'Meaning motion': Form and movement in nineteenth-century British poetry

This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century poets discovered a new sense of form based on conceptual models of physical motion. For Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Hopkins---the poets considered in this study---physical motions were not only objects of perception; images of motion provided a new vocabulary for the primary forms of the physical world, of consciousness and perception, and of social and cultural movements. Conceptions of physical motion affected textual forms as well: Romantic and Victorian experiments with poetic forms, both old and new, must be understood as experiments with a different sense of how to see form itself. Traditional models of form as geometric shape or as repetition in time---models of form as purely spatial or purely temporal---fail to capture the working sense of poets who found the primary shapes of experience in motions. New cultural forms for apprehending the world are thus implied by nineteenth-century poems themselves.;The first two chapters trace the origins of this poetry of physical motion to Wordsworth. In the first chapter, the qualitatively heterogeneous motions of Lyrical Ballads are shown to reject Hume's reduction of the mind's motion of "thought" to a uniform succession of instants. The second chapter argues that The Prelude employs physical motions as primary forms for representing the profound changes of education and political revolution at the center of its narrative; these primary forms oppose a more traditional model of metamorphosis for describing change. The third chapter challenges the critical consensus of Tennyson as a poet of inaction and stasis; In Memoriam, it is argued, is best seen both formally and thematically as a search for mobile forms of experience in the wake of loss---forms more affirmative of consciousness than self-absorbed repetition or large-scale, scientific process. The fourth chapter turns to Hopkins to examine his radically agonistic conception of motion as a form for nature, self, and aesthetic experience: motion addresses nature to us as an object of knowledge, it describes selves as radically irregular and particular, and it underlies and is structured by Hopkins's generalized notion of counterpoint.