with movements of thought in the field of Romantic studies,
which anticipates ideas and methods now current in the discipline at large. Similarly,
the themes that this book explores—for example, nature, agency, thought, singu-
larity, form—can lay claim to an independent general interest. Although these topics
arose from and, in each case, remain anchored to my readings of particular poems

1 “If there are obstacles, the shortest line between two points may be a crooked one.” Bertolt Brecht,
Life of Galileo (New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1980), 106. Brecht’s phrase is, for me, a
double allusion—the more proximal reference being the title of my beloved colleague’s work: Geoff
Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2005). It was Geoff ’s intellectual presence within Michigan’s interdisciplinary work-
shop—Comparative Study of Social Transformations (CSST), 1987–2001—that shifted my lifeworld
from Philadelphia to Ann Arbor. It is Geoff’s friendship that, more than anything else, has enriched
my life here for nearly thirty years.
2 Thinking through Poetry

(in all cases but one, British Romantic poems), my treatment of them speaks to a
general readership, or solicits this way of reading by specialists in other periods and
perhaps other languages as well.
Thinking through Poetry accordingly has two independent sources of coherence.
One is the narrative arc, spanning, as I have noted, some thirty years of study in
the field of British Romanticism. That narrative traces the migration of theory from
philosophy, politics, and linguistics to the sciences. My subtitle—Field Reports on
Romantic Lyric—with its resonance to both natural history and to physics, seeks
to capture the book’s conceptual center of gravity, its other source of coherence.
Indeed, one way to specify the migration I reference is from one kind of field to
another: from a field that is organized on a vertical model of relational dynamics
wherein the depth term exercises structural and genetic priority, to a model based
on part–whole and entity–environment relations, with field conceived as a surface
favoring recursive and self-organizing dynamics.
This conceptual structure (exemplified primarily in Part 2: Criticism: Field
Theories of Form) follows from the book’s core problematic. I use that term in its
classic sense, derived from French structuralist thought,2 where it means a matrix of
(a) topics, (b) axioms, and (c) either interests or aims that generates a distinctively
organized and interrelated field of problems or questions. All of these (topic, axiom,
aim) may be understood by reference to the migration of theory just summarized.
The key topic within the problematic of Thinking through Poetry is materialism,
conceived as both a philosophical term and as a widely shared desideratum for the
dominant strains of literary and cultural criticism of the past thirty years. Closely
related to the topic of materialism is that of nature (or rather, natures), in the sense
of constructs of materiality and otherness enabling (and more recently, and in real
time, so to speak, disabling) projects of human self-fashioning.
The key axiom is that the material (and/or nature)—its provenance, locus, con-
tent, and effects—is neither an essence nor a social construction (as in, either a
hegemonic or consensual projection) but a historically conjunctural phenomenon
in the sense of an objective convergence of historical forces. That being the case,
every act of materialist critique must first labor to determine what matters (which
is to say, how matter materializes) within a given conjuncture. As prolegomenon
to the work of reading, one asks what sphere, scale, and organization of life and
thought does the category-work of materiality at that moment and for that exer-
cise. What makes this a conjunctural rather than a presentist exercise is a concept
of the punctual intertwining of particular presents with particular pasts (a historical
logic tracing to Benjamin, taken up as a topic in Chapter 2). Although a quasi-
mystical aura sometimes attaches to that notion in Benjamin, in this book the sudden
conjuncture is seen as a function of uneven historical development, unexpected
convergences, and time-release effects.
The key interest making up this three-fold problematic is poetry: more narrowly,
lyric poetry and more narrowly yet, the kind of lyric that crystallized as the norma-
tive instance of that form in the Romantic period and that continues to dominate

2 Especially from the writings of Louis Althusser. See n. 12 below.

 Introduction 3

the cultural field. That lyric kind might be summarized as a drama of interiority
(of feeling thinking and of thinking feeling) figured as both combat and collusion
between, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “the mind of man and Nature,” with both of
those master-categories made present, exclusively so, in the verbal and rhetorical
fabric of the text.3 Here as throughout the book, I treat Wordsworth’s poetry as a
paradigm instance of this lyric kind, in hopes of contributing to knowledge that
may in addition prove useful in the study of other poetic or literary kinds. In biol-
ogy, such instances are called “model systems,” defined as “an object or process
selected for intensive research as an exemplar of a widely observed feature of life or
disease.”4 What the model-system method forfeits in sampling breadth it seeks to
balance out in depth of focus and in historical depth, in the sense of data accumu-
lation about one well-defined subject over a long period of time. Wordsworth satis-
fies both criteria; no modern poet has been the subject of critical study—particularly
of a formalist, rhetorical, and, as it were, grammatological kind—for as long and
as intensively as Wordsworth, and no other single-author set of lyrics concentrates
within itself as many of the defining features of the genre (of that lyric “kind”
described above) as Wordsworth’s.
A number of questions arise from the problematic just stated and circulate
throughout in the following chapters. They treat of: (1) dialectics (especially nega-
tive dialectics)5 as a model of individuation and as a method of inquiry; (2) pre-
modern pictures of mind and matter (in Spinoza’s terms, thought and extension)6,
and of the many and the one; (3) constructions of entity and environment, mind and
body, part and whole, and cause and effect developed in the physical, biological, and
computational sciences of the twentieth and twenty-first century; (4) the aesthetic
as a category of both resistance and absorption; (5) constructs of the human and of
the subject that are not defined by labor, desire, reflective self-awareness, or sociality
(in the sense of either the polis or its cultural and demographic subdivisions,
e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality); (6) the uses and status of models and metaphors
for exploratory purposes (over and above their explanatory function); (7) the
relevance of analytic scale (and of relations between different scales) to interpretive
validity; and (8) the concept and conduct of immanent critique.
The results of those inquiries coalesce as an argument—an argument for the kind
of thinking enabled by lyric poetry. This argument represents a strong, sharp alter-
native to what might, on the face of it, seem like a kindred study: namely, Simon
Jarvis’s 2007 monograph, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. For Jarvis, poetry’s special
resources for thinking lie exclusively in its acoustic and sensuous properties, its “song”
as he puts it.7 He argues that this body language, unique to poetry, properly repels

3 Wordsworth, The Five-Book Prelude, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), “Appendix 1:
The Analogy Passage,” l. 28.
4 Mary Poovey, “The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001),
408–38 (quote on p. 408).
5 In the sense developed by Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:
Continuum, 1973).
6 For Spinoza, see Chapter 5.
7 Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
4 Thinking through Poetry

all interest in “philosophical system,” a term of opprobrium for him (reductive,

mechanistic, opportunistic, etc.).8 I count as one central achievement of Thinking
through Poetry a rescue of the term “system” from the negative associations with
which Jarvis loads it, and a reinstatement (and demonstration) of the intellectual
dimension of poetry. The argument is for an enlarged notion of thinking, one that
activates the strange and special materiality of poetic language for a knowledge-
based but imaginative activity undreamt of in Jarvis’s philosophy. Studies by Daniel
Tiffany, J. H. Prynne, Sharon Cameron, and Branka Arsić are the gold standard for
this kind of work.9 All are instances of “beautiful work,” the title of an earlier
monograph by Cameron,10 and, like that study, as concerned to invent a discourse
for opacity as they are to perform, deliver, and explain the movements of thought
propelled by encounters with radical innocence, or, “what resists symbolization
absolutely.”11

2
My title phrase, Thinking through Poetry, seeks to capture the deepest aims and
most sustained procedures of this book while Field Reports, my subtitle, names the
critical genre on offer and identifies its sources of coherence. Despite my earlier
linking of Field Reports with the overall narrative arc (and Thinking through Poetry
with its conceptual structure), readers will note in the following discussion how the
two dimensions converge. The overlap, complicating what I described as the book’s
two-part, diachronic/synchronic format, is deliberate, and I signal it by loading
each of my title phrases with a threefold reference indexing both ideas and methods.
I draw on the multivalence of my key term, “field,” and of my hinge-term, “through”
(both discussed below) to explain a critical practice that imitates the book’s abiding
interest in models of form and becoming that surpass the structure/history, formalism/
historicism binaries which, in our discipline, are still hard to escape. Because crit-
ical genre (over and above critical aim) is something of a topic or at the very least
a leitmotif within this study, I lead my discussion of what this book is by saying what
it is not. My contrastive examples are meant to heighten awareness of the available
choices and also to highlight the coordinates of this study upon a disciplinary map.

8 Ibid. 4.
9 Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000); J. H. Prynne, Field Notes: “The Solitary Reaper” and Others (Cambridge: privately
printed, 2007); Sharon Cameron, The Bond of the Furthest Apart: Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson,
and Kafka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). In this latest monograph, Cameron’s study
texts are cinema and prose fiction, not poetry. Her critical practice here, however, as in all her earlier
work, is as intellectually serious and ambitious in its address to the sensuous dimension of language
as is the best work in poetry criticism. The same holds for Arsić’s Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in
Thoreau (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
10 Sharon Cameron, Beautiful Work: A Meditation on Pain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000).
11 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, trans.
John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
 Introduction 5

