| My dissertation offers a new reading of romantic poetry based on a compositional poetics. I focus my analysis on Erasmus Darwin, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, all of whom had extensive knowledge of chemistry. Chemical motion follows the pattern of combination and change; this pattern was called "elective affinity" in the eighteenth century. In this period, chemists, linguists, and poets elaborated the analogy between elements of matter and elements of language. In the 1780s, interest began to shift from human nature to nature, which, in the case of chemical matter, could "act" by itself without human intervention, even though the matter was neither living nor sentient. The romantic poets sought a way to bridge the analogy between the changing forms of matter and the changing forms of language. The poets began to focus on the process of poetic creation and to imitate in their poetic process the pattern of elective affinity. By imitating the process of motion found in nature, the poets attempted to put their poetry in motion literally. Erasmus Darwin believed the literary trope called "comparison" was most like elective affinity because comparison brought together entities of language with resemblance to one another. Erasmus Darwin invented a poetic technique based on analogy, in which analogical ideas combine and change one another. William Blake closed the gap between matter and language through his chemical method of production, in which his poetry is literally produced by the chemical reaction between nitric acid and copper during the etching process. One of the most important chemical phenomena for Coleridge was crystallization. Crystals are matter that has organized itself from the inside out, so that form is not imposed on the matter, but organically co-evolves with it. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and "Frost at Midnight," we see Coleridge comparing the work of meter to the work of the frost, as his poems also crystallize by following a natural pattern of motion. I conclude with a discussion of Shelley's experimentation with an elective affinity of sound, through the medium of breath, or the taking of air into the body, in "Ode to the West Wind" and Prometheus Unbound. |
