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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.
 Introduction 17

poetries of indifference, served me as a classifying tool for gathering up styles and

characters that confound rather than resist (and thus, in dialectical fashion, thereby
affirm) protocols of critical rewriting and of the “knowing subject”—both poet
and critic. The self-forgetful, diffident, abject, or grotesque figures who populate
Wordsworth’s poetry (the discharged soldier, the old man traveling, the old
Cumberland beggar, Simon Lee, Margaret, the leech gatherer)47 began calling out
to me—this time, not as prompts for the poet-interlocutor’s and, thus, the reader’s
self-tutelage or conversion experience or fall-to-rise, but as imaginative experiments
that conduct a critique of the human and of the natural as received category terms
of their own time, and, as a proleptic critique of 1980s revisionist readings of those
terms: that is, of my own readings.
My earliest conceptual purchase on these figures came from fiction, not critical
theory: Melville’s Bartleby and Chauncey (aka, “Chance”) Gardener, hero of Jerzy
Kosińsky’s 1970 novel and Hal Ashby’s 1979 film, Being There.48 Thinking through
those figures in 1991 gave me a way into the quiddity and power of Wordsworth’s
“Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay, a Sketch” (1798). It also
provided a way to hold onto that power in the face of Wordsworth’s revision of the
poem, where he deletes the historical context (the old man’s journey to his dying
son, wounded in a sea fight) that explains the figure’s flattened state and at the
same time intimates its political dimensions. Wordsworth’s famous (some might
say, shameful) removal of that narrative in 1815 changes the poem’s signature from
history to philosophy, pathos to mystery. The change—from mimesis to metaphys-
ics—is violent and total, and it forcibly distracts attention from all that art cannot
help. In the context of “Bartleby” and Being There, however, metaphysics seems less
an evasion of thought than a critique of the thought-forms (humanist, rationalist,
historicist) driving the French Revolution (and its inevitable implosion). To the
extent that those thought-forms entered into the revisionist critique of Wordsworth,
the metaphysical emphasis put critical pressure on that as well.
Chapters 4 and 5 respond to that pressure by conducting their analysis on a
conceptual plane, where they locate their textual explication as well. Because the
Marxist–Hegelian critique of the Cartesian problematic was the lever through which
I had raised up Wordsworth’s poetry sufficiently to see how it was made, I turned
now to Spinoza, Descartes’s near-contemporary and runner-up in the contest for
mainstream status in the Enlightenment tradition. The shift was from an existentially
opportunistic and epistemic dualism (in a word, humanism) to a monist metaphys-
ics complicated by a nonperspectival theory of mind and an ontology organized
around multiplicity and continua rather than singularity and category disjunction.
Instead of perspective determining levels or extent of understanding, for Spinoza it
is degree of participation in the whole that entails—or rather, just is—a particular
and embodied kind and quantity of understanding. Like Marx’s, Spinoza’s is a

47 “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” “Simon Lee,” “The Ruined Cottage,” “Resolution and
Independence.”
48 Two other movies of that decade, The Terminator (1984) and Back to the Future (1985), set logi-
cal challenges to my thinking of time, sequence, and causality. See Chapter 2.
18 Thinking through Poetry

praxis theory of knowledge, with praxis foundationally linked to self-preservation

(conatus); the key difference is Spinoza’s ontology, derived from his metaphysics.
For Spinoza, the self is never not enmeshed in—indeed, engendered and, in his
usage, “composed” by—collectivity (“masses,” in his idiom)49 and defined by the
extent and complexity of that mesh. The power of the individual is nothing but
the expression of that state of cohesiveness. Whereas Marx had provided me my
angle on the Cartesian paradigm, my purchase on Spinoza came from sources in
the postclassical sciences of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My reading in
complexity theory, autopoiesis, dynamic systems theory, emergent properties, far-
from-equilibrium states, distributed neural networks, and many other field theories
of form (as I now call them) helped me to leverage Spinoza’s holistic complexity
metaphysics into pictures of differentiated but undivided states of being, becom-
ing, and knowing.
I close Part 1 with my 2007 review essay on new formalism, despite its being
odd man out in terms of its critical genre. I include it for several reasons; one is to
round off the internal chronicle of our changing profession with a more descriptive
and collective narrative. In a passage quoted above, from the Essays Upon Epitaphs,
I, Wordsworth meditates on the paradox that thoughts of death—corporeal fini-
tude—lead inexorably to thoughts of infinity, suggesting that the feelings, in this
case, “though they seem opposite to each other, have another and a finer connection
than that of contrast.—It is a connection formed through the subtle process by
which, both in the natural and the moral world, qualities pass insensibly into their
contraries, and things revolve upon each other” [my emphasis]. I quote this beautiful
reflection on the “natural and the moral world” to point up a similarly “subtle
process” at work in the world of thought: here, the passage from new historicism
to new formalism. Although some of the work that I treated under the heading of
the formalist turn comes at the tension between form and history in a reactive
fashion—a turn against history and a turn back to earlier twentieth-century con-
structs of aesthetic form—some of it shows the two “revolv[ing] upon each other,”
evincing a style of turning peculiar to immanent as opposed to extrinsic critique.
Some of these studies address the dilemmas that I worry in Chapters 2–5, often
from the vantage of other period- and topical interests, and in the process, many
more such dilemmas emerge along with more various and fine-tuned approaches
to them. In other words, while first phase new formalism does not resolve those
dilemmas, the sheer quantity and variety of approaches to them changed the basic
cast of the formalist project, triggering a qualitative shift in the thinking of form.
And the “new” new formalism, so to speak, fills the gap that I named in my review
of the literature through 2006: namely, its conceptual incuriosity about the category
of form, and its oddly insular indifference to other disciplines’ and discourses’
interest in form. Here is Ellen Rooney, back in 2000, recognizing the problem and

49 For a superb discussion of the individual and (or rather as an effect of ) the multitude, see Warren
Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries, (London: Verso, 1999), chapter 3, “The
Body of the Multitude.” Also, Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics
and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
 Introduction 19

anticipating the foundational shift in new formalism from then to now: “if a long-
ing for the lost unities of bygone forms . . . is the impetus of a new formalism, the
chances are not good for what is already an . . . urgent project: the revision and reani-
mation of form in the age of interdisciplinarity.”50 In ecopoetics, some instances
of historical poetics, lyric studies, new materialism, philosophical poetics, digital
studies, and of course dedicated explorations of form such as Caroline Levine’s,51
that “reanimation of form in the age of interdisciplinarity” has happened.52 In the
narrative economy of Thinking through Poetry, Chapter 6 signals a turn from a
labor of the negative (Part 1) toward a more deliberately constructive project.53

4
In Part 2: Criticism: Field Theories of Form (Chapters 7–10), I return and add
to Chapter 4’s survey and sampling of so-called “postclassical” frameworks in the
physical and life sciences: e.g., theoretical biology, number theory, dynamic sys-
tems theory, theory of self-organization and autopoiesis, postclassical physics, and
in one instance, analytic philosophy. The overall goal of this section is to set aside
both classical and intuitive pictures of subjects and objects, entities and environ-
ments, structures and histories, singularities and multiplicities, and causes and
effects, in favor of models of recursively self-organizing fields of spatial, temporal,
and logical kinds. The chapters report on field theories seeking to describe the
being and becoming of both living and inanimate forms, and, above all, their
entanglements in each other. Despite the heavily and diversely theorized nature of

50 “Form and Contentment,” Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000), 25.

51 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2015).
52 Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian have written a powerful and lucid account of this
complex and ongoing phenomenon in “Form and Explanation,” Critical Inquiry 43 (2017), 650–69;
see my response to their essay in Critical Inquiry 44 (2017), 144–55.
53 To fill out the institutional timeline tracked in this book, I reference here two of my essays from
the beginning of the century, “Picturing Pleasure: Poems of Elizabeth Bishop,” What’s Left of Theory:
New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas
(New York: Routledge, 2000), 192–239; and “Object-Loss and Object-Bondage: Economies of
Representation in Hardy’s Poetry,” ELH 73 (2006), 549–80. An important moment within the
profession-wide shift that I describe above as a movement from an epistemic to an ontological mate-
rialism was the project of thing theory, a rubric that could fairly be copyrighted by Bill Brown, whose
landmark work emerged as early as 1998 (“How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story),” Critical
Inquiry 24 (1998), 935–64, followed by the defining “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001),
1–22). My two articles explore the psychic and social life of things—the strange life of things inside
the mind (introjects, for instance) and the even stranger life of ordinary things—consumer things—
that, for reasons of empire’s global economy, never go away. My description of this phase of my project
(namely, the psychic and social life of things) is meant as homage to anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s
The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), a work that, regrettably, I did not read until 1995. I consider this the first study in what became
known as thing-theory: the first thoroughgoing displacement within Marxist thought of a theory of
production by a theory of consumption as an analytic for the commodity form. Appadurai’s study was
my introduction to this line of thought.
20 Thinking through Poetry

my readings in this section (all but one trained on canonical Romantic poems), the
method is experimental in two senses. First, the generative problem derives from
or takes shape within an experimental object—namely, the poem, isolated and
structured as an object of inquiry, its history secreted within it and on a scale
incommensurable with experiential events. Also experimental is the section’s way
of keeping the validity of the theory-move tied to its success (in kind as well as
degree) in resolving that generative problem and to its potential for application in
other textual contexts. Rather than describe this section of the book from an inner
standpoint (as in my accounts of Part 1), I shift to the external standpoint.
What were once and not that long ago (that is, in the 1970s and 1980s) strictly
intellectual or theory-driven challenges to the nature/culture binary have become
real-world and globally acknowledged facts—and not just facts, of course, but
affectively charged crises and catastrophes, with worse ones visible on the horizon.
The scale on which we witness worldwide climate change and environmental deg-
radation is at once so vast and so infinitesimal as to trigger a transformation of
quantity into quality, unhinging utterly the nature/culture binary. No one needs to
unearth the presence of culture—human labor, interests, histories—in nature any-
more. It is all over the place and much farther back than anyone had dreamed.54
Can we even continue to say “nature” when we speak of and from an environment
such as ours; can we say “environment”—“we” meaning citizens of the timescape
called Anthropocene or Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, and “environment” mean-
ing “what surrounds”?55 Another truism of our general (as distinct from academic)
history that has bearing on this meltdown of the nature/culture binary is the
everyday (that is to say, fully integrated and naturalized) reality of genetic engin-
eering in our food, medical interventions, and research protocols, and of course
the far more routine and insensible couplings of brains and digital technologies. As
many in our discipline have observed (N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway
are the brand names for this field of study), genetic and technohybridity have
become facts of life.56

