Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism 9781503633568

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Giving Language Time
2 The Transported Word
3 Voices of the Ground
4 Radical Diversions
5 The Primitive Today
Conclusion: Deracination
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

AGAINST THE UPROOTED WORD

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AGAINST THE UPROOTED WORD Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism Tristram Wolff

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2022 by Tristram Wolff. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free, archival-­quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Wolff, Tristram, author. Title: Against the uprooted word : giving language time in transatlantic Romanticism / Tristram Wolff. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022022181 (print) | LCCN 2022022182 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503632769 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503633568 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages in literature. | Language and languages—Philosophy—History. | American literature—History and criticism. | English poetry—History and criticism. | Romanticism—United States. | Romanticism—Great Britain. Classification: LCC PN56.L27 W65 2023 (print) | LCC PN56.L27 (ebook) | DDC 821.009/34—dc23/eng/20220629 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022181 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022182 Cover art: Keith Waldrop Cover design: Rob Ehle Typeset by Elliott Beard in Adobe Garamond Pro 11/14.4

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction: Pulling Roots  1 1

Giving Language Time  17

2 The Transported Word  60 3 Voices of the Ground  99 4 Radical Diversions  138 5 The Primitive Today  182 Conclusion: Deracination  219

Notes 237 Bibliography 277 Index 307

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Acknowledgments

Language . . . resembles a breath of air that envelops all yet is too fine for the eye to see its individual elemental form. —­W ilhelm von Humboldt

T H E R E ’ S S I M P L Y N O W A Y  to

thank everyone I would like to, for their help with the work that went into writing this book. It’s been so long in the making I don’t even know how all these ideas wound up in one place. So if we talked, or if you encountered these ideas in some form anywhere, if you ate with me, drank with me, worked with me, or took a walk with me, if you taught or took a class with me, you probably helped it take shape. This book has changed a lot since I began writing it. It is still a study of romantic writers who pictured language as something that looked less like a list of names and more like a physical substance or opaque atmosphere: “just as a mountain mist only takes form from a distance,” wrote Humboldt in his Basque Writings, language moves between observed, individuated forms and nebulous experience, for “as soon as one steps into it, it drifts around formlessly” (171). What I used to describe vaguely as an ethical aversion around 1800 to paralyzing language by turning it into individuated objects, or by fixating on the wrong kind of “roots,” led me gradually to the later pivot, at the end of the nineteenth century, that tipped organicist philology into the social science of linguistics. This pivot, I found, was meant to downgrade natural images in social thought that by then had effectively fused language, national character, and race. Recognizing the importance of racialization within the history of what vii

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Raymond ­Williams calls “ideas of nature” in the romantic era changed the emphasis of the story I was trying to tell. Giving language time by making language look more natural was a question of tremendous urgency for some writers, before and after 1800. Within the next century, the question was how to make language look less natural. Why? Whereas natural thought-­images had once served to dissolve a highly artificial primitivism that regarded civilization as a process of linguistic abstraction, somewhere along the way those solvent images began to serve instead to harden and separate and distinguish languages along with linguistic subjects—­people—­on the basis of race. We are still very much tangled up in the images, models, and habits of thinking that romantic writers fought against, when they tried to build new relationships by building new ideas of nature. If we still want to build new relationships—­and I do—­we could do worse than study romantic poetry. As Herder says, What I am, I have become. At Brown, learning from Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, Susan Bernstein, Thalia Field, and Geoffrey Russom reshaped my impressionable brain, as did dinners with Dore Levy. There was no better place to go to grad school than Berkeley, and it turned out that Erica Roberts was usually responsible. Kurt Beals, Justin Boner, Kathryn Crim, Katrina Dodson, Emily Drumsta, Alex Dubilet, Andrea Gadberry, Amanda Goldstein, Rhiannon Graybill, Lily Gurton-­ Wachter, Jessie Hock, Andrew Leong, Tom McEnany, Karla Nielsen, Gillian Osborne, Shaul Setter, David Simon, Toby Warner, and Travis Wilds all made seminars, reading groups, and after-­parties pop. Thanks to an amazing roster of Berkeley romanticists, who may to this day not even know how they helped: Ian Duncan, Kevis Goodman, Rob Kaufman, Celeste Langan, Janet Sorenson, and especially friends and committee stalwarts Anne-­Lise François and Steve Goldsmith. Michael Lucey remains a close intellectual fellow-­traveler, in linguistic anthropology and beyond. Everyone should get to read Vico with Niklaus Largier. Judith Butler told me, in my prospectus defense, that “giving language time” was a good phrase and I should keep it. For material support of all kinds at Northwestern, I thank my colleagues in the English Department, the Comp Lit Studies Program, and beyond, beginning with the expertise, ingenuity, and humor of Kathy

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Daniels, Dave Kuzel, Nathan Mead, Sarah Peters, and Ashley Woods. I’m grateful to Lydia Barnett, Eula Biss, Nathalie Bouzaglo, César Braga-­ Pinto, John Alba Cutler (much missed), Nick Davis, Topher Davis, Tracy Davis, Ryan Dohoney, Hannah Feldman, Brett Gadsden, Reg Gibbons, Jay Grossman, Leslie Harris, Jim Hodge, Daniel Immerwahr, Rebecca Johnson, Jules Law, Emily Maguire, Juan Martinez, Michael Metzger, Evan Mwangi, Kalyan Nadiminti, Patrick Noonan, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Susie Phillips, Jonas Rosenbrück, Julia Stern, Natasha Tretheway, Alejandra Uslenghi, Wendy Wall, Erica Weitzman, Will West, Ivy Wilson, and Keith Woodhouse. I’m even more grateful to those special souls who read materials of one kind or another for this book: Marquis Bey, Brian Bouldrey, Alicia Caticha, Harris Feinsod, Michelle Huang, Lauren Jackson, Justin Mann, Jeff Masten, Kaneesha Parsard, Viv Soni, Nikki Spigner, Helen Thompson, and Kelly Wisecup. A heartfelt thanks to my amazing chairs and directors, past and present: Katy Breen, Chris Bush, Susannah Gottlieb (several times a lifesaver), Susan Manning, Alessia Ricciardi, and Laurie Shannon. Conversations with students often made this project better; thanks especially to Sam Botz, Arif Camoglu, Jayme Collins, and Emma Montgomery. Many other Chicagoans (current and lapsed) enabled the arrival of this book, usually by inviting me to live more deliciously. Special thanks to Mario Aranda, Nadim Audi, Susy Bielak, Daniel Borzutzky, Adrienne Brown, Daniel Callahan, Catherine Carrigan, Pete Coviello, Patrick Crowley, Annie Decker, Sarah Dimick, Paul Fagen, Rachel Galvin, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Lizzy Klein, Emily Licht, Benjamin Morgan, Nasser Mufti, Kim O’Neil, Julie Orlemanski, Jerry Passannante, Rajiv Pinto, Zach Samalin, Fred Schmalz, Danny Snelson, Sonali Thakkar, Kris Trujillo, Nick Valvo, and S. J. Zhang. For their heroic participation in a pandemic-­era manuscript workshop held over Zoom I thank Mary Favret and Mark Canuel. Among the romantic-­adjacent colleagues near and far who have contributed over the years in ways both easy and hard to name are Ian Balfour, Marlene Daut, Bakary Diaby, Tasha Eccles, William Galperin, Lenora Hanson, Virginia Jackson, Jamison Kantor, Theresa Kelley, Jacques Khalip, Wendy Lee, Eric Lindstrom, Deidre Lynch, Maureen McLane, Omar Miranda,

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Anahid Nersessian, Brian Rejack, Emily Rohrbach, Jonathan Sachs, Kate Singer, Michele Speitz, Andrew Stauffer, Mike Theune, Orrin Wang, Josh Wilner, Amelia Worsley, and Nancy Yousef. Some of the linguistic anthropologists who helped shape my thinking in conversation were Jillian Cavanaugh, Frank Cody, Nick Harkness, Judith Irvine, and Michael Silverstein. Thanks to the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern for an essential fellowship year, in 2020–­21, and to Jill Mannor, Tom Burke, Megan Skord, director Jessica Winegar, and a terrific group of fellows, for warm conversation in cold times. Thanks to James E. Francis, Sr., Darren Ranco, and Micah Pawling for their help with Penobscot history, which I am still just getting to know. Thanks to the good people of the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Morgan Library in New York, for research assistance. Thanks to European Romantic Review, for permission to reprint material appearing in chapter 1 (drawn from the 2016 article “Arbitrary, Natural, Other: J. G. Herder and Ideologies of Linguistic Will,” ERR 27, no. 2, https:​/​​/​w ww​.tandfonline​.com​/​); and to Essays in Romanticism, for permission to reprint material appearing in chapter 5 (drawn from the 2011 article “Romantic Etymologies of Walden,” EIR 18). Thanks to Keith Waldrop for permission to use the cover image. Thanks to the American Comparative Literature Association for generously recognizing this book with the Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award. And my thanks of course to the editors at Stanford, who took the project on: Faith Wilson Stein, Erica Wetter, and Caroline McKusick. My special gratitude to the manuscript’s reviewers, whose generous, wise, and practical counsel changed everything, again. Boundless thanks to my parents, Christian Wolff and Holly Nash Wolff; to my siblings, Tico, Tamsen, and Yeo—­for making their families mine too—­and to Rebecca Béguin, the most prolific writer of all. And then my constant companions: Klaus, the feline gray romantic; and most of all Corey, beloved partner in all things. No one has done more in the last two decades to nourish me, and this project, but mostly me, than you. Finally, a toast to the memory of two friends, model scholars and larger than life characters, who both died in 2020: Cynthia Bognolo and

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Michael Silverstein. Cynthia, forever my favorite force of nature in the classroom, I don’t know that you would have cared to read this book, but you would have loved to talk about it. And Michael, whose classroom I didn’t have the chance to set foot in, your ideas changed the way I think, even if you might not have recognized them in this form. Here’s to all the lunches.

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AGAINST THE UPROOTED WORD

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Introduction Pulling Roots

Our cognition is therefore . . . not as autonomous, voluntarily choosing, and unbound as is believed . . . The wise men of our world . . . revere their reason as a congenital, eternal, utterly independent, infallible oracle . . . Let them talk and pray to their idol-­ words [Bildwörter] . . . The more deeply someone has climbed down into himself, in the structure and origin of his noblest thoughts, then the more he will cover his eyes and feet and say: “What I am, I have become. I have grown like a tree; the seed was there, but air, earth, and all the elements, which I did not deposit about myself, had to contribute in order to form the seed, the fruit, the tree.” —­J . G. Herder Do you understand your own language? —­David Walker

T H E “ U P R O O T E D W O R D ” O F T H I S B O O K ’ S T I T L E is akin to what Herder describes when he complains in 1778 of men of reason who imagine thought as something “autonomous” and “independent.” These ideas are elevated as word-­idols, words pictured as universal, given, and fixed. Herder is then envisioning a particularly pernicious part of speech wrought by a mode of reason that fragments and alienates language from its formative environments or contexts of utterance. The formally uprooted word presupposed by this picture of linguistic reason—­a word lifted out of the messy exchanges and encounters of hearing, feeling, reflecting, and speaking, by an independent and rational subject whose

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cognition is “autonomous, voluntarily choosing, and unbound”—­is, for Herder, an enlightenment invention; as Humboldt would say of language, “the idea of its separateness is only in us.”1 Worse, the invention is of a highly selective kind, and closely related to a presumed unboundness that assumes the bondage of others. The hypocrisy of such a concept is what the Black Boston orator David Walker railed against in 1829: “Read your Declaration, Americans!!! Do you understand your own language?” Walker’s question is what we usually call rhetorical (the answer in one sense is obviously no), but its literal premise overlaps with Herder’s earlier critique. The words used in the US Declaration of Independence are revealed, by Walker, as word-­idols, and the enlightenment concept of independence carries a constitutive nonknowledge of its dependencies within its “own language” of freedom. Walker’s resounding question might be asked of any writer or reader, of all writing and reading: Do you understand your own language? This is so, even though language is never strictly our own: it is always uprooted, in the sense of being pulled between subjective and objective moments, and romanticism is often exploring this indistinct gray area. Yet Walker’s question must be asked of Herder, as he theorizes the constitutive nonknowledge shaping the subject’s sense of self-­possession. “The more deeply someone has climbed down into himself  .  .  . the more he will cover his eyes and feet”: Herder’s sightless subject is not just feeling his way around, but immobilized, thing-­like in the way he is immersed in his surroundings. To try to imagine the limits of what we cannot step outside of, Herder emphasizes our blind insensibility and our bondedness to environmental conditions that precede and outlast us. We are rooted, in the sense that we are unwittingly bound up in ongoing processes of formation. Yet Herder unexpectedly uses the organic metaphor of tree growth to deemphasize the notion of a grounding origin or rooted unity; instead, Herder’s figure evokes a temporal process of first-­person formation dependent on an external, inorganic environment, “air, earth, and all the elements, which I did not deposit about myself.” This subject’s freedom is better imagined as relational elasticity than as independence, as the ability to answer the attraction, or pull, of the other: “self-­and other-­feeling (once again expansion and contraction) are the two expressions of the elasticity

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of our will,” for as a human subject, Herder writes, one is bound “to love one’s way into others, and then to follow this sure pull.”2 A relation to otherness is beautifully idealized here, but—­does Herder understand his own language? Figures that seek to redefine freedom by naturalizing or entangling the human within its surroundings work differently for different subjects: as Walker’s fellow Black activist Maria Stewart wrote in 1833, those others who are habitually “looked upon as things” then become responsible for persuading their observers that they are human, that is, “things in the shape of men.”3 In that same year, Pequot preacher William Apess alluded to a different tree, exhorting his readers to fight the naturalized hierarchy of the world’s peoples propagated by white Europeans, “till this tree of distinction shall be leveled to the earth.”4 The idealized pull of understanding Herder described so lovingly requires uprooting this tree of distinction. This is something Herder sometimes saw, and sometimes did not. Remaking enlightenment ideals, the writing of the romantic century is full of such gray areas. Herder’s simple phrase, “what I am, I have become,” is a kind of emblem for this book: it is a phrase that tries to feel complex temporalities inside experiences of rootedness and uprootedness. Since Herder’s time, uprootedness has also become a generalized philosophical lens for global modernity, often abstracted from the brutal specificities of diaspora. Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, theorized uprootedness as a human condition: “by uprooting himself from the world, man makes himself present to the world and makes the world present to him.”5 The uprooting that produces this encounter conjures a lost language, a desire to be part of the world’s spontaneous expression: “I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express.” But that desire is continually frustrated, and as Maurice Blanchot further remarked, as “uprooted creatures,” even when we do “feel rooted,” we like to “pull at this root with an uprooting force.”6 For Blanchot, the feeling of uprootedness makes us fascinated by origins, linguistic and otherwise, inventing timelines that invite “a certain conception of history” that arrives with heavy baggage: “the necessity of some provenance, of successive continuity, the logic of homogeneity, the revelation of sheer chance as destiny

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and of words as the sacred depository of all lost or latent meanings whose recovery is thenceforth the task.”7 The movement of our thoughts may swiftly confine itself to these timelines of successive continuity, which imply specific kinds of roots. This book is about attempts to dissolve the timelines holding linguistic history in place, so as to give language new temporal shapes. In the process, it also reconsiders what is taken for granted in a categorically “human” condition of uprootedness. To borrow from Denise Ferreira da Silva, the writers who appear in this study aim, with varying degrees of success, “to apprehend the world anew, without separability, determinacy, and sequentiality.”8 They work through the desire to know what it feels like to be inseparable, indeterminate, nonsequential, sometimes even to be expressed by a landscape of sky and water. Each writer featured imagines what it is like “both to be a free and speaking subject, and to disappear as passive, patient” in a balance of autonomy and participatory thingy-­ness, as a subject and object at once.9 I argue that these well-­k nown writers shaped the naturalizing tendencies of romantic thought in reaction to the “uprooted word,” or the formal analytic used to classify languages according to a progressive timeline of history and a corresponding hierarchy of civilizations (and we will have to resign ourselves to mixed metaphors, because the uprooted word helps build this linguistic “tree of distinction”). Writers including Phillis Wheatley, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Henry David Thoreau “naturalized” language—­which is to say they softened, thickened, deepened, and dissolved it—­to counteract the forms of knowledge that arrested and uprooted language from its active formation in the lives of speakers.10 However, as romantic and postromantic philologists historicized language in the image of a “natural organism,” natural metaphors also smoothed the way for racial determinism. Earlier experiments in linguistic naturalism become difficult to disentangle in retrospect from the determinate racializations that aimed to separate and biologize languages and cultures, to harden and sequentialize them on a historical timeline. As mid-­nineteenth-­century philologist August Schleicher put it, in a speciously romantic idiom that fixed even a secularized language strangely outside human agency, speakers could no more alter their language “than a nightingale can change its song.” Because of where

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and how speakers are located on distinct branches of human life, efforts like Schleicher’s to naturalize social categories by likening them to known quantities, fixed objects, or physical processes are still justly among the most reliably discredited bad habits of intellectual life. Yet Against the Uprooted Word searches for imagined natural qualities of language that preceded or resisted a hardening into the insidious forms of nineteenth-­century race science. It rejects the inevitability of that scientific turn, in order to recover a range of foreclosed, but still vibrant, ways of imagining language and nature. The book focuses on a period in imaginative writing and language theory roughly between 1750 and 1850, spanning the Euro-­A merican intellectual formations we have come to call romantic. It is guided by two questions. The first question, how did theories of language succeed in formally uprooting the word from the messy realities of speech? occupies chapter 1 and shorter parts of each chapter thereafter, contextualizing its primary authors against their contemporaries’ theories of language. The second, what kinds of alternate linguistic thinking did these reactions against the uprooted word prompt romantic-­era writers to seek out? inspires chapters 2–­5. Each of these places a canonical author of the romantic century (Wheatley, Blake, Wordsworth, Thoreau) in proximate literary contexts, and against broader contexts of enlightenment philosophy and positivist philology. Understandably, from our perspective in the long wake of their era’s inspired ideas and slowly unfolding disasters, critics have sometimes underestimated this cluster of linguistic naturalisms; in fact, their effects have largely been mischaracterized, in part thanks to a necessary turn away from the racialized “roots” of nineteenth-­century language study. Nevertheless, that neglected possibility is there still: an entire imaginative repertoire of ways to think language and nature together, offering alternatives to the civilizational and racial hierarchies that came to dominate nineteenth-­century philological thought. In Phillis Wheatley’s poem “To S. M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works,” for instance, language “flows” in mutual comprehension through the shared “landscapes” of an imagined afterlife, even as her own racialized lyric voice subtly politicizes that future linguistic ideal as pointedly unrealizable in the present she inhabits. Much like the later generation of writers Matt Sandler calls “Black Romantics,” Wheatley understood her poetic

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work to be taking part in the “ongoing realization of a universal freedom,” yet a freedom of a kind whose mistaken premise of universality endlessly deferred its completion.11 For Wheatley and—­in distinct ways—­the other writers I read here, naturalizing language is not a method of tracing words back to the origins of their triumphantly civilized present, but rather a way of giving language the capacity to imagine new shared futures. To say that language acted naturally was not to circumscribe or unify it, but to disperse it among agencies, collectives, and surroundings; not to fix it in place, but to set it in motion. Wheatley plainly presents an especially charged voice when placed, as a canonical writer who was at the peak of her fame also an enslaved Black woman, at the top of a list of white men, as she is here. But the power of her writing—­or, as I will argue, of her linguistic disposition—­as in part a product of contending forces of global modernity, gives Wheatley an essential, and largely overlooked, role in revealing the romantic era’s efforts at rupturing, reversing, and varying a linguistic imaginary rapidly taking the form of progressive history. As an insider/outsider in several senses, she articulates in her poetry a philosophical resistance to external determination. The ways she maps her own unfreedom, linguistic and otherwise, across social and material regimes of existence make palpable what is lost under the idea of the universal, by means unavailable to—­and at times, in marked contrast with—­the other writers featured here. Placing Wheatley at the beginning of this story reinforces a claim that is increasingly reorienting romantic studies: that the conditioning forces of colonial and racialized social relations permeate apparently noncolonial spaces and, in a multitude of direct and indirect ways, help constitute philosophical thought and aesthetic production. One can see plainly, as Manu Chander points out, how “even the most cosmopolitan Romantics fetishized racial and cultural differences”; but it is also true that in a more diffuse sense, as Nikki Hessell writes, “the experiences of Indigenous peoples across the world were precisely the experiences that triggered Romantic literature, as the quest for land, wealth, and cultural and political domination that drove settler-­imperial actions globally came to shape British and European life.”12 Not only freedom and bondage, but the subjective contours of romantic nature imagery, questions of the poetic imagination, and

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problems of social alienation are all conventional topics in romantic criticism that might well be viewed squarely and generatively through what Simon Gikandi calls the “symbolic economy of civility and civilization,” including the categories of race and erasure that stealthily but pervasively defined social thought in the enlightenment and revolutionary eras.13 This book argues that the stance developed by critics like Chander, Hessell, and Gikandi opens new paths into the rhetoric used by romantic writers to link language’s temporalities to natural processes. Across its five focal chapters, I identify a tendency, within the social thought embedded in imaginative literature of a long romantic era, to interiorize the temporal estrangement stemming from an effort at multiple position-­taking, at adopting stances simultaneously objective and subjective. Poetry and poetics (and I include here the often self-­conscious poetics of prose) use this cleaving of temporal positions to think about language as the observer’s active experience of reflection, utterance, and audition, and to picture how language comes to feel natural or unnatural. Against the Uprooted Word is a selective literary history of these feelings as they prepare the way for the disciplinary formation of linguistics. In its critical approach to the intertwined “roots” that have shaped modern ideas about language, nature, and race, it also contributes to ongoing conversations about chronopolitics in environmental criticism and postcolonial studies. I join recent scholars scrutinizing the colonial foundations underlying the philological and ethnographic methods of the humanities, like Silva, Siraj Ahmed, and Timothy Brennan, adapting their insights to show how major writers of the romantic canon braided the strands of language, nature, and historical agency in different combinations. It may be uncontroversial to say that, in their natural poetics, romantic-­era writers point us to the quasi-­material qualities of language. Yet no scholarly study has focused on how or why that attentiveness dismantles linguistic form in order to diversify historical time, in effect giving language new temporalities more intimate, shared, and expansive than the progress-­driven historical imaginary that would supplant or absorb them. I argue that writers of the era sought out ways to represent language as simultaneously solid (a product of history) and soluble (still actively in play). The commonplace notion of poetically inspired living language, which many enlightenment and romantic thinkers

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­ lotted in a distant primitive past, also comes to animate linguistic experip ence in the “now,” as it charges and recharges the present. These writers try to generate an “element of surprise or unexpectedness” in language, which is precisely what Gauri Viswanathan has suggested is “crucial” to “the decolonization of philology”; and while it is not always clear what stakes the writers themselves may have had in decolonizing anything, the temporal estrangement they captured in images of nature did—­and I believe still do—­offer tools for unraveling the chronology of Eurocentric modernity.14 Again, this story is full of gray areas. “Uprooting” means a few too many things. In social histories of the era, “uprootedness” is likely first to call to mind both the “freeing” of labor power for the capitalist mode of production, in the process of dispossession, clearance, and enclosure, and the closely related forced or free migration and transhumance of bodies through colonial settlement and the global slave trade—­in short, the colonial and urban resettlements of the world escalating toward the industrial age. Let me be clear: the point of pursuing alienation as a linguistic problem, and specifically the “alien word” as an uprooted word, is emphatically not to conflate bodies with language, in spite of how entangled the histories of roots and deracination are—­or rather, how entangled historical accounts of linguistic change and the paths of diaspora have been. At the same time, the basic ethos of language shaping this book’s story does insist that to think about words, one must also think about bodies. And a linguistic materialism—­Marxist or otherwise—­that makes sense of collective utterance through embodied, mixed durations has, I think, one source in romantic-­era naturalism, through a variously articulated nondualism of matter and spirit, which I associate here primarily with the radical enlightenment and with Spinozan-­inspired monism. As an umbrella term, the “uprooted word” encompasses a set of practices of literacy and knowledge production whose background is European colonialism and its exportation of gradually hardening global configurations of capitalist social relations. The distanced account I offer of this “set of practices” is necessarily abstract, but is meant to suggest how that praxis impacted the pictures of language that literatures of the romantic century were willing or able to imagine. In its overall orientation, within the transatlantic literary sphere it maps, Against the Uprooted Word seeks to redefine the widely hailed

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romantic desire to change how we perceive where nature ends and the human begins. I explain this desire as an aspiration to mitigate the damage done by uprooting the word from the complex relations of speakers, understood instead by the writers in my study as participants in changing linguistic worlds. If those critics of today driven to merge humanistic and natural ways of knowing—­and there are many, from the environmental humanities to a multitude of new materialisms—­occasionally feel obliged to disavow capital-­R Romanticism, it is partly because romantic thought carries the association of mystified or racializing fallacies that have issued from primitivism and organicism, tied deeply to theories of poetry and language origin. As for what is right and wrong in such associations, this book takes a further step toward setting the record straight. It is indisputable that writers of the romantic century from Herder forward played a role in the naturalization of collective subjects of language, who could then be tracked and temporalized as closer to things than to “things in the shape of men,” or assured some gradiently human “shape” according to a governing tree of distinction. In spite of this fact, I hope to show how much we still have to learn from romantic-­era writers who imagined arrangements of language and social life through the images of durability, vulnerability, and revolution they borrowed from the natural world. I have to thank those readers who pressed me to consider whether the speculative claims I make here for and against romantic-­era writing are anachronistic, that is, imprinted by questions of the moment. The answer is: yes, they are. I assume throughout that poetry holds within it theories of language; that these theories study linguistic temporalities; and that these temporalities may or may not distinguish or rank forms of human life. Any clause of that cluster of assumptions may seem to go out on a limb, and each is informed by contemporary theoretical preoccupations. But with this book, I want precisely to produce gaps, or hold open possibilities, by rejecting the inevitability of a historical association that has linked romantic-­era ideas identifying language and nature with later ideas identifying language and race. And in that speculative spirit of returning to moments of possibility held in suspension, not yet sedimented, I hope to make a virtue of the critic’s always anachronistic situation, drawing on Michel-­Rolph Trouillot’s contention that “pastness” is a position never really past, as well as Walter Benjamin’s critical posture of unsettling linear

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history-­keeping. While the primary authors appear chronologically, the shape of each chapter interleaves these writers with “before” and “after” texts, modeling the congealing of an idea of history as cultural progress against which romantic-­century thinking tried to offer possible alternatives. Each chapter holds imaginative writing up alongside more explicitly linguistic thought ranging from the late seventeenth to the mid-­t wentieth century, and I have become ever more willing to disturb conventional periodizations of romanticism (here by bringing nuance to its supposed differences from its “others,” like enlightenment or positivist idioms). My aim is a critical historicism that acknowledges its own productive poetics. It has taken a lot of pulling to loosen even my own entrenched senses of romanticism. In this project of pulling or stretching what I think I know, anachronism and eclecticism continue to be a big help. Chapter 1, “Giving Language Time,” provides an overview for the book, challenging received accounts of how, around 1800, language came to be seen and studied as a historical phenomenon. I begin by discussing a brief text called “A Mende Song,” recorded by the Black US linguist and literary scholar Lorenzo Dow Turner. In thinking about the song as a product of romanticism, I suggest that Turner’s example, published in 1949, offers a submerged alternative to existing romanticisms, and thereby a model for adjusting how scholars practice the field of romanticism today. From here, the chapter goes on to show how poetic bonds between language and nature constituted a more diverse chronopolitics than influential discursive and intellectual histories of language study have recognized (as in Michel Foucault, Hans Aarsleff, or Edward Said). Against a more familiar green romanticism, defined by the apparent desire to return to origins in a simpler state of nature, I focus on a “gray romanticism,” which activates language across different kinds of time, often by introducing inorganic images. From a gray or indistinct place, romantic writers may choose not to choose between language imagined as subjective experience and objective history. I argue that the linguistic politics of gray romanticism stand out against the colonial logics of philology, or the ways European theories fixated on archaic language origins to build an idea of history that strengthened language’s extractability from its actual, ongoing production. The extractable or uprooted word would culminate

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in philological ideas about reconstructing roots; before that, however, I propose that it constitutes a major, underrecognized object of critique for imaginative writers of the romantic century. The notion of a gray romanticism thwarts the identification of romantic nature with self-­contained organicism, attending to romanticism’s reliance on radical strands of enlightenment thought. I close with an account of Herder’s role in that tradition, shifting attention from linguistic organicism toward a language ecology. Rather than organically bonding language to race, Herder’s naturalism attacked an enlightenment linguistic voluntarism that interpreted “civilized” language as willfully abstracted from its surroundings. Taking up a widespread recent critical reassessment of Herder in postcolonial studies, I argue that there was no reason why the linguistic naturalism Herder espoused should necessarily have consolidated, for the philologists he influenced, into nationalism or nativism. Herder emphasized surprise, or the gradual and involuntary changes in linguistic forms of life. While scholars have long grappled with his interpretation of Spinoza, I argue that Herder’s adoption of monist ideas is focused not on the suppression of agency, but on its dispersal among collectives, dismantling the myth of the sovereign, self-­contained will by foregrounding formation, reception, and re-­creation. These dispersed agencies offer a far more radical and nuanced picture of what it means to theorize language in a “Herderian” tradition. In chapter 2, “The Transported Word: Wheatley’s Part,” I propose that what Phillis Wheatley calls a “softer language,” linking images of poetry, freedom, and the afterlife, offers a vision of language in motion through “scenes of transport.” In emphasizing the texture of language softened by free movement, Wheatley intervenes in the monolithic chronology of language that emerged through the enlightenment’s stadial theories of civilization. Drawing on Black feminist theory, I argue that Wheatley’s Afro-­ British-­A merican linguistic standpoint, in and beyond her volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), expresses a slanted version of the participatory or “submerged” subject we find elsewhere in the era. In her conscious role as exceptional yet representative lettered, Black lyric subject, Wheatley’s cautious management of her own audibility instructively differentiates her balance of license and constraint from the com-

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promised agency celebrated in later romantic formulas (whose prototype for my purposes is Wordsworthian “wise passiveness”). That negotiation of freedom and unfreedom helps establish the blind spots of eighteenth-­ century naturalism with respect to an increasingly racialized subject of history. Against influential theories of language and stadial civilization, like Adam Smith’s organicist conjectural essay “Considerations on the First Formation of Languages” (1761), I show how Wheatley, described as a once “uncultivated Barbarian,” breaks open enlightenment discourses to unravel the primitivist timeline of linguistic modernity. The chapter culminates with Wheatley’s rewriting of Ovid’s Niobe, in whose failed metamorphosis, I argue, we glimpse the geological imagery that would shape romantic-­century conceptions of the human, but this time from the “partial” angle of a racialized lyric subject whose humanity was, for some readers, precisely in question. Chapter 3, “Voices of the Ground: Blake’s Language in Deep Time,” turns to the political force of William Blake’s exemplary poetic investment in radically expansive temporalities and mixed durations. In the context of his mediation of Britain’s possessiveness over the literary “property” of its colonies, I recover Blake’s desire to rewrite how we think about history and historical agency against the background of long eighteenth-­century European philosophic discourses concerning geologic agency (in Spinoza, Diderot, Hutton, and Goethe), extending in the process a reading of Blake’s “The Clod and the Pebble” into several illuminated books, The Book of Thel (1789) and The Book of Urizen (1794). In these visual texts, I show how the geological strata in Blake’s poetry give language deep time and an ongoing actualism resonant with his anti-­imperial politics. For Blake, the poetic possibility of another world is always on the point of dismantling the oppressive order of this one (hence his stubborn present-­tense cry, “Empire is no more!” offered in the midst of Britain’s rise to imperial superpower). I join scholars like Saree Makdisi in imagining that Blake, like Herder, represents a poetic articulation of radical enlightenment, nondualist thought, and that this unorthodox materialism helps to situate the chronopolitics of Blake’s revolutionary stance as well as his attachment to the products of orientalist encounter (such as Charles Wilkins’s 1785 translation of the Bhagavad-­Gita). Blake’s open linguistic subject, whose

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“every Word” famously varies with its “Expansion or Contraction,” imagines a materialist poetics of embodied voice that redraws the temporal horizons of enlightenment humanism. I argue that Blake’s affinity for a form of Spinozist materialism is, however, also filled with images that express how what looks like nature is not given, but continuously remade in the “language” of everyday life. In his commitment to unheralded forms of liberation, Blake makes sure “nature” is not mistaken for compulsion. Chapter 4, “Radical Diversions: Wordsworth’s Overgrowth,” places the much debated desire for the vernacular in Wordsworth’s early poetics—­or the infamous “real language of men”—­in the context of a dissolution of linguistic categories under way in 1790s British radicalism. Following the undersung work of Olivia Smith, I recount the stir caused by John Horne Tooke’s immensely influential etymologies in The Diversions of Purley (1786–­1805), which grafted political radicalism onto linguistic roots. This philological lens leads to new insights into the grayer undertones of Wordsworth’s so-­called “green language.” I argue that, in tense collaboration with Coleridge, Wordsworth displaces etymological thought into intimate yet alien natural environments, anchored by the eerie opacity of language reimagined as a rock-­strewn landscape. Examining the relationship of linguistic naturalism to the loosely ethnographic (or as Makdisi has argued, elliptically racializing) project of Lyrical Ballads, the chapter culminates in a reading of “Hart-­Leap Well,” building on recent work by critics like Maureen McLane and Alan Bewell, who have shown anew how native antiquarianism drew on a broader colonial imaginary. I suggest we can see this more clearly if we recall the ideas of Anglo-­Saxon freedom underlying the radical idiom Wordsworth turned to his own purposes. Looking back across the Atlantic, this is confirmed by a rereading of Wordsworth’s ambivalent radicalism through a contrast between approaches to Haiti and history in Wordsworth’s sonnet “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” and an ode to liberty by the Haitian poet Antoine Dupré. Chapter 5, “The Primitive Today: Thoreau in the Wild,” acknowledges and situates the complex primitivism of Henry David Thoreau’s writings, under the influence not only of Emerson but also of European figures like Goethe and Coleridge. In this chapter, I bring into focus an American

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inheritance of radical enlightenment linguistic naturalism that is a far cry from Wheatley’s earlier position (and further removed still from the renovation of history in Haitian romanticism). I show how Thoreau plots imaginary language “origins” through present-­day poetic renewal, exulting in the participatory experience of speaker, language, and environment reciprocally transforming one another; and yet how, paradoxically, in this exultation, his attachment to an idea of wilderness retains and reproduces an attachment to purity. Against exquisite readings of Thoreau’s wildness (Sharon Cameron) and materialism (Branka Arsić), I critique the positive valences often attached to Thoreau’s occupation of the wild. With scholars in Native Studies (Jean O’Brien, Lisa Brooks), I situate Thoreau’s desire for proximity to Wabanaki languages of the Northeast, like Penobscot, alongside his inability to understand them as contemporary with his own utterance. The chapter locates the contradictions that stem from the persistence of Thoreau’s racialized primitivism with respect to Indigenous life, in the face of his regard for variation, mixed durations, and regeneration in the natural world. Among other texts, I examine The Maine Woods, Walden, the Journal, and the unpublished Indian Notebooks, drawing as well on nineteenth-­century studies of Indigenous American languages (John Heckewelder, Peter Du Ponceau). I close by looking ahead to Franz Boas—­who in his landmark proto-­structuralist essay, “On Alternating Sounds” (1889), used a scientific idiom to expose and disarm the racializing arsenal of ethnographic data-­gathering practices, which guided the application of comparative philological tools to so-­called “oral cultures”—­as well as to his contemporary, Odanak Abenaki linguist Joseph Laurent. Finally, the conclusion, “Deracination,” completes the book with a glimpse of romanticism’s afterlives in language study, following the romantic century. I address some of the forgotten ironies in the gradual turn away from a bluntly racializing organicism, which had already been censured as a suspect romanticism by earlier antiracist linguists. A concise example of these ironies comes in 1907, when Boas’s student Edward Sapir invoked the idiom “grow like Topsy” to describe the newly expanded temporality of language change. Sapir’s reflexive recourse to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), in order to reroute language away from originary “roots,” actually collapsed language with a literary caricature of

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nonwhite otherness, ironically demonstrating the enduring power of literary language to shape racial time. Setting such instances aside, I return to linguist and literary scholar Turner, whose fieldwork on the creole Gullah from the 1920s through the 1940s treated seriously the elasticity and mobility of linguistic phenomena resulting from the forced migration of speakers of African languages overlapping with the romantic century. Looking back from Turner’s vantage point serves several purposes: it points us toward other, submerged romanticisms, only hinted at across the pages of this book, while also showing how the romantic chronopolitics described here may actually help generate alternatives to the Eurocentric historicism standard for periodizing academic objects of study. The itinerary through well-­k nown writers in this book—­W heatley, Blake, Wordsworth, Thoreau—­follows a transatlantic path that might seem designed to move from righteous to culpable. I am not seeking racist impulses in individual writers, however, but rather shifts in metaphorical usage that give expression to broader cultural sensibilities. At the same time, I would not have written this book if I didn’t think there were things we can learn from these writers, lessons both positive and negative. Already in Wordsworth’s moment, and much more so in Thoreau’s, we find varieties of racial thinking pressing on their radical speculations about language and its intimate relations to time, place, and circumstance; I am interested in reading them for the resulting complexities. To look ahead to the book’s end, by taking the example of Thoreau: around 1852, in his “Indian Notebooks,” Thoreau wrote, “Morton (in his Crania) quotes Sir Wm Jones [indirectly] as saying ‘The Greeks called all the southern nations of the world by the common appellation of Ethiopians, thus using Ethiop and Indian as convertible terms.’ Query—­the origin of the word Indian?”15 As a minor instance of Thoreau’s etymological pursuits, this is perhaps hardly significant; but in its compaction, in a scant few phrases, of a whole trajectory of Euro-­A merican racial thinking, it is fascinating. Oddly commingled, in Thoreau’s question, are linguistic markers of race that merge far-­flung regions of the colonized world together into a kind of proto–­Global South (orientalist views of the East Indies, the nonspecific Africanness of “Ethiopian,” the undifferentiated New World “Indian”) as though to lay bare the rhetorical artifice of race and its distinctions.

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The lines embed a quotation—­Thoreau citing Samuel Morton, citing Sir William Jones—­that encapsulates retrospectively a story I will recount, piecemeal, over the course of this book: the absorption of a racial analytic transmuting the eighteenth-­century enlightenment desire to historicize a differentiated human race (exemplified in Jones’s “Anniversary Discourses” of the 1780s–­90s) into the positivist ethnological impulse to measure, quantify, distinguish, and define (exemplified in Samuel Morton’s 1839 Crania Americana).16 What emerges in Thoreau’s speculative question is a monolithic alterity, projected etymologically onto American Indians.17 But his ideas about Indigenous language and locality were not consistent—­that is, they changed. Through much of his writing life he would collect arrowheads and Native American place-­names as analogous relics, mentally locating northeastern Wabanaki speakers in the past. But primitivist though he certainly was, his feel for language was complicated. In a recent lecture titled “Penobscot Sense of Place,” Penobscot tribal historian James E. Francis Sr., after reminding his audience of the racially polarizing cultural idioms in which Thoreau was educated, cites an 1858 Journal passage in which Thoreau writes, “it was a new light when my guide gave me Indian names for things for which I had only scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I saw [things] from a new point of view.”18 Reclaiming that flexibility of view, from detachment to a new and grounded perspective, Francis moves past the “scars of colonialism” audible in Thoreau’s own language (“when my guide gave me Indian names”); he reorients Thoreau, by making him newly available as a backdrop for explaining how Penobscot language is in touch with its surroundings, and by repurposing him as a resource for encouraging the language’s revitalization. Residual primitivism would have prevented Thoreau himself from anticipating this kind of linguistic renewal in his own lifetime. But why shouldn’t he help us anticipate it, today?

1

Giving Language Time  

Time is a thought-­image of successive, mutually linked, conditions. —­J . G. Herder All artists are involved in their time. —­Dionne Brand

R E C O M P O S I N G R O M A N T I C I S M : “A M E N D E S O N G ”

I begin with the two epigraphs to this chapter, which turn to images and artists to understand the idea that, as Barbara Adam puts it, “all time is social time.”1 Herder’s line destabilizes historical thinking by stating that time is put together with “thought-­images” (Gedankenbilder); implicitly, in the same phrase, it reintroduces image-­thinkers—­everyone—­as givers of time. Radical as this move is, though, its “successive conditions” lean back on linear sequence. Dionne Brand’s claim that “all artists are involved in their time” allows us to unfold its complexities: first, the perfectly Herderian idea that image-­thinkers are situated in and complicit with a Zeitgeist; and second, that they are invested or tangled up in the time their work gives to form. This helps us to see that conditions we imagine as successive in other senses also coexist. I hope my focus on “giving language time” will make familiar romantic-­era texts newly visible in this book, since the uptake of romanticism is part of what has continuously provided new terms for its reinvention, according to new values. The lower-­case “romanticism” preferred throughout these pages to the conven17

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tion of capitalizing “Romantic” or “Romanticism” (whether for writer, era, ethos, or field of study) marks typographically my desire to contribute to current scholarship that reorients, adjusts, and multiplies where we look for the r-­word, without worrying too much about redefining it. By keeping the name while lowercasing romanticism’s capital, I mean to stay in touch with where the field of romantic studies has been, while looking ahead to where it might still go. Into those “missed opportunities” described by William Galperin in the writing of the romantic era, which indent romantic historicism with pockets of the everyday “close at hand and hiding in plain sight,” I follow Lisa Lowe’s proposal of reading disciplinary objects through the past conditional—­a sense for “what could have been”—­that makes provisional the present configuration of the human.2 So I begin by turning briefly to a text “about” uprootedness that stages differently some of the contradictions in the chapters to come. Though by most definitions this text will seem peripheral to romanticism, in several senses it is a product of the romantic century, even a reinterpretation of romanticism; and it marks a moment in the literary history of linguistics that models the reconfiguration of archives and timelines of the romantic century, even where we continue to read romantic authors long central to the field, like those who take up the most space in this work. In this sense it may help us perform what Silva calls a critical work of “composing and recomposing,” in order to “expose fissures through which possibilities can be contemplated.”3 “A Mende Song,” printed in 1949 in English-­Mende interlinear translation, was sung in 1933 by Amelia Dawley of Harris Neck, Georgia, and recorded by Lorenzo Dow Turner, professor of literature and early African American linguist:

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FIGURE 1. “A Mende Song,” sung by Amelia Dawley and recorded by Lorenzo Dow Turner in Harris Neck, Georgia, 1933. Source: Turner, Africanisms, 256.

