:“Genial” Perception: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Myth of Genius in the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Next article FreeBook Review“Genial” Perception: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Myth of Genius in the Long Eighteenth Century. William Edinger. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2022. Pp. ix+287. Hope: A Literary History. Adam Potkay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. vii+422.A. W. LeeA. W. LeeContributing Editor, The Scriblerian and Kit-Cats Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreAdam Potkay’s latest monograph more or less picks up from his 2007 The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism. Winner of the Harry Levin Prize for the best book in literary history between 2006 and 2008, The Story of Joy culturally and philologically excavates “joy” from the Hebrew Bible through Yeats and beyond. In the present volume, he provides a similar service for the concept (or emotion or virtue) of hope. Potkay begins with the ancient Greeks—Hesiod, Aeschylus, Pindar, and Thucydides—and carries his survey through modernism—Kafka, Camus, Ellison, and Beckett. Throughout this process, he combines a probing historical imagination, a sharp critical discernment, and a deft eye for textual explication, along with the gifts of a good storyteller, to provide a thoroughly accessible yet intellectually engaging account.Each of the five chapters takes up a distinct cultural episteme: classical, Christian, Augustan, Romantic, and modernist. In each, Potkay elucidates the antinomies both positive and negative—and many complexities in between—that philosophers and literary artists have discerned and developed in their deployment of “hope.”The first chapter, focusing upon Greek and Roman antiquity, exhibits the limits and restrictions these two intertwined worlds imposed: hope as deceptive, as irrational, as productive of fearfulness, as distracting from the present moment, and as squandered on things devoid of authentic value. A good example of this layered dialectic may be found in Potkay’s handling of the texts by the Greek poet Hesiod, whose only surviving authentic writings, Theogony and Works and Days, feature the myth of Pandora’s jar. Zeus, enraged at the trickery of Prometheus, creates a beautiful woman whom he sends to earth with a container full of mortal ills, such as care, toil, and disease. After Pandora opens the lid, they all escape, leaving only hope (elpis, ἐλπὶς) in the jar. While the standard interpretation holds that hope is a comfort to humankind, Potkay explores other possibilities—especially the notion that Zeus intended it to be an additional torment. Prometheus’s presence in the story adduces further complexities, such as the Titan’s gifting mortals ignorance of their final fate, as well as fire. This constitutes a sort of “blind hope,” allowing people to undertake future-oriented endeavors, occluded from their possible failure of futility.In Works and Days, Hesiod admits two kinds of strife: one born of Night (Nyx), purely destructive, and a later one that promotes competition, leading to constructive effort that may yield fruitful results. Hope within the Greek poet thus possesses a binary status: on the one hand, by placing stock in things by their very nature delusive, empty, and unsatisfying, hope may be harmful; on the other hand, salubrious competition may contribute to virtuous and positive hope for future rewards. Prometheus also appears a century later, in both Aeschylus and Pindar. The former’s Prometheus Bound elevates the god to the status of a culture hero who brings humans fire and, consequently, the arts of cultivation, civilization. The latter’s epinicia (choral hymns) address the Titan in a handful of places, most prominently in Olympian 12 and Isthmian 8. Again, in both authors, hope receives ambivalent treatment. Aeschylus’s chorus of ocean nymphs applaud the boon of “blind hope”:PROMETHEUS.I planted firmly in their hearts blind hopefulness.CHORUS.Your gift brought them great blessing.(42)Pindar, however, dismisses this “blessing”: “with men, this is blind hope without power” (45). In Olympian 12, “shameless hope”—hope for either the undeserved and unachievable (or both)—is reproached, while “measured hope” or “good hope,” a via media, is condoned (44–47). (Prometheus in Greek suggests “forethought.”) Ultimately the essence of Pindaric wisdom lies in these verses: “[while] men must keep good hope in mind,” “it is best to keep one’s eyes always on each thing before one’s feet, / for over men hangs a deceptive existence, as it unwinds life’s path” (Isthmian 8.16, 13–14, in The Complete Odes, ed. Anthony Verity [Oxford University Press, 2007], 137).This emphasis upon the present moment plays a significant role in both early