This chapter considers a range of Latin documentation and poetry composed in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, with a particular focus on the social settings in which the material was produced, consumed and performed. The chapter opens with an overview of the contemporary charter corpus, which is a rich mix of Latin and Old English documents drawn up in the names of royal, non-royal, ecclesiastic and lay individuals. This survey provides several points of comparison with the material examined in Chapters 2 and 3, and it allows us to consider the possible impact of Alfredian education reform. Consideration is given to the linguistic dynamics of the corpus and to examples that employ Latin specifically to enhance the performative potential of the document. Two sets of Latin poetry are then introduced – acrostic verses in praise of King Alfred and the ‘Metrical Calendar of Hampson’ – both of which were most probably composed within, and for, the milieu of the West Saxon court. The authorship, transmission and possible sources of inspiration for this poetry are considered. It is then argued, through a comparative discussion, that the performances of this Latin documentary and poetic material were critical to their value.

Chapter 3 focuses on a small number of letters from Keats to his poet-friend John Hamilton Reynolds written in the first few months of their friendship, in late 1817 and early 1818. As aspiring young poets, Reynolds and Keats developed a close, competitive-collaborative friendship in which the exchange of letters played an important part. The chapter examines the ways in which some of the main tenets of Keats’s conceptual or theoretical sense of both letter-writing and literary criticism arose out of the interchange of letters with a poet with whom he actively collaborated. Through a reading of Keats’s commentary on the power of Shakespeare’s poems and plays, the chapter argues that letter-writing is intrinsically collaborative, and that in his letters to Reynolds, Keats also emphasizes the collaborative or corresponding quality of both literature and literary criticism.

Chapter 8 looks at a critical moment in Keats’s life in order to trace the way, in his letters, he works through a crucial decision about his future as a writer. Focusing on a series of interlinked and in some ways ‘porous’ letters written during a single week in September 1819, the chapter discusses Keats’s sense that he is, or soon will be, ‘unpoeted’ – that he can no longer be a poet. Alone in the small city of Winchester, Keats writes a series of often overlapping letters that ultimately move him towards a decision concerning whether or not to end his career as a poet. The chapter aligns the specific circumstances of the limited space of the cathedral city in which Keats is temporarily staying with the limited space of the letter-page itself and examines how he resolves a critical life choice in and through correspondence.

The introduction outlines the key themes of the book and offers brief summaries of individual chapters. It offers a brief overview of Keats’s letters and a summary of their publication history, their reception, and their place in his public reputation. The chapter proposes that Keats’s letters can be considered as a body of work in its own right, and that literary criticism needs to develop an epistolary poetics to enable and support a formal critical reading of his correspondence.

How does one let the infinite expanses of the heavens into the puny orb of a human eye? Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ envisions a form of filiation between sentient flesh and celestial light, a form of intimate and mutual recognition between the body and the spheres. This chapter confronts Barbauld’s poetic meditation to later poems by William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley which also endeavoured to force the infinite into the circle of the eye. As physiological optics laid bare the anatomical workings of sensation, the cultural representation of sight implied the irruption of darkness within light inside the obscure integuments of the eye. The central darkness at the heart of the human eye allows one to experience, through the configuration of one’s own flesh, the bottomless depths of the universe, while astronomy initiates a revolution in the perception of temporality.

This chapter explores the intersections of the aural and the tactile in Romantic poetry. To trace the emergence of form within organic and inorganic matter, Romantic poetry draws on the anatomical and musical concept of formant, a material structure that shapes sound into melody within musical instruments and within the organs of hearing and phonation. The anatomists who explored the inner ear discovered a form of internal landscape, with crags and crevices, akin to geological formations. This prompted Erasmus Darwin and William Wordsworth to meditate on the aural potentialities of inorganic matter: the mineral at the origins of sensation and the phonic richness of matter. Percy Shelley also attends to the vibrancy of matter aspiring towards form when he muses on sculpture: honing the stone but also the senses of the artist, sculpture orients the senses towards the invisible and the potential, awakening the aspiration for freedom.

