Orrery Imaginings

Chapter 5 looks at how Coleridge articulated the governing dynamics of the imagination in the 1810s and 1820s with persistent reference to gravity and the interaction of centripetal and centrifugal forces. This regulated his thinking about matters as big as idealist philosophy, poetics, the origins of life, and aesthetics, and as small as conversation. It shows that Coleridge used astronomical forces to understand the underlying structure of creative, philosophical, and critical activity, which he illustrated with spider-webs and ripples on the water. Texts given close attention: Biographia Literaria; The Statesman’s Manual; ‘The Theory of Life’; Marginalia; Notebooks; and the Opus Maximum.

Nature’s Mathematics

Chapter 1 explores the geometrical quality of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s imaginative commitments. Focusing principally on The Pedlar, the Guide to the Lakes, and Coleridge’s Notebooks, the chapter locates the origins of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s geometric visions in a divinely relational language of shapes which they intuited as children to describe the world about them and which moulded their shared Pedlar consciousness in the 1790s. It proposes that Wordsworth and Coleridge sustained the mathematical expressions of the Pedlar’s ethico-theological vision in their dealings with nature and the mind, perceiving in the material world a language of geometric forms which held it together.

Introduction

The Introduction proposes that a series of speculative scientific analogies operate at the very centre of how Wordsworth and Coleridge perceived the world and how they expressed that perception, revealing the brilliant inventiveness with which they transfigured the material universe. It establishes the conceptual value of analogy for the poets and suggests that focusing on the poets’ imaginative uses of analogy is a way to uncover the importance of scientific patterns, principally derived from mathematics and astronomy, for their poetic, religious, philosophical, and critical writing. This overturns the long-standing critical consensus that the Romantic poets were not interested or able to understand hard science and instead highlights the centrality of scientific structures in their creative thinking.

Epilogue

The Epilogue examines Coleridge’s reception and influence at the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1833, and explores his small role in the nomenclature of Victorian science. The mythography that elevated Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s scientific standing above that of his forebears is shown to be false, although it played into Counter-Enlightenment narratives of the sort propounded by Isaiah Berlin, who contended that for the Romantics ‘Science is submission’. In fact, Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s compulsively analogical imaginations awakened in them a lasting curiosity for scientific structures which parallels Tennyson’s own scientific allegiances. It was a trajectory that they experienced together, on the Somersetshire hills, in the pages of the Philosophical Transactions, and in the poems, schemes, and experiments which culminated in Wordsworth’s pivotal 1802 amendments to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

Celestial Cartography

Chapter 2 documents the place of the Moon and the night sky in the communal life of the Wordsworths and Coleridge at Alfoxden and Grasmere by tracing an interwoven series of scientific, natural, and typographical crescents in their poems, notebooks, and letters, before culminating in a reading of the 1802 revisions made to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. It shows that star-gazing, far from being injurious to their sensibilities, was most often a memorializing pleasure for the poets and their families in the absence of John Wordsworth. The chapter focuses on the workings of allusion and communal memory in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals; Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ‘A Letter to ——’, and ‘A Soliloquy of the Full Moon’; and Wordsworth’s ‘Peter Bell’ and ‘The Thorn’.

Telescoping Faith

Chapter 6 examines Coleridge’s recourse to the discoveries of William Herschel to conceptualize and communicate his conversion to Trinitarian theology, explaining it as part of a complicated effort to break free from Joseph Priestley’s Socinianism, materialism, and philosophical necessity. Modernizing Priestleian science with a set of spiritual symbols taken from William Herschel was a way in which Coleridge hoped to escape from Priestley’s metaphysics. The handling of Herschelian science—especially infra-red and triple stars—is thus seen as a seismometer for Coleridge’s faith. The implications of this symbolic logic on Coleridge’s epistemological categories of the Reason and the Understanding are explored, together with his persistent use of a telescope as a symbol for faith.

Stellar Revisions

Chapter 4 scrutinizes a sequence of changes that Wordsworth made to The Prelude in the 1820s and 1830s which suggest that his numerous scientific connections at Trinity College, Cambridge, rarely mentioned in biographies of the poet, alongside his close friendship with William Rowan Hamilton, spurred him to integrate the latest innovations in mathematics and astronomy into his autobiographical poem. Wordsworth’s proximity to scientific advance in later life effected a ‘transfiguration’ in his poetics, given that his amendments to several passages of The Prelude suggest that he thought language could become outmoded like a mathematical formula or a technical instrument.

Orbicular Poetics

Chapter 3 recovers the formal lineage of Wordsworth’s ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ by following it back through Milton’s political sonnets to the Tuscan poets of the cinquecento, pre-eminently Giovanni della Casa and Torquato Tasso. It suggests that Wordsworth’s conception of the Miltonic sonnet as a dewdrop exemplifies the relationship between gravity and gravità and asprezza, and proposes that the moral force of Wordsworth’s political achievement across the first decade of the nineteenth century was the result of his intricate negotiation with the actual weight and tendency to downward motion of the sonnet form. The chapter demonstrates the influence of the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ on Wordsworth’s political pamphlet the Convention of Cintra, and also discusses Samuel Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme and John Donne’s sonnets in this tradition.