Contenu du sommaire : Poets of Sensibility

The Pleasures of Imagination by Mark Akenside spontaneously calls to mind Addison's essays in The Spectator on account of the apparent similarity of the chosen topic. Akenside's approach is nonetheless distinct from Addison's in so far as it tends to lift the poet up from the material world and is inspired by a deep yearning for spirituality. Akenside's poem is permeated by deist preoccupations and is based on the dualist principle of natura naturans and natura naturata. Nature is the visible effect of the invisible divine. Although the senses play a major role as messengers between the internal and external worlds, they cannot be considered an end as such, but must be nurtured by a keen desire for spiritual elevation. The poet has a privileged position in this respect, for he alone can free himself from the mire and dust of the external world. He is “a chosen one” among his fellow-creatures. The power of his imagination, whether spontaneous (through the senses), or creative (beyond the senses), gives him a form of knowledge superior to that of other men. Akenside vindicates the omnipotence of the mind. His sensualism tends towards spiritualism. Nature, inspired by a neo-platonic approach, is seen as the reflection of invisible essences. The Pleasures of Imagination paves the way to transcendentalism.

Since the Victorians, the thinness of Gray's output has encouraged critics of various persuasions to view him as an inhibited, ultimately abortive poet whose temperament was not up to the challenges and pressures he had to face (Miltonic influence, the commercialisation of culture, the suppression of homosexual desire, etc.). Yet his few published poems did enjoy tremendous fame, at least during the last third of the eighteenth century, and he never was entirely forgotten. The present article attempts to make sense of Gray's paradoxical status in literary history, by focusing on three salient aspects of his work: first, a certain kind of belated Augustan or Neoclassical desire for perfection, which he carried to intransigent extremes, and which may partly explain the sense of novelty many of his poems elicited; secondly, a close engagement with the new empiricist epistemology, which resulted in his foregrounding the intensities and ambiguities of sensation; thirdly, a lurking, elusive political radicalism, which to an extent stemmed from his peculiar lyrical procedures, and contributed powerfully to his aura in the 1780s and 1790s.

William Cowper is commonly remembered (if at all) as a psychologically weak and vulnerable man, “a coward” even (according to W. Hazlitt) who was “afraid of trusting himself.” Yet this alleged infirmity tends to tone down the vigour and originality of the poet's work. This article aims at reappraising Cowper's poetry by focusing mainly on his passion for vegetable life. As growing organisms that develop spontaneously into natural forms, ancient trees and young shoots, leaves, flowers and roots, and even cucumbers (whose phallicity is explicit) provided Cowper with apt metaphors for an invigorated textual body. They all testify to the poet's creative intuitions and to his remarkable ability to experiment with poetic language on his quest for intellectual rapture and physical pleasure.

Robert Burns deliberately chooses to provoke his readers' tastes by mentioning the bottom in his poems and songs on a regular basis. This article aims to show, first, that, far from being a maverick, Burns is the inheritor of a long, sometimes forgotten literary tradition. The behind metonymically stands for the lower belly and more generally for bodily fluids. Within the Burns corpus, scatological references unsettle social hierarchies, and offer a carnivalesque critique of the aristocratic, religious, scientific and literary realms. Beyond the undermining of social conventions, Burns's agenda in his “arse” poetica is to put forward the humane dimension of mankind.

When he looked at fossilised sea-shells, the poet and naturalist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) read the gradual transformation of species through “millions of ages” in their “glossy volumes.” In his poetry, fossilised shells look like strange artefacts no one crafted: the original organism acts either as the mould or as the raw material of the fossil emerging out of it, as if sculpted by time from the inside. The genesis of life-forms seems to take place outside divine intervention, through a series of negligible transformations: the imperceptible substitutes itself for the Unseen. In these beautiful forms, carved by death, time generates artistic forms. Destruction writes itself into a narrative of creation, and as the work of time becomes legible in the forms of the fossil, time fleshes itself out.

Hume and Smith's notion of sympathy, being coeval with the new rhetoric of communication, restores the ambiguity between experiencing passion and using it as a persuasive tool, which has been pervasive in the èthos-pathos dyad since Aristotle. For Hume the rhetorical power of sympathy partakes of an aesthetic mirroring process inducing non-motivated moral effects. In Smith's scheme of the self as a projection of the impartial spectator, sympathy and moral sentiments are objectified. Communication becomes markedly linguistic: a style devoid of figures is identified with the ethical transparency of sociability. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, poetic sympathy and pathos are barely distinguishable. Simple creative figures should overflow from the ideal language of passion—whereas for Blake the performative enargeia of words reveals the Logos and reflects its absolute sympathy. In Gray and Collins's odes, the poet questing for sympathy must confront abstract personifications. But in “The Mad Mother” and both “Nurse's Songs” the speaker's èthos is labile; figures of speech in such pathematic lyrical writing fall prey to metrical and grammatical instability.