54 For longer perspectives on climate and culture, see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El
Niño, Famines, and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), and, farther back, both
Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the 17th Century (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2013); farther yet, Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the
History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2017), especially chs. 10 and 11.
55 Haraway’s term for today’s timescape (in her view, successor to both Anthropocene and
Capitalocene) is Chthulucene: a monster word for our monster world. It joins chthonos (under-earth)
and kairos (the now-time, the fateful time). On her account, the work of our epoch is “making kin,” a
“compositionist practice” (“sympoeisis”), joining biotic and abiotic creatures and powers: Donna J.
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2016), 55.
56 N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth
Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary
Literature and Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Chaos and Order: Complex
Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and How We Became
Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999).
 Introduction 21

Also to be reckoned into the nature/culture collapse (or is it a surpassing? a

Hegelian Aufhebung?57) is the much discussed shift toward postclassical thinking in
the physical and mathematical sciences and in the life sciences as well, beginning at
the start of the twentieth century in physics but accelerating and shaping knowledge
regimes in all the sciences by the 1980s. “Postclassical” is the umbrella term for
post-Newtonian kinds of explanation, wherein the very lawfulness of physical
law—repeatability, quantitative exactitude, time reversibility, predictability, rule of
noncontradiction—is challenged and is brought into the understanding of biological
process as well.58 In a wide range of studies, the rule is now curiously unruly: regu-
larity arising from randomness, intentionality emerging from routine in complex
systems, flow rather than qualitative distinction separating noise from information,
and time as irreversible (i.e., historical) in certain physical processes (e.g., thermo-
dynamics). Phenomena within the natural and physical sciences often seem more
like not fully rational agents—people!—than rule-abiding bits or systems of matter.
From this perspective, totality—the many cultural, economic, and political
master-forms that had seemed exclusively and oppressively totalizing to us thirty
years ago—looks entirely different. If the whole is not an iron regularity—if its
systematicity not only accommodates but creates the conditions for novelty, sur-
prise, and category transformation—then it need not be rejected out of hand.
Totality also looks different from the perspective of the total conditions and behav-
iors of the twenty-first century: e.g., transnational flows of labor, populations, trash,
goods, water, credit, information; web-based technologies that extend the individual
and the collective deep into one another, squeezing out those mediations that,
in the old days, both linked and distinguished those two spheres of activity and ana-
lysis. There is a difference, I maintain, between, on the one hand, conditions that
are analytically available and/or known by experts (as some or even many of these
certainly were as early as 1962, viz., Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring), and, on the
other, conditions that are lived as if unmediated, inescapable, and universal
(i.e., as if “natural”).
I rehearse these familiar generalizations only to highlight one small fact that
signifies in one very small history that is relevant to this book and the kind of
reader likely to be interested in it. When teaching “Tintern Abbey” (and “Michael,”
the Immortality Ode, “The Ruined Cottage,” “Elegiac Stanzas”) in 1978, to stu-
dents obviously bored or mystified by the poem’s many and central references to
nature, I asked, “What could ‘Nature,’ that huge abstraction, possibly mean to
Wordsworth, or, for that matter to us, today?” As we read the lines, “knowing that
Nature never did betray | The heart that loved her,” I asked “What form could

57 Aufhebung, typically translated as surpassing or overcoming, is Hegel’s term (from the Phenomenology
of Spirit) and subsequently a rich concept in the history of ideas, especially prominent in twentieth-
century critical theory. It means a mix of preservation and cancelation—more precisely (and herein lie
both the difficulty and the power of the concept), preservation by means of annihilation. A classic
example is the growth of a plant, where the flower cancels or annihilates (in the sense of replacing) the
bud, at the same time preserving the bud at a higher level (in the sense of realizing, actualizing, instan-
tiating it).
58 Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky, eds., Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical
Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
22 Thinking through Poetry

betrayal possibly take?” This was a rhetorical question, designed to make my stu-
dents see that nature cannot “betray” us but history can. Obviously, nature can hurt,
destroy etc., but betrayal takes agents and intentions, and that requires history on
a human scale. Who, at that time, could imagine nature as anything but a trope for
“what is,” or more critically (some might say, cynically), a god-term, a figure for
ideology, or an effect of routinized perception (Blake’s “Vegetable glass”)? 59
With the wisdom of hindsight, one sees that these questions were not, as I thought,
rhetorical. They arose from assumptions peculiar to my own timescape: the post-
war, urban, prosperous First World. They were questions “of our climate.”60 Romantic
poetry—the first modern “nature poetry”—was the obvious and ideal place to ask
those questions. So it is, again; echoing Gertrude Stein, again for the first time.61

5
All readers will see at once that this is a book that reads—critically reads—in a mas-
sive and relentless way that is out of all proportion to the scale of its study texts,
lyric poems all. Readers who are not Romanticists—thus, less likely to be invested
in the poetry—will be especially sensitive to the number of butterflies broken on
the complicated wheels of these inquiries. Another obvious asymmetry is the fact
that the readings, while attending with obsessive closeness to minute textual par-
ticulars, are, on many occasions, wildly distant in their recourse to analytic frame-
works designed for problem sets that have little or nothing to do with language,
much less literature generally or poetry in particular. Sometimes these frameworks
speak directly to the uppermost themes and arguments of the poems in question;
often, they do not.
One reason for such procedures and for the excess and asymmetry that they
produce is that critical reading, in addition to being what this book does, is also
what it is about. A second reason is that the kind of critical reading in play as both
method and topic juggles objectives that are not only diverse but, on most accounts,
mutually exclusive. My title, Thinking through Poetry, seeks to capture and con-
dense those dissonant aims by rotating the phrase around three distinct axes: (1)
thinking through a poem in the sense of “by means of ” it, or, in piggyback fashion;
(2) thinking through in the way that we speak of thinking through a problem—
meaning, to the end of it—rather than merely thinking about it; and, (3) thinking
through a poem in the sense of “beyond” it, denoting passage to a different place:
in other words, a speculative, philosophical kind of criticism. Whereas variant #1
is a critical discourse that adheres to the text, #2 and #3 either predicate or at some

59 Wordsworth, “Lines, Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” ll. 123–4; Blake, “There Exist
in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable
Glass of Nature,” A Vision of the Last Judgment, The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey
Keynes (London: Nonesuch Press, 1957), 605.
60 Wallace Stevens, “The Poems of our Climate”—on which see Chapter 10.
61 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933, ch. 7 http://gutenberg.net.au/
ebooks06/0608711.txt. See Chapter 8 for discussion of singularity and repetition in Stein.
 Introduction 23

point in their development arrive at a working distance and difference between

text and reading.62
Another source of excess is that rather than treat this critical practice as a free-
standing topic, I approach it through repeated returns upon my own work as it
comes to inhabit different institutional and historical moments. The goal is “to
think practice within practice,” a slogan from the era of first-wave materialist cri-
tique and still good—worth remembering—today.63 Critique of this kind (“reflex-
ive” is one term for it, “immanent” is another), targets the aims, methods, effects,
side-effects, and delayed effects of particular critical practices—in this respect, dif-
fering not at all from both theory-driven readings and extrinsic, or “criteriological”
ones.64 To the reflexive critic, however, these are moving targets, seen as aspects of
the situation that brought them forth rather than as inconsistencies that could
have been avoided, shortfalls relative to some freestanding epistemic (much less
ethical or political) criterion, or, conversely, as sovereign achievements. As noted
earlier, my term, “situation,” tallies with the Marxian concept of historical con-
juncture, an ensemble of uneven determinations arising from different sectors of
a complex historical field.65 “Situation” is not to be equated with either topical

