The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography: Lines of Air in Smith, Wordsworth, and Coleridge Alexander Scherr Introduction: Towards a more-than-human historiography of the Romantic age When scholars of Romanticism evoke the ‘spirit of the age’, they usually refer to the historical consciousness that began to take shape in late eighteenth-century Europe. The established literary-historical assumption is that the Romantics developed a heightened sense of living in history due to the revolutionary climate that was nourished, among other influences, by the events of the French Revolution. In his introduction to the “Romantic Period” section of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, M. H. Abrams reaffirms this assumption: he links the spirit of the age to the “pervasive feeling that this was an age of new beginnings when, by discarding traditional procedures and outworn customs, everything was possible, and not only in the political and social realm but in intellectual and literary enterprises as well” (2000: 6). The spirit of the age could thus denote an atmosphere of political and intellectual eventfulness, but it could also refer to a cultural moment permeated by an air of uncertainty. According to Reinhard Koselleck’s influential work (2004 [1979]), the late eighteenth century saw a crisis of historicism, that is, a growing awareness that the present is but a transitional moment within a perpetual movement from a recent past which is already left behind towards a future which has already begun to cast its shadows. Due to this historical shift, in modernity the present is characterized by a “difficulty of apprehending one’s own time” (243). Drawing on Koselleck, Emily Rohrbach has argued that authors around 1800 aimed to articulate this dilemma. “Romantic-period writers understood their world to be shadowed by a dark futurity, even inhabited by it”, she suggests (2016: 1). While these writers sought to grasp their own historical moment in its relationship to an “unknown DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 1 On the etymology of these terms, see also Abrams (1957: 121). and unpredictable time, yet to come” (1), their literature also acknowledges the epistemological limitations of this endeavour. In Rohrbach’s Keats-inspired phrase, the European era we now call Romanticism is the period of “modernity’s mist”, testifying as it does to “the tension between an unpredictable future and the urgency to define the present from a future vantage” (27). Regardless of whether we understand the formation of historical conscious‐ ness around 1800 in the more utopian terms of the ‘spirit of the age’ or the more Gothic register of ‘modernity’s mist’, readers may have noticed that the above account of the historiography of the period is riddled with aerial and climatological vocabulary. (My own language has employed terms such as ‘revolutionary climate’, ‘atmosphere of political and intellectual eventfulness’, and ‘air of uncertainty’.) I call attention to this situation not only to highlight how readily we resort to climatological metaphors to describe the Romantic shift in historical consciousness, but also to point out that, in traditional historiogra‐ phies of this era, they are considered as just that: metaphors. The assumption that the real physical properties of air, or changes in the natural atmosphere, may matter in the analysis of the late eighteenth-century crisis of historicism would not have made much sense to Koselleck and his followers. Although the Latin term spiritus - just as its cognates in Greek (pneuma), Hebrew (ruach), Sanskrit (atman), and many other languages - denotes both mental and physical phenomena (‘air/ wind’ vs. ‘soul’), 1 we have grown accustomed to retranslating the physical into the mental, the natural into the cultural. A ‘more-than-human historiography’ of the Romantic age, as I endeavour to outline it in this contribution, is reluctant to conduct such retranslations too readily. Taking its cue from Karen Barad’s theory of “agential realism” (2007: 132-185), it calls attention to “intra-actions” between materiality and discursivity in Romantic communication around 1800, contending that many writers of the period understood the changes of air which marked their historical moment in both material and discursive terms. In this context, the aerial quality of poetry - the idea that the language of poetry exhibits the same properties as those that Romantic science attributed to air - is particularly significant. To develop these connections in more detail, I engage with recent work in Romantic air and atmosphere studies, focusing especially on Thomas H. Ford’s theory of “atmospheric Romanticism” (2018: 17-53). By insisting that scholars of Romanticism must learn to ‘demetaphorize’ aerial communication around 1800 (200), Ford distinguishes his approach from Abrams’ pioneering analysis of nonhuman aerial actors in Romantic poetry (1957), in which breezes, winds, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 258 Alexander Scherr 2 Among the recent studies on Romanticism inspired by contemporary philosophies of the nonhuman are Morton (2008; 2012), Ellermann (2015), Gottlieb (2016), and Washington and McCarthy (2019). Directly relevant to my own argument is Michelle Speitz’s essay on “Affect and Air: The Speculative Spirit of the Age” (2019), though Speitz is less interested in historical consciousness. 