Thinking through Poetry is not driven by an overarching and unifying argument,

topic, or period-interest, nor does its coherence lie in the development of a new
theoretical paradigm or in the sustained application of an existing one. To state the
obvious, this book, like all critical studies, has topics, makes period-specific claims,
and draws on the discourses of critical and cultural theory. Its defining character as
a whole, however, is independent of those offerings. Similarly, although readers will
find this study attached at all times strongly and sometimes fiercely to the making
of arguments, the genre is not that of the intervention, either within one well-defined
set of debates or in relation to a loose general consensus about a particular topic,
field, or approach.
The primary materials provoking critical exercise throughout this book are all
standard items within the repertoire of British Romantic poetry and, in one case,
its afterlives. In other words, this is not an archivally driven project in the sense of
recovering never published or long neglected texts, or of contriving new groupings
for renewing familiar works or for making fresh claims about intertextuality and
influence.
Balancing the narrow bandwidth of the primary texts, the conceptual resources
in play in this study are many and various, especially with respect to their disciplinary
provenance. (In a few cases, these resources can be considered innovative, sampling
analytic frameworks rarely or never used in literary and cultural study.) However,
while I treat such frameworks as objects of interest in their own right, all are
brought on in the service of practical criticism undertaken at the level of individual
works and of the poetic form comprising them all: namely, lyric. Reading—the
core exercise of this study—is what generates and is made, in the end, to justify
what are often lengthy detours into bodies of thought that offer themselves as aids
to reflection. In other words, and as I said above, theory—in the sense of applying
or developing a particular paradigm borrowed from another discipline—is not the
source of the study’s coherence.
My subtitle, Field Reports on Romantic Lyric, condenses several references. First,
it indicates a location and a history. As I have said, this is a book that issues from
and reports on the field of British Romantic poetry and poetics in its development
over three decades—the span of a single biological generation and of several aca-
demic ones. My phrase, “field reports,” underscores the difference between a his-
tory of critical taste and an internal history of critical thought. Of course, all critical
work inhabits and is inhabited by its scholarly field and the history thereof. My
claim goes farther. Some of the chapters that are based on published articles, con-
tributions to edited collections, and lectures delivered at large conferences have
had an influence on the developing field of Romantic studies. Moreover, because
the procedure is, loosely speaking, longitudinal (where a population of primary
texts, selected for their possession of certain properties, is subjected to regular trials
over time), I have been able to turn that influence into a critical feedback loop,
generating reflections on the very changes prompted by my own and likeminded
work. Not just passively “of its moment(s)” and field, this is a study that, from
beginning to end, draws its institutional and intellectual situation—regarded as, in
the strongest sense, its condition of possibility—into its topical purview. Moreover,
6 Thinking through Poetry

it works its conditions of historical being into its method, converting the fact of
that inescapable entanglement into a practice of immanent critique.12 To be sure
(and, as is consistent with the foregoing claim), my understanding of both imma-
nence and of critique has changed considerably through the years, but what has
held constant is the goal of coordinating my epistemic premises and equipment
with their historical moments. If there is any “wise passiveness”13 in this book, it
lives in the recurrent relinquishment of earlier positions following their interroga-
tion by the movements of critical, institutional, and general history. To be clear, if
crude, the distinction is between an intellectual history conducted from within
and a history of taste.
In other words, the feedback loop described above is not just a happy accident
of what I called the longitudinal character of this study. Neither is it the sign of
either an ethical or a subjective commitment to a practice of repeated self-study.
Instead, the commitment is to the practice of historical materialism, which, fol-
lowing Perry Anderson’s isolation of the key feature of that practice, is not just a
theory of history but also a history of theory. Here is Anderson’s fuller statement:
historical materialism, “unlike all other variants of critical theory” (including those
that try to factor into their development the “wider movement of history”), “differs
in its ability—or at least its ambition—to compose a self-critical theory capable of
explaining its own genesis and metamorphoses.” A self-critical theory is one that
repeatedly plots its own “internal history, of cognitive blindnesses and impediments,
as well as advances or insights” (emphasis his).14 At the same time, it coordinates
this internal history with the changing field of external and objective determinations,
just as it rediscovers its political objectives in “the real movement of things,” redefining
those aims as required.15 Thinking through Poetry tells a tale neither of collective critical
progress nor of individual enlightenment or intellectual Bildung (self-cultivation,
education); it traces a deepening and widening spiral of dialectical thought, even—
or especially—when it struggles to move beyond dialectics.
For a helpful contrast, consider The Limits of Critique (2015), Rita Felski’s excel-
lent mapping of the discipline’s many turns over the past thirty years. The clarity
of Felski’s survey (and her disabused view of “crrritique”) is a function not just of
her critical acumen and her skill as both observer-participant and narrator, but also

12 For an extended treatment of this method, see Chapters 2 and 3. I intend a Sartrean resonance
to my word, “situation”: that is, a degree of constraint or unfreedom (arising from the histories that
are sedimented in the “practico-inert”) and at the same time, an opportunity for freedom to be realized
within and against this particularized experience of intransigence. The situation is never a raw contin-
gency nor is it utterly individual, despite its presentation as such to our awareness. Situation, as Sartre
conceives it, is always an effect of collective human action in the past or present, which is to say, it
represents a unification and totalization rather than a bare presentment. The term, “situation,” is
prominent throughout Sartre’s writing, showing continuous evolution from Being and Nothingness
(1948), through Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). Situations is the title of the essay collection
series (initially from Les Temps modernes) that Sartre began to compile and publish in 1947 with newly
augmented editions appearing regularly during his life and posthumously as well (Situations IX, 1972
consisting of interviews from 1965–70).
13 Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply,” l. 24.
14 Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 12, 14.
15 Ibid. 11.
 Introduction 7

of her overall retrospective and external stance.16 A view from the present is a view
from above, and the advantages of that view for the purposes of mapping are obvi-
ous. The view throughout Thinking through Poetry is, however, neither presentist
(the rear-view mirror gaze) nor radically historicist (viz., the fantasy of becoming
one with the past so as to channel its own self-understanding). As explained most
centrally in Chapter 2, the viewpoint in this book is, as I have indicated, conjunctural,
in the manner described by Benjamin.17
The word “field” has a substantive dimension as well as a situational one. It
names a conceptual impulse working through Part 1 and surfacing as an explicit
topic in Part 2. (See Chapter 11 for the most concentrated treatment.) The diverse
intellectual frameworks recruited throughout that section’s problem-solving exer-
cises share a common goal: the attempt to displace both classical and intuitive
pictures of subjects and objects, entities and environments, forms and histories,
singularities and multiplicities, and causes and effects with models of dynamic,
self-organizing, and recursive fields of spatial, temporal, and logical kinds. Thinking
through Poetry, insofar as it is a series of field reports, reports on field-theories of a
peculiarly “holistic but non-totalizing kind”18 developed in the study of ontogeny,
dynamic systems theory, neurophysiology, set theory, evolutionary biology, physics,
computer science, and (closer to home), textual studies.19
A third resonance intended by my subtitle is with the genre of ethnographic
field-notes and its now customary attention to the mix of embeddedness and alien-
ation obtaining between the cultural observer and her objects of study, as well as
its discursive etiquettes for incorporating that awareness into its knowledge-claims.

16 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 117–50.
17 See also above, Pierre Macherey’s contrast of “moment” and “conjuncture”: In a Materialist Way:
Selected Essays, trans Ted Stolze (London: Verso, 1998), 10.
18 William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); “holis-
tically but nontotalistically”: Mark Taylor, Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 12; “a general science of wholeness, which until now was considered
a vague, hazy, and semi-metaphysical concept”: Ludwig von Bertalanffy, quoted ibid. 140; “Unlike the
idealistic holism that sees the whole as the embodiment of some ideal organizing principle, dialectical
materialism views the whole as a contingent structure in reciprocal interaction with its own parts and
with the greater whole of which it is a part. Whole and part do not completely determine each other”:
Richard Levins and Richard C. Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985), 136.
19 See Chapter 11 for a field-theory model in the domain of textual studies, organizing the rela-
tionship between work, version, and text. For a sample of the language of fields, a conceptual para-
digm that, in biology, dates to the late nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth century (e.g., William
Bateson, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Hans Driesch), consider this, from Brian Goodwin: “A field,
that is, a spatial domain [in fact, on their own account, a spatio-temporal domain] in which every part
has a separate structure determined by the state of the neighboring parts so that the whole has a spe-
cific relational structure. Any disturbance in the field . . . results in a restoration of the normal relational
order so that one whole spatial pattern is reconstituted.” See “Field Theory of Reproduction and
Evolution,” Beyond Neo-Darwinism: An Introduction to the New Evolutionary Paradigm, ed. Mae-Wan
Ho and Peter T. Saunders (London: Academic Press, 1984), 228. And from Gerry Webster and
Goodwin: “Fields, conceived as dynamical systems and genetic or environmental factors, are supposed
to determine parametric values in the equations which describe the structure of the field. Such factors
therefore act to ‘select’ and stabilise one empirical form from the set of forms which are possible for
that type of field.” See Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 99.
8 Thinking through Poetry

Related to that, the phrase, “field reports,” is also a homage to one particular study that,
like this one, actively invites the ethnographic reference. That study, self-published
in Britain and unavailable commercially, online, or in my own research library or
its regional consortium, came to my notice only after my all-but-finishing this book
and thinking about its title. The serendipity is immensely gratifying. I refer to
J. H. Prynne’s Field Notes: “The Solitary Reaper” and Others, a study that weaves the
figure and concept of field into its form and content.
Prynne’s 134-page monograph takes as its sole study-text Wordsworth’s “The
Solitary Reaper.” The title’s reference to that poem (which stands “single in the field”
of Prynne’s monograph—“single,” but dispersed across it) and the poem’s own
narrative prime us for a certain kind of critical practice: one that stops, looks,
imagines, reflects, and then, “gently pass[es],”20 leaving the poem undamaged by the
critic’s meddling intellect. Readers who recognize Prynne as a major contemporary
poet are even more likely to anticipate what is sometimes called a poetic criticism,
wherein a performative mimesis stands in for research and argument. On this read-
ing, the “notes” referenced by Prynne’s title would be seen to imitate—“remediate”
is the more precise term—the musical notes of the reaper and of the poem that
itself remediates her song. Prynne’s study, framed by these expectations, promises
a knowledge-form for our times, one that leaves only a modest footprint, setting
no obstacle to overcome, no normative achievement for subsequent travelers anx-
iously or eagerly to reckon with, and involving no rebarbative critical gymnastics.
Both title and format of Field Notes (a numbered format, gesturing toward both
outline notes and textual footnotes) cue a descriptive, meditative, noninvasive prac-
tice of thinking with or literally alongside the poem (as in a marginal note or run-
ning commentary rather than a footnote) rather than about it—a procedure to which
I will return.
Yet this is not at all what happens. Quite the contrary: Field Notes is a tour de
force of intellectual curiosity, critical energy and edge, and wide, deep, erudition.
The numbered notes that make up the text come from the field, or rather fields
(they are legion) of academic, expert knowledge: general, cultural, and literary his-
tory as well as sociology, musicology, economics, and anthropology. Prynne works
these scholarly fields as a professional, doing serious and exacting research as pro-
voked by and brought home to textual particulars, and generating clear, sharp argu-
ments about the workings and import of both primary and secondary texts. There
is nothing of either the humble amateur or the facile dilettante about this labor—a
labor of highly skilled and selective excavation, not gleaning. The academic fields
mentioned above are the first-order “others” named in Prynne’s title, and, through
that field work, second-order others, in the sense of nonfocal persons, come to fill
the scene. Some of them belong to groups and categories that have formed the
traditional subject matter of modern anthropology (figures from premodern or
preindustrial cultures; or, contemporary instances of either incomplete modern-
ity or marginality). As I said, however, many others who lack that primitivist