62 Chapter 11 takes a much broader view of thought, key aspects of which are informed by David
Bohm (Thought as a System (London: Routledge, 1994)), by Eugene Gendlin (Experiencing and the
Creation of Meaning (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962)); David Michael Levin, ed.,
Language Beyond PostModernism: Saying and Thinking in Gendlin’s Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1997). To my deep regret, I was not aware of N. Katherine Hayles’s Unthought: The
Power of the Cognitive Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) while writing that
chapter. Had I known this study, I would have been able to take my own thinking about thinking
much farther.
63 Macherey, In a Materialist Way, 37.
64 Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 33. See also Macherey, In a Materialist Way, 5: “Precisely
because [Althusser and others] were Marxists and materialists, they granted philosophy what few oth-
ers would: an objective, historical existence, a fact that paradoxically earned them the label of ‘idealist.’
Paradoxically, because they began by refusing the myth of the independence of philosophy, a myth
that has its positive and negative variants. In the positive variant of this myth, philosophy transcends
any particular time or place, a fact that renders it timeless and universal, according it a freedom to
speak not to particular classes, genders, or nations at particular moments but to all people at all times.
According to the negative variant, philosophy is properly speaking nothing, or rather a dim reflection
of the reality that is its cause but which it cannot affect in return; once social relations were made
transparent, philosophy even in its phantom, spiritual existence would simply disappear: the death of
philosophy.”
65 Like the concept of “determination in the last instance,” “conjuncture,” “situation,” and “con-
stellation” (from Benjamin) are designed to ward off the kind of monocausal explanation sometimes
associated with Marxist critique. Althusser, who mobilizes the phrase “determination in the last
instance” for twentieth-century critical thought, tracks the phrase to Engels, who, “in 1890, tak[es]
the young ‘economists’ to task for not having understood that this was a new relationship. Production
is the determinant factor, but only ‘in the last instance’: ‘More than this neither Marx nor I have ever
asserted.’ Anyone who ‘twists this’ so that it says that the economic factor is the only determinant factor,
‘transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, empty phrase.’ ” Louis Althusser, “Contradiction
and Overdetermination,” For Marx: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1962/over-
determination.htm; Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama (London and New York:
Verso, 2009). A multivalent term, constellation expresses the relationship between objects and con-
cepts such that the object, like a star, retains its particularity even within (or over against) the univer-
salizing tendency of the concept. Perhaps the best known occurrence of the term is the following: “It’s
not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather,
24 Thinking through Poetry

circumstance or political commitment, or with degrees of individual understand-

ing, and emphatically not with a moment or stage in some quasi-Hegelian
teleology.
My sense of what constitutes a philosophical or speculative criticism has many
sources in both literary-critical practice across the board of period and topical
study over the past forty years, and in critical theory over the same span.66 Two
immediate references, however, stand directly behind my earliest thought for a
book title—which was not just Thinking through Poetry but Thinking, through
Poetry. One is Pierre Macherey’s A quoi pense la littérature, and the other is Martin
Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking.67 Regarding the literary object, poetry, and
the question of its generically distinctive call to thinking, and/or to a special kind
of thinking, that is a topic addressed in this book’s penultimate chapter. More
pertinent, though, are each chapter’s enactments of the thought-form that I describe
below. On the strength of these, the reader will decide if the special expectations
that readers bring to poetry and/or the special resources mobilized by poetic writ-
ing solicit (or simply enable) a thought practice that is unique among the literary
genres.68

image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.
In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a
purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not pro-
gression but image, suddenly emergent.—Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not
archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.” “Awakening,” The Arcades Project,
trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 462; nn. 2a, 3.
Adorno uses the term as well, referencing the spatial arrangement aspect of the constellation as a meta-
phor for a lateral representation of thought and object rather than a hierarchical or organic sequence.
And see Negative Dialectics (the section “Constellation in Science,” pp. 164–6), for Adorno’s distinct-
ive use of the term.
66 Donald Ault, Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning Blake’s The Four Zoas (Barrytown, NY:
Barrytown Limited, 1999); John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An
Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Ross Chambers,
Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991), and The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Alan Liu, The Laws
of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004),
and Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009); Paul Mann, Masocriticism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1999); Jerome McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1972), Don Juan in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), Towards a Literature
of Knowledge (New York: Clarendon Press, 1989), Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be
Lost (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide
Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001), and The Point Is To Change It: Poetry and Literature in the Continuing
Present (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007); Louis A. Renza, “A White Heron” and
the Question of Minor Literature (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Michel Serres,
Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
67 Pierre Macherey, The Object of Literature, trans. David Macey (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995); Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper &
Row Publishers Inc., 1968).
68 Paul Jaussen’s Writing in Real Time: Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2017) is an ideal source for considering the special claims of lyric poetry
 Introduction 25

Macherey brings together texts that, “insofar as they belong to the historical field
of Literature are amenable to philosophical readings in which philosophy intervenes,
in a nonexclusive way, as a system of reference and an instrument of analysis.”69
The point, he says, is not to offer “a philosophical interpretation of these works
which would relate them to a common intellectual core,” but rather to “suggest
readings in which the philosophical mode of approach will in each case be singu-
larly implicated, in a determinate and differentiated manner.”70 In the generically
diverse works that Macherey gathers (he includes Foucault among de Stael, Flaubert,
Celine, and Queneau), philosophical argument “play[s] the role of a real formal
operator.” In some cases, philosophy occupies the literary text in a documentary
fashion as well, where it “shows through the surface . . . as a cultural reference that
has . . . been worked into the text.” The primary mode of relation between literature
and philosophy, however, is the former, wherein philosophical argument “organ-
izes the overall shape of the narrative, or . . . structures the mode of its narration.” 71
The following excerpts from Macherey clarify the special sense in which he intends
his key terms, “organize,” “philosophical mode[s] of approach,” and “formal operator”:
(1) “. . . a kind of thought, in the philosophical sense of the word, is present in
literary texts, under very varied forms, none of which can be reduced to the philo-
sophical model of interpretation. In other words, the philosophy at work [in these
texts] is a properly literary philosophy, whose content coincides with the very com-
position of these texts, which do not constitute for it simply an envelope or a sur-
face, on the order of effects produced by a literature of ideas.” (2) “Literature, with
its own means, also produces thought, in a way which constantly interferes with the
procedures of philosophy” (my emphasis). (3) “What does literature think about?
could therefore also be extended as follows: ‘What does Literature make it possible
to think about?’ ” Adapting that last phrase to my own purposes, I would say,
“what and/or how does literature make it possible to think?”72 I choose these sev-
eral passages from Macherey for their strong distinction between philosophy as a
language of truth and philosophy as “a language of truthfulness,” a language of what
Emerson called “Man Thinking.”73 In the field of British Romanticism alone, one
now sees a dark and wonderful redemption of philosophy, that once authoritative

over other poetic genres with respect to “emergent poetics.” It is, in addition, a matchless exemplar of
thinking through poetry.
69 For Macherey, “literature” begins at the end of the eighteenth century: Object of Literature, 3.
70 Ibid. 7–8. 71 Ibid. 6. 72 Macherey, In a Materialist Way, 22–3.
73 My thought and language echo this comment by Jerome McGann, from a private correspond-
ence: “the language of philosophy has become an alienated language ‘in our time.’ In a certain sense,
when it gained its academic ascendance, it was able to persuade many people, especially humanists,
that it was a language of truth rather than a language of thinking, and some adopted it as if it were a
language of truth . . . Its fall from grace that began in the mid-late ’80s emerges in [your] writing as
a kind of dark redemption. It isn’t the language of truth, it is an exemplary (alienated) language of
truthfulness, or, [one that] has discovered that about itself, has discovered its own rag-and-boneshop
of the heart. And so it emerges as a language of truthfulness (perhaps, in our day, the perfectly dark
interpreter of the trumped up discourse of ‘truthiness’).” The reference to Emerson is from “The
American Scholar,” 1837 (originally, “An Oration Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at
Cambridge, [MA]”), included in Emerson’s 1841 volume, Man Thinking: An Oration. http://
digitalemerson.wsulibs.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/text/the-american-scholar.
26 Thinking through Poetry

idiom, “dark” in its embrace of enlightenments other than those sanctified by the
great humanist philosophies of middle modernity (e.g., Spinoza, Lucretius). One
also sees creative deconsecrations of the churchly systems (e.g., throughout human-
ist study today).74
Macherey includes some kinds of critical writing (e.g., his own, Foucault’s) in
“the historical field of Literature.” Like literature proper, “philosophical criticism”
will project “a form of thought” that, like “the sonata or symphony,” inheres in “the
structure of [its] successive movements.” In work of this kind, thinking is “dis-
persed and concentrated, diluted and condensed in texts whose fabrics and
margins were woven by the speculative issues that historically conditioned their
production and reception.”
Wittgenstein is brought on to provide a slogan to this effect: “Philosophy ought
really to be written only as a poetic composition.” The move is a feint, however, a
device used to smuggle in Heidegger, who, Macherey comments, “could have writ-
ten that sentence, and perhaps he did write it. It appears in a collection of fragmen-
tary notes drafted by Wittgenstein.” Summoning Heidegger, no matter how muffled
or indirect the call, is a strange move for a thinker like Macherey, formed within an
intellectual tradition not just different from what Heidegger represents but in most
ways, and certainly by reputation, inimical to it. I understand the move as an
instance of this general assertion: “. . . the meaning of a philosophy, to borrow a
phrase from Derrida, is originally deferred, activated only later . . . by an encounter
with other philosophies, as well as scientific theories, literary works etc. . . . it must
think by means of other philosophies, it becomes what it is through them” (my
emphasis).75 Heidegger is how Macherey “interferes with” the procedures of
philosophy, in that way “evoking” (his term) within his own text a “form of thought
which is neither literary nor philosophical because it is both.”76 Similarly, in my
own practice, thinking through often entails thinking through not just others but
highly unlikely and even antithetical others (that is, Others, in that weighted,
inflected way we often use the term).
As I said, “through” in my title phrase, works as a preposition meaning “by means
of,” “beyond,” and as half of a portmanteau usage, “thinking through a problem”
(in the sense of considering it from as many angles as possible and bringing that
thought to logical conclusion as best one can). Before explaining these shadings, let
me pause to distinguish what might sound like cognates, i.e., thinking “by means
of ” and thinking “with.” Readers will recognize the latter as a usage from the lexi-
con of so-called posthermeneutic reading (e.g., reparative reading, surface reading,