3 The question when the Little Ice Age began is a controversial matter in which I cannot claim any geological expertise. It is safe to say, though, that it was well underway in the seventeenth century and entered its final phase at the end of the eighteenth century. Tobias Menely’s Climate and the Making of Worlds (2021) is the first study to conceptualize the Little Ice Age as a frame of reference for the interpretation of seventeenthto nineteenth-century English literature. clouds, and air are considered only as figures of speech. While Ford primarily locates his work in historicist and cultural-materialist traditions, I recognize in his framework an effort to link the epistemological concerns with the period’s sense of uncertainty to ontological assumptions about the properties of air and atmospheres. In this way, atmospheric Romanticism resonates with the return to ontology in recent philosophies of the nonhuman (from new materialism to speculative realism and object-oriented ontology), which has increasingly acknowledged Romantic thought as a key interlocutor for its own philosophical positions. 2 The re-evaluation of nonhuman aerial actors in Romantic air and atmosphere studies has implications for the work of historiography - a discipline that has paid increased attention to the nonhuman in the wake of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential work. In traditional historiographies of the Romantic age, the events which are conventionally considered crucial to the spirit of the age are those of “human history”, not “natural history” - to employ Chakrabarty’s distinction (2009: 201). A selection of the events of Romantic human history is included in Table 1. Grossly reductive as this list may be, we are likely to come across these events in standard introductions to English Romanticism (see, for example, Abrams 2000; Seeber 2012). In these established accounts, the events of natural history are usually not regarded as integral to the spirit of the age. For a long time, it mattered little to historians that the period around 1800 coincided with the final phase of the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’ - a geological period whose dimensions exceed the more modest historical units of literary and cultural periodisation. 3 In fact, to say that the events of human and natural history in Table 1 ‘coincide’ is to imply that they are not causally linked and could not meaningfully be integrated within one and the same calendar. From this traditional vantage point, the fact that the time around 1800 marks “the onset of carboniferous industrialization” (Ford 2017: 78) and can therefore be considered as one of the beginnings of the period we now call the Anthropocene is another DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 259 4 I include Watt’s invention of the steam engine under natural history because it has become symbolic of the dawning of industrialisation and industrial pollution. For the problem of how to periodize the Anthropocene and its many potential beginnings, see James (2022: 1-5). 5 For literary studies and literary history, see Bristow and Ford (2016), Horn (2016), and Menely and Taylor (2017). merely chronological overlap with the calendar of human history - nothing more. 4 Framework “human history” “natural history” Period Romanticism (c. 1785-1830) - Little Ice Age (c. 1600-1850) Key events (selection) 1789 French Revolution 1798 Lyrical Ballads 1807 Slave Trade Act (Britain) 1818 Frankenstein 1824 death of Byron 1770 renewed cooling 1774 steam engine ( J. Watt) 1783 Laki eruption 1815 Tambora eruption 1816 “Year without a Summer” Tab. 1: Historiographies of the period “circa 1800” Meanwhile, the problem with the Anthropocene is that it is not a purely geolog‐ ical period but a reckoning with epistemological, ethical, and historiographical implications. This, at least, is one of Chakrabarty’s key ideas. In “The Climate of History”, he posits that “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (2009: 201). For Chakrabarty, the challenge for historiography in the Anthropocene is to hybridize or “collapse” the calendars of the human and the natural in ways that enable innovative approaches for relating history to the vast dimensions of geological time. How this can be done is a methodological concern that scholars have only recently begun to discuss. 5 My contribution aims to advance this project. In correspondence with efforts to rethink the period around 1800 along “eco-historicist” lines (Higgins 2017: 12), it develops a more-than-human account of the Romantics’ sense of historical time, highlighting close entanglements between cultural and natural climates, human and nonhuman actors, and literary and scientific cultures. Focusing on the role of aerial nonhuman actors such as winds, clouds, and breezes, I offer readings of poems written around 1800 which embody not only the spirit of their more immediate historical surroundings but also, on a larger geological scale, the air of the Anthropocene. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 260 Alexander Scherr To elaborate this approach, I argue that Romanticism resonates particularly strongly with the challenges of the Anthropocene because it developed what Ford aptly calls an “atmospheric sense of history” (2018: 2). I begin by sur‐ veying recent work on Romantic atmospheres, which accounts for the late eighteenth-century fascination with atmospheres by interpreting the latter as ontological realms of uncertainty in which the boundaries between language and matter, human and nonhuman agency, history and nature, and literature and science are permeable rather than solid. 