20 Wordsworth, “The Solitary Reaper,” Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi (New York:
Norton, 2014), p. 411, l. 4.
 Introduction 9

cachet (i.e., high-cultural expert voices) also occupy the space of inquiry. Between
these two groups of subjects and interlocutors, Prynne “chooses not choosing.”21
Finally, I use the word “field” in my subtitle to signal a caution that has long
been foundational for students of hermeneutics (but that, with hermeneutics being
in bad odor, has been forgotten or rejected outright). By analogy to a visual field,
textual fields do not merely contain blind spots, they come into being in relation
to some particular blindness, peculiar not to a person but to what I called above a
situation (or, a conjuncture).22 Paradoxically, the existence of this blind spot (this
seeing from a certain position that can itself never be fully seen, or not until one
vacates the position) is the condition of seeing at all. If there is an ethical dimen-
sion to this book, this is its content—this stated and enacted insistence on the
interdependent blindness and insight peculiar to one’s moment of writing. Recent
challenges to this basic fact of cognition object to its presupposition of a textual
“repressed”—a defining secret that calls forth and explains the text itself as nothing
but the elision, masking, displacement, etc. of that deep truth. They also reject
what they see as the presumption of epistemic superiority on the part of the critic.
These challenges stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the uncon-
scious as defined throughout the psychoanalytic literature, beginning with Freud’s
famous revision of his structural theory of mind into a dynamic account. On the
dynamic account, the unconscious is not a deep truth trumping the false con-
sciousness of consciousness itself. It is instead one element in a dynamic process
through which different kinds and degrees of knowledge (more precisely, affective
representations) are related to each other. The goal of analysis is, very precisely, the
work or working of analysis, in the sense of generating this network of knowing in
a context where, for the first time, it can be seen, seen as (in Wittgenstein’s phrase)
one’s “form of life,”23 and therefore seen as potentially and to some extent change-
able. The correct figure of speech for capturing this kind of seeing is not “penetrat-
ing” but “planar,” or better (on account of the dynamism of the term), “topological.”

21 This is Sharon Cameron’s title phrase for the thought-style of Emily Dickinson, in Choosing Not
Choosing: Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For conceptually
and procedurally kindred projects (i.e., critical experiments that combine searching and often technical
research with procedural and aesthetic alignment, and sometimes mimesis, of values marking their
object of study), see Branka Arsić, Passive Constitutions, Or, 7 ½ Times Bartleby (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2007); Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), and Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); T. J. Clark,
The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006);
Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2008); Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2012); Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2016). See also n. 9 above.
22 Conjuncture, from Althusser: “The central concept of the Marxist science of politics (cf. Lenin’s
‘current moment’); it denotes the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination of the contradic-
tions at any given moment to which political tactics must be applied.” Ben Brewster, Althusser Glossary,
1969. https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/althusser
23 “. . . the word ‘language-game’ is used here to emphasize the fact that the speaking of language is
part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Philosophical Investigations, I: 23). Language functions due to
“agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life” (PI 241). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
wittgenstein/#GramFormLife.
10 Thinking through Poetry

Topology is the study of “properties of space that are preserved under continuous
deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending.” The only dis-
allowed operation is tearing; everything must touch everything in the topological
field.24 I prefer the term topological reading to surface reading for topology’s
emphasis on the depth of the surface itself, when that two-dimensional manifold
undergoes the kinds of deformation just described.25
Similarly, in Althusser’s extrapolation of psychic process to the realm of the social
and political, ideology (that is, the scaled-up equivalent of the Freudian ego, or of
consciousness itself, and, in terms of writing, counterpart to the textual surface) is
the way that individuals live their relation to the Real, a Real that materializes,
however, only in that relationship. Freud, Lacan, and Althusser firmly and repeat-
edly reject the notion of a Real (“metaphysics of presence”)26 that stands apart
from and prior to this process of mediation, the name for this work of representa-
tion and realization. Denial, splitting, and projection, by contrast, are names for
the defense mechanisms that generate the fantasy of an original, authorizing, and
independent Real.
A related error is made by those who allege that suspicion reading claims
epistemic superiority to its objects of study: namely, their own projection of a
double-standard for literature and criticism. The inescapable logic of a “horizonal”
(cf. Gadamer, “fusion of horizons”) and dialectical (blindness/insight) hermeneutics
is that it applies to all genres of knowledge production, the scholarly and/or critical
as well as the imaginative.27 Obviously, there are better and worse examples of the
method—that is, reflexive and reductive ones—but that has nothing to do with
the method’s validity. For Gadamer’s “horizonal” as a description of historically
and causally intertwined interpretive constraints and opportunities, I would sub-
stitute “field.” In place of suspicion hermeneutics, we might posit a field-theory of
reading.

3
Above, I designated Thinking through Poetry’s first source of coherence as a narra-
tive arc. As already suggested, read in this way the book tracks a major shift in the
study of British Romanticism, and, in parallel, it plots two distinctive phases in a
developing project—a project pursued individually but in ways that have always had
fellow travelers. The book’s section headings, explained below, signal this field-wide

24 Eric W. Weisstein, “Topology.” From MathWorld—A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.

wolfram.com/Topology.html.
25 See Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (London: Bloomsbury, 1988): “Foldings, or the Inside
of Thought (Subjectivation),” 78–101.
26 Originally used by Heidegger but associated with Derrida and poststructuralism more generally:
roughly, the assumption of a grounding, self-identical presence or primacy anchoring representation.
27 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1989). See n. 33
below.
 Introduction 11

shift as it intersects with my own interests. Not surprisingly, given what I have
already said, the shift (considered at both institutional and individual levels) per-
tains to concepts of materiality, especially as these concepts bear on ideas of nature
and the human, agency and value, practice and theory. This shift offers itself to
both subjective and objective description. The inner standpoint and the outer one
complement each other rather than coinciding or coalescing into one.
I give to Part 1: Theory (Chapters 2–6) the subtitle “Materialism Against Itself ”
to signal a focus on the internal contradictions emerging from roughly a decade of
historically materialist readings. The chapters in this section take their rhetorical
point of departure (and, at a higher level of generality, their governing problem)
from the debates that polarized critical agendas in the field of Romantic study
beginning in the late 1980s and extending through to the early years of the new
century. Formalism versus historicism is one such debate; humanist versus posthu-
manist orientations is another, as is what came to be called environmentalism versus
ecopoetics (roughly, thematic versus formalist, and conservationist versus radically
transformative approaches to nature thinking). At some level, all these debates
worry the politics of knowledge; all wrestle with the dialectic of enlightenment28—
too often, with no awareness of that fact. Is critical knowing a form of domination
and absorption fundamentally opposed to the aesthetic impulse? Or, is it an agent
of redemption, a release of the aesthetic from the frozen forms in which it has been
encased? Does critique flatten (reduce and traduce) the artwork’s human dimen-
sion, or does it realize it, as only a recovery of the poem’s struggle with and against
its original conditions of fallen social being can show? Rather than engage those
debates from the outside (from either a parti pris position or a neutral stance),
these chapters, which grew from ambivalence about and reflection on my own
critical practice, internalize the arguments on both sides. They do not “teach the
conflicts,” they enact them.29 In three cases in Part 1 (Chapters 2, 3, and 6) and
two more in Part 2 (Chapters 7 and 8), I bring on Wordsworth poems as both
practical demonstrations of these tensions and, more important, to anchor those
tensions in the literature itself. It is not just we, in other words, who anguish such
matters; the poetry itself (I would say, all the poetry we call Romantic when we use
the term qualitatively rather than merely chronologically) stages these debates in
its own concrete and situated terms (e.g., in its formal workings, arguments, recep-
tion histories, intertextuality, referential gestures, etc.). Because those terms are con-
crete and situated—because they are poetic terms—they provide a kind of traction
that is not, I believe, available through critical reflection alone. In other words, the
readings offered in these chapters are not illustrations, they are thinking through
poems.
Described from an inner standpoint, Part 1 plots a confrontation with the
contradictions organizing my own practice of historicism in the three books I had

28 The phrase entered intellectual life via Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of
Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
29 Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American
Education (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
12 Thinking through Poetry

published in the late 1980s, the last of which, Keats’s Life of Allegory,30 was decisive
for my move into a self-critical phase. My account of Keats’s relationship to the liter-
ary canon showed me something about the nature and origin of my own intellec-
tual stance, by which I mean my attachment to a particular literature of knowledge
and a particular literature of power. (I borrow De Quincey’s terms—Romantic
terms—in order to underscore my unselfconscious identification with my objects
of study.) The former—literature of knowledge—comprises the so-called “strong
critics” of the 1960s and 1970s who had shaped my sense of Romantic poetry, its
philosophical provenance, and its ideal theory-interlocutors in the present. The
leading names in this group—a genuinely visionary company—are M. H. Abrams,
Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Northrop Frye, Geoffrey Hartman, and, in a differ-
ent but equally charismatic way, David Erdman. By literature of power, I mean the
poetry considered canonical for Romanticism in the 1970s, prior to the robust
recovery of the poetry by women (cf. the Northeastern [formerly Brown] Women
Writers Project)31 and to the full-blown interest in and access (typically, digital) to
the period’s nonliterary writers (and to noncanonical constructs of literariness). In
my reading of Keats’s style as classed and gendered in ways integral to its accom-
plishments, I glimpsed aspects of my own formation and of my investment in
otherness and alienation. My picture of Keats mobilized a subject-form that fet-
ishized those deficits and contradictions, capturing their productive energy by block-
ing the movement toward consummation and integration. With what aim? I inquired.
To engender a kind of pleasant pain in the service of aesthetic and existential self-
fashioning, a process of “stationing” (Keats’s word)32 rather than mastering and
transcending, a style that I associated with the middle class—middling station—of
Keats’s day.
My allegorizing of Keats’s style rescued his own life of allegory33 and transformed
its conditions of alienation into conditions of achievement. The hero of my alle-
gory was writing itself, or writing under the conditions of modernity, with its
power to double the negative and turn deficit into plenitude, hapless transgression
into literary originality, everyday embarrassment into a high self-consciousness.
Beyond the triumphalism, I felt the gender implications of the parallel between, on
the one hand, the less-becomes-more, substitute-becomes-supplement devices
I described as Keats’s solution to his central social dilemma and, on the other, the

