BARS Blog

Mark Sandy is Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He has published extensively on Romantic poetry and its legacies, including the monographs Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (Ashgate, 2005) and Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (Ashgate, 2013; reprinted by Routledge, 2019). He has also curated a series of edited collections on Romantic echoes from the nineteenth century to the present day, decadence, Venice and, most recently, the spectral (Ghostly Encounters: Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Routledge, 2021), co-edited with Stefano Cracolici). He is currently the editor of The BARS Review. His new monograph, Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment, which we discuss below, was published earlier this year by Edinburgh University Press.

1) How did you come to realise you wanted to write a book on the influence of British Romanticism on American literature?

Although my primary research interests have been in Romantic poetry, I have always been fascinated by how you can trace the legacies of Romanticism (positive and negative) in the literary culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This, coupled with my love of reading and teaching American literature, made me wonder whether the writings of Blake, Byron, Keats, and Shelley were as important to the formation of American literary culture as, say, the writings of Coleridge and Wordsworth. This question stayed with me, especially as I had often felt the presence of these other Romantic writers in the works of Emerson and Thoreau, as well as later twentieth-century American writers. This haunting sense of the Romantic presences of Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Keats in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writing formed the first seeds of what became this book.

2) Many of your chapters invoke nature prominently.  Is nature, for you, at the heart of the legacy of British Romanticism in the United States?  If so, to what extent would you figure this as a positive inheritance?

For me, at least, nature – in all its varied forms sublimely beautiful and sublimely terrifying – is central to the British and American Romantic Imagination but also, inextricably, bound up with these ideas and representations of nature are questions about the self and identity. You can see, for example, in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman how they adapt models of nature from British Romanticism to capture the vastness of America’s land- and seascapes in ways that also voice the newly emergent sense of individual and collective identity that these writers experienced.  I think that the influence of British Romanticism in the United States is, on the whole, positive. Whether Romantic ideas about the self and nature are emulated, transmuted, transduced, or shunned, they remain a vital wellspring for the American Imagination. ‘The romantic ought to be everywhere’, Wallace Stevens claims and then, paradoxically, continues (embracing both negative and positive Romantic legacies), ‘But the romantic must never remain.’   Stevens’s conundrum, I think, perfectly captures and embraces the double-bind of positive and negative Romantic influence on the American literary imagination.  

3) Which U.S. authors did you begin the project with the strongest interest in examining?  Which writers surprised you the most as you traced their interactions?

As Keats has been a Romantic poet who has featured prominently in my research into other aspects of Romanticism, I was very keen to revisit the question of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Keats.  It is well known through Fitzgerald’s letters, novels, and other writings that he was a great admirer of Keats and many of his works of fiction make both direct and indirect allusion to the poet’s work. There are also many biographical parallels between Fitzgerald and Keats (as Jonathan Bate’s recent book underlines), despite the historical distance between them.  For my part, I wanted to think through the extent to which Keats’s ideas about negative capability helped shaped Fitzgerald’s mode of narration, especially in The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, but also elsewhere. More surprisingly or, at least, less obviously, there are also important lines of Romantic influence (and response) that can be traced in the writings and thinking of two of the most important twentieth-century American novelists, Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison.  The extent and depth of their engagement with Wordsworth in particular, and Romanticism more generally, is truly remarkable.

4) The majority of the book’s chapters pair British poets and U.S. prose writers.  What did you find most revealing about exploring influence not only across the Atlantic, but also across forms?

In traversing the Atlantic and the traditional critical boundaries of prose and poetry, my study reasserts the significance, in particular, of second-generation Romantic poets for American literary culture by reassessing our understanding of Romantic inheritance and influence on post-Romantic aesthetics, subjectivity, and the natural world in the American imagination. As with the negative and positive inheritance of Romanticism, tracing the imaginative exchanges between British Romantic poetry and later American novelists reveals a similar story of continuities and discontinuities, as well as augmenting a stylistic impulse towards the poetic in these American writers (especially the works of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Bellow, and Morrison).

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

My continuing fascination with questions of Romanticism’s bequests and its haunting presence in the post-Romantic literary imagination will inform a new book-length study that I plan to write, provisionally titled Ghostly Presences in Romantic and Victorian Poetics: From Wordsworth to the Brownings.

Lucy Cogan is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, politics and religion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing. She has published articles on Sarah Butler and Charlotte Brooke and edited Charlotte Dacre’s Confessions of the Nun of St Omer for the Chawton House Library Series. Her particular passion is William Blake, on whom she has published several articles and book chapters and who is the subject of her first monograph, Blake and the Failure of Prophecy, which has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan and which we discuss below.