74 François, Open Secrets; Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New
Logics of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other
People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and
Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Anahid Nersessian, Utopia, Limited:
Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Joan Richardson,
A Natural History of Pragmatism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Rei Terada, Looking
Away (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
75 Macherey, In a Materialist Way, 14.
76 Macherey, The Object of Literature, 2, 9 (for “evoking” and “form of thought”).
 Introduction 27

literal reading, just reading), although it now has a currency of its own, independent
of those methods. I underscore the resonance not so as to equate “thinking through”
and “thinking with” but rather to distinguish them sharply, and then set them as
complementary rather than contrary critical practices.
I hear the phrase, “thinking with a poem,” as a synonym for Keats’s expression,
“bringing home” to it, used in a letter to Reynolds where the author muses on how
“a Man might pass a very pleasant life.” “Let him on a certain day read a certain
page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it,
and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon
it.”77 In the letters, this kind of undefended entry into the world of the text, where
the reader abandons himself to its unknown modes of being and to his own alea-
tory associations, is not just the prelude to but typically the condition for Keats’s
famously rich and curious general insights, applications, and speculations. These
seeming takeaways, however, are very much not that; they are continuations of the
wandering and dreaming rather than conclusions drawn or exits from those pleas-
antly suspended states.78
In some ways a cognate to Keatsian reading, Heidegger’s version of thinking shows
one important difference. While it too aspires to a thought-form that is nonrepre-
sentational, nonpropositional, and nonsystematic—that is, a thinking with—it is
at the same time conducted “with rigor and strictness about the nature of Being”
and thus, a thinking through to something or somewhere else that is nonetheless
careful to carry into that “elsewhere” traces of the passage through. Heidegger’s gno-
mic phrase—“the nature of Being”—as irritating (and, in its claim to nonconcep-
tuality, as self-refuting) as it is, nonetheless pinpoints a new aspiration. Thinking—on
Heidegger’s account and in his idiom, a response to a “rising into unconcealment”—
is itself a rising or opening, and as such, it is constrained indefinitely to suspend
closure of a formal or logical kind. That constraint arises from the “ontology”
(Heidegger’s term) of unconcealment.79 The shift to the ontic—a call for thinking to
attend not to things as they are (“beings,” in Heidegger’s phrase), but to the Thing
(“Being”) that underwrites the existence and plurality of things—is a move toward

77 John Keats to John Hamilton Reynolds, 19 February 1818, The Letters of John Keats, ed.
H. Buxton Forman (London: Reeves & Turner, 1895), 88.
78 In many registers (structural, rhetorical, syntactic, etc.), and as readers have long remarked,
Keats’s poetry insists on a strictly relational rather than foundational mode of assertion. One clear
example is the multiply embedded dreaming states established in The Fall of Hyperion, and their rela-
tionship as a whole to Hyperion.
79 For an interstitial and/or atmospheric space of unconcealment, see Sharon Cameron, Thinking
in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Cameron’s project in this study is to
“question the identification of consciousness with psychology.”
I am now exploring working distinctions between metaphysics and ontology as these terms are used
by contemporary philosophers. For my initial framing, I draw on Brian Cantwell Smith’s On the Origin
of Objects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), on Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s discussion of it (“Cutting
Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology,”
SAQ (Winter 2002), 187–212), and on a fine review article by Josefa Toribio (“Extruding Intentionality
from the Metaphysical Flux,” Journal of Experimental and Theoretical AI 11 (1999), 501–18). I pre-
sented the first stages of this inquiry at the MLA Convention, 2018, in a paper titled “Meta-physics”
for the panel “Romanticizing Meta-?”
28 Thinking through Poetry

“radical objectivity,” to borrow the parlance of the Heidegger commentary.80 It is

“radical” because rather than consisting of things and the relations between them,
Being names a domain—a kind of plenipotentiary relational field—that brings
forth those entities in their categorical (and thus cognitive) discreteness, and brings
forth, too, the working relations between them. (Heidegger’s absolute of relational-
ity has affinities with physicist David Bohm’s “implicate order,” with Karen Barad’s
physics of “intra-action,” with Haraway’s turn to biological and ontogenetic fields
for remodeling discrete life forms, and with contemporary ontotheorists such as
Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Tim Morton, Eduardo Kohn, and others.81) For
Heidegger, thinking is not a Keatsian plunge into the welter of what is, but a move-
ment toward a realm of self-structuring possibility, a kind of potentiating platform.
Affording no local habitation to the chameleon poet, it also deprives the chame-
leon thinker—the thinker-with—of any and all perspective, even the most alien.
In other words, the goal of Heidegger’s thinking with objects is to think through
them to objectivity itself: to think through beings to Being, without at the same
time objectifying or transcendentalizing that ground of infinite possibility.
I strongly emphasize and admire the aspiration here, not, however, the achievement.
Jerome McGann would characterize the project as a game that must be lost.82
Thinking with—as practiced and theorized by both Keats and Heidegger—makes
bid to free us from habitual ways of grasping things as they are: that is, things as
they are for us, or, subjectively (a term pitched, here, toward Wittgenstein’s “aspect-
perception”—that is, primary gestalt cognition—rather than everyday usage where it
references personal tastes, feelings, opinions).83 The posture of this book is that

80 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989), 176. Taylor uses this phrase, radical objectivity, to describe both Heidegger’s
and Merleau-Ponty’s critiques of subjectivism.
81 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter
and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Intra-action, from Karen Barad, “Meeting
the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism Without Contradiction,” in Feminism,
Science, and the Philosophy of Science, ed. L. H. Nelson and J. Nelson (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1996), 161–94. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010); David Bohm, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics (London and
New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), and Wholeness and the Implicate Order (New York:
Routledge, 1980); Bohm and Basil J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of
Quantum Theory (New York: Routledge, 1995); The Essential David Bohm, ed. Lee Nichol (New York:
Routledge, 2003); William Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2002), and A World of Becoming; Donna Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields:
Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1976), and Staying with the Trouble; Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology
Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Timothy Morton, Ecology Without
Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), and
The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
82 For a finely conceived etymological, intertextual, and conceptual unfolding of “chameleon,” see
Swift, “Wordsworth and the Poetry of Posture”; McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That
Must Be Lost (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
83 See Severin Schroeder, “A Tale of Two Problems: Wittgenstein’s Discussion of Aspect Perception,”
Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny, ed. J. Cottingham and P. M. S. Hacker
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). “Between 1946 and 1949, Wittgenstein occupied himself
intensely with the topic of aspect perception or seeing-as. It is one of his main concerns in the
typescripts and manuscripts that have now been published as Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology
 Introduction 29

thinking with needs thinking through in that Heideggerian sense of searching

through things toward relations, understood as the condition of generation of the
sensible: i.e., as that which brings forth objects rather than arises from them.84 In
Thinking through Poetry, thinking with and through alternate over and over again,
forming a pattern of thought that spirals both out and down, seeking always to
expand and deepen its reach.85
As a final comment on through-thinking as an aspiration to the thinking of
relationality, let me juxtapose to Heidegger these remarks by Haraway from her
2016 monograph, Staying with the Trouble.86 She opens by introducing us to the
work of Marilyn Strathern, celebrated anthropologist and “ethnographer of think-
ing practices.” While anthropology as a discipline tends to recognize its objects of
study as precisely not objects but rather relations, Strathern is unusual in applying
the same kind of relational thinking to her own instruments of knowing (methods,
models, discourses, problem sets, concepts). Here is Haraway, building on Strathern’s
example: “It matters what relations one uses to study the relations that one stud-
ies.” “It matters what . . . knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts.” Studies
that do this “pu[t] relations at risk with other relations, from unexpected other
worlds, accepting the risk of relentless contingency.”87
I use Strathern’s, Haraway’s, and my own affirmation of “relentless contingency”
as a thought ideal to endorse a very different kind of risk that also goes with
through-thinking. I mean the risk of being wrong, of being inconsistent, of being
unpersuasive, of being accessible to debate, or all of the above. Thinking through a
problem means clearly stating it, framing a possible solution and/or research plan,
doing that work and showing it, and then making the argument, in the sense of, if
not solving the problem, then coherently and in step-by-step fashion addressing it.
Thinking through is a way of doing intellectual business that invites one’s readers
to test one’s claims. Simply issuing the invitation signifies that rather than floating
an opinion, exploring a feeling, mapping a domain, assembling analogies, or curat-
ing exhibits, one is making a good faith attempt at a knowledge claim or a state-
ment of justified true belief. The exercise is closer to formal problem-solving than
it is to either a Keatsian associative commentary or to Heidegger’s drive toward a
phenomenological absolute.
That said, the analogy to problem-solving is complicated by one final feature of
thinking through, or one option that it affords most dramatically to those who make
literature (and especially poetry) their object and occasion for thinking through.
As I conceive it, this kind of thinking can (and sometimes should) juxtapose

and Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, and it is discussed at considerable length in the selec-
tion of remarks Wittgenstein culled from those volumes in 1949 (MS 144; TS 234), and which was
eventually printed under the title ‘Part II’ of Philosophical Investigations” (p. 352).
84 For a hard-headed and clearly illustrated account, see computational philosopher Brian Cantwell
Smith’s On the Origin of Objects.
85 McGann has characterized Emerson’s prose as a writing “that drives and circles, so that various
passages catch at others in repeating fashion” (private correspondence).
86 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 12, 26; Michael T. Taussig, The Nervous System (New York:
Routledge, 1992), and Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993).
87 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 12.
30 Thinking through Poetry

different conceptual frameworks, so that while each is deployed systematically, inter-