The five unrepeated lines of this song constitute, it is said, the longest known text in an African language to have survived after Atlantic passage in the centuries of the slave trade. But it is not exactly the song’s testimony to violent deracination that draws me to this text; instead it is the linguistic alienations, the various kinds of uprooting the song undergoes in and after Turner’s transcription. These linguistic alienations are also embodied, to be sure, but because there are several kinds of uprootedness in play in these pages, I want to emphasize that this book tracks coincidences, without making analogies, between uprooted bodies and uprooted words. In its printed form, the song becomes a fragment of culture, repeated or “preserved” in oral transmission and recollection, a remainder of the Atlantic passage and life before it, a talisman of linguistic resistance. But precisely in this form—­recorded, written, translated, published—­it is uprooted or removed as it is transformed from social discourse to a collected artifact to a text on paper or screen, lifted from earlier contexts of utterance to become a new kind of object. It has been changed by what happens to a scrap or stretch of language when it is moved through ethnographic encounter (interactions that double as data collection) and scholarly knowledge production (transcription, interlinear translation, textual framing, reproduction and circulation). Recontextualized in this process, and reappearing here, the song also undergoes—­with another kind of uprooting—­a form of lyricization in the compaction and mediation of its

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performative significance: sung as a Mende funeral song, recorded on a Georgia plantation, published in a work on linguistics, included in a study on romanticism.4 Once recorded, new layers of meaning accrue, just as old layers are worn away or made differently visible. The resonances of the words in Turner’s translation change because of how and where the song has moved. Though it is hard to imagine what it would mean to know, we can certainly imagine the path of this song on its way; we can give it a History. Sung in what is now Sierra Leone before the enslavement of one particular singer; borne on the ship that transported that singer across the ocean, most likely in the decades between slavery’s formal legalization in Georgia in 1750 and before the slave trade was officially proscribed in 1808; then sung in the rice plantations of the Sea Islands off coastal Georgia, and repeated for at least several generations, even as its literal significance in Mende was (we might say) worn away over time; until it was eventually turned from a West African funeral rite into a song to entertain children under and after slavery in the US South.5 We can follow it then, too, after Turner recorded Dawley in the 1930s (along with many others), transcribed her song using the conventions of ethnographic fieldwork, and—­ after nearly two decades of further linguistic research—­published it in print in a postwar climate of global decolonization, as linguistic evidence of Black resilience. A young Lorraine Hansberry read Turner’s book alongside W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Folk Then and Now, in 1951, as a document in the worldwide struggle for Black liberation.6 Turner’s pathbreaking work occasioned the song’s further study and retranslation, so that it eventually became the basis for a widely publicized roots-­seeking project, for which Dawley’s daughter traveled to Sierra Leone to meet a Mende-­speaker who, like her, could still sing it. That astonishing story of diaspora and homecoming, conforming with an “anthropologic discourse of origins lost” and a triumphant romance of recovered African roots, has been captured and retold in a series of articles, exhibitions, commemorative events, and documentary films, starting in the 1990s.7 But sounding back through these dates and speculations, the song as Turner transcribed it and as we have received it also echoes through this book for the variety of ways it gives language not just history, but other kinds of time. It is significant as a milestone in mid-­twentieth-­century

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linguistic study, which crystallizes within this textual object new possible narratives about encounter, creative survival, elasticity, and resurgence with retrospective bearing on race, language, and nature in the romantic century. It is a document of deracination and continuity across several scales of time that fold back over the romantic era. More particularly, as a study performed by an African American intellectual in the Jim Crow South, it is a remarkable document in the history of the study of language “origin”—­not because of the Gullah language’s African “substrates,” but because it takes the mixed language practices of creolization as an important component of language change, rather than an extralinguistic process.8 In a manner both like and unlike the vernacularization of poetry and language study associated with the romantic era, it revalorizes the past by plotting it in the present. Turner’s act of relocating an “origin” in a contemporary vernacular, perhaps most spectacularly with this song, is like such romantic tendencies, both in its ethnographic basis and in its transvaluation of the everyday. But it is also unlike most of its romantic predecessors in that as an utterance, including its recording and reproduction, it interrupts what Doreen Massey calls the “accepted speaking-­space of modernity,” or at least its racialized history in the United States, by hearing African voices in American bodies as sources of knowledge.9 Read this way, it also prepares us to hear a poet like Phillis Wheatley, in chapter 2, as interrupter of “Euro-­chronometric” modernity. Fittingly, it was a chance encounter that linked the song to the study of romanticism, since I came across Turner while reading a book about romantic writing. That volume was inscribed by its author, Eva Beatrice Dykes, Turner’s former colleague at Howard, as a gift sent “with kindest wishes.”10 Dykes’s 1942 monograph on Black life in British Romantic writing (subtitled “A Study of Sympathy for the Oppressed”) answers in some respects Turner’s earlier Anti-­Slavery Sentiment in American Literature prior to 1865 (1929). Both works, along with the decades of research that went into Turner’s Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949) where “A Mende Song” appears, form part of a broader endeavor to document and revalorize the African diaspora from various disciplinary angles. This was the project of prominent Black intellectuals writing before and alongside Dykes and Turner, reflected variously in the novels of Pauline Hopkins; the cultural criticism of Alain Locke; the mixed-­genre social analysis of

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W. E. B. Du Bois; the novels and ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston; the philosophical history of C. L.  R. James, and so on. A whole branch of possible research in romantic studies remains to be pursued, on the romanticism of each of these authors, and on the utility of German and transatlantic romantic thought for their study of racial modernity. More specifically, Turner’s Africanisms belongs among the texts that shaped early anthropological stances toward the African diasporic present, by seeking to identify African “remnants,” “survivals,” “retentions,” or “carry-­overs”; in addition to Boas’s student and colleague Hurston, this included works by Arthur Fauset, Arturo Schomburg, Frances and Melville Herskovits, Elsie Clews Parsons, Fernando Ortiz Fernandez, Jean Price Mars, Suzanne Comhaire-­Sylvain, and many others.11 Such writers historicized not just race but racialization; their research agendas included navigating and reconceiving the ways cultural agency, the social space taken up by Trouillot’s “subject of history,” can be given or withheld.12 Dykes and Turner shared the project of building a literary and cultural history attentive to the fugitive figure of the Black romantic subject.13 Their project required criticism’s “disintegrating act,” a creative dismantling of literary and other histories, using archival ingenuity to pull at the threads of canonical “national” traditions by viewing romantic writing within global histories of empire, racial formation, and literary production.14 The contingencies of history laid bare even in passing by an object such as “A Mende Song” (or “Amelia’s Song,” as it is sometimes called) help dissolve the singular object called “Romanticism,” as time period, cultural formation, and tool for teaching literary history.15 Not unlike the Bantu song sung by Du Bois’s great-­great-­grandmother, which haunts his writings, this one has something and nothing to do with romanticism, the era in Euro-­A merican letters with which it shares a chronology, but which it touches only belatedly. As Saidiya Hartman writes of Du Bois’s “opaque” family song, such deposits rest inside and outside the stories we are used to telling; they bear traces of romantic-­era lives, “articulated in the rhythm of the line, conveyed in the length of breath.”16 Maybe it helps imagine ways to pull up, pull apart, and recompose the field of romanticism, by helping us, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s interesting terms, “learn to think the present—­the ‘now’ that we inhabit as we speak—­as irreducibly

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not-­one.”17 But if so, it will do this by widening the openings that link us to the past or, as Lowe puts it, by “returning to the past its gaps, uncertainties, impasses, and elisions.”18 I will return to Turner’s work on “A Mende Song” in my conclusion. G R AY R O M A N T I C I S M

This book is a study of the conceptual work of imaginative literature, partly to adjust the received story of how language acquires history in the romantic century. By the acquisition of history, I mean both language’s uniform timeline or that “certain conception of history” which Blanchot links with origins and the love of roots, and the linguistic “heaviness” or “density” symptomatic of the epistemic shift, around 1800, famously described by Foucault. In The Order of Things, Foucault narrates a process by which language solidified as an independent entity, becoming, in Said’s gloss, “a domain all of its own held together with jagged internal structures and coherences.”19 It is conventional to charge romanticism with supplying the requisite primitivist and organicist images later used during the philological revolution to imagine those “structures and coherences,” and to construct its historical method; at the close of this chapter, I take up the key role of Herder in this story.20 However, if we read the same history of linguistics through literary episodes, as I do here, we will find a more opaque and conflicted linguistic disposition across Euro-­A merican romanticism’s transatlantic literary sphere, exemplified in densely figured adjustments to the temporal experience of the linguistic subject. Giving language history is only one way of giving language time.21 Attitudes struck by romantic-­era writers vacillate between what Raymond Williams describes, in his indispensable brief history of Western linguistic thought in Marxism and Literature, as the sense of language as a historical object, on the one hand, and as a constitutive activity, on the other.22 Williams contends that both tendencies emerged in the eighteenth century. Holding in mind the temporal imaginaries Williams divides into history and activity, we can see poets picturing language change taking place somewhere between involuntary participation in collective formations and the upsurge of linguistic activity continuously recharged in poetic expression, oral literatures, and dialogic exchange. In this way, language

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was given not just objectifying history, but different kinds of time that unraveled the effects of language’s historicization, by slowing, varying, or otherwise perplexing the project of tracing language “back” to nature. In general, accounts of language’s emergent historicity tend to underestimate the romantic century’s interest in a “newly active sense of language”; but we can trace that sense through poetry’s fine-­grained attention to the dynamic “naturalness” of language’s constitutive activity.23 I will call language understood as constitutive activity “linguistic actualism,” as shorthand for the subject’s experience of language activated in different kinds of time. There are several reasons for this. Actualism, alongside “uniformitarianism,” is the geological principle that argues—­ against the notion of catastrophic forces as the sole cause of geological change—­that change is mostly constant, gradual, and indiscernible to the human eye. Paolo Rossi glosses “actualism” as “the thesis that we can infer the nature of processes that occurred in the past by analogy with the processes observable and at work in the present. Thus, all of the geological forces active today were active in the past as well, and their action is slow, continuous, and uniform.”24 Victorian scientist and theologian William Whewell coined the term “uniformitarianism” in 1832, in contradistinction to “catastrophism,” to describe the then ascendant gradualist view of geological change, famously articulated in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–­33). It required a Whewell—­conservative apologist for the theological worldview that catastrophism seemed to support (on the model of the biblical flood)—­to name this geological gradualism, and Whewell’s adversarial coinage helped codify the ungodliness or unorthodoxy of slow, gradual, and passive materialisms for the nineteenth century. But in fact, as Rossi shows, variations of gradualist thought were around much earlier, and are carried by enlightenment and romantic materialisms. In their wake, convergences appear across the romantic century between geological actualism and the “sense of language as actively and presently constitutive.”25 It is a commonplace in the history of linguistics to say that, around the mid-­nineteenth century, the doctrine of uniformitarianism (closely aligned with methodological actualism) was imported from the science of geology into the study of language, in order to channel comparative philology away from its fixation on origins and veneration

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for “roots.”26 But romantic-­era thinking was clearly testing out varieties of linguistic actualism long before this.27 I refer to these poetic experiments with different kinds of time as “gray romanticism,” where grayness signals both a frequent return to stones and geology, and an embrace of ambiguity or opacity (a gray area). Aris Fioretos portrays what he calls the “gray pursuit” of thinking as “that strange activity, psychic and physical alike, in which it remains unclear if we discover or invent, receive or project meaning,” such that it is “neither properly objective, nor thoroughly subjective.”28 Gray romanticism temporalizes this in-­between experience as a linguistic subject’s ecological formation within gradualist material, social, and psychic environments; in doing so, it often returns to inorganic figures, adapted by analogy from physical processes, to think about language change. The contingency that seemed to some to threaten linguistic decay or erosion may become, at times, an inevitable—­ even beneficial—­feature of the renewability of social and material worlds. By setting objectifying forms of linguistic observation in motion, writers tried to close the social distances imposed in theories of language “origin” (back then) and “nature” (out there), instead staging language change as the intimate, participatory aggregation and dispersal of forms of life and nonlife across contested and ongoing time scales. To understand the chronopolitics of linguistic thought in the romantic century requires a literary attention to metaphors of natural process: imaginative literature, with its high tolerance for ambiguity and obscurity, is especially adept at finding images to represent gray romanticism’s mixed feelings of at once belonging and not belonging in language. Poetry, in particular, is a laboratory of experiment in building and unbuilding linguistic subjects. Let me offer two images that naturalize language to give it different kinds of time. In Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “Baskenfragment” (1802), he observes that “language is sculpted by each refinement to accommodate the understanding, and like the small stones thrown reciprocally back and forth by the river’s currents, polished and ground down for ever better use.”29 Humboldt’s image transforms the problem of thinking language’s origins by externalizing, naturalizing, and temporalizing it. He then adds a benign sense of artistic agency and progress (“sculpted by each refinement,” “polished”) and instrumentalization (“for ever better use”), rely-

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ing on two underlying facts of the image: first, the material opacity of stone; and second, its incrementally slow and impersonal changes of state through a process of social weathering. Agency remains palpable in the foreground at the level of individual utterance (“each refinement”), even as the collective, dispersed work of deep-­focus change comes into view. The object called “language” is here, as Denise Riley says, “fat with” history, embodied and future-­oriented in its durability; but it is also constituted out of activity, and not only in an accretive sense, but in its continuous susceptibility to the creative wear of being handled by its speakers.30 For Humboldt as for other writers of the era, speakers may both handle and, to borrow from Judith Butler, be handled by their language.31 William Blake’s short lyric “The Clod and the Pebble,” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), works through a similar picture with subversive playfulness. Anchored by a conversation between a “Clod of Clay” and a “Pebble,” two adjacent geological forms whose material composition seems to prevent them from communicating, the poem takes an image like Humboldt’s small stones and sets it to the music of time: “So sung a little Clod of Clay / Trodden with the Cattles Feet / But a Pebble of the Brook / Warbled out these Metres meet.” Elsewhere, I have proposed the possibility of reading these two voices as threads of sound unspooling over different speeds, even as they are normed to the same readerly “scale” by the poem’s flat-­footed trochaic beats (duh duh duh duh duh duh duh).32 Without Blake’s bringing the question to the poem’s surface, we are asked to imagine linguistic experience by moving from the perspective of a vulnerable life form to one more hardened, yet vulnerable within a different kind of time. Though dialectically opposed, they are also, arguably, different expressions, in different “moods,” of the same material or substance. One could say that the poem renders a version of Spinozan ontology (substance monism, aspect pluralism) in the shape of a nursery rhyme. It seems to match exactly Jacques Rancière’s claim that the “great multiplication of languages, in the Romantic age, makes the most modest of stones speak.”33 If we now compare the processes at work in these two images, what do we find?34 The brilliance of Humboldt’s passing image for language change lies in its tricky balance between the speaker’s agency, and the

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way that agency is dispersed over time and between speakers. But there are more troubling inflections here, too, in that odd instrumentalizing “use,” attached to language’s sculpting, refinement, and especially polish, which suggests language’s advance through stages of aesthetic or technical improvement, and implicitly also the gradual cultivation of the speaking subject. Reading the image this way suggests the ease with which a progressive timeline of civilization can imprint metaphors concerning cultural transformation. In the abstract, to “polish language” would here be to wear away vestigial inefficiencies over time; analytically it introduces a metric for linguistic study distinguishing “polished” from “unpolished” languages, qualities that easily attach to speakers. And in fact, by developing and formalizing typological divisions among the languages of the world that classed them by grammatical characteristics, Humboldt later did just that. Along with the Schlegel brothers (who each studied Sanskrit with the former East India Company colonial agent Alexander Hamilton, a colleague of Sir William Jones), he helped to establish, for the nineteenth century, a widely applied model for plotting languages at different stages in a primitivist developmental narrative: a morphological distinction between isolating, agglutinating, and inflectional grammars was mapped onto the languages of the world and could be used to distinguish them according to progressive narratives of cultivation or civilization.35 Of course, Humboldt is directly describing language change, whereas Blake’s poem is only obliquely “talking about” language by picturing contrastively embodied voices. But it seems clear that Blake’s imagery is not invested in “polish,” and to that extent, it varies the ways we can interpret what used to be called “romantic nature imagery” as a conduit for linguistic thinking. In my view, imaginative writing often makes linguistic proposals even where they are not explicit, and a poetics implicitly offers what Ludwig Wittgenstein called a “picture of language.” While Blake does make stones speak, and perhaps even in a sense does “give each form of life its own speech back,” as Siraj Ahmed more generally describes romantic literary representation, this does not mean he necessarily “aspired to read the history inscribed in every object,” or to universalize the “gift” of language, understood on the model of the gift of civilization.36 In Blake’s image, a different linguistic imaginary is possible, one whose balance be-

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tween linguistic agency and its social dispersal is even more intricate than Humboldt’s, more open to the incommunicable, even as its nursery-­rhyme voices may strike us as comically talkative. It helps to work back from an image like Humboldt’s, for the complex linguistic imaginary embedded in romantic nature imagery is made most visible retroactively, with the subsequent trajectory of the study of language before our eyes. Knowing something about the unfolding of language study into a positivist science, through the historical method of comparative philology (which I review below), gives special insight into the linguistic preoccupations of romantic poetics. The reasons for this will take the remainder of the chapter, and then of course the rest of this book, to explain. But I offer these two images of gray romanticism to begin as, respectively, emblems of civilizing and radical enlightenment possibilities in the rendering of language under way during the romantic century. This is important since, as anthropologist Kathryn Woolard argues, civilization itself was “largely a linguistic concept” in the eighteenth century.37 In 1828, Humboldt wrote to the pro-­assimilation Cherokee journalist and spokesperson Elias Boudinot, to subscribe to Boudinot’s Cherokee Phoenix, the first newspaper printed in a Native American language. Citing his interest as partly scientific—­“I have for some years now made a particular study of the indigenous languages of America”—­Humboldt congratulated Boudinot on his dedication to “progress”: “I heartily hope, Sir, that you may succeed fully in your admirable enterprise of conserving the integrity of your ancestral language and of linking it with the progressive march of ideas and enlightenment.”38 In stressing racial progress, or the advance toward enlightenment in the form of print, Humboldt was doing no more than Boudinot himself, who two years earlier had raised funds to produce the paper by delivering an address emphasizing his own transformation from “savage” linguistic origins—­“in a language unknown to learned and polished nations, I learnt to lisp my fond mother’s name”—­to his present-­day linguistic refinement, standing forth as embodied proof that, as he put it, “Indians are susceptible of attainments necessary to the formation of polished society.”39 Progress or polish means acculturation, or more pointedly a capacity for change or civilize-­ability, intended here to disprove “Indian timelessness”—­

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the idea, as White Earth Ojibwe scholar Jean O’Brien puts it, that some are “passive and static by nature.”40 Boudinot harnesses a temporality of civilizational improvement for his own ends, but he is conscripted into what Mark Rifkin calls “settler time” in the process.41 Linguistic and epistemological force fields of conscription and resistance, explored in different colonial settings by critics like Janet Sorenson, Nikki Hessell, and Sunil Agnani, have informed the chapters that follow in ways that may initially surprise the reader. As they resist what Sorenson describes as the universalizing force of “imperial grammar,” and flirt with varieties of nativism, how closely or distantly are the linguistic dispositions of a William Wordsworth or a Henry Thoreau indebted to the colonial contexts that helped establish language as an object of study? Writing of regimes of temporality in the French Caribbean, Édouard Glissant offers what is, mutatis mutandis, a clarifying commentary on the internal tension between “lived experience” and “official way of thinking” for colonized subjects, who may well enact refusal and conformity in different combinations, while always carrying the weight of civilizing History: “there is a contradiction between a lived experience through which the community instinctively rejects the intrusive exclusiveness of a single History and an official way of thinking through which it passively consents in the ideology ‘represented’ by its elite.”42 This helps us understand Boudinot’s linguistic predicament: his self-­descriptions for a transatlantic Euro-­A merican audience perform the contradictions of colonial subjectivity, comparable to what Agnani describes as colliding “epistemological worlds . . . accidentally enabled” in colonial enlightenment spaces.43 It also, perhaps unexpectedly, helps us understand the linguistic stance of Wordsworth or Thoreau, and the internal colonialisms of Britain and America, in a multilayered or, as Sorenson suggests, internally “transnational” sense, as their writings reflect, albeit in very different ways, some of the same contradictions.44 Indeed, much familiar writing of the transatlantic romantic century registers the internal heterogeneities of temporal experience symptomatic of its rapidly changing world. Boudinot’s use of “polish” is thus one of many ways that language is given ambiguous forms of time through metaphors of natural change. This takes place across an era when shifts in the perception of language, race,

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and the collective of the nation led to a naturalization of their proximity, drawing them into an increasingly tight knot of association. By “naturalization,” I mean both that these shifts in perception normalized those terms, making them seem self-­evidently and unavoidably interconnected, and that images of natural phenomena were one means used to make that normalization work. The varieties of uprootedness that helped prompt romanticism’s formation may seem first and foremost to call attention to an increasing fascination with, and codification of, linguistic “roots.” During the nineteenth-­century phase of Indo-­European language study, positivism’s mystical, back-­formed image of the root—­that “invention of grammarians . . . named by analogy with plant growth”—­was reshaped from a grounding origin into a “formative germ,” with a force that pulled the knot of language, race, and nation ever tighter.45 But those organic images of growth that powerfully abbreviate the idea of language change, in  familiar expressions of linguistic genealogy (roots, trees, branching), coexist in the romantic century alongside unapologetically inorganic or enthusiastically disintegrative images.46 These alternative images preceded and competed with the organicism of roots, producing ways of giving language time that did not conform to the project of giving language history. Jacques Derrida’s insistence that all language be understood as “writing” initiated a philosophical deactivation of racial time, insofar as it disarmed the denial of form, development, or history to languages that have no textual archive that could be recognized by European readers. As Ahmed argues, citing Derrida, colonialism’s two-­part linguistic trick is “to make language appear to be the colonizer’s possession,” and then to instill that concept in the colonized subject, who “internalizes” it as the path to freedom.47 Indeed, interpreters like Gayatri Spivak and Robert Young have long emphasized that Derrida’s provocation, from at least Of Grammatology on, was a prolonged demonstration of the ironies of mistaking the uprooted word for the only kind or, rather, for the kind against which all others must be judged. Derrida makes the uprooted word legible as a partisan representational mode, an ideologically saturated way of arresting linguistic activity, a picture of language as increasingly “freed” from its environments. Yet while caught up in Derrida’s rigorous dismantling of the nostalgic naturalism in a stabilizing “etymologism,” one may miss the resistant

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forms linguistic naturalism began to take in the later eighteenth century.48 To suggest that language, and linguistic change, is natural, is not only a desire for retrograde simplicity but also a claim that language works in ways as complex as the material processes of the physical world. Poetic appeals to naturalization are not always or merely reactionary. Writers of the romantic era give language new kinds of time in order to understand the passive or involuntary relation to spoken language, to be at home with its opacity. Such images intensify, set in motion, slow down, or reroute encounters with natural worlds that have been staged in theories of language origin or plotted as primitive start dates on developmental timelines of civilization. Particularly within inorganic or geological images, this also undercuts origins-­thinking, through the sensation of being caught up in the midst of a slower, patterned sense of movement, both contingent and coherent. The actualism of nature’s “calm oblivious tendencies” (Wordsworth), or its “self-­regulated  .  .  . motion or change” (Emerson), plays out in a kind of time no longer devoted to progress. Still novel in the eighteenth century, such ideas about nature’s carelessness, dynamism, or self-­regulation, now conferred to language, beg new questions about the role of individual and collective agency in linguistic production.49 The radical or counter-­enlightenment fusion of language with nature aimed to submerge linear theories of linguistic progress and decay within ecological modes of receptive and collective agency, and to foreground the vicissitudes of linguistic subjectivity as surprising openings for creativity. Poetic expressions of language’s “tendencies” are partly reactions against the externalization and solidification of language, taking objective shape outside of participatory experience. Shifting focus from green to gray romanticism, this book’s angle on the alignment of language and nature foregrounds this reactive quality. The sensibility visible in Humboldt and Blake (above) remakes language not merely into natural forms, but according to ecological processes, whose linguistic “actors” are also acted on. Their linguistic reorientations to origins-­thinking accompany shifts in ideas about nature. As Paul de Man famously groused, “literary history has generally labeled ‘primitivist’ . . . the first modern writers to have put into question, in the language of poetry, the ontological priority of the sensory object”; expressing a related sentiment, Geoffrey Hartman later added, “the desire of the Romantics was never for a mere return to

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the state of nature.”50 This questioning of priority, origin, and return is visible in experiments with nondualism, which allowed gray romanticism to play with categories of matter, time, and sequence as a way of coming to terms with nature’s difficulty. Seeing green romanticism in grayscale—­following the lead of Paul Fry’s “stone-­colored criticism,” or Kevis Goodman’s keen eye for the georgic mediations in Wordsworth’s “mute earth”—­is not exactly new.51 Critics have long argued that the romantics reconceived “nature” itself as an experimental relation to time, one that gave language different temporalities using inorganic or mechanistic qualities that defamiliarized an anticipated “green language.”52 Of course, in considering nondualism I am drawn to Marjorie Levinson’s more recent experiments linking Spinozism with romantic poetry. But my argument also owes a broader, deeper debt to the field-­changing work of rhetorical criticism of various stripes that rendered temporality inescapable as a constitutive and contradictory feature of romantic (especially Wordsworthian) linguistic naturalism. This work undermined the commonplace—­long outdated, yet strangely persistent—­that romantics were united around what Bruno Latour has called “warm and green” nature, and that language was its spontaneous outgrowth; whether they emphasized inscription and “the epitaphic,” or custom, habit, and social repressions, these readings of romantic nature transformed greenness in advance of ecocriticism, introducing new shades of gray.53 Linguistic time—­doubled, multiplied—­was not confined by the nature image to growth or decay, or even to a line or a direction, but gave what Blake called “Contracting or Expanding Time” to an elusive, elastic linguistic moment.54 Such a plurality of temporal schemes, of course, lays the groundwork not only for my own work, but for a number of romanticist critics examining aesthetic structures of differentiated temporality from various angles, to imagine paces or rhythms of change moving across and within one another.55 Gray romanticism can act as a resistive mode of thinking against powerful enlightenment models of the subject, but it is not a coherent or positive agenda; instead, it is a mixture of literary styles, philosophical inheritances, professions of faith, ethical attitudes. It is in this sense, as I’ve suggested, also a gray area. Naming it makes visible a far greater diversity

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of theoretical inclinations, extending beyond what is rooted in nature: linguistic naturalism is not only mimetic Cratylism or late Adamic theories of the fitness of names, not only primitivist cries of nature stirred by the passions, not only the nativist originalism of grounding etymologies. Each of these fixed relations to nature is recalled and reworked throughout the romantic century. But none encompasses the grayer sensations of many-­scaled movement in nature imagery across the romantic century, transforming how language itself might be felt or pictured. At the same time, the dilation of time adopted into linguistic thought after the late eighteenth century also becomes new ground for adjudicating linguistic capacities as prerequisites for human belonging. By the mid-­nineteenth century, this logic had fully entered philology, as a perfectly typical 1860 treatise on language suggests with its first category of speakers: “inferior races which have no history, covering the soil since an epoch which must be determined by geology rather than by history.”56 To make language akin to natural forms, whether green or gray, can taxonomize and rigidify the differences increasingly transferred to languages’ speakers. As Kathryn Yusoff has shown, the formation of geology as a science is itself, in the context of the extractive labor of mining, part of the history of racializing nature; the material and discursive “richness” not only of living but also of nonliving or inorganic nature helped Euro-­A merican colonial formations of racial capital simultaneously produce and restrict the category of the human by defining some people as things even as natural resources are defined as nonlife.57 Mixing human with geologic durations eventually also helped differentiate kinds, giving some languages an older, “other” time. The grayness of gray romanticism takes shape in the shadow of the “uprooted word”: like Humboldt’s polished pebbles, its images could both react against the uprooted word and contribute to new typologizing distinctions. Observed analytically from what Charles Taylor calls the “grip” of the “external perspective,” the uprooted word is formally disengaged or abstracted from vernacular speech contexts.58 As Williams argues, we cannot separate the “extraordinary advance in empirical knowledge of languages,” in which Humboldt participated, “from its political history . . . in a period of extending colonialism.”59 But Humboldt is a genuinely contradictory thinker. Living out this political history, he like other

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writers of the romantic era responded to the uprooted word by positioning the linguistic subject as at once actively working on language and passively living it, simultaneously handling and being handled. Linguistic anthropologist Dell Hymes notes that “at a given time, in a given place, the range of interests in language is variously institutionalized, variously distributed among disciplines”; following Maureen McLane’s likeminded pursuit of the ways “romantic ethnography surfaced in highly disparate texts,” the chapters ahead show how poetry itself is one such discipline, digesting and representing social affinities in linguistic expressions offered as natural images.60 The uprooted word is a variation on what the Bakhtin circle called the “alien word”: the word viewed as a historical object conceptually alienated from its formative “ideological environments.”61 It reveals how romanticism positioned itself both within and against the abstracting force of the scene of ethnographic encounter, in reality a far-­reaching site of knowledge production that fused the others of Europe with an idea of uncultivated, original nature (whether unspoiled and authentic, or uncivilized and vicious).62 We can understand romantic nature imagery as a scene of linguistic theory and experiment, if we reattune ourselves to the role of temporality in that imagery, and, in particular, to how writers deploy different kinds of time simultaneously—­what Jonathan Sachs insightfully recognizes as this poetry’s “heterochrony,” or what I will sometimes call here mixed durations (after Henri Bergson’s “durations of different tensions”).63 This chapter’s Herder epigraph stands for a wider romantic sense of how the experience of time is shaped or mediated, given or imposed, through what he calls “thought-­images,” anticipating the vibrantly dialectical historicity of Walter Benjamin’s Denkbilder. Below, I show how Herder builds a chronopolitics into the mixed durations of gray romanticism. For while he contributes to the formation of linear historical thinking, he also anticipates later Marxian critical attention to singular modernity’s standardization of time and its representation. What Bergson identified as “the useful habit of substituting for the true duration, lived by consciousness, of an homogeneous and independent Time” re-­emerges famously in Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” but as something more insidious than a “useful habit.”64 Now, it is that famous “homogeneous and empty time”

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associated with the idea of progress and a positivist, monocultural, universalizing historicism. What sounds in Bergson like an individual tendency becomes in Benjamin allied to forms of power. Later, following Benedict Anderson, it is more specifically linked under a regime of print literacy accompanying capitalist modernity to a particular kind of historical collective, the “imagined community” of the nation-­state. I have interpreted the gray romantic desire to give language different kinds of time as a counter-­claim to history’s singular unfolding. Amid a diverse body of fields theorizing competing “temporal regimes,” I have drawn extensively on a postcolonial and anthropological theoretical vocabulary that points toward alternative, minority, or discrepant modernities.65 I cannot aspire to the marvelous taxonomy of poetic “displacements of colonial history” that Edgar Garcia has recently offered; however, I locate a sometimes surprisingly similar willingness in transatlantic romantic-­era poetics not to reduce or assimilate, but to recognize and pursue divergent temporal affinities.66 As Glissant notes, “cultures develop in a single planetary space but to different ‘times’ . . . we cannot put a hierarchical order to the different ‘times’ pressing into this global space.”67 Elizabeth Povinelli identifies the tendency Glissant here cautions against as an analytic of “social tense,” or the habit of time-­stamping and typecasting lives as past or present, traditional or modern.68 It is under the related regime of what Charles Mills calls “racial time” that we find a reactive desire for “resetting the Euro-­chronometer,” among both European and non-­European thinkers.69 The atmosphere of temporal ambivalence in romantic writing has long proven interesting on its own, particularly along the deconstructive seams of romantic criticism. But by working through gray romantic naturalism, we can ask new questions: how—­to paraphrase Povinelli—­are the goods and harms of communicability socially distributed?70 When linguistic qualities of temporal experience diversify, how does this variation converge with problems of social alienation? What are the consequences for speakers, for their audibility as subjects or their credibility as agents, when their languages pick up the baggage of particular ideas of nature? When languages are imagined as thing-­like, how do supposed qualities, like roughness or polish, changeability or timelessness, facilitate what Sylvia Wynter calls “dysselection” for some languages and their speakers?71

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The observational standpoint that produces the uprooted word required to give language “history” characteristically licenses the observer to do a handful of things: to disavow language’s collective production in embodied exchange, to posit its origin in a distant past, and to locate and fix it on a timeline of civilization. Gray romanticism, by giving language different kinds of time, may resist or diverge from these objectifying tendencies, nearly point by point: by responding to the possessive individualism of the free singular will, in the process of submerging the linguistic subject in a shared world of other natural forces (“natural” in the ecological senses of interdependent or involuntary); by combating reductively primitivist origins-­thinking, in the process of relocating imagined roots or origins not in a distant past but in an unfolding present; and by disrupting modernity’s self-­narration as a singular linear temporality, in the process of proposing that linguistic forms of life are composed out of different kinds of time, or mixed durations. However, these forms of apparent resistance not only attempt to counteract ethnocentric primitivism; they can also themselves wind up shaping objectifying, formalist, “uprooting” tendencies of philological thought in the nineteenth century. Because giving language time allows or compels its speakers to inhabit different kinds of time, gray romanticism also collaborated in producing differentiated subjects of history.72 Long after Said showed how figurative lines between qualities like “inorganic” and “organic” were racialized during the nineteenth century, our understanding of these processes is still developing: more recent examinations of parallel category-­distinctions—­life and nonlife, human and nonhuman—­have continued to open our eyes to their violent impact during and beyond the romantic century.73 I am totally convinced of the presence in romantic poetics of heterochrony, which Sachs compellingly locates in a particular, historically emergent awareness of life in distinct temporalities.74 What interests me most is how this heterochrony coincides with what anthropologist Johannes Fabian long ago called “allochrony,” or the primitivist privilege observers may adopt in perceiving themselves as occupying a more modern time than those under observation. In some ways the mixed legacy of gray romanticism begins with what it means to be Herderian. Gray romanticism’s lived sense of belonging at once to different times travels in uneasy company with a primitivism that

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produces what Apess called the “tree of distinction” using social tense. The convergence of primitivism and allochronism subtending historicism peels strata of humanity apart, fortifying social distance and cultural difference between observer and observed. Herder is a favored culprit for inventing this knowledge practice: even as his early cultural relativism “rejected . . . the sweeping developmentalist schema that placed enlightened modernity at the pinnacle of mankind’s civilizational evolution,” Aamir Mufti argues, he remains culpable for the racializing tropes his historicism instantiated.75 The enlightenment commitment to a presumed universalism, on the one hand, and perspectivism and pluralism, on the other, are we might say conditions for the production in the nineteenth century of “scientific” racial hierarchy; Silva, for instance, tells this story as the emergence of an “analytics of raciality,” which she argues produced, with Herder’s help, the white European as true subject of history. Perhaps the idea that perspectivism is compatible with the rise of racial science seems paradoxical. Surely those trying to see from other points of view are invested in relativism’s potential to democratize social relations? But the relativizing of dispositions and lifeworlds as demarcated and solidified cultures hastens the hierarchical graphing of peoples along a cline of civilization. And this process, as Maurice Olender reminds us, was endemic to the project of philology; it deployed natural metaphors to serve its own racial projects, like the infamous binary “Aryan” and “Semitic,” vigorously pursued by philologists such as Ernest Renan and August Schleicher. For Olender, too, Herderian romanticism is a key early moment in that history. U P R O O T I N G T H E “A L I E N W O R D ”

A deceptively simple claim of V. N. Voloshinov’s is crucial to this story: “romanticism, to a considerable degree, was a reaction against the alien word and the categories of thought promoted by the alien word.”76 To prepare to explain why “Herderian” means something different to this book, I turn now to a history of this “alien word,” and the conceptual uprooting of language, which Herder and others specifically reacted against. Giving language different kinds of time responds to a picture of language that uprooted the word from its reproduction in everyday life. The romantic nature image materializes language, but its material imaginary is

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inhabited from an inner stance that counteracts the frictionless transmission of linguistic objects. In response to various linguistic alienations—­ nominalism, or the reduction of interactive language to words as names; textualism, or the linguistic chronopolitics that monumentalizes writing as the more civilized form of speech; and the consolidation of linguistic form into historical object—­romantic-­century poetry produced a more fluid phenomenological vocabulary for picturing language. Its naturalizing imagery was designed in part as a solvent for objectifying, alienating categories of thought. So let us look back at some of the historical moments that uprooted the “alien word,” reinventing language as a temporalized marker of race. The uprooted word emphasizes a particular literary history of the alienated word, and the romantic-­era writing that reacted against it: “uprooting” describes the processes by which the alien word is increasingly conceptually legitimated as external to language’s active production in speech and thought. When in 1860, at the far end of the romantic century, August Schleicher declared language a “natural organism” outside the “determination of the individual will,” and the science of language a “natural historical discipline,” he merely fulfilled a longstanding objectivist habit that alienated language from reflexive or interactive speech.77 His natural history of language fully uprooted it from discourse, and this completed uprooting is precisely what focuses attention on lost and recoverable roots as signs of identity (what Glissant calls the “monolingual prejudice” that “my language is my root”).78 That the speaker cannot alter their language “any more than a nightingale can change its song” adds a romantic note, but the alienating force of philological organicism signals the passage of thought-­images from romantic to positivist historicism. For the planting of roots in a mythic past places them far from the “movement of the world,” as Adorno put it in an early essay: “they are necessarily transferred to the start in order to be able to maintain themselves in the face of the world’s dynamic. The ideas become static: frozen.”79 In their love of roots, nineteenth-­century philologists like Schleicher built the natural history of language as a legitimating myth of origins by erasing its social preconditions, at the same time fashioning language into a better tool for differentiating people. Kenneth Burke lucidly expressed a thought much

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like Adorno’s: “the narrative way of trying to say how things truly are is to say how they originally were”; to this we should add, with Yusoff, that “questions of origin are never too far away from questions of difference and belonging.”80 Schleicher’s linguistic organicism is not completely distinguishable from gray romantic naturalism or inorganicism. While the racially charged, nation-­ building organicism of nineteenth-­ century philology has often been recounted, the sources and effects of inorganic metaphors that anxiously imagined cultural loss as material erosion have not. Michel Bréal, one of the nimblest nineteenth-­century critics of Schleicher’s root-­ mania, also noted that, reading the comparative philologists, “one might indeed at times think that one was reading a treatise on the geology of the grammatical world, or that one was witnessing a series of crystallizations of speech.”81 Indeed, inorganicism could be deployed as a kind of annex to roots-­thinking, oddly fixing language to similarly origin-­dependent timelines. Already in 1808, in his famous treatise on Sanskrit, Friedrich Schlegel wrote that the “artistic construction of the language becomes obliterated and worn off by common daily use, especially during a long period of rudeness and barbarity.”82 Word forms become, as a British philologist imagined in 1834, “relics of the immaterial world,” which “from their everyday and universal use, have been worn, until, like pebbles on the beach . . . hardly a vestige remains to indicate their original form.”83 Schleicher himself declared in 1860 that words were diminished from earlier forms in a manner “rather like a statue, which by rolling about in a riverbed for an extended period” lost its “limbs,” so that “not much more than a smoothed stone cylinder is left, with scarcely a hint of what was once there.”84 Though inorganic erosion may seem to run counter to the Indo-­European roots canonized by Schleicher and others, both metaphor-­ families work on the same archaizing timeline, by alternately expressing anxiety over loss or euphoria over recovery of archaic origins. Another critic mocked the devotees of Aryan origins who believed that “somewhere in the East, and somewhere in the past, there was an immense deposit of primeval wisdom of which the scattered fragments might be recovered for our enlightenment.”85 Evaluating gray romanticism, we will need to keep in mind that inorganicism is in itself no more “radical” than organicism.

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Humboldt with his polished pebbles was interested in how language progresses geologically through erosion (or elsewhere, through crystallization). More characteristically, he called language a “fashioned organism,” a social object intimate, alien, and always in the making, well before Marx and Engels evoked the process of alienation itself as a “crystallization [Sichfestsetzen] of social activity, [a] consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations.”86 Like the Marxian emphasis on social forms as something “we ourselves produce,” Humboldt’s care toward this organism’s fashioning maintains language as a definitive social activity that dissipates the myth of a stable origin in the distant past, dissolving this language of the philosophers (as Marx would say) back into the mixed durations of everyday life.87 Following both Humboldt and Marx, the Bakhtin circle recognized the romantic era as having accomplished something unprecedented in the history of language philosophy. Understanding language as active and constitutive—­“the medium through which consciousness and ideas are generated”—­they became, argues Voloshinov, “the first philologists of native language, the first to attempt a radical restructuring of linguistic thought” by introducing “new categories” through which to apprehend and study it. He points out that, crucially, the stance adopted in their works was “the viewpoint of the person speaking,” not “the passively understanding philologist.” This stance or structure of address seeks to reverse the processes of language’s uprooting by recognizing the subject as submerged in language.88 After Foucault, much of the received wisdom from intellectual histories of philology tells us that the cusp of the nineteenth century witnessed what Haruko Momma calls the “historicization of language.”89 But if, as Bakary Diaby has recently put it, romanticism’s “mood” of historicity “still sets the terms by which we discuss racial subjection in the present,” the notion of giving language history in the romantic era still badly needs the scrutiny afforded by theories of racialization.90 During this era race signified and distinguished in increasingly inflexible ways—­as Saree Makdisi puts it, “racial lines were charted out and then deepened and hardened”—­and we still need to know more about the linguistic coordinates of that social mapping.91 Schematically put, I am investigating this

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question during a transatlantic century that runs from an era of fascination with the noble savage, to an era of fascination with the noble “Aryan” (emblematized respectively by Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s 1755 Discours sur l’origine de l’ inégalité and Arthur de Gobineau’s 1853 Essai sur l’ inégalité des races humaines). The period witnessed language’s historicization, but also its racialization, governed by the modulation of language as marker of civilizational difference to language as the sign of race. Language’s uprooting in the romantic century is inseparable from the long-­eighteenth-­century dissemination of a version of John Locke’s language philosophy through the French and Scottish enlightenments, or the well-­k nown “stadial histories” of civilization. The uptake of Locke’s theory of language from book 3 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding adapts a liberal modernizing project into linguistic analysis, which, as anthropologists Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs explain, sought to “make speech appear to stand apart,” through “practices of purification” or “tools for stripping language of direct connections to things or social forms.”92 In this version of Locke’s thought—­which, in recognition of one of his most influential enlightenment interpreters, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, anthropologist Michael Silverstein once dubbed “Condillocke”—­ language emerges through social exchange that depends conceptually on individualized wills using atomized units (ideas, signs, words) to represent or predicate about a separate, preexisting external world.93 Though Locke discusses the psychological dimensions of language’s formation, the behavioral repertoire of his linguistic agent is limited to imagined acts of naming and communicative directness largely reliant on a vague linguistic voluntarism, through which language is “used” and meaning “imposed.” The nominalist basis of Locke’s theory collaborates neatly with what anthropologist Jenny Davis has called “linguistic extraction,” the colonial impulse of ethnography that “renders languages into extractable objects that can be collected, preserved, utilized, and even admired.”94 Against Locke’s individualist voluntarism, linguistic naturalisms in the romantic century frequently imagine varieties of collective “involuntarism.” In the next chapter, with Wheatley as counterpoint, I will say more about this dyad, in order to get a better sense of the voluntarism that presumes the subject’s individuation, freedom, and detachability

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from shared worlds, by way of Adam Smith’s exemplary essay “Considerations on the First Formation of Language.” There, the sign’s progressive independence from its surroundings, its vaunted “abstraction,” mirrors the civilized subject’s progressive rational autonomy or freedom from dependency. While it is certainly possible to overstate what some have called the uprooting effect of language’s “autonomization” performed by Lockean voluntarism, the self-­governing intervention of the individualized will in the production of language, ironically embedded in the term “arbitrary,” remained an important and conflicted strand in the survival of enlightenment language philosophies throughout the romantic era.95 The conceptual “uprooting” of language from shared contexts, while purporting to be about language in general, in fact produced a gradient universality, “imbu[ing] some ways of speaking and writing with authority while rendering other modes a powerful source of stigma and exclusion.”96 It also triggered an answering desire in radical enlightenment, counter-­ enlightenment, and romantic thought to undo language’s alienation from physical and social environments. In their reactions to theories defined by linguistic voluntarism, these answers characteristically resorted to natural images with unwilled effects to signify interdependence between linguistic subject and surrounding milieu. As Williams points out, the longer, wider context for these reactions lay in the “European exploration and colonization” that “dramatically expand[ed] the available range of linguistic material.”97 Rancière usefully locates a “great multiplication of languages” in the “Romantic age,” but we can certainly push this vague dating back. One prompt for early enlightenment efforts, alongside Locke’s, to theorize, generalize, and taxonomize language as an object of study was the creeping sense of the true scale of linguistic diversity, as Europe’s encounters with regions around the world were increasingly documented and disseminated.98 Two instances make brief appearances in the next chapter: Locke’s textual encounter with the Mi’kmaq language of Newfoundland, and Humboldt’s study of Old Javanese and the Austronesian language family. By the mid-­to late eighteenth century, the study of language in Europe was galvanized by what Thomas Trautmann has called an “explosion in the grammar factory,” a period of linguistic knowledge production during which an extraordinary

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quantity of data was gathered and formalized by Europeans (or, as anthropologist Joseph Errington outlines in detail, gathered and composed in contact zones, then theorized after being “circulated back to Europe”).99 This entailed the rampant production of wordlists, dictionaries, grammars, and translations, the very forms of which reflect the missionary, mercantile, and administrative priorities that governed the social order at the horizons of European empire.100 To call this vast unfolding narrative of the long eighteenth century an “uprooting” is partly to link these literate traces to European encounters with non-­Europeans, and to the processes of colonial expansion. But apart from making that link explicit, it is also here that we can plainly see how the alien word distinctively evolved into a criterion of comparative civilization. Language was also more and more vividly imagined as alienated from its environments, as it began to instantiate new types of social difference: as Errington shows, transliteration and translation, for instance, might reinforce the mapping of physical and spiritual difference onto timelines using epistemological “gaps” and incommensurabilities, because the introduction of a standardized writing system appeared to Europeans to “give” linguistic abstraction to non-­European peoples as a stage on the path from savage to civilized life, toward a universal (and Christianized) modernity.101 Timothy Brennan reminds us that Voloshinov historically linked the “alien word,” a picture of language grounded in the archivable forms produced by “abstract objectivism,” with a priestly class and with an “imperial relationship,” such that “comparative linguistics” concretized “the study of encoded acts of earlier conquest.”102 Because we still live in this picture of language, we have to continually remind ourselves that the “word” is made alien not as an effect of the abstracting, rational powers of mind attributed to the technology of the alphabet, but by the ways these representational adaptations were perceived and affirmed as advances toward language’s formal autonomy and detachability, as the sign of civilized reason. This alien word takes new shapes according to evolving colonial practices of literacy, particularly the so-­called “reduction” of speech to writing in societies deemed “oral” by those observing and categorizing them.103 We might link the strategic selectivity of such processes of reduction, through Davis’s linguistic extraction, to what Jodi Byrd calls the

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“exploitation and mining of indigenous intellectual and cultural subjectivities”; indeed, given the colonial history of the Americas, “extraction” and “mining” are hardly innocent figures of speech.104 Language in the colonial sphere is as collaborative as anywhere else, but exchange was governed by a distribution of power in which, for example, contact zone multilingualism might primarily serve that “priestly class” as a tool of conversion, and colonized subjects as a strategy of survival. A notion of language as extractable helped create, consolidate, and naturalize linguistic subject positions more or less proximate to nature, more or less audible or credible, and more or less safe for the speaker. Some participants were observers, others observed; simply put, linguist and colonial agent overlap as social roles. These processes of uprooting the word—­“reduction” or alphabetic romanization, translation, circulation—­would then become a leading method for “legislating human differences in a rapidly colonializing world.”105 That productive language explosion helps us reread a well-­known climax in both European romanticism and the conventional narrative of the origins of comparative philology, when the Welsh judge, administrator, poet, and cultural translator, Sir William Jones, of the British East India Company, famously proposed a family tree of “Indo-­European” languages, including Sanskrit, Persian, Latin, Greek, Celtic, and Gothic, using the technology of wordlists. While Jones himself lived and worked at Fort William, a British colony in Bengal, many Europeans who wrote on the languages of the world never left Europe; the use of wordlists for lexical comparison to establish kinship, distinctive attributes, and patterns of change among language forms was extensively undertaken in European metropoles, as linguistic data continued to pile up. Humboldt, for instance, an exceptional linguist of the generation after Jones, basically exemplified the gentleman scholar who mostly “stud[ied] language from a safe distance.”106 Though he balanced his study of orientalist texts in Germany, Paris, and London with fieldwork on the Basque language while traveling in Spain (prompting his analogy of language and pebbles in a brook), unlike his brother Alexander, the naturalist and explorer, he never left Europe: instead, he collected indigenous language materials from around the globe, from sources like the Boston Mission Society (through American correspondents like John Pick-

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ering), the Spanish Jesuit missionary and scholar Lorenzo Hervas (whom he met while a diplomat in Rome), and Scottish East India Company colonial administrator John Crawfurd, about whom we will hear more in the next chapter.107 In Siraj Ahmed’s recent account, Jones occupies a preeminent position as early executor in the growth and spread not only of philological thinking, but more generally of the “historical method” as basis of the Western humanities.108 Following Jones, and during Humboldt’s career, which overlaps or abuts figures familiar from Foucault’s study (Schlegel, Bopp, Grimm) and Said’s (Sacy, Renan),  a major shift in linguistic study occurred: the methodological move to morphological comparison based on grammatical features, rather than lexical comparison based on wordlists. A favorite episode in genealogies of the social sciences, this moment captures a shift in the atmosphere of knowledge production, whereby around 1800 “the criterion of morphological comparison” gradually appeared to be “in the air.”109 The practices of comparative grammar that then fell into place, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, were almost immediately called the New Philology, later the Philological Revolution. But the power and purchase of this method was the outcome of longstanding historical circumstances; its textualist bias, or “tendency toward objectivism,” was partly the outgrowth of colonial relationships, or, as Williams puts it (echoing Voloshinov), a “largely unnoticed consequence of the privileged situation of the observer” over the observed.110 If we return to acknowledge the observer’s peculiar specificity in this picture of language, the drama of an “explosion” of textual records and a methodological “revolution” becomes differently visible as a long, slow transcript of co-­authored encounter in which, as Sarah Rivett has argued, “indigenous languages worked to transform the structure of European thought,” even if usually by Eurocentric misprision, typification, or negative example.111 As the historical method in linguistics became increasingly powerful, so too did the widespread use of an organic paradigm, and the language of evolution, sparking prolonged debate over the disciplinary home of philology that escalated after the mid-­nineteenth century. This development—­ which, being widely narrated in conventional histories of linguistics, I pass over here briefly—­turned the alien word into something that could

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be historicized on the model of the physical world: an uprooted word. Much like other “organic objects,” wrote philologist August Pott in a typical aside, language “has times of progress and arrest, of growth, of flowering, of fading and of gradual death, in one word it has its own history” (1833–­36).112 Even before the mid-­nineteenth century, politicized questions about which metaphors were “permissible” for language change became increasingly explicit.113 Despite the blurring noted above, a major axis for differentiating languages fell along the fault line between organic and inorganic, helping to distinguish Indo-­European or “Aryan” languages from Semitic languages in particular, and the rest of the world’s languages in general, which, presumed to be lacking the capacity for growth, might seem mechanical, chaotic, prehistoric. Ideologies of temporality were used to define a particular language’s relation to historicity as a measure of its speakers’ degree of civilization: Schleicher, for instance, adopted the category of relative “capacity for change [Veränderungsfähigkeit]” from Darwinian biology to interpret “civilized” languages as evolutionary survivors.114 Schleicher’s bestowal of this special capacity for progressive change on certain languages used linguistic evidence to locate non-­Europeans in “a childhood without history,” as Olender puts it, while he eagerly reconstructed the “roots” of Indo-­European.115 By the 1860s, those critical of philology’s proximity to race science were discouraging tired debates about language’s “origin” and the reification and veneration of roots.116 For such critics, organic and inorganic historicism alike, or the natural history of language, threatened to render language totally external to its living speakers. In France, Bréal complained of the appearance of what he called “grammatical organism,” and the “fourth natural realm” of language it uncritically presupposed. Yet the force of this uprooting in producing language as a historical object was undeniable. As Bréal put it, “it is via the purely external study of grammatical phenomena that comparative philology has established itself and made its discoveries”; or, as historian Anna Morpurgo-­Davies writes, “the organic metaphor offer[ed] a justification for a study of language per se.”117 Decades later, Ferdinand de Saussure echoed Bréal, writing on the errors resulting “whenever the comparative philologists looked upon the

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development of two languages as a naturalist might look upon the growth of two plants.”118 In the era of Saussure in Europe and of Franz Boas in the United States, the “sociocentric” shift in language study, which displaced naturalism to re-­create the study of language as a social science, marked a motivated turn against language’s racialization (which I return to in my conclusion).119 “We now realize,” runs the final paragraph of Saussure’s published Course (published in 1916), “that Schleicher was wrong in looking upon language as an organic thing with its own law of evolution, but we continue, without suspecting it, to try to make language organic in another sense by assuming that the ‘genius’ of a race or ethnic group tends constantly to lead language along certain fixed routes.”120 With the word “genius,” this tendency “to make language organic” was associated strongly with a suspect Germanic romanticism, Herderian by way of Humboldt, Schlegel, and others. However, at the same time, as we have seen via the discourse of African retentions and “vindication” in the postslavery United States, Boas’s Herderian concept of culture was widely redeployed in the struggle for racial equality.121 Closer attention to the important resignification of the “folk” concept in work by Alain Locke, Du Bois, and Hurston might remind us not only of the limitations, but also of the lost complexity in Herder’s thinking on culture; indeed, it might give us a better handle on romanticism more broadly. Under the influence of correctives like Saussure’s, philology’s naturalizing tropes and evolutionary tales have often been cast as the predictable consequence of a regrettable romantic residue clinging to positivist historicism. That is not my story. In the dispersed forms explored in the following chapters, language appears as the airborne matter of poetry’s “softer language” (in Wheatley’s Poems); in the volatile, fiery depths of the earth (as in Blake’s Book of Urizen); between the clouds, stones, and healing “slow decay” of a misbegotten built landscape (Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads); or among the proliferating sound-­shapes of a thawing sandbank, as one world literally melts into another (Thoreau’s Walden). In these pictures, language’s changes are accidental, impersonal, slower forms of wearing away or accreting, felt from the stance of subjects under the sway of their linguistic environments. Such moments activate language, undermining a monolithic historicism under whose regime speech forms, having acquired

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positive objectivity, have been uprooted from the world, remade into objects separable from the linguistic reciprocity of uptake and utterance. Particularly in Wordsworth and Thoreau, we also find incipient or fully formed signs of racializing objectification. Yet, neither reducible to nor wholly disconnected from the objectivist “geology of grammar,” their gray romanticism allows affordances of solidity and solubility to coexist; what appears solidly objective from one angle of thought appears as a process of transformation from another. As Silverstein once quipped: “one theory’s naturalness is another’s epiphenomenon.”122 W H AT C O U L D I T M E A N T O T H I N K L I K E H E R D E R ?