30 Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (New York: Basil Blackwell,
1988).
31 The Women Writers Project: http://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/.
32 In a comment on Paradise Lost, 7:420–3, Keats notes that Milton “is not content with simple
description, he must station.” (Quoted in Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1967), 142.) In Keats’s Life of Allegory, I develop a link between the sculptural poise—a kind of
moving arrest or motion without movement—noted by all who comment on Keats’s style and his
project in social stationing.
33 Keats’s Life of Allegory had taken its title phrase from Keats’s letters, where, in the context of his
reflections on Shakespeare, he writes “a Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory. . . . Shakespeare
led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.” (Letters of John Keats: A Selection, ed. Robert
Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 218.) The book’s subtitle, Origins of a Style, meant
to summon up and set as a critical model Fredric Jameson’s Sartre: The Origins of a Style (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1961).
 Introduction 13

logic subtending the many theory discourses that gave me my own critical gram-
mar.34 With Keats, I argued, a difference culturally coded as lack (i.e., his unnatural,
as it were, prosthetic access to the cultural tradition) gets made over into a signifier
and simulacrum of presence. The gendering of this story that I traced in Keats sug-
gested the historical and cultural overdetermination of my own ideas and methods
(my own subject-position, or the one that I had made my own, to the extent that
one chooses these things), prompting a searching and discomfiting review.
I looked back to my reading of Wordsworth, grasping the identification and
idealization mixed into that effort as well. My Wordsworth, as opposed to the cari-
cature I have been joined to (viz., my alleged denunciation of his personal and
poetic integrity), was a paragon of authenticity, the exact opposite of the hypocrite
I was said to depict. I argued no “choice” for Wordsworth, no easy escapism, and
above all no bad faith (as in, erasing the compromising evidence of contemporary
life and politics). What there was in the poetry and what I argued was representa-
tion, which, by the traditions cited above is always and by definition misrepresen-
tation: “misprision,” as Harold Bloom put it.35 There was only “seeing,” within and
by means of a structured field of vision. The seeing was unique to a position, not a
person, or rather to a position embodied in a person at some time, in some place,
and having those conceptual, affective, and discursive tools.36

34 I came to grasp that connection through Eric Santner’s Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and
Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). This is the burden of his open-
ing chapter (“Postwar / Post-Holocaust / Postmodern”) and it is sustained throughout the book: “ . . .
this obsession with death, loss, and impoverishment . . . is part of a larger, more properly postmodern
project that is equally concerned with the resources of what one might call a playful nomadism. That
is, these discourses of bereavement see in the harrowing labor of mourning one’s various narcissisms
and nostalgias a source of empowerment, play, and even jouissance” (p. 11; and see pp. 16, 18, 19, 62).
Also, p. 168, note 39: part of a long textual note on de Man’s juvenilia, where Santner offers this sum-
mary of Jonathan Culler’s commentary, viz., “that deconstruction, as a form of analysis dedicated to
the disarticulation of what one had taken to be natural and inevitable, is that mode of Ideologiekritik
which may best undo the narcissisms and nostalgias—and the totalitarian tendencies that ostensibly
flow from them—informing the Western tradition.”
35 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
36 My understanding of blindness and insight as dialectically codependent came from Althusser’s
cross-grained reading of Marx in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane, 1969), (with
Étienne Balibar) Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1970), and Lenin and Philosophy
and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). I flagged that, but
also expected readers to recognize the general shape of the epistemic claims, for Althusser was a theor-
ist of our time, as defining as Derrida. A problematic is a field of vision, without which seeing/know-
ing cannot happen. By the same token, for those who see through that problematic—as in, by means
of it—its outlines and workings are imperceptible. It is, simply, your way of seeing, your constitutive
categories, invisible if you are inside them (which is to say, if they are inside you). This kind of under-
standing entered American literary criticism and took on a more technical, language-specific cast,
through Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (NY:
Oxford University Press, 1971).
Because this is an important point in itself (to wit, Felski’s recent account of “crrritique”) and key
to the developing arc of this book, I take the risk of flogging a dead horse. The essay of mine that drew
(and still draws) the most fire is “Insight and Oversight: Reading ‘Tintern Abbey,’ ” from Wordsworth’s
Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 14–57. The bulk of
that essay went into parsing the poem’s problematic, reading it as consisting of folkways histories of
the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, of Cartesian excluded middles, of anxieties
about poetry and patronage in an age of free market print capitalism, and many other things. That was
14 Thinking through Poetry

Not only was my reading of Wordsworth not “damaging,” it was profoundly

idealizing and humanizing (in that Hegelian-Romantic mode so gorgeously tracked
through Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism), delivering a figure of the capable poem,
heroically conflicted, suffering the creative contradictions of its age and thereby
dying into life.37 Wordsworth, on my reading, took on the look of a new Prometheus,
to whom I repeated his own early words, that they might be integrated into the
amassing harmony. Similarly, from this belated vantage, I saw how my study of the
Romantic fragment as a historically distinctive (and historically expressive) poetic
form not only redeemed the brokenness of those texts by a practice of recuperative
reading, but credited them with a unity, coherence, closure, and achievement not
just matching but surpassing the achievement of the well-wrought urn.38 Less was
indeed more. Brushing against the grain ended up burnishing the glamor.

what the poem was about, I said; that was what shaped its sense of the still, sad music of humanity;
that is what mediated its philosophic themes. “Mediation” was a key concept in the traditions of
Hegelian Marxism and in the general discourse of materialist scholarship at the time. The doubleness
of the term was not just understood but mobilized for critical purposes. Like the verb “to cleave,”
“mediate” means both to divide and to connect. It means a “belonging-together-in-opposition,” a
phrase coined by T. J. Clark (“Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982) 139–56),
and one that I borrowed at the time. The picture of the mind did not abolish the picture of the place;
to the contrary, each brought the other into being. The pictures describe a dynamic relationship, not
two separate items, exactly comparable to the way in which, as I say above, the Freudian unconscious
is not a deep truth trumping the false consciousness of consciousness itself, but a process through
which different kinds of knowledge are related to each other. Comparable also to Althusser’s notion of
ideology as the way that individuals live their relation to the Real, a Real that becomes such only in
that relationship, rather than standing outside of and prior to it. The subject of my reading was that
relationship, that process of mediation—not the vagrants and the war, and not Wordsworth’s bad faith.
I will take this opportunity to speak even more clearly now than I did then, this time for a new
generation of readers and to respond to a fairly recent critique. It does not matter if the river muck on
the Wye commonly noted in the late 1790s came more from algae than from industry, or if the
vagrants or the smoke happened to be in evidence on the day or at the hour that Wordsworth did his
looking, any more than it matters for a reading of the “Eton College Ode” that fog might have
obscured Gray’s view of Windsor Castle; or, for that matter, whether he wrote en plein air or not. Here
is what matters: (a) what contemporary reports tell us about what could have been known or seen at
that time, at that place, by persons so positioned. Because evidence of that kind is rarely uniform and
never exhaustive, what also matters is (b) what we can know from historical and critical reconstruc-
tion, which, to the extent that it seeks to understand its materials, will show how inconsistent reports
(such as oozy weeds vs. pollution from the coal furnaces along the Wye) can both be objective. Finally
(and, I would say, first as well), what matters for the reconstruction of a problematic, or a field of see-
ing, is (c) what an artwork shows at a given moment in its reception history. I say “shows” rather than
“tells,” “argues,” or “narrates” so as to underscore the fact that the expressive medium in question is the
artwork’s form: its body-language, as distinct from its discursive dimensions. Does our reading of the
form–content relationship make more of the poem make sense (i.e., does it add to the set of things
that signify)? And does it make more sense of the poem, as in, a sense more precise, more vivid, more
complex, more moving, more generative, more memorable, more intelligent, more liberating, etc.?
Those three criteria are my test for historical validity in interpretation, not comparing one empirical
record with another to see whose is bigger. See Charles J. Rzepka, “Pictures of the Mind: Iron and
Charcoal, ‘Ouzy’ Tides and ‘Vagrant Dwellers’ at Tintern, 1798,” Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003),
155–85.
37 The phrase, “damaging reading” is from Morris Dickstein’s “Damaged Literacy: The Decay of
Reading,” Profession (1993), 34–40.
38 Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1986).
 Introduction 15

What I learned in the aftermath of the Keats book was the error, which was also
the truth of my readings (borrowing from Adorno, its own historical “commit-
ment”): namely, that its concept of nature and the human, and of art and critique,
came right out of the deepest arguments—I mean the formal arguments—of the
poems themselves.39 Literature against and thereby for itself: writing agonistes,
tempered in the crucible of its contradictions, strengthened by tactically deploying
its weaknesses, perfected by giving itself over to the humanizing labor of reading.
What was all this if not a lesson in the cunning of history, and topping that, the
cunning of art, testifying to the human spirit, fashioning itself through and against
its conditions of social and material being, at once negating and actualizing its real-
ity principle and, in that complexity, achieving autonomy? This was the condition
and the limit of my philosophy: this noble rider and the sound of words, this pres-
sure of imagination rising up against and precisely calibrated to the pressure of its
peculiar reality.40 In a fine new account of that moment, Simon Swift notes the
“emphatic posture” that “once shaped a whole generation of readings of Romantic
poems . . . highlight[ing] that generation’s claims for the activism of the critical act,
its Orphean rescue of blocked or occluded voices.” (He notes critically as well the
“vocabulary of restraint” circulating through today’s new reading, in this way mak-
ing room for his own focus on an “indefinitely suspended horizontality” in both
Wordsworth’s poetry and in the critic’s own posture.)41
Early in the Wordsworth book, I quoted a famous passage from Arnold’s essay
on Wordsworth: “Wordsworth’s poetry . . . is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature her-
self. It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but
wrote his poem for him. He has no style.”42 I used the excerpt to show the tran-
scendentalizing thrust of the long reception history and to challenge the seeming
transparency (e.g., universality, disinterest, ahistoricity) of Wordsworth’s represen-
tation of nature and, in consequence, of the terms of his dialectic, “the mind of
man and Nature.” The goal was to reanimate a corpus grown hugely abstract by
showing the richly worked, complexly motivated, historically specific, and affectively
charged character of its stylelessness.
Five years later, Arnold’s phrase—“as inevitable as Nature herself ”—came back
upon me, echoing with a strange new force. It amplified effects in Wordsworth’s poetry
that I had certainly registered in the 1980s but always as instrumental to the exist-
ential and epistemic adventures of the poet-narrator figure: the “becoming-sovereign

