Toward a Romantic Theory of Metabolic Rift: Rhythm and Rift in Percy Shelley’s Poetics

Metabolic rift is a recent keyword in Marxist scholarship that refers to the destructive effects of mismatched energy throughput rates. The concept is instrumental to Marxist ecology, but it has also been charged with enforcing a binary between nature and society and romanticizing nature as unchanging. This paper proposes that metabolic rift should be understood as a theory of rhythm originated by Thomas Malthus, in which desynchronized rates of growth occasion mass death. On the basis of metabolic rift’s Romantic origins and rhythmic character, I turn to Percy Shelley to construct an alternative tradition of metabolic rift. Close readings of Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry and 1816 poem Alastor show that Shelley embraces crisis and mutability to construct a rift theory in which poets manipulate tempo to heighten our sensitivity to the earth’s rhythms.