Herder’s name is a regular reference point in discussions of the worst effects of the desire to naturalize language. Yet beside his reputation as architect of a durable “romantic” cultural nationalism, his position in the history of racial thought has always attracted a serious ambivalence, particularly among postcolonial critics, thanks to his explicit outrage against enlightenment Eurocentrism.123 Herder was a vociferous critic of the predations of colonialism and empire; as much as any other European thinker of his moment, he exemplifies how romantic linguistic ideologies took shape against the ethnocentric historicism concentrated through the theory and practice of European colonialism. He addressed its powers directly—­“you little northern part of the world”—­as blind heroes of their own epic, a story of one fragment of humanity ransacking its way around the globe, then rationalizing its subjugation of others as the “so-­called enlightenment and civilizing of the world.”124 Here, I confront Herder’s mixed reputation in order to reexamine what it means—­what it could mean—­to think about language like Herder. My central aim is simply to show that even a cursory closer look at Herder’s writings reveals a far less stabilizing linguistic naturalism than might be anticipated. Why does that naturalism seem stable? Here, in Kathryn Woolard’s words, is the conventional wisdom about a “romantic or Herderian concept of language”: “it is a truism that the equation of language and nation is not a natural fact but rather a historical, ideological construct  .  .  . conventionally dated to late-­eighteenth-­century German romanticism and Johann Herder’s famous characterization of language as

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the genius of a people.”125 Perhaps implicitly refering to Benedict Anderson, Woolard continues: “exported through colonialism, this Herderian or nationalist ideology of language is globally hegemonic today.”126 Woolard’s own language here is striking: the slippage from “romantic or Herderian” as truism to “Herderian or nationalist” as truth suggests how much depends on the intervening epithet “Herderian.” In my view, a closer reading of Herder’s thoughts on the accidental formation of language yields not a proto-­nationalist theorist of a naturalized Volk, but instead an avatar of the complex, still unrealized possibilities of gray romanticism. To see this, we must first confront how Herder’s attention to what Voloshinov calls “native philology”—­his interest in folk tradition and oral cultures—­has been interpreted as a romantic primitivism that prefigures nationalist sentiment and paves the way for the abuse of organicist tropes by applying metaphors of growth and decay to whole peoples.127 Herder did indeed tend to generalize the involuntary features of linguistic practice in essentializing terms (“the genius of a people”) congenial to what Mufti calls “one-­world” thinking.128 We might usefully recall a powerful reading of the contrast between Herder’s and Locke’s linguistic ideologies, between Herder’s “collective, historically situated force of tradition” and Locke’s “individual, decontextualized exercise of reason.”129 Yet this reading then identifies Herder’s dispersal of agency—­its “collective, historically situated” openness—­with his veneration of the primitivist Volk, rendering it the seemingly inevitable precursor to ethnonationalism (even as it points out how, in context, resistance to “mixing” stems from Herder’s avowed disgust at colonial violence).130 While it does require reading Herder partly against his own grain—­and this is the approach I take to each of the chapter protagonists—­I argue here that Herder offers the materials to dismantle his own idea of bounded language communities. Each individuated “human collective” or linguistic “organic community,” whose naturalness seems to depend on its integrity, is enabled by a very different naturalism: a theory of collective, dispersed linguistic will, intended to disarm the Lockean sense of linguistic property acted out by the willful exercise of reason.131 Sharp critics have targeted not only Herder’s essentializing primitivism, but also the historicism that seems to result from it, shaping the

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“emergence of racial time” that contributed to modern race concepts in the course of Europe’s empire-­building.132 Several recent accounts meet in the judgment that the historicism Herder inaugurates tracks closely with a racialization of the subject of history completed by the human sciences in the nineteenth century. Mufti, for instance, builds a critique of historicism resulting in the claim that Herder’s stabilizing “notion of language and culture” distantly underlies deterministic theories of “biological race.”133 Silva likewise argues that “Herder’s formulation of the historical consolidates the locating of human difference in temporality”; however, her account of how this happens helpfully moves us in a new direction.134 While acknowledging his polemics against the stadial history whose primitivism implicitly justified slavery, Silva analyzes Herder’s role in constructing the “onto-­epistemological” historical subject. For Silva, Herder’s innovative historicism relies on a notion of the “productive” powers of thought as “housed in the mind”; this “interiorizing of poesis” then “rewrites the play of reason by locating universal poesis in the mind of man,” which is to say, in the mind of that subset of humanity granted the full powers of the “universal” subject.135 Silva curiously suggests that Herder abides by a Cartesian distinction between mind and “affectable body,” and that he does not notice that his system “depends on that which man shares with the things he seeks to know.” For Silva, Herder is indifferent to the enclosed mind’s embodied subjection to life’s conditions, or, as she puts it, the “necessity that threatens to submit man, the mind-­body composite, to outer determination.”136 Herder thus initiates a transitional chapter in the production of racialized, “affectable” non-­Europeans, and Europeans as true subjects of history, later carried out by Hegelian thought. Linking Herder’s historicism and nineteenth-­century scientific racism is not wrong, but it is misleadingly incomplete, because it assimilates the temporal complexity of Herderian thought to mere historicism. Herder does locate “human difference” in temporality. Yet we can recast the “Herderian” by recognizing that some contradictions in Herder’s work are the sign not of a mystified dualism, as Silva implies, but of a dynamized monism that comes to characterize a broader romantic-­era conception of spontaneity under constraints, or the unwilled conditions of social agency.137  “If we had a history of human inventions,” a young

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Herder enthused in 1767, “how we would find products which arose in accordance with the cosmogony of Epicurus, through a confluence of the atoms! Series of causes worked together, against each other, and after each other . . . Not how language should have arisen or could have arisen, but how it arose—­that is the question!”138 This wild naturalism, with its final note of exultant, almost desperate empiricism, derails the idea of language invention emblematized in individual or willful acts, or the Lockean model of historical agency that also grounds the sovereignty of the nation. Instead the invention of language, as with any other cultural “product,” precisely “[escapes] the laws of the will.”139 If thinkers like Humboldt later refined and disciplined the gray shades of Herder’s language ecology, the Humboldtian social subject’s permeability was an aftereffect of Herder’s dispersal of the will, which had opened up the linguistic agent to webs of accidental influence and interdependency. No matter how inwardly felt, nature is here at the same time always uncertain: something outer, something other. Seeing this means recognizing the importance of Herder’s sensitivity to language’s ongoing origins in utterance, hearing, and interaction, part of a broader preoccupation not with individual acts but with processes of origination that are inchoately ecological, rather than natural in any simple sense. Herder’s native philology, and his outrage at the analytic habit of alienating language from speech, stem from his belief that this damages our conception of both self and other, by falling into the trap of privileging the data of the linguistic observer over the experience of the linguistic participant. A Herderian model of language change thus constitutes a phenomenology of the receptive and participatory ripple effects of individual thought and utterance in the production of language at different timescales. Herder’s dynamized monism is hardly without its problems. The trajectory that theories of unfreedom take through Spinozan naturalism toward racial determinism in the nineteenth-­century sciences of man (with, as Silva notes, Hegel as their live wire) deserve much closer attention. A familiar path of Herder’s reception results in the consolidation of a collective linguistic subject primed for typological differentiation and hierarchization (where a progressive Bildung tracks differentially according to national “genius”). Yet a different Herderian thinking spear-

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headed counterforces against Eurocentrism and against pure interiority. What Silva calls “outer determination” plays an explicit and important role in the way each subject comes into being. Herder’s dispersal of the will stands as a half-­developed sense of language’s sociality or “betweenness”; what Silva reads as Herder’s “interiorizing of poesis” can, I think, be taken as one moment of a process that takes self and other as temporary positions within a larger, longer phenomenology of social relationships. Or rather, Herder’s naturalizing movement through what Charles Taylor calls the speaking subject’s “inner standpoint” submerges the linguistic agent within a series of environments whose status as social or natural we cannot tell apart.140 Here I follow John Noyes’s recent claim that Herder’s project of “unmasking philosophy’s complicity with imperialism” already ventures, in its embrace of self-­difference, a proto-­Derridean linguistic chronopolitics.141 Noyes notes Herder’s repeated observation that the human lives “in contradiction” with himself and his surroundings; this contradiction “enables the question of origins” even as it initiates a “critique of [that] metaphysical quest,” by introducing the experience of self-­differentiating delay into language.142 By continually prohibiting language from settling into an object, this built-­in delay disables the universalizing timeline told by stadial histories of language and civilization. Whereas Locke’s arbitrariness, with its German translations Willkür or Willkürlichkeit, emphasized freedom of the will, Herderian naturalism seeks out the unanticipated and unwilled aspects of linguistic practice. Because of an ambiguous relation to individualistic freedom that this Herderian involuntarism introduced into theories of language origin, “romantic or Herderian” linguistic naturalisms have come to seem naïvely essentializing or determinative. Noyes helps us identify where Herderian naturalism departs from developmental narratives of language organically built out of stadial forms of social organization: by emphasizing the contradictions of arbitrary language, Herder allows us to recast language itself as a chronopolitical problem. This is where that dynamized monism comes in. Herder’s involuntarist naturalism reanimates the radical enlightenment to reject the linguistic forms of Lockean modernity. Williams, like most other critics, has cited Herder as crucial theorist not only for linguistic historicism, but for the

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emergent notion that language is a constitutive, active part of life.143 The coexistence of these two tendencies in one picture of language—­which is to say, the simultaneity of temporal orientations at the heart of gray romanticism—­can be partly explained by going back to Georg Lukács’s claim that the German counter-­enlightenment’s concessions to mystery were built from a love of contradiction that nurtured an incipiently dialectical philosophy.144 Lukács identifies as characteristic of Herder’s thought a haphazard collectivism that should not be exclusively reduced to nationalism: “Herder,” he writes, “was the first thinker of the German Enlightenment to raise the question of the nature of collective social praxis—­even though he was never able to arrive at a clear conceptual definition of the nature of the acting subject and the real laws governing his actions.”145 What in Herder was misrecognized as “irrationalism” was an “advance toward the dialectic”; “the increasing understanding of contradiction as the basis of life and knowledge” is central to what were, in Herder’s milieu, the “disintegrating tendencies of the Enlightenment,” and here Lukács places once again “the influence of Spinoza” (which already “works in the direction of the dialectic”).146 In this light, even the famously Herderian idea that the origin of language is not accessible to human thought as a willful act sounds Spinozan. When Spinoza wrote that “we cannot say a word without remembering that we have done so [before],” a collective subject’s perspective (“we cannot say a word”) displaces the possibility of access to an original occurence.147 Learning and using language require the very opacity of familiarity, because to be meaningful, a word must call up a previous usage. To know a language is to remake it by repeating it anew: speech occurs partly by some “spontaneous motion of the body” apart from the “free power of the mind.” For Spinoza, in language as in all domains of human action, “the decision of the mind which is believed to be free . . . is nothing more than the affirmation” of an existing idea.148 Current research into Herder’s rather slapdash Spinozism has foregrounded his resistance to both causal determinacy and willful arbitrariness; at the time Herder was writing, it was the damage the latter did to thought that seemed especially to privilege characteristically European forms of epistemological and colonial violence. Along with the “dynamic historicity of the natural world,” this meant in-

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troducing internal diversity into the enlightenment category of the universal subject.149 Herder’s romanticism takes up the unwilled reproduction of thought, but transforms it by emphasizing the spontaneity or reactivation in each moment of the subject’s participation in a social collective, yielding the thoroughgoing sense of language as the product not of an individuated or homogeneous, but of a dispersed and differentiated will. Already in his early writings on language, Herder offers an account of the internal heterogeneity of “national” languages, composed of “borrowed viewpoints.”150 But more consequentially, it is when faced with the problem of how to distribute linguistic will among collectives that Herder makes language’s original moment inaccessible. This has the further effect of pushing readers to reimagine that originary “moment” as materially present in everyday experience.151 The relocation of linguistic origin from a primitive past into the midst of the daily reproduction of life troubles illusions about rootedness: it rattles the fixed stability of temporally distant origins, the flat pictures imagined by reconstructed histories, the linear time of civilization’s singular progress. Posing the problem of language origin in terms of a continuous sequence of accidents and errors, Herder’s embrace of nature as a benevolent unfreedom is best read alongside the enlightenment countercurrent represented by a deracinated writer like Wheatley. As we will see, Wheatley positions herself against monumentalized timelines of humanity’s “education” through her own heterogeneous self-­identification as “Ethiop” and American. This partial stance, making something new with its “borrowed” language and its pointedly situated appeals to freedom deferred, interrupts a certain wholeness in the notion of civilizational progress that always lurks in historicism. Wheatley poses her lived unfreedom as an unnatural condition, which is why her poetry must imagine something beyond it: a new kind of mobility and a sense of possibility that orients her language toward an uncertain future. But it is work to make what some will see as an accident—­her intellect, her eloquence—­look natural. This calls to mind another possible effect of the idea of unfreedom in Spinozan philosophy: that it helps find and recognize knowledge in unexpected places. Writing on enlightenment thought in the Haitian revolution, Nick Nesbitt argues that it inspired an “improvisational, nonhierarchical epistemology.”152 This is probably not what Herder

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intends with it, but the idea that language was invented involuntarily, and is remade continuously and collectively, means it is happening everywhere and all the time, reliant on what one of his readers has called a socially distributed “language labor.”153 This is why it is so important to see that nature in his scheme gives language not just differentiated durability, but an overall looseness, a changing social reality. And this “radical restructuring” of language theory toward actualism—­substantially modified when we place it in proximity with the actualism of Wheatley’s poetics—­was made possible by the invention of a concept of collective linguistic will, a peculiar mixture of active and passive linguistic participation. Herder directly countermands Locke’s claim that “the signification of sounds is not natural, but only imposed and arbitrary,” writing that it is “opposed to the whole analogy of all human forces of soul” to imagine language “thought out from pure arbitrary volition [Willkür].”154 “The whole analogy” is shorthand for language as a form of life, which we see more plainly in Humboldt’s later, deceptively simple claim about speakers and language: “they make use of it without knowing how they have fashioned it.”155 Humboldt’s concession to nonknowledge highlights linguistic agencies at different orders of magnitude: the first and second “they” here distinguish a local, individual act from a collective one. The split in this pronoun, and the negotiation of individual and group which it holds open, are Herderian impulses.156 Nonknowledge stands here against that liberating of signification canonized in Locke’s philosophy (the sign’s progressive autonomy from environmental constraints),  which allows attention to settle and fix on the sign or word, as separable and extractable items. We can understand the linguistic separability defined by Lockean nominalism as symptomatic of a geopolitical moment in European empire-­ building when the decontextualized movement of languages around the globe intensified the impression of the alien word as an uprooted word, freed on its timeline of progress from a long past willful act, fantasized as its origin. For Herder, arbitrary language is a false solution to the obstacle of opacity: “a sensation which can only be had through the obscure sense of feeling is susceptible of no word for us, because it is susceptible of no distinct characteristic mark. Hence the foundation of humanity is, if we are talking about voluntary language, linguistically inexpressible.”157

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Obscurity fills language’s developmental timeline with contradictions: how does one describe the indebtedness, responsiveness, or attachments of language, without first representing it as alienated or separable from that environment? How can the developmental continuity of language formation be narrated if the categories by which we might recognize it are by definition already abstracted, alienated, uprooted? Herder’s determined orientation against the singular will is exemplary of a broader romantic dissent from the impulse to lift or extract language from its environments, speech forms, or social entanglements—­to formalize and privilege the power of the “uprooted word.” He naturalized language, because—­long before Alfred North Whitehead would write that “there is no nature at an instant”—­he harbored a conviction that “nature knows no rest,” and that slow revolutions, both natural and social, persist “unnoticed, quietly, but all the more powerfully shaping the world.”158 A late poem “The I: A Fragment” lashes out against individuation, reaching instead toward a receptive involuntarism, or mitigated will, unthreatened by its own dependency, and drawing strength from the recognition that what appears to be outside us is actually what sustains us: . . . Separated From all that lives, from what surrounded And still surrounds you, what feeds and livens you, What would you be? Not an “I.” Every single drop in your vital fluid; in your blood every single particle; in your soul and heart, each rushing thought and knack, habit, inference and act; (An engine you exercise without knowing it) Every word whatsoever from your lips, every feature Of your countenance, is a stranger’s property Conferred to you, yet only on loan. So, always varying, constantly changing The owner of these strangers’ properties slinks through the world. He sheds clothes and habits, Changes languages, customs, opinions,

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As the restless-­walking tread of ages presses these Upon him, as the great mother forms His heart and head in her womb . . . . . . What part Of your ten times ten thousand Feelings is truly yours?159 Agencies—­linguistic and otherwise—­are inside and outside: “Every word whatsoever from your lips . . . is a stranger’s property / Conferred to you, yet only on loan.” Explicit about redistributing linguistic property, these lines neatly contradict that organic “Herderian” language, in its naturalized Eurocentrism, which Benedict Anderson called Herder’s “private-­ property language” (in fact, Herder comes close here to Bakhtin, who famously wrote that “the word in language is half someone else’s”).160 The poem reshapes an imagined freedom of action into what Spinoza calls the “causes which have disposed [us] to wish and desire,” yet the chameleonic “owner of these strangers’ properties” is free to act, provided there is acknowledgment that arrival in the world is a kind of dependency, and one’s agencies are on loan.161 With its reference to shared properties, the poem plainly works against the unquestioned possessive individual necessary as a fictional agent in the logic of the market. By theorizing the “human individual as a composite singularity,” Spinozan thought often functions in the eighteenth century as an unspoken antagonist of liberal thinkers like Locke and Smith, because, as Marxian critics have argued, his metaphysics allowed for “the possibility of imagining forms of individuality or human singularity between the juridical categories of the individual and the state.”162 In this poem, Herder may, as Ulrich Gaier argues, most evidently be counteracting the voracious ego of Fichtean monism, but more interestingly his redistribution of the “I” and its properties redefines selfhood as a composite fiction, participating in collective drives “without knowing it.”163 Though it has been called a poem of “partial-­ness,” I would add that it is equally a poem of self-­difference or transindividuality, a composite form of personhood incorporating what is interior and exterior across the self’s apparent boundaries.164 Herder’s efforts to pull apart the basis of the sovereign will—­whether consolidated in the individual or in the state—­deserve far more attention,

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as does his desire to comprehend the contradiction of an internal alterity, an inside-­out subject, to dispel what he alternately called “the pernicious bad habit / of the hard I” and “the prejudices that cling to the self.”165 Herder theorized monist transindividuality as immortality, or a “binding medium” of experience that links us to our surroundings: “this is the invisible, hidden medium that links together minds through thoughts; hearts through inclinations and drives; senses through impressions and forms; societies through laws and institutions,” and so on.166 We might still call this medium “genius,” but as a “natural” process of social formation it is far more conflicted, accidental, and unstable than we might expect, for the point of holding onto it “against our will” is to open us up to others: “did we not let go of ourselves and open ourselves to others? Did we not receive from others and feel that they were a part of us and we were a part of them?” We become accustomed to the voice, mien, glance, and expression of the other in such a way that we unconsciously appropriate them and transmit them to others. This is the invisible, magic cord that ties together even human gestures; it is an endless transmission of characteristics—­a palingenesis and metempsychosis of thoughts, inclinations of our hearts, and drives that we assimilate and then reject, and vice versa. We believe we exist in isolation from others, but this is never the case; we do not even exist in isolation when by ourselves.167

The linguistic subject imagined here, submitted to this “endless transmission of characteristics,” is rendered social by reframing unknowing or unwilled expression as participation. The passage imaginatively dissolves or dismantles the familiar units of language into social and material environments. This dissolution is related to the antinominalist desire, often articulated in romantic texts, to change scale or slow down how we examine the world’s rates of change, and to reconfigure or break down the artificial building blocks of words and grammatical categories. At a different level of abstraction, it is also meant to counteract the utilitarian language ideology that assumes language is created, imposed, and used by intending subjects in order to represent an objective, preexisting world. Herder’s

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ecological language theory, calculated to unseat linguistic models of this kind, asks that we recognize a passive role in our own language formation, at the same time that we assume responsibility for an active role in its ongoing re-­creation. The categories we reflexively rely on—­word and world, but also minds and bodies, subjects and objects—­are inseparable. While attentive to the force of alienation in language, this theory also allows us to dwell on material sign processes and situated bodies, because language is a thing that takes place under particular conditions.168 To read astonishing excerpts like these makes us feel that Herder’s ideas, had they developed differently, might have had far other implications. Like Herder, the other writers featured in this study supply images of language from different submerged positions, from which language is felt as at once both solid (a product of history) and soluble (still actively in play). In the aggregate, these images show how romantic-­era writers highlight not only language itself as alienated from social life, but the feelings of uprootedness that accompany varied forms of social alienation. In its simultaneous give and resistance, the notion of language as a naturalized object, as more than just mine, opens toward the thought that we occupy contradictory kinds of time.

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The Transported Word Wheatley’s Part

All colonized people . . . position themselves in relation to the civilizing language. — ­F rantz Fanon Upon my arrival, how like a Barbarian shou’d I look to the Natives; I can promise that my tongue shall be quiet for a strong reason indeed being an utter stranger to the language of Anamaboe. — ­P hillis Wheatley SCENES OF TR ANSPORT

By identifying the uprooted word as a formal convention of transatlantic language study that evolves across the romantic century, we may glimpse how the racial projects embedded in the “progress” of philology had their roots in colonial knowledge production. Following Voloshinov, Williams, Said, and other, more recent scholars, I have argued that early ethnographic genres of language description helped produce and rationalize the formal separation of language from its speakers, so that language on its own increasingly came to seem “natural.” As speech would increasingly come to be racialized on scientific grounds, theories of linguistic freedom and unfreedom—­voluntarism or involuntarism—­would acquire different valences for different subjects. In this book, which follows mostly familiar white male writers, only indirectly affected by the unprecedented unsettling of global populations still under way in their lifetimes, I continually 60

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return to forms of linguistic involuntariness theorized through images of natural process, as one way to consider what Sunil Agnani has called the enlightenment’s “internal plurality.” Where do these writers carry racializing formalisms, either as targets of criticism, or as the furniture of their ideas? Where are alternatives proposed in defiance of civilizing currents of enlightenment thinking, and where, by contrast, are the latter’s exclusionary universals hiding out (or openly embraced)? This chapter, however, offers a contrastive view for the subsequent development of later romantic images that exult in our unwilled participation in nature’s “tendencies,” offering instead an early poetics of diasporic naturalization. In The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery, Matt Sandler calls romanticism “a European-­originating, cosmopolitan ideology which sometimes emphasized the local, Indigenous, and rooted,” noting that this means (for African American writers) that “diasporic Black artists and intellectuals had to make significant revisions to its basic components.”1 For my purposes, I would not call romanticism “European-­originating,” because I want to register some of the ways romantic literature becomes most sharply visible, already in its earliest forms, when recalled against the backdrop of Europe’s encounters with non-­European worlds.2 Sandler’s keen point about the diasporic Black lyric voice needing to introduce “significant revisions” to the impulses of romanticism holds true proleptically, though, in the case of Phillis Wheatley (provided we note that she was herself an underacknowledged resource for European romanticism). In an epigraph to this chapter, drawn from a letter written after her emancipation expressing her refusal to return to Africa, the disposition I will draw out in her poetry is cuttingly condensed in her ironic self-­identification as a Bostonian “Barbarian,” silenced in this imagined encounter with the “Natives” of “Anamaboe.” As Randy Sparks has outlined in detail, by the mid-­eighteenth century, Annamaboe, or Anomobu, was among the major slave-­trading ports on the Gold Coast. It was roughly the size of Charleston, South Carolina, or Kingston, Jamaica, and the majority of its inhabitants, whether Fante, British, mixed, or using any of myriad other identifiers, were involved in the slave trade, which continued to increase steeply through the end of the century.3 When Wheatley refers to the “language of Anamaboe,” does she mean Fante, or

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does she mean—­in a more abstract and encompassing sense—­the active social practice of the slave trade? Calling herself an utter stranger to it, either way, she makes clear that to imagine herself there is to imagine herself silenced. In this chapter, I argue that Wheatley harnesses her own linguistic displacement to fashion herself as a revolutionary poet engaged in “creative appropriations” of enlightenment thought.4 She used her own manifest uprootedness, as a so-­called “Barbarian” in the alien territory of New England, transforming herself through a laborious, life-­encompassing act of linguistic artifice, using her love of the word (what Carolivia Herron calls her “philology”) as subversion—­a weapon in her fight to change what her readers viewed as natural.5 Reading her work as a poetic commentary on the contradictory demands placed upon the racialized subject conscripted into European literacy—­a Black subject claiming the white space of print—­grounds this book’s subsequent chapters, focused on Euro-­A merican authors.6 What I am calling diasporic naturalization makes linguistic change—­here, a softening effected by the poetic imagination—­a question of transport and mobility, and does so in a way the other authors do not: from a position of unnatural unfreedom. Wheatley’s word is shaped in advance by an enforced partiality, insofar as she is audible only as an incomplete linguistic subject (whether as former “Barbarian” or as “imitative” poet). My claim is that her poems counteract not this partiality itself, but its disparagement. I argue that the linguistic disposition she projects—­as an “Ethiop” addressing Harvard undergraduates, or the “Afric muse” addressing the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, fluent in their language—­makes a virtue of transported alterity, makes her poetic authority an effect of diaspora.7 Wheatley installs a “discrepant modernity” in these terms of address, preemptively reversing the poles of what Homi Bhabha calls the “disturbing, uncertain time of the colonial intervention” which later European writers would register as a “horror” of the primitive.8 In place of a language of essentializing archaism, Wheatley’s poetic performance as a diasporic linguistic subject writes over colonial allochronism, even as its racial distinctions are still forming, redirecting through a new creative agency, as an African-­born American writer, the smooth cadence of neoclassical verse.

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The radical pose of Wheatley’s work is consonant with romantic-­era linguistic actualism, but she nears that intellectual current less through theme or form, and more through the inherently social criterion of audibility—­that is, the pragmatic project of making herself heard. For Wheatley, participating in the civilizing language is experienced alternately as imposing and empowering. As Patricia Hill Collins writes, “partiality, and not universality, is the condition of being heard”; for those advancing alternative knowledge claims, “owning their position” is a marker of credibility.9 Collins’s standpoint epistemology takes socially defined categories of subject formation as interdependent factors that shape the subject’s audibility; and it takes the ability to take up a position as that which shapes the subject’s credibility. With Hazel Carby, I would then add to our picture of Wheatley’s positioning that because “the terrain of language is a terrain of power relations,” and because it emerges “between socially organized persons in the process of their interaction,” the way Wheatley finds to “own” her linguistic position is by presenting us with self-­conscious expressions of a particular linguistic disposition.10 Held by her unique conjuncture of overlapping identity categories, being heard may seem to require Wheatley to approximate the ostensibly universal European enlightenment values she accommodates formally in her writing. Collins helps us see that Wheatley’s struggle for audibility, rather than assimilation, asks us to listen for the ties her voice continually creates with its surroundings; Carby helps us locate these ties not as identitarian, but as interactional. In my view, to explore these ties does not mean trying to hear a return to something original or authentically vernacular in her experience. Rather, the picture of language developed in her poetry is a kind of “transport” that affiliates the ecstatic language of poetic expression with a more general passage to freedom by way of the metamorphosis of the voice after death, which she repeatedly invokes in her elegies. The crux of this reading of Wheatley’s Poems comes, however, not in the elegies, but in a question of mobilization in an unusual first-­person-­ plural future tense, shared with a Black artist, Scipio Moorhead (who some have argued made the one extant portrait of Wheatley): “On what seraphic pinions shall we move  .  .  .  ?” In “To S. M., a young African Painter, on seeing his Works,” the freer physics of heaven offer an exper-

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imental space of future transport that will release tongues to “flow” and muses to “glow”: But when these shades of time are chas’d away, And darkness ends in everlasting day, On what seraphic pinions shall we move, And view the landscapes in the realms above? There shall thy tongue in heav’nly murmurs flow, And there my muse with heav’nly transport glow Like other well-­k nown poems in her collection that provisionally open outward and upward toward a new light or lightness, only to run up against a hard limit at the poem’s end, this “transport” is abruptly arrested in its final lines: “Cease, gentle muse! The solemn gloom of night / Now seals the fair creation from my sight.”11 Still, the arrest that here blocks imagination’s flight-­path leaves in place an opened space in the mind—­ call it poetry, heaven, or freedom. “There,” the aesthetic imagination has carved out something unforeseen and exploratory, something that offers the lift and propulsion of getting carried away, a rush—­what Wheatley herself calls that “new creation rushing on my sight.” Moorhead’s bold “new creation” is aligned here with Wheatley’s own poetic practice. If the poem addressed to “S. M.” ends with flight arrested, the poem that precedes it, “Niobe in Distress for her Children,” provides a startling counterpoint by refusing to bring language to a standstill, refusing to finish the poem at all, at the exact moment its classical source-­text dictates a woman’s tongue metamorphoses into stone. I close the chapter with a reading of that passage from “Niobe,” with its intense compression of questions not only of violence, punishment, and justice but of embodied speech, imaginative transformation, and language after life in “this world.” Unlike the recurring belief in African diasporic myth, literature, and song that sees in death a return to the African continent, Wheatley’s “transport” or metamorphosis here does not seem to correlate to an imaginative return to her birthplace in Senegambia. As the letter cited in my epigraph documents, Wheatley had opportunities to return to Africa, and chose not to, articulating her refusal, as I discuss below, in part through

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linguistic alienation: to do so under the conditions offered would be to lose her voice. To be heard is to be neither singular, nor whole, but a mercurial and partial creature, in fact the partial creator of that linguistic subjectivity she articulates as an African-­British-­A merican poet. In the spaces carved out by the efforts of imagination sketched in “To S. M.,” for which “the realms above” stand, new “landscapes” come into view, where new modes of transport are possible and new kinds of language move. In her poetry, Wheatley insistently maps the linguistic space of poetry onto the language of freedom by way of angelic or “seraphic” song. In doing so, she repurposes the conventional heavenly “there”—­“There shall thy tongue . . . And there my muse . . .”—­making new sense out of that strange timeless temporality of “everlasting day,” and theorizing what she calls a “softer” language as medium of future communication, reconstituting the enlightenment desire for universal transparency. For Wheatley, the question of linguistic agency is self-­evidently fraught in ways it is not for the Anglo-­A merican writers in the following chapters. To a heightened degree, Wheatley embodies many of the contradictions of individuality and freedom in the modern world. An exemplary insider/ outsider, her stance insists that all bodies are partially positioned, even as some understand themselves as unpositioned, as universal or neutral observers. “Positioned” here means with respect to civilized modernity or, as Fanon has it, “in relation to the civilizing language”: whereas for Euro-­ American networks of romantic linguistic thought, vernacularization (emplacement within a local or native environment) becomes a defining aesthetic motive, for non-­European and nonwhite writers that motive is complicated by the already displaced experience of an exceptional literate subject laying claim to the formally uprooted categories of European languages. The diasporic claim to the alien word appears at first to be a move toward universalization, from a perspective not of emplacement but of displacement and acclimatization; hence the assumption that her poetry is merely imitative. In Wheatley’s case, to take possession of biblical stories and motifs, Western literary references, or the enlightenment discourse of freedom is to experiment with the transportation these new languages afford, in which project displacement itself is an advantage. As Betsy Erkkila writes, Wheatley was able to “revoice” and “reaccent” the language of

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insurrection in revolutionary America.12 But this also allowed her to subtly theorize audibility by way of bodily dissonance, opposing, with what Barbara Johnson calls her “controlled and devastating irony,” the unfreedom of racialized slavery to the liberations of political independence, religious conversion, and bodily release through death.13 It is the space of poetry itself where these contradictions play out. In the layered and interactive space her poetry mapped, she found ways to make her “submerged voice” carry.14 Her Afro-­British contemporary Ignatius Sancho, who called hers a “mind animated by Heaven,” wrote that Wheatley’s poems “do credit to nature—­and put art—­merely as art—­to the blush.”15 Properly unfolding this phrasing would take time (the blush itself, for instance, is a racialized term in the age of sentiment); what I love is that it attributes to Wheatley native genius not as a given, but as high art. That her poems “do credit to nature” also demands we heed the traces of a different, “softer” language that surfaces throughout their imagined worlds. Critics have identified the environmental racial theories current in the eighteenth century as part of Wheatley’s strategic self-­representations, while also suggesting that her acclimation to European literary traditions demands close attention to discursive strategy.16 These readers note that Wheatley draws on enlightenment “climate theory,” in the French tradition of Montesquieu and Buffon, redeploying its terms to critique the social uses of racialized blackness.17 In that tradition, as Allewaert glosses it, “particularities of place” affect or determine social and biological formations.18 Wheatley both used this tradition and mitigated environmental determinism by demonstrating that those like herself who are dislocated in geospatial terms are themselves changed, even as they create change. It is not difference, but racial hierarchy and oppression that poisons social forms, basing itself in naturalized human distinctions rather than the shared capacity for mobility. Wheatley’s fluency, mapping her identity across and between cultures, may seem a simple bid for inclusion in universal categories, a familiar humanist gesture of sympathetic appeal—­as though preempting the supplicatory “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” with the challenge, “When I write poetry, is my human voice not audible?” I am arguing that there is more here, in fact a tough-­minded critique, in her emphasis on the

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mobile and transformative qualities of language: her poetry places that possible leveling of presumed universality in an indefinitely delayed language to come, at once imagining it and pointing to its inevitable postponement under the governing principles of racial time. In his discussion of Wheatley’s poetry, Goudie suggests that such “creolizing vernaculars” of extraordinary voices that cross a writer’s identity with the production of a language believed to belong to some other bodily identity assert a “liberatory potential” even as they “de-­authorize” identitarian essentialisms that fix hierarchical social roles.19 This allows us to hear Wheatley’s work actively articulating a position of self-­difference, in and against local communities and transatlantic consumer publics that confined her voice within crossed identitarian lines of race, class, gender, and citizenship. But we can rephrase this as a “partiality” discernible in her ways of knowing—­ the double movement of her poetry, which in its claim upon universality does indeed take its distance from the “vernacular” June Jordan looked for there without finding it, but also uses its diasporic worldliness to make a virtue of the stance of the “outsider-­within,” and to position the reader so that we, too, stand at once both in and outside of available forms of enlightenment subjectivity.20 She is not assimilating, but rather—­as Jordan says—­making herself at home. This gesture is not politely cosmopolitan; it is openly geopolitical. I hope to show that this reading of Wheatley allows us to understand anew a familiar participatory poetics of romanticism more broadly, which elaborates nature’s hold on us in social terms, but from wholly different social stances. Wordsworth’s gray romantic desire, for instance, to “feed this mind of ours / In a wise passiveness,” is about a kind of patience that opens and slows: it shares mind in common and reasserts a linguistic kinship with the world outside of himself, by quietly conversing with the “mighty sum / Of things forever speaking” (including the “old grey stone” where he is wisely and passively perched).21 But the wisdom of patience varies across subject positions and linguistic dispositions. As I will show, in Wheatley’s poems material natures sometimes speak too, but with a doubled, echoic tongue, inscribing deep-­seated artifice within any imagined linguistic naturalness. Wheatley manages her own audibility quite differently from the ceded agency of a Herder or a Wordsworth. She is not

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patient, but quick; she does not have the time they have. Negotiating freedom and unfreedom, she points to the blind spots of eighteenth-­century naturalism from the partial perspective of a participant-­observer, a diasporic subject of history specified in her race, gender, and social standing. In English, a “civilizing” language marked by its Atlantic and worldwide movements, and particularly by the “language of Anamaboe” in a broadly social rather than narrowly linguistic sense, Wheatley’s ideas about her own formation in language contrast with enlightenment, romantic, and positivist histories. Ironically embracing her role as cultivated barbarian, she adopts a participatory, future-­oriented naturalism to unravel the primitivist timeline of modernity. The chapter culminates with Wheatley’s rewriting of Ovid’s Niobe, who is supposed to turn to stone, but instead this time is suspended in action. As we saw in chapter 1, alignments of human with geologic temporality readily lend themselves to assigning a past tense to the present, “naturalizing” it by rendering it a passive object. Wheatley spoils that transformation, and helps find another voice for romanticism by bringing present and future into play against a linguistics tied to a primitivist past. P H I L O L O G I C A L R A C I A L F O R M AT I O N

In her now classic essay on Wheatley, June Jordan suggestively evokes the imagined “vernacular” Wheatley might have tried out, if she had not felt pressed by her circumstances into adopting the language of a “white man’s literature of England”: “consider what might meet her laborings, as poet, should she, instead, invent a vernacular precise to Senegal, precise to slavery.”22 Though she had lived at least her first seven years in “a country of many tongues,” the language of her poetry is the English of the sphere to which she was euphemistically—­as she herself put it—­“brought.” It was a language imbued with “the conceits, the ambitions, the mannerisms” of the mid-­eighteenth century’s leisured neoclassical aesthetics. These alien scripts “filled up the mind of the African child,” to create in her poetry a mixture of Western classical allusions, English Restoration iambic beats, and transatlantic evangelical idioms. For Jordan, what was “lost” in this prolonged contact zone encounter was something truer to her past: her interior life.23 While I am not thinking within the framework of loss, Jor-

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dan’s imaginative experiment reminds us to take seriously the question of her linguistic prowess less as a prodigy and more as a strategist of freedom. Both Jordan and more recently the poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers help us think of her not only as a representative of early Black Atlantic diasporic “literacy,” but also as a young West African child coming of age and intent on survival in a strange country, after the dehumanizing terror of transatlantic passage, and her sale to the Wheatleys upon arrival in New England. In The Age of Phillis, Jeffers vividly imagines for modern readers, in poems she calls “lost letters” and particularly in their bracketed, italicized, and crossed-­out passages, what might be missing from the record, what might have gone unheard. After acclimating to this foreign place, she made herself at home in the language and registers that allowed her voice to be partially heard.24 One important way to read the losses Jordan and Jeffers point to in the legacy of Wheatley’s voice is—­following Henry Louis Gates, and more recently Joseph Rezek—­as the logical result of the impossible demands on Black writing in the eighteenth century. In the print sphere of Europe and its colonies, Wheatley’s poetry was read first within the enlightenment context of a racializing rhetoric of civilization, as first and foremost a disproof of intellectual inferiority and a “verbal witness” of human belonging.25 As Gates puts it, “slaves and ex-­slaves met the challenge of the Enlightenment to their humanity by literally writing themselves into being,” with strategic self-­representations of thought, feeling, experience, and belief.26 They sought to create, in other words, the Black romantic subject, against contemporary European colonial discourses. The eighteenth-­century double bind for Black writers of proving one’s own humanity, using the very terms designed for its rejection, cornered the few like Wheatley who managed to cross the thresholds of literacy, print, and circulation by demanding what was deemed impossible, both in advance and in retrospect: “an authentic black voice in the text of Western letters.” One paradox here is the contradiction between a definition of being human as linguistic audibility, while being forced to be “heard” in print: “black people could become speaking subjects only by inscribing their voices in the written word.”27 In this way Wheatley was conscripted into a mode of literacy within whose sphere she embodied an inassimilable exception.