6 I suggest that an acknowledgement of these uncertainties can enrich the established historiographical assumption that the period’s sense of contingency stemmed from its increased historical consciousness. From the vantage point of atmospheric Romanticism, the spirit of the age involves “an experience of the air itself ” (Menely 2021: 170), even though this experience is articulated in an ever so elusive and cloudy language. In my close readings, I examine the aerial poetics of two texts - Charlotte Smith’s sonnet “LXXVII: To the insect of the gossamer” (1797) and William Wordsworth’s “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798) - which present themselves as lyrical lines of air that blend in with the uncertain climate of their time. I comment on the implications of my readings for a more-than-human historiography in a brief coda, closing my argument with a brief comparative glance at Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798). 7 Uncertain times, cloudy boundaries: A brief introduction to atmospheric romanticism “The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose”, writes Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (2003 [1790]: 7). The sentence is a rather obvious comment on the recent revolutionary events on the Continent, which the conservative Burke noted with some suspicion (in contrast to many other Romantic writers). Yet, Burke’s language also gestures towards a revolution of a different kind: the experiments which many of his contemporaries in both England and France had recently begun to carry out in the new sciences of air. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 261 6 In addition to Ford’s work (2017; 2018), which is particularly important for my own argument, my stance on Romantic atmospheres is indebted to Horn (2016), Higgins (2017), Fulford (2018), Nersessian (2020), Menely (2021), and Berns (2023). For a helpful overview of the emerging interdisciplinary field of air and atmosphere studies with a strong focus on the Romantic age, see Boyson (2022). 7 I will use in-text references for the three poems, citing by lines. References are to the following textual editions: Smith (1993 [1797]), Wordsworth (2013a [1798]), and Coleridge (2013 [1798]). 8 Romantic science was, for a long time, an entirely overlooked area of research - a neglect that was encouraged by the erroneous assumption that Romanticism was anti-science. Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2009) has done much to correct this image. Scholarship on Romantic air and atmospheres honours this reorientation. By the end of the century, there was a well-established experimental tradition in pneumatic chemistry, which had received considerable impulses from Joseph Priestley’s Experiments and Observations of Different Kinds of Air (1790 [1774- 1786]). There was also a more recent research area with strong interests in air: the emerging field of meteorology, which, according to Vladimir Janković (2000), became a modern scientific discipline around 1800. In one of his notebook entries written in 1796, Coleridge perceived contemporary society as standing on the threshold of a new age, expressly linking his hopes for the new century to “progression in natural philosophy - particularly, meteorology or science of airs & winds” (1957 [1796]: 133). Soon after, Luke Howard published his essay “On the Modifications of Clouds” (1865 [1803]), in which the vocabulary for the description of clouds (as it is still in use today) was established. As these examples underline, late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century thought was enamoured with air and atmospheres. It is vital for my argument that we keep in mind that the boundaries between the different experimental endeavours that participated in the Romantic spirit of the age were not as strict as we are tempted to consider them from the vantage of the twenty-first century. Ironically enough, the new sciences of air emerged in an uncertain cultural atmosphere in which meteorology and chemistry were not yet the specialized disciplines - separated by distinct theoretical assumptions, research methodologies, institutionalized protocols, and the like - as which we know them today (see also Fulford 2018: 113). This also goes for the discipline of climatology, which was envisioned by Romantic thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder to include both natural and human agency, and which was therefore as much an anthropological as it was a scientific endeavour (Horn 2016; Ford 2018: 10). Taking the fundamental cloudiness of such boundaries into account, recent scholarship on Romanticism proposes that, if we want to get to grips with the spirit of the age, we must enrich the study of the canonical texts of human history - including literature - with the study of contemporary scientific culture in order to bring the material-discursive qualities of Romantic air and atmospheres into view. 8 If we take this project seriously, we will see that the very distinction between literature and science constituted another cloudy boundary around 1800. As Ford points out, “[t]here were long-standing, multifaceted intersections DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 262 Alexander Scherr between experimental Romantic poetry and the emergent sciences of air” (2018: 150). An example is the highly experimental spirit that infused late eighteenth-century