1) How did you first become interested in William Blake?

Back when I was doing an MA in Modernity and Culture and thinking naïvely that I might do a PhD on imagist poetry or something, I took a module run by the eminent Coleridge scholar Jim Mays on intertextuality which featured Milton’s Paradise Lost, Blake’s Milton and Allen Ginsburg’s Howl. Mays had chosen the Tate facsimile edition of Blake’s Milton as the set text but you couldn’t get it anywhere and I became mildly obsessed with hunting it down. After traipsing all over London I finally tracked down a battered copy in the Tate gift shop and then opened it to find the strangest work of literature I’d ever come across. It was the sense that this mad vision was always on the point of making transcendent, mind-blowing sense that hooked me and it’s that same quality that still has me coming back to Blake today.

2) How did Blake’s understanding of the role of the prophet differ from the way we’d commonly conceptualise that figure today?

I think that as literary scholars it’s hard to escape the habit of treating prophecy primarily as a rhetorical stance or mode out of a kind of squeamishness with its claims to have access to a “divine vision” or whatever you want to call it. But to track the shifting significance of prophecy in Blake’s oeuvre means accepting that for him prophecy was a kind of action you do in the world. Yet if we accept that his prophetic poetry is performative and its purpose was to change the world then by his own standard his life’s work was an utter failure. In the book I wanted to try to capture how this trauma plays out across his career, as he tries to recover that unity of action and purpose he had felt in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the French Revolution.

3) In your Introduction, you argue that Blake’s ‘awareness of divergent temporalisations of prophetic action allowed him to adjust his use of the prophetic form as his understanding of his authorial mission evolved over time’.  Where in his milieu would you locate the starkest of these adjustments?

I’m not sure if this is the ‘starkest’ but maybe the most consequential of the shifts I discuss is from the Old Testament model of prophetic temporality to an apocalyptic model. In the popular consciousness they tend to be treated as interchangeable but there is an important distinction in how these models understand the relationship between prophecy and time that had major consequences for Blake and his sense of himself as a prophet.

For the Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel, who influenced Blake’s earliest articulations of the power of prophecy, the outcome of the prophet’s judgment was a matter of negotiation between God, his prophet, and his people. In other words, the future could be changed if the people listened to the prophet and altered their course. For apocalyptic prophets, on the other hand, the future is set. The end of the present world is coming and you can’t do anything about it. All you can do is wait for the fireball of righteous judgment to consume you like that guy in the car in Independence Day. So when Blake moved towards an apocalyptic model with works like “A Song of Liberty” and America he was expressing more than his confidence, he was signalling his certainty, that the end for all the corrupt regimes of Europe was imminent come what may. But then it didn’t happen. In the book I consider the ways he attempted to reinvent his prophetic system over and over again across the rest of his career, moving between these models, as he tried to think through how and why he had been so wrong.

4) Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics are one of the book’s inspirations: what for you were the most exciting elements of Blake made visible by the book’s development of Ricoeur’s insights?

Ever since I was a Philosophy undergrad I’ve had a thing for Ricoeur because his theory of hermeneutics has always struck me as a profoundly humane way of thinking about our predicament, flailing around trying and failing to understand each other and our world. Ricoeur is often lumped in with Derrida as just another post-structuralist for whom the notion of truth is subject to deep suspicion. But for Ricoeur it’s not that there is no truth, just that it is multifaceted, perhaps endlessly so, since we are constantly changing and our perspective on the truth changes with us.

One of Ricoeur’s explanations of the hermeneutic method, in particular, helped me to conceptualise both my own analytical process and also Blake’s poetic practice. Ricoeur describes our attempts to grasp the truth when we perform hermeneutics as moving in a spiral pattern with each attempt approaching the truth at a different level or angle. Failure is therefore built into this process since each revolution reveals only part of the truth and the whole truth remains stubbornly elusive. For me, this is how Blake came to understand his own prophetic method, which is (if you are familiar with his later work especially) often maddeningly repetitive. I argue that these repetitions in his poetry reveal it to be a reiterative hermeneutic practice through which he attempts to work through his previous failed attempts to discern that visionary truth he was chasing throughout his career.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

Something completely different! I’m currently putting together a Medical Humanities podcast with a UCD colleague (Alice Maugher, School of History) called The Demon Drink, which looks at Ireland’s fraught relationship with alcohol from the 1600s through to 1922 (the founding of the Irish state). The podcast should be coming out in late-July/August. This developed out of my work on my second monograph which is focused on drunkenness in eighteenth and nineteenth century Irish literature.