Obscure Visions

On 'The Calamity Form' by Anahid Nersessian

In spite of its presumed familiarity, the poetry of the Romantic period remains politically contested today. It isn’t difficult to gather why this is the case—thematizing solitude and interiority alongside the development of modern capitalism, the Romantics wrote at the outset of conditions that we still somehow inhabit; and their largely recalcitrant stance toward these contemporary developments continues to inform our lyric options in the present, from stridency to quietism.

Even so, this perennial interest has less to do with the poets’ own views in their time, ranging from reactionary to revolutionary over the course of a single career, than with a series of ongoing and tacit debates within reception between historicism and formalism—the reading of poetry in situ and poetry as such. No doubt there is something about the writing itself that prolongs this discussion; for, as Raymond Williams writes, there have been “few generations of creative writers more deeply involved in study and criticism of the society of their day.”¹ This sense of their own historicity, notes Williams, complicates a popular rumour of the English Romantics as indifferent to the material world, given to flights of personal feeling and metaphysical abstraction. But whatever fanciful portrayal Williams contradicts, his basic assertion of the political conversancy of this school has been broadly accepted since the 1960s, and today the Romantic poets are frequently described as prophetic with respect to the alienation of humanity, by capital and from the earth.

In The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, Anahid Nersessian accepts and departs from a commonplace depiction of the Romantics as social poets, exploring the predominance of several moods and mechanisms in poetry contemporary of the Industrial Revolution. All told, Nersessian’s interest restores a strangeness and variety to this poetic culture, where melancholia pressurizes the imagination, and scientific fascination complements, rather than supplants, mysticism. Nersessian’s close readings draw from Goethe, Wordsworth, Keats, and Cowper, among others whose writing lives spanned decades of enclosure, technological advancement, and bourgeois revolution. However, rather than present this writing as a simple gloss on rapidly changing surroundings, Nersessian assesses these authors’ works as an emanation of experiential difficulty, in each case making an obscure response to increasingly obscure conditions.