39 Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” New Left Review 1st series, 87–8 (Sept.–Dec. 1974), 75–89;
and “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991), 1: 37–54. See Chapter 6, “What is New Formalism?,” 89, 94–5,
96–7. There is a double irony worth noting here: first, that my critique of my own new historicist criti-
cism—an immanent critique of the commitments informing my working ideas and methods—goes
deeper than the many attacks on it; and second, that surpassing historicism is the dialectically royal
road to its preservation.
40 These phrases are from Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (New York: Vintage Books, 1951,
chapters 1 and 2.
41 Simon Swift, “Wordsworth and the Poetry of Posture,” English Literary History (forthcoming).
42 Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, 4.
16 Thinking through Poetry

subject” figure.43 This new alertness on my part was not, at this time, a response
I connected with either general cultural sensitivity to or academic interest in envir-
onmental degradation and finitude. Instead, I traced it to the postclassical science
research path I had already begun venturing on, where history got plotted on
entirely different scales and timeframes from the order of politics, events, and cul-
tural determinants and where the relation between form and history seemed both
suppler and more concretely realized than in the Hegelian/Marxian models that
had been key to my intellectual formation. (Prigogine and Stengers’s path-breaking
work on self-directing chemical reactions was my introduction to this thought-
style.)44 Arnold’s phrase threw into relief not the big bow-wow poems (the “great”
period-poems that I had treated in my book of that title), but the slighter, stranger,
off-center poems from the same “great period.” It trained the spotlight not on the
poet figure in these lyrical ballads but on the stony things in his way.45 Arnold’s
coupling of “inevitable” with “nature” opened onto longer durées than those that
had measured my sense of history, and it highlighted other human “natures” than
those I had studied: more precisely, other ways of being human—not against or
through nature, and not even in nature but rather, somehow (in ways I could not
conceptualize) of nature.
I assimilated Arnold’s “inevitability” as indifference—a less fatalistic, less easily
theologized, more neutral term, one that could accommodate history, albeit on a
scale that seemed qualitatively to change the very idea of history.46 The phrase,