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At the same time, caught in the “dilemma” of being both “a black convert and a neoclassical poet,” Wheatley’s status as speaking subject was legislated not only on racialized linguistic terms, but on the feminized and religious purity of her vocation.28 On the one hand, poetry was offered as proof of Black genius (while also judged by readers like Thomas Jefferson, disinclined to recognize Black humanity, to be “below the dignity of criticism”).29 On the other, her patrons in both England and New England were abolitionists in the evangelist spirit of Calvinist Methodism, some of whom urged Wheatley to join the “colonization” of Africa by freed slaves in order carry the light of the Word back to the country of her birth.30 It was clear both to these patrons and to Wheatley that such a venture would have meant the sacrifice of her literary ambitions. As the Reverend John Thornton pointedly wrote to her, having suggested such a scheme, her eloquence was a snare: “the kingdom of heaven is not in word, but in power . . . when I wish you to have increasing views of redeeming Love, I would have you thrown into silent wonder and adoration of the wisdom and goodness of God.”31 Kenneth Silverman convincingly interprets Thornton’s Calvinist “anti-­ intellectualism” as an admonition “against pride in the intellectual gifts which made her name synonymous with the mental equality of blacks.” Thus, for Wheatley, the Black enlightenment double bind of claiming humanity in terms designed to deny it was compounded by a conflict between her own poetic vocation and her missionary circle’s suspicion of “over-­intellectualization” and linguistic genius (let alone linguistic genius in the Black, female, enslaved laboring class). The heaviness of these combined linguistic pressures is, I think, what Jordan believes holds Wheatley’s poems back. I suggest speculatively that this heaviness is also simply the substance of her position, or her linguistic disposition, in these imbricated worlds. “To speak means above all assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization,” Frantz Fanon warns, with the power and burden of that “possession.”32 In the chapter epigraph, Wheatley refuses John Thornton’s proposal that she become a missionary, by asserting her literary persona as the embodiment of a modern linguistic subject of a new kind. Thornton’s desire for Wheatley to be “thrown into silent wonder” seems to be part of a sustained doctrinal exchange, which helps us hear the shady humor of her phrase, “I can

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promise that my tongue shall be quiet.” The pressure to quiet down, to douse with devotion and service that “intrinsic ardor” that drove her to write, was a gendered, heteropatriarchal imperative as much as a racialized demand; Thornton was also proposing that Wheatley should marry either one or the other of two Black missionaries from Newport, Rhode Island, Bristol Yamma and John Quamine, both already committed to the journey. With another sharp irony, Wheatley deflects this bid to reabsorb her recently emancipated self back into service of others, by suggesting that she would be their burden: “but why do you hon’d sir, wish those poor men so much trouble as to carry me so long a voyage?” Wheatley has taken this transatlantic “voyage” once before, in the other direction; as her poems restlessly move toward the future, Wheatley’s freedom points forward, upward, and inward, but not backward. Indeed, the “backward” orientation of the voyage to what Wheatley sums up in her reference to “Anamaboe” also identifies a kind of primitivism. David Kazanjian reads the exchange between Thornton and Wheatley in terms of her rejection of the broader terms of the colonization project, in which abolition and Black liberation conform with the US national project of racial purification; her emphasis on home as “my British & American friends,” a social milieu not defined by race, is her pointed reply.33 But more interesting for us, as I’ve indicated above, is the complex linguistic reversal she makes in this letter, proposing unseriously that she would be a “Barbarian” among Africans, and an “utter stranger” to the local language: “upon my arrival, how like a Barbarian shou’d I look to the Natives; I can promise that my tongue shall be quiet for a strong reason indeed being an utter stranger to the language of Anamaboe. Now to be serious . . .” By framing her return to Africa as cultural encounter in these terms (“Barbarian,” “utter stranger to the language”), she ironically echoes words used in the prefatory texts to her book, Poems on Various Subjects, published the previous year: first, John Wheatley’s declaration that having been “brought from Africa to America, in the Year 1761, between Seven and Eight Years of Age,” she had “in sixteen Months Time from her Arrival, attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before”; and second, the famous testimonial from a panel of citizens of repute: “we whose Names are under-­written, do assure the World, that the

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POEMS specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by PHILLIS, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa.”34 In recycling this language, she makes herself at home not just in English, but in the “speaking-­space of modernity” through ironic disidentification not with Africanness, but with the categories that would fix her Africanness as a condition of permanent premodernity.35 Redefining linguistic barbarity as the English of her new world, while still humorously and firmly positioning herself within it, she disorients a “West”-­directed timeline of cultivation, by frankly displaying its incoherence. Wheatley’s imagined scene of encounter helps us see her against a background spanning the romantic century, from the post-­Locke enlightenment language theory of Smith to the romantic philology of Wilhelm von Humboldt and the positivism of his readers. Here I work through how the uprooted word prepares a path for philological racial formation, a counterpart to what Robert Lawrence Gunn calls “philologies of race,” giving us a new window onto Wheatley’s significance.36 In the promotional copy that announced her passage over the threshold into civilization through her study of European languages, in her book itself and in the reviews that met its publication on both sides of the Atlantic, the manifestly remarkable phenomenon of her poetry is miscast as a passive or imitative induction into Western civilization, rather than as an active creative accomplishment (what some call “creolization,” if by that we mean not the content of linguistic forms but a mixed disposition, that is, a critical stance from in-­and outside of the ostensibly “civilized”).37 For Wheatley’s “contentious relation to Enlightenment knowledges” is not only visible through discursive strategies in her poetry that play reversals on climatic “hierarchies of race and place,” as Goudie puts it; I count as an oppositional knowledge-­claim her performative pushback against language’s developmental timeline, as it takes shape in stage-­oriented histories of civilization across the eighteenth century.38 Adam Smith’s “Considerations on the First Formation of Languages” (1761), appended to later editions of his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), runs on this developmental timeline the way a train runs on its tracks. “Considerations” represents a widely circulating and influential way of

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thinking about language, highlighting how important interventions like Wheatley’s were. Emerging at a moment of expanding interest in language origin, in a mid-­eighteenth-­century phase of linguistic speculation typified by “post-­Lockean philosophy and pre-­familial linguistics,” Smith’s argument has been called “organicist” to distinguish it from rationalist and supernatural theories of language origin.39 Its organicism was not the more familiar nineteenth-­century variety, of course, which famously literalized metaphors of growth, genealogical descent, and decay. Yet it predicts this literalization, in the sense that language for Smith and others “grew alongside the development of mankind” after emerging out of origins conjectured through psychologized behaviors in imagined scenes of proto-­human sociality, like mimetic gestures and “natural cries.”40 I won’t rehearse the theoretical debates that drove those speculations, or descend deeply into Smith’s essay (which speculates about the sequential historical emergence of grammatical parts of speech). Instead, I emphasize that Smith’s narrative of linguistic origin and progress follows a logical trajectory of decreasing attachment to physical surroundings, and that this logic fixes in mind a historical timeline for language that equates the development of civilization with the gradual production of abstract thought. Smith’s story is full of the “-­isms” romantic-­era writers wished to dismantle: nominalist, in the sense of being focused on language as a hoard of names or words as referential units; voluntarist, in the sense of giving linguistic agency to intending subjects to express premeditated desires; and primitivist, in the sense of positing language origin in a distant past. “Two savages,” Smith speculates, “who had never been taught to speak, but had been bred up remote from the societies of men, would naturally begin to form that language by which they would endeavor to make their mutual wants intelligible to each other, by uttering certain sounds, whenever they meant to denote certain objects.”41 Smith then explains how, through a kind of rhetorical transposition (“now not at all necessary”), words once used for single objects or locations would transform “insensibly” into “classes and assortments” through increasing “degree[s] of abstraction and generalization.”42 As the experience of the savage is “enlarged,” names once used for particular objects (“cave, tree, fountain”) become increasingly general; the speaker comes “to denominate a multitude, by what originally was in-

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tended to express an individual.”43 This linguistic path toward civilization is also a path from natural necessity to freedom, from the physical to the “metaphysical.” At one end of this story is savagery, at the other, reason; humans attain rationality by becoming linguistically independent of their environment. Knowing this, we can see how deftly the essay borrows on its own empiricist epistemology—­sensory impressions preceding derivative ideas—­to build onto liberal individualism an explanatory principle for the “progress” of language toward civilization (about which Smith, in a profoundly enlightenment mood, expresses an unconvincing ambivalence toward the essay’s end).44 The privileges of civilization include enjoying regret for what is lost in the acquisition of civil society’s freedoms; but the theatrical dejection at losing language’s archaic poetic “sweetness” is ballasted by the unquestioned good of detachability—­linguistic, social, and affective—­from one’s surroundings. In its recourse to “first formers” for a picture of what Hobbes and others called “inventors” or what Locke called “the first beginners of language,” the essay is also perfectly typical of the tendency to jump easily between temporal remove, spatial distance, and civilizational difference. Insofar as it is focused neither on rational nor on supernatural linguistic origins, the essay develops out of post-­Lockean epistemological premises shared to a degree with several slightly earlier, quite different, and better known essays concerning language origin: Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746) and Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine de l’ inégalité (1755). Smith reviewed Rousseau’s work (which itself discusses Condillac’s) shortly after its publication, for an Edinburgh periodical; by that time, he had already begun lecturing on language, and was presumably already developing the theory outlined in “Considerations.”45 In sequence, Condillac’s, Rousseau’s, and Smith’s essays, different as they are, turn Locke’s psychological narratives of sign-­formation into developmental history, or linear accounts of global differences among peoples at different “stages” of civilization (if with markedly different conclusions). Smith’s essay at its core reiterates the “freedom” of detachment that Locke vividly described: “words become general by being made the signs of general ideas: and ideas become general, by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that par-

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ticular existence.”46 Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs point out that “to wrench language from society, as from nature, hinged on a process of decontextualization,” and that process itself depended on “redefining language in such a way that its social embeddedness could be construed as peripheral, pathological, and suppressible.”47 Deviating in any way from the imagined ideal of humanity in this disembedded or uprooted subject—­the reasoning, adult European male—­vitiated linguistic subjectivity, and Smith’s essay uses limit cases of the human familiar to the enlightenment, like the savage, child, and “clown.”48 Thus the essay reiterates not only a version of civil society’s stadial progress, but also the ways the very shape of the human plotted in history defined what language was and who could have it.49 For Locke, freedom is envisioned as the struggle for detachment, whose corresponding linguistic attribute is generality or abstraction. In Smith’s essay, a timeline emerges for language’s detachability, laid out along an “insensible” (unconscious) sequence of events by which some speakers gradually overcome the particular in order to become universal, while other speakers remain attached to particulars, hence bound to civilizational infancy. This narrative of linguistic detachability from sociospatial surroundings emerges precisely as the “multiplication of languages” observed and archived by fascinated Europeans provided an endless supply of newly detached counterexamples, non-­European languages deemed poor in abstraction. Sarah Rivett shows vividly how Indigenous American languages helped to produce European theories of language. By looking at transatlantic debates over missionary reports on the challenges of linguistic diversity for communicating the gospel, Rivett argues that Locke’s reading of French Jesuit reports, as in Chrestien Le Clercq’s description of the Mi’kmaq of today’s Nova Scotia, contributed in substantive ways to his picture of language’s formation. For Locke, linguistic “marks” or “signs” are distant from what is fixed or natural; the empiricist claim for the material origins of our ideas underwrites his belief in the so-­called “arbitrariness” of the linguistic sign, making “arbitrary” a shibboleth against language mysticism.50 In Rivett’s account, Locke completed an “epistemic transformation in language philosophy” by rendering words the products not of divine revelation, but of human thought and social relations, and

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this shift was prompted by transatlantic debates over “the materiality of language in practice”—­the obstacle of linguistic opacity on the missionary frontiers of New World colonies.51 Marginalia in Locke’s copy of Le Clercq’s Nouvelle relation de la Gaspésie (1691; probably acquired in 1698) reveal his interest in passages detailing the nondistinction between matter and spirit in Mi’kmaq cosmology; and while that work could not have directly inspired his earlier account of language’s proper detachability in his 1689 Essay, Rivett proposes that Locke’s sharp denial of language’s spirituality (which romantic-­century writers would reintroduce as language’s constitutive or world-­making force) means that “alternate philosophical world[s]” like this one prompted the picture of semiotic arbitrariness and individual freedom Locke produced during the 1690s.52 In the same way, Smith’s pictures of civil and economic society were generated against travel and missionary records from the Americas to Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands.53 Among those colonial and missionary frontiers, Walter Mignolo has described with great care the New World “colonization of language,” with its “reduction” or “taming” of indigenous languages into Latin; as he argues, this early modern colonial scene is just one moment in a much longer process by which “reading the word became more and more detached from reading the world.”54 Much remains to be written on the ways European pictures of language absorbed colonial knowledge production into speculative theories of language origin. But jumping ahead now to the nineteenth century reveals the absorption of that colonial standpoint into comparative grammar. Kathryn Woolard puts this succinctly: “colonial linguistic description, frankly political and conversion oriented in the early colonization of the Americas, came to be conceived by nineteenth-­century participants as a neutral scientific endeavor.”55 This transformation is one of the truly profound rearrangements of knowledge to occur in the romantic century, and its relevance for romantic literature has been too little discussed. How did literary aesthetics change, as the study of language shifted in the slow, transformative uprooting of the alien word? To understand this dimension of romantic-­era literature, we miss a tremendous opportunity if we neglect Wheatley’s poetry, as a body of work that quietly writes back to a global configuration of knowledge still assembling the historical timeline

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that consolidated racial difference as its motive force. Her voice interrupts this process of historical and philological racial formation. In fact, I read Wheatley as a sort of weathervane, helping to show the shifting patterns of response to dominant pictures of language in the enlightenment; as these patterns of response themselves become dominant in the subsequent shift toward natural models and organicism, they can still point us back to where romantic linguistic naturalism comes from, and suggest as well where it could have gone. It is precisely between that earlier “frankly political” linguistic description in colonial spaces that Woolard describes, and the “neutral” science that emerged to map linguistic difference as racial difference, that writers of the romantic century tried to reimagine language’s naturalness. In the movement of language study toward scientific neutrality, the timeline for the “growth” of civilized language in Smith becomes the conflicted Bildung embedded in Humboldt’s complex organicism, where a certain scientism already lurks. Humboldt’s grandest linguistic endeavor was the three-­volume, posthumous On the Kawi Language of the Island of Java (1836). A reissued version of the entire first volume, a book-­length introduction, became his best known theoretical writing on language in general. Humboldt poured years into the work, and the reason returns us to the question of roots. Kawi, also “Old Javanese,” is an Austronesian language of the Pacific, but an elite literary form—­a “poetic language”—­ with significant lexical influence from Sanskrit. In the 1820s, Humboldt studied Sanskrit in London, eventually playing an important role in the ascendance of Indo-­European comparative philology. In the introduction to the so-­called Kawi-­Werk, as elsewhere, Humboldt is defensive about the openly hierarchical distribution of qualities he ascribes to language families: languages of a “natural” order or “purely regular form,” of which Sanskrit is the paragon, stand in contrast to languages as different as Chinese, Hebrew, and Delaware that “deviate” from this course, in their “drawbacks” and “aberrations”: they lack “versatility,” “harmony,” “power.”56 They do not nurture the “habit of methodical reasoning.”57 Humboldt’s disciple and editor, J. C. Edward Buschmann, a scholar of Mesoamerican languages, wrote in his preface to the Kawi-­Werk that Humboldt wanted to show “how [even] the conquering force of a superior intellectual power

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is unable to disturb the fast roots which a native language has put down in nationality.” Warming to his theme, Buschmann goes on: “he wanted to unveil the deep meaning of the term language-­stem [Sprachstamm], that force which divides populations and imposes its awe-­inspiring law upon the search for human origins.”58 According to Buschmann, the work aims to prove that the historical grafting of Sanskrit onto the Austronesian “stem” cannot make Kawi proper kin to Indo-­European. In spite of the global reach of his linguistic studies, and his unsettling of the Eurocentrism of comparative philology, it seems to me the work is nevertheless plainly animated by an attachment to Indo-­Europeanness. Whether or not Buschmann’s account of Humboldt’s motives is to be trusted, the Kawi-­Werk is a milestone in the process of philological racial formation. This process was the result of the distanced study of language remaking colonial linguistics as science: for, of course, Humboldt’s scholarly speculations relied on texts prepared by missionaries, travel writers, and colonial agents. For the Kawi-­Werk, transcripts of poetry and “handwritten” Javanese dictionaries and grammars—­the bedrock of the author’s map of the Austronesian “family,” extending from Madagascar to the Easter Islands—­were supplied by John Crawfurd, a Scottish surgeon with the East India Company who served as a colonial administrator across South and Southeast Asia.59 The incorporation of material from the likes of Crawfurd is an underestimated part of the process that produced language as the sign of race, increasingly understood as a temporal, spatial, and intellectual distance from Europe. Crawfurd’s dreary, rationalized supremacism weaponizes enlightenment timelines to make much of “the weakness of the human mind in the infancy of civilization” (referring to those under his colonial watch). His writings act out the frame-­shift Woolard describes, where colonial power is remade as scientific objectivity normalizing the racialization of speakers.60 A noisome late essay, “European and Asiatic Races,” occasioned in 1866 a wonderful rebuttal from Dadabhai Naoroji, a nineteenth-­century Indian scholar, businessman, and politician, who patiently illustrated the logic by which a colonial enlightenment ethnographic gaze metamorphosed into the epistemological violence of scientific racism. Condemning the “superficial observation” of “foreign travelers,” who “bend and adapt facts to a foregone conclusion”

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(as when Crawfurd writes, “Beauty and symmetry of person would seem to decrease as we proceed from West to East”), Naoroji pointed out how this fact-­making used generalization as the blunt weapon of empire, by fabricating racial distinction: “wholesale abuse of the whole nation from persons of position and authority in science . . . engenders a war of races.”61 Crawfurd’s comparative “symmetry of person” has turned the enlightenment arrow of progress and the global geographies of empire into a naturalizing diagnostic of rational capacity. That Humboldt used such writers as sources perhaps makes it less surprising that he is comfortable relaying how the linguistic structure of Indo-­European languages is “more excellent” than Chinese or Arabic, or  that this “could hardly be disputed by any impartial scholar.”62 But Humboldt is a far more contradictory thinker, who also pushed back against a divisive organicism: language’s governing principle is freedom, by which I do not mean that arbitrary will [Willkür] connected with conscious awareness, but rather the self-­activating influence of individuality  .  .  . Since each generation builds its language onto an earlier one, and each tribe [Volksstam], intermingled by chance, builds its language onto a foreign one, there enters as a result something truly exterior, really supplementary to what belongs properly to the organism . . . Society is the necessary condition of language, which would otherwise be incapable of taking form, and thus language comes into being even in its particular diverse forms through the entirety of laws guiding the formation [Bildung] of human society.63

In this somewhat utopian passage, we can raise an eyebrow at the abstracted categories of “law” and “freedom,” and the movement of peoples “intermingled by chance.” But the categories of “will” and “individuality,” the social “organism” and what “belongs properly” to it, undergo a precise scrutiny, confronted by their own proper foreignness, with profound effects on the active temporalities in play. Humboldt coordinates scaled layers of intersecting linguistic organization to create new ways of understanding agency—­natural and social, individual and collective. One might compare the later Marxian language of social “metabolism” as a

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similarly dialectical principle, through which we glimpse the continuous “formation of human society.” That for Humboldt something “truly exterior” is inevitably altering languages across social time (between generations) and social space (between tribes or “folk-­stems”) dismantles Buschmann’s “awe-­inspiring law” dividing races by their language-­stems; Humboldt’s expansive “organism” here troubles the idea that one language can never “disturb” another’s “fast roots.” One needs the widest possible understanding of language as the totality of relations among humans and their environments—­“the entirety of laws guiding the formation of human society”—­to understand the minutest of its shifts in practice, and vice versa; the small-­scale freedom of “self-­activation” is what makes that “entirety” possible.64 Still, Humboldt’s beloved “laws” of formation are not built for that “something truly exterior” that Wheatley represents. Humboldt writes in partial tension with Mignolo’s account of how primitivism maps language onto history during the eighteenth century, as “the barbarian languages became primitive ones by which to measure the evolution from the simple to the complex.”65 I maintain that Wheatley’s linguistic tool for pulling apart the idea of her barbarism cannot be a vernacular from her past (to whatever extent she may have retained elements of the linguistic world of her childhood), nor would it simply be an admirable proficiency in the civilizing language. The interruption she stages is in the apparent abruptness of her linguistic disposition, the here-­ness and now-­ness of her linguistic artifice, the collapse of “civilization” imagined as a stadial timeline that can divide people into types. The freedom Humboldt imagines is something that governs (“language’s governing principle is freedom”); in her poetry’s evocations of speculative liberation, from her position as an unfree subject, Wheatley rejects, or really deconstructs, that phrasing. The story told in and by her poetry embodies an entirely different picture of cultivation, one more bluntly true to the social ecologies Humboldt abstractly imagines, with his “tribes, intermingled by chance.” Humboldt’s freedom is oriented against Locke’s individual possessiveness or “arbitrary will”: its “self-­activating influence” replaces the chronology underlying empiricist epistemology, and this spontaneous activity ought to short-­circuit the arrow of progress converting sensuous bodily embed-

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dedness into reasoning intellectual detachment. Yet Humboldt’s historicist objectivity clings to “forms of the subject” grounded in “separability, determinacy, and sequentiality,” cultivated distinctly in globally differentiated languages whose distance from Europe makes them deviant or aberrant.66 Humboldt’s imagined freedom obeys quasi-­natural laws, and so it cannot help but, as Naoroji put it, “bend and adapt facts to a foregone conclusion.” Even as he transforms his ideal language so that its “origin” moves freely through the present, the destination for this freedom is marked on a linguistic map oriented increasingly, in Humboldt’s lifetime, by Indo-­European. On a loosely empiricist timeline of language’s civilization, abstraction as rational mind is the hard-­won distance from sensory origins. But wherever matter and spirit are less strictly distinguished, the timeline leading from the one to the other falls apart. In Wheatley’s own self-­ mythologization, moving easily between this world and the next, a cultivated “Barbarian” redefines her uprootedness as mobility. In her poems, transatlantic passage is resignified as the movement of culture, activated by the open fact of her literacy, in order to imagine further “transports,” in poetry but also in (and after) life. I don’t think it is unduly grandiose to say that by unraveling the primitivist timeline of modernity, Wheatley ultimately aims to use poetry to pull apart the conceptual basis of New World slave society. Poetry, imagination, and the afterlife collaborate in producing the future “landscapes” where free movement means a different relation to time: “But when these shades of time are chas’d away, / And darkness ends in everlasting day, / On what seraphic pinions shall we move, / And view the landscapes in the realms above?” In her poems, displacement is the precondition for a temporal imaginary where “shades of time are chas’d away,” yet (and no wonder) as a displaced subject, a detachable individual, independent of her environment, is not Wheatley’s image of freedom. Rather, her displaced condition heightens awareness of the need for community, which she reinvents, in Rinaldo Walcott’s phrase, “in the interstices of a creole and thus evolving sensibility and reality.”67 It takes work to see that this poetics is almost inevitably more complex in its postures than the cultural productions of writers who write “freely,” or who have not undergone a subsuming conscription into a civilizing lan-

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guage.68 Her work suggests that the partiality she experiences so intensely is an underlying fact of all life; civilization is not a historical timeline, but an everyday process. Attaining “polish” is, for some, a daily grind. That she sees diaspora as preparation for mortality’s universal uprooting helps explain the almost feverish optimism of her elegies. Imagined this way, her poetry is a glimpse of the afterlife’s reconfigured linguistic community. SOF TER L ANGUAGE

As language is made natural on organic and inorganic models over the romantic century, its objective “history” pressed flat and pulled taut, what happens to linguistic agency? For instance, who gets to have that “self-­ activating influence of individuality,” Humboldt’s version of involuntary linguistic freedom? To answer this question, I draw out further Wheatley’s importance to this story by asking how she manages her own linguistic agency, especially by way of the elegies she writes for others. I end by looking at the role of the echo in her poetry, particularly the “vocal hills” that close “Niobe in Distress.” Wheatley is not exactly writing within the poetic tradition I am calling gray romanticism, but here too I think of her as an “insider/outsider.” Gray romanticism tries to give language different kinds of time, not by counting off language’s objectified forms from a safe distance, but by submerging its own partial view in language’s medium, and by posing the “speaker” in a partly active, partly passive stance. Again, this romantic poetics of compromised agency comes famously into view through tropes of receptivity, as in Wordsworthian “wise passiveness.” Wherever language or poet dissolves into the surrounding world, these tropes of receptivity carry, I think, romanticism’s “reaction to the alien word,” its resistance to the textual record’s deepened divide from the linguistic activity that produces it. In “To S. M.,” Wheatley instead envisions herself at some future, timeless moment bathed or dissolved in an etherealized linguistic medium (“And there [shall] my muse with heav’nly transport glow”), but here, in this world, her path is profoundly shaped by linguistic and material labor. Wheatley’s reaction to the alien word will self-­evidently not be that of a Herder or a Wordsworth; her unfreedom makes a different claim on the mixed durations of linguistic form. Just the same, in the commanding line from “To S. M.” that I keep

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returning to—­“On what seraphic pinions shall we move”—­she articulates a particular first-­person plural, a Black “we” in the future tense, where the undercurrent of speculation comes closer than usual to asserting collective agency: not a wise passiveness, but a soft language of submerged, deferred, or suspended action. Like the graveyard poets of the mid-­eighteenth century in Britain (indeed, with echoes of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”), Wheatley engages endlessly with death in her Poems. In recent years, critics like Joanna Brooks and Caroline Wigginton have offered powerful readings of the strategic work Wheatley performs in developing the genre of elegy. Wheatley’s linguistic disposition, the language adequate to her life and work, has not only the ethereality of the “next world” of revelation, but also the romantic century’s quasi-­material sense of language. Though she sometimes calls it noble, pure, or refined, it is named on the first page of her only book as that more overtly textured “softer language,” in the poem “To Maecenas”: “Maecenas, you, beneath the myrtle shade, / Read o’er what poets sung, and shepherds play’d . . . Their noble strains your equal genius shares / In softer language, and diviner airs.”69 The soft airiness of this musical language carries through her elegies, where she repeatedly imagines access not only to a person’s spirit, but to language’s afterlife. On the death of their daughter, she counsels grieving parents to “hear” the child in heaven, and “learn to imitate her language there”; describing a dead wife to the widower, she writes, “There sits thy spouse amidst the radiant throng, / While praise eternal warbles from her tongue”; intently focused on conjuring a dead child, she tells the parents, “Methinks I hear her . . . / Invite you there”; of another, she declares, “What charms celestial in his numbers flow / Melodious, while the soul-­enchanting strain / Dwells on his tongue and fills th’ethereal plain”; meanwhile, she assures another grieving widower, “There sits, illustrious Sir, thy beauteous spouse; / . . . To notes divine she tunes the vocal strings.”70 In each elegy, audibility is the bridge between this world and a world to come. Voices of the dead appear as part of the search for a language less heavy, less full of grief, but they are not so much dematerialized as rematerialized. In their bodily reconfiguration, the mourned are celebrants in a new, more

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nearly universal congregation—­“enlarg’d,” “new-­k indling,” etherealized, risen, aglow, “to flesh no more confin’d”—­and their language is suited to these new conditions. This language made of “air,” the barely material stuff of song, purports to guide its addressee toward “th’unbodied mind,” nourished by “uncreated things,” even as these voices are made audible in their new and different body.71 Their song is sufficiently material to dwell, to warble, to fill. While drawing on conventional evocations of angelic song in the terms of evangelical Methodism, these voices work also to bind this world to the next through the “softer” poetic medium of song, in different genres of public address. “Had I the Tongue of a Seraphim, how would I exalt thy Praise,” Wheatley promises in an early pious aside; while in “To Maecenas” the wish for a tongue is rendered in a parallel secular form: “O could I rival thine and Virgil’s page, / . . . Then should my song in bolder notes arise, / . . . But here I sit, and mourn a grov’ling mind / That fain would mount and ride upon the wind.”72 This latter poem’s humility is rhetorical, by which I mean not false, but strategic. Like the conditional “had I the Tongue,” its skill consciously belies its self-­ deprecation by fulfilling its desire in the performance. Its aspiring “notes” have the boldness of avowed attachment to a body that is not grounding its “grov’ling” mind, but rather assertively positioning it in a developing global imaginary as both African and American. Let’s recall how the naturalisms of nineteenth-­century philology are supposed to have evacuated individual agency from language, as a backdrop to Wheatley’s part in the romantic-­century project of amending linguistic agency. “Romanticism,” we know already, is conventionally assigned responsibility for fabricating the link between nation and language naturalized over the course of the nineteenth century. The accepted history of linguistics looks back to “the end of the eighteenth century” for the first stirrings of “a science of language that, in contrast to well-­established earlier views, defined its object of study as a natural entity, out there to be discovered.”73 Those earlier, established views included the ideal of detached linguistic voluntarism in play for Locke’s independent linguistic agent, standing behind a range of enlightenment traditions of social thought: the “Anglo-­Scottish explanation of collective behavior,” for example, that remained “focused on the freely chosen actions of individuals,” or the early

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American “political conception” of linguistic individualism.74 The science of comparative grammar required naturalizing language to set aside the will as agent, since individual agency appeared to contradict the possibility of “laws” guiding language change. Even as Adam Smith was forging a durable image of society premised on the selfish, individuated will, the progressive growth modeled by conjectural histories of civilization, like his own, predicted a historical method that suppressed individual agency to guarantee scientific social objectivity: “models of biological and cultural change . . . emerged from the same matrix of late-­eighteenth-­century European empiricism, when language (like life itself) for the first time attained historicality—­a lbeit a history devoid of intentional action.”75 At the same time, language was increasingly alienated from speech and speaker: “by the mid-­nineteenth century it had become common in the scholarly world to see language as crucially unaffected by human will or individual intent.”76 By then, linguistics had become, for philologists swayed by evolutionary models, “a natural science, both because its object of investigation [was] open to direct observation and because language [was] outside the realm of the free will of the individual.”77 “The extreme character” of this naturalism spurred critiques of linguistics as natural science, and a shift toward a sociocentric linguistics led to “the disappearance of most organic metaphors in scholarly work” by the century’s end.78 Understood within the longer span of the romantic century, the rise of the social sciences reveals improvised solutions in imagining social cohesion in cultural practice, encouraging analysts not just to stereotype but to typify, using scientific terms, the “qualities” of social groups now imagined as bounded wholes or organisms. If the desire for a scientific study of society was oriented by the problem of balancing individuated agency with collective identity, its internal logic subordinated individual agency to holistic collectives, with troubling consequences. Shifting alliances to the natural sciences certainly explain some of the prestige of comparative grammar, yet in Fabian’s words, the “wholesale adoption of models . . . from physics and geology was, for a science of man, sadly regressive intellectually, and quite reactionary politically.”79 Hence, the methodological borrowings Bréal called, in 1866, the “geology of grammar,” combined positivist models, like Comte’s social physics, with evolutionary thought,

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causing the physical processes or biological life-­cycles of languages to reflect determining arcs of civilization and decline.80 The focus on history’s big picture obscures the finer grain of language’s ceaseless traffic. Historians of linguistics have sometimes remarked on the irony that during this phase of linguistic study, giving language time in the shape of History seems to have required revoking it as practical activity. But this is less an irony than an expression of chronopolitical tensions resulting from a hardening Eurocentric timeline of linguistic development that eventually found Indo-­European to serve as its mythic origin. Where might Wheatley’s “softer language” belong, in the history of linguistic thought busily constructing its object of analysis by suppressing linguistic agency? Wheatley was, I have argued, engaged in a poetic project of pulling apart the timeline of Western history; in her case, softening or etherealizing language was one way of focusing attention on other kinds of time, where new agencies might be imagined. But poetic projects like Wheatley’s are not usually included in the history of linguistics. Though writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge do sometimes enter its scope, that narrative has fixated on writers who historicized language through organic metaphor, not writers who envisioned language’s actualism: its constitutive activity and the submerged or participatory agencies continuously adjusting it. Yet language’s capacity to act is precisely what romantic poetics is about, in the lyric “now” and in theories of the “imagination.” Arguing that the “whole mode of being of language” changes with the transition from universal grammar to historicist philology, over the invisible line of 1800, Foucault captured the feeling of a culture undergoing tectonic shifts in modes of representation, a European knowledge system whose natives experienced “the demotion of language to the mere status of an object.”81 This vividly expresses how the increasing power of the scientific observer’s external perspective transforms philology into the study of uprooted words and objectified languages, looming above speech and speakers.82 But The Order of Things makes the congealing of a linguistic world made newly legible seem inevitable, makes us miss how this objectification might have been undone by equally potent moments of softness or unraveling. As Susan Gal and Kathryn Woolard write, over time “images of linguistic phenomena gain social credibility and political

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influence,” but these images are always contested.83 The scientific object of language would remain confusingly active, rich in obstacles and compromises even where its analysts strove to make it appear inert. How do imaginative writers, those visceral philologists, both enable and respond to a shifting balance of language’s “density” and “transparency”? What can an exceptional figure like Wheatley tell us about how such textured terms are recharged from a partial view such as her own, from both in-­and outside of “Europe”? And how might her sense of a softened collective artifice of language’s natural forms, or a language of the next world that “dwells on [the] tongue and fills th’ethereal plain,” have laid the ground for other outsider poetries, like Blake’s, in whose linguistic scene of revelation “every Word & Every Character / Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or / Opakeness of Nervous fibres”?84 In contrast with Wheatley’s “softer language,” naturalizing figures evoking involuntary participation (like language’s erosion or crystallization) highlight some of the changing political stakes of willful “arbitrariness” across the romantic century, and in particular associations that linked the tyranny of sovereign will and agency to language origin. The use of the word “arbitrary” in the writing of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and others is, as William Keach has shown, a residue of Locke and the enlightenment language theories that followed him. In the eighteenth century, following Locke, “arbitrariness” is associated with abuse of power, but thanks to a bolstered sense of agency attached to the idea that signs are humanly constructed, the term was also associated with individuated agents of civil society who could challenge the sovereign’s capricious will. In their reactions against Lockean epistemology, while often speaking within its terms, romantic-­era writers dissolve that willful power more readily into their surroundings, inventing participatory forms of linguistic agency. Much interesting work might still be done to see how, throughout the romantic century, Locke’s possessive individual and Smith’s market actor are repeatedly clashing with varieties of romantic collectivism somewhere between Spinoza’s critique of the sovereign subject and Marx’s critique of the bourgeois individual.85 The gradualism tailored to philological figures like organisms or “erosion” resists imagining language as the equipment of “first formers” or of self-­governing,

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individuated agents.86 The ­individual as a linguistic agent competed with the “organism,” but also with inorganic naturalisms and other mixed collectives. For Herder, agency in language change unfolds in dependent relation with forces beyond the subject’s knowledge: linguistic agency is not willful and arbitrary, but unwilled and participatory. To confront the Herderian or Wordsworthian participatory subject with Wheatley’s partial subject forces us to rethink the “wise passiveness” of romantic expression alongside the voice of the unfree writer, exploring in the language of poetry how to fashion that partiality into “heteronomous” freedom.87 Foucault’s neglect of the role of colonial knowledge production as the structuring condition of comparative philology was partly corrected by Said. Foucault had nothing to say about this aspect of the epistemological shift he describes.88 However the formation of “philologies of race,” and the racializing force of linguistic distinctions, have since been studied with more care, developing Said’s central point that “Indo-­European is taken as the living, organic norm, and Semitic Oriental languages are seen comparatively to be inorganic.”89 Yet this “rigid binary opposition” is not the only axis around which “time is transformed into the space of comparative classification.” Yes, the spatializing of time enables comparative philology, sorting languages according to organic West and inorganic East, or lining up the “tree of distinction” with the “tree” model of linguistic derivation, but this is only part of the story. Philology could serve as a way of coloring in regions of the globe according to a key of civilizational “ages” in relation to a European standard. On the broader canvas of the world, Said’s binary looks much more involuted. In the comparative study of language enabled by Euro-­A merican colonial networks, practices of giving language time developed not only Said’s spatialized temporality of East and West, but a global process of racialization linked to the giving or withholding of History. The very notion of being a people “without history,” or of being, as Glissant writes, held at some dark distance on “the hidden side of the earth,” renders assemblages of non-­Europeans as external, inorganic matter grounded in unintelligible proximity to nature, an ahistorical, nonlinguistic “infancy.”90 Silva’s term for this is “affectability,” the philosophical sign of exclusion—­or of that “inclusion that masks itself as an exclusion”—­ whose signature is ahistoricity or, in linguistic and civilizational terms,

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stagnation, unchangeability.91 In Smith’s sequential process of civilizing language, for his model of the articulate subject to emerge on the stage of history, child and savage remain in analogous bondage to “nature”; or as Wynter makes plain, “overrepresentation” is made possible by underrepresentation, by humans “hidden” from recognition.92 As Yusoff has argued, bondage to a grounding nature often has a geological basis, and she shows how easily what it means to be without history shades into the dark subregion of racialized opacity, where, beneath notice, earth’s “hidden side” figures laboring bodies as contiguous with geological matter throughout plantation and extractive zones.93 Along with other recent critics, however, Yusoff also argues that closer attention to a long history of Black poetics refigures opacity, toward the sense Glissant gives it, as an ecological principle promising “another geological ethos.”94 As a city-­dweller, Wheatley does not frame her diasporic naturalization through lyric experiment with cultivation, as many later Black poets would.95 In Kimberly Ruffin’s terms, the literature of voices with no history, those “described . . . pejoratively as being natural,” often strives “to reconcile experiences in the natural order and the social order.”96 Ruffin directs attention to a longer tradition of ecological poetics in Black writing, and though she is not thinking here of Wheatley, this sense of being caught between natural and social orders aptly characterizes one of the many ways Wheatley the poet articulates the ironies of her linguistic disposition. A revealing echo-­figure materializes at regular intervals through Poems, and this figure offers a possible linguistic commentary on what it means to occupy the position of being a thing, a part of the landscape in the racialized sense of being “natural,” while also being a poet, a “thing” in a human shape whose voice can only carry on condition of appearing imitative. I use this figure of the echo—­in which a voice is both internal and external, both thrown and sourceless—­to move us toward a closer encounter with Wheatley’s spectacular confrontation with opacity in “Niobe.” For the “vocal hills” that end the main body of that poem are yet another way to imagine how a voice keeps circulating softly, keeps moving and changing, even as the speaker is supposed to be dead. In each of these echoes, Wheatley rewrites audibility as an effect of environment, introducing a relay between artifice and nature to describe the movement of sounds as a resounding. In “To Maecenas,” Homeric poetry

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creates a booming echo out of the fullness of its imaginary palette, bringing a world to life for the awe-­struck reader: “While Homer paints lo! Circumfus’d in air, / Celestial Gods in mortal forms appear; / Swift as they move hear each recess rebound, / Heav’n quakes, earth trembles, and the shores resound.”97 Later, in “To a LADY on her coming to North-­A merica with her Son, for the Recovery of her Health,” Wheatley describes a complicated scene that resolves a (white) woman’s restorative journey north with a family reunion back in the tropics, animating the landscape so it can take part in the general celebration: “With shouts of joy Jamaica’s rocks resound, / With shouts of joy the country rings around.”98 And trading awe and joy for grief, a final echo-­scene appears near the end of “Niobe,” where Wheatley envisions Niobe appealing to the gods for mercy on her last living child: “‘Ye heav’nly pow’rs, ah spare me one,’ she cry’d, / ‘Ah! Spare me one,’ the vocal hills reply’d.”99 All three of these moments not only imagine the responsiveness of an environment, they link the echo with a geological voice: shores and rocks resound, vocal hills reply. In a work charged with proving its author’s authentic genius and originality, the repeated return of this “echo” strikes me as overdetermined, especially in “Niobe” (since this translation from Ovid’s Latin, though also here proof of classical literacy, is understood as an imitative genre). Wheatley appears to comment in these moments on how spatial surroundings transform sound and feeling, disclaiming originality while embracing new poetic effects. In these scenes, she insists on the power of echo to do something new, and indeed, there are no “vocal hills” in Ovid’s version (nor, as far as I can find, in accessible eighteenth-­ century English translations). Wheatley transforms a repetition in Niobe’s voice from the original text (“unam . . . relinque! / . . . et unam”) into a more poignant echo (“ah spare me one . . . / Ah! Spare me one”) that transfers vocal agency, between the first and second iterations, from Niobe to the hills around her. Detaching vocal agency from the utterer’s body through displacement onto proximate natural forms illustrates both the limitations and the creative possibilities of this displaced or thrown voice; yet her language’s sonic detachability, its inorganic (uncontained and uncontrolled) iterability, is characterized not by generalization, but by movement and intensification. By letting Niobe’s words, repeated by

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these “vocal hills,” hang in the air, Wheatley resists by postponing the abstracting force of Niobe’s petrification, in Ovid’s tale; she resists the inevitability of the story’s conclusion while repositioning us there, sharing Niobe’s surroundings, asking us to feel what she feels. NIOBE AND THE IDIOM OF AC TUALISM

That Wheatley should find strategic places to explore the creative possibilities of the echo, or articulate a language of the future while conforming outwardly to neoclassical European linguistic and aesthetic models, should not be surprising, yet it has sometimes been difficult even for admiring readers to land on this dimension of her work. Her strategic poetics place her alongside other romantic-­era expressions of “actualism,” in which the looseness of the lyric “now,” and the imagination’s power to soften nature’s hard terms, become ways of showing that language changes as we experience it. But to see this we need to abandon the timelines of cultural authenticity or originality fostered by narratives of civilization and discourses of primitive poesis, to recapture the ways re-­voicing and re-­sounding become re-­creation. Zora Neale Hurston, writing on African-­A merican language and aesthetics, once put this idea very simply: “what we really mean by originality is the modification of ideas.”100 I have referred to Wheatley’s “conscription” into Western literacy, signaling a knowledge practice distinct from a “merely” imitative poetics scripted by white Western sources, but I am also inspired by Jeffers’s phrase, “the age of Phillis,” to ask: what if we were to take Phillis Wheatley’s transformative reading of Ovid’s “Niobe” in parallel with Toussaint L’Ouverture’s roughly contemporaneous encounter with the radical enlightenment anticolonialism in the eighteenth-­century “best seller” The History of the Two Indies, interpreted by David Scott and Sunil Agnani as L’Ouverture’s ambivalent “conscription” into colonial enlightenment?101 Might we then likewise parallel Anthony Reed’s suggestion of calling political modernity “the age of Haiti,” in order to call postenlightenment literary modernity, with its inauguration in romanticism, the “age of Phillis”? How would that new “framing of time,” now turned from heroic, militaristic agency to a quieter, everyday re-­sounding, renovate accounts of romanticism, revolution, and “our definitions of freedom”?102

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Such questions flag some of the ripple effects we could imagine through reorientations of method, scale, and period, even within an existing canonical archive that, at least for some, has long included Wheatley. If the white romantic writers grouped together in the following chapters mostly undertake a particularizing labor in critical response to the falsely universalizing discourses of the enlightenment, Wheatley’s resistance to alien universals also particularizes, but without taking any naturalized ground for granted. This means that as an African representative of a literary Britain and a revolutionary America, she uses universalizing enlightenment registers and neoclassical linguistic categories to reorient her own uprootedness with respect to the naturalized unfreedoms of her social situation—­enslavement’s metamorphosis of human into object, but also religious conversion and linguistic assimilation—­remaking these as transports, mobilities, freedoms. She suspends in uncertainty the presumed determinacy of progressive history built into her own transformations. Her temporal disruption of enlightenment pictures of language preemptively reorients the critique of the uprooted word pursued in romantic-­era writing, with its immobilized, artificial linguistic forms, even as her own deracination, her precarious balance of freedom and unfreedom, underscores the limitations of romanticized conceptions of nature. At this point, I turn to the actualism underlying the picture of a future language communicated in her work, the key to her disruptive presence. For Wheatley is also asking, from her partial stance, a linguistic question with direct consequences for definitions of freedom: even under socially imposed conditions of unfreedom, how can we express the feeling that language goes on “naturally,” moves on its own, even as each speaker is an influential participant in its ongoing formation? How do heteronomous subjects speak freely? To find the linguistic actualism in Wheatley’s work, we have to follow the pull of inorganicism through questions of historical agency. One way to think of the motive for reconceiving language in new shapes is as an effort to envision the activity of what appears most solid—­or, as I’ve outlined, to invent for language something like geologic “actualism.” As Herder demonstrates so well, in order to adjust the willfulness of linguistic agency, gray romanticism searched for new ways to describe a participatory

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or collective model of language in the midst of change. Herder’s gradualist deceleration and dispersion of agency helps us to see that the “origin” of language is always happening. For Wheatley, we could go further and say that the origin of language—­if by this we really mean the languages of all speakers—­is not just always happening, but is still (perhaps always) to come. In gray romanticism, the resistance, durability, or opacity of language coincides in curious ways with its malleability or fluidity—­most famously in the idea of poetry itself as the medium of the creative imagination. In her variation on gray romanticism, Wheatley theorized this faculty in her famous “On Imagination,” affirming its liberatory force, while also offering reminders of its limits through a characteristic self-­ interruption that suspends the reader in the lyric “now,” an imperative to defer that douses and chills her poetry’s “rising fire”: “Winter austere forbids me to aspire . . . Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay”).103 In chapter 3, I briefly address the relationship between this poem and the early British romantics. As I argued in chapter 1, gray romanticism’s temporal expansion and contraction of material forms often implicitly rely on an actualist understanding of the world’s interlocking rates of change. There are now enough critical works on romantic poetry and geology or stone that I will not pause any longer trying to prove my sense that actualism is part of the air romanticism breathes, or that it colors the lyric mode in particular.104 But to reiterate my own framing of the poetics of stone, my concentration in this book on the relation of geological with linguistic thought reveals itself most strikingly in poetry. In gray romanticism, actualism provides an idiom for varying the forms of subjective agency in the production of language’s social objectivity. As I read the poetics of gray romanticism, the stance it fosters is phenomenological: it affirms, as if in a mutual touching, utterance’s dialectical contingency and the activity shaped by representational conditions and ongoing uptake. As a historical sensibility, linguistic actualism hangs in the balance between an understanding of linguistic history and a realized feeling of linguistic activity. That balance is represented especially using natural images that hold together senses of language in simultaneous, distinct timescales, as both solid (historical) and yet soluble (active) at one and the same time.