As it traces the emergence of organic life and the gradual transformation of species, Erasmus Darwin’s treaty in verse The Temple of Nature develops a poetics of what eludes our sense of sight, of the viewless and eyeless beings at the radical origins of life. The chapter thus retraces a poetic journey back to a perceptual framework in which sight does not yet exist. Erasmus Darwin tries to apprehend life before the first eye opened, to envision a world so young that sensation itself had just been born. That journey also goes back to the origins of the alliance of poetry and science in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and its poetics of corpora caeca, those viewless bodies that create entire worlds through blind contact. It lastly registers some of the aesthetic and epistemic aftershocks of Lucretius’ and Darwin’s poetics of blind bodies in the poetry of William Blake.

As late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century scientific advancements generated new modes of comprehending life and matter, they also expanded the modalities of sensation, and generated new representations of the senses and of the act of sensing. Touch joined sight as a predominant source of analogies for scientific investigation. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the proliferation of modes of scientific imaging based on transferring the object of observation onto a material subjectile: from anatomical casts to the study of fossil imprints, modes of apprehension involving direct transfer ‘from matter to matter’ flourished, endowing direct contact with a paradigmatic role. What happens, then, to Romantic vision when touch reasserts itself? The creative interactions between touch and sight raises with renewed acuity the question of the modalities of figuration at the heart of Romantic conceptions of imagination. Who or what is sensitive and affected? Who and what envisions?

Scientific discourse on the vibratory nature of light and sound is reflected and deflected by the supple and regular structures of Percy Shelley’s last poems, which trace the emergence of transient beauty through an aesthetics of propagation and dispersal. In ‘To Jane. The Recollection’, ‘Lines written in the Bay of Lerici’, and ‘The Triumph of Life’ (1822), Shelley reflects on the fate of light and sound once they come into contact with the humours and integuments of the eye and the ear. The motif of the waveform, as a transient signal reaching the sense organs through the fluid mediums of water and of air, reflects the pleasure and transience of contact. This creative state of the body is unstable, like the eye of a storm, and the poems also record the moments when sensation comes undone, when the signal unravels and dissolves into the noise of ordinary sense-data.

The last chapter brings the volume full circle as it looks into the ultimate confines of perception, across the limits of death. Contrasting with the Christian sacralization of the last breath, physiological research at the time revealed various stages in death, when vital organs fail one after the other, raising the troubling possibility of sensory remanence running through nervous fibres as the body gradually dies. These specters of sensations were invested by the Romantic imagination. This chapter investigates paradoxical imaginings of sensation after death in Keats’s Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, Percy Shelley’s ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which registers the dawn of sensation in a creature composed of tissues taken from the charnel-house, learning to feel through dead flesh. Such sensory experiments offer imaginative answers to the paradoxical question: what do the dead see through closed eye, through empty orbits?

This chapter looks at poetic explorations into the visionary powers of nonhumans. It examines a series of sense experiments in the works of Erasmus Darwin, Percy Shelley, and John Clare. For these poets, there is more than meets the human eye, as creativity is not limited to humankind. They draw on scientific investigations into the sensory apparatuses of animals and on research about the metabolic process later termed ‘photosynthesis’, in which the whole surface of the vegetal body is sensitive to light. That sensitivity, in which the body is both all eye and all skin, is the most vital sense, the one that truly defines plant life in its uncanny vitality. In these imaginary experiments, by endeavouring to experience the world through nonhuman senses, the poet encounters multifarious sensory modalities, as well as strangely intense forms of vision.

This chapter explores a number of key questions concerning Ginsberg’s choosing India to revive his spiritual, historical, and class-conscious searches through his travels. Ginsberg, as he was Jack Kerouac’s protégé, repeated Jim Crow patterns of white–Other engagement throughout his life and could therefore be seen as insensitive. Another key question has to do with the authenticity of such searches – was Ginsberg really seeking Hindu advice as to how to organize poetry and protest, now that India had been freed from the British? All of these questions raise the issue of Hindu revivalism, which meant taking off the cape of colonial submission that rendered Hinduism to be a kind of penitent orientalism. In the end, was Ginsberg’s trek unique, or did it coincide with other colonial adventures?