43 At the time, I had no framework for articulating states of quiet being—in Wordsworth’s own
idealizing phrase, “wise passiveness”—without, like him, transvaluing that state of quiet being, which
he explores from earliest days. Cf. “The Borderers”: “Action is transitory—a step, a blow, | The motion of
a muscle—this way or that— | ’Tis done, and in the after-vacancy | We wonder at ourselves like men
betrayed: | Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, | And shares the nature of infinity.” The Poetical
Works of William Wordsworth: Poems Written in Youth; Poems Referring to the Period of Childhood, ed. E.
de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), 188, ll. 1539–44.
44 Ilya Prigogine and Isabel Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature
(New York: Bantam Books, 1984). In a self-directing chemical reaction, “there is no longer any univer-
sally valid law from which the overall behavior of the system can be deduced. Each system is a separate
case; each set of chemical reactions must be investigated and may well produce a qualitatively different
behavior” (pp. 144–5). Reactions of this kind occur in systems that are thermodynamically open to
the environment and where non-equilibrium can become a source of order: Erich Jantsch, The Self-
Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution (Oxford:
Pergamon, 1980), 28. The authors propose that “processes associated with randomness, openness lead
to higher levels of organization” and that “irreversible time” (that is, historicity in the working of
physical law) is not a mere aberration but a characteristic of much of the universe (p. xxi).
45 While reviewing the copyedited MS of Thinking through Poetry, I attended the 2018 MLA
Convention panel titled “Weak Environmentalism.” Three of the talks (by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Paul
D’Amour, and Susan Wolfson) hitched their reflections (on a slow and sideways form of activism) to
the figure of stone. All were superb, but I single out Wolfson’s “Stories in Stones” for its vantage on
Wordsworth and its sensitive reading. Her gloss of the “mounting stone” in “The Old Cumberland
Beggar” was one of several fine and moving illuminations of Wordsworth’s poetry.
46 Whereas events and conditions set the scale for my earlier sense of history, the time scale keying
my later interest chimes with the temporality of Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs, 1: “It is a connec-
tion found through the subtle progress by which, in the natural and moral world, qualities pass insen-
sibly into their contraries, and things revolve upon each other. As, in sailing upon the orb of this Planet,
a voyage towards the regions where the sun sets, conducts gradually to the quarter where we have been
accustomed to behold it come forth at its rising.” W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington, eds., The Prose
Works of William Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 2: 53.
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about, displaying their colours, poor things, to advantage, and
suffering cruelly.’[28]
Much more attention is now paid to the prosecution of the fisheries,
and the preparation of the fish for export, in our North American
colonies. Last season, an enterprising firm in Carleton, New
Brunswick, sent to the Gulf of St. Lawrence a vessel of 30 tons, fitted
with the necessary apparatus and well supplied, for the preparation
of spiced salmon; which vessel, after an absence of two months and
a half, returned with a full fare of the estimated value of £1,750, or
yielding a profit of about 700 per cent. on the outlay, with all
expenses defrayed!
A large New Brunswick vessel recently brought to Liverpool 100
boxes, containing 1,200 tons of preserved lobsters, of the presumed
value of £300, also the result of colonial enterprise.
The flesh of the sea-perch or cunner (Ctenolabrus cæruleus),
sometimes called, on account of its prevailing colour, the blue perch,
is sweet and palatable. They are skinned before being dressed. The
fish is taken by myriads, on the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts.
The striped bass (Labrax lineatus) is a very fine salt-water fish, and
so is the diminutive white bass, better known by its popular name
‘white perch.’ They are a very fine fish for the table when in season.
Their ordinary weight is from four to six ounces in September; they
are often taken above half-a-pound in weight; the largest seen
weighed above a pound.
A schull of the striped bass, 500 or 600 in number, weighing from 4
to 8 lbs. each, have often been taken at one haul of the net, in New
Brunswick. They ascend fresh-water streams for shelter during the
winter, and were formerly taken in large quantities in the Richibucto
and Miramichi rivers. The fish gathered in large shoals, lying in a
dull, torpid state under the ice, and holes being cut, they were taken
in nets in immense numbers, corded up stiff on the ice, like fire-
wood, and sent off in sled-loads to Fredericton and St. John.
The chub is usually considered a coarse fish, but those of large size,
eaten fresh, are very palatable. Mr. Yarrell says, ‘that boiling chub
with the scales on is the best mode of preparing it for table.’
‘The brook-trout of America’ (Salmo fontinalis), says Mr. Herbert, ‘is
one of the most beautiful creatures in form, colour, and motion that
can be imagined. There is no sportsman, actuated by the true
animus of the pursuit, who would not prefer basketing a few brace of
good trout, to taking a cart-load of the coarser and less game
denizens of the water. His wariness, his timidity, his extreme
cunning, the impossibility of taking him in clear and much fished
waters, except with the slenderest and most delicate tackle—his
boldness and vigour after being hooked, and his excellence on the
table, place him without dispute next to the salmon alone, as the first
of fresh-water fishes. The pursuit of him leads into the loveliest
scenery of the land, and the season at which he is fished for is the
most delightful portion of the year.’
The sea-trout of the basin of Bonaventura are of large size, 3 lbs.
and upwards, brilliantly white, in fine condition, very fine and well
flavoured.
The summer gaspereaux, or alewives, (Alosa tyrannus) are an
exceedingly fat fish, and well flavoured; the only objection to them is
their oily richness. Besides their being fatter, they are smaller and
more yellow in colour than the spring fish.
To the epicure, a fresh caught salmon-trout of the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, especially early in the season, will always afford a rich
treat. The flesh is of a brilliant pink colour, and most excellent: its
exceeding fatness early in the season, when it first enters the mixed
water of the estuaries, is such that it can be preserved fresh but a
very short time. The sportsman will find it a thoroughly game fish;
rising well at a brilliant fly of scarlet ibis and gold, and affording sport
second only to salmon fishing. In some parts of the Gulf they have
been caught weighing 5 to 7 lbs.
That beautiful and savoury fish, the smelt, is a great table delicacy
with us; but on the Gulf coasts of New Brunswick, large quantities
are used every season merely for manure.
As food, the skate is held in very different degrees of estimation in
different places. In London, large quantities are consumed, and
crimped skate is considered delicate and well flavoured; but on some
parts of the English coast, although caught in considerable numbers,
the flesh is seldom eaten, and is only used for baiting lobster pots.
The French are great consumers of the skate; and its flesh is used
extensively both at New York and Boston. By many it is deemed a
great delicacy. After the fish is skinned, the fleshy part of the huge
pectoral fins, which is beautifully white, is cut into long thin slips,
about an inch wide; these are rolled like ribbon, and dressed in that
form.
The capelan (Mallotus villosus), the smallest species of the salmon
family, possesses like the smelt the cucumber smell, but it differs
from the smelt in never entering fresh-water streams. As an article of
bait for cod, and other fish of that class, the capelan is a fish of much
importance; whenever abundant, the cod-fishing is excellent. It has
been found as far north in the arctic region as man has yet
penetrated; and it forms so important an article of food in Greenland,
that it has been termed the daily bread of the natives. In
Newfoundland, it is dried in large quantities, and exported to London,
where it is sold principally in the oyster shops.
The large, flat-fish known as the halibut (Hippoglossus vulgaris),
which sometimes attains the weight of 300 lbs, is often taken by the
cod-fishers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. These fish are cut in slices,
and pickled in barrels, in which state they sell at half the price of the
best herrings. The flesh, though white and firm, is dry, and the
muscular fibres coarse. The fins and flaps are however esteemed
delicacies.
The mackerel of the British North American coasts is of a much finer
flavour than those caught on the shores of Europe.
The salmon are also noted for their very fine flavour.
If there are no turbot, brill, or sole, in the St. Lawrence, there are
other delicacies. A species of eel is exceedingly abundant and
frequently of large size. One of these, a sea-eel, split, salted, and
smoked, without the head, was 30 inches in length, and 15 inches in
diameter, breadth as split, nearly the size of an ordinary smoked
salmon and quite as thick. 300 barrels of large eels, taken with the
spear in the Buctouche river, are usually salted-down for winter use.
They are generally excessively fat, the flesh very white and
exceedingly well flavoured. Packages of eels have been lately
imported into London from Prince Edward’s Island. Smoked eels are
very delicious, and they have even begun to preserve these fish thus
at Port Phillip.
The fisheries of the North American lakes and rivers are not
prosecuted as they might be, but are beginning to receive more
attention. The white-fish (Corregonus albus) is found in all the deep
lakes west of the Mississippi, and indeed from Lake Erie to the Polar
Sea. That which is taken in Leech Lake is said by amateurs to be
more highly flavoured than even that of Lake Superior. There is
another species of this fish, called by the Indians tuliby or ottuniby
(Corregonus artidi), which resembles it, but is much less esteemed.
Both species furnish a wholesome and palatable food.
The French Canadians call this fish Poisson Pointu, and the English
term them ‘gizzard fish.’ The origin of the latter name appears to be,
that the fish feeds largely on fresh-water shell fish and shelly
molluscs; and its stomach thereby gains an extraordinary thickness,
and resembles the gizzard of a fowl. The stomach, when cleaned
and boiled, is a favourite morsel with the Canadian voyageurs.
The white-fish of the bays and lakes of Canada is represented to be
the finest fish in the world by the Canadians. The flavour of it is
incomparable, especially when split open and fried with eggs and
crumbs of bread. They weigh on the average about 2 lbs. each when
cleaned—100 of them filling a good sized barrel. Those caught in
Lake Huron are more highly prized than any others.
Several Indian tribes mainly subsist upon this fish, and it forms the
principal food at many of the fur posts for eight or nine months of the
year, the supply of other articles of diet being scanty and casual. Its
usual weight in the northern regions is from 2 to 3 lbs., but it has
been taken in the clear, deep, and cold waters of Lake Huron, of the
weight of 13 lbs. The largest seen in the vicinity of Hudson’s Bay
weighed between 4 and 5 lbs., and measured 20 inches in length,
and 4 in depth. One of 7 lbs. weight, caught in Lake Huron, was 27
inches long.
Among other species of fish that inhabit these great inland seas are
the mashkinonge, or mashkilonge, the pike or jack, the pickerel or
gilt carp, the perch, and a species of trout called by the Chippeways,
namogus.
A huge mashkilonge, so ravenous is its propensities, is often caught
from the stern of a steamer in full speed, by throwing out a strong
line with a small tin fish attached. A marked peculiarity of most of the
Lake fish is the quantity of fat, resembling that of quadrupeds, which
they contain, entirely different from the salt-water fish—while their
flavor differs from that of the latter, being much more delicate and
white than that of river fish.
Lake Superior abounds with fish, particularly trout, sturgeon, and
white-fish, which are caught at all seasons and in large quantities. Of
these the trout, weighing from 12 to 50 lbs., and the white-fish,
weighing often over 20 lbs., are perhaps the most important.
The salmon trout are equally large, weighing from 10 to 70 lbs.
Lake Champlain also abounds with fish, among which are salmon,
lake-shad, pike, and other fish.
The reciprocity treaty has given a new field to the fisheries on the
Canada side of Lake Huron. Some 200 American fishermen are now
engaged within fifty miles each side of Goderich in the business.
This has greatly stimulated the Cannucks, and it is estimated 400 of
them are now engaged in the same business. About 100 miles of the
Lake shore is lined with gill nets and seines. Every boat that comes
in has a large number of salmon-trout from 30 to 50 lbs. weight.
White-fish are very large. The fish caught at Collingwood terminus of
the northern railway, from Toronto, are packed in ice, and go to
Oswego, Rome, Utica, Albany, and New York. Great quantities taken
at Goderich go in ice from thence to Cleveland and Cincinnati.
The Toronto and Oswego markets are supplied with fish from
Collingwood, and a well organized company, with nets, ice-houses,
&c., might do a fine business by supplying the New York, Boston,
and other American markets, daily with trout, bass, and white-fish
from the waters of Georgian Bay.
Fishing with the scoop net is the most laborious of all modes of
fishing. It was found in practice at the Sault St. Marie by the Baron
De Hortan, when he penetrated to that point in 1684. It has been
practised ever since, because it is the only mode by which the white-
fish can be taken. They go there to feed and not to spawn; the
bottom of the river is a rocky broken ground, and the current runs at
the rate of 12 miles per hour; the eddy in which the fish are found is
of small circuit, and only one canoe at a time can enter it. The canoe
is forced into it by setting poles. The man in the bow has a scoop
net, the handle to which is about 15 feet in length. He has only time
to make one stroke with the scoop, the next instant the canoe is
whirled away by the current far below the point where the stroke was
made.
The plunge of the scoop may be successful or not according to
chance; one fish or half-a-dozen may be taken, or very frequently
none. As soon as one canoe is thus swept away, another one
supplies its place, and in this manner some eight or ten canoes in
rapid succession take their turn. Canoes are used because, being
lighter, they can be forced up where it would not be possible to put a
boat. Even though the white-fish would take the hook, still in such
rapid water it could not be used.
Again, the character of nearly the whole of the coasts of Lakes
Huron and Superior forbids any other mode of fishing than by gill
nets.
Gill nets are often set in 60 feet of water, and the fish cannot be
taken at such localities in any other mode, except at some seasons
of the year when they will take the hook.
Again, there are localities along Lake Superior, where fish such as
the rock sturgeon and mashkilonge can only be taken with the spear,
and that in 30 feet water; the bottom is so disturbed, distorted,
upheaved, and broken by volcanic action, that gill nets cannot be
