Wordsworth and the poetics of air

It's not about anything you'd really call contemporary fiction, but my new book might nonetheless be of interest to some readers of cli-fi. It's called Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air, out a month or two ago. It's also not anything you'd call cheap (or even reasonably priced), but if you go to the Cambridge website (http://admin.cambridge.org/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1700-1830/wordsworth-and-poetics-air?format=HB) you can get a 20% discount by entering the code WATPOA2018.

The book was launched on 22 August by John Frow and Clara Tuite. At the launch, I made a few remarks on the image that appears on the book's cover. (You can find the image here: https://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/sammlung-online/carl-gustav-carus/goethe-denkmal .)
 Here are my notes, which I have to say are a bit telegraphic, but which some people might find worth reading:

You can’t judge a book by its cover. In the case of my book: bullshit. I’ll tell you about the cover, you judge the book.

A painting by Carl Gustav Carus. A German romantic painter, friend acolyte of Caspar David Friedrich, Goethe. A painter – but also a medical doctor by profession. Art / science crossover figure. Title Zu Goethe’s Ehrengedächtnis. Means something like: Goethe, in memoriam. Or Goethe monument. Painted in 1832 just after Goethe’s death.

In my book, only a sentence or two on this painting, specifically on this title. Which echoes the title of a Goethe poem I discuss in detail in the book, Howards Ehrengedächtnis. That poem about an English meteorologist, Luke Howard, who in 1802 invented our modern terminology for clouds. Cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, and combinations. Terminology still in use. Important in the history of meteorology. Up until about 1800: meteorology was still about meteors. Weather too. But also everything between the stars and the surface of the earth. From about 1800: reformulated as the modern science of weather, atmosphere, climate. Howard a major figure in this disciplinary modernisation.

A great scientific advance recognised at the time by Goethe and others – Wordsworth too. But also a problem for poetry: a new scientific language of air. How does poetry respond? Most people today: Goethe’s poem (and more broadly, Romantic literature), a celebration of scientific modes of knowledge. That interpretation, better than the old interpretation, that Romantic poetry was anti-science. The celebration reading is better. But my sense: things are much more ambivalent. Goethe’s poem a case in point. Title means: Howard, in memoriam. But Howard was alive when Goethe wrote his poem. Goethe was corresponding with him. So definitely some animosity there: the poem celebrating the birth of modern meteorology also imagines its inventor as being dead. That’s all I say about the painting in the book: an aid for interpreting the title of the poem that it echoes.

But there’s more to say about it. For one thing: religious iconography. Shaped like an altarpiece. But an atmospheric image, not a religious one. Participates in a broader atmospheric secularisation of religious symbols, language—language of spirits, of divine breath—I trace in the book.

Also, an imaginary tomb. On top, an aeolian harp: important Romantic instrument of the imagination. The aeolian harp: a kind of automatic environmental music. The wind blows through the strings, makes them resonate. Taken up as an image of poetry, of poetic production, in Romanticism. The harp in this image: as if Goethe was still producing poetry beyond the grave.

Now, in the book: show that atmosphere became cultural around 1800. When people started to talk about the atmosphere of a room, a painting, a text. An atmospheric image. Formulations that first appear around 1800. The same time atmosphere, weather, climate, also become the objects of systematic scientific study. Atmosphere pulled in two directions at once. Becomes material. But also becomes more metaphoric.

My claim in the book: poems record these shifts. Record this disarticulation of scientific atmosphere from cultural atmospheres. They are like instruments that measure changes in the composition of available meanings of the air we breathe, the weather that surrounds us, the climates that inform us.

Part of Goethe’s enthusiasm for Howard: set up a network of meteorological observatories. High-quality date of past climates. Still useful. Back then, as still today, meteorology, climatology, use instruments to record changes in literal atmospheres. But how do you measure changes in metaphoric atmospheres? Or changes in the relationship between literal and metaphoric atmospheres? Literal instruments are no use. You need metaphoric instruments: Imaginary instruments that can record changes at this interface between metaphor and literality.

Poems are those instruments. And this painting, too, is an image of just such an imaginary instrument. So I see it as a painting of an atmospheric poem, a painting of an imaginary Romantic poem. The aeolian harp splits the air into its metaphoric and literal dimensions. It records what how those dimensions relate to each other. And it does this even after the poet’s death. For the painting is funereal, operating in the zone of memory and mourning. Even after the poet’s death, the poem, posthumously, keeps on working as a measuring device, a recording device.

That means that Romantic poems can be used, can be read, to gauge continuing changes, ongoing changes, in how physical and cultural atmospheres relate to each other. And that matters today because the space first opened up between physical and cultural atmospheres in the Romantic period is being collapsed in our time, the time of climate change. In our time, political atmospheres have real climatic effects. And vice versa. Poems from the past can continue to tell us about the changing meanings of the air around us even long after they were written. This painting pictures the poem in that sense, as that kind of device. After the death of the author, recording shifts in the meaning of atmosphere. And that’s what my book is about, what it tries to do.

End on a note of self-criticism. I’ve written a melancholy, sombre book. Because we live in dark politico-climatic times. But my book isn’t dark enough. After this book went to press, I found out—not a great discovery, I just didn’t know this—that Carus went on to write a book titled On the unequal capacity of the different human races for higher mental development. 1849. Carus’s ideas there were then taken up Arthur de Gobineau in a book called An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 1853, now recognised as the founding text of what gets called “modern scientific racism.” Carus’s racist writings aren't discussed in the academic literature on his art. Which is why I didn’t know about them. But clearly they’re related. Race matters, somehow, in this painting. I don’t talk about that in the book. I don’t really talk about the painting much at all. But it is on the cover. I think it’s a good book. But there are things that need talking about that I don’t talk about in it. Atmospheric Romanticism isn’t necessarily racist. But it contains potentials that, in historical fact, become racist, even part of the foundation of modern racism. And those potentials are still being played out today, in the unequal global distribution of climatic benefits and climatic suffering, of atmospheric goods and atmospheric evils. I think I’ve written a good book. And it’s a dark book. But it’s not dark enough. That’s my self-criticism.