The seven decades of Allen Ginsberg’s life and poetic work coincided with major changes in societies’ approaches to the mentally ill. Mid century, near rock-bottom in this difficult evolution, Allen burst onto the scene with “Howl” and then “Kaddish”. Allen’s shocking and monumental works said we need to face mental illness and madness, stop seeing them as apart from ourselves, find spiritual meaning, take risks, and make major changes to humanize our approaches. With the approval of Allen and later his estate, I could conduct new research to bring us closer to Allen and Naomi’s lifelong involvement with madness and mental illness and why it matters in relation to his poetry. The result was Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness (2023). Allen’s radical acceptance of madness as a basic and potentially beneficial human capacity was far ahead of his time in inviting readers to change how we understand and engage with madness and mental illness.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the book and elaborates on the significance of racial doubt as a category of analysis beyond nineteenth-century Cuba. Given that racism has deep cultural and affective roots, the skeptical analyses that humanistic research centers will remain vital, even as the institutions supporting such research are destroyed by oligarchic, race-baiting forces. Skepticism is a power that the Humanities share with racial doubt. It implies, counterintuitively, a hope – to question in order to get things right – and a pledge to knowledge – to avoid denial, ignorance, and false explanations. No matter how indispensable one’s convictions about race might be, clinging to them would mean forsaking this hope, this pledge, and the broad political alliances required to imagine a world better than our own.

Chapter 5 offers a new reading of Cuba’s most famous enslaved writer, Juan Francisco Manzano, who started publishing in 1821 and became legally free in 1836. While it engages with his well-known autobiography, the chapter focuses on his poetry. To the degree that slavery was justified through race, Manzano’s emergence as an author produced racial doubt among those who believed that poetry and literary skills were the exclusive domain of white people. At the same time, he explicitly disidentified from blackness, prompting many generations of critics to discuss how Black he was. As new generations return to his texts, the palimpsest of conflicting ideas about his Blackness or lack thereof keeps changing. The chapter examines some of these layers by focusing on the paradox of enslaved authorship – of a writer who built his authority on the basis of his deauthorization. Poems, the chapter shows, were Manzano’s most elaborate literary form of back talk, as they allowed him to evade the abolitionist pressure to write about slavery.

This chapter examines key ideas concerning the dialect and metre in which Pindar’s poems were written, as well as the story of the transmission of his works from his day, through antiquity and the Middle Ages, then down to our own times.

The Introduction explains why nineteenth-century Cuba is a particularly rich context for studying racialism (the assumption that social hierarchies are based on the existence of races), racial doubt (those moments when this assumption gets questioned and racial differences seem less clear), and the different groups of racialized people who mobilized doubt as they worked to reinvent themselves and their society. It also shows how the analysis of the notions at the core of each chapter – racist agnosia, farce, passing-as-open-secret, fictions of racial coherence, back talk, and the reappropriation of Blackness – illuminates present-day critiques of color blindness. Finally, it explains why the book is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on enslaved people’s testimonies and abolitionist writing that attacked illegal slavery by denouncing lies, falsification, and farce; the second one, on free people of color who wrestled with two “one-drop” rules (one which rendered a person not-white, the other which made them whiter); and the third one, on the emergence of Black Cuban writing.

Emerson’s poetry has been somewhat of an enigma for readers and critics alike, who have often found it thematically opaque and stylistically unwieldy. Many have concluded that he was incapable of writing “better” verse, a conclusion predicated upon the assumption that he intended to do otherwise but couldn’t. This essay takes as a starting point the idea that the roughness of Emerson’s poetic style was intentional and that his metric irregularities are not accidents. After analyzing the style, rhetoric, and prosody of the poems, this essay contextualizes these elements within Emerson’s metaphysics. It argues that Emerson’s poetry reveals the crumbling of meter that led to the modernist revolution and free verse; poetic style did not suddenly jump from Longfellow to Whitman, but rather meter was stretched and strained before it was broken.

This chapter looks at the poetic herbarium through the concept of vegetal ontology, addressing works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and especially Emily Dickinson. The epistolary herbaria is a collaborative affair; “a flower in a letter,” like the tendencies of the plants themselves, seeded itself among various writers from across national frontiers. Not only were the form and the content of the messages vegetal but so also was the act of sending, disseminating the herbarium as so many seeds or spores, preceded by lovingly tending to, gathering and preserving flowers. In her work, Dickinson restages the elemental and cosmic clash of viriditas – “greenness,” or the self-refreshing power of finite existence that reaches its apotheosis in plants – and ariditas – “dryness,” or the scorching heat of sin understood in the extra-moral sense of everything that contravenes life and its renewal. Dickinson’s approach is at the same time allegorical and literal, plants providing her with a way of dealing with the inexorability of death. Analogous practices and preferences, like genres and authors, developed across nationalities, geographies, and time periods.