intellectual culture in Bristol. To traditional Romanticists, Bristol will likely suggest the place in which the first edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads - a key text of English Romanticism - was completed for publication in 1798 (hence, the entry in Table 1 above). Yet, it was also the place where, roughly around the same time, the Pneumatic Institution opened its doors. Established by the physician Thomas Beddoes in 1799, this medical institution accommodated the eccentric research of the chemist Humphry Davy (who also wrote poetry) and welcomed some of the best-known Romantic poets such as Robert Southey and Coleridge, who visited Beddoes and Davy to inhale nitrous oxide (O’Gorman 2011; Colman 2016; Fulford 2018). According to Ford, the manifold exchanges between scientifically interested poets and poetically-minded scientists testify to their shared concerns with “regulating patterns of respiration” (2018: 151) - a problem that required pneumatic chemists like Davy to experiment with the right dose of gas, and that led to similar experiments with metre (the lyrical patterning of respiration) in the literature of Wordsworth and other Romantic writers. What was at stake in these scientific-literary experiments, then, was real air. Both Romantic pneumatics and poetry aimed to put the human mind into “a state of vivid sensation”, as Wordsworth writes in his famous “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads (2013b [1800]: 95), by using air and metre as resources for intellectual elevation. If the Romantics aimed at something like “spiritual transcendence”, as has often been suggested, theirs was a model of transcendence “rooted in the material world” (Fulford 2018: 113). By insisting on this materialistic qualification, recent work on Romantic atmospheres challenges the thesis - famously put forward in Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology (1983) - that authors like Wordsworth and Coleridge celebrated nature as a model for art because it represented the sole promise of transhistorical permanence in a fast-changing world. For scholars such as Ford and Fulford, on the other hand, the Romantics were much closer to the breath of their historical moment - a breath they considered as at once natural and historical - than some scholarship in the traditions of cultural materialism and new historicism has been willing to admit. Atmospheric Romanticism thus paints the picture of a turn-of-the-century intellectual culture that was as much interested in air as it sought to be transformed by air. None of this is to say that Romanticism embraced a naïve kind of materialism. What is valuable about recent scholarship on Romantic atmospheres is that it registers a doubleness in the period’s sense of uncertainty, suggesting that DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 263 9 Such anxieties about the fleetingness of language can extend from oral communication to the medium of print. As Ford demonstrates in a reading of one of Wordsworth’s “Slate-Pencil” poems, they were nourished by the expansion of print capitalism, which multiplied texts to such an extent that poems like Wordsworth’s display a need to acknowledge their own marginal place in this new attention economy (2018: 79-94). the Romantics were not only uncertain about their historical moment but also about the philosophical means of apprehending it. The ontology of the atmosphere responds to this situation. As Ford explains, “Romantic uses of the word ‘atmosphere’ were often neither metaphoric nor literally physical, but instead pointed to a zone of indistinction, or of as yet unsettled knowledge, somewhere between literality and figuration, between scientific concepts and poetic evocation” (2018: 4). As a “zone of indistinction”, the ontology of air and atmospheres became a key framework through which many Romantic intellectuals related to the world they inhabited. They believed that air was of the natural world while also being indispensable to embodied human thinking about that world. In atmospheric Romanticism, poetry is the medium best-suited to embodied thinking, because its materiality is entirely on par with its textual or discursive features. Poetry was considered by many Romantic writers as an “aeriform” medium designed for recitation (Fulford 2018), sometimes featuring a blank verse whose endless enjambments may literally leave the reader breathless (Ford 2018: 164-173). But, like air, this poetry is often not solid or confident about its message, flaunting an anxiety that it might dissolve into the atmosphere without being noticed. 9 In Anahid Nersessian’s felicitous terminology, Romanticism articulates a sense of calamity about the effects of the Industrial Revolution but does so in a language that is “calamitous” in itself (2020: 4). While English poetry around 1800 responds to what Dorothy Wordsworth called “the alteration in the times” (2002 [1800]: 3), it considers itself as being affected by similar “qualities of indeterminacy, modifiability, vagueness, suspension and internal heterogeneity” (Ford 2018: 204). I will continue to delineate this precarious aerial ontology with the help of two poems which present themselves as modest “lines”, rendering their own lyrical work as a form of air writing. In choosing two texts which were both written in the experimental-revolutionary climate of the late 1790s, I aim to cast some new light on established literary-historical work on the period around 1800. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 264 Alexander Scherr 10 The spider is gendered as male in lines 12-13 (“…while sevenfold wreaths / of rain‐ bow-light around his head revolve”). “in mid air”: Aerial ontology in Charlotte Smith’s sonnet “LXXVII: To the insect of the gossamer” (1797) One way of summarising Charlotte Smith’s poem “To the insect of the gossamer” - a work that featured in the 1797 second volume of her Elegiac Sonnets - is to say that it is all about fine lines. In fact, the poem accords a double meaning to the concept of the ‘line’. Firstly, it refers to “the line / of Gossamer” (ll. 1-2), that is, the thin thread which some spiders (“insects”) employ for the purpose of floating through the air, embarking upon a journey which looks like a “fairy sail” (l. 8). In keeping with the Petrarchan tradition of the sonnet form, the poem’s speaker is full of admiration for its addressee, calling him a “viewless Æronaut” (l. 1) and praising the “form minute” (l. 5) of his material. 10 The spider’s flight might be short, but it is nevertheless celebrated as a heroic attempt to leave behind “Life’s dull realities” (l. 12). The line of the spider’s gossamer thus responds to an atmospheric ontology: The animal is envied for the sublime experience of floating “in mid air” (l. 2) and his ability to make contact with the gaseous environment by which contemporary poets and scientists alike were so fascinated. This contact is established through a near-invisible tool which is ambiguous in itself. Although the silken line of the gossamer is material, it is also characterized as “the golden thread that Fancy weaves” (l. 9), and hence a creative and even spiritual accomplishment, a work of art. This choice of language already gestures towards the second meaning of the term. The “line” is also the instrument of poets, which includes - in a highly self-referential manner - Smith’s own poetic line. As Bethan Roberts observes, the sonnet repeatedly indicates a “correlation between poet and spider” (2019: 149), most explicitly in line 11, in which the spider is called a “young and visionary Poet”. For Ford, the most outspoken proponent of atmospheric Romanticism, “correlation” would probably not be strong enough a term, though. To recall, his framework assumes that Romantic poems which address aerial phenomena usually indicate that they are made of the same aeriform material. From this point of view, the text is literally an “aerographic sonnet” (Speitz 2019: 48). Indeed, the enjambments in the poem produce the effect that it stands “in mid air” itself, and one could argue further that the text floats between the Italian and English traditions of the sonnet, having its initial Italian quatrain (ABBA) followed by an English quatrain (ABAB) and a sestet comprised of three couplets (Roberts 2019: 148). Because of its internal dynamics of change and alteration, the poem gives a general impression of windiness, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 265 remaining faithful to its aerial poetics until the end. Consequently, when in line 14 the speaker conjectures that the spider’s aerial journey will soon be over (“Ah! soon at Sorrow’s touch the radiant dreams dissolve! ”), the sonnet ends as well, literally dissolving into air. From a more-than-human perspective that takes the intimate connections between discursivity and materiality seriously, it is conspicuous how frequently Smith’s sonnet LXXVII foregrounds constraints to its poet-protagonist’s actions, figuring agency as a phenomenon residing in what Barad calls “intra-action” (2007: 33) rather than discrete individuals. As is pointed out in line 4, the voyage of the sonnet’s nonhuman protagonist is “breeze-guided” (in much the same way in which the poetic line is breath-guided), meaning that the spider is not a fully autonomous actor and cannot navigate the environment as he pleases. This philosophy provides a twist to Romantic efforts at transcendence, which the poem genders as male, thus producing an effect of irony and critical distancing on the part of the female poet. Its speaker professes awareness that, at the very moment that the spider is about to abandon “Life’s dull realities”, his flight will soon be terminated by “the keen Swift” (l. 8). Roberts is therefore right to observe that “this flight or transcendence is temporary and limited, dependent on external forces that also bring about its end” (2019: 149). It is almost as if the strong currents of history would cast the spider-poet back into the vortex of his historical moment, forcefully reminding him that he is not in control of the unsteady atmosphere of his time. In this context, the fact that the poem’s nonhuman Æronaut is “viewless” (l. 1) underlines his lack of vision concerning the course of future events. In her reading of the sonnet, Roberts points out that the term “Æronaut” had only recently emerged in European languages in connection with the invention of the hot-air balloon (2019: 150) - another French revolutionary success of the 1780s. The notion is also found in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which Burke advises his compatriots to stand “on the firm ground of the British constitution” while cautioning them against the “attempt to follow in their desperate flights, the aëronauts of France” (2003 [1790]: 210). Recent human history is here conflated if not with natural history, then at least with technological history and attendant hopes of mastering the natural world (which, from today’s point of view, are impossible to dissociate from the Anthropocene). For the conservative Burke, this spirit is a little too adventurous. His language betrays an anxiety of too much revolution, an awareness of a climate so windy that it can hardly be navigated. With too much experimenting going on (both in the political and the scientific realm), the “firm ground” of established knowledge is abandoned and the sense of uncertainty increases. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 266 Alexander Scherr 11 Wordsworth’s oeuvre comprises several other poems stylized as “lines”. Among the examples published in the Lyrical Ballads are “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite”, “Lines written at a small distance from my House, and sent by my little Boy, to the Person to whom they are addressed”, and “Lines written in early spring”. 12 Marjorie Levinson points out that this date is not only the day before the ninth anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille but also the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat (1986: 16). Smith’s sonnet, I want to suggest, expresses concerns with the difficult job of poetry in such an uncertain climate. It does not so much critique the spirit of the age than inquire into the implications of this historical shift for a language which is itself perceived as aeriform, modifiable, and indeterminate. Staging the effort of (male) Romantic poetry to transcend its circumstances and create permanence, the sonnet ends in dissolution, admitting to a poetic line which is just as fine and fragile as the spider’s thread. “wreaths of smoke”: The weak historicity of William Wordsworth’s “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798) To refine my understanding of the Romantic poetics of lines as a precarious and fragile treatment of a given topic, I turn to a second textual example which evokes this epistemological stance as early as its title: William Wordsworth’s “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798”. 11 Perhaps it would be appropriate to think of my own reading as lines written on “Tintern Abbey”, as reasons of space will require me to bracket a number of points raised in previous analyses of this highly canonical poem. These include, for instance, the text’s political context, which is already evoked by the inclusion of the date of Wordsworth’s visit to the Wye Valley in the poem’s title - a trip he undertook on July 13, 1798, together with his sister Dorothy. 12 When Wordsworth refers to “the fretful stir / Unprofitable” and “the fever of the world” in his poem (ll. 53-54), it is hard not to think of the revolutionary political climate of the 1790s, though it has also been suggested that more personal events - from family problems to financial worries - had taken their toll on the poet (Levinson 1986: 18). Given my interest in Romantic air and atmospheres, I feel even more remiss in having to gloss over some of the insightful readings of the poem’s form presented by other scholars. Ford and Fulford, in particular, have done much to analyse Wordsworth’s “pneumatic” employment of the blank verse by relating his literary experiment to the research at Beddoes’ Pneumatic Institution - a DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 267 13 William and Dorothy visited the Wye Valley during their summer stay in Bristol. Ford conjectures that Wordsworth may have met Beddoes during this time (2018: 186). The characterisation of “Tintern Abbey” as a poem showcasing “Wordsworth’s great pneumatic blank verse” is also Ford’s (188). collaboration which Ford retraces with great attention to detail. 13 Among the key passages examined by these scholars is the final part of the poem’s second stanza, where Wordsworth describes the mood in which the human mind is at its most receptive, ideally suited for the composition of poetry: […] that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul. (ll. 42-47) Fulford does an excellent job of arguing that these lines paint a physiological picture of human consciousness, which goes to relativize McGann’s critique that Romantic poets renounced their material reality, celebrating the immaterial (2018: 101-102). For Fulford, the whole poem is a meditative exercise in respiration, readable as Wordsworth’s attempt to find peace of mind in troubling times, but not a naïve idealisation of sublime nature. The critique of the poem’s lack of awareness of its material circumstances has often targeted a passage which is relevant to my own historiographical concerns. It appears at the end of the first stanza, in which Wordsworth first describes his enthused impressions of the natural landscape upon his return to the Wye Valley, reflecting on the five years which have passed since his last visit: […] Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, With some uncertain notice, as might seem, Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone. (ll. 15-23) Much vigorous debate has ensued over the “wreathes of smoke”, which the poem seems to render as a natural part of an idyllic landscape. In her widely received DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 268 Alexander Scherr essay on “Insight and Oversight: Reading ‘Tintern Abbey’” (1986), Majorie Levinson subjects the above-quoted lines to a suspicious reading, emphasising that Wordsworth’s presentation of the smoke occludes the social reality of his time: “In 1798”, she clarifies, “the Wye Valley, though still affording prospects of great