used, and the fish can only be reached in the hollows, crevices, and
chasms of the rock where they lie, by means of a spear, which is
thrown and has a line attached to the extremity.
The Lake Superior Journal says:—‘Angling through the ice to a
depth of 30 fathoms of water is a novel mode of fishing somewhat
peculiar to this peculiar region of the world. It is carrying the war into
fishdom with a vengeance, and is denounced, no doubt, in the
communities on the bottoms of these northern lakes as a scaly piece
of warfare. The large and splendid salmon-trout of these waters have
no peace; in the summer they are enticed into the deceitful meshes
of the gill-net, and in the winter, when they hide themselves in the
deep caverns of the lakes, with fifty fathoms of water above their
heads, and a defence of ice two or three feet in thickness on the top
of that, they are tempted to destruction by the fatal hook. Large
numbers of these trout are caught every winter in this way on Lake
Superior. The Indian, always skilled in the fishing business, knows
exactly where to find them and how to kill them. The whites make
excursions out on the Lake in pleasant weather to enjoy this sport.
There is a favourite resort for both fish and fishermen near Gros
Cap, at the entrance of Lake Superior, through the rocky gateway
between Gros Cap and Point Iroquois, about 18 miles above the
Sault, and many a large trout at this point is pulled up from its warm
bed at the bottom of the Lake in winter, and made to bite the cold ice
in this upper world. To see one of these fine fish, four or five feet in
length, and weighing half as much as a man, floundering on the
snow and ice, weltering and freezing to death in its own blood,
oftentimes moves the heart of the fisherman to expressions of pity.
The modus operandi in this kind of great trout fishing is novel in the
extreme, and could a stranger to the business overlook at a distance
a party engaged in the sport, he would certainly think they were mad,
or each one making foot-races against time. A hole is made through
the ice, smooth and round, and the fisherman drops down his large
hook, baited with a small herring, pork, or other meat, and when he
ascertains the right depth, he waits—with fisherman’s luck—some
time for a bite, which in this case is a pull altogether, for the
fisherman throws the line over his shoulders and walks from the hole
at the top of his speed till the fish bounds out on the ice. I have
known of as many as fifty of these splendid trout caught in this way
by a single fisherman in a single day; it is thus a great source of
pleasure and a valuable resource of food, especially in Lent; and the
most scrupulous anti-pork believers might here ‘down pork and up
fish’ without any offence to conscience.’
The Cleveland Plain-dealer has a lengthy account of the trade of the
house of J. M. Craw and Son, of that city. It says:—‘At the
warehouse, 133, River street, in this city, is a grand depôt of its
receipts. From this place large supplies of salt provisions,
fisherman’s tackle, seines, lines, and everything needed on the
coasts of the upper lakes, are forwarded. At Washington Harbour, in
Green Bay, engagements are made with the fishermen of 118 boats,
each of which has a head fisherman, who has his crew engaged in
fishing. Over 300 men are constantly engaged, spring and fall, in that
locality in catching, packing, and forwarding fish. Similar settlements
of fishermen are scattered all along the coasts of Lakes Michigan,
Superior, Huron, and Erie. The number of varieties of Lake fish fit for
packing is large, including white-fish, siskawit, trout, pickerel, cat-
fish, bass, herring, perch, shad, and bayfish. The amount of fish
received by Craw and Son, in 1856, exceeded 14,000 barrels, and
as their receipts this year from Lake Michigan will be about 6,000
barrels, an increased aggregate is anticipated. This large amount is
so much added to the food of the country, and constitutes an
important addition to its wealth. From the details of this single house
we may learn something of the extent of the entire trade.’
In the Baikal Lake, Siberia, there is a fish (Callyonimus Baicalensis)
from four to six inches long, so very fat, that it melts before the fire
like butter. It yields an oil sold to great advantage to the Chinese.
The Lake Superior Journal, of October 27, notices the arrival of a
100 barrels of the famous siskawit from Isle Royale, and learns from
one of the fishermen that there have been caught this season
between 300 and 400 barrels of this fish, together with a few trout
and white fish. They fish on that island for this fish principally, as the
siskawit are worth as much again as whitefish and mackinac trout in
the lake markets.—The siskawit is said to be the fattest fish that
swims, either in fresh or salt water. The fishermen assert, that one of
these fish, when hung up by the tail in the hot sun of a summer day,
will melt and entirely disappear, except the bones. In putting up
about 50 barrels this season, one of the fishermen made two and a
half barrels of oil from the heads and ‘leaf fat’ alone, without the least
injury to the marketableness of the fish. Besides this leaf fat, the fat
or oil is disseminated ‘in a layer of fat and a layer of lean’ throughout
the fish. They are too fat to be eaten fresh, and are put up for market
like whitefish and trout.
‘Fish being here very scarce,’ (Falls of the Uaupés,) ‘we were
obliged,’ says Mr. Wallace, ‘to live almost entirely on fowls, which,
though very nice when well roasted, and with the accompaniment of
ham and gravy, are rather tasteless, simply boiled or stewed, with no
variation in the cookery, and without vegetables.
‘I had now got so thoroughly into the life of this part of the country,
that like everybody else here, I preferred fish to every other article of
food. One never tires, and I must again repeat, that I believe there
are fish here superior to any in the world.
‘Our fowls cost us about a penny each, paid in fish-hooks or salt, so
that they are not such expensive food as they would be at home. In
fact, if a person buys his hooks, salt, and other things in Para, where
they are about half the price they are in Barra, the price of a fowl will
not exceed a halfpenny; and fish, pacovas, and other eatables that
this country produces, in the same proportion.
‘Many of the fish of the Rio Negro are of a most excellent flavour,
surpassing anything I have tasted in England, either from the fresh
or the salt waters; and many species have real fat, which renders the
water they are boiled in a rich and agreeable broth. Not a drop of this
is wasted, but with a little pepper and farinha is all consumed, with
as much relish as if it were the most delicate soup.’[29]
Pirarucú, the dried fish, which with farinha forms the chief
subsistence of the native population of Brazil, and in the interior is
the only thing to be obtained, resembles in appearance nothing
eatable, looking as much like a dry cow-hide, grated up into fibres,
and dressed into cakes, as anything I can compare it with. When
eaten, it is boiled or slightly roasted, pulled to pieces and mixed with
vinegar, oil, pepper, onions, and farinha, and altogether forms a very
savoury mess for a person with a good appetite and a strong
stomach.
If we pass to the Pacific coasts of South America, we find the most
esteemed fish are the robalo, the corvino, the lisa, and the king-fish.
The robalo (Esox Chilensis, Hemiramphus Brazillensis of Cuvier,) is
nearly of a cylindrical form, and from two to three feet long. It is
coated with angular scales of a golden colour upon the back, and
silver on the belly; the fins are soft and without spines, the tail is
truncated, and the back marked longitudinally with a blue stripe,
bordered with yellow. The flesh is very white, almost transparent,
light, and of a delicious taste. Those taken upon the Araucanian
coast are the most in repute, where they are sometimes caught of
eight pounds weight. The Indians of Chiloe smoke them, after having
cleaned and soaked them for 24 hours in sea water, and, when
sufficiently dry, pack them up in casks of 100 each, which are
generally sold for about three dollars. The robalo prepared in this
manner is said to be superior to any other kind of dried fish.
The corvino (Sparus Chilensis) is nearly of the same size as the
robalo; it is sometimes, however, found of five or six feet in length.
This fish has a small head, and a large oval body, covered with
broad, rhomboidal scales, of a mother-of-pearl colour, marked with
white. The tail is forked, and the body encircled obliquely, from the
shoulders to the belly, with a number of brownish lines. The fins are
armed with spiny rays, and the flesh is white, firm, and of a good
taste, particularly when fried. It would probably be better still if it were
prepared like that of the tunny.
The lisa (Mugil Chilensis) in its form, scales, and back is much like
the common mullet, but is distinguished by the dorsal fin, which in
the lisa is entire. There are two species of this fish, the sea and the
river lisa, neither of which exceeds a foot in length; the first is a very
good fish, but the latter is so exquisite, that it is preferred by many to
the best of trout.
Another esteemed fresh-water fish of Chile is the bagre, or luvur
(Silenus Chilensis, probably the A. geneionis inermis), which has a
smooth skin, without scales, and is brown upon the sides, and
whitish under the belly. In appearance, it is not very prepossessing,
for in form it resembles a tadpole; the head being of a size
disproportionate to the length of the body, which does not exceed
eleven inches at the most. It has a blunt mouth, furnished like that of
the barbel with barbs. It has a sharp spine on the back fins, like the
tropical bagre, but its puncture is not venomous, as that is said to be.
The flesh is yellow, and the most delicious of any esculent fish that is
known. There is said to be another species of this fish inhabiting the
sea, which is black—the same, probably, that Anson’s sailors called,
from its colour, the chimney-sweep.
While on the subject of fish common to this locality, I may mention
that the Abbé Molina states, that ‘the river Talten, which waters the
Araucanian provinces, produces a small fish called paye, which, as I
have been assured by those who have seen them, is so diaphanous,
that if several are placed upon each other, any object beneath them
may be distinctly seen. If this property is not greatly exaggerated,
this fish might serve to discover the secret process of digestion and
the motion of the fluids.’
Mr. Ruschenberger thus describes a Hawaiian restaurant:—‘The
earth floor of a straw hovel was covered by mats. Groups of men
squatted in a circle, with gourd plates before them, supplied with raw
fish and salt-water, and by their side was an enormous gourd, of the
dimensions of a wash tub, filled with poë, a sort of paste made of
taro. They ate of the raw fish, occasionally sopping the torn animal in
the salt water as a sauce, then sucking it, with that peculiar smack
which indicates the reception of a delicious morsel.’
The noble salmon, which honest Izaak Walton justly calls, ‘the king
of fresh-water fish,’ is too well known as a choice article of food to
need description. A jowl of fresh salmon was one of the requisites, in
1444, at the feast of the Goldsmiths’ Company; and in 1473, three
quarters of Colnbrook salmon are charged 6s. 4d.; and at a fish
dinner of the same company in 1498, among large quantities of fish
mentioned, are a fresh salmon 11s.; a great salmon £1; and two
salmon-trout 2s. 8d. In 1518, for ij. fresh samon xvijˢ jᵈ Item, a fresh
samon xiijˢ iiijᵈ; and in the eighth year of King Henry VIII. iiij. fresh
samons are charged xlˢ
In the great rush after gold, the fisheries of the Pacific coast, which
have been famous for years past for their extent and value, have not
received that attention which they merit. Now that the living tide has
again set in strongly towards the North-West, the demand for food to
feed the thousands will cause the fishery to be more largely
developed. The whole coast is particularly rich in the more valuable
species of the finny tribe.
A San Francisco paper states:—‘The salmon of California and
Oregon, with which our markets are supplied in the fresh and cured
state, are nowhere surpassed in quality or flavour. Our rivers, bays,
and estuaries are alive with these valuable fish, and the fishermen
are busy in securing them during the present run. It is estimated that
there are 400 boats on the Sacramento river alone, engaged in
fisheries. The boats are valued at 60,000 dollars, the nets at 80,000
dollars, and seines at 6,000 dollars. The fishing season lasts from
the 1st of February to the 1st of August, during which time the
estimated average of each boat per day is 30 dollars, or an
aggregate of 12,000 dollars. The hauling seines yield 100 dollars
each per day, or 2,000 dollars in the aggregate. The fish thus caught
supply the markets of San Francisco, Sacramento, Marysville, and
the mining towns in the interior. Sometimes 2,000 lbs. are sent to
one order. The amount shipped daily to San Francisco at present is
from 5,000 to 6,000 lbs., which will be increased as the season
advances.
‘The fishing smacks outside the harbour in the vicinity of Drake’s
Bay, Punto de los Reyes, Tomales, and similar points, as well as
other portions of the coast, are busily engaged in the trade.
‘This business is becoming every year of greater interest, and the
attention of our legislature has recently been drawn to its proper
regulation and protection. A description of the fishes common to
these waters, with an account of their habits, quality, and relative
value, would be of great interest.
‘In addition to salmon there are other varieties of fish deserving more
than a passing notice. Much difficulty is experienced in classifying
them under the proper heads, and recognizing the species under
their various arbitrary names. The sturgeon, the rock cod, the
mackerel—which, although it bears some resemblance to the
Atlantic fish is inferior to it in flavour and fatness—the herring, the
smelt, the sardine, and other varieties found in our markets, are all
more or less valuable. Myriads of sardines abound along the whole
southern coast. The Bay of Monterey has especially become famous
for its abundance of this small but valuable fish. It is a matter of
surprise that the taking and preparation of this fish, which enters so
largely into the commerce of the world, has never been attended to
as a source of revenue and profit in this region. The experiment
certainly is worth testing. There are doubtless many persons here,
familiar with the trade as practised on the coast of France, whose
services might be secured in the business.’
Another Californian paper, the Sacramento Union, remarks:—‘The
fishing interest in the Sacramento at this point is increasing and
expanding with astonishing rapidity, from year to year, and from
month to month. The water of the river must be alive with salmon, or
such numbers caught daily would sensibly reduce their numbers. But
experienced fishermen inform us, while the run lasts, so countless is
the number, that no matter how many are employed in the business,
or how many are taken daily, no diminution can be perceived. Even
the ‘tules’ between this and the Coast Range are reported to be filled
with salmon. The run this year is said to be greater than ever before
known at this season. The extraordinary run of the present time is
only expected to continue for something like three weeks. They
seem to run in immense schools, with some weeks intervening
between the appearance of each school, during which the numbers
taken are light, as compared with the quantity taken during a time
like the present. No account is kept of the number engaged in
fishing, or of the amount caught, and all statements relative thereto