ference arises from the plurality. Rather than labor to simplify, unify, subordinate,
etc., the critic may choose to tolerate the interference on the view that for a philo-
sophical criticism, not only will the approach to each literary text be (in Macherey’s
phrase, cited above) “singularly implicated, in a determinate and differentiated man-
ner,” but so will the approach to different features in or aspects of the same text, or,
to a text that descends over time into different discursive and historical domains,
reconfiguring itself in each. What then is the bearing of “through” in the sense of
exhaustive, and bringing to conclusion (i.e., through to the end)? Obviously, there
is no getting to the end of analytic frameworks. However, it may happen that
the relations between and among these frameworks produce an overall sense of the
insufficiency of each and all, reorienting us toward the thought of or the aspiration
for totality, in that radically “objective” sense explored by Heidegger. This call to
wholesale rebooting can stimulate new modes of thought and bring out fault lines
in old ones.
 PA RT 1
T H E O RY: M AT E R I A L I S M
AGAINST ITSELF
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
kamen mehrere Häuptlinge, unter anderem der alte Mayentén, ein
stattlicher Mann, von einigen seiner besten Krieger umgeben, um
mich zu überreden.
Ich begab mich zu dem bolivianischen Militärposten und suchte
den Kommandanten zu einem Eingreifen zu bewegen. Vergebens
versuchte ich ihm zu erklären, daß er, wenn er nicht den Ashluslays
gegen die Tobas helfe, eines schönen Tages, oder richtiger Nachts,
mit allen seinen Soldaten niedergemetzelt werden würde, daß er
aber, wenn er ihnen beistehe, sich und seinem Lande den inneren,
noch unerforschten Teil des nördlichen Chaco eröffne. Er dürfe nicht
vergessen, daß es bis zum nächsten Orte, wo Weiße seien, 150 km
sei, und daß die Anzahl derer, die ihm helfen könnten, nur gering sei.
Er trug jedoch Bedenken, einen in einem fremden Lande wohnenden
Stamm anzugreifen, obschon dieser Stamm unaufhörlich Raubzüge
auf bolivianischem Gebiet vornahm. Ich beschloß deshalb
zurückzukehren.
Nach langen Unterhandlungen und sicherlich vielen Lügen
gelang es meinem Dolmetscher, die Indianer zu bewegen, uns einen
Wegweiser zu geben, der uns auf unbekannten Pfaden durch das
Innere des nördlichen Chaco führen sollte.
Die Gegend um das Dorf Tonés besteht aus offenen Ebenen,
Sümpfen und parkähnlichen Wäldern aus Algarrobo. Dieselbe wird
stark von Jaguaren heimgesucht, die sogar die Reittiere verfolgen.
Mehrere Pferde und Maulesel der Soldaten waren zerrissen,
trotzdem der Militärposten, wie erwähnt, nur einige Monate alt war.
Wenige Meilen oberhalb des Dorfes Tonés bildet der Pilcomayo
einen Wasserfall. Das ist der merkwürdigste Fall, den ich je in
meinem Leben gesehen habe. Nicht ein Felsblock, nicht der
geringste Stein hindert das Wasser, sondern es braust zwischen
harten Tonbänken dahin. Nicht weit unterhalb dieses Falles löst sich
der Rio Pilcomayo in gewaltige Sümpfe, die sog. „Esteros del Padre
Patiño“ auf, wo unerhörte Schilfmassen das Weiterkommen jedes
Fahrzeugs verhindern. Infolge dieser Sümpfe ist der Fluß, der sonst
für den Verkehr so wichtig sein könnte, unfahrbar. Im Rio Pilcomayo
gibt es unerhörte Massen Fische, und Tausende Indianer entnehmen
dem Flusse einen großen Teil des Jahres ihre wichtigste Nahrung. In
den Sümpfen finden sich eigentümliche Lungenfische „Lepidosiren“.
Der Rio Pilcomayo ist ein merkwürdiger Fluß. Wenn er die Berge
verläßt, führt er Steine und Kies mit sich, nach dem Inneren des
Chaco bringt er aber nur Schlamm. Während der Trockenzeit trägt
der Wind diesen Schlamm weit umher, und die Tage, wo die
Staubmassen über den Chaco wehen, sind höchst unangenehme.
Der Rio Pilcomayo hat, nachdem er die Berge verlassen hat, bis ins
Herz des Chaco hinein keinen einzigen Nebenfluß. Er hat oft seinen
Lauf verändert und sich neue Wege gebrochen. Entfernt man sich
etwas vom Flusse, so trifft man mit Wasser angefüllte Reste alter
Flußbetten, Muschelbänke und große, verräterische Erdhöhlen an.
Am oberen Pilcomayo verlieren die Kolonisten in diesen Höhlen, die
bis zu 10 m tief und zuweilen mit einer dünnen, zerbrechlichen
Decke bekleidet sind, jährlich viele Tiere. Diese Höhlen dürften in der
Weise gebildet sein, daß die gewaltigen Massen Hölzer, die der Fluß
mit sich geführt und aufgehäuft hat, von den Schlammassen bedeckt
werden und dann, wenn der Fluß sich einen neuen Lauf gesucht hat,
vermodern. In den Trockenzeiten wüten in den Wäldern und
Gebüschen des Chaco gewaltige Feuersbrünste. In der Regel
zünden die Indianer das Gras und die Büsche an, um die leckeren
Erdratten, die zu den Delikatessen ihrer Speisekarte gehören,
besser finden zu können. In einer Chorotisage ist von diesen
Erdhöhlen und Waldbränden die Rede.
Vor langer Zeit wurde alles von einem großen Feuer verheert,
das alle Chorotis, außer zwei, einem Mann und einer Frau, die sich
in eine Erdhöhle retteten, tötete. Als alles vorüber und das Feuer
gelöscht war, gruben sie sich heraus. Sie hatten kein Feuer. Der
schwarze Geier hatte einen Feuerbrand nach seinem Nest gebracht,
dieses war in Brand geraten, das Feuer hatte sich längs des
Baumes verbreitet und kohlte noch unter dem Stumpfe. Der Geier
schenkte nun dem Choroti von diesem Feuer, und seitdem haben
diese Feuer. Von diesem Manne und dieser Frau stammen alle
Chorotis her.[4]
Die Wälder des Chaco sind reich an wilden, eßbaren Früchten.
Es gibt ganze Wälder von Algarrobo[5] und Tusca,[6] ganze Sträucher
von Chañar.[7] Die Schlingpflanze, welche die Tasifrucht trägt, ist
sehr gemein. In wasserarmen Gegenden erhalten die Indianer
Wasser aus einer Wurzel, die von Weißen und Chiriguanos Sipoy
genannt wird.
Das Tierleben ist nicht sehr reich. Von größerem Wild sieht man
meistens Rehböcke und Strauße. Der Jaguar ist, wie erwähnt,
häufiger. Den Spuren nach zu urteilen, sind Tapire und Wildschweine
nicht ungewöhnlich. Füchse sieht man ebenfalls zahlreich. Die
Gürteltiere sind gemein. Der aus dem Chaco bekannte
windhundähnliche Hund[8] ist selten. Das Vogelleben ist besonders
im Walde arm. Die Flußufer und Sümpfe sind von einigen Storch-
und Entenarten belebt. Eidechsen, auch die großen
Iguanaeidechsen, huschen an warmen Sonnentagen überall umher.
Meilenweise sind die Ebenen mit den für die Reiter so lästigen
Löchern der Erdratten übersät.
Die wilden Tiere im Chaco sind für den mit Feuerwaffen
Bewaffneten nicht sehr gefährlich. Der Jaguar ist der Schrecken der
Indianer. Kurz bevor ich einmal nach einem Matacolager kam, hatte
ein Jaguar einen Indianer von einem Feuer, an dem er mit einigen
zwanzig Kameraden lag und schlief, fortgeschleppt und getötet.
Giftige Schlangen, auch Klapperschlangen, kommen vor, man sieht
sie aber selten. In den Seen darf man nicht baden, und auch in den
Flüssen kann dies gefährlich sein. Am Rio Pilcomayo gibt es kaum
einen Indianer, der nicht zahlreiche Narben von Palometafischen[9]
hat.[10] Mit ihren messerscharfen Zähnen schneiden sie aus dem
Körper desjenigen, der so unvorsichtig ist, da zu baden, wo sie sind,
große Fleischstücke heraus. Einmal wollte Moberg über den
Pilcomayo schwimmen. Es war gegen Ende der Trockenzeit, und
das Wasser strömte in einer schmalen, tiefen Rinne dahin. Ganz mit
Blut bedeckt stieg er aus dem Flusse. Kleine Siluroidfische hatten
ihn in Massen überfallen und ihm mit ihren scharfen, lanzettförmigen
Flossen zahlreiche tiefe Wunden zugefügt. Um sich vor dem Biß der
Palometafische zu schützen, wenden die Ashluslay, wenn sie in
Sümpfen waten, aus Caraguatáschnüren[11] dicht geknüpfte
Strümpfe an.
 Schön ist es im Chaco nicht. Der Wald entzückt nicht das Auge
durch üppiges Grün, die Palmenwälder und Schilfbüsche ermüden
durch ihre Einförmigkeit, die Seen sind klein und gering an Zahl. Der
Rio Pilcomayo hat hier keine Nebenflüsse. Keine Anhöhe, kein Berg,
von wo man eine Aussicht über das Land hat. Im Innern des Chaco
gibt es keinen Stein, ja kaum ein Kieselkörnchen. Überall besteht der
Boden aus Staub und Schlamm.
Die Regenzeit beginnt im November oder Dezember und endet
im April oder Mai. Macht man eine Reise in diese Gegenden und will
nur dem Pilcomayo folgen, so ist die Trockenzeit die beste Reisezeit.
Zur Vornahme von Ausflügen in den wasserarmen nördlichen Chaco
soll man den Anfang der Regenzeit wählen.
Der Chaco ist gesund. Während meines Aufenthaltes am Rio
Pilcomayo waren weder ich noch meine Begleiter krank, und die
weißen Kolonisten scheinen sich alle einer guten Gesundheit zu
erfreuen. Möglicherweise sind die schrecklichen Staubstürme für
Schwachbrüstige auf die Dauer ungesund.
Wir nahmen nun von unseren Freunden im Dorfe Tonés
Abschied und versprachen ihnen, wiederzukommen. Wer weiß,
wann dies geschehen wird? Vielleicht tanze ich noch einmal mit im
Reigen auf dem großen Platz, vielleicht erheitert mich noch einmal
das Algarrobobier, vielleicht johle ich noch einmal auf den Festen
dieser meiner Ashluslayfreunde. Am besten wäre es vielleicht, wenn
ich nicht zurückkehre. Warte ich noch einige Zeit, so hat sich
wahrscheinlich auch hier viel verändert und verschlechtert und der
Besuch bereitet nur eine große Enttäuschung.
Wir verließen mit unserm Wegweiser den Pilcomayo und
begaben uns nach dem nördlichen Chaco. Ich hatte erwartet, wenig
bebaute Gegenden zu finden, sah aber bald meinen Irrtum ein.
Gebahnte Wege führten nach allen Richtungen. Der Wegweiser
übergab uns schon nach zwei Tagen, wir hatten aber das Glück,
andere Reisegesellschaft zu finden. Zwei Ashluslayindianer, denen
die Tobas ihre Frauen geraubt und die Kinder gefangen fortgeführt
hatten, waren auf dem Wege zu den Mataco-Guisnay, um mit ihnen