natural beauty, presented less delightful scenes as well. The region showed prominent signs of industrial and commercial activity: coal mines, transport barges noisily plying the river, miners’ hovels” (29). Levinson also demystifies the “vagrant dwellers” to whom the speaker alludes in line 21, arguing that these people would in reality likely have been charcoal burners who depended on extremely precarious work for their livelihood (29). From the vantage point of a critical reading in the tradition of Levinson and McGann, Wordsworth is quickly accused of romanticising the landscape in a way that clouds the judgment of social reality and is inattentive to the historical context. “Most of the poems we call Romantic resist historical elucidation”, Levinson states in more general terms (55). Recent work on Romantic atmospheres does not so much disagree with this statement than entertain the possibility that cloudiness - the incapacity of “historical elucidation” at a time when real changes to the world’s atmosphere were becoming palpable - is a part of Romantic historical consciousness itself, a way in which writers around 1800 sought to apprehend a changing world while acknowledging the limitations of their efforts. Here, I return to the poetics of Romantic lines. In a particularly forceful reading of the poem, Ford calls attention to the “little lines” in line 16, interpreting them in a similarly self-referential way as I read the “line of Gossamer” in Smith’s sonnet: “Lines of this nature - involuted, self-referential lines that name themselves as ‘lines’ - are in Wordsworth very often lines of vapour or lines of curling mist: that is to say, atmospheric lines”, Ford submits (2018: 156). Although the “little lines / Of sportive wood” are not clearly marked as aerial themselves, Ford reads them as part of an atmospheric environment that, while strongly affecting the speaker, always remains obscure. His suggestion is that “Tintern Abbey” depicts a “landscape [which] has been so abstracted that it has converged with the poem itself ” (156) - an aerial surrounding that blends in with a poetic language composed of similarly aerial lines. There is thus a general atmosphere of uncertainty in the text, which turns the whole poem into “a scenery of vapour” (15). This is exactly the impression on which Keats reports in a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, written on May 3, 1818. In it, Keats praises “Tintern Abbey” for articulating the contemporary sense of uncertainty - the impression that recent historical events and advances in scientific knowledge about air have paradoxically resulted in an atmosphere of ever more indeterminacy. With DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 269 14 Rohrbach’s notion of “modernity’s mist” takes its inspiration from this passage. “Tintern Abbey”, Keats writes, “We are in a mist - We are now in that state - We feel the ‘burden of the Mystery’” (2000 [1818]: 893). 14 The context just outlined is helpful for reconsidering the “wreathes of smoke” as another vaporous appearance in the sky above Tintern Abbey. It is true that Wordsworth does not retrace their origin to the industries that had become part of the Wye Valley by the end of the eighteenth century, which is why - from today’s historical perspective and with the knowledge we possess about the Anthropocene - it is tempting to read this absence as an “oversight” in Levinson’s sense. However, in presenting his observations as “lines”, Wordsworth also makes no claim to assessing the harm (let alone the harmful long-term effects) of the smoke on the Earth’s atmosphere. Instead of blindly transcending its social context, his poem perceives its historical moment as cloudy, meaning that it articulates concerns about the fleetingness of the speaker’s momentary vision. Wordsworth aims to shield his language from the threat of evaporation in the poem’s final stanza by addressing Dorothy as a sympathetic listener and installing her as a future rememberer of the current moment of joy. Still, what Nersessian writes about Wordsworth in a different context is also true of “Tintern Abbey”: being aware of its own transience, his poetry attests to a “problem of recognizing or registering historical causality” even as it acknowledges this effort as the order of the day (2020: 61). Following scholars such as Nersessian, Ford, and Rohrbach, I propose that we may think of this difficulty as a weak form of historicity rather than blank a-historicity coded as transcendence. This proposal has implications for the way in which we understand the role of Romantic poetry in its contradictory relation to the emerging historical sense of change and transitionality. Much traditional scholarship solves this contradiction by assuming that Romantic writers looked to nature as “the transhistorical opposite to the fissile antagonisms of historical experience” (Ford 2018: 151), using nature as a model for their poetry as an art of transcendence. Atmospheric Romanticism complicates this assumption insofar as it reads Romantic conceptions of nature as more contradictory in themselves. Writers around 1800 may have desired permanence in the forms of nature and art, but their experiments with air and atmospheres - together with the contemporary scientific knowledge established about these phenomena - advanced their sense of mutability, vagueness, and uncertainty. The poetic “lines” of these writers were seen as capable of reshaping the atmospheres by which they were