A Mind That Feeds Upon Infinity

This book's focus is on the socialization of the imagination, and Romantic poetry is viewed as simultaneously a poetry of growth and of defense. This theme is followed in chapters on Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and Shelley, in an attempt to discover how each poet copes with the problem.

What "internalization" means for writers and critics of Romanticism, including Rousseau, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Freud, Benjamin, and Sedgwick Winner of the American Conference on Romanticism's Jean Pierre Barricelli Book Prize "Although defining Romanticism is a standing problem for literary history, some notion of internalization at the level of cultural tradition has recurrently been proposed as the solution to that problem . . . In this debate the notion of internalization tends to be handled . . . as a known quantity, whereas I am arguing that the notion itself remains obscure and thus that the problem of internalization and the problem of Romanticism may indeed, with respect to the discourse of literary history, be closely intertwined"—from Feeding on Infinity Notions of "internalization" play an important role in many contemporary fields of discourse, including literary history and theory, psychoanalysis, ideological critique, and learning theory in the social sciences. Indeed, the term "internalization" is pervasive and seems to answer a shared need of expression to such an extent that it is one of those technical words that has found its way into everyday use. But the meaning of this term and the continuities and discontinuities at work in its varied deployment have, for the most part, gone unanalyzed. In Feeding on Infinity, Joshua Wilner explores the power and limits of the discourse of internalization through the close reading of a variety of texts drawn from the Romantic tradition, a tradition which is both source for and oftentimes object of this discourse. Through the study of writers including Rousseau, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Freud, Benjamin, and Sedgwick, he seeks to deepen our understanding of the problem of internalization, while situating its more or less explicit emergence as a problem in relation to the history of, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, "patriarchal poetics." Through patient attention to the transformations of rhetorical structures of representation and address performed by these works and to the frequent condensation of these transformations in figures of eating and drinking, Feeding on Infinity makes available to inquiry a surprisingly rich and largely unexplored network of connections within the "long" Romantic tradition. At the same time, it forges new links between deconstructive reading practices, psychoanalysis, and recent work in gender studies.

div What does eating have to do with aesthetic taste? While most accounts of aesthetic history avoid the gustatory aspects of taste, this book rewrites standard history to uncover the constitutive and dramatic tension between appetite and aesthetics at the heart of British literary tradition. From Milton through the Romantics, the metaphor of taste serves to mediate aesthetic judgment and consumerism, gusto and snobbery, gastronomes and gluttons, vampires and vegetarians, as well as the philosophy and physiology of food. The author advances a theory of taste based on Milton’s model of the human as consumer (and digester) of food, words, and other commodities—a consumer whose tasteful, subliminal self remains haunted by its own corporeality. Radically rereading Wordsworth’s feeding mind, Lamb’s gastronomical essays, Byron’s cannibals and other deviant diners, and Kantian nausea, Taste resituates Romanticism as a period that naturally saw the rise of the restaurant and the pleasures of the table as a cultural field for the practice of aesthetics. /DIV

The essays in this book meditate deeply on Wordsworth's own theory of literature, and probe into questions that few critics have bothered to ask, yet which, when asked, seem very central indeed. Topics treated include The Sublime and the Beautiful; Literary Echoes in The Prelude; Wordsworth's Aesthetics of Landscape; Wordsworth's Imaginations; The Fancy;' The Poetry of Nature'; sight as' The Most Despotic of our Senses'; the Snowdon vision and 'The descent from Snowdon'; ' A Sense of the Infinite'

Originally published in 1941. This book stresses the transcendental, rather than purely aesthetic, qualities of William Wordsworth's work. It argues that the unusual aspects of Wordsworth's mind are not isolated and did not seem to him fanciful or merely personal; they were, for him, so many paths, difficult to find and harder to follow, yet leading to the great central truth that is the goal of all humankind's loftier strivings.

Genial Perception offers a critical examination of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s naturalist construction of creative and critical perception, and a historical study of the perceptual dimension of poetic taste. “Genial” is the adjectival form of “genius,” and eighteenth-century critical naturalism understands “genial” perception as a gift of nature, as an inborn power operating autonomously through the senses and imagination and thus independently of cultural influence. By exploring the philology of keywords and binaries inherited by the two poet-critics and used to describe and interpret their perceptual experience, both creative (imaginative) and critical, Genial Perception traces how that experience reveals an unacknowledged indebtedness to discourse and language, having been silently and perhaps unconsciously shaped by patterns and trends in the literary culture in which Wordsworth and Coleridge came of age. This study shows that critical perception, often thought to be too elusive and subjective to make a proper subject for historical investigation, can be approached through study of the terms—the language—of the practical criticism that attempts to communicate it; that both critical and creative perception are far more dependent on language than is commonly recognized; and that philology, by recovering the original usage, functions, and contexts of critical keywords, provides for an accurate historical understanding of the claims made by critics in the long eighteenth century for “genial” perception, and can illuminate the dynamics of “genial” perception itself.

Surveying the later work of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, Edward Clarke unfolds their very last poems and considers the two poets' relations with western literature and tradition. This book shows how these two latecomers transform the ways in which we read earlier poets.

Presents a collection of critical essays on English poet laureate William Wordsworth and his works.