Romanticism
Of Matter and Meter: Environmental Form in Coleridge's ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’
By , University of California, Davis (January 2008)
Section: Romanticism
Subjects: Literature, Philosophy, Romanticism.
People: Tennyson, Lord Alfred, Shelley, Percy B., Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.
Key Topics: nature , ecocriticism, sexual transgression, utopianism, deconstruction.
Abstract
In this essay, Timothy Morton explores ecological ways of reading Coleridge's poem ‘Effusion 35’, which he revised as ‘The Eolian Harp’. Previous criticism (such as M. H. Abrams's) has suggested that the Aeolian harp is a way of thinking about relationships between humans and nature, but how precisely should we define these? And do these definitions have anything to do with artistic form (as well as content)? Morton demonstrates that Coleridge conducts an experiment in environmental form, for which the Aeolian harp (or wind harp) provides a key. This popular household gadget was common in the eighteenth century, and several poets had written about it, notably James Thomson. Coleridge innovated in poetic form by making the Aeolian harp a figure for automation, and for the monitoring and recording of environmental processes. The poem thus anticipates, in an imaginary way, contemporary cultures of sound recording and reproduction. Using Marx, Morton demonstrates how the poem organizes meaning in a radically democratic way. ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’ ultimately open our minds to the possibility of ‘ecology without nature’ – a deconstructive, open-minded idea of ecology.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00520.x
This article abstract has been viewed 3886 times.
Top 5 related articles
-
Planting the Nation's ‘Waste Lands’: Walter Scott, Forestry and the Cultivation of Scotland's Wilderness
By , University of Salford
(Vol. 6, March 2009)
Literature Compass -
Ecocriticism in British Romantic Studies
By , University of Northern British Columbia
(Vol. 3, December 2006)
Literature Compass -
British Romanticism and Animals
By , King's College London
(Vol. 5, December 2008)
Literature Compass -
A Cosmopolitan Salon-Hostess: Friederike Brun's Revision of Schiller in Idas ästhetische Entwickelung (1824)*
By , Department of Comparative Literature, University of California Davis
(Vol. 1, August 2004)
Literature Compass -
Medicine of the 1820s
By
(Vol. 1, July 2004)
Literature Compass
Top 5 Related Blackwell Reference Chapters
Romantic Philosophy, Transcendentalism, and Nature
With a broad and deep knowledge of philosophy, literature, and political issues, Herman Melville was ...
By Rachela Permenter
Nature
One of the defining characteristics of the Romantic movement in Europe is its enduring engagement with ...
By James C. McKusick
Kant, Hegel, and the Rise of Pedagogical Science
Three passages from Kant's lectures on pedagogy are repeatedly cited in the literature (especially European) ...
By G. Felicitas Munzel
Britain at War: The Historical Context
Oh, bloody and most bootless Waterloo.Which proves how fools may have their fortune tooWon, half by blunder, ...
By Philip Shaw
deconstruction
School of philosophy and literary criticism forged in the writings of the French philosopher Jacques ...
By PAUL NORCROSS