simultaneously informed. Yet, they were also troubled by an DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 270 Alexander Scherr anxiety of misrecognising their historical circumstances, and of dissolving into the atmosphere without being noticed. Coda: Historiography “in a mist” The notion of weak historicity allows me to restate my hypothesis that the sense of temporal uncertainty which emerged in European modernity towards the end of the eighteenth century was accompanied by additional uncertainty about the philosophical means of apprehending it. What is cloudy in atmospheric Romanticism is not only “the alteration in the times” (see section 2) but also the boundaries between the discursive and the material, the human and the nonhuman, history/ culture and nature, literature and science. In exploring these constellations, recent scholarship on Romantic air and atmospheres takes a page from both innovative historicist work (Ford, Nersessian, Rohrbach, Menely) and approaches inflected by philosophies of the nonhuman (Morton, Gottlieb, Speitz). While my own contribution has aimed to enrich this vibrant field by offering readings of two Romantic poems that present themselves as transitory “lines”, other forms have come under scrutiny in recent scholarship. Ute Berns (2023), for example, discovers an aerial poetics of a different kind in S. T. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798), the opening poem in the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Although the text is written in archaic language and indebted to genre traditions that foreground the supernatural (Gothic literature, apocalyptic Biblical narrative), Berns demonstrates that it responds to the transitional climate of its own historical context in surprising ways. The relevant context, however, is not the revolutionary political climate but an atmospheric change of a more literal kind: the transition in energy politics and the shift towards fossil fuels which would soon lead to the appearance of steam-powered ships on the oceans while also exacerbating aerial pollution. Taking this shift seriously, Berns makes much of the sudden emergence of the ghost ship in the ballad’s third part - the event that follows the Marinere’s careless shooting of the albatross. She observes that the two spectral figures which command the strange vessel are described as “Jet-black” (l. 183) - a reference to coal - while their ship is not dependent on the wind (ll. 161-162: “Withouten wind, withouten tide, / She steddies with upright keel”). Historical precision is crucial: In 1798, when the ballad was first published, no steamships had travelled the oceans yet, but their appearance was palpable for contemporaries and quite literally in the air. For Berns, this structure of feeling is articulated by the ballad. She suggests that Coleridge’s Marinere is “Ancyent” DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 271 because his ship is still reliant upon the wind for movement - an idea which is supported by the “unpredictable stop-and-go dynamic” in which the stanzas are composed (Berns 2023: 234). By contrast, the ghost ship is ‘modern’ because it introduces a turning point to established energy cultures, ushering in the geological transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. Although she does not frame it in these terms, Berns presents us with a highly innovative reading of the Romantic spirit of the age in which, however, this spirit already anticipates its pollution by the “soot” of the Anthropocene. This is precisely the Marinere’s perception of the atmosphere briefly before the arrival of the modern ship: “We could speak no more than if / We had been choked with soot” (ll. 133-134). I conclude with Coleridge’s “Rime” (as mediated through Berns’ reading) to suggest that literary historiography in the Anthropocene is a cloudy and even sooty project itself. What I have conceptualized as a more-than-human histor‐ iography seeks to challenge the clear-cut boundaries between “human history” and “natural history” (in Chakrabarty’s sense), venturing into a hazy zone of indeterminacy. For the Romantic age, it enriches the traditional humanistic scale of analysis, such as the ‘spirit of the age’ or Koselleck’s notion of Sattelzeit (the formation of historical consciousness in the period from c. 1750 to 1850), with the scales of natural history (the Great Transition, the Little Ice Age, etc.), refusing to dismiss this overlap as mere coincidence. The historiography I envision registers some confusion about what drives history and historical consciousness in the period around 1800: the French Rev‐ olution or the onset of industrial pollution? Experimental poetry or pneumatic science? An immaterial spirit or palpable changes in the real air? To see that the lines between these alternatives are rarely solid is one way of understanding the Romantics’ fascination with aerial-poetic “lines”, and thus of historicising their own feeble sense of history. As Eva Horn has pointed out (2016: 88), the period around 1800 is so relevant to the historiography of the Anthropocene not simply because it happens to be the time when the steam engine was invented, or when the Industrial Revolution took place (historical facts readily cited by scientists today). It was also the period when Romantic writers first developed a vague awareness of the problem of thinking the Anthropocene avant la lettre (historical consciousness). 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