Eastern and Western philosophy. To follow one of many possible discursive trails, in the Roman world the Hellenistic philosophies of Epicureanism and Stoicism both gained considerable traction. Because of the total loss or only fragmentary remains of earlier works in Greek, the Roman poet Lucretius represents the former school most fully. Based upon a materialist atomistic theory, the mid-first century BCE De rerum natura (The Nature of Things) advocates jettisoning the fear of death—as well as personal immortality—in order to attain present-state mental tranquility (ataraxia). The Stoics too favored the primacy of the present, as they sought relief from suffering (apatheia), particularly as found in human passions. Hope was minimized in both schemes, although the later Roman Stoic Seneca allowed for the hope of helping others and preserving the security of homeland. Virgil may represent this in his “ruler hope,” that of a national savior, as found in his famous fourth eclogue (although Potkay subjects this to an ironically arch reading). In sum, the first chapter compresses an extraordinary amount of information that my spare account here hardly does justice to. I offer it, however inadequate, to indicate something of the depth and sweep of Potkay’s project. Readers may thus take the preceding paragraphs as representative of the four chapters of the book that follow.Some of the themes just enumerated recur elsewhere in the book. For example, in chapter 2, we find “ruler hope” (as found in Virgil and Isaiah) resurrected into a universal messiah, as enunciated in the Christian gospels, and especially the Pauline epistolary corpus, which proclaimed the “good news” of Jesus’s imminent return. In Christianity, the tentative “good hope” found in the classical world in such figures as Pindar blossoms into an inescapable thematic promise, as in 1 Corinthians 13:13 (KJV): “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” These three become known as the theological virtues. Although St. Augustine resisted their imperative, they form a cornerstone in the majestic theological architecture of St. Thomas Aquinas, which remains today the primary theology of the Catholic Church. The chapter also examines the hope vested in the notion of salvation of all, based upon Romans 8:20–21 and developed by the early church fathers Origen and Gregory of Nyssa (and quietly reaffirmed in the twentieth century by theologians such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer). Major shifts in the Christian revolution of the early Common Era centuries include hope for eternal life (as opposed to the Lucretian celebration of individual annihilation) and investing in Christ’s offer of hope to the poor and wretched of the earth—as opposed to the Greco-Roman valorization of the aristocratic and literate elite. Such structural ligatures suturing the various chapters of Hope, whether based upon similarity or contrast (see, e.g., the extension of what has been elsewhere called “realizable hope” on the poor and enslaved, in chap. 3, and again, in chap. 5) resonate throughout, operating like so many leitmotifs that draw the music of the larger whole into unity. Later chapters extend and complicate the foundations laid out in the first two, as they range through authorities such as Milton and Pope, Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth and Percy Shelley, Goethe, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kafka, ending with Waiting for Godot. The book’s conclusion observes:But, as we have seen, to Estragon’s [in Waiting for Godot] final suggestion that they might be better off if they parted, Vladimir answers in we-mode: “We’ll hang ourselves to-morrow… . Unless Godot comes.” Hope and suicide remain options, and constitute one antithesis in a play that, in the end, is as much about its own formal shape as it is about the human condition, or the condition of Europe after the Great Wars. Hope and its absence, as well as things to hope for and their absence, remain organizing principles long after Europe’s age of unified faith has ended.(324)If this does not return us full circle back to Hesiod and the classical world, it does suffice to lightly interlace the last four chapters into a satisfyingly succinct little knot.The readings in Hope, at times brilliant, can also be elliptical. Discussing, for example, Tacitus in one page, Kant in two, can exert demands that not all readers might be ready to meet. However, while one may not agree with all the author’s interpretative conclusions, dismissing them without consideration would be a mistake. Hope is not a quick read. If the reader truly digs into the primary passages Potkay examines—as I often attempted to do—mapping the context, parsing lines in the original languages, tracing contacts and connections with other relevant