This chapter looks at Thomas Moore’s attempts to maintain a midway point between post-Napoleonic conservatism and emerging radical reform movements. It looks at his biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan in the context of wider debates about the nature of Whiggism and its suitability to the political moment. Moore’s attempts at moderation ran aground on the shores of Irish history, as his work increasingly moved to prose in order to make explicit political tensions that had been implicit in his poetry.

This chapter recovers the work of Charles Phillips, a barrister known for his florid rhetorical style. It looks at his argument with the Edinburgh Review about the proper nature of ‘legitimate eloquence’ within the context of wider tensions in post-Napoleonic Britain around the democratisation of public speech. Oratory was now considered potentially radical, even anarchic, which gave a greater urgency to defining and policing Irish speech.

This conclusion looks at cultural debate in the 1830s to consider the way in which the earlier decades of the nineteenth century were already being historicised by writers and intellectuals aware that they were entering a new literary age.

This chapter looks at Maria Edgeworth’s writings on Edmund Burke from 1805 to 1814, culminating in her novel Patronage published in that year. It looks at the reputation of Burke and the charges against his style by the Irish writer George Ensor as a way of thinking about how Burke’s mixed style of rhetoric may have influenced Edgeworth’s fictional practice. The relationship between rhetoric and realism is considered, as well as reasons for Edgeworth’s fall from literary favour in later years.

This chapter looks at the work of John and Michael Banim, who emerged as important Catholic novelists in the late 1820s. Their work attempted to capture the energy of O’Connellite politics in fiction, blending rhetorical set pieces with melodramatic incident. Public speech and oratory become centrally important to their work, and the influence of Richard Lalor Shiel on John Banim in particular becomes clear on reading his work.

This chapter looks at a minor controversy in the life of Charles Robert Maturin to consider his work in the light of sectarian tensions during the ‘Second Reformation’: the energised push by the Church of Ireland to convert the Catholic population in the 1820s. The role eloquence plays in Maturin’s work will be looked at and considered in relation to wider issues surrounding religious rhetoric and Gothic writing.

This introduction provides an introduction to the historical and theoretical frameworks for looking at Irish literature in the Romantic period. It considers the place of the Irish language in characterising Irish eloquence, and argues that British critics also linked Irish eloquence to Gothic excess. It introduces some of the main authors that will be looked at in greater depth later, including Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Thomas Moore, and Charles Maturin.

This chapter looks at the work of Sydney Owenson, focusing on two novels, The Wild Irish Girl and Woman; or Ida of Athens. It considers the way in which Owenson crafted a powerful model of female eloquence in response to the perceived failures of more mainstream political speech. It looks at the legacy of the Volunteer movement of the 1780s as well as the Irish-language background of her work. It also notes the publication of Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia, an important rhetorical treatise, and the links between his work and Owenson.

Starting in the late 1820s, African American poets began to write in concert with the abolition movement, and their work began to appear in anti-slavery periodicals. In these efforts, they translated the aesthetic theories of European Romanticism, and imagined Black consciousness beyond the confines of slavery and racism. Especially in the two decades before the Civil War, poets such as George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, Joseph Cephas Holly, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper undertook a wildly various range of formal experiments in the service of ending slavery and reconstructing Black cultural life. This chapter undertakes a survey of a number of the antebellum period’s Black poets, with the idea of thinking through the prophetic scope of their claims on history. It argues that in taking this posture, the Black Romantic poets anticipated more recent claims about the long-durational character of the Black radical tradition.

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 Romantic age is generally seen as fertile ground for vibrant synaesthesiæ, reconciliations of the senses, when, for instance, one is invited to feel the texture of an object by merely looking at it: sight endowed with the power to touch at a distance. This chapter explores the opposite, uncomfortable experience of the eye forced into direct contact, when touch invades the eye and neutralizes sight, in order for poetic vision to emerge. It is an invitation to explore the other side of synaesthesia in the works of a late Romantic and fervent reader of earlier Romantic poetry: Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey’s attempts at healing the disconnection between sight and touch aims at imaginatively turning the eye into a sensitive surface. De Quincey’s aesthetics of development, in the photographic sense, opens up new sensory experiments into the relationship between sight and touch.

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.

It is hard to overstate the importance of William Blake (1757–1827) within Allen Ginsberg’s life and poetry. The numinous event that Ginsberg experienced in 1948, which he would later call his “Blake vision,” became a key part of his self-fashioning as a countercultural visionary, a prophet in a tradition that stretched back through Blake to Milton and the Bible. As an expert salesman, Ginsberg also became a dedicated proselytizer for Blake, whose work he promoted not only through poetry but also college classes, interviews, music, and his vast personal network. Ginsberg thereby positioned Blake as a lodestar of the counterculture and ultimately influenced Blake’s position within popular culture and academia itself. However, Ginsberg’s narrative of his “Blake vision” also changed significantly over time, and Ginsberg’s strong link to Blake has sometimes obscured the importance to Ginsberg’s work of other Romantics, such as William Wordsworth.

This chapter examines Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seemingly contradictory relation to European Romanticism. Focusing on the concepts of genius, idealism, and originality in key works (Nature, English Traits, and Representative Men), it argues that Emerson’s admiration for English and German Romantic writings was not at odds with his call for cultural independence. Because Emerson understood the genius to be a teacher who empowers his students to reject him, he could imagine any reliance on Coleridge, Wordsworth, or Carlyle as ultimately enabling independence. The philosophical idealism essential to Emerson’s call for cultural independence, moreover, was a mode of perception that defied national categorization and so did not threaten the distinctive American culture he hoped to inaugurate. In his later writings, Emerson also came to clarify a concept of originality that involved the adaptation of inherited forms rather than the invention of new ones. Because borrowing became a precondition for innovation, intellectual debts did not undermine autonomy.