als Zwischenhändlern betreffs der Auslösung ihrer Kinder aus der
Gefangenschaft zu verhandeln. Wir reisten gemeinsam.
Als wir nach den Dörfern kamen, wurden wir mit Tränen und
Wehgeschrei empfangen. Auf diese Weise zeigten die Weiber
unsern neuen Freunden ihre Teilnahme an deren Kummer.[12]
Überall wurden wir gut aufgenommen und durften in den
stürmischen, regnerischen Nächten den spärlichen Raum in den
Hütten teilen und uns an den Lagerfeuern erwärmen. Zuweilen
wurden wir auch zu den einfachen und unappetitlichen Mahlzeiten
eingeladen. Alles ging gut und wir waren auf diesen unbekannten,
niedrigen Indianerpfaden, wo man sich in der Regel dicht an den
Hals des Reittieres drücken muß, um nicht von den Zweigen
gestreift zu werden, einen Grad nach dem Chaco zu geritten. Man
hatte mir gesagt, die Gegenden seien aus Mangel an Wasser
unbebaut. Dies war keineswegs richtig, obschon es zuweilen weit
zwischen den Tränken war. In der Regel ist das gefundene Wasser
braun und stinkend.
Alles ging, wie gesagt, gut, bis wir zu einem Häuptling namens
Chilán kamen. Als wir durch den dichten Wald, der nach einem Dorfe
führte, ritten, raschelte es überall in den Büschen. Chilán hatte seine
Krieger auspostiert, um uns, falls wir schlechte Absichten hätten,
einen warmen Empfang zu bereiten. Ruhig ritten wir durch den
gefährlichen Wald gerade in das Dorf Chiláns. Mit bösen Blicken und
unter einigen weniger freundlichen Worten an unsere
Reisekameraden empfing uns der Alte. Als Freundschaftsgabe
überreichte ich ihm ein Messer, worauf er halb zögernd den
Streitkolben, den er in der Hand hatte, weglegte.
Chilán muß unseren Wegweisern bestimmte Weisungen
gegeben haben, denn nach dem Besuch bei ihm begannen diese
uns in der Richtung nach dem Rio Pilcomayo zu führen und nicht,
wie wir gewünscht und sie uns infolge unseres Versprechens von
Geschenken gelobt hatten, nach Norden. Da wir die Tränken nicht
kannten, fanden wir uns nicht ohne ihre Hilfe zurecht. Wir waren
schon nahe an dem Flusse, als wir eines Abends in ein
Ashluslaylager kamen. Müde, wie ich war, legte ich mich gleich
schlafen. Moberg fand es eigentümlich, daß beinahe nur Männer im
Lager waren, ließ aber seinen Verdacht nicht verlauten und kroch
ruhig unter das Moskitonetz. Ungefähr gegen zwei Uhr erwachte der
Dolmetscher durch ein Signal, das jemand im Walde gab. Einer der
Männer im Lager erhob sich leise, ging fort und kam nach einiger
Zeit mit einer Schar bewaffneter Leute wieder. Der Dolmetscher
lauschte und hörte, wie die Neuangekommenen fragten, warum die
Ashluslay uns nicht töteten. In diesem Falle bekämen sie die
Karabiner und könnten die Tobas mit Erfolg bekämpfen. Wären wir
getötet, würden die Weißen niemals erfahren, was im Innern ihres
Landes sei. Sie sagten auch, sie wünschten den Skalp des blonden
Mannes, d. h. Mobergs, für ihre Feste. Meine Wegweiser wollten sich
indessen an dem Überfall nicht beteiligen. Diese Weißen sind
unsere Freunde, sagten sie.
Der Dolmetscher, der meine beiden anderen Begleiter, zwei
bolivianische Soldaten, geweckt hatte, redete nun die
Neuangekommenen an. Diese machten sich nun eilig davon.
Vergebens bat er sie, bis zum Morgen zu bleiben. An der Sprache
hatte er jedoch gehört, daß es Matacoindianer waren. Diese von der
Zivilisation halbverdorbenen Indianer wollten also einen Mord
begehen, an dem „die Wilden“ sich nicht beteiligen wollten.
Vielleicht haben wir es Onásh, so heißt der Mann, der gegen den
Überfall sprach, zu verdanken, daß wir nicht das Schicksal Crevaux’,
Ibaretas und Boggianis teilten.
Am folgenden Tage waren wir wieder im Lande der Mataco-
Guisnay. Wir hatten keinen Bissen zu essen und der Regen goß in
Strömen. Wir waren also hungrig und froren. Zelte hatten wir schon
lange nicht mehr mit, da wir sie zum Schutz unserer Sammlungen
hatten zurücklassen müssen. Wir ritten in ein Dorf und wurden
höchst unfreundlich empfangen. Wir bekamen nicht das geringste,
und man weigerte sich bestimmt, uns während der Nacht in den
Hütten Schutz gegen den Regen zu gewähren. Obschon sich in der
Gegend, in der wir jetzt waren, keine Weißen befanden, suchen alle
diese Matacoindianer bei den Weißen Arbeit und kennen den
„Segen“ der Zivilisation.
 Als wir dann des Nachts hungrig und frierend an einem Feuer
saßen, das infolge des Gußregens nicht kräftig brennen konnte,
dachten und sagten wir böse Sachen über den Einfluß der Weißen
auf die Wilden des Urwaldes und verglichen die Ungastlichkeit der
Matacos mit der Freundlichkeit, die wir tief in den Wäldern bei den
Indianern genossen hatten, die nie vorher von Weißen besucht
worden sind.
Nach zwei Tagen waren wir wieder bei einem bolivianischen
Militärposten. Ich war der einzige, der beritten ankam. Die Pferde der
anderen waren ermüdet oder unterwegs gestürzt.
Die Indianer, besonders die Ashluslays und Chorotis, die ich auf
diesen Streifzügen im Chaco kennen gelernt habe, will ich hier in
den folgenden Kapiteln zu schildern suchen. Da ihre Kultur ziemlich
gleichartig ist, glaube ich, sie zusammen behandeln zu können.
Nicht viele Verfasser haben bisher die Sitten und Gebräuche der
Chorotis und Ashluslays geschildert. Beiträge zur Kenntnis der
letzteren sind von Herrmann[13] geliefert worden, der sie, gleich den
Tobas, Sotegaraik nennt. Eric von Rosen[14] hat ausgezeichnete
Photographien von den letzteren veröffentlicht.
Der vortreffliche deutsch-argentinische Anthropologe R.
Lehmann-Nitsche[15] hat auf den Zuckerfabriken von Esperanza
wichtige Studien über die physische Anthropologie der Chorotis und
anderer Chacostämme gemacht. Er hat den richtigen Platz für
derartige Forschungen gewählt. Die Fabrik liegt, wie erwähnt, an der
Eisenbahn, man kann also allerlei Instrumente mit der größten
Leichtigkeit dorthin schaffen. An Ort und Stelle befinden sich
ausgezeichnete Dunkelkammern zur Entwicklung der Platten usw.
Die sich für die physische Anthropologie der Chacostämme
Interessierenden verweise ich auf die Arbeit dieses Verfassers.
Da die den Chacostämmen angehörenden Guaycuru-, Mataco-
und Maskoi-Gruppen in vielen Beziehungen eine den Choroti und
Ashluslay ähnliche Kultur haben, so ist die Literatur, die hier des
Vergleichs wegen von Interesse ist, eine sehr große.
 In dieser Arbeit ist indessen nicht der richtige Platz zu solchen
vergleichenden Forschungen. Hier will ich vor allem ein Bild des
Lebens unter den Indianern geben, wie ich es aufgefaßt habe, und
überlasse solche Forschungen Sonderaufsätzen in
Fachzeitschriften.
Der einzige ältere Verfasser, der die Chorotis erwähnt, ist Pedro
Lozano. Er nennt jedoch nur den Namen. Sehr möglich ist es ja, daß
sowohl die Chorotis wie die Ashluslays den älteren Verfassern
bekannt waren, aber unter anderen Namen als die, die wir kennen.
Die Ashluslays nennen sich selbst so. Die Chorotis nennen sie
Ashli, die Matacos Sówua oder Sówuash, die Tapietes sagen
Etéhua, die Tobas Sotegaraik. Die Weißen sagen in der Regel
Tapiete und verwechseln sie mit einem hier unten näher
geschilderten Stamm. Die Chorotis nennen sich selbst Yóshuahá,
welcher Name natürlich angewendet werden sollte. Sie kennen
jedoch jetzt alle ihren Chiriguana-Namen Choroti, den die Weißen in
Chorote verspanischt haben. Die Matacos nennen die Chorotis
Mánuk oder Má-niuk.
Sprachlich gehören die Ashluslays und Chorotis mehr zusammen
mit den Matacos. Ich bringe hier einen kurzen Auszug aus dem bei
ihnen gesammelten Wörterverzeichnis, damit der Leser etwas von
ihrer Sprache sieht.
Choroti Ashluslay
Auge táte tósse (ss mit Zischlaut)
Zahn (n)kiente seuté
Bart (n)pótsi posé
Ohr (n)kioté (dein) akféi, (mein) ikféi
Zunge pálnat cháclitj
Nase natóve anās, inās
Sonne kíle fincóclay
Mond huéla huéla
Stern catés catīs
Feuer húat (éti) itósh
 Wasser inyat ināt
Erde áshnate cotjāt
Gut és is
Schlecht häes
Weit tóshhue tójke
Nahe hätóshhue cháshle
Fisch siúsh sájetj
Hund aléna núu
Hündin alénaséshni núuasésna
Salz chuhóne sifóni
Tabak shushú finóc
Mais péāta láutsitj
Mutter téte, máma mimé
Tochter yóse yósi
Haus huéte huéte
Er, du náca, téla
Ich yá (m)
Nein hä am
Gibt’s nicht náhipa ámpa
Ja (Antwort) häe, téy létj, hé
Weib aséshnia asésna
Gattin tsémbla chácfä
Morgen káshlomata slúmasi
Weg náyi náiss
Tabakpfeife kiti finkoshi
Rio Pilcomayo téuk, tehuóc téhuoc
Für Gegenstände, die diese Indianer von den Weißen erhalten
oder die Weißen haben anwenden sehen, bilden sie eigene Worte
und lernen gewöhnlich nicht die spanischen Namen, z. B.:
Choroti
Bleistift = bésnike.
Brille = ukíne.
 Revolver = sēta.
Notizbuch = ésenik.
Stiefel = sāti.
Uhr (für die Sonne) = kílekíe.
Die Aussprache der Chorotisprache schien mir nicht besonders
schwer, die Ashluslay sprechen aber verschiedene Worte so, daß
man, um sie nachzuahmen, eine gewisse Zungenakrobatik
anwenden muß. Besonders schwer wiederzugeben sind einige Kehl-
und Zischlaute.
Zahlwörter. Ashluslay.
1 = huéshla.
2 = näpú.
3 = pú-shana.
4 = it-chat-cúch (schwieriger Halslaut).
5 = hué-shla-no-étj.
6 = hué-shla-yāma.
7 = näpú-
8 = púshana-
9 = it-chat-cúch-yāma.
10 = yāma képäa.
Ich teile auch hier einige gewöhnliche Ausdrücke aus der
Chorotisprache mit.
Ich will nicht = hähua.
Dieses ist mein Vater = náca sínia.
Ich will = sikéyi.
Willst du? = makéyi.
Er will = náca kéyi. Auch náca símehe.
Ich bin hier = yámpo.
Er ist hier = nácapo.
Wir sind hier = póyata.
Er will nicht = náca hä símehe.
Ich habe gesehen = íwuin.
Ich habe nicht gesehen = häwuin.
Hast du gesehen = máhuenea.
Warten = hatéma.
Viele Frauen = aséshnialo.
Weicher Mais = peáta-hä-tóc.
Harter Mais = peáta-tóc.
Mit Bart = pótsipu.
Gehen wir = ná.
Ich gehe = yápe.
Gehst du = malápe.
Wirst du gehen = maáki.
Ich bin gegangen = hihóyi.
Ich bin nicht gegangen = hähóyi.
Ich gehe nicht = häeyic.
Er ist gegangen = nácaya.