are made from estimates obtained from those who have experience
in the business, and probably approximate correctness. These
estimates give the number of men employed now in taking fish in the
Sacramento at about 6OO—the number of fish taken daily, on an
average, at 2,000—their average weight 17 lbs., making 34,000 lbs.
per day. Two cents per lb., which is probably more than the present
average price by the quantity, would give a daily income to those
employed of 680 dollars, not very high pay. Either the number of
men engaged in the business, we imagine, must be over estimated,
or the number of fish caught under estimated. It requires two men to
man a boat, which would give 300 boats for 600 men: 2,000 fish a
day would give to each man a fraction over three as his share. We
presume few are fishing who do not catch a good many more than
that number. We saw a boat-load, the product of the previous night,
consisting of 66 salmon, weighed yesterday morning. They averaged
a fraction over 17 lbs., and gave 33 as the number caught by each
man, instead of three, as estimated above. Say the 600 fishermen
man, on an average, 200 boats a night; the average number caught
by each boat put at 20, and the sum total would be 4,000 fish,
instead of 2,000, as estimated. Our impression is that the latter
comes nearer the mark than the former, as a good many of the
fishermen send their fish directly to San Francisco; others take them
to different points for salting. Large numbers are salted down daily,
several firms and individuals being extensively engaged in this
branch of the trade. The fish are put down in hogsheads, which
average, when filled, about 800 lbs. From 1,000 to 3,000 lbs. are put
down daily by those engaged in salting. An acquaintance has filled
65 hogsheads this season. The most of those engaged in salting live
on the Washington side of the river, and salt their fish there.
Including those engaged in salting, catching, and selling, probably
the fish business furnishes employment for 1,000 men.’
The salmon is found in no other waters in such vast multitudes as
are met in the rivers emptying into the Pacific. On the Atlantic side,
the leading fish feature is the run of shad in the spring; on the Pacific
side, salmon ascend the rivers at all seasons, in numbers beyond all
computation. In California and Oregon, the rivers are alive with them;
the great number taken by fishermen are but a drop from the bucket.
Above this, on the coast side, tribes of Indians use no other food. As
a table luxury, they are esteemed by most persons the finest fish
caught. Unlike many fish, they contain but few bones, and the
orange-coloured meat can be served in slices to suit customers. It is
emphatically the meat for the million; it costs so little—not a quarter
that of other meats—that rich and poor can feast upon salmon as
often in the day as they choose to indulge in the luxury. In the course
of a few years, salmon fishing will extend itself to all the prominent
rivers in the North Pacific States. Catching and curing salmon will
then have become a systematized business; the fish consumption
will then have extended itself generally over those States, and more
than likely become, in the meantime, an important article of export.
While upon the subject of these fisheries, it may be added, that a
considerable portion of the Chinese population, both at San
Francisco and at Sacramento, have engaged extensively in this
business. In the vicinity of Mission Creek, near the former city, they
have gone into the business upon a large scale. The average ‘catch,’
each day, is estimated at about 5,000 lbs., for which a ready market
is found among the Chinese population, at five dollars per cwt. The
process of catching, cleaning, and curing, presents a busy and
curious scene.
Sir John Bowring remarks that, ‘The multitudes of persons who live
by the fisheries in China afford evidence not only that the land is
cultivated to the greatest possible extent, but that it is insufficient to
supply the necessities of the overflowing population; for agriculture is
held in high honour in China, and the husbandman stands next in
rank to the sage, or literary man, in the social hierarchy. It has been
supposed that nearly a tenth of the population derive their means of
support from fisheries. Hundreds and thousands of boats crowd the
whole coasts of China—sometimes acting in communities,
sometimes independent and isolated. There is no species of craft by
which a fish can be inveigled which is not practised with success in
China. Every variety of net, from vast seines, embracing miles, to the
smallest hand-filet in the care of a child. Fishing by night and fishing
by day—fishing in moonlight, by torchlight, and in utter darkness—
fishing in boats of all sizes—fishing by those who are stationary on
the rock by the seaside, and by those who are absent for weeks on
the wildest of seas—fishing by cormorants—fishing by divers—
fishing with lines, with baskets—by every imaginable decoy and
device. There is no river which is not staked to assist the fisherman
in his craft. There is no lake, no pond, which is not crowded with fish.
A piece of water is nearly as valuable as a field of fertile land. At
daybreak every city is crowded with sellers of live fish, who carry
their commodity in buckets of water, saving all they do not sell to be
returned to the pond or kept for another day’s service.
The fishing grounds of Van Diemen’s Land are periodically visited by
a splendid fish named arbouka, a well-known piscatory visitant on
the coast of New Zealand. Great numbers of these beautiful
denizens of the deep have been caught, varying in weight from 60
lbs. to 100 lbs. each. The trumpeter is one of the most magnificent of
Tasmanian fish; and is unrivalled in the quality of its flesh by any
visitant in those waters. A demand has been created for them in
Victoria; and before long, a stirring trade will be established between
the two colonies in these beautiful fish.
The native cooking-oven of New Zealand, called the unu, is a very
curious contrivance, and is thus described by Mr. S. C. Brees. It
consists of a round hole, about two or three feet in diameter, and
twelve inches deep, in which some wood is placed and lighted.
Large pebble-stones are then thrown on the fire and heated, which
remain at the bottom of the hole after the wood is consumed; the
stones are next arranged, so as to present a level surface, and
sprinkled with water; wild cabbage or other leaves are moistened
and spread over them, upon which the food intended to be cooked is
laid; the whole is then covered over with leaves and flax-baskets,
and lastly, filled over with earth, which completes the operation. After
allowing it to remain a certain time, according to circumstances,
which the cook determines with the utmost precision, the oven is
opened and the food removed. Eels and potatoes are delicious when
cooked in this manner, and every other kind of provision.
The seer-fish (Cybium guttatum) is generally considered the finest
flavoured of the finny race that swims in the Indian seas; it has a
good deal the flavour of salmon.
There are several esteemed fish obtained round Ceylon. The
Pomfret bull’s eye (Holocentrus ruber) is found at certain seasons in
abundance on the southern coast of Ceylon, in deep water. It is
greatly esteemed by the natives as an article of food, and reaches a
considerable size, frequently nearly two feet in length. The flesh is
white and solid. For splendour and beauty, this fish is almost
unsurpassed.
A fish called by the natives great-fire (Scorpæna volitans) is eaten by
the native fishermen, the flesh being white, solid, and nutritive.
Linnæus describes the flesh as delicious.
The pookoorowah (Holocentrus argenteus) is a very delicious fish,
seldom exceeding twelve or thirteen inches in length. The gal-
handah (Chætodon araneus), a singular and much admired fish, only
about three inches in length, has a delicate and white flesh, and is
greatly esteemed.
In Java and Sumatra, a preparation of small fish, with red-rice,
having the appearance of anchovies, and the colour of red-cabbage,
is esteemed a delicacy. So in India, the preparation called tamarind
fish is much prized as a breakfast relish, where the acid of the
tamarind is made use of for preserving the white pomfret-fish, cut in
transverse slices. The mango-fish (Polynemus longifilis, Cuvier; P.
paradiscus of Linnæus), about eight or nine inches long by two deep,
is much esteemed in India. At Calcutta the Lates nobilis, different
species of Polynemus, and the Mugil Corsula, daily cover the tables
of Europeans, who will more readily recognize these fishes under the
names of the Begti or Cockup, Sudjeh, Tupsi, and the Indian Mullet.
At the Sandheads may be found some of those delicious fishes,
which are more familiar to the residents of Madras and Bombay, for
instance, the Indian soles, the roll-fish, and above all, the black and
white pomfrets, and the bummolah, which latter in a dried state is
known by the name of the Bombay duck. The bummolah is a small
glutinous transparent fish, about the size of smelt.
There are many excellent fish obtained from the sea round the Cape
Colony, and about 2,500 tons are shipped annually to the Mauritius,
forming nearly three fourths of the island consumption; the principal
consumers being the coolie labourers or Indian population.
Geelbeck, or yellow mouth, sometimes called Cape salmon
(Otolithus æquidens, Cuv. and Val.), is the finest as to quality; they
are taken abundantly with the hook and line, or net, and weigh about
14 lbs. The cost of preparation ready for shipment is about £12. It
forms an article of food for the poor and lazy. The Malays at the
Cape cure a great deal in vinegar (for home consumption), the same
as pickled salmon in England; and it is not a bad representative of it.
For exportation they are opened down the back, the intestines taken
out, head cut off, salted for a night, and dried in the sun.
Snook (Thyrsites atua), similar to the baraconta, is a long, slim, oily
fish, taken with any shining bait; it is a perfect salt-water pike, very
strong and ferocious, and is dispatched, after being pulled on board,
by blows on the head with a kind of knob-kerrie. These are cured the
same way as the geelbeck; the cost of production is about £16 per
ton. They are highly prized by the colonists, and esteemed before
any fish imported into Mauritius, fetching about £2 per ton more than
cod. These fish are very fine eating when cured fresh. They are also
much esteemed in Ceylon. The Malays cure them without salt by
drying in the sun, with a little pepper and spice; they are then
delicious.
Silver fish (Dentex argyrozona) are similar to the bream of England;
each weighs from 6 to 8 lbs. They are got up for shipment the same
as the others; the cost of production is about £10 per ton. They are
the least esteemed of any at the Mauritius market, but when fresh
they are very nice eating. The bastard silver fish (D. rupestris) is
considered one of the very finest fishes in the colony. It is esteemed
for foreign markets. Harders are a mullet, about eight inches long,
which are principally cured in small casks in brine, for up-country
use. The Cape farmers are very fond of them, but few are exported.
They have also mackerel very large, very fat, which are better cured
than fresh.
The Jacob Evertsen (Sebastes capensis), so called after a Dutch
captain, remarkable for a red face and large projecting eyes, is a fish
which, though common in Table Bay almost at all seasons, is highly
prized for its flesh by most colonists. Another species, the sancord
(S. maculatus), which is not so common, is a very delicious fish. The
kabeljauw (Sciæna hololepidota) is a large fish from two to three feet
long, common on the coast, being caught with the hook and the
drag-net. It is one of the staple fishes in the Cape Town market; dried
and salted like cod it is exported to the Mauritius and elsewhere. Its
flesh when young is good, but firm and dry in adult individuals. The
baardmannetje (Umbrina capensis, Pappe), another newly described
fish of the same family, which is chiefly caught in False Bay during
summer, measures from 2 to 2½ feet, and is reputed for its delicious
flesh.
The hangberger (Sargus Hottentotus), a fish about 18 inches long,
which is common in Table Bay from June to August, is much in
request, particularly at the time when it is with roe. It is also cured
and pickled for economical purposes. It feeds on shell fish, and is
caught with the hook.
The Hottentot fish (Sargus capensis), from 12 to 14 inches long,
which is mostly confined to Table Bay and the West Coast, may be
caught at all seasons with the hook. It is not only a superior table
fish, but forms when salted and dried an article of export.
The roode steen brassem of the Dutch (Chrysophrys laticeps,
Cuvier) is a bulky fish, often exceeding 3½ feet in length and 14
inches in breadth. It is very voracious, and feeds generally on crabs
and cuttle fish (Sepia and Loligo). As food it is much prized, and is
also cured for exportation.
The Roman fish (Chrysophrys cristiceps) is one of the prettiest and
most delicious fish met with in the Cape markets. It is generally
acknowledged to be a superior dish.
The daggerath (Pagrus laniarius) is of a dark rose colour, about 12
inches long. It is highly prized in the colony for its delicious flesh.
This handsome fish owes its surname, laniarius (butcher), both to its
colour and to its sharp teeth and voracity.
The windtoy (Cantharus Blochii) is a delicious table fish, more
commonly caught in winter, and often put up in bundles along with
the Hottentot fish (Sargus capensis). The flesh of the dasje fish,
another species (Cantharus emarginatus), is also highly esteemed
as food.
There is a fish called by the colonists the bamboo fish (Boops salpa),
from feeding on algæ and being caught principally in localities where
there is an abundance of sea-weed. On account of its vegetable
nourishment, it exhibits at times a particular smell when embowelled,
and is for that reason called stink-fish by some of the fishermen. It is
a rich and delicate fish, and though scarce in the Cape Town market,
is common in Saldanha Bay, where it is dried and salted for home
consumption.
The flesh of the bastard Jacob Evertsen (Pimelepterus fuscus) is
well flavoured and very nice. This fish is of a uniform dusky brown
colour. It feeds on shell-fish.
The galleon fish (Dipterodon capensis) is more plentiful in the
western division of the Cape Colony; it is highly esteemed as food
and always fetches a good price. It is, however, disliked by some on
account of the many black veins traversing its flesh, and is at times
rather unwholesome, from being too rich and requiring good
digestive organs.
The elft-fish (Temnodon saltator) is uniformly lead coloured, shaded
with dark green on its back. From leaping now and then out of the
water it has obtained its name of saltator (jumper). It is held in great
esteem as a table fish, and the younger individuals are truly deemed
a dainty.
There are several species of mullet recorded as inhabitants of the
bays and rivers of the Cape Colony. All of them are caught with the
net. They make good table fish, but are more frequently salted or
smoke-dried (under the name of bokkoms) like the herring, and thus
preserved, form a very considerable article of home consumption as
well as of export.
The klip-fish (Blennius versicolor, Pappe) is greatly reputed for its
flesh, which is nice, well flavoured, and wholesome.
The flesh of the bagger (Bagrus capensis) is extremely delicate, and
bears a greater resemblance to that of the eel than that of any other
sea fish in the colony. Owing to its ugliness, this curious fish, which
hides itself among stones in muddy water the better to entrap its
unsuspecting prey, is from popular prejudice less prized than it
deserves.