Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation by Carmen Faye Mathes (review)

Reviewed by: Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation by Carmen Faye Mathes James Metcalf Carmen Faye Mathes, Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2022). Pp. 264. 70. 00 cloth. To be provoked by poetic form is to be disappointed in expectations conditioned by inherited patterns of reading and structured by forms and genres which were pressed into new shapes by the Romantics. Elegiac sonnets, lyrical ballads and tales, theatrical fragments, and political sonnets and odes—these experimental poetic forms constitute what Carmen Faye Mathes calls "a complex negotiation with deeply held expectations of and attachments to particular literary experiences" (1). Romantic play with form strides athwart the "anticipatory arcs" of reading through disruption, deferral, refusal, and other negative reorientations of readerly "structures of feeling" (as theorized by Raymond Williams) (1) ; it does so not in empty gestures of novelty, but to enact the strained relationality of lived experience in the flux of the social life of feeling. As a finely crafted contribution to affect studies, Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation takes its bearings on the pre-cognitive yet sociable movement of feeling from Spinozist radical materialism. Against the persistence of Kantian disinterested judgment in Romantic studies, Spinoza affords an alternative philosophical tradition which emphasizes the "material entanglements" of everyday life, in which "'being moved' refers to embodied experiences not separable from their objects" (9). The impressible body is subject to outside forces at once pre-personal and impersonal, neither private nor individuated, and this material condition affirms all life as precariously relational rather than boundedly subjective. Where the feeling intensity of Romantic lyric has seemed to represent a fully formed agentive self, Spinoza posits affect as the struggle with transitory forces to which we are porous, caught up in "the uncountable causes and effects that proliferate powerful and often un-traceable natural motions and countermotions, that is, ideas and affections" (16). Mathes's development of this material philosophy demonstrates its aesthetic implications: living in time and bearing its discomforts becomes, in Romantic poetics, a formal straining with this experience's negative intensities. This poetically mediated affective tension enacts the Spinozist conatus: the striving of existence which expresses both resilience and vulnerability. In poetry, expectation can be uncomfortably drawn out and ultimately disappointed, revealing how Romanticism's provocative forms "encourage exertion—asking readers to struggle with, not merely undergo, challenging feelings" (4). Mathes thus persuasively claims that negative affects can be aesthetically deliberate, not just ambiently registered. Through strategies of disturbance and delay, poets do not discharge aesthetic pleasure but unwind its anticipation by requiring readers to be open to new regimes of feeling. Confronting such affective misdirection is the provocation of Romantic poetics, the formal tactics of which contour pleasure's horizon to the world of change it inhabits. Feeling like one thing before becoming something else, the swerve of a poem against the grain compels reading on through unfamiliar processes and uncomfortable responses in pursuit of new forms of literary experience. This case is compellingly presented over five chapters. The first revisits Charlotte Smith's renovations of the sonnet to offer an enticing vocabulary for understanding anew Smith's tireless yet laborious poetics as it develops over ever-growing editions of the Elegiac Sonnets (1784–1797). If a sonnet's distended meter indexes "a tenacious kind of guarded optimism, " then voltas—isolating the End Page 407 poet/speaker in a final, inward turn of tortured feeling—represent a "hope against hope" (28). Smith's "hope against hope" is not a straightforward plea for sympathy; instead, lines of identification between reader and poet/speaker, which might resolve the suffering that impels the poems, are foreclosed as the sonnets continue to struggle against difficult structures of feeling. Hope hardly arrives before it is turned against in a brutal encounter with reality, yet Smith's speakers do not give up striving towards a less naïve, more vitally embodied persistence in being. Chapter 2 tracks how in Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) William Wordsworth's narratives might be blocked by metrical adjustments, while Mary Robinson, in Lyrical Tales (1800), reinstates narrative through a positive revaluation of the affective force of personification. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's reflections on readers' receptivity (or. . .