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Again, figures derived from the inorganic world of stone can easily also freeze history into preserved relics, rather than insisting on invisible, active change. At the romantic century’s end, the “slowly-­changing language” of deep time in Origin of Species (1859), which Gillian Beer has read so well, helps Charles Darwin reconstruct the timelines of evolutionary history: “I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect.”105 In the passage that follows that sentence, the natural historian is imagined as a heroic philologist of nature, preserving what is left to reconstruct what is missing: the geological record is mapped onto a singular history with a “succession of chapters,” most of which are missing. Exactly like the Indo-­Europeanists’ reconstructions of lost linguistic forms, Darwin thus turned processes of natural selection (and dysselection) into forms of loss that enable feats of archival recovery.106 In 1866, by contrast, Bréal wrote against the attractive power of Indo-­European roots as origins, by yet again repurposing the image of words as pebbles, but now toward a very different end: “words are like boulders torn from mountains and carried along by rivers at the beginning of their course: their rough edges having been already smoothed halfway along, they finally end up as those little round pebbles continually washed and worn down by the surf.”107 Drawing on the same metaphoric repertoire as Darwin and others, Bréal suggests that, seemingly always already “torn” from their material matrix, words change constantly under the force of social weather, which varies over time in intensity; they are diasporic, well traveled, so it isn’t meaningful to fixate on their origins. The structure of this figure may still be loss, but the structure of its feeling is neither regret nor excitement. Loss is now given as a fact without pathos. For Bréal—­still basically positivist in stance—­the mark of progress for a newly critical science of language will require the realization “that the world did not begin at the point beyond which we can no longer see”; that its history is “imperfectly kept” needn’t prompt heroic reconstructions of desired origins on an imagined historical timeline.108 Looking backward from the romantic century’s end shows how by then language had hardened into a historical object of analysis, whose naturalized basis rose through contentious debate to the level of discursive legibility for Bréal’s generation, making debates about linguistic

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agency especially heated. But romantic-­era writers had already articulated this problem in the experience of being both language’s recipient and its creator, or by cultivating variants of participatory agency and “wise passiveness.” Instructively, Wheatley does not celebrate passivity in any comparable way; or rather, no matter how much she positions herself getting carried away, her “transports” point us not toward a passive, but toward a diasporic and heteronomous subject. The rewriting of Ovid’s lines in her Poems brings the theme of metamorphosis fully in view; yet Wheatley’s translation ends before the poem is over, refusing to concede to “fate,” or repeat the inevitable end of a familiar story. The implicit argument that language allows us to revise our ideas but only using existing materials, that originality is really the “modification of ideas,” is especially emphatic because the occasion of her creative license, of breaking from the original, is the involuntary figure of the echo. By not turning its central figure to stone, by leaving Niobe the use of her tongue to mourn, Wheatley leaves open the smallest freedom against its opposites, keeps alive the dead text in an image of its active resounding. There are two epyllia (short epics) included in Wheatley’s Poems, and they beg comparison on grounds not only of shared genre but of shared concern: the first tells the Old Testament story of David and Goliath, the second the story of Niobe from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Both in a sense illustrate Proverbs 16:18, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”—­yet the choice to retell both demands of us that we try this proverb on in different ways. As with Goliath, Niobe’s pride leads to divine punishment, but this time in the brutal, public killings of her defenseless children, and her subsequent metamorphosis into stone. The complexity of Wheatley’s ambition with her book emerges subtly when we read Niobe after Goliath, as a disruption of moral absolutism, through the poems’ contrastive illustrations of violence, or fatal redress for the sin of pride. For whereas Goliath and Niobe are both charged with pride and the loaded term rebellion, for challenging divine power, in the tone and form of their respective punishments the poems ask for inverse affective responses. Parading “proud vaunts,” the “[r]ebellious” Goliath “dares heav’n’s monarch” and suffers the vengeance of God in the form of David’s “forceful pebble”; Goliath’s vivid beheading (“The blood in gushing tor-

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rents drenched the plains / The soul found passage through the spouting veins”) attaches the heroic victory to David’s humility, faith, and bravery, rewarded with “riches” and a “royal bride.” Niobe’s punishment for scorning the goddess Latona, applied through similar language, is out of all proportion: Apollo (Latona’s son) agrees “[t]o punish pride, and scourge the rebel mind,” by killing the source of Niobe’s “presumptuous” conceit, her numerous unsuspecting offspring, dispatching them in the midst of play, prayer, or grief (and several times recalling the gore of Goliath’s execution). But this punishment and Niobe’s grief evoke sympathy, even from Apollo: “pity touch’d his heart”; “[s]he weeps, nor weeps unpity’d by the foe.” Foregrounding the pathos of its ruthless lesson in humility, the poem’s end makes sure we know the poem is—­as Nicole Spigner has shown—­a tribute to maternal grief in the face of terrorizing and arbitrary death. Restaging the proverbial punishment of pride with a classical source, rather than the Bible, allows Wheatley to question the prescriptive right of divine law (since Greek gods are flawed, like humans). More pointedly in the poem’s final lines Wheatley questions the easy alignment of destiny and death in the term “fate”; for fatedness might here be read through the ever-­present vulnerability to death under the social regime of slavery.109 As Spigner and others have pointed out, the poem’s trick lies in refusing to follow the letter of its source-­text. In the last moment before authorship is curiously ceded to “another Hand,” the crushing last line of the penultimate stanza—­“In her embrace she sees her daughter die”—­pauses indefinitely to give Niobe time to mourn, indeed, demands that we sit with her while she does so. In that closing moment, the poem holds itself open; the succeeding stanza is permitted only in being framed as someone else’s “Work.” That is, the moment when Niobe is turned to stone, is finished, as a footnote in Wheatley’s original work tells us, by someone else. It is not just, as Allewaert keenly points out, that Wheatley here combats the closure of recognition by which the brute economy of colonial slavery performed the “conversion of persons into things”; in its refusal, her translation also studies with devastating precision that process of conversion.110 I take Spigner’s reading of this simultaneous turning away and lingering on a Niobe alive and speaking, still animated with grief, as a refusal to

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petrify and silence this mothering figure, or to turn her into the object the “original” demands—­a refusal to finish the poem that way—­and a resistance to the final violence that would rob the mourner of her voice. As readers we are held, as life passes from Niobe’s daughter, in the same suspense as Niobe herself. This act of holding is both Niobe’s and the poet’s, and, by invitation, the reader’s; it is a challenge to the “fate” promised by the story’s end, whereby embodied language is turned to stone—­and, as Chiles notes, not only stone but the neoclassical “marble” conjuring a culturally valued whiteness.111 As the extraneously authored ultimate stanza goes, “Her tongue, her palate both obdurate grew, / Her curdled veins no longer motion knew; / The use of neck, and arms, and feet was gone, / And ev’n her bowels hard’ned into stone; / A marble statue now the queen appears, / But from the marble steal the silent tears.” This completion by “another Hand” closes the opening left by the previous stanza, but the end of the poem, as Wheatley claims it in her own voice, exerts a force against the final stanza’s resigned, “silent tears,” in which Niobe’s human form is reconceived as “obdurate,” without motion or the “use” of its limbs, “hard’ned into stone.” Ending where she does, Wheatley quietly resists the naturalized unfreedom that makes death’s metamorphosis not, this time, a liberation, but a petrification in which humanity resigns voice, motion, and color. In Wheatley’s close-­up image of a mother mourning her last dying child, “Niobe in Distress” enriches—­as “Goliath of Gath,” of course, does not—­the elegiac networks of meaning produced across her book, pointing back toward the afterlife of language. Replacing David’s militant heroism, Niobe’s conflicted tale of impious pride, stolen life, and humanity extinguished in petrification reshapes our relationship to a myth we may think we already know. Perhaps the David and Goliath story might be cautiously mapped onto the stirrings of revolutionary sentiment in America (about as close to revolutionary sentiment as Wheatley, seeking publication in Britain, would venture in Poems). The Niobe story, however, calls upon us to think about similar justifications of righteous violence from a new subject position: not a plucky underdog, but the grieving mother whose fate is determined by powers beyond her control. This rewriting positions itself against racial time, which “fixes” cultural others by placing

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them in permanently premodern, “traditional” time past; unfit for autonomy (or, in Kantian language, unripe for freedom), this was a “permanent condition projected onto Europe’s racial others, creatures of nature and necessity, not of freedom and reason.”112 To stop short of Niobe’s petrification is a refusal of the myth’s closure, for which Wheatley substitutes the present-­tense reality of the dispossessed (“In her embrace she sees her daughter die”), representing those whose lives are not their own. How do the ambivalences of linguistic expression represented by Wheatley’s work prefigure or stand apart from later writers in the “Age of Phillis”? How do the facts of diasporic experience cast a shadow on the many meanings of uprootedness?113 The turn from “Niobe in Distress,” which elevates a present-­tense suffering, to the poem that follows it, “To S. M.,” is, I think, the crux of Wheatley’s Poems: for where the former mourns the present, the latter imagines “a new creation” intensified by the future language of a collective (Black) first person. The diasporic subject knows that worlds come and go. But learning the rules of a new world, by learning the civilizing language, does not mean following them, by accepting the silencing power of pastness imposed by primitivism, or the present as it persists in the “language of Anamaboe.” “Niobe” leaves us in a different present, to shrug off the weight implied in the foregone conclusion of Niobe’s scripted metamorphosis, completed in the ceded agency of the final stanza by “another Hand.” But “To S. M.” counteracts that objectification by returning us to Wheatley’s preferred metamorphosis, that etherealization effected through heavenly language, whereby a new language would, in some unspecified future, turn the civilizing world of the present itself into an unmourned memory. The move from tragic scene of loss to a speculative future through Black art is both subtle and spectacular. “On what seraphic pinions shall we move / And view the landscapes in the realms above?” That simple-­sounding “we” makes resoundingly audible a partial sense of promised “heav’nly transport” that ever so slightly expands the linguistic realm of the possible.

3

Voices of the Ground Blake’s Language in Deep Time

Then what have I to do with Thee? —­W illiam Blake SLOWING DESIRE

The short lyric “The Clod and the Pebble” (1794), cited in chapter 1, is not a conventional reference point for the limited scholarship on Blake’s theory of language. Yet while buried, the theory is there: Love seeketh not itself to please Nor for itself hath any care But for another gives its ease And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair So sung a little Clod of Clay Trodden with the Cattles Feet But a Pebble of the Brook Warbled out these Metres meet: Love seeketh only self to please To bind another to its delight Joys in another’s loss of ease And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite 99

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The internal stanza here, which curiously situates this dialogue on love languages as a geological conversation, helps us read Blake’s “voices” more generally. The poem’s voices are gesturing toward a drama on materialist themes, which casually introduces geological time into linguistic form. Linguistic naturalism traditionally secures a fit between word and world, but Blake does something very different, by instead using physical forms to give language—­meant in a purposefully expansive sense—­scales of time that both harden its apparently subjective malleability and soften its apparently given naturalness. Instead, voice is an expression of insensible tendencies structuring a very human-­sounding natural world, where this expansive language installs epistemological, libidinal, affective, and spiritual registers in material poetic forms: the Clod of Clay “sings” its faith; the Pebble’s “Metres” skeptically take the measure of the Clod’s notion of selfless love. As Blake wrote in his early print experiment All Religions are One, “the forms of all things are derived from their Genius.”1 So material forms are beliefs or stances unfolding as poetic utterances, and they live in their contradictions, here articulated as different relations built between “self” and “another.” Blake’s idiosyncratic linguistic naturalism is not focused on origins, objects, or histories of language but on lived patterns of meaning, rather like what Wittgenstein called “forms of life.” These patterns show how an individual voice is shaped by its surroundings, by powers beyond its control, even as it carries its own force, a contradiction that recognizes the temporal complexities of linguistic experience. Each voice is submerged in a world it helps make. Blake shows us how the geologic scale of deep time can attach us to opacity whenever the timeline of history tries to alienate us from our language. To do this, he calls on the contemporaneity of “Poetic Genius,” the “Art” native to all humanity. In the image of stone, the language of Poetic Genius decelerates, taking on hardness and solidity; at the same time, this natural figure guarantees the softness of constant, invisible change. This is the powerful dialectic in the “actualism” of geological thought that Blake helps transmit to poetry: it is a process that slows and solidifies, even as it animates and energizes. Having declared the universal derivation of “form” from “Genius,” Blake writes: “as all men are alike in outward form, So (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the

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Poetic Genius.”2 So humans in their “infinite variety” have in common the constitutive world-­making capacity of poetic creation. In positing a basic human likeness encompassing poetic diversity, Blake reveals his affinity with English scholar of myth Jacob Bryant, whose A New System; or, An analysis of ancient mythology (1774–­76) proposed radical unity between Afro-­A sian and European cultures (Blake worked on the book as commercial engraver). Yet Blake does not share the primitivist timeline of Bryant’s etymological method, which linked cultures “back” to a shared origin, in order to “reduce the truth to its original purity.” “There are in every climate,” wrote Bryant, “some shattered fragments of original history; some traces of a primitive and universal language.”3 Blake concurred with Bryant that the “antiquities of every Nation under Heaven” proved them equally “sacred,” and that “all had originally one language,” but hinted that this “origin” was not in some deep past, but still there for those who could hear it, despite the rationalized linear history that turns present forms into “traces” of a distant past: “the reasoning historian . . . cannot with all their artifice . . . disarrange self evident action and reality.”4 To the contrary, those apparently primitive “antiquities” are proofs not of past glory but of “Poetry as it exists now on earth”: “to suppose that Art can go beyond the finest specimens of Art that are now in the world, is not knowing what Art is.”5 As W. J. T. Mitchell has put it, for Blake creation is not “an event which occurred in the remote past”; it is the reality of life being built and rebuilt, “as if the cosmos were being redesigned with each passing moment,” disrupting “our sense of conventional ‘objective’ time sequence,” the sense that makes History. Saree Makdisi has forcefully argued that this is how Blake breaks “the chains of linear time.”6 Of the many sources from which Blake assembled his idiosyncratic ideas about how worlds are built through spiritual language, Charles Wilkins’s 1785 translation of the “Bhagavad Gita”—­his Bhagvat-­Geeta—­ looms large, containing vivid pictures of this making and remaking of the world: “the universe, even, having existed, is again dissolved; and now again, on the approach of day, by divine necessity, it is reproduced. That which, upon the dissolution of all things else, is not destroyed, is superior and of another nature from that visibility: it is invisible and eternal.”7 Indeed with one or two exceptions (Phillis Wheatley being the most no-

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table), most of the writers in this study valued Wilkins’s translation, for images such as this: Herder translated parts of it into German, Humboldt wrote extensively about it during his Sanskritist phase in the 1820s, and Coleridge referred to it regularly. It spoke to Emerson, and Thoreau “bathed” in it. In the Descriptive Catalogue for his disastrous 1809 exhibition, Blake describes a drawing called The Bramins, now lost: “the subject is Mr. Wilkin, translating the Geeta; an ideal design, suggested by the publication of that first part of the Hindoo Scriptures, translated by Mr. Wilkin. I understand that my costume is incorrect, but in this I plead the authority of the ancients, who often deviated from the Habits, to preserve the Manners, as in the instance of the Laocoon.” The “Laocoon,” of course, is the Greek sculpture in stone of a writhing figure who—­in Blake’s words—­“though a priest, is represented naked.”8 Paul Barlow has argued that this “incorrect” costume must refer to the group of Brahmins from the picture’s title, who would have been assisting Wilkins, the orientalist scholar, typographer, and colonial administrator, in making the first translation of the Hindu religious text.9 But perhaps “Mr. Wilkin” has had his “Habit” changed, too: after all, when Blake later engraved his own Laocoon, a dizzying image-­text hybrid, he wrote upon it: “Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed.”10 Barlow explains his interest in non-­Western myth as a millenarian syncretism in the air during Blake’s creative lifespan, which fused Judeo-­Christian tradition with other world religions. Blake’s familiarity with figures like Bryant and Wilkins, both in the orbit of William Jones, supplies his mythic world recognizably with features of classical poetry and religious iconography from Afro-­A sian civilizations. (Jones, too, read Bryant with interest, but criticized him as a bad historian of language, a practitioner of “conjectural etymology.”)11 Yet where previous critics have made political cause of Blake’s borrowings from Indian thought in other paintings from the same exhibit, Barlow argues that Blake’s fascination with South Asian literature and cosmology is not coded argument, but evidence of emotional and spiritual attachment.12 Rather than confirming the “truth claims of Jones and Bryant” by rediscovering “distorted vestiges of Hebrew truth” in Hindu scriptures, Blake’s reception of “the Geeta” instead confirms that these sacred writings have similar currency, or even simply are, as he wrote, “the same thing.”13

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I imagine Blake’s lost drawing as a missing representation, in his own idiosyncratic aesthetic language, of distant, imperial linguistic exchange in an episode of cross-­racial contact.14 “Linguistic exchange” seems euphemistic for the process by which the object Blake calls “the Geeta” comes into being, in the course of “extraction from its textual and social contexts.”15 David Bindman has argued that while we cannot see Blake’s “ideal design,” we might look for a reference point to his friend John Flaxman’s relief carving of Jones transcribing the words of three scholars, with the caption, “He formed a digest of Hindu and Mohammedan laws.”16 In this carving, Jones is seated at a small desk, one leg comfortably crossed over the other, a banana tree behind him, writing with a pen as three partly robed figures, seated on a raised platform on the ground, appear to recite and contemplate: Brahmins, the learned or priestly class, delivering classical “texts” and “laws” to Jones for codification. Reading this image, Barlow concludes that, taking into consideration any plausibly shared features, the transmission of law in Jones’s role as a colonial judge would likely be very different from any image Blake might make of a parallel transmission of spiritual knowledge through Wilkins. But in that imaginative spirit, let us go further, and ask whether Blake’s image might in fact have been pointedly at odds with a representation

Memorial to Sir William Jones sculpted by John Flaxman, 1801, in University College Chapel, Oxford University. Source: Courtesy of Oxford and Empire Network, University of Oxford.

FIGURE 2.

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such as Flaxman’s, and particularly its medium, marble. Flaxman’s work sets in stone an imperial relation, celebrating and monumentalizing a scene of linguistic extraction. Jones is pictured doing the mundane work Siraj Ahmed calls “fixing social practices that had been fluid,” remaking these “precolonial discursive practices” into “abstract legality.”17 Could we imagine in Blake’s lost drawing of Wilkins translating, instead of a codifying scene, the releasing or movement of spiritual knowledge in the reception of a sacred text—­the sharing, rather than the mining, of knowledge? Blake might have had Wilkins himself naked like Laocoon, alongside the Brahmins, in a pose of inspiration, instead of maintaining the power differential marked as civilizational contrast in the “correct” dress of Flaxman’s carving (Jones’s shoes beside the pandits’ bare feet, for example). I imagine his design as a response to Flaxman’s realist allegory, in which the wisdom of a collective tradition is captured by the pen as text in order to “digest” the law, rendering cultural exchange as Jones’s own act of creation (“he formed a digest”), capturing this process in the paradigmatically durable medium of stone.18 Flaxman’s marble image of a man copying and fixing laws is the antithesis of what I propose to understand here as Blake’s linguistic actualism. It has intriguing resonances, however, with a famous image of Blake’s from the year Jones died, which is not lost. Lacking Blake’s The Bramins, let us think of Flaxman’s realistic scene of imperial benevolence alongside the famous frontispiece to The (First) Book of Urizen (1794). As we will see, the hardening of linguistic forms is a special target of Blake’s poetics, and one of his prototypical scenes of a misplaced faith in literalist textualism comes from Urizen. In that scene, the patriarch Urizen, in his search for a “solid without fluctuation,” has composed alone a sacred text that is also a book of laws: “Lo! I unfold my darkness, and on / This rock, place with strong hand the Book / Of eternal brass, written in my solitude.” The frontispiece memorably pictures Urizen’s desire to make linguistic time stand still as a fantasy of dogmatic self-­enclosure, with the solidity of individuation that closes over the mind impressed by sole agency. Here we find Urizen as scribe, eyes down or closed, seemingly copying texts with both hands from a book he is sitting on, framed at his back by Mosaic tablets or gravestones—­a monument to the desire for self-­equivalence, for law and order.

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Print made by William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, plate 1, “The First Book of Urizen” (Bentley 1), 1794. Source: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1978.43.1419.

FIGURE 3.

We might think of this engraving as an intensification of the bad linguistic habits of the imperial stance, a mental tyranny born out of a kind of sacralized—­and satirized—­idea of transcription as replication instead of movement. If we compare it with Flaxman’s marble, Blake’s Urizen seems to merge Jones (pen in hand) and the pandits (downcast eyes, crouch, bare feet) in a single body, now facing the reader. Author and “informant” in one, Urizen dictates and copies the “secrets of wisdom” and of “dark contemplation” in order to secure and reduce the world’s unutterable multifariousness to clear universal law: “One command, one joy, one desire / One curse, one weight, one measure / One King, one God, one Law.”

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In these phrases Urizen’s formula for linguistic absolutism echoes—­and expands—­the rollback against discourses of “freedom” in the 1790s: for instance, as Julius Scott reports, concern over the spread of revolutionary ideas to the French Caribbean colonies prompted one French general in 1792 to change the slogan displayed on flags by French recruits traveling to Saint-­Domingue from “Live Free or Die” to “The Nation, the Law, the King.”19 It is hard to imagine a more vivid condemnation of this variety of what Mufti calls “one-­world” thinking than the tragicomic figure of Urizen. With or without Flaxman as reference point, Blake’s image implies that the linguistic conversion of knowledge as dialogue into knowledge as copying, turning oral forms into textual law, embodies a one-­way process of materialization; what Amanda Jo Goldstein calls Urizen’s “forcible denial of social form” here takes linguistic interaction and turns it into dead text.20 In its objectifying stance, it stems from an epistemology anchored by an image of the subject as self-­sufficient individual, one in whose self-­closure the ideas of sovereignty and property (whether attached to a discourse of universality or not) are euphemisms for leveraging power, including linguistic or literary power. Verbal transactions enabling the extraction, translation, and circulation in Europe of Wilkins’s Bhagvat-­Geeta were euphemized in its preface as “social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion”; India was viewed as “the literary property of the English nation.”21 To undo such a notion of annexed “property,” and the imperial imaginaries that extended it, was one of Blake’s great aesthetic tasks. I suspect the language of imperial possession is a model against which we may imagine Blake’s lost image The Bramins, though we will never know what it looked like. For Blake, “communication” under the exercise of dominion must prompt us to envision language differently; power relations concretized in language are not natural but naturalized, that is, built and acculturated. Jones and Wilkins, of course, stand at the core of the cultural processes described in Edward Said’s Orientalism, and in recent critical revisions to that work. In the 1785 edition of Wilkins’s translation, Warren Hastings’s dedication offers a condensed expression of Said’s argument, in which the signature convergence of paternalistic sympathy with the euphemistic vi-

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olence of “the right of conquest” indicates one very real purpose of circulating the classical texts of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit: to establish local control by exerting epistemological authority, and to instill in its English readers the distanced colonial feeling he calls the “obligation of benevolence.” In that phrase, Hastings expresses the sentiments of the civilized for whom, as Du Bois later wrote, a dawning consciousness of “high descent” sparks a “desire to spread the gift abroad”:22 Every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state: it is the gain of humanity . . . it attracts and conciliates distant affections; it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection; and it imprints on the hearts of our own countrymen the sense and obligation of benevolence.23

Hastings, Makdisi explains, “ordered the extraction and circulation of Oriental knowledge for the purposes of command”; as the East India Company “systematically started using local languages in its government of India,” by the 1770s, the process of colonial rule through mastery by “acculturation” ensured that the study of language and literature would be, in Hastings’s words, “useful to the state.”24 And, of course, it is not only culture and politics that are interfused here, but also a very public domain of feeling: the kind of distant affection, we might say, that “lessens the weight of the chain” while still seeking “to bind another to its delight.” The appeal to read is held out as an affective lure, even a kind of duty: for how much of Britain’s imperial stance is told in this expressed desire to stoke the extractive desire for knowledge acquisition by attraction to its treasures of wisdom? Of the native informants, Hastings writes that this material “was contributed both cheerfully and gratuitously,” despite a longstanding “reluctance to communicate the mysteries of their learning to strangers.”25 In the “Translator’s Preface,” Wilkins himself expands: “so careful are they to conceal it from the knowledge of those of a different persuasion, and even the vulgar of their own, that the Translator might have sought in vain for assistance,” but for “the liberal treatment they have

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of late years experienced from the mildness of our government.”26 This same folding together of linguistic reduction, forms of governance, and extractive desire is crystallized in Flaxman’s relief carving, and satirized in Blake’s Urizen frontispiece. To understand the coordination of empire and language in the persona of Urizen, I will look closely in this chapter at how, for Blake, desire is configured as material constraint in the production of knowledge, often by way of a geological imaginary. Like Herder’s, Blake’s language is inflated with exclamation marks, filled like a lung with the voice of outrage that rails against oppressive cruelty. I want to show that for Blake, the use of stone as a figure of hardening is not dismissive of materiality itself, but is used instead to dismiss a hasty materialism skeptical of anything it cannot sense directly, one that cannot think in more than one “time” at once. In the terms of this book, Blake’s thought moves within the epochal shift that resisted the uprooted word, though obliquely, by representing the actively mixed durations revealed in dialogic encounter. He may not have the self-­reflexive relation to linguistic disposition that I’ve argued Wheatley represents in relation to her own experience, but interestingly the theory of language his poetry develops, as between the Clod and the Pebble, displaces a universal standard through distinct forms of life whose embodied voices are partial and conflicting expressions of shared material circumstances. (Though it is not really relevant to my argument here, it is also more than likely Blake read Wheatley’s poetry.) Blake’s poetry cultivates a receptivity to voice—­but knowing something as a “voice” may require a different way of listening. So Blake’s “language in deep time,” as I am thinking of it, demands that we arrive at an awareness of being co-­ participants in a seemingly infinite array of patterns of meaning-­making. Blake has not been much read in relation to “linguistic naturalism,” much less philology, which is understandable. Not only does he rarely describe language in its objectified forms—­for him, as “The Clod and the Pebble” indicates, it is a constitutive medium of experience—­but his “nature” is also not a given, not “out there,” but surprisingly full of imagination’s artifice. Even as his worldview encompasses devoted interest in the natural sciences and an attachment to the world’s infinite forms, nature itself is often identified as mystification—­in which the “vegetative”

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senses disguise the infinite, like a veil. Indeed, his work sometimes recalls language from Wilkins’s translation: “as thou art unable to see with these thy natural eyes, I will give thee a heavenly eye,” Kreeshna tells Arjoon (in Wilkins’s spellings), appearing in his truer form, before later downshifting again from a spiritual to a “natural form.”27 In Blake, the senses come in all kinds—­“As a man is So he Sees. As the Eye is formed such are its Powers”—­and nature’s forms depend on something we might call sensory desire: “to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination Itself.”28 Blake’s poetry imagines a possible shift in our relation to the material world, to the world as materially perceived—­away from “crude materiality” and toward a linguistic materialism in which shared expression has constitutive force.29 Its naturalism refuses either to dispense with matter or to be mystified by it. One argument of this chapter is that this shifted materialism makes the geo-­imaginary of Blake’s poetry especially important. In the linguistic relations dramatized in his poetry, Blake integrates representations of conquest, constraint, and petrification, moving among imperial geopolitics, philosophical materialism, and the superior feeling that shapes historical and sensory individuation in the division of self and other or self and world. Blake’s meaning contrasts with a canonical and still striking reading of romantic rhetoric that does not mention his poetry. Commenting in 1960 on a line of Hölderlin’s that imagined words growing like flowers, Paul de Man remarked in passing what a different “effect” the romantic gesture of linking language to organic growth would have had if the poet had likened language to stone, instead of to a flower. “The effect of the line,” he wrote, “would have been thoroughly modified if Hölderlin had written, for instance, ‘Steinen’ instead of ‘Blumen,’ although the relevance of the comparison would have remained intact as long as human language was being compared to a natural thing.”30 De Man illustrates, by negative comparison, a generalized “nostalgia for the object” exemplified in the flower’s desirability. Yet Blake’s work makes us question the claim that a stone language can only modify, without significantly altering, this nostalgic link between language and nature. Giving language geological features draws the lifespan of stone—­deep time—­into our picture of language. A nostalgia for the object might prompt poets to try to “stuff nature into

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words,” but Blake’s gray romanticism helps us see that naturalizing language has less green effects.31 In The Book of Thel (1789), the eye of desire flits from more to less comforting forms, from a flower to a “Clod of Clay,” and from there to the unsettling dead ground, secretly in motion beneath our feet. And The Book of Urizen (1794) plots subject-­formation through reproductive, imperial, biblical, and geological chronologies, satirizing the idea of the sovereign subject (the idea that “I” am the one thing in this universe not formed or dependent) by revealing its instability and reactive self-­perpetuation. In both books, I argue, the language of geologic nature is intended to slow desire, and to reframe the active role of the linguistic subject. As a poetic figure, stone often serves as the repository of our imaginative maximum for inert matter, the “ultimate example of materiality” or “dominant instance of the primitive reality of things.”32 Yet the eighteenth century was rich in theoretical proposals placing geological forms in various continua with animate entities, from “thinking matter” or hylozoism, to the influence of Spinoza’s monist Ethics, to the materialism of the Encyclopédie authors, to neo-­Lucretian poetics.33 Writing in Spinoza’s wake, for instance, Herder points out the relatively unknowable liveliness of stones: “of the feelings of plants we know nothing, and of the phenomenon of impulse toward motion in stone, still less.”34 The attraction to stone lies not in primordial materiality, but in its cultural availability as a figure of inanimate, emphatically nonlinguistic, natural form. To render earth or stone animate or give it language obviously alters what stone connotes, but less obviously it also stretches the limits of language, helping to come to terms with the opaque muteness shaping what “the human” normatively includes. The most celebrated British geologist of the era, Scottish Enlightenment thinker James Hutton, also published an ambitious philosophical work in 1794 whose materialism declared the ceaseless mobility of matter.35 Among stone’s figurative gradations are inertness or passivity, heaviness, density, solidity, hardness, coldness; but its apparent inanimacy is recognized by writers like Hutton as an invisible activity, elemental—­temporal—­slowness, a kind of obstacle to thought. Stone chastises the desire for immediacy, and becomes thereby a figure for human finitude and its active passiveness—­though with Wheatley’s work

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as counterweight, we are continually reminded that stoniness also more pointedly introduces limits on what, or whom, the “human” categorically includes. But it is one of the signal properties of romantic-­era figures for finitude, like stone, that the feeling of imposed limits is reevaluated or renegotiated.36 Below, I orient Blake alongside these eighteenth-­century geological and philosophical discourses. Their theoretical pronouncements focus on learning something about humans from rocks, and end up empathizing with their stony objects. “Then what have I to do with thee”—­the chapter epigraph, from “To Tirzah,” another of Blake’s Songs of Experience—­is an expression by turns tender and cold, a way of thinking through the conflicted material powers that organize relations between “self” and “other.” If we think about the “colonial world” that Frantz Fanon described as “a world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues,” we have a later picture of the long shadow cast by a material imagination Blake’s use of stony images strives against.37 To show this, I follow moments where Blake invents relations between language and geological form to tell stories about affect and self-­presentation. Between geological, philosophical, political, and poetic spheres, I argue that language “hardens” to the extent that it takes on the mute alienness of stone, giving it a social solidity that exceeds the timescales of individual actions; but as long-­term temporal processes are recognized in geomorphological features, all forms of solidity become mere shorthand for their invisible processes of formation, erosion, and accretion, so that language also “softens” in the analogy. Like stone, it undergoes imperceptible alterations. How does this destabilizing naturalization allow a representational shift in the reification of language, making it solid and objective, so that it can be perceived as a “thing” changed over time? And yet, at the same time, how does a language routed through geological worlds also potentially reanimate the dead texts of language, the “alien word,” giving voice to different histories of signification?

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NO VESTIGE, NO PROSPECT

Discussing the onset of comparative philology, anthropologist John Leavitt presents it in the context of an epistemological shift from Mosaic to geological chronology: Up to the early nineteenth century, most Europeans accepted calculations based on the Bible that the earth was a few thousand years old. Most of the early comparative philologists therefore presumed that whatever the ancestral form of the Indo-­European Languages might have been, it had to be close to the original language of mankind. The opening-­up to “Deep Time” came in the work of the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (1795–­1875). In his Principles of Geology (first volume 1830), Lyell adopted the principle of uniformitarianism: the kinds of processes we observe around us today must be used to explain processes in the past . . . Suddenly the earth, and with it the living world, looked much, much older—­ old enough, in fact, to think seriously about transformations in living things, and of humans and their languages, over a long period.38

The relation between an expanded historical scale and the study of human and linguistic origins is well expressed here. But it is generally accepted that Lyell developed his principle of “uniformitarianism” from an earlier form in Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788), and this shift toward thinking “seriously” about evolution in “humans and their languages” over an extended timescale was clearly under way earlier in the romantic century. Before returning to Blake’s poetry, I interpose several intellectual backgrounds, ranging from the scientific to the philosophical, each of which allows in different ways for romantic reorientations of linguistic perspective accompanying the gradual shift toward an awareness of what is now called “deep time.” These backgrounds informed the geological discourse picked up by figures like Blake. They take the form here of brief but representative moments in the thought of James Hutton, Baruch Spinoza, Denis Diderot, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Hutton’s theories were popularized among other places through the writings of John Playfair, in his memorial “Life of Dr. Hutton” (1797). While it is Hutton himself who wrote most famously that in his view

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geological processes revealed “no vestige of a beginning,—­no prospect of an end” (a radical challenge to the problem of origins), it is the famous line from an anecdote in Playfair’s “Life” that leaves us reeling, dropping out the temporal depth of this new discourse: “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”39 Playfair is preoccupied in this document with the legibility of stone to the attentive observer: “with an accurate eye for perceiving the characters of natural objects, [Hutton] had in equal perfection the power of interpreting their signification, and of deciphering those ancient hieroglyphics which record the revolutions of the globe.”40 But such standard metaphors of “reading the characters” of nature (here in order to explain a fossil’s age and formation) are sometimes also inverted by Playfair, so that geological forms themselves speak. When Playfair describes the triumph of Hutton’s hunt through the Glen Tilt valley in central Scotland for evidence to support his theory that intruded granite veins illustrate geological restoration (being formed through regenerative processes of volcanic activity), he declares that “of all the junctions of granite and schistus which are yet known, this at Glentilt speaks the most unambiguous language.”41 This rock formation—­a “junction” that is really a disjunction between two types of rock—­communicates to its observers within what immense scales of time it was undergoing continuous processes not only of erosion, but also of reformation. Blake’s career roughly corresponds historically with the troubling, exhilarating geological discoveries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and with the developing scientific language that instantiated the consistent legibility of geological features. Noah Heringman draws the parallel between Blake and Hutton on the grounds that Hutton “challenged the view of rock as primitive matter . . . much as Blake challenged the philosophical regime of solid surfaces in his negative images of petrifaction.”42 I think Heringman risks overstating Blake’s antimaterialism here, but I am indebted to the idea that both sought a “new account of solidification,” with a vastly attenuated temporality to match it, an account that would balance the weathering forces of dissolution with stone’s formation. As the arguments between advocates of Neptunism and Plutonism, and the solutions volleyed over what Stephen Jay Gould has called the “paradox of the soil,” occupied the intellectual energies of romantic-­

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era savants, the actual awe-­inspiring age of stone gradually became an accepted, if necessarily unfathomable, possibility.43 Playfair’s vertigo is symptomatic of this shift: the substance, organization, and arrangement of stone were definitively recognized as markers of the extreme separation in age of the human species and the mineral content of the ground supporting life. century philosophical exchange on stone had The late eighteenth-­ another source in the metaphysical system of Spinoza. A controversial philosophical touchstone for varied strands of the radical enlightenment, romanticism, and German idealism, Spinoza proposed that stones (like all bodies) exist and persist within a scale of animacy, distributed and determined by forces to which all bodies inevitably respond.44 In a 1674 letter defending his views on freedom and determinacy, Spinoza develops an analogy between a human’s and a stone’s perspective, in order to show the limits of awareness enclosing individual “agency” in each. He illustrates how “created things” are “determined by external causes” invisible to them, using the simplest example he can imagine, a stone flying through the air. “While the stone continues to move, it thinks, and knows that as far as it can, it strives to continue to move. Of course since the stone is conscious only of its striving [conatus], and not at all indifferent, it will believe itself to be free . . . [just as] men are conscious of their appetite and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.”45 Though it strikes us still as provocative that stone is given, in this letter, a certain agency, in fact a dynamic passivity is the lever that lifts the comparison: just like stone, humans passively “act” according to unrecognized external forces. This is the line of ethical reasoning which Diderot carried to one possible logical endpoint, in the opening lines of Le Rêve de d’Alembert (1769): D’Alembert: . . . then you will have to admit that stones can think. Diderot: And why not? D’Alembert: That’s pretty hard to swallow [dur à croire]. Diderot: Yes, for someone who cuts and shapes them, or who grinds them into a powder without hearing them cry out.46

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“Dur à croire,” indeed: Diderot’s preoccupations here, which would circulate around Herder, Goethe, and Blake, followed questions raised by philosophical debates over eighteenth-­century hylozoism, the experimental doctrine that matter can think. These were perilously impious proposals for animating the inert, for locating the inhuman in human frames, for rearticulating material resistance.47 They are also intriguing experiments in sympathy, during an age of Europe’s colonial expansion under the imperatives of racial capitalism, which also sought new rationales for denying humanity to certain subjects of history, and for perceiving embodied subjects more easily as things. It was within the reach of such speculation that stone itself might be “crying out” (inverted in the much later corollary, that far from making some humans more like objects, this thought might mean humans themselves are “walking, talking minerals”).48 Diderot goes on to explain how an inability to hear rock cry out is part of what conceals our own mineral composition: he describes the process by which marble might be pulverized, enter the soil, and be consumed and incorporated along with cultivated plants. In doing so he collapses the necessary timeframe for the sake of his narrative, registering this compression: “let it rot for a year, two years, a century, for I am not concerned with time.” Of course, he is precisely concerned with time, as times vastly different in scale are being playfully overlapped. The temporalities in question—­ stone’s disintegration, human ingestion and absorption, and the speculative time it would take to “see” this process—­are not merely joined; they are inseparable. This philosophical undertow takes its pull from the thought that humans are affected or shaped by the same forces and elements that shape stone. Goethe was one of several German romantic-­era literary figures who were trained and active in the subfields of knowledge that preceded geology (Novalis and Alexander von Humboldt were two of the others). Among his morphological and scientific aphorisms, his exploration of a quasi-­linguistic mediation between the observer and the observed emerges in the opacity of geological terms: “stones are mute teachers, they make the observer speechless, and what is best learnt from them cannot be communicated.”49 Goethe leans on stone’s inaccessibility, while claiming that its very “muteness,” however exemplary of the alienness of matter, can be

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learned. He suggests that there are ways of relating to material surroundings that relax our assumption of matter’s resistance. The aphorism nudges us to imagine language differently, by being taught muteness (if perhaps a muteness we already possess). The attentive relation to nature which Goethe models linguistically by imagining stone’s teachable quiet stands as a rich point of comparison for Blake; it also reemerges through Goethe’s wide influence, for instance on Emerson, who would write: “we first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause.”50 Yet here, instead of shared origins, Goethe poses relation to stone as potential communication, a mode of knowledge other than “grasping”—­a kind of faith or deference in the observer, now made a listener.51 What is the relationship between hearing a rock cry—­or listening to its quiet—­and comparing language to nature more generally? Any answer will have a lot to do with scale: or as Goethe wrote, “In observing nature on a scale large or small, I have always asked: Who speaks here, the object or you?”52 The recognition of geologic time, while emphasizing the relative shortness of human time, also reveals humans to be participating in something “deeper.” Scholarship on deep time’s discovery loves to cite an immodest paragraph of Freud’s listing Copernicus, Darwin, and himself, as having successively reduced the presumed extent, centrality, superiority, and stability of the sphere of the human, pruning back its scale and self-­ confidence. In these citations, a simplified historical turn from the biblical chronology to deep time is claimed as a further reduction in this series. But if in a certain sense the awareness of deep time, of geological timescales, does fixate on the smallness or insignificance of the human timescale, it does so specifically through comparison and disjunction of vast to infinitesimal, and through the expression of different relations between these scales. For writers like Goethe, Blake, and Emerson, the sensation of finitude is not cause for panic; rather, as Emerson writes, in a peculiar tone between complacency and wonder, “geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature.”53 It relates us inseparably to worldly or secular environments, where “secular” collapses worldliness with a sense of the eons’ cyclical depth, or in Blake’s Urizenic idiom, a “rolling.” These scalar disjunctions echo the analogy between linguistic life and stone, helping to explain the usefulness of the figure of matter that thinks,

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speaks, or teaches. The animism of nature in romantic writers—­and particularly stone as marker of nature’s temporal depth—­can be understood to inflect a solidifying sense of human finitude. It can also establish, not merely a distance between the timescales operative in these figures, but the simultaneity of their terms. Hutton’s skill, as Playfair puts it, lies in “marking the gradations of nature, as she passes from one extreme to another,”—­but this serves to demonstrate the “continuity of her proceedings.”54 And in Goethe’s “On Granite” (1784) he describes difference and continuity between granite (which, unlike Hutton, he believed to be the oldest, original form of stone) and the human “heart”: I do not fear the accusation that a contrary spirit has led me away from my consideration and depiction of the human heart, the youngest, most diverse, most fluid, most changeable, most vulnerable part of creation, and has brought me to the observation of the oldest, firmest, deepest, most unshakeable son of nature [that is, granite]. It is evident that all things in nature have a clear relationship to one another, and that the questing spirit resists being denied what it can attain . . . I may be forgiven my desire for that sublime tranquility which surrounds us when we stand in the solitude and silence of nature, vast and eloquent with its still voice . . . Filled with these thoughts [Gesinnungen] I approach you, the most ancient and worthiest monuments of time.55

Directly addressing the mountaintop he sits on, Goethe places the human against the inhuman not to distinguish but to “approach” Nature’s “still voice,” understanding granite as the most physically alien and temporally ungraspable part of creation, and wishing to establish a relation. Whereas Hutton had recognized, visiting Glen Tilt in 1785, that the granite was younger than the schist into which it had intruded, for Goethe, the very fact that granite is in his judgment the extreme of durability against which to measure human changeability renders its “connection” to the human heart, and the gradations separating them, the more wondrous. In posing scalar leaps as continuities, Goethe’s “mute” communion matches the Huttonian encounter with that long geological language attesting to the mutability of apparently solid form: “it is on the objects which appear the most durable and fixed, that the characters of revolution are most deeply imprinted.”56

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Thanks in part to Hutton, who also wrote extensively about agriculture, debates regarding the properties and history of land masses and rock formations at the tail end of the eighteenth century revolved around the problem of whether and how stone, which clearly degenerated through erosion and weathering, might also regenerate. In retrospect, it seems likely that theories of earth’s self-­restoration are related to poetic experiments with the trope of bringing stone to life. The scalar comparison that allows us even to imagine geological formation or decay in human time already becomes a way of attributing liveliness to stone: it needs “quickening” to be visible, something attempted in different ways in “The Clod and the Pebble,” The Book of Thel, The Book of Urizen, and elsewhere. Linguistic actualism, as I’ve outlined it here, invites different kinds of time into poetry, but these kinds of time are also complementary. As W. J. T. Mitchell suggests, in representing the coexistence of “dream time and deep time” in mythic and geological temporalities, romantic “natural imagery” entangles widely distinct timelines.57 And these complicated possibilities can be wielded by writers in the romantic century as a critical method for expressing the narrowness of enlightenment definitions of the human. While emblematic of nature’s apparent passivity, stone may seem to reinforce the anthropocentric sense of homo faber, or the human as sculptor, shaping nature’s incomprehensible stoniness.58 But as these literary and philosophical reference points show, the point may be not to reinforce human agency, but to learn from stone how to accommodate nonknowledge. Gradations of animacy attributed to the world’s forms are signs of a spectrum of varying intimacy with our objects of knowledge, or variations on the desire for closeness, even as these gradations tend to represent stones as what Mel Chen calls “bad verbal subjects.”59 Anxiety over human finitude can be mitigated by a relation to the world based less on knowing it with certainty than on listening to it, attending to its mute voices. For Blake, a different regeneration—­deeply tied to the creative energies manifested in poetry, and the resulting expansive picture of language—­serves as an imperative against imperial modes of knowledge, classified in Blake’s mythography as “Urizenic,” that petrify the world (including its human inhabitants) in order to hold it still, to take hold of it and extract from it.

