The Ends of a Line and the Passion of History

Abstract

Casual readers and professional critics alike often ask themselves whether to pause or continue reading at the end of a line of poetry. At the heart of this dissertation are the questions of why do we do this, what value does that self-questioning have, and to what ends can we set it? In the nineteenth century, poets and readers alike surprisingly connected these questions to issues of education, philosophy of mind and religion, composition, the sublime, mortality, morality, and the environment. This dissertation is the first study of the poetic line-ending in the nineteenth century. It recovers these lost histories of the line-ending to show how this apparently trivial or aleatory feature of verse is in fact instructive to fundamental questions of the philosophy of form and poetry’s relationship to history. I begin by tracing Wordsworth’s term passion through his prose writings. A concept he saw as intimate with the line-ending’s especial potential, I show that Wordsworthian passion connects poetry’s ‘physical’ presence to the histories of feeling that poetry labours to access. In this introductory chapter I suggest that Wordsworth’s passionate prosody ought to be taken as a cue to our understanding of the poetic line-ending as a sensible mediation of aesthetic history. I delineate a number of critical voices who have attempted to establish principles by which the critical imagination can be both ‘magnanimous and shrewd’, relating the expansive conceptual histories of aesthetic philosophy to local paralinguistic effects of verse form. The most significant of these is Theodor Adorno whose theory of a ‘materialistic-dialectical aesthetics’ facilitates a reading of the poetic line-ending as engaged in ethical work. If the line-ending is a moment where verse form asks us to question what we have seen and what we know, then this element of verse form can unexpectedly serve as a warning against the exigences of single-minded ‘commitment’. To provide both a study of this element of verse form, and a contribution to the philosophy of form as such, I undertake an experiment in criticism. In Section I, I invest in three different methods of enquiry – historical poetics, philosophical aesthetics, and material text studies – to show how the many theories of poetic analysis which have been developed in recent decades are most valuable when they are mutually reinforcing. Chapter 1, ‘History’, assesses a range of contemporary schoolbooks (most significantly Kennedy’s Latin Primer) to show that the Georgian and Victorian classroom was a factory of a dialectical philosophy of form which was connected by these prosodists to the line-ending’s double movement. Chapter 2, ‘Philosophy’, traces the philological history of Hopkins’s theory of enjambment to St Augustine’s little-read treatise on prosody, De musica. I show how the revival of Neo-Platonic philosophy in the century more broadly provides a vocabulary for a philosophy of form which requires the poetic mind to engage in enabling paradoxes – an experience which Augustine called distentio animi. Chapter 3, ‘Composition’, attempts to catch the composing mind in this act of distention, tracing how poetic manuscripts can reveal the poet’s self-figuring as historically plural and conscious of its own genetic formation, and that this form of self-composition takes place with conspicuous regularity at the line-ending. In Section II, the dissertation takes up these insights in four short essays, each of which offers a reinvigoration of close-reading practices. These essays range widely from the history of the sublime, to meditations on grief, to the ethical investments of verse technique, to our oldest histories of the natural environment.