works, then a truly rewarding experience emerges. Potkay leads us through some of the peaks of the Western intellectual tradition (save the lamentable gap of the Italian Renaissance and the northern humanists, especially Erasmus and Thomas More) through the complex, expansive prism of “hope.” Some may view this focus as a turnoff: while he examines texts written by members of the laboring classes (Stephen Duck, Mary Collier), women (Hannah More, Dickinson), and people of color (Equiano, Wright, Brooks, Ellison), his brief is not to burst open the canon. But this is not tantamount to accusing the book of lacking contemporary relevance. With catastrophic climate change, democratic political systems facing their possible mortality, and globally threatening diseases, we in 2023 (and the years ahead) need hope now more than ever. Hope undertakes a thorough, if not comprehensive, examination of this elusive yet indispensable property of the human psyche, this, perhaps, inalienable human right.William Edinger has written a book, “Genial” Perception: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Myth of Genius in the Long Eighteenth Century, that was published almost on the same day as Potkay’s. “Genial” Perception and Hope share other things in common. Both take the Romantic period as central to their discursive purview. Both practice what might be called “cultural philology,” the parsing of a single word throughout its etymological, social, and literary history. In Edinger’s case, it is “genial,” by which he means “genius,” in Samuel Johnson’s phrase, to perceive directly and originally, “not weakened or distorted by the intervention of any other mind” (1; Preface to Shakespeare [1765]). Of course, Potkay’s survey commands a rather larger stadial embrace: Who else’s recent monograph would profit by comparison to Hope’s Himalayan sweep? However, while Edinger’s project claims “only” the British long eighteenth century as its field, it allows him to trace genealogies extending back to the seventeenth century (in both France and Britain), as well as to the ancient classical world.Edinger draws his key term from usage by both Coleridge (“genial discrimination” [Biographia Literaria]) and Wordsworth (“genial circumstances” [The Prelude]). Traditionally, Romanticism (a term that Edinger, for the most part, eschews) was seen as cutting a new path in reaction against its immediate generational forbears, proclaiming the values of innate genius and the unmediated imagination, as opposed to a mimetic model of literary creation that held sway at least since Platonic and Aristotelian aesthetics: the two perspectives were memorably telegraphed in the title of M. H. Abrams’s famous book, The Mirror and the Lamp. Edinger closely examines Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poetic and critical texts, tracing an intellectual history culminating in Kant and the late eighteenth century, one that in fact impregnated the minds of the fellow poets when youths. Edinger describes a “modern” (i.e., post-Dryden) critical ideology he identifies as “critical naturalism”—an ideology based on the terms “n/Nature,” “genius,” and “imagination.” He writes: “Where the two [Wordsworth and Coleridge] considered themselves autonomous as genial perceivers … their [perhaps unconscious] embrace of a recognizably traditional critical terminology” served as foundational to their “discoveries” (187).This philological excursion memorably concludes by closely reading the different drafts of the Mount Snowdon passage in The Prelude, locating such precursive influences as Spenser, Milton, Shaftesbury, Collins, Akenside, James Clarke, James Beattie, William Gilpin, and even Wordsworth’s own early self, as found in Descriptive Sketches, concluding that “language here is no mere vehicle or instrument of vision but a creative agent of the vision itself. Wordsworth was not inspired by an epiphany on a mountain [, but language or history itself]” (186).This is an important book, one that deserves a richer consideration than allowed by present space constraints. Indeed, this is true of my accounts of both Hope and “Genial” Perception. However, a more piercing needle threads through the two. In his preface, Potkay movingly informs us that the death of his wife prompted him to begin his book in tribute to her. Obversely, William Edinger passed away shortly after the publication of “Genial” Perception, leaving behind his spouse and family, as well as two unpublished sequels to the present book. If the hurry and worries of immediate life can wear humans down, literature and literary criticism may, hopefully, provide a countervailing—and uplifting—alternative. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/727691 HistoryPublished online October 04, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.