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This requires learning to simply tune out the voices populating the world, but Blake suggests that the capacity to hear the pattern of relations sustaining the world’s forms is accessible—­indeed, it is, to those sensitized to the imagination, an always broadcasting frequency. M AT T E R ’ S H E A R T

In “The Clod and the Pebble,” to imagine earthly forms with mouths that warble and sing lodges objective inertia in language forms, yet adds to this apparent density the enlivening processes of slow change in different times. Instead of merely quickening language, bringing it organically to life, this linguistic geologizing petrifies it in order to hear it, slowing language’s “life” to a glacial pace, bringing it almost to a standstill. At the same time it introduces the imaginative capacity to think of language as always invisibly in motion: to repeat Hutton’s formula, a closer observation of phenomena will reveal those minute “changes of things, which are not barely apparent, but are real.” Placing the lyric “I” in so-­called deep time presents a viewpoint from which even those language forms that seem the most still and concrete, or changelessly “natural,” are subject to imperceptibly slow shifts of dissolution and regeneration. Hence, alongside the rise of what would later be called geologic uniformitarianism, a style of thought enters poetic pictures of language: linguistic actualism. In the text of the final, apocalyptic plates of Jerusalem, Blake explicitly proposes that language’s specificity can in a sense be defined through processes comparable to hardening and softening, in one of the best known of his direct references to language (cited earlier alongside Wheatley). Here, the manifold dimensions of significant form are expressed this way: . . . every Word & every Character Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or Opakeness of Nervous fibres. Such was the variation of Time & Space Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary . . .60

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Once again Wilkins’s Bhagvat-­Geeta offers a possible reference point: “all things act according to their natures, what then will restraint effect?”61 In the linguistic “Visionary forms” that constitute conversation among the reconfigured creatures Blake imagines here, language is thoroughly retheorized as a function of the body (if it can still be called that).62 Throughout his poetry, Blake offers illustrations of an implicit theory of language that widens the reach of linguistic processes for living things formed within semiotic ecologies. In portraying Blake as a language theorist focused on how linguistic “variation” accords with forms of life, I propose that his view of language’s embodied temporality borrows the thought that “all things act according to their natures” to open outward toward variable structures of knowledge and feeling, inextricable from the material composition and desires or attachments of linguistic bodies.63 Angela Esterhammer has suggested that these lines “reconceptualize the act of naming,” also a way of saying it sets itself apart from earlier linguistic naturalisms that fit the word onto the world.64 A useful point of departure for Blake’s linguistic naturalism is the mysticism of seventeenth-­century philosopher Jakob Böhme, whose writings provide both inspiration and contrast.65 Böhme’s “Language of Nature” seems to inform the voices that weave the texture of Blake’s poetry. For Böhme, the expression of a spiritual force emanating from each thing or creature (its signature) is revealed in its “external Form,” but also equally in its “Instigation, Inclination and Desire,” and in its uttered “Sound, Voice and Speech”: “for Nature has given to every Thing its Language according to its Essence and Form.” To make this “language” easier to visualize, Böhme fills nature with mouths, ceaselessly uttering their essence: “every thing has its Mouth to Manifestation; and this is the Language of Nature, whence every Thing speaks out of its Property, and continually manifests, declares, and sets forth itself.”66 Böhme’s attribution of voice “even” to “trees and plants,” and to “stones and metals,” finds a kind of expression in those last lines of Jerusalem: “All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone.”67 Yet while Böhme’s image of mouths vividly urges the reader to apprehend the world by listening to its voices, the emphasis on each thing’s “property” (Eigenschaft) indicates a difference from Blake. Blake inherits the sense that not only sound, but drive and desire (“Trieb

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und Begierde”), corporeal form (“Gestalt des Leibes”), and customs and gestures (“Sitten und Gebärden”) reveal language in living and nonliving things, but in his work utterances transform—­they are not restricted by “property,” or anchored to individual entities as their “signature”; instead, they alter with historically mediated shifts in sensoria, relations, and forms of life. Böhme’s already capacious “Natursprache” acquires variability in Blake’s fibrous, embodied “Expansion or Contraction.” Blake’s “voices” give utterance to quasi-­a llegorical abstractions that generalize tendencies of thought and desire, rather than to “creatures” in the sense of denizens of Creation. But Blake’s clearest difference from Böhme’s naturalism is that his poetry gives language time: as with the Pebble and the Clod, contrastive temporality or lifespan influences stance, perspective, and expression. One of the affinities between language in Böhme and Blake is a slippage between voice, appearance, and desire. But rather than revealing hidden qualities (essences or “signatures”), for Blake voices manifest the alterable perspectival stances they typify; an epistemology of voice and listening emerges as crucial to the production of each speaker’s world. By giving up fixed qualities, Blake lets go of relations of referential immediacy or iconicity. For all his fascination with naming, he does not seem preoccupied with the fitness of names, as a residually Adamic or Cratylist theory would be; instead, language emerges in heated, expansively conceived conversation, organized by what Bakhtin called “addressivity,” or the ways address structures experience differentially. This language is materially embodied, saturated with desires, antagonisms, and hierarchies of relation. Blake analyzes linguistic patterns or habits by tracing mythic “histories” of passionate response. His naturalism does not promise to reveal a universal language, but to teach a practice of listening to voices based on their continuous manifestation through material composition. To witness this theory in action, let’s look at how natural and mineral forms acquire voices in Blake’s Book of Thel (1789). The protagonist (whose name evokes Greek thelo, “I wish/will/desire”) is a sprite-­like creature whose philosophical temperament leads her to a paralyzing despondency over life’s transience. This gloomy mood inspires a series of interrogative complaints, which are answered by personified features of the landscape

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around her, each attempting to offer reassurance: a lily, a cloud, a worm, and a clod of clay. Finally, in a world underground to which the Clod invites her (“my house”), she listens to “voices of the ground,” which culminate in a voice issuing from her own “grave plot.” (Perhaps the Clod’s “house” plays on Wilkins’s translation of Krishna’s name for mortality in the Bhagavad-­Gita: “this world, the mansion of death.”)68 This voice poses a series of questions about sensory and epistemological limits; when the series ends, Thel flees “with a shriek” back to her home, Har. What begins for Thel as an anxiety over temporal finitude leads to a climactic encounter with the voice that radicalizes that anxiety, in that its depth is felt not only temporally, in the brevity of individual life, but also epistemologically, in a terrifying sensation of the limits of the knowable. If Thel allegorizes discontented desire, she does so by playing out reactions to the world internal to a certain kind of reason. Her sequence of encounters insists on the prejudices inherent in voicing, listening, misunderstanding or mishearing. It dramatizes the movement between seeing and hearing, mistrusting the senses or trusting the senses too much, and dwells intently on the effects of voice, how hearing a certain way creates a certain world. Her complaints, delivered to “the secret air,” are posed in a contradictory form: she laments her own future disappearance, itself guaranteed by the individuated autonomy she clings to. It comes as a surprise to her, then, that her invocations are answered by a succession of things with voices, clearly inflected by her attitude toward them: “O little Cloud the virgin said, I charge thee tell to me, / Why thou complainest not when in one hour thou fade away . . . ah Thel is like to Thee. . . . The Cloud then shew’d his golden head & his bright form emerg’d, / Hovering and glittering on the air before the face of Thel.”69 As her apostrophes reiterate this process of producing their addressees, we may find ourselves reading the poem as a study of the idea of the pathetic fallacy. Or we may see these personifications as the simplifying effects of observing with a kind of species-­narcissism: Thel appears human in Blake’s illustrations, and her perception is inevitably anthropocentric, for she must see and hear “according to” the shape of her embodied experience. Yet Blake does more: even as her speech seems to act by materializing fit interlocutors, Thel is puzzled by being brought face to face with the world as it comes

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alive; eliciting linguistic life from the world of nature, hearing its voices, alters the sense of that life which having a voice is presumed to bestow.70 In an early essay, Marjorie Levinson developed the notion of Thel as an allegory of desire whose “ventriloquisms” shape the poem such that “the fact of speech—­the act of speech—­is the hero of the poem.”71 For Levinson, the idea of knowledge spheres, or “paradigms,” from the poem’s famous Motto (“Does the Eagle know what is in the Pit? / Or wilt thou go ask the Mole? / Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? / Or Love in a golden bowl?”) is enacted by Thel through the invocation of animate interlocutors from her natural surroundings. Epistemological and linguistic frames, with their outer limits, are aligned; these limits haunt and shape Thel’s journey. That for which “Thel’s vocabulary lacks a word” escapes her perception; even as language enables some kinds of communion, it disables others.72 Levinson’s focus on language is illuminating especially when Thel’s limits are provisionally surpassed by descending into the underworld, where voices emanate from the ground (including her own grave), granting access to a kind of knowledge otherwise denied, and giving her the temporary ability to hear beyond her linguistic capacity.73 Thel’s descent into the “land unknown,” like the katabasis of classical literature, serves as a provisional death, in this case in order to allow an impossible fantasy of communicability between live and dead matter that levels that hierarchy of animacy. Thel’s progress from creature to personified creature is characterized by material softness, by an unwilled—­and so unwanted—­mutability. Blake emphasizes not only temporary life, liquidity or “fading,” but also a softness introduced by Thel’s “soft voice” and “gentle lamentation.” Thel’s first question is, “why fades the lotus of the water? / Why fade these children of the spring?” before launching into a litany of things evanescent, to which she likens herself: “a watry bow,” “a parting cloud,” “a reflection in a glass,” “shadows in the water,” and so forth.74 Countering Thel’s disappointment at sensing her own impermanence, these conjured creatures seem at peace with their formal fluidity: though only “a watry weed,” the Lilly is content to wait for its evaporation in “eternal vales”; the Cloud explains its afterlife as nurturing moisture. When Thel despairs at the thought of becoming “only . . . the food of worms,” her personifications begin to condense and

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descend to earth. That liquidity of the Lilly (which “the summer’s heat melts”) and Cloud (which “court[s] the fair eyed dew”) gives way to the infantilized, prelinguistic Worm, so resistant to Thel’s interpretive assimilation into speech (“Art thou a Worm? . . . art thou but a Worm? . . . Ah weep not little voice, thou canst not speak . . . Is this a worm?”), and its interpreter, the Clod of Clay. “My bosom of itself is cold, and of itself is dark,” the “matron Clay” tells Thel, while reassuring her, much as the Lilly and Cloud have, that “we live not for ourselves.” Her pious modesty takes that of the Lilly and Cloud to an extreme: “thou seest me the meanest thing,” she says, stressing the transitivity of Thel’s perception; and, while this reiterates Thel’s sight as shaping power to render the world’s forms recognizable (as the Clay is gendered and humbled), the phrase “meanest thing” draws this element of nature closer to that “ultimate example of materiality,” stone.75 The Clod declares her comparative inanimacy, her “hard”-­ness and “cold”-­ness signifying apparent resistance, before inviting Thel to know more, suggesting that she cross a threshold of knowledge: “all thy moans flew o’er my roof. but I have call’d them down: / Wilt thou O Queen enter my house.” Pulling Thel’s plaintive language below earth’s surface, the matron Clod is authorized to grant Thel temporary access to the material world: “ ’tis given thee to enter,/ And to return.” Thel remains at first silent, observing “where the fibrous roots / Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists” and then listening to “the voices of the ground.”76 Recalling Goethe’s account of the human heart as Creation’s “most restless” part, she follows these “restless twists” whose roots seem to turn into voices, literalizing linguistic roots as what binds the human heart to its material ground, with invisible movements just barely sensed. In this Gothic picture, crossing garden with graveyard, Blake shows how spooky it would be to see—­to know or understand, by some unimaginable mode of access—­the dark sap of language pulsing through the body’s fiber, tracing what should be an opaque, inaccessible path through “every heart” to its origin in nonlinguistic matter. Among the things Blake accomplishes in The Book of Thel, not least is the transformation of a recognizably pastoral comfort in the idea of seeming timelessness (eternity), by way of a loosely geological attention

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that refocuses the conventional compensatory “blessings” of mortality—­ suffer well now and get your “afterlife” later—­into the frightening language of gradual, impersonal change. This is how Blake is giving language deep time. Underground, Thel’s serial progress slows, as she herself is quieted, becoming a rapt observer: she “wander[s],” is twice “listning,” is now “waiting oft,” now stands “in silence,” until, increasingly immobile and passive, she “sat down / And heard this voice.”77 Her underground listening illustrates a slowing of desire similar to that required by Huttonian epistemology, which one commentator describes by saying that “most of the geological process is . . . just too slow to watch. How can you base a theory on the perception of what is almost imperceptible?”78 In her underworld, Blake’s Thel answers this question, as if Hutton’s observer were interanimated, as Goethe advocates, with her object of study: while exploring the Clod’s “house,” she slows to perceive the imperceptible (and perhaps the better term would be Fred Moten’s “interinanimated”).79 Thel’s complaint aboveground was that, as time passes, the futile body dies. But time passes, it turns out, in different ways. As she finds that she is lodged in matter, she experiences her own death, her own mineral composition—­in another phrase from “To Tirzah,” her “mortal part.” To understand your part in the ground’s voice, you have to decompose—­or at least, decompose the desire for individuation. (Perhaps the misunderstanding of “taking part” as “falling apart” makes Thel a cousin or counterpart to Wordsworth’s Lucy, whose name calls to mind another Greek cognate—­ luein, “to loosen, dissolve”). Thel’s experience underground shows what externality sounds like to the unwilling participant. In the eerie, earthy voice of Thel’s “grave plot,” the familiar Blakean motif of “Expansion or Contraction” that stretches the form of human sensoria is registered as a fear of intimacy with the world and as a protest against too much knowledge. Its series of rhetorical questions implies that perception is not limited or private enough. “Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction,” breathes Thel’s grave, “Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile!/ . . . Why a Tongue impress’d with honey from every wind? Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?”80 This voice asks why the senses must know experience, why the body must confront its mortality, rather than being “closed,” resting in a state of innocent in-

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dividuality. Why, in other words, must it exist within timeframes in excess of its own?81 This voice invents, through an immature desire, a chimerical innocence sufficient to its own world, an autonomy that was never the case. It observes and recognizes a world beyond the individual, a temporality in excess of its private lifespan, but interprets this stretched and mixed temporal environment as indifferent to its proper self, and rejects it. Thel is that part of the will that glimpses its participation in a “greater than itself” (“To Tirzah”) and refuses or retreats from it: “The virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek. / Fled back unhinderd.” Blake’s focus on the mutual influence between bodily or intellectual shape and natural or material environment in Thel illustrates his interpretation of how human language operates within histories and ecologies of meaning-­making. While language is always formally vital to Blake’s philosophy, he is not overly preoccupied with its units—­with signs or words. He stretches language, until it inhabits the mixed agencies within interpretive processes crossing affective response, desire, embodied epistemology. In Thel, we could say we find the desire for a circumscribed or private language, and though we may sympathize with her rebelliousness, Blake stages her defiance as a stubborn resistance to an awareness of larger and longer languages. At another level, the poem’s geological uprooting or unseating of timeless pastoral comfort might be read as counter-­Wordsworthian avant la lettre, insofar as it is about the artificiality of seeking green solace from nature (though of course, as many have pointed out, Wordsworth has a grayness all his own); all explicit solace Thel receives from the shapes she conjures, and particularly her voyage underground, is experienced as cold comfort. Coaxing language from the ground seems to invite the side effect of confronting mortality. This mortality effect follows a simple principle of inversion: to allow that language—­as figure, as address—­may lend a stony world life also shows how life may be turned to stone.82 In The Book of Thel, Blake borrows the generic descent to the underworld to rewrite eighteenth-­century theories of geological regeneration and matter’s flexibility, casting the “act of speech” as hero. Using these narrative materials, the poem formulates an attentiveness to the many timelines within which language changes: it theorizes a material dimen-

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sion of vocal form through a story about language’s curious conversation between ephemeral softness and durable solidity. That “deep” place where subterranean hearts “infix” their “fibrous roots” is, partly at least, a temporal depth; in Thel’s provisional death, we glimpse a momentary unwanted collapse of the figures that compare human and stone, where a “life” is slowed toward “death,” and where the spans of striving material forms contract and dilate, converge and disperse. Levinson points out that The Book of Thel was composed and etched between the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and may be read as a transition between the two. In “The Clod and the Pebble,” we saw Blake stage a concise geological conversation between experience and innocence. The Book of Urizen, completed the same year as Experience (1794), might be viewed as a contrastive transformation of The Book of Thel from a song of innocence into a song of experience: Blake takes Thel’s resistance to change and illustrates it in a far more dangerous form, as the genealogy of the psyche or the individuated self in parallel with the self-­inflicted indurations of imperial desire. It is also, of course, a tragicomic narration of origins-­thinking and a parody of Genesis; only instead of Adam simply having once, long ago, handed out true, natural names, there is the solitary linguistic power of the divinity Urizen, under whose law-­giving dominion incommunicability hardens the world’s citizens against one another. GENESIS NOW

“The Clod and the Pebble,” with its bluntly contrasted voices, proposes more directly than most of Blake’s obscure poetic dramas that the voice is shaped by external influences, and there imagined within differentiated geologic scales of time. Readers from George Eliot to Germaine Greer have taken the poem to represent what Northrop Frye called “irreconcilable attitudes”; the poem offers a surface-­level exposition of the polarized points of view interpretable as “innocence” and “experience,” respectively.83 How do their languages differently express what it feels like to inhabit a body with a given composition? Never mind origins: what does it feel like to be in the midst of language? For Blake, language is deeply enmeshed within attitudes and behaviors, within material, social, and spiritual conditions, all subject to change. More broadly, in his poetry, our so-­called “facul-

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ties” or qualities are always on their way from somewhere, to somewhere. No dimension of experience is excluded from the process that is shaping our relation to the world around us. Process and relation are the basis of this spiritual physics, and his language and images are always passing through pressurized spaces of conflict, in which voice and address shape the making and remaking of sense. The claustrophobic Book of Urizen takes place precisely within these pressurized spaces of conflict. Blake habitually uses the language of solidifying, contracting, narrowing, or shrinking as indicative of restrictive conditions, or a progressive sensory straitening: hence, what Heringman called his revolt against the “regime of solid surfaces” is generally interpreted as antimaterialist.84 But, as Ernst Cassirer points out, even where it seems to favor spirit, voice, and imagination, the Spinozist monism reworked throughout the romantic century can cut both ways: solidity functions in more ways than one.85 To stretch our picture of language, “Clod” crucially relies on an illustration of how conceptions of time inflect knowledge structures, and the attitudes toward the world that knowledge helps create. This shows how conceptions of time may find their way into matter, or how matter simultaneously inhabits numerous temporalities, substantively altering how the world is interpreted. By reimagining the mineral world’s hard, cold matter in attitudes correlated with material lifespans, Blake compels the speaking subject to feel material cooperation or complicity with the surrounding world, a feeling that may be hard to feel as comfort, but perhaps need not come as looming terror, as it does for Thel, or continual frustration, as it will for Urizen. The correlation of language, attitude, and timescale situates Blake within the philosophical and geological speculations of the era: it explores the bonds existing among superficially opposed forms of matter, like human heart and granite, or more generally between “self” and “another.” Those materialist speculations—­like the innovative materialism underlying Hutton’s geology or the afterlife of Spinozan monism in the peculiar materialisms of Diderot or Goethe—­can help us magnify the conversation in “The Clod and the Pebble,” and see its stark contrast playing out in nuanced ways across Blake’s poetics. Again, Blake’s “naturalizing” linguistic sensibility does not correlate individual language units with objects in

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the world; instead, it recruits abstract voices to materialize views, stances, desires. In geological terms, his naturalism transforms the legibility of the geologic record into a materialist poetics amending the apparent rigidity, permanence, or resistance of matter. To give voice to mineral matter suggests that language is a concrete expression of culturally inflected modes of apprehension, in opaque continuity with what lies outside knowledge’s formation. The apparent finitude of the linguistic creature, understood as materially conditioned and therefore subject to alteration, could then be represented as a gift, rather than a curse: if the limits of its awareness are invisibly in motion, language’s hard or fixed forms also have room to breathe, and our nonknowledge can expand and contract. It means our linguistic lives are conditioned, but it also means they are not rigidly “determined,” because they are constitutive or creative of their surrounding worlds. This brings us closer to Urizen. In saying that geological actualism reminds us that the hard limits of awareness are invisibly in motion, I am recalling another form of actualism from the beginning of this chapter: the ceaseless exercise of imagination or “poetry as it exists now on earth.” For Blake, a counter-­historical realm of poetic possibility guides us toward dismantling oppressive order: the counterfactual “Empire is no more!” uttered in the midst of Britain’s rise to imperial superpower, is a case in point.86 But actualism is also a source of terror. Before Blake, Spinoza had laid the philosophical groundwork for naturalized relations of involuntary dependency: in phrases cited already, “men think themselves free, inasmuch as they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them to wish and desire.”87 These causal relations define our dependence on what seems to lie outside of us. Like Spinoza, Blake hated the tendency to model the idea of an individuated agent’s conscious “will” on the autonomy of the sovereign’s arbitrary rule (so that the individual mind works like the state). Spinoza argued that, “bound to estimate” the worlds they move through “in accordance with their own nature,” humans tend to project this model of sovereignty between the body, the state, and a cosmos ruled by divine providence. Blake’s Urizenic mythography is structured around a version of that idea, but in characteristic formulas like “they became what they

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beheld,” he makes sure we see how being “bound” by our “own nature” is a long, slow process. The worlds we inhabit happen through iterative and reciprocal re-­creation; the ways we “estimate”—­size up, desire, feel, believe—­continuously create the world. In fact it is Los’s creative efficacy in building the very idea of the “sovereign individual” that results in some of Urizen’s most horrifying imagery. When Thel flees, she fails on a modest scale. Urizen’s fail is epic. Urizen, Blake’s “divine ruler,” is famously imagined as exactly that, a big compass in the sky, a best effort at the desire for a view from nowhere. He embodies the will to measure, a generalized form of the reductive single-­mindedness that results from the habit of seeing or desiring the world through the creation of abstractly comparable units, even as these units are travestied in fungible material bodies. This single-­minded desire gradually materializes as a body and its world under the regime of individuation. The manifold effects of subject formation under this regime include drastic changes wrought on available perceptions of the physical world, affective repertoire, relations between social groups, and the forms political power can take. In Urizen’s deep time, “bound down / To earth by their narrowing perceptions,” the subjects of this regime of conduct, thought, and feeling undergo what it means to “shrink together”: “the ears of the inhabitants / Were wither’d, & deafen’d, & cold” such that “their eyes could not discern / Their brethren of other cities.”88 Blake’s emphasis at the book’s end on this subjugating process of shrinking and hardening takes place in a land whose “name was then Egypt,” but is “now call’d / Africa,” the continent that takes the “form of a human heart,” making a direct link between mental coercion—­the narrowing, hardening, and closing off of the singular mind—­and the brutal hard-­heartedness of enslavement, bringing the Old Testament into Blake’s eighteenth century. Urizen is a satire not only of Genesis but of origins-­thinking, as well as the fulfillment of Blake’s promise in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) that its narrator will give the world a “Bible of Hell,” “whether they will or no.” In the course of its narrative, Urizen, “that solitary one,” leaves the other Eternals, in order to seek, as he declares, “for a joy without pain, / For a solid without fluctuation.”89 Alongside the poetry, Urizen’s images depict a geological world that is all solidification and constraint, whether

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as landmasses or bodily form. Why, we might wonder, should a “joy without pain” require a “solid without fluctuation”? That petrifying impulse immediately becomes a binding and condensing, till there appears—­ “where nothing was”—­“a wide world of solid obstruction,” shortly followed by Urizen’s act of law-­giving, alluded to above: Lo! I unfold my darkness and on This rock place with strong hand the Book Of eternal brass, written in my solitude: Laws of peace, of love, of unity, Of pity, compassion, forgiveness. Let each chuse one habitation, His ancient infinite mansion. One command, one joy, one desire, One curse, one weight, one measure, One King, one God, one Law.90 Following his push for a “solid without fluctuation,” these are unmistakably authoritarian attempts to narrow the void of still nonexistent things into hardened and stilled categories of one: “laws of peace, of love, of unity,” yes, but inscribed in Urizen’s mania for immobilizing reductivism (his fixation fixation) lie the clear characters of tyranny, subservience, patriarchy, normative desire, originalism, nativism, xenophobia, and so on. This is a picture of the formation of a psychic economy under the regime of single-­mindedness: repeatedly it is “I alone,” “even I,” “alone, I” whose darkness is unfolded and imposed in Urizen’s desire for stillness, a ground to stand on and to measure from. The law-­giving act here described merely records what is already in motion, the ironic unfolding of an irreversible “chain” of events or shifts in the world’s forms (“iron” and “chain” link linear time to spiritual and bodily enslavement throughout), in which are demonstrated the disastrous effects of this desire for the narrowing of psychic life and affective range. The more change or flux is resisted, with a desire that creates and conjures matter itself as a form of resistance, the more change is felt as pain, emblematized (as for Thel) by

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the material necessity of mortality: “for he saw / That no flesh nor spirit could keep / His iron laws one moment. / For he saw that life liv’d upon death”; “bound down / To earth by their narrowing perceptions, / They lived a period of years, / Then left a noisom body / To the jaws of devouring darkness.”91 If Urizen’s “one desire” here is to halt the flow of change, the effects of thinking death as an inevitable horror pale beside a life lived under this regime. The closure of the individual, the closing of the mind around its property, initiates a kind of torture: And hardening Bones began In swift diseases and torments, In throbbings & shootings & grindings Thro’ all the coasts; till weaken’d The senses inward rush’d, shrinking Beneath the dark net of infection. Till the shrunken eyes, clouded over, Discern’d not the woven hipocricy, But the streaky slime in their heavens, Brought together by narrowing perceptions, Appear’d transparent air . . .92 No wonder Blake has no great reputation as a materialist: he seems to want to reveal the material world as a torturing illusion. Yet the description here of those whose gradual embodiment registers as pain and disease, who look at the “heavens” and cannot see them through “clouded” eyes that make “streaky slime” look like “transparent air,” depends on this term “woven hipocricy”: the world these creatures inhabit is a slowly fabricated condition. It is not exactly an illusion, or rather its illusoriness does not mitigate its power. This murky vision holds what I think is a surprisingly clear message: being created, its “hipocricy” can be uncreated. If the chains and knots and netting that twist and weave this world are a kind of fabrication, there should be not just one “Book / Of eternal brass,” about how the world

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was made—­its binding, solidification, and reduction—­but infinitely many books of Urizen, revealing the suppressed or invisible movement foreshortened in a text’s solidified forms. Compare the metaphor of fabrication in Herder’s “Self: A Fragment,” the companion poem to “The I: A Fragment,” cited earlier, which combats individualism with a poetic Spinozism: . . . the power That operates in you; the inner prophetess Creating, from the former world, the future world; She who bestows order, who untangling From confusions weaves the knotted cords of nature Into a beautiful tapestry in and outside you; That is you, your self . . . That part of us that lives in the hearts of others, Is our truest and deepest self 93 In giving up an idea of the self as property, as autonomy, Herder suggests, you understand your imbrication with alterity, your part in the cosmos. How does Herder make the “outside” of our conscious being—­a woven fabric, echoing the “web” that forms as Urizen “Walk’d over the cities in sorrow”—­sound, instead of bondage, like a blessing? What would we need to have that feeling, instead of the other? At the very least, a less sick relation to matter, and a less blind relation between self and other. In Blake, the “Net of Urizen” is also “the net of Religion” as well as a “net of infection”: “a Web, dark & cold, throughout all / The tormented element stretch’d / From the sorrows of Urizen’s soul . . . So twisted the cords, & so knotted / The meshes, twisted like to the human brain.”94 As though revealing on the back of Herder’s “beautiful tapestry” another picture, this time of horrific unfreedom, Blake’s images envision the involuntary train of states through which we pass as conditions in which we find ourselves constrained. Of fierce importance to both Herder and Blake is the aim of making involuntary features of experience palpable, without mistaking these externalities for determinate fate or divine will. But where Herder’s tone models gratitude, Blake’s oppositional politics plays out a dire scene in which, under a social imperative of “self-­determination,” the phobia of

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dependence builds domineering and incapacitating sensibilities into everyday life, even as it produces, instead of peace, perpetual pain.95 Recalling how Foucault wrote of juridical identity as a “type of individualization . . . linked to the state,” rather like Urizen’s, Judith Butler has used metaphors similar to those of Herder and Blake to express an ambivalence between bondage and attachment in the ways a psyche is conditioned to believe in its separable “self.”96 Viewing attachments as knots, binds, and the “fabrication” of the psyche through forms of socialization pervaded by relations of power leads Butler to theorize a kind of stretchiness afforded through the reflexive turning of desire against subject formation. Despite the ill effects when self-­sufficiency drives people to—­as she says—­“act as if they were not formed,” we catch ourselves in this act, in pursuit of perseverance.97 Recall Herder’s phrase: “what I am, I have become.” In Spinoza’s wake, the subject’s formed-­ness or becoming is woven into its surroundings, prompting figures like nets or tapestries to represent an unwanted or unknown dependence on a surrounding world of interacting agencies. Indeed Butler herself links Spinoza’s own idea of perseverance or “self-­preservation” with a kind of sociability: “it turns out that the means by which self-­preservation occurs is precisely through a reflection or expression that not only binds the individual to others but expresses that bind as already there, as a bind in several senses: a tie, a tension, or a knot, something from which one cannot get free, something constitutive that holds one together.”98 What Butler describes as “an irresolvable tension between singularity and collectivity” may even prompt the subject to seek its own “unraveling.”99 Blake’s Urizen considers our relation to dependency, what props us up and structures us, but he also models how those structures expand and contract. Well before Wordsworth, a poet who more famously tried to loosen the knot of the subject, romantic-­century writers were looking closely at the “cords of nature” to show how they consist of a kind of patterned art, crossing “in and outside” us. Many were reacting in some way against the idea of independence as self-­contained detachment, or against a kind of formed subject, like Urizen, who requires fixed “authoritarian” language or “compulsive stabilization,” as Condillac’s linguistic subject has been described.100 Somewhat surprisingly, even John Locke offers an early image

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of the material force of language that partly holds our worlds together, when he refers to a word or “name” as a knot of ideas, completing the mind’s effort to collect and preserve its thoughts: “for the connexion between the loose parts of those complex ideas being made by the mind, this union, which has no particular foundation in nature, would cease again, were there not something that did, as it were, hold it together . . . Though therefore it be the mind that makes the collection, it is the name which is as it were the knot that ties them fast together.”101 The mind is what makes connections and collections of ideas, but interestingly here, for Locke, it is not the mind but the name—­language imagined with its own agency—­ that binds them so they do not fall apart. For Blake, too, language has no “foundation in nature,” no stabilizing roots linking word to world. Yet in Blake, minds are not agents collecting ideas in the first place; mental activity participates in a web-­like pattern of meaning-­making, which can take the form of compulsion: “So twisted the cords, & so knotted / The meshes, twisted like to the human brain.” Roots and knots are images that can represent attachment as belonging or attachment as bondage, and indeed, can train the mind to moralize bondage itself, like the Pebble: “Love seeketh only self to please / To bind another to its delight.” But unlike Locke or Condillac, Blake’s materialism is also filled with images that express how what looks like nature is not given, but built, unbuilt, and rebuilt, through the “language” of everyday life. For Blake, “nature” cannot be defined by determinacy or mistaken for compulsion. Instead, materialism makes the language of imagination the constitutive medium of human being. In her longstanding work building a platform for scholars of romanticism to reevaluate the materialist currents of romantic-­era poetry, Levinson points us to a line from another great reader of Blake, art historian T. J. Clark: “and why, after all, should matter be ‘resistant’?” 102 Blake’s indifference toward distinguishing between matter and spirit is a form of that same question, hurled at what he viewed as a reductive—­“shrinking,” “hardening”—­materialism of his age. By the same token, his belief in “spiritual agency” is not an idealist capitulation to the idea that the “Mortal part” is divisible from the “Spiritual Body”: the subject who believes nature works to “close my Tongue in senseless clay” simply mistakes the reciprocal relations through which it

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helps to shape its own world (“To Tirzah”). Both Thel and Urizen represent ways of thinking about language as a world-­shaping power—­a power of address, a power of law-­giving—­in geological surroundings that dramatize how matter comes to seem resistant. Urizen’s narration of a whole world’s hardening is not unlike Fanon’s account of the developed colonial sphere as a “Manichaean and petrified” world, “a world of statues.” This is the world that Flaxman’s marble frieze of William Jones, enlightened colonial linguist and digester of laws (as well as poet and crucial source for the British romantics), reiterates and commemorates; it is also a world I like to imagine Blake’s lost image The Bramins preemptively seeking to liquidate, by imagining some strange spiritual form of Charles Wilkins, translated as much as he is translating. We have seen how stone’s animacy produces a sense of linguistic materiality, as both stone and language acquire slow, invisible motion in deep time. To grant stone sufficient animacy that it may, by its incremental movements, remake language’s apparent stability is to relax the assumption of matter’s resistance. Through Blake’s gray romanticism, I have argued that among its other resources, figurative language in romantic poetry uses animism in part as a linguistic critique—­a resistance to language’s immobilization. In speaking of a “world of statues,” we may be reminded here too of how in Wheatley’s rewriting of the story of Niobe, she uses not animation but rather a suspended deanimation to keep speech alive. This is in turn a good reminder that images of animation, like images of the inert, will be handled differently by poets whose lives and languages are observed or measured by an external standard, making them hard for some ears to hear. Actually, it is hard not to think of Wheatley and the “language of Anamaboe” when we reach the end of Blake’s Urizen, to find the ears of Urizen’s “sons” grown “wither’d, & deafen’d, & cold” in what is “now called / Africa,” habituated by their own “narrowing perceptions” to a world of “diseases and torments,” having been hardened from the start by the brass book of rules governing their world: “One command, one joy, one desire / One curse, one weight, one measure / One King, one God, one Law.” Blake’s poetic materialism is hard to pinpoint, especially in its attacks on empire and racial capitalism, which extend the terms of the literal slave trade to encompass epistemology, desire, religion, science,

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and much more. But beside his more spectacular images of revolutionary violence, his materialism insistently shows that what seems most solid is invisibly moving, and that this revelation will cause familiar ground to give way. To Thel’s questing desire, the experience of having a body becomes mortality’s slippery slope; for Urizen’s will to rule, a similar sense of transitory embodiment feels like sovereignty undermined. In the former, language’s material affinities represent a feared intimacy; in the latter, language’s material limits represent a resented noncompliance. By sizing up voice through what Whitehead later glossed as nature’s “differences of scale”—­in particular the depth of time made visible in rock’s forms, which in its extremity jolts us dizzily into seeing the simultaneity of matter’s diverse temporalities—­Blake suggests that language’s different textures, however apparently solid, mute, or resistant, may still, when closely attended to, teach us to expand or contract, feel in different tempos, or hear in new ways.

4

Radical Diversions Wordsworth’s Overgrowth

How shall I trace the history, where seek / The origin of what I then have felt? — ­W illiam Wordsworth, 1799 PRELUDE F E LT T R A N S I T I O N S

To call the moment of Wordsworth’s poetry in the Lyrical Ballads “transitional” is to retrofit the work’s eventual literary historical importance into latterly proposed discursive and political histories shaping English literature “around 1800.” There is a certain poetic justice in this, since the feeling of transition was also one of Wordsworth’s great topics; the retroactive effort to “recollect” or intuit one’s movements as movements within historical and material environments helps capture his poetry’s characteristic scale-­jumping, its first-­person sense of history expressed in the language of feeling. So it is interesting to think about how we read Lyrical Ballads itself at the junction of many crossed paths of historical narrative, staked out much later: in 1800 we are at the midpoint of a proposed historical Sattelzeit in European politics and knowledge, and on the threshold of a category of “literature” distinct from other kinds of writing; in the midst of a shift in the European articulation of “self” and “other,” structured by aesthetic and orientalist discourses, and a period of imperial growth and domestic turmoil between revolution and reaction; in the course of an ongoing revolution in Haiti threatening to upend the Eurocentric meaning 138

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of freedom, shadowed and shored up by racial determinism and national self-­determination; and turning a corner with “nature” itself, redefined against industrial manufacture, bourgeois tourism, colonial science, and global extractivism. A volatile mix of polemics, but in one way or another, Lyrical Ballads might be felt moving through each story of transition.1 Lyrical Ballads also occupies a moment at the cusp of a European epistemic turn toward the modern sciences of Man (Foucault), during the reconfiguration of European language study from philosophical speculation to scientific or systematic order (Aarsleff). It is also a representative chapter in the “extended literary-­philological moment” of “vernacularization” in Europe, or more accurately the stabilization of traditional, “national” pasts (Mufti).2 The moment is marked in England by the influence of the politically radical philologist John Horne Tooke, who often stands for the backward drag in English philology against a broader current of continental science, since texts in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and other languages extracted by British colonial officials would become the basis for a German-­driven comparative philology. In 1835, recognizing the backwardness of native philologists like Tooke, one early reader of the continental comparatists wrote of the lack of up-­to-­date Anglo-­Saxon philology by British scholars: “we have had, it is true, and still have, men who pride themselves on their exploits in English philology, but the best among them are much on a par with persons who fancy they are penetrating into the profoundest mysteries of geology, while they are only gathering up the pebbles that lie on the earth’s surface.”3 The comment seems at once to draw on the actualist impulses of gray romanticism, and to mark philology’s turn to a scientism happier to see things in black and white: it casually suggests once more how deeply infused the study of language was with images drawn from geology, while also showing that there was by then a right and wrong way to do both. As Olivia Smith, one of this book’s lodestars, long ago proposed, the collaborative project of Lyrical Ballads was partly written under the influence of a mixed reaction to Tooke. Tooke, a self-­styled Lockean, favored not natural but mechanical metaphors of language’s simplification over time. Yet when we recall Adam Smith’s suggestion that linguistic progress meant “fewer wheels,” Tooke’s counterproposal that the blurred

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motion of language change was driven by more wheels seems a sign of political reformism (he called abbreviations “the wheels of language”). The romantic-­era preference for thinking of language in natural terms soon competed with such artificial images. Despite this mechanistic language, it is partly thanks to Tooke that any engagement with linguistic roots in Britain around 1800 runs into the openly radical politics associated with revealing a common folk English past through contemporary usage, by way of the era’s “vigorous indigenous scholarship of Anglo-­Saxon.”4 A sense of northernness assists the British radical discourse in the 1790s with its emergent sense of Westernness, an image of masculinist individualism, self-­determination, and dispassionate reason that Saree Makdisi has argued in Making England Western was formative for nascent ideas of occidental whiteness. Across a transatlantic era before and after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, the concentrated production of what Srinivas Aravamudan calls “Britain’s vernacular roots” bespoke an Anglocentric linguistic sensibility and reading public that consolidated cultural nationalism, using a “native” discourse of liberty already long cultivated from what Laura Doyle has unfolded in detail as the “racialization of freedom.”5 Tooke’s enthusiasm for things Germanic was powerful enough for him to argue that Latin was descended in part from the “Northern languages.”6 The traces he leaves of his engagement with early modern Anglophilic sources, like botanist John Ray’s Compleat Collection of English Proverbs (1670), are also signs of the influence of a rooted tradition of cultural pride in Anglo-­Saxon origins.7 These works recall that buildup of efforts, over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to pit a philological nativism against an elite classicism, extending at least as far back as Richard Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1634), which distinguished between Britain—­the ancient Celtic and Roman world—­and a true beginning of England with the arrival of the “English-­Saxons.” Verstegan announces a linguistic project, which Tooke picks up, to combat his contemporaries’ “ignoran[ce] of our owne true ancestors.”8 If Anglo-­Saxon feeling is carried forward from such early documents into Tooke’s radical philology, it surely also helps to shape the occidentalizing discourse of 1790s radicals outlined in Makdisi’s work.9 While Verstegan counteracted the “decay” of ancestral English pride, by the

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time of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), the English language itself was “widely” taken to be “permanently under threat from decay.”10 As Janet Sorenson has argued, Johnson’s project of producing a tradition through standardization “alienated English from its contemporary speakers,” and it also borrowed from the playbook of “conventional markers of colonial difference” to do so.11 In a strong sense, the historical moment of the Lyrical Ballads reacted against Johnson’s desire to “fix” language in place, putting language’s history and its active changes to new use. As we will see, Wordsworth would resignify the source of Johnson’s anxiety by affirming the healing powers of Nature’s “slow decay” on objects that include language. But as John Mee suggests, by the 1790s Tooke’s radical influence allowed many writers to align liberty with linguistic variability, as in works by Thomas Paine, Charles Piggott, and, in America, Noah Webster.12 And etymology itself becomes a tool of self-­liberation: consider the strange moment in William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), after his hero comes across a “general dictionary of four of the northern languages,” while on the run from the wrongful persecution of Mr. Falkland: “I determined to attempt, at least for my own use, an etymological analysis of the English language. I easily perceived that this pursuit had one advantage to a person in my situation.”13 Caleb’s odd philological digression can be better understood by linking him to Tooke, who as Olivia Smith shows, after his 1777 trial for sedition, used philology as a ready means to lay bare the linguistic workings of illegitimate, vested power.14 Language itself—­its power to subjugate—­was plainly part of those “modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism” which Godwin’s preface promised to expose; and it was these tyrannies of the interior that a native philology might have the power to unmask.15 The question of how primitivism and the fixation on roots and origins would help to link theories of race to theories of language, later in the nineteenth century, thus comes more clearly into focus when we connect romantic era vernacularism to the folk categories of Anglo-­Saxon study and to radical investments in a nativist imaginary. This is not exactly revelatory, but it certainly deserves closer attention. Sorenson notes that Tooke’s explicit criticism of Johnson’s Dictionary, that it is foreign to

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everyday speakers, is cast in terms of ethnic alterity: “nearly one third of this dictionary,” writes Tooke, “is as much the language of the Hottentots as of the English.”16 Pursuing the relation between vernacularism and nativism helps us see that the linguistic disposition of Lyrical Ballads holds in tension various enlightenment impulses, both civilizing and radical. As a cultural object, it draws on a contemporary sense that language is necessarily politicized, but I argue here that roots are not the idiom of its linguistic aims, which drastically expand their political attention from unrecorded despotism to a more diffuse politics of the natural world in what Wordsworth calls “unrecorded time.” As against Blake, for whom deep time is a way of thinking against empire, for Wordsworth a turn to longer timescales is a way of putting off politics. For even as the gray romantic turn that results in giving language different kinds of time is philosophically radical, its immediate political ambitions are much more anodyne than Godwin’s. In the phrase “unrecorded time,” from the Lyrical Ballads keystone “Michael,” for example, it is a somewhat indistinct “region,” not a person—­“the abode / Of Nature & of unrecorded time”—­ that bears an “inalienable right.” These lines have prompted Alan Bewell to note “how much a radically new conception of geological time informs [Wordsworth’s] poetry.” I will come back to the importance of slow time Bewell points to here, but it is certainly worth noting (as he and others have) that the poetry’s naturalizing linguistic imaginary is at the same time colored by early ethnographic practice, so that within the diffuse politics of slow time, we should not be surprised to also find buried some emergent signs of modern ideas about race.17 Along with a more general lure toward folk philology, the much-­studied culture of ballad collection, composition, and circulation constitutes a key vernacularizing genre of the romantic era.18 This helps us see that while we may be tempted to read Wordsworth’s vernacular impulse as part of Voloshinov’s romantic “reaction,” described in chapter 1, the strategic uses of “oral literature” in print forms in the era of the Lyrical Ballads show that the “real language of men” is no simple naturalizing poetic response to the alien word. In Tooke’s radical idiom, romantic reaction takes the form of anticlassical nativism; for Wordsworth, whatever is natural about language may be “inalienable,” but still sometimes feels alien.