Tafel 3. Dorf des Chorotihäuptlings „Waldhuhn“.

[3] G. Friederici: Skalpieren und ähnliche Kriegsgebräuche in

Südamerika. Braunschweig 1906.
[4] Ehrenreich (30–31) nimmt ebenfalls an, daß große
Pampasbrände zur Entstehung solcher „Sintbrandmythen“
beigetragen haben. „Die Mythen und Legenden der
südamerikanischen Urvölker“. Berlin 1905. Suppl. Zeitschr. für
Ethn. Eine dieser ähnliche Sage ist von den Arowaken in Guyana
und von Yuracáre bekannt.
[5] Prosopis alba.
[6] Acacia aroma.
[7] Gourliea decortitans.
[8] Canis jubatus.
[9] Eric v. Rosen hat eine ausgezeichnete Photographie eines
Chorotis mit einer Narbe von einem solchen Fisch veröffentlicht.
The Chorotes Indians in the Bolivian Chaco. Stockholm 1904. Bild
VI.
[10] Serrosalmo sp.
[11] Caraguatá = Bromelia Serra.
[12] Dieser Brauch scheint mir eine gewisse Ähnlichkeit mit den
von älteren Verfassern beschriebenen Begrüßungszeremonien zu
haben. Vgl. Friederici: Der Tränengruß der Indianer. Globus Bd.
LXXXIX. Nr. 2.
[13] Herrmann: Die ethnographischen Ergebnisse der deutschen
Pilcomayo-Expedition. Zeitschr. für Ethn. 1908.
[14] Eric von Rosen: The Chorotes Indians in the Bolivian Chaco.
Stockholm 1904.
[15] R. Lehmann-Nitsche: Estudios Antropológicos sobre los
Chiriguanos, Chorotes, Matacos y Tobas. Anales del Museo de la
Plata. Tomo I. Buenos Aires 1908.
 Drittes Kapitel.

Unter den Indianern am Rio

Pilcomayo (Fortsetzung).