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To counteract the uprooted word means, again, giving language different kinds of time. Margaret Fuller would in 1843 describe “the Words­ worthian creed” as the task of “apprehending the infinite results of every day”: “who sees the meaning of the flower uprooted in the ploughed field? . . . the poet who sees that field in its relations with the universe.” What sounds here like a spatial attentiveness is equally a temporal one, the elasticity of “every day” when the mind “stretches of itself.”19 This means the oblique engagements with philology evident in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s early experiments in form are an effort to experiment with linguistic temporality, and are at least distantly politically motivated. While they are certainly guilty of fetishizing the archaic, the poems also frequently undermine primitivism by emphasizing how the archaic is recharged in different kinds of time; for example, as McLane points out, “Hart-­Leap Well,” the “modern ballad” I discuss toward the end of this chapter, splits its time between a medieval backdrop and the historical moment surrounding its contemporary readers. At its halfway mark, leaving its feudal world behind, it “moves into an utterly contemporary chronotope, featuring speech ‘in the now.’”20 In that sense, while ambivalently associating itself with the occidentalizing idioms of radicalism, the fascination throughout Lyrical Ballads with the archaic in the everyday constitutes a lateral move away from primitivism, in advance of the racializing schemes gradually settling in Euro-­A merican knowledge practices ranging from early ethnographic data-­gathering to innovations in literary form. To see such reflexive representations of language in this way requires confronting how the new picture of language we have been following—­ “linguistic actualism,” language understood as a constitutive medium of experience—­forms in response to the world around it. In Making England Western, Makdisi argues that Wordsworth’s poetics are entangled with the question of racial formation in the British interior in the romantic century. This tangle partly converges with McLane’s work on the ways British writing of the era projects the ethnographic scene through a domestic lens, or what for instance Bewell has called Wordsworth’s “domestic anthropology.” This work returns attention to the frequency of “encounter” in the poems of the Lyrical Ballads. But for McLane, the category

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of primitive “orality” is itself always under scrutiny in these poems. To me this means that, in dissonance with Wordsworth’s ostensible egotism, his linguistic naturalism enables a more capacious subjective disposition that competes with the ethnographic role of individuated observer fixed in a stance that looks “down” on its backward, externalized objects (a gaze fusing the scientific with the imperial eye). His linguistic naturalism dissolves the word to set it in motion, across different kinds of time. By contrast, Makdisi argues that Wordsworth’s own enlightenment impulses predispose his readers to occupy Englishness in racial terms, by gradually inculcating in them associations that diagnose nonwhiteness in the nonverbal, nomadic, impoverished fringes of society he depicts. In my view, Wordsworth’s early explorations of linguistic mediation remain more open to alterity than this reading allows; at the same time, Makdisi helps us see some of the other ways the linguistic naturalism in his poetry remains caught up in the exclusionary work of establishing humanity differentially. Here I am thinking of the line Bewell draws from Locke to Wordsworth, using an empiricist epistemology that classes together such exemplary “backward” cases as “Children, Ideots, Savages, and the grosly Illiterate” (who are disproportionately women, the rural population, and the working classes).21 As Bewell points out, Wordsworth’s concern for these and other figures from the social margins “works within, even as it works against, the philosophical procedures of the Enlightenment.”22 Later, I will return to this claim in thinking through Wordsworth’s gray romanticism, under the sign not of complicity but of complexity.23 In his two-­book 1799 Prelude, Wordsworth “traces” and “derives” features of a “felt” language that can only be captured by expanding familiar linguistic frameworks. There is a strange vacillation, in this poem, between the impulse toward origins (as expressed in the epigraph to this chapter), and the conviction that such an impulse will inevitably be frustrated: “hard task to analyse a soul,” he writes, simultaneously declaring his aim and its difficulties, for the soul’s instincts and thoughts have “no beginning.” Wordsworth’s vacillation defies the historian in us all, the way we trace even the meaning of our thoughts by moving “through the history and birth of each / As of a single independent thing.” The simplistic principle of causation, happy to settle individual origins for the “birth” of

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things, approximates the etymological reasoning that believes in a stable, true meaning for a given word, independent of its ongoing attachments. Wordsworth’s difficult self-­analysis—­in which the etymological sense of “unloosening” or even a chemical dissolving is surely in play—­strives to trace or follow vast complexities in signification. Once called “Wordsworth’s essay on the origins of language,” the famous passage about “infancy” that follows uses that prelinguistic state to reveal how a mind first “spreads” and absorbs associations, how of itself it “gives” meaning and equally “receives” it from nature.24 For Wordsworth, this “infancy”—­an inarticulate, felt language—­is always with us. Firstness is conceived not as an event now past, but as a passing event: the desire for a “beginning” is enjoined to look not for a singular point but for a layered, ongoing process. In what follows, I attempt to account for the etymological mood of Wordsworth’s sometimes-­civilizing “poetics of humanization,” as well as for its innovation in expanding an unthinkably slow temporal motion through its picture of language.25 In the process, I will address, if not answer, the question of racialized identity this temporal expansion sometimes contrastively implies. This effort takes us first on a detour through Tooke’s work, as the preeminent figure in etymological speculation in England as the early British romantics were writing their best known works. Asserting enthusiastic praise for the “invention of signs,” the outspoken Tooke cautioned, in 1778, that there was nevertheless “nothing more productive of error when we neglect to observe their complication.”26 Unfortunately, this admirable caveat is spoiled by Tooke’s own reductive simplicity. His technique for debunking a picture of grammar by unmasking the meanings of “insignificant” words through etymology resonated with his radical contemporaries, from Bentham to Godwin to Edgeworth, from Erasmus Darwin to Thelwall, Coleridge, and Hazlitt. Tooke argued that apparently meaningless parts of speech were formed by gradual abbreviation: “if” was simply the distant but legitimate offspring of “yifan,” Anglo-­Saxon for “to give,” and “yet” that of “yetan,” “to get,” their legitimacy proved by the fact that such words “still retain their original signification.”27 Different aspects of his theory emerged for his diverse readers as primary; for the early British romantic poets, it was not the thrill of debunking, much less the restitu-

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tion of a singular or “original” sense, but rather the prospect of linguistic change it visibly guaranteed. The approaches Coleridge and Wordsworth took to etymology were intended to offer correctives—­different in their respective cases—­through the dissolution of the hardened associations latent in social language. Thus while both described a collective reality of language in naturalized terms, they also tried to locate spontaneous linguistic agencies. By giving language time, they found complications inherent in superficially simple “signs” and associations, but without trying to reduce them, as Tooke had, to an “original signification.” Tooke is widely remembered for proposing the impersonal principle of abbreviation activating language change. But the degree to which Tooke’s influence may have been responsible for urging Coleridge to the organic concept of a language’s “Law of growth” has often been lost, and the same might be said for the correspondent cultural “instinct of growth,” which for Coleridge guides the production of meaning and its “desynonymization,” or refinement. In developing his own picture of language in dialogue with Coleridge, Wordsworth was in turn compelled to enact language’s temporal life in his poetry, through the accumulation of passional affinities that register meaning’s transformation. But while in their radical days of collaboration with William’s sister Dorothy, language seemed dissolved or disintegrated, Coleridge built from that basis an idea of linguistic cultural growth, whereas Wordsworth envisioned something more like natural overgrowth. Especially in the heady years of the Lyrical Ballads, earliest draft of the Prelude, and some of his prose, Wordsworth breaks down linguistic origins by picturing them within vaster natural histories. These histories contrast varying scales of time, emphasizing an attachment that comes about not through locating common origins, but through tracing a commonness—­a power—­in the tendency of things. In one pointed example, Wordsworth’s famous 1803 sonnet to Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture takes the coy Spinozism of Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” (1796), in which all things are “organic harps . . . that tremble into thought,” apparently turning its “one intellectual breeze” to the radical cause of universal liberation: “Thou hast left behind / Powers that will work for thee: air, earth, and skies; / There’s not a breathing of the common wind / That will forget thee.” I’ll return to this poem, and

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the language of a revolutionary history of the present which its natural imagery seems both to celebrate and defer. The multiplied “breathing of the common wind” in “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” submerges its addressee’s inaudible voice, yet the natural “powers” carrying it promisingly move not backward, but outward from a moving point of “common” origin. As with his own self-­analysis, the “origin” of change is reconceived as a continuous, nonlinear process. That Wordsworth’s naturalism takes origin as coeval with tendency is generalized, in the first “Essay upon Epitaphs,” by the thought that the inexorable question of “whither” is as pressing as the roots-­inflected question of “whence.” A prevailing nominalism in enlightenment language theories placed conventional emphasis on atomistic linguistic units that encouraged theories of language origin favoring narratives of invention, naming, and “contract” myths of sign production.28 For Coleridge and Wordsworth, however, the sign is rather understood to come about (and disappear) through some natural process. Language is envisioned as material and soluble; the impersonal life of the sign is predicated on its transformability and supersession. The problem of describing indivisible “parts of speech,” and the necessity of dissolving, through poetic activity, what both call “arbitrary” in language formation, reveals a picture of language as something felt, that is, within whose expressive frame one can at best feel one’s way around. What Coleridge eventually called the “radical difference” between their respective pictures of language comes into focus when we compare their attempts to define a desirable sense of the “common.” Wordsworth’s poetry frequently tries to feel change as language’s universal constant, to make language visible in motion. In his time-­lapse views of language change, so palpable in “Hart-­Leap Well,” he makes visible its re-­formation through disintegration. In his distinctive differences from Coleridge, he thematizes the effects of weathering and decay, through analogies between mental processes and physical manifestations, which concentrate on the creative efficacy of dissolving in a manner quite distinct from that “dissolution” that Coleridge ascribes to the Imagination, in the Biographia Literaria’s famous definition. Amid nature’s forms—­woods and crags, rills and skies—­whose “deep quiet” (“There is an eminence”) is still felt despite

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its obscurity, the poetic attention recognizes its inevitable conversation with the “mighty sum / Of things forever speaking” (“Expostulation and Reply”). As William Galperin puts it, Wordsworth criticism, “green readings aside,” has moved steadily away from “the poet’s status as a ‘nature poet’” toward “the particular phenomenology to which his engagements with the world refer.”29 In this regard, we might well compare his thought with Herder’s earlier ecological gradualism—­“What I am, I have become”—­ taking place from the first person.30 Here I aim to qualify what Frances Ferguson once called Wordsworth’s “psychological etymology,” by pursuing the psychic itineraries he traces not back, but outward through natural and social forms.31 These itineraries use the linguistic subject’s interior sense to catch the interactions of nature and its opposites (artifice, willfulness) as interdependent. One can then see how Wordsworth’s linguistic naturalism  offsets his “green language” with a gray language.32 Mortality reorganizes matter in unthought forms of vitality, and Wordsworth watches how uniquely various bodies experience changes of state, how despite the appearance of solidity they may “feel / The touch of earthly years,” participating in earth’s spin and orbit, in his inexhaustible phrase, “with rocks, and stones, and trees” (“A slumber did my spirit seal”). This vision of the world through inhuman timescales prompts a parallel vision of language, in its continuously changing state, as biodegrading. For readers of Wordsworth, it has been easy to let the gray get upstaged by the green, but the complicity between forms of nature and language in Wordsworth lies in their being given invisible but continuous change conceived through the viewpoint of geologic time.33 So, while words like “biodegrade” threaten to reinstate a simplistic organicism in Wordsworth’s “natural forms,” the nature of his poetry is far more temporally fraught. In my reading of “Hart-­Leap Well,” I withdraw from a greenness that settles too quickly and firmly on nature’s essence, turning toward what Paul Fry, writing on the changing significance of Wordsworth as nature poet, calls a “stone-­colored criticism.”34 Yet recall that the stoniness of gray romanticism can also merge with the incipiently racializing bases of linguistic criteria used to distinguish life from nonlife. What are the global ramifications for the racialized domain of the human, when language history is imagined in natural terms? For

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Foucault, at the dividing line of 1800, the European transition in language history is profound: by acquiring historicity, language was “thickening and taking on a peculiar heaviness,” even though the feeling of this transition for those belonging to that culture could not rise to awareness in a “thematic and positive manner.”35 In Williams’s terms, we could say that this occurs somewhere between a residual and an emergent structure of feeling. Foucault’s surprisingly hasty conclusion that this leads to the leveling of cultures—­“from now on, all languages have an equal value: they simply have different internal structures”—­mystifies what happens next: in effect, it skips a century of supremacist theories of linguistic difference.36 It cannot make sense of linguistic situations like Phillis Wheatley’s, for instance, when language’s “heaviness” takes on new meaning because speaking means “bearing the weight of a civilization.”37 Far from equalizing the “value” of languages, the methodological innovations that led to the rise of comparative philology would precisely enable a new hierarchizing of the languages of the world, along with their speakers, only now in terms set by science. The relativism that might have guaranteed the equality of their “different internal structures” instead reassured a supremacism that allied grammatical difference with differential human capacities. In Lyrical Ballads, the “heaviness” of language registers—­is felt—­as a naturalness neither refused nor assimilated to the human; but in its very desire to provide new grounds for remaking the category of the human—­in its “poetics of humanization”—­the universalisms of a civilizing enlightenment persist, in transition toward the philological world to come. D I S S O LV I N G T H E P R O B L E M

The substance . . . of all that I have . . . to communicate on the subject of Language . . . would probably . . . have been finally consigned with myself to oblivion, if I had not been made the miserable victim of—­ Two Prepositions and a Conjunction. —­J ohn Horne Tooke, Epea Pteroenta

According to his own account, Tooke was pressed into philology to save his own neck.38 Against charges of treason, he tried ostentatiously to reanalyze crucial “Indeclinables” that formed part of the prosecution’s evidence. A Letter to Mr Dunning on the English Particle, written in jail, was published in 1778; this was followed by the two volumes of Epea Pteroenta:

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or, The Diversions of Purley (in 1786 and 1805).39 Once Tooke rewrote the Letter for inclusion in Diversions, his etymological technique acquired a philosophical frame that seemed to imply, in a loose interpretation of Locke, that language might be reduced to originary empirical encounters with sensible phenomena. Because he is primarily concerned to show that the most common words (that seem least “significant”) are signs of older, corroded signs, yet still retain their now concealed but permanent and stable signification, his etymological reductions are only carried out over a short chronology, just far enough to show that words like “if,” “and,” or “but” have (a single) meaning, which has been forgotten due to their grammatical use. From this point of view, the excessive concentration on syntactic distinction in the authoritative philosophical grammars of the time, like James Harris’s Hermes, was a distraction from language’s empirical basis (while privileging the classically educated). Proceeding through the smallest words, or indeclinable “particles,” the first volume of Diversions declares at regular intervals this putatively empiricist and nominalist Lockean allegiance: “for prepositions also are the names of real objects.”40 Volume 2 then extends the technique to demystifying abstract terms by vigorously reducing them to concrete and unified designations: so that after calling up a list of seemingly unrelated words (for example, shot, shotten, shut, shuttle, shoot, shout, shit, shitten, shittle, sheet, scot, scout, scate, skit), Tooke can write: “all these, so variously written, pronounced, and applied, have but one common meaning: and are all the past participle [sceat] of the Anglo-­Saxon and English verb [scytan], [scitan], to shite, i.e. projicere, dejicere, to throw, to cast forth, to throw out.”41 The repetition of the formula, “x ‘is merely,’ ‘is but’ y,” exhaustively renders what were announced as the “complications” of language change into a compact melodrama of mystery-­solving, in which everything turns out to be shit. That technique of unveiling, in order to dissolve and level syntactic categories, results in a strange paradox: Tooke’s linguistics, so manifestly driven by his radical politics, rest on this conservative principle of stabilization and unification. The most forcefully reductive feature of Tooke’s theory is his insistence that words have only one proper meaning, independent of their use or historical variation. So all this dazzling

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performance of language’s changes, in written form and pronunciation, through combination and abbreviation, contributes to the rather dull thought that many words are really one, and that there is one meaning per word, held equitably in common by a language community. What has been described as Tooke’s chemical procedure of dissolution sets out programmatically to find such “radicals,” elementary particulate matter or precipitates; the method’s purpose is to be rid of inessential grammatical distinctions, a procedure explicitly politicized through the social resonance of distinction. But curiously for Tooke, tracking the abbreviations and transformations of lexical items excludes changes in meaning, with the result that his revolt against what he perceived as grammatical conservatism results in semantic absolutism: “the words themselves appear to me to continue faithfully and steadily attached, each to the standard under which it was originally inlisted.”42 Tooke’s politically motivated attacks against a stiff, universalizing grammar resulted in an etymological method that allowed language’s temporality to take fluid shape, yet paralyzed itself with its claim of semantic permanence. What is the significance of this gap between the linguistic analysis Tooke performs, and the conclusions he draws? To his contemporaries, the promised reforms of radical politics, translated into Tooke’s late Lockean language philosophy, found apt emblems both in the way Tooke’s etymology tried to dissolve universal grammar, and in the revolutionary implications of language change itself. Just as the paradigm of “reform” stands as the pattern behind Tooke’s virtuosity in reshaping familiar parts of speech, poetic justice guides the convergence of senses in the term “radical,” pointing to a convenient resonance between politics and language origin. When Hazlitt puns that the radical Tooke “strikes at the root of his subject,” for example, he seems to call both to mind (along with its chemical meaning, a “radical” could refer to an indeclinable lexical item).43 Indeed, Tooke writes already in the Letter to John Dunning, “They will probably say that I carry with me my old humour in politics, though my subject is now different,” and early reviews were much concerned with whether his reputation in his two favorite “subjects” could be separated.44 In fact, the political epithet “radical,” itself an abbreviation of “radical reformer,” is first attested in the 1790s and it is easy to imagine

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this organizer, pamphleteer, and emblem of late eighteenth-­century progressive politics, punning on his reputation as an accomplished etymologist of indeclinable particles, that is, a reformer of radicals.45 Tooke’s “exceptionally retaliatory” reformism in language theory is directed especially toward the conservative politician and linguistic philosopher James Harris (nephew of the Earl of Shaftesbury).46 Harris, Tooke remarks, had argued that the particles were literally insignificant, “held to have NO meaning,” mere ligatures connecting the necessary parts of speech.47 Yet as his own case made clear, any such words can be immensely powerful in the law courts, exploited for the disenfranchisement of those without a socially authoritative voice: “for mankind in general are not sufficiently aware that words without meaning, or of equivocal meaning, are the everlasting engines of fraud and injustice” (recall again the scene from Caleb Williams).48 That a majority are ignorant of the force exerted by language’s smallest parts makes language all the easier for those in power to use as an apparatus perpetuating inequality through linguistic “imposture.” The analogy collapses when pressed too hard, but once one looks for it, it is easy to find Tooke projecting the distribution of class power onto parts of speech. He champions humble, insignificant particles as the abbreviated forms of more respectable, powerful parts of speech like nouns and verbs—­making them, effectively, equals. Superficially a Homeric reference, Tooke’s title itself, Epea Pteroenta, or “winged words,” refers perhaps more directly to Harris’s Hermes, one of the great pillars of eighteenth-­century British language philosophy, and a standard grammar of its age. As several critics have noted, Hermes, messenger god and inventor of language, is depicted in the frontispieces of both works, but in strikingly different ways, reflecting a crucial distinction in what each author means by words with wings. Harris’s Hermes is a bodiless statue, immobile, stony and passive, “Inventor of Letters and Regulator of Language,” clothed in a toga-­like mantle. Indeed, the figure takes the form of a “herm,” or square column with a carved head wearing Hermes’s winged helmet. As Harris writes, the god is pictured with “no other part of the human figure but the Head, because no other was deemed requisite to rational Communication. Words at the same time, the medium of this communication, being (as Homer well describes them) Epea

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Pteroenta, Winged Words, were represented in their Velocity by the Wings of his Bonnet.”49 Yet velocity is immobilized by Harris’s limbless stone statue; its wings connote communicative exchange, not active history.50 The engraved frontispiece to Tooke’s Diversions, meanwhile, shows a naked, athletic youth seated atop a block of stone in an active pose, smiling and caught in mid-­motion. His liveliness and bodily integrity are in pointed contrast to Harris’s statue, but especially important is the fact that he is not wearing his wings: his clothes and all trappings of his divine mantle, winged helmet, caduceus, ankle-­ wings—­ lie discarded roles—­ around his seat. To show that his act is in the midst of unfolding, he is pictured still holding one wing up against his right ankle. This fluent figure hints that language’s wings, the parts that adapt it for rapid mobility, are a sort of necessary artifice, a mechanism animating progress. Below the image is the caption, “Dum brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio [As I labor toward brevity, I grow obscure],” the voice of Horace’s poet issuing directly from Hermes, or indeed from language itself.51 As a result, the motive force of compaction through abbreviation in Tooke’s allegory occurs impersonally in the process of language change, consistently altering the appearance of words; in due course, the traces of its past appearance are “obscured.” The velocity emphasized by Tooke’s adoption of language’s “wings” describes the motion of words not only between interlocutors, but also through time. To mortalize, as it were, this allegory of language both gives language time and democratizes it, attempting to make its words “common.” Harris’s way of understanding language effectively reinforced social categories shaped and sustained by refined speech and access to education. Having “resolved Language, as a Whole into its constituent Parts,” Harris predicts Tooke’s objections: “but now as we conclude, methinks I hear some Objector, demanding with an air of pleasantry, and ridicule—­‘Is there no speaking then without all this trouble? Do we not talk every one of us, as well unlearned, as learned; as well poor Peasants, as profound Philosophers?’”52 Opposing simple machines to the science of physics, Harris replies to this imagined skeptic that it is one thing to use language, quite another to understand how it works. When Tooke later played precisely this skeptic’s role, alluding to Hermes as the one who “blinded philoso-

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phy,” he claims directly to the contrary that “a man of plain common sense may obtain [wisdom and true knowledge], if he will dig for it; but I cannot think that what is commonly called Learning, is the mine in which it will be found.”53 Knocking educational norms of elevated thought by minimizing the distinction between philosophers and peasants, Tooke opens the way for vernacular philosophy as it appears in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, which likewise argues that what is truly “philosophical” lies far from artificial learning. All of this confirms that Tooke’s reductiveness is also a form of populism, implying that reopening language as common property appealed to the progressive politics of the young Coleridge and Wordsworth. Yet Tooke’s radical reform of language achieves its democratic effects only by first picturing language as sustaining its own velocity, or by giving language time. As Hazlitt wrote in general terms of his style of address, Tooke “wanted effect and momentum” (Hazlitt’s italics accelerate his subject); and as Leigh Hunt wrote in the Examiner, he “bade adieu to the leaden Hermes of Harris to admire the more vivacious, engaging and informative spirit of The Diversions of Purley.”54 Against Harris’s “leaden” dead weight, Tooke’s vivacity was also imparted to linguistic forms themselves, and this left its mark in the eccentric etymological thought of Coleridge and Wordsworth. In Tooke’s Diversions, language changes materially, among each cluster of lexical forms, from “shut,” to “shitten,” to “scate,” even as that variability is in tension with the stubborn fixity of unified semantic origin. Tooke spends a great deal of energy straining against abstract terms and distinctions, specifically when abstraction serves legal, political, and economic powers.55 And he does this by arguing that abstractions are crucial to the constitution, distribution, and abuse of power, resulting in the maltreatment of illiterate and voiceless classes, through forms of abuse his etymology sought to correct. There is an immediacy built into the idea of common, sensible origins, and into the notion that words have a solid foundation in an archaic encounter ostensibly recalled through etymology. But Tooke’s derivations, despite themselves, cannot leave the reader standing on a singular meaning’s solid ground; instead, they insistently remind us that the mutability of form cannot help but redound to meaning. His implicit value-­system ensures that a past world of fixed

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objects, sensations, and truths is prior to language, and implies that primordial acts of will established its terms. But by his own methods, that fixity cannot stand. The contradictions of his method are manifest when we consider that deriving truth from troweth or think from thing does not make either especially concrete; it merely begs the question of what sort of criteria we use to decide something is concrete, and what sort of timeline underlies the relationship that traces abstract terms “back” to actual stuff. One of Tooke’s early critics, the Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart, displays this well while indulging his own prudery in reference to Tooke’s gleeful derivation of shit as a mere alternate of shoot, shout, and shut. The two take opposite views on the “false delicacy” which in Tooke’s words “proscribed a very innocent and decent word.”56 “I should be glad to know,” complains Stewart, “what practical inference Mr. Tooke would wish us to draw from these discoveries . . . is it that the latter should be degraded on account of the infamy of their connexions; or, that every word which can claim a common descent with them from a respectable stem is entitled to admission into the same society?”57 Stewart plays on Tooke’s leveling of class on the field of language, but presumes his reader’s endorsement of class difference and exclusion, to preserve the “customs” derived from privilege. The question itself may be classist posturing, but he has a point: “shit” can be used as abstractly or as concretely as one likes, so what is the “practical inference”? As Hazlitt put it in 1810, Tooke “brought 2000 instances of the meaning of words to demonstrate that we have no abstract ideas, not one of which 2000 meanings is anything else but an abstract idea.”58 In fact, the intellectual act of reducing many words to one is its own justification. Smith suggests that Stewart’s mistrust of word history as a guide to semantics means he “favors permanence,” where Tooke’s technique stresses the historically dependent nature of language. But while Stewart’s claims serve politically reactionary ends and support the maintenance of class distinctions, weirdly it is Tooke who strives for permanence. Stewart’s stated authority is “propriety,” which involves merely deferring to “custom and to the ear”; the problem is not that Stewart favors permanence, but that he favors certain customs, certain ears.59 Tooke’s semantic stability is the surety for his democratization of language, but it is clear that this

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aspect of his theory is one reason Hazlitt and Coleridge, for example, even in moments of praise, are always put off by a tendency toward stubborn oversimplification, and prefer a different payoff: that language’s past changes guarantee its present solubility. As I’ve indicated above, the use of chemical terms like “solubility” is not anachronistic. Writing after Tooke’s death, Hazlitt exploits the metaphor of chemical solutions to describe how his theory had altered language. Though he uses Tooke’s own metaphor of unmasking, saying and that he “saw language stripped of the clothing of habit or sentiment,” what starts as a disrobing becomes something more caustic, corroding the “web of old associations wound round language,” before putting it more bluntly: “Mr. Tooke, in fact, treated words, as the chemists do substances.”60 Tooke approached the vexed question of indeclinable ligatures by investigating their evolution, dissolving his hardened specimens back into their earlier forms, a method aimed at simplifying individual words, as well as, in the words of a more recent critic, “at the analytic dissolution of all syntactic distinctions.”61 With typical punning wit, Hazlitt writes that “Mr. Tooke’s work is truly elementary”; for where Harris’s Hermes cannot properly be called “analysis,” since it multiplies rather than reduces taxonomic distinctions, Tooke’s reductive instinct, both his best and worst feature, aims to boil down “a solution of words into their component parts.”62 Powerful as his method is, Tooke’s instinct for tracing language’s transformations persistently contradicts his own reductive semantic absolutism. The Diversions contains page after page of citations from early English literature, attesting that the shape of language dissolves over time, even as it assembles and consolidates a vernacular past for the linguistic identity of Englishness. If Tooke’s theoretical demonstrations of “abbreviation” are devoted to both effects—­a stubborn reductiveness and a proliferative process of dissolving—­it is clear that it was the latter that captivated the early British romantics. The visions of language change that emerge in Coleridge and Wordsworth’s early collaborations—­a handful of which I work through, below—­was profoundly affected by the cultural ripple effect of Tooke’s blunt but ingenious derivations. In spite of his claims to anchor words to a stable meaning, Tooke’s practice of enacting the solubility of words over a circumscribed chronology made language’s independent temporality, its “natural” or involuntary changes, vividly available to his contemporaries.

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BREAKING UP

We begin to suspect that there is, somewhere or other, a radical Difference [in our] opinions. —­S. T. Coleridge, Let ter to Sotheby, 13 July 1802 A Poet’s Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances of Nature—­& not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similes. —­S. T. Coleridge, Let ter to Sotheby, 10 September 1802

If Tooke turns words against abstraction, and gives them a near material firmness and a changing shape by showing them in motion, this dynamic solidity is ever more palpable in romantic-­era poetic theory, as Coleridge’s “living Things,” or Wordsworth’s “things, active and efficient.” Both retain the lively, self-­sustaining mutability Tooke illustrated, but turn away from original, stable meanings. In place of his loose empiricism, which seemed to assume a passive nature whose objects once long ago inspired language’s beginnings, we find an attempt to mingle language with nature in the present, and in fact to merge the poet’s person with a natural landscape. The failed artifice of “formal Similes,” for Coleridge, is the result of an insufficient intimacy with, an incomplete submersion into, “the great appearances of Nature.” In principle, this implies not yet being merged enough, still being recognizably contained in a falsely realized linguistic experiment, as though the desired chemical reaction had not quite worked. In preference to this “loose mixture,” the full “unification” of self and surround that Coleridge wishes for, in the epigraph to this section of the chapter, hints at the “radical difference” between his and Wordsworth’s thoughts; nevertheless, a material and soluble language figures equally in the poetics of both. Both Tooke’s influence on Coleridge and his oblique relevance for understanding the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads are uncontroversial, but in this chapter I shift the emphasis of that influence. I follow Olivia Smith in understanding clear parallels between the Preface and Tooke’s Diversions, and a shared resistance to the assumption of a natural division between classes or kinds.63 Both level hierarchies of taste and cultural influence, presenting and valuing what is “common” across social strata, considering conversational or “low” (and Anglo-­Saxon against Latinate) language as

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equivalent to what was traditionally considered refined, poetic, or philosophical. Both do so by revealing something artificial about language: in Tooke’s case, the divisions between parts of speech are dissolved and the cultural prestige of abstraction grounded; in the Preface, a certain quality of received canons of diction is revealed to channel thought more narrowly, to its detriment. A sense of folk rootedness acquires value when language is traced to native origins, whether in Tooke’s Anglo-­Saxon philology or in the Preface’s rural-­formed “real language of men” and “real language of nature.” Yet this important reading of Tooke’s influence does not acknowledge the broader temporal liveliness introduced by language’s solidity and dissolution. To complicate interpretations of the Lyrical Ballads Preface that leave it looking merely naïve or primitivist about authentic expressiveness, we have to focus attention on timescale variations enacted through language. Where “low and rustic life” lets the “essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they . . . speak a plainer and more emphatic language,” or when rustics “hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived,” it is logical to interpret this proximity to nature through intimations of primitivism in the idiom of etymology.64 These are clearly legible as etymological moments, and Smith herself seems to find language here literally lodged in “appearances of nature”: “somewhat mystically, the passage means that rustics speak a pure language because they live among and are surrounded by the origins of words, as if they were standing in a landscape of language.”65 On one reading, the Preface would then seem to blend what is most reductive in narratives of language origin that emphasized nature and the passions with the rather dogmatic empiricist presuppositions behind Tooke’s etymology, and simply to plant such reductions in the soil of present-­day England. Viewed the wrong way, transporting language origin from a distant mythic past to the here and now, so that language invention is reimagined as a constant of use, reinforces the notion that the noble laboring poor were akin to the “savages” of colonial exploration, the back-­formed ancestors of civilized cultures.66 The reinscription of language origin onto the common, ongoing experience of speech in the present thus draws on a civilizational timeline,

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but it is not for that reason necessarily regressive. Instead I will argue, at the end of this chapter, that it holds within it possibilities for racializing language and mind. But these are mostly left as possibilities, since primitivism is both an organizing theme and an indirect target of the Preface’s aims. “The principal object then which I proposed to myself in these Poems,” the passage cited above begins, “was to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them . . . the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.”67 As Frances Ferguson has shown, those “primary laws” invoke the conjectural histories of stadial theories of civilization; that “state of excitement,” the private temporality of individual experience; and the “incidents of common life,” a zone where the two temporalities cross.68 This mixed duration is a crucial dimension of the theories of both Coleridge and Wordsworth, as a number of critics have noted, and it does in fact imagine civilization as a process happening all the time.69 Smith herself notes that Coleridge, in an effort to move between and integrate theories of language and theories of mind, tries to “establish a parallel between the evolution of language and an individual’s psychological relation to words.”70 The tracing of ideas exemplifies the temporality of an individual psyche; the tracing of words or language conjures the broader temporalities of cultural and social formation. This already implies that language change is always the effect of both active and passive modes of speaker participation. But as we will see, where Coleridge fixates on the active capabilities of the imagination, Wordsworth in his poetry enacts both its acts and its passions, not only its openness but its belonging to a nature with temporalities deeper than its own. Tooke’s derivations brought language change to life, allowing language to collect a material thickness. The empiricist observation that language is essentially mutable enables more clearly the thought of a substance somewhere between solid, liquid, and spirit, dissolving or growing. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, different combinations of timescales occur to us simultaneously (psychological, sociocultural, natural historical), so that language too seems to occur to us, soaking into us even as we adjust its forms. Making meaning is not imposing contractual obligations, and using language is not just consciously selecting among lexical items. Language—­particularly in

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Wordsworth—­involves making our way through an ecologically complex landscape that precedes and is affected by our awareness of it. Tracing language’s changes across different timescales necessitated stumbling over the insight that it seems to trade “natural” or “arbitrary” qualities, as the same associations may become one or the other depending on the circumstances of the observer. Individual words, considered as fixed, atemporal, or uprooted might well seem arbitrary in Locke’s sense; but due consideration of the processes of language change suggests how the “establishment” or formation of language is not in this sense arbitrary at all. As Tooke says, “words do not gain, but lose letters in their progress: nor has unaccountable accident any share in their corruption; there is always a good reason to be given for every change they receive . . . a probable or anatomical reason for those not arbitrary operations.”71 Leaving aside that words now shed “letters” as usage wears them down (elsewhere, Tooke speaks of dialect variation; here he seems not to distinguish letters from sounds), the proposal of a vague “anatomical reason” to account for language change, though quite different from the “sound laws” recognized by future philologists, nevertheless suggests that languages are structured, that is, regulated neither by conscious human agency nor by laws of social compact, but by their own self-­sustained logic, so that forms are generated in some internally consistent manner. In Coleridge’s hands, this “anatomical” consistency unfolds into an organic “Plant.” Language’s power is now experienced and traced through psychological attachments, themselves indicative of more pervasive tendencies; instead of shedding letters, words now germinate. In a much cited letter, he wrote to William Godwin in 1800: I wish you to write a book on the power of words, and the processes by which human feelings form affinities with them—­in short, I wish you to philosophize Horn Tooke’s System, and to solve the great Questions—­ whether there be reason to hold, that an action bearing all the semblance of pre-­designing Consciousness may yet be simply organic, & whether a series of such actions are possible  .  .  . Is thinking impossible without arbitrary signs? &—­how far is the word “arbitrary” a misnomer? Are not words &c parts & germinations of the Plant? And what is the Law of their

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Growth?—­In something of this order I would endeavor to destroy the old antithesis of Words & Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, & living Things too.72

Coleridge’s “words &c” is a fascinating category whose extent is unclear, as is his impatience with the account of thought coordinated through arbitrary signs, but most interesting of all is his question about the “Law of their Growth.” Accepting the premise of inevitable mutability suggested by Tooke’s idea of abbreviation, Coleridge reverses this principle, developing out of it a theory of language change driven not by “wheels” toward reduction, but by living growth.73 Typically, Coleridge converts Tooke’s stilted image into a vivid, animate figure. It is worth recalling another “emblem of the formation of words” from the Biographia Literaria, a microscopic entity that multiplies through mitosis: a word is a “minim immortal among the animalcula infusoria which has not naturally either birth, or death, absolute beginning or end: for at a certain period a small point appears on its back, which deepens and lengthens till the creature divides in two and the same process recommences.”74 The asexual procreation of these “living Things” makes their naturalness strange and anarchic, rather than comforting or orderly.75 Etymology creeps into the Lyrical Ballads as language change begins to merge with the poetic faculty of the imagination. Coleridge’s famous retrospective disavowal of their joint project generously credits Wordsworth’s feeling for “natural objects” as the catalyst for his famous redefinition of “Imagination,” as a force which (in its “secondary” form) “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-­create.”76 But Coleridge’s “desynonymy” or differentiation of imagination from fancy appears amid a number of observations on language change. When Coleridge turns, in chapter 4 of the Biographia, to the critical reception of the Preface, even as he defends the work as poetry he criticizes its tone, phrasing, and message, before distancing himself from the “Lake School” epithet and from the composition of the Lyrical Ballads.77 The trouble with the Preface, he notes, was its provocative reversal of values (its resort to the “low” for poetic truth). Yet he claims that it was Wordsworth himself who prompted his own central critical revelations: at their first meeting, he recalls the “sudden effect” of

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a poem Wordsworth recited, which “made so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgement.”78 Tooke’s specter lurks insistently at the margins of this chapter; in his marginalia to one passage, John Thelwall accuses Coleridge of disavowing what he considered an obvious debt to Tooke.79 Thelwall is missing those early, politically radical sympathies that made Coleridge, and the other Lake Poets, figures of suspicion. In distancing himself—­from Tooke, from the Preface, from the Lake Poets—­Coleridge wants to disarm his own critics, and specifically to refute the charge of any “perversion of taste.”80 He does this by breaking up his own association with these contested positions, but also by coming up with his own versions of language change, not as an imperative toward efficiency but as a revelatory reservoir testifying to the characteristic preoccupations and values of an age. Thus, while Coleridge doesn’t mention Tooke (except by repeating some of his derivations, such as “if” from “give”), he diverts his etymological influence into new channels. He argues that language change is guided and regulated by an intellectual force native to a language community: “in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize those words originally of the same meaning.”81 Elaborated at greater length in a footnote, this process is clearly idealized—­as terms like progressive and growth indicate—­into a continual refinement or improvement (though with the appealing addendum that whatever is progressive, like language, is “of course imperfect”), which emphasized dynamic proliferation instead of reduction.82 Where Tooke demonstrated that what looked like many words was really one (because they could be reduced to the same buried root), Coleridge shows instead that what appeared to be one word ought really to be more. This should occur as knowledge was refined, and meaning evolved accordingly. He even suggests, echoing the philological trope of material “worn away” over time, how form and usage mutually influence one another: “each new application or excitement of the same sound will call forth a different sensation, which cannot but affect the pronunciation. The after recollection of the sound without the same vivid sensation will modify it still further; till at length all trace of the original likeness is worn away.”83 Nevertheless, this passing insight runs counter to desyn-

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onymization, ideally the work of “men of research” who wish to avoid the “erroneous consequences” of sophistry and confusion, forcibly supplying new words or allocating new meanings where they are deemed necessary. Coleridge’s habit of coining words clearly fits this motive: for every “desynonymize” and “esemplastic,” there is a neologism from Biographia to which English is now fully accustomed: “intensifying,” “reliability,” “visualize,” and so on.84 In apparent tension with desynonymy’s interventionism, Coleridge also describes the ungovernably social effects of language change through its impersonal operations: “when this distinction has been so naturalized and of such general currency that the language itself does as it were think for us . . . we then say, that it is evident to common sense. Common sense, therefore, differs in different ages. What was born and christened in the schools passes by degrees into the world at large and becomes the property of the market and the tea-­table.”85 Having replaced Tooke’s Anglo-­Saxon linguistic commons, for Coleridge language trickles down to the masses from a self-­selected, enlightened literati. Such a neutral vision of words “naturalized” after deliberative correction jars against the earlier thought of those insidious “terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues,” from “Fears in Solitude” (1798), those “empty sounds to which / We join no feeling and attach no form!” When linguistic conventions become “naturalized,” begin to “think for us,” shouldn’t the resulting “common sense” begin to ring the same alarm bells those “empty sounds” once had? Not by 1817: the recognition of habituation to linguistic forms takes on a positive or negative glow, according to political mood. Habituation describes the inevitable movement or concealment of sources. The poet of “Fears” feels governed by a numbing and merciless terminology, inflicted from without; the critic of Biographia suggests the salutary benefits of a comparable infliction, from within a class empowered to impose it. In congratulating himself for being the “first of my countrymen” to recognize and define the distinction between the terms fancy and imagination, Coleridge refers to Wordsworth’s discussion of the attempt made in William Taylor’s British Synonymes Discriminated (1813).86 With his typically pathological tendency to plagiarism, he does not, as John Shields points out, refer to Phillis Wheatley’s much earlier distinction of these

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terms, in “On Imagination”—­despite his indisputable familiarity with her famous poem, parts of which had been reprinted in works he knew well, by Thomas Clarkson (1786), Gilbert Imlay (1792), and John Gabriel Stedman (1796).87 “Good for Coleridge!” writes Shields dryly; Wheatley is not one of Coleridge’s “countrymen.” Coleridge takes it that Wordsworth has satisfactorily demonstrated Taylor’s treatment of these terms to be “both insufficient and erroneous,” but it is interesting also to note Wordsworth’s principal complaint with Taylor: “here, as in other instances throughout the volume, the judicious Author’s mind is enthralled by Etymology; he takes up the original word as his guide and escort, and too often does not perceive how soon he becomes its prisoner.”88 Instead of each word’s origins, the definitions Coleridge and Wordsworth quibble over are by contrast refinements staking out the terms’ current and future applications, marking the constant re-­formation of language in the present. To this extent their positions are comparable, and also Wheatleyan: for her “softer language,” with its ethereal diffuseness, tends, as I’ve argued, toward a particular futurity. But here specifically we can detect, in Wordsworth’s reservations about etymology, a veiled criticism of Coleridge’s own philological enthusiasm. Originality is a curious thing, and there is a poignancy to Coleridge’s giving Wordsworth partial credit for recognizing the terms’ “diverse meaning,” since Coleridge is going out of his way to differentiate himself from Wordsworth, to coin himself anew and to disengage pointedly from old associations. Again, the effort of his Biographia is in part a desynonymy—­a breakup—­of himself from a radical past, and somewhat more painfully from a former close friend. That they shared “frequent conversation” on precisely this semantic distinction suggests how close (while leaving Wheatley’s poem out of this origin story).89 Each refers to the other as “my friend” in these passages, when they cite one another, with who knows what tone of sentiment, obligation, or aggression. Wordsworth, Coleridge writes, has provided a practical guide to poetic imagination and fancy, with examples, a “sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage”; he himself aims to dig deeper, to “add the trunk, and even the roots, as far as they lift themselves above ground and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness.”90 It is as though, by adding the trunk and roots

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to Wordsworth’s picture, Coleridge is reinstating the full organic sense of “radical” against its political reformist connotations, seeking instead, in 1817, a stabilizing ground. That “common consciousness” is, as Coleridge recognizes, much more unruly in Wordsworth’s and indeed sometimes his own early poetry, where language’s motion turns out toward natural timescales that exceed it, turning restlessly between integration and disintegration. Wordsworth’s genius lies, Coleridge writes, in “awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom,” washing away “the film of familiarity,” enacting what Coleridge also describes as his “original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere and with it the depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents and situations of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the luster, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops.”91 Let us join Shields in recalling that Wheatley’s “On Imagination” also declares, when imagination overtakes fancy, that “[t]he frozen deeps may break their iron bands . . . Show’rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose, / And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.”92 The dispersal Coleridge describes makes imagination a liberating force that liquidates or vaporizes solid form, emphasizing the mobility latent in the hardened world. Imagination as a melting or (as Wheatley also says) “diffusion” recovers the “ideal world” Coleridge attributes to the Wordsworthian imagination; that it so precisely echoes Wheatley’s “sparkle” and “dews” suggests that Coleridge has absorbed Wheatley’s spirit, without acknowledging the full scope of her poetry’s desire to “break” those potent “iron bands.” When at length Coleridge does get around to his famous definition of imagination, expressed through its “secondary” echo (which works “with the conscious will”), reading again closely, we may see not Wordsworth’s but Wheatley’s powerful solvent, a force with the power to melt a world of dead objects: “it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-­create . . . It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”93 The vitality of the imagination, expressed by its power of diffusing elemental attachments, implied in the Lyrical Ballads not a linguistic law of growth, but a poet stretching or dissolving into “his” surroundings. “The Nightingale,” one of Coleridge’s contributions, offers a positive myth

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to enact this dissolution. The bird’s supposed sadness becomes custom, repeated unthinkingly by those poets who “nam’d these notes a melancholy strain”: “many a poet echoes the conceit, / Poet, who hath been building up the rhyme / When he had better far have stretch’d his limbs / Beside a brook in mossy forest-­dell / . . . to the influxes / Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements / Surrendering his whole spirit” (ll. 22–­29). Once “nam’d,” the link between this nocturnal song and melancholy is compounded in poetry’s “building up” of the association, until it is taken for granted by fashionable, urban “youths and maidens most poetical” (ll. 35–­37). But to listen to the nightingale’s song in another frame of mind, as Coleridge (and “My Friend, and my Friend’s Sister!”) has, is to dissolve the association. Language change takes place in the midst of a receptivity to those influences, so the poet himself is softened, relaxed. The timelines of origin myth and child psychology cross, as Coleridge makes receptiveness to language change a parenting technique, proposing to raise his own impressionable child “[f]amiliar with these songs, that with the night / He may associate Joy!” (ll. 108–­9). Like a human chemical reaction, it seems you can instigate language origin in the figure of the child—­or the child within—­through a radical openness to the “influxes / Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements.” This may indeed be the most distinctive fact about the early radical joint project to point language change away from Tooke, through recourse to nature: the innovation of reversing etymology’s retrospective orientation, and materializing the futural promise of language. I have argued, of course, that Wheatley crucially modeled this upward, outward spiritualizing of linguistic form, into a possible future where the existing world she lived in might better distribute human dignity; but if, as I believe, we should see this as a process of naturalization, she imagined it as more work than a poet “surrendering.” The “softer language” of her Poems required tremendous labor, in the service of reinscribing the chronopolitics that helped to decide where nature begins and ends, for subjects whose surrender to being naturalized was involuntary. Compare “The Nightingale” from Lyrical Ballads with Coleridge’s “The Dungeon”: nature is what should fill the infant’s mind, but is also that force Coleridge adjures to heal the imprisoned criminal: “Thou pourest on him thy soft influences

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/ Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets, / Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters, / Till he relent, and can no more endure / To be a jarring and a dissonant thing.” Unnervingly diagnosing the culprit as a “dissonant thing” waiting to be tuned by some intellectual breeze, Coleridge subjects this unnatural being—­in a poem with admirable reformist sympathies—­to liquid treatment of the solvent of nature’s language, almost a torture by nature, “till he relent” to being animated by its “soft influences.” How to persuade the charitable Coleridge that the “jarring thing,” or the imprisoned more generally, may already be human—­ “things in the shape of Men”? Yet Lyrical Ballads carries out the work of Wheatley’s imagination in conveying that to melt the existing world recovers its potential. This becomes a reversal of origin-­seeking, inasmuch as it asks not where language has been, but where it is going. Ferguson called this Wordsworth’s “preoccupation with linguistic tendency.”94 In Wordsworth’s encounters with “indifferent” or “mute insensate things,” his own language thickens, caught up in the very material histories it describes; through its personal and impersonal timelines of formation, language “grows,” but in inassimilable, unwieldy tendencies, rather than out of grounding origins. Its naturalness stems from mixed durations felt in transition, not from histories grasped in observable forms. BRE AKING DOWN

Remember, also, that the medium through which, in poetry, the heart is to be affected is language; a thing subject to endless fluctuations and arbitrary associations. The genius of the poet melts these down for his purpose. —­W ordsworth, “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (1815)

Writing in 1810, Wordsworth suggested that language could be either an ambient force “like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe,” guaranteeing “communion with the inner spirit of things,” or it could be that “counter-­spirit” that like “poisoned vestments” would slowly eat away at an “individual or people.” Curiously, by then, this imperceptibly contaminating weight on thought—­this bad gravity—­seemed to Wordsworth to “dissolve” the integrity of communal feeling, and to “alienate [the victim] from his right mind.”95 I say curiously because, as we have seen, both he