Gemeinwesen.
Wir sind alle Brüder, sagte einmal ein Chorotiindianer zu mir. Im
großen gesehen bilden auch die Chorotis und Ashluslays zwei
Familien. Sie wohnen in einer bedeutenden Anzahl Dörfer von
wechselnder Größe verteilt. Es gibt dort Dörfer mit ganz wenig
Familien und Dörfer, wie das des Ashluslayhäuptlings Mayentén, das
etwa 1000 Bewohner hatte. Die Dörfer, oder richtiger die Stellen, wo
die Dörfer angelegt sind, haben Namen. So hieß ein Chorotidorf
vuátsina = Erdratte, ein anderes hópla = Grasblume, ein drittes
tónoclel = alte Pfütze, ein viertes asnatelémi = weiße Erde usw.
Die Chorotis und Ashluslays sind nicht vollständig seßhaft. Sie
ziehen beständig, wenn auch nicht weit. Als ich z. B. 1909 dieses
Land besuchte, fand ich sehr wenige Dörfer an demselben Platze
wie 1908. Sie ziehen des Fischfangs, der Algarrobo, ihrer Äcker
wegen usw. Während der Trockenzeit ziehen viele Indianer nach
dem Rio Pilcomayo, um dort zu fischen. In der Regenzeit ziehen sie
sich in das Innere des Landes zurück, wo sie in der Regel ihre Äcker
haben. Das ganze Menschenmaterial im Gemeinwesen der Chorotis
und Ashluslays ist sehr beweglich. Zuweilen teilen sich die Familien,
zuweilen vereinigen sie sich zu großen Gruppen. Die Individuen,
besonders die Jugend, ziehen beständig von einem Dorf zum
andern. Die Choroti- und Ashluslaydörfer, die ich gesehen habe,
lagen teils im Walde, teils auf der Ebene. Einige Chorotidörfer lagen
während der Trockenzeit unten am Pilcomayofluß an dem niedrigen,
jährlich überschwemmten Ufer. In keinem Chorotidorf waren die
Hütten nach einem bestimmten Plane geordnet. In mehreren
Ashluslaydörfern waren sie dagegen um eine Art Marktplatz
gruppiert, auf welchem die Männer unter Ausschluß der Frauen
einen gemeinsamen Sammlungsplatz hatten, der entweder ganz
einfach im Schatten eines großen Baumes lag oder durch ein zu
diesem Zweck gebautes Sonnendach geschützt war.
Es ist höchst interessant zu sehen, daß wir hier eine sehr
primitive Form des von vielen Indianerstämmen bekannten
„Männerhauses“ finden, in welchem die Männer sich versammeln, zu
welchem die Frauen aber keinen Zutritt haben.
Der Platz für die Dörfer war offenbar überall so gewählt, daß man
Fische, wilde Früchte, oder, zur Erntezeit, seine Äcker in der Nähe
hatte. Im Innern des nördlichen Chaco ist man bei den Dorfanlagen
an die wenigen Tränken gebunden, deshalb sind auch die dortigen
Indianer viel seßhafter, als die am Rio Pilcomayo. Dort sind auch die
Hütten viel besser gebaut, als an diesem Flusse.
Zwischen den Dörfern führen eine Masse Wege, die sich in der
Nähe des Dorfes netzförmig auflösen. Aus diesem Grunde ist es oft
schwer, den Pfaden der Indianer zu folgen.
Weder die Chorotis noch die Ashluslays haben einen für den
ganzen Stamm gemeinsamen Häuptling. Die meisten Dörfer haben
ihre Häuptlinge, aber diese sind unabhängig voneinander. Bei den
Ashluslays habe ich Häuptlinge gesehen, die über mehrere Dörfer
herrschen. Die Häuptlinge haben je nach ihren persönlichen
Eigenschaften Einfluß. Sie sowie ihre Frauen arbeiten genau ebenso
wie die anderen Indianer. Sie haben keine Diener; solche sind bei
diesen Indianern unbekannt. Der Häuptling hat keinen Ehrenplatz
bei den Trinkgelagen, seine Hütte nimmt keinen besonders
auserwählten Platz im Dorfe ein.
Er ist ein Familienvater, den man respektiert, der aber nicht
regiert.
Im Krieg nimmt er vielleicht eine leitende Stellung ein, die
anderen gehorchen ihm aber nur soweit, wie es ihnen paßt. Kommt
ein weißer Mann nach einem Indianerdorf, so wird er von dem
Häuptling empfangen, und die Sitte erfordert es, daß er ein
Geschenk erhält. Dies scheint mir indessen eine spätere Erfindung
der Weißen selbst zu sein. Der Weiße hat zur Unterhandlung im
Dorfe eine bestimmte Person nötig gehabt und hat sich darum der
Häuptlingsinstitution bedient und sie weiter entwickelt.
Die Häuptlingswürde scheint in der Regel vom Vater auf den
Sohn zu gehen. Ist der Sohn beim Tode seines Vaters minderjährig,
d. h. nach indianischen Begriffen kein älterer, verheirateter Mann,
wird sie interimistisch von einem älteren Verwandten ausgeübt. Sehr
oft, besonders nach Kriegen, wo die Männer ihre Tüchtigkeit zeigen
können, entstehen neue Häuptlinge.
Unter den Ashluslayhäuptlingen, die ich kennen gelernt habe,
sind bemerkenswert Toné, Mayentén, Mocpuké, Aslú, Mentisa und
Chilán; unter den Chorotis Attamo aus einer Ashluslayfamilie, Kara-
Kara, Éstehua und Tula. Die meisten von ihnen waren Greise, die
offenbar in der Hauptsache über Kinder, Enkel, Geschwister und
deren Kinder regierten.
Eine große Macht im Dorfe besitzt, wo ein solcher vorhanden ist,
der Dolmetscher. Er spricht Spanisch und unterhandelt mit den
Weißen. Bei den Chorotis befanden sich mehrere Spanisch
sprechende Individuen, bei den Ashluslays keiner.
Einen bedeutenden Einfluß hat auch der Medizinmann. Man
bietet ihm viel Essen an, behandelt ihn somit gut. Niemals habe ich
gehört, daß ein Medizinmann gleichzeitig Häuptling war.
In den Choroti- und Ashluslaydörfern herrscht kein
Klassenunterschied, noch gibt es Reiche oder Arme. Ist der Magen
voll, so ist man reich, ist der Magen leer, so ist man arm. Wir sind
alle Brüder, dies ist der Grundgedanke im Gesellschaftsbau dieser
Menschen. Sie leben in einem beinahe vollständigen Kommunismus.
Schenkt man einem Choroti- oder Ashluslayindianer zwei Hemden,
so verschenkt er sicher das eine, und vielleicht alle beide. Bekommt
ein Indianer Brot, so teilt er es in kleine Stücke, damit es für alle
reicht. Ich vergesse niemals einen kleinen Ashluslayknaben, dem ich
Zucker gab. Er biß ein Stückchen ab und aß es anscheinend mit
Wohlgefallen auf, dann sog er ein bißchen an dem Rest und nahm
ihn aus dem Munde, damit die Mutter und die Geschwister auch
kosten sollten. Bekommt ein Choroti- oder Ashluslayindianer einen
Rock, so trägt er ihn vielleicht einen Tag, am folgenden Tage hat ihn
ein anderer usw. Niemals raucht einer dieser Indianer seine Pfeife
allein. Sie soll von Mund zu Mund gehen. Oftmals hat mir ein
Indianer die Pfeife aus dem Mund genommen, einige Züge getan
und sie mir dann wieder zurückgegeben, denn so will es die Sitte
dort. Ein Mann, der viele Fische gefangen hat, teilt mit dem, der
weniger Glück gehabt hat.
Es wäre indessen ein großer Irrtum, wenn man glaubte, daß in
dem Indianerstaat nicht jedes Individuum das besitzt, was es arbeitet
und anwendet. Niemals würde es einem Indianer einfallen, den
Besitz eines anderen auszutauschen. Ein Mann würde niemals
etwas, was seiner Frau oder seinem kleinen Kinde gehört,
weggeben, ohne sie zu fragen. Jede Sache hat ihren Besitzer, da
der Besitzer aber mildtätig ist und alle aus seinem Stamme als
Brüder betrachtet, so teilt er freigebig mit den anderen. Die Tiere
haben Besitzmarken. So sind die Schafe, um den Besitzer zu
kennzeichnen, an den Ohren auf verschiedene Weise geschoren.
Wird jedoch ein Schaf geschlachtet, so wird das Fleisch an alle
verteilt. Bei den Ashluslays haben die gewebten Mäntel Zeichen, die
den Besitzer angeben. Einige solche Besitzmarken sind hier
abgebildet (Abb. 4). Da sie eine Art Namenszeichnung sind, sind sie
höchst interessant. Möglicherweise haben indessen die Indianer die
Idee hierzu von den Zeichen, mit welchen die Weißen ihr Vieh
stempeln, erhalten. Zahlreiche, von den Weißen gestohlene Pferde
mit solchen Zeichen habe ich nämlich bei den Ashluslays gesehen.
 Die Mäntel sind, wie erwähnt, gezeichnet, trotzdem will derjenige,
der einen großen guten Mantel besitzt, nicht allein unter demselben
schlafen. In den Ashluslaydörfern pflegten ein paar Indianer oft des
Nachts in meinem Bett zu schlafen, offenbar in dem Gedanken: „Du
Weißer hast so große Decken, daß sie für mehrere als dich reichen.“
Diese meine Indianerfreunde hätten sehen sollen, wie es bei uns
zu Hause zugeht, wie der eine in einem prachtvollen Bett schläft und
der andere friert. Die Weißen sind ja auch nicht Brüder. —
Gütergemeinschaft herrscht bei diesen Indianern nicht, aber zufolge
der großen Mildtätigkeit versucht keiner, sich auf Kosten des
anderen einen Vorteil zu verschaffen, sondern teilt freigebig mit
allen, was er hat. An dem einen Tage schenkt er, an dem anderen
nimmt er Geschenke entgegen.

Abb. 4. Eigentumsmarken auf Mänteln,

Ashluslay.
Das Land hat keinen Besitzer, die Äcker gehören dem, der sie
bebaut. Land ist genug vorhanden, und es ist Raum da für alle.
Sollte die Bevölkerung so groß werden, daß Mangel an anbaubarem
Land eintritt, so würde es wohl auch mit dem gemeinsamen
Besitzrecht aus sein.
Man sollte meinen, daß in einem Gemeinwesen, wie dem dieser
Indianer, eine gewisse Gesetzlosigkeit herrscht. Diebstahl ist
unbekannt, d. h. Diebstahl von den eigenen Mitgliedern des
Stammes, denn es herrscht dort ein so großes Gemeingefühl, daß
niemand zu stehlen braucht. Ich glaube auch nicht, daß die Indianer
sich gegenseitig belügen. Dem Weißen lügt man etwas vor, man
sagt ihm ganz einfach, was man für nützlich für den Stamm hält.
Man betrügt ihn, wenn es paßt, man sagt ihm die Wahrheit, wenn es
nicht schaden kann. Ertappt man einen Indianer auf einer
Unwahrheit, so betrachtet er es ungefähr so, wie ein Weißer die
Entdeckung eines Aprilscherzes. Er lacht und findet es amüsant.
Wird man ärgerlich, so hält er den Betreffenden offenbar für dumm.

Abb. 5. Ashluslaypapa mit seinem kleinen Jungen. Rio Pilcomayo.

 Der Mord beschränkt sich auf den Kinder- und Elternmord, dies
ist aber vom indianischen Standpunkt kein Verbrechen. Das klingt ja
schrecklich. Die Indianerin betrachtet es als ihr Recht, die
Leibesfrucht abzutreiben und ihr Neugeborenes zu töten, wenn sie
will. Sie glaubt offenbar ein Recht an dem Leben zu haben, das sie
gegeben. Die Abtreibung der Leibesfrucht geschieht durch
mechanische Behandlung in weit vorgeschrittenem Stadium[16] und
kommt somit, wenigstens bei den Chorotis, immer in den Fällen vor,
wo unverheiratete Frauen schwanger werden. Die neugeborenen
Kinder werden getötet, wenn die Mutter von dem Vater verlassen
wird, und immer, wenn sie mißgestaltet sind. Ich kenne mehrere
solche Kindesmörderinnen, die liebe und gutherzige Mädchen sind.
Ein solches ist z. B. Ashlisi, ein Mädchen, das einige lustige
Zeichnungen, von denen zwei weiterhin wiedergegeben sind, für
mich gemacht hat. Unserer Ansicht nach sollte ein solches
Verbrechen eine Frau verrohen. Das ist ein vollständiger Irrtum,
denn das Verbrechen verroht erst, wenn es Verachtung seitens der
Umgebung verursacht.
Wenn ein Indianer seine alte blinde Mutter oder seinen
verkrüppelten Vater tötet, so befreit er sie selbst von einem Leben,
das ihnen eine Last ist, und sich selbst von einer Extramühe im
Kampfe ums Dasein. Daß sie dieselben zuweilen lebend
verbrennen, wie mein Dolmetscher Flores es einmal bei einer alten
Frau seitens der Chorotis gesehen hat, erscheint uns natürlich
grausam. Möglicherweise haben sie indessen die Alten im Verdacht
der Hexerei gehabt. Die sittliche Freiheit ist, wie ich hier unten
schildern werde, sehr groß. Untreue und Eifersucht werden durch
Schlägereien zwischen den Frauen geordnet. Ein grobes
Verbrechen ist auch das Verhexen. Leider weiß ich nicht, wie es
bestraft wird.
Im Verhältnis zu anderen besser organisierten Stämmen sind
solche Gemeinwesen, wie es die Choroti- und Ashluslayindianer
bilden, äußerst schwach. Die beste Gelegenheit, dies zu
beobachten, hatte ich während meines Aufenthaltes bei den
letzteren. Diese waren, wie erwähnt, in einen Krieg mit den Tobas
verwickelt, welche unter Leitung des energischen Häuptlings