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and Coleridge viewed dissolving and melting as part of the poet’s job. I turn now to the ways the early radical Wordsworth narrated the poetic act of melting down associations as performed not only by “the genius of the poet,” as in the epigraph to this section, but also upon the linguistic agent; and I close by thinking about how an outside linguistic force, for Wordsworth, may also be aligned with alienation. In drawing out the moment both he and Coleridge take as disintegrative, Wordsworth spends much more energy than his friend modeling this negative stage of association. Wordsworth did, however, compose for Lyrical Ballads a series of poems “on the naming of places,” which hint at his version of Coleridge’s coinages, tending to express how arbitrary names occur to the namer in relay with natural (involuntary) circumstances under various passions or compulsions. Wordsworth frames the sphere of arbitrary linguistic “fluctuations” within a shared indebtedness to the impersonal temporalities of nature—­with the reciprocal effect, as Kevis Goodman and Alan Bewell have shown, that nature itself bears the legible traces of historical layers, in histories that mix with the “earth” artifice, passion, violence, love, and loss. For Wordsworth, mind and nature interact as “temporal structures, built up layer upon layer like a geological formation”; a striking linguistic version of this comes in “Hart-­Leap Well,” to which I will turn shortly, and which constitutes a kind of mythic kin to the “Poems on the Naming of Places.”96 I have said that Wordsworth’s “nature” might be understood as the name of a relationship to time’s passage. Setting in motion what Coleridge called the “influxes” from the “shifting elements” of nature, Wordsworth dwelt on its “low breathings” and “indisputable shapes,” allowing the receptivity celebrated by both poets to leave a much deeper impression of the gray language of nature always already in motion, until we hum physically with that “ghostly language of the ancient earth” (1799 Prelude). If Coleridge emphasizes the “growth” of language in its temporal progression by way of active reform, Wordsworth’s defense of the “common” pauses on the idea of re-­formation as a passive procedure of imaginative disintegration. Perhaps what is called in the Preface the signature human pleasure in “recognizing similitude in dissimilitude” expresses differently the thought that imagination’s animating force breaks down distinctions to find what is held in common. Far from deriving the legitimacy of words

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from natural roots, Wordsworth suggests that words are more like efficient pressure points in complex ecologies of absent, invisible, or unknown forces in motion—­impersonal but patterned effects that find expression within his picture of “felt” language. This is not meant to diminish the power of words, but rather to extend language’s reach to include this newly pictured idiom of the passions. A “common” human nature, in Wordsworth’s scheme, is fundamentally built out of linguistic elements, but these elements themselves do not belong to grammar or lexicon. Thus Ferguson suggests that “what Wordsworth describes in rustic language is not a specific diction,” while Richard Turley remarks that the Preface’s object lies less in rendering a “lower-­class idiom” than in making a “clean break” with “prefabricated” phrases and imitative posturing.97 Like them, I am questioning not whether the Preface’s “real” language tried to limit itself to certain select words, but whether it was limited to words at all. Instead I would say that it aims at a new spectrum of linguistic values. The reception-­anxiety running through the framing texts of Lyrical Ballads focuses on preparing the reader for “low” language and experiments in conversation; but its “selection” aspires to reach, if only inarticulately, beyond dialect or the units of words to a felt language immune to mastery. Indeed, the inarticulacy of this reaching is its virtue, since it surrenders the illusion of control, the better to understand what a naturalized commonness might mean. Language’s “real”-­ness depends not on true names or original sources, but on sensing its mobility. So when Wordsworth says that the poet, “from practice,” learns a method of expression to utter “those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement,” this “structure” describes something other than a static nature, a pattern of culture less clear, less visible, further submerged within the forgetful reflexes of the body and its impacted habitus.98 Indeed, these “passions and thoughts and feelings” are what we are made of, the knowledge we all “carry about”: And with what are they connected? Undoubtedly with our moral sentiments and animal sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the operations of the elements and the appearances of the visible

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universe; with storm and sun-­shine, with the revolutions of the seasons, with cold and heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with injuries and resentments, gratitude and hope, with fear and sorrow.99

All this, then, contributes to what surfaces as language. Wordsworth’s heterogeneous, interwoven “elements” philosophize Tooke’s “conjunctions” and “particles,” though not with the organic wholeness Coleridge had intended, in his letter asking Godwin to “philosophize” Tooke’s system: for Wordsworth, “the elements” too are indispensable parts of speech easily imagined inessential, taking shape in movement, only now in many more dimensions. Such a broadness of mind reforms etymology into something that can trace meaning’s changing associations when language becomes enormously, unthinkably ecological, composed of pieces whose effects we barely sense, requiring “words that are unknown to man.”100 Wordsworth calls up this linguistic ecosystem to widen and extend language, and not to reduce it, as Tooke had; but he also breaks things down into connections that form something more like an inorganic than an organic whole, which Coleridge would not have done. Enlarging language does not merely make its speakers feel small, though it should make them feel like moving parts of something bigger than themselves. What Tooke showed, almost accidentally, of language—­its tendency to shift forms willy-­nilly, to conceal its own past—­is now figured in terms of slow “natural” processes that render the linguistic agent partly passive or submerged, like disintegration. This transition takes place first because the diversion of radicalism that Wordsworth and Coleridge refined, from different angles, views language as subject to physical changes in various scales of time. Between Tooke’s illustrations of abbreviation, Coleridge’s proposal of a language community’s law of growth, and Wordsworth’s subjective accounts of meaning’s changing shape, there are important transitions in what is taken for granted of language. For both Wordsworth and Coleridge, for instance, language is now “a thing subject to endless fluctuations,” though the form of its naturalism varies: words, signs, or “associations” may look arbitrary and yet be situated in narratives of natural history.101 This attitude is particularly clear when the durations we imagine for language are multiplied and mixed. But in Wordsworth’s “murmur

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and the murmuring sound” (“Nutting”), or his “rocks that muttered close upon our ears” (“Simplon Pass”), a strange etymology is audibly plotting linguistic courses in inhuman timescales, so that a world extends off the edge of the picture our minds can supply. This is where the strange language we hold in common lives. Wordsworth’s poetry promotes a grayer notion of language’s formation, while also picturing the ways meaning is accommodated by the linguistic mind. The inkling we are meant to feel is of an archaic yet familiar language, in which the poet dimly recognizes himself, and to which he feels he belongs. Far from merely humanizing this strange language of breathing, murmuring, and muttering, the recognition may estrange us from our own. This makes for a rootless radicalism: “Not only general habits and desires, / But each most obvious and particular thought  .  .  . Hath no beginning” (II.263–­76, 1799 Prelude). But that rejection of easy origins is immediately softened: “Blessed the infant babe—­/ For my best conjectures I would trace / The progress of our being” (II.267–­69). The world’s influxes are accommodated and sought by the mind, entailing a mixed agency, a participatory shaping and being shaped. Wordsworth plots the formative blur of infancy between the child’s poised “poetic spirit” and its inclination to “gather passion,” that receptive state in which feelings “pass into” its life, “creator and receiver both.” This is far more than a linguistic faculty, yet it holds language; and where “in most” this “infant sensibility” is “abated and suppressed,” others dwell within it, “through every change of growth or of decay.” Wordsworth communicates a rather ominous corollary to the “ineffable” bliss of feeling “the sentiment of being spread / O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still” (II.449–­51): the body, recognizing itself in a transient nature, understands that it will come apart, but truly does not seem to fear its dispersion across either what “moves” or what is apparently inert. And for a slow, complex tale of decomposition we need look no further than “Hart-­Leap Well.” In this poem he is as attentive to the gradual and even painful process of dissolving associations, as he is to their formation; but in order to condemn a false version of linguistic thought, it is necessary to dissolve not just language, but a false orientation toward it. “Hart-­Leap Well” shows what becomes of the cues borrowed from the body of etymological thought figuring prominently in the Lyrical Ballads’

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inception; or, we might say, the poem shows what happens to radicalism in Wordsworth’s poetry. The poem’s note offers us an etymology, which is explained by way of an origin myth: “Hart-­Leap Well is a small spring of water . . . Its name is derived from a remarkable chace, the memory of which is preserved by the monuments spoken of in the second Part of the following Poem, which monuments do now exist as I have there described them.”102 These “monuments” are timeworn, and this headnote is perhaps the most compact expression of an analogy between reading the meaningful changes in a physical environment and tracking the shape-­ shifting forms of words, as in Tooke’s etymologies. The name of this spot, “Hart-­Leap Well,” condenses or abbreviates the well’s myth, and remains its monument, but the poem doesn’t stop there. It also narrates the circumstances surrounding the telling of this myth, and its transformation from a tale of valor to one of cruelty, from one of distant origin to present recounting. The poem is an etymology of its own name, but it reveals not only the truth of its significance, as etymology is supposed to do, but also a falsity folded into that truth, or a falsification of a true association. The naturalness of a healing “slow decay” now at work predicts that, given enough time, even the name may change: “these monuments shall all be overgrown,” including the place-­name. If there is a law of growth proposed, as there is in Coleridge, it is not additive; it envisions the concomitant law of dismantling, erosion, and biodegrading, in language’s transformations. It longs for linguistic overgrowth. The first half of the poem tells the story of a knight who hunts a hart to exhaustion, until at length it is killed. Taking three final leaps down a steep cliff, it breathes its last into a spring at the hill’s base. The hunter, exultant from the immensity of his “remarkable chace,” promises to raise a “Pleasure-­house” at that spot; to name the spring “Hart-­leap Well” after his victim; and to memorialize the hart’s fall, both by building three columns, one for each of its last leaps, and by building a basin in which to catch the spring. The second half of the poem recounts how the poet-­ traveler happens upon what was left of this memorial splendor, now a strangely vacant ruin charged with supernatural gloom, and how he learns from a local shepherd the story just recounted. The shepherd ponders what is odd about the spot, and speculates on the hart’s reasons for choosing to

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die there; the poet offers the final word, declaring that they should share the lesson of the story, learned both from “what [Nature] shews, and what conceals” (l. 178). From the vantage of part 1, then, the poem unfolds as a medieval tale of origins, full of the tones of nostalgic English myth: the knight asserting his seigneurial rights, the fabled hunt, the ruin, the shepherd who renders the legend. But as part 2 sinks in, this version of things begins to break down. Not only do the poem’s final images dwell on the decomposing ruins, and predict the relief of their future disintegration, they render the etymological origin story told in part 1 no more (and no less) than folktale. Beginning with this reconstructed origin is a ruse; it represents an amalgam of traditions, social, moral and linguistic, in desperate need of reconfiguration, waiting to be dissolved. Here I am drawing on recent critical accounts that find in Wordsworth’s evolving radicalism, ecological sensibility, and temporal poetics an ambivalent reaction to England’s domestic colonial imaginary.103 But I want to turn these readings toward the linguistic context I have been outlining. “Hart-­Leap Well” is one of many versions, in the Lyrical Ballads, of what it means to ignore or misunderstand the language of the heart. In the narrative of the poem’s first half, the hunted creature’s final acts, recognized and memorialized by his hunter, are the stuff of language origin myths: for the memorials are built on the sites of primitive forms of both writing and speech. Three columns are raised where the hart leaves its hoof-­marks “imprinted on the verdant ground,” and the well’s basin is installed where it utters its final, suffering cry: “with the last deep groan his breath had fetch’d / The waters of the spring were trembling still” (ll. 43–­4 4). With this attentive specificity, the poem allows us to reconstruct how language origin might imitate animal tracks or cries. It is as though these nonlinguistic expressions serve as analogues to some ancestral hunter’s written and spoken language, since the poem’s encounters hinge on the hunter’s prototypical enactment of language origin, the insistently agentive act of naming. The well’s name then cements the memorialization: the effort to fix the hart’s leap in place with columns, and to contain the spring’s running water in stone, is completed in the act of conferring the name, “Hart-­leap Well.” The story retells an original empirical encounter, then, and imagines it artificially solidified by “hand of man” into constructed forms, archi-

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tectural and linguistic—­rather as a putatively empiricist language theory like Tooke’s might do. The resonance between wells, sources, springs, and origins is as clearly audible as any metaphor of roots. Yet this etymology is not a stabilizing one: even the competing “spring” synonyms, leap and well, collapse any simple temporal origin for the association. Which “spring” springs from which: is the leap made significant by the well, or vice versa? The knight’s building project, and the notion of naming that seems to provide its grounds, consists of a love of monuments seeming to stand against time: “Till the foundations of the mountains fail / My mansion with its arbor shall endure” (ll. 73–­74), he declares, and later, the poem’s most memorable phrase, “The Pleasure-­house is dust” (l. 169), resounds against the knight’s hubris. If a certain grip on language is expressed here through the urge to transform a spring into a well, to trap or contain mobility, it is apt that upon first surveying the spot, the poet notes a blocked relation to time or, more specifically, to what he calls “spring-­ time”: “It seem’d as if the spring-­time came not here.” The sense that temporality is always reasserting itself is immediate, however, in the next line: “And Nature here were willing to decay” (l. 116). Releasing that will to permanence, that grip on language, requires the anticipation of an impersonal “willing,” a different spring, the millenarian prospect, previewed in the final stanzas, of a “milder day,” when nature will recover (ll. 171–­72). To let go of this grip on stabilized language, to release the “course of time” and divert etymological thought toward his own purpose, Wordsworth exploits the poetic effects of mixed durations. Where Coleridge’s “The Nightingale” crossed association psychology with conjectural language origins, in “Hart-­Leap Well” the imagined phases of dissolution and reattachment are happening in slow motion, outside those anthropocentric frames. Nature’s “slow decay” applies not just to the landscape, but to us as well: “She leaves these objects to a slow decay / That what we are, and have been, may be known” (ll. 173–­74). From the traces of those memorial objects, from what is gone and what is left, we piece together a historical time, in which the transitions in different forms of life have left their marks. But the specter of the knight’s miscalculation—­the speed with which his mansion, so swiftly built, is then reduced once more to dust—­haunts the poem. Within the scope of the line “these monuments

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shall all be overgrown,” fall not only the knight’s constructions, not only his coined name, but the poet’s encounter with the shepherd, the poem itself, the Lyrical Ballads, its readers, and so on, as if pulled in over the edge of an eroding slope, before the earth can cover the damage. The poem’s mixed durations frame its recollected empirical encounter not only as a linguistic origin, but as a creature’s killing (or, to follow Bewell’s reading, a species extinction) whose significance persists.104 The knight, a rich man but a poor reader, is distracted by joy in the accomplishment of death, and immediately attaches himself to the apparently accidental location. The shepherd, reading more subtly from below, imagines instead that the hart chose this spot to “make his death-­bed near the well.” Its motive is obscure, but the association named by the knight is the same one made physically by the hart, in marked earth and trembling water. Now, in the slow time of decay, the true relation in the name is obscurely sensed beneath the false one. The knight belongs to an apparently bygone feudal social order, for whom the landscape can be built up through monumentalized exertions of will: pursuit, conquest, building, naming. But that aristocratic privilege signified by the hunt has present-­ day transatlantic echoes for Wordsworth, in narratives like Stedman’s, of people hunted, tortured, and killed, and of killings turned into spectacle. As McLane and others have shown, Wordsworth knows the colonial order is also at home on the Scottish border; indeed, he is writing within a “transnational vernacular cultural imaginary” that loosely aligned mediated language “collected” from “Native Americans  .  .  . Scots border-­ raiders, Morayshire dairy-­maids, Highlanders, and African ‘Negroes’,” alongside the domestic outsiders encountered in the Lyrical Ballads.105 In 1803’s “The Solitary Reaper,” the inscrutable song of a “Highland Lass” working alone in a field gathers until the valley “overflow[s] with sound,” and brings to mind songbirds among “Arabian sands” or “the farthest Hebrides,” extremes of empire brought close to home. As McLane puts it, “fantasies and experiences of primitivity disperse themselves throughout the home world”: the poet’s linguistic estrangement (“Will no one tell me what she sings?”) prompts him to wonder whether the song is about ancient “far-­off things” or “familiar matter of to-­day,” a question persistently at work in Wordsworth’s ballads.106 The where and when of

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her language are resolved into a new and enigmatic beginning, as sound carrying turns to sound actively carried: “the music in my heart I bore / Long after it was heard no more.” In “Hart-­Leap Well,” language “origin” dramatized in its falsely theorized form—­built by artifice, by “hand of man”—­is rewritten under the reshaping power of Nature’s slow decay. Languages of the heart and the sense belong not to us, but to a commons that isn’t only or exactly true; the inscrutable accessibility of the “common things that round us lie” (“Poet’s Epitaph”) suggests that even when “the earth and common face of nature spake to me / Rememberable things,” the mind’s attempt to grasp language as “things” arrests the currents of meaning that carry us along with them.107 It is not simply, as in fuzzy claims to sentimental inarticulacy, that no words will do; it is, strictly speaking, that communication takes place or fails to take place around words, beyond the claims to self-­enclosure inhabited by a linguistic subject or agent. As Wordsworth would later put it, in book 3 of the 1805 Prelude, the “breathings” modeled by his poetic practice mark a meaningful force “far hidden from the reach of words” (3.185). This bigger picture of language is pervasive, followed or traced outward into its physical surroundings, opening inward to its dissolution and re-­formation, in a rhythm of influx and utterance. Such a felt language alters and is altered by its participants. In this felt language, the common springs of action and passion form a consistency that is embodied, common, vital. Even as the felt language encountered in the early Wordsworth engages the “trappings of archaism” through actualist gestures that pull us into “the now,” it does so mostly “here, now, and in England ”—­even or perhaps especially when these poems, like “The Solitary Reaper,” are imagining “far-­off things.”108 I have argued that Wordsworth’s absorption and reinscription of the radical etymology Tooke practiced counteract an attachment to the primitive (much as McLane suggests that his use of the ballad form, in which “encounters are modeled as embodied exchanges of speech,” intervenes where antiquarianism and ethnography meet to consolidate linguistic objects).109 I’ve also suggested that it was in the domain of the “common” that Wordsworth and Coleridge most drastically diverged, in their intuitions about language’s impersonal changes. I close here with a look back at that “common wind” mentioned at the outset,

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from Wordsworth’s sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture dying in a French prison, published first in the Morning Post early in 1803, and reprinted among the Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty in Poems in Two Volumes (1807). How does Wordworthian radicalism—­a radicalism owned and disavowed in various ways from the 1790s on, amended and ambivalently retained, attached in evolving configurations to “nature,” “liberty,” and “nation”—­ manifest in this sonnet? TOUSSAINT! the most unhappy man of men, Whether the rural milk-­maid by her cow Sing in thy hearing, or thou liest now Alone in some deep dungeon’s earless den, O miserable Chieftain! where and when Wilt thou find patience? yet die not, be thou Life to thyself in death; with chearful brow Live, loving death, nor let one thought in ten Be painful to thee. Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee, air, earth, and skies There’s not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee: thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man’s unconquerable mind. 110 David Scott, among others, has suggested that in spite of its sympathies, the poem suffers from a “transcendental complacency” that naturalizes Toussaint’s suffering, silencing historical agency with natural imagery; while Carmen Faye Mathes has recently argued, more interestingly, that in its nondualistic merging of mind and matter, the radical Spinozism in the final lines actually speculates about how readers might “continue to listen to him.”111 Like Mathes, I read the lines as Spinozist; however, while this makes them less transcendental, I doubt that it makes them less complacent. What is fascinating, in a poem in some ways remarkable for its openness, is how uninterested in listening to Toussaint Wordsworth seems. The counseling of “patience,” a linguistic receptivity or “wise passiveness,” here actually imposes muteness; the nearness of the rural sound-­

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image—­the singing of a “rural milk-­maid,” later revised to “whistling Rustic”—­recalls, as Mathes points out, scenes like the one described in “The Solitary Reaper,” but its sound is here canceled in the strange hypallage, “earless den.” Not just earless but voiceless, Toussaint now himself becomes the rememberable thing no “breathing of the common wind” will forget, a part of “speech” in a natural idiom. The revolutionary present in Haiti is, like Toussaint, silenced, contained, held at a distance (as the epithet “Chieftain,” rather than colonial French general, distances by archaizing him). The possibility of freedom is delayed or really denied by the counseling of resignation to captivity and death: the poem’s later versions lament that Toussaint has “fallen,” “never to rise again.” That the monuments here “left behind” are not objects but powers, breathings of an inorganic and uncontained natural world (air, earth, skies, and wind), philosophizes the language that we hear only in its absence: any words attributed to Toussaint. The poem offers no association between Haiti and freedom except as a memory of the “common wind,” and this makes sense, as Cora Kaplan argues, when we read it in its published context in the Liberty sequence, focused on French tyranny and English freedom.112 It is not an anticolonial poem. It is uncontroversially anti-­France, but certainly not pro-­Haiti (nor even in this instance explicitly antislavery). In the days before and after publishing Wordsworth’s poem, the moderate Morning Post included reports of violence in St. Domingo, with vivid accounts of mass killings of defenseless or bound Black captives by the French, hundreds or thousands at a time (2 and 4 February). If these descriptions of barbaric cruelty are one context for Wordsworth’s picture of Toussaint’s noble resignation in prison—­“The Blacks, in dying, will not take quarter. Under the stroke of the bayonet, they declare death preferable to slavery” (1 February)—­it plays to a sympathetic, even admiring portrayal of the victims of French war crimes, but also to what Saidiya Hartman has called the “spectacular character of black suffering” that here trafficks in the racial stereotype that some living bodies feel less.113 In the issue of 2 February 1803, appearing two columns from Wordsworth’s poem is a report that the French have succeeded in hiring British merchant vessels to carry French troops to Haiti, an effort supported by the colonial faction of “West India Proprietors” who, while

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proud to be British, would “prefer the French to the dominion of the Blacks”: “this may be good argument in Jamaica, but it is most pernicious reasoning in London. If once our Colonial subjects are allowed to calculate the prudence of their allegiance, there is an end of our Colonial Empire.”114 The balance of feeling in the passage is not easily captured, but its axis is a fixed point composed of Francophobia and British imperial ardor, with no hint of racial democracy. Reading the Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty, published the year the slave trade was abolished within the British empire, it is clear Wordsworth—­who called slavery “this most rotten branch of human shame” (Prelude 10.260) but who, as Katherine Bergren writes, “was neither anti-­imperialist nor a committed abolitionist”—­still believes liberty is a properly English thing.115 France was no symbol of liberty; Napoleon reimposed slavery in the French West Indies in 1802 (after its earlier abolition in 1794). But what of Haiti itself, where freedom has a very different meaning than it does in England? Doris Garraway has described the major challenge for early anticolonial Haitian intellectuals as one of linguistic asymmetry: “the ultimate denial of the equality of speaking subjects, is to suffer the condition of being covertly addressed at the same time as one is publicly ignored.”116 Wordsworth’s sonnet is exemplary in having Toussaint as explicit addressee, yet Toussaint’s unheard voice, despite being carried in every “breathing of the common wind,” remains anchored to an unfreedom not unlike Coleridge’s “dissonant thing,” locked up in “The Dungeon”—­ only now without the possibility of rehabilitation, except through transmutation. If we want to hear a Black voice with things to say about liberty, there is no reason to look for it in Wordsworth (much less Coleridge); we can find it instead in the transatlantic poetry of the early years of Haiti’s independence. The poet and playwright Antoine Dupré, who wrote “O you, ancestral lord! O Sun (Last Sigh of a Haitian)” (“Soleil, dieu de mes ancêtres” [Dernier soupir d’un Haïtien]) around 1815, offers us a poem that answers Wordsworth’s “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” with an inverse image: its dying poet, at the end of life, no longer locked away in “some deep dungeon,” invokes the sun’s blessing in order to sing a song of freedom that guarantees its singer’s final breath will lead this time not to a slow transfiguration into the “breathing” of natural elements, but to the soul’s fiery af-

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terlife in the instant he expires (“my / Soul shall yet burn with passion-­fire / When, dying, I sigh my last sigh” [“Ah! Brûle encore mon âme / Après mon dernier soupir”]). A spiritualized description of natural substance, not unlike Wordsworth’s, merges death and life, as it were, in “due course of time,” but now precisely with the quick release of freedom, rather than its patient sacrifice, as the guarantee of their interfusion: “Nature decrees that all is born / To live and die . . . Man lives for naught but death; but then, / Should it not be his destiny / To be reborn and live again, / If he, indeed, loved liberty?” (“Par les lois de la nature / Tout naît, tout vit, tout périt / . . . L’homme vit pour cesser d’être, / Mais, dans la posterité / Ne devait-­il pas renaître, / S’il aimait la Liberté?”) The poem’s final lines take this metaphysics of recycled matter and turn it into a principle of poetic justice, in the form of a preemptive threat against the return of colonial tyranny: “If once again upon our shore / The tyrants their foul faces show, / Let their hordes’ blood forevermore / Make our fields still more fertile grow” (“Si quelque jour sur tes rives / Reparaissent nos tyrans, / Que leurs hordes fugitives / Servent d’engrais à nos champs”). As the poem’s recent editors note, these lines play directly on the French “Marseillaise,” and the poem more generally turns enlightenment tropes—­clarity and light, the laws of nature, revolutionary liberty—­against exclusionary Eurocentrism.117 These tropes are Dupré’s raw material: as Wordsworth says, “the genius of the poet melts these down for his purpose.” On top of melting and remaking the tropes of French Enlightenment, it is perfectly possible to imagine that Dupré is doing something similar with Wordsworth’s sonnet: according to one report, Dupré in his youth “attempted a career as an actor in England” (and the sonnet may in any case have circulated early in postindendepence Haiti).118 It is clearly legible, among the early literary documents of Haitian independence, as an effort to stabilize a national past (though Haitian poetry’s own move toward “vernacularization” would come a generation later, with poet Oswald Durand). Whether he alludes to Wordsworth’s sonnet or not, we can understand Dupré’s ode to liberty as an “answer” to the limits of the human and the specificity of nature in the European colonial imaginary. The Declaration of the Independence of the Blacks of St Domingo, issued late in 1803 (within a year of Wordsworth’s sonnet to Toussaint appearing in London’s

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Morning Post) already stated plainly a cornerstone of the Black radical tradition, warning interpreters of European enlightenment ideals—­“blinded so much as to believe themselves the essence of human nature”—­that it is past time to open their eyes to the heterogeneity of the human.119 Dupré’s final image of retreating colonists used as fertilizer to enrich the fields of Haiti—­itself a pointed reuse of the tropes of European radical enlightenment, to nourish his poetic creations—­may recall Wordsworth’s desire for a healing nature to restore equilibrium, to remediate and regenerate; but in its revolutionary enthusiasm, it casts aside the Wordsworthian call for “patience,” and accelerates his “slow decay,” with a very different transatlantic radicalism.

5

The Primitive Today Thoreau in the Wild

The half-­known obstructs knowledge. Since we only ever know by halves, our knowledge always obstructs knowledge. —­J ohann Wolfgang von Goethe The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression. —­Ralph Waldo Emerson The ear has also its rules, to which the mind imperceptibly conforms. —­P eter Stephen Du Ponceau T H E N AT U R A L H I S T O R Y O F H U M A N L A N G U A G E

The epigraphs to this chapter, drawn from authors Henry David Thoreau read and revered, paint a picture of knowledge as partial, and of a linguistic subject shaped from without, who expresses and hears according to external relations and opaque “rules.” Du Ponceau, early linguist of Indigenous North American languages, remarked that these rules of the ear were “an interesting fact in the natural history of human language, justly entitled to the attention of philologists” (a philological attention that this “fact,” of course, did not necessarily receive).1 Returning to David Walker’s 1829 question, which similarly asks the hearer to self-­differentiate, to be jolted into self-­awareness, we can recall a more pointed valence that slants these epigraphs: “do you understand your own language?” Walker’s anger 182

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at discrepancies between what Emerson called “the man” and his “expression” succinctly reveals how linguistic nonknowledge lands differently, with epistemological and physical violence, depending on the observer—­ and echoes Phillis Wheatley’s famous letter to Mohegan preacher Samson Occom, in which “the Cry for Liberty” in American slave society prompts her to remark on “the strange absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically, opposite.”2 In the following scene from The Maine Woods, Thoreau should be asking Walker’s question, “Do you understand your own language?” but instead he implicitly asks himself: do I understand their language?, and explicitly answers, “I could not understand a syllable.” The passage from “Chesuncook,” originally published in the Atlantic in 1858, records Thoreau by a campfire, entranced by the sounds of the language spoken close at hand by his Penobscot and Abenaki guides: While lying there listening to the Indians, I amused myself with trying to guess at their subject by their gestures, or some proper name introduced. There can be no more startling evidence of there being a distinct and comparatively aboriginal race, than to hear this unaltered Indian language, which the white man cannot speak nor understand. We may suspect change and deterioration in almost every other particular, but the language which is so wholly unintelligible to us. It took me by surprise, though I had found so many arrow-­heads, and convinced me that the Indian was not the invention of historians and poets. It was a purely wild and primitive American sound, as much as the barking of a chickaree [red squirrel], and I could not understand a syllable of it; but Paugus [a Pequawket chief killed in 1725], had he been there, would have understood it. These Abenakis gossiped, laughed, and jested, in the language in which Eliot’s Indian Bible is written, the language which has been spoken in New England who shall say how long? These were the sounds that issued from the wigwams of this country before Columbus was born; they have not yet died away . . . I felt that I stood, or rather lay, as near to the primitive man of America, that night, as any of its discoverers ever did.3

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As Lisa Brooks notes, Thoreau is here “left out of the conversation because of his own illiteracy in Wabanaki language.”4 We learn more in this scene about Thoreau’s ear itself than about anything he listens to. The “purely wild and primitive American sound” which Thoreau naturalizes as “the barking of a chickaree” is thoroughly mediated by his extensive reading in Native American history, and perhaps particularly influenced by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, to whom I return briefly at this chapter’s close. In the sounds that “have not yet died away,” Thoreau hears a stubborn permanence that spells ephemerality, contradictory qualities often attributed by settler philologists to the grammar of Native American languages (and to “oral” languages more generally); indeed, that ominous phrasing, “not yet” seems lightly to predict the extinction of its speakers and sounds in one.5 “Change and deterioration” are contrasted with unchangeable durability, “this unaltered Indian language,” which immediately recalls for Thoreau the “arrow-­heads” he had collected all his life in Massachusetts. Thoreau reads Wabanaki language through racial time, imaginatively placing its sounds, like stone artifacts of a presumed past, according to what Jean O’Brien calls the “ideological project of ‘lasting,’” a common practice that denominates individuals as the last of their kind, thereby actively erasing the contemporary presence of living communities.6 In this scene, his copious reading on Indigenous Americans, which accelerated in the decade and a half before his death in 1862, stands like a wall of books between himself and his companions. The Maine writer Fanny Hardy Eckstorm, an invaluable source for contextualizing the social setting into which Thoreau arrived, pencil in hand, assesses Thoreau’s “luckless knack of blundering when he came in contact with men”: Thoreau, she wrote in 1904, could not “get the measure” of his Penobscot guide Joseph Attean, later to become the first elected governor of the Penobscot Nation, because he “hired an Indian to be aboriginal,” and if he said “By George!” or talked like a “Yankee,” he simply did not match Thoreau’s “hypothesis of what a barbarian ought to be.”7 Hence his excitement that night by the campfire. “Racial difference,” writes Linda Martín Alcoff, “is often experienced as a distancing without regard to spatial proximity,” and the scene Thoreau sets here is a pitch-­perfect instance.8 Thoreau’s primitivist eyes and ears devise a social

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distance both caused by, and compounding, a tightening link between language and race. He understands this encounter from the perspective of a whiteness as he says absolutely racially “distinct” from his company; and this whiteness is exemplary, so that his own ignorance of the language spoken in his presence is taken as evidence that it is incomprehensible to “the white man” (despite the fact that cultural translators—­Indigenous, British, Métis, French Canadian, American, as well as many identities beyond and between—­were stock figures in his reading). Imagining their language as “wild,” “primitive,” “unaltered,” Thoreau externalizes himself as a civilized observer, imagining he has traveled back in time to a mythical moment of first encounter, as one of America’s “discoverers.” In the very moment of breathless “nearness” invoked in the final sentence, Thoreau labors to stay as far from his companions as he can. Until, that is, his reverie is abruptly cut short by a paragraph break, in which Attean breaks the circle to address him directly: “in the midst of their conversation, Joe suddenly appealed to me to know how long Moosehead Lake was.” Of course, Attean knows that Thoreau, a surveyor by trade, likes to measure the world around him—­including the parts he cannot “take the measure” of. The mundane suddenness of Attean’s question, his switch to English, and the shift in footing it performs to include Thoreau in the circle all shatter the distinctions language and race have congealed into. By asking Thoreau for information, Attean is practicing cultural diplomacy rather than merely playing the role of native guide.9 Thoreau is looking at the language and its speakers as utterly alien, falling into the trap of uprooting language precisely by naturalizing it; Attean’s address jogs him from his reverie. There is the possibility, here, that Thoreau is making fun of himself for withdrawing into a fantasy, but still the fantasy flourishes throughout his writings. The passage vividly suggests what it is like, as David Murray has remarked, “to be in possession of a language which sealed you off from progress altogether.”10 In his multilingualism, in his ability to translate between worlds, Joe Attean is “culturally more sophisticated” than Thoreau; yet cultural aptitude of this kind tended to be used asymmetrically as proof of backwardness, incoherence, “lack of civilization.”11 In the pages that follow the account given above, answering his endless questions

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about the words for this and that—­an activity which prompts Thoreau flippantly to liken his companions to “philologists”—­he notes with the interest of the scientist, “I observed their inability, often described, to convey an abstract idea.”12 “Often described” reminds us again of that wall of books, from the French Jesuit “Relations” Thoreau pored over, to the philologists, historians, and poets of his own day; the description appears in Samuel M ­ orton’s Crania Americana (1839), but we only need to recall Adam Smith’s essay on language’s “first formation” to remind us that unfitness for abstraction is a form of linguistic primitivism common from enlightenment conjectural history through the romantic century. Just as his ear hears the chickaree in spoken Abenaki, in this characterization, he “discovers” what he looks for. In Sarah Rivett’s words, romantic-­era thought had no difficulty “preserv[ing] the linguistic value of indigenous culture . . . while eliding Indian existence” as it actually appears, so that “Romantic Indians sit somewhat uneasily alongside Romantic celebrations of primitive language and poetry.”13 This sitting somewhat uneasily is documented literally in Thoreau’s campfire eavesdropping. In this book, I have built on the work of linguistic anthropologists who show that the speculative origins of culture featured in timelines of civilization make credible various kinds of linguistic primitivism. These speculative origins  gradually became formally condensed in the nineteenth century as philological “roots.” This means in part that we might view the representational labors of philology through the nineteenth century as slowly composing multiple, competing narratives about race. In this chapter, Thoreau emerges as a curious actor in this play. On the one hand, his writing represents a late gray romantic tendency toward phenomenological strangeness developed with many of the same romantic-­era preoccupations we have seen already, which desegregate the categories of nature and culture while dismantling the timeline of civilization to reorient “us” with respect to origins. On the other, his attachment to wildness is indelibly shaped, as in the passage above, by the fantasy of crossing a threshold into pure alterity, and by his apparent inability to see Native American peoples and individuals, who loom large in his writing, as other than “past.” In these moments, it is often hard to tell where and how well he can hear himself. In this chapter, I explore this tension as its own kind

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of compromised agency: fascinated by local variation, phenomenological reciprocity, temporal complexity, and his own active participation in semiotic worlds, Thoreau with his scientist’s impulse to measure is at the same time beholden to increasingly sedimented forms of racial time. I begin, though, with a brief review of Thoreau’s most proximate source for linguistic naturalism, and for the “actualism” of his late gray romanticism. “This is the effect on us of tropes,” writes Emerson in “The Poet”: “[we] have really got a new sense.”14 Emerson’s phrase is a kind of equipment for glimpsing shifts in how language comes to be sensed, measured, and evaluated through poetry. How does the gradual elaboration of language as an object of scientific study amend a romantic canon that introduces practices of giving language time to dismantle the alien word? The chronological assumptions underlying primitivist thought display the simple power of attributing temporal qualities to the object that language gradually becomes, in and after the philological revolution. In my reading, Thoreau’s entire work constitutes an effort to take better account of the tropic movement in material relations, to rediscover mobility in what appears inert. But in tracking that tendency in Thoreau’s thought, it is all the more evident that it coexists with a racialized idea of inertia or “stagnation,” which the white mythology of enlightenment philosophy had used to imagine the capacity for change according to the ideology of progress, and which nineteenth-­century American ethnology and philology enthusiastically adopted. If Emerson proposes the force of tropes as the actualist source of linguistic change, what is the nature of this power; to whom is it granted? In returning to Thoreau’s America, we come back to a very different sense of the gradations of linguistic naturalism from those caught in the “softer language” of Wheatley or, more briefly, in the radical materialism of Haitian poet Antoine Dupré, both of whom saw much more of the world than Thoreau. Thoreau stands in continuity with strands of thought already examined in German language theory and British romantic poetry. Anchoring this continuity is a preoccupation with breaking down habits of thought that alienate language from its environments. As with Herder or Wordsworth, this naturalizing style is sometimes mistakenly assimilated to a nostalgic logic seeking the recovery of origins.

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Thoreau’s racial primitivism forms an idiom within his gray romanticism, and these tendencies are in tension: he elevates language’s characteristic mutability or activity, yet in confronting speakers of Wabanaki languages does not recognize them as part of a world evolving in the present. The question of how “mutability” works in language for “us,” in the settler America Thoreau inhabits, runs up against the obstacle of Native American languages, as in the scene above, where “their” language simply does not change—­and must be interpreted, for that reason, as vanishing.15 Thoreau’s writings pose for us a salutary recognition of the self-­ alienations in linguistic experience against an orientation that reflexively builds social distance into the observation of Native languages and their speakers. How does Thoreau appear to want both to release the grip of the “external perspective” to better understand linguistic activity, and yet to remain at a safe distance? Returning to Emerson’s linguistic actualism at least helps interpret Thoreau’s version of that dissolving power of the poetic imagination. The Emersonian “reaction against the alien word” urges the recognition that our terms are temporary and in part unconsciously self-­imposed. According to Emerson, when we “find ourselves” in nature, we open or abandon ourselves to strange communications, as when for instance “the incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them”; so begins a dawning awareness of how to converse with the material world, in order to “make friends with matter.”16 Emerson’s linguistic effect on Thoreau lands in part through the nondualist materialism often missed in transcendentalism, which I locate partly in the by now familiar desire to inhabit multiple perspectives simultaneously. And geological matter once again allows us to adopt various points of view in order to live with the natural world: “geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature . . . We knew nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed.”17 In the midst of this re-­periodizing of knowledge—­in which “patient periods” are also long sentences worn away or “rounded” through the continual decomposition of writing and rewriting—­holding many perspectives is the only way to know “rightly.” Because, as Eduardo Cadava explains, “the link between geology and language was pervasive during Emerson’s day,” erosion, de-

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composition, and sedimentation provide metaphors through which Emerson can express his sense that “transforming the language he inherits” will “transform the relations within which we live.”18 As in Wordsworth, social renewal is contingent on a relation to one’s language, and Emerson is likewise concerned with reactivating etymology for this purpose. Out of this intellectual background emerge the etymological flourishes generated in Walden (1854). Thoreau’s etymological practice is frequently one of self-­observation, as he assumes the role of a naturalist whose own small acts require description; his etymologies bear a figurative weight brazenly belying their philological falsity. Instead of making a historical object out of language, this kind of etymology foregrounds the contingency of figuration, and the inevitable defeasibility of language, showing how an apparently lifeless world transforms according to temporal perspective, and how—­using a definition of “society” that seeks, in Emersonian fashion, to desegregate nature and culture—­“institutions” are “plastic like clay,” a prerequisite for his radical politics of reform. In this picture of language, a commitment to the observation of patterned processes reconstitutes form, and origin, through another version of linguistic actualism. Its attachment to nature can look superficially like literalist primitivism, but a new relation to matter undercuts that reading. Emerson’s famous claims about language—­that “language is fossil poetry,” that “nature is a language”—­at first seem straightforwardly primitivist in their echoes of proto-­romantic voices, like Vico, Rousseau, or Herder, whose myths of origin were enabled by figurative language or sounds of nature.19 But an even more pervasive primitivist reservoir feeds into Emerson’s reception of enlightenment empiricism. In Nature (1836), he tells us that “words are signs of natural facts . . . Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance . . . Right means straight; wrong means twisted; Spirit primarily means wind.”20 Emerson here plainly recalls Tooke’s Lockean scheme of tracing language’s roots back to loosely imagined empirical encounters, deriving words, as Locke suggested one might, from “sensible ideas.”21 In a passage that also recalls Percy Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry,” he makes a dim linguistic past present to us, as Adam Smith and many others had, with resort to “savages” and the childhood of

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humanity: “because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry.”22 While “radical correspondence” is not the Lockean lexicon, the relation between things and thoughts, to which tropes stand as testament, depends on a “forgotten” direct link between original language forms and their referents.23 In valuing a prior correspondence, and its reacquisition, Emerson seems to name the poet’s work of “fasten[ing] words again to visible things” as an act of retrieval that could fix linguistic units to objects in the world. Yet if we read around these excerpts, we will find that language’s processes of formation always outstrip its individual units. Words, like “visible things,” stretch, subside, accrete, or dissipate according to perspective; what appears at first to lie in the past becomes guarantor that something new is coming. This is already clear in “The Poet” (1841–­43) with Emerson’s famous etymologist, the poet’s counterpart, who mines for tropes laid down by time: “though the origin of most of our words is forgotten . . . The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”24 Like others in this book’s repertoire, this actualist image decelerates and externalizes language, seeming to alienate it by naturalizing it, while deftly using material formation to picture poetic agency in geological time. On the one hand “every word was once a poem”; on the other, “every new relation is a new word.”25 The first conjures language’s primitive former state; the second uses its past transformations to access language’s current mobility. The reorientation from a backward-­looking love of origin to a sensitivity within our present condition structures that “perpetual youth” we glimpse by relocating a mythic forest to the Concord woods. Nature diverts the reader’s gaze from a static history admired in retrospection, to the ongoing present, or from the “dry bones of the past” to (selectively) universal poesis: “why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”26 The linguistic reform that reimagines a “new relation” as an “original relation” evidently intends by original language, like nature itself, not

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something static, external, and prior, but something active, reciprocal, and current. The move allows Emerson to attend to the inadequacy of seeing language as words and symbols. As he states in his early lecture “The Uses of Natural History” (1833), “nature is a language and every new fact we learn is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary.”27 Language can be a limitation—­something that deadens, measures, and divides—­and yet also a means of expansion, something that, as in Wheatley, etherealizes or awakens. Repurposing the terms of Coleridge’s definition of the imagination, Emerson writes, “Words are finite organs of the infinite mind . . . They break, chop, and impoverish it.”28 Remarking on the brokenness of “the dictionary and grammar of [man’s] municipal speech,” he advocates not only new words or meanings, but new appreciation of what we already possess, since “we are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use.”29 But there is more, for “words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.”30 We live in our own meaning-­making, which materializes our intellectual capacity: “we are symbols and inhabit symbols.”31 Remaking language’s naturalness as its active and impersonal force shows that archaic empirical roots are “our least debt to nature,” because the salient feature of the “analogy that marries Matter and Mind” is its continuous restlessness.32 This active process advocates a nondualism to reveal the nondistinction in the perceived gap between nature and spirit—­and the goal of changing minds is to change the world: “a correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.”33 And so, he writes, “the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought,” but it is not matter itself which is purged, only the unquestioning acceptance of its immutability.34 This eccentric materialism suggests that the “block” itself is not in matter; it is in our relation to matter. Thought has the power to overthrow mechanical association and short-­sighted empiricism, in fact, the whole political system of that sensualist regime: sounding more than a little like Blake, Emerson writes that “the first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses.”35 At the same time, even as “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me,” this transcendent “I” is famously rendered as a bodily “eyeball.”36 Its account of submergence or self-­abandonment into surroundings is a moody phenomenological narrative, far from the linear historicism of empiricist epistemology: “we dis-

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trust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature,” writes Emerson; “We own and disown our relation to it, by turns.”37 And while his first target is usually the “materialism of the times,” Emerson also warns against a wide-­eyed idealism that leaves matter behind “like an outcast corpse” or risks “denying substantive being to men and women.”38 To “own” our relationship to nature is to enjoy another materialism, to tell less a natural history of human language—­as Du Ponceau had put it—­than a human history of natural language. In a journal entry of 1822, Emerson writes: “he who wanders in the woods perceives how natural it was to pagan imagination to find gods in every deep grove & by each fountain head. Nature seems to him not to be silent but to be eager & striving to break out into music. Each tree, flower, and stone, he invests with life & character.”39 Already at this early stage in Emerson’s thought, a primitive past reemerges to an open mind in today’s forests. Over a decade later in Nature, the poet-­figure steps forth against a presiding empiricism: “the sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the Reason.”40 Later still, in “The Poet,” such inhuman objects receive new sense: “the poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives [things] a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object.”41 Emerson’s poet “invests [things] with life” and “impresses his being,” remaking the world as human not with a rooted, but with a fluid language. What Thoreau gleans from Emerson, for better and worse, mingles this ability to leave one’s prints on the world with the appealing capacity for surrender. As we’ll see, Thoreau learns the Emersonian tricks of giving language time through tropes, as both poet and etymologist. Symbols, according to Emerson, “must be held lightly” because they are delicate and require a certain care, but also because we should not become too attached to any single way of expressing ourselves.42 This reveals Emerson imagining language as continuous relocation, as his own figures tilt and turn: “all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and

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houses are, for homestead.”43 In encouraging us not to dwell too securely in the language we sometimes feel we possess, Emerson accommodates the mind to mobility, to a mixed state of guidance and surrender reaffirmed in the poet’s relation to words, which “he rides . . . as the horses of thought.”44 Reading this line, Stanley Cavell has noted that, as modes of conveyance, words both “obey our intentions and work beyond our prowess.”45 If the poet’s speech “flows with the flowing of nature,” we can now read this “with” as obscure affiliation, not imitation.46 And because both the horses of thought and language’s “flowing” directly precede the passage about “fossil poetry,” linguistic sedimentation and the horse’s gallop both become visible as fluid motions, in perspectival variations, in different kinds of time.47 The etymologist handling fossils and the poet riding horses collaborate fluently across deep and shallow time. Solidified, fossilized language can be unearthed by the etymologist, and newly animated by the poet, until we too have a new sense. WALD EN ’ S WILD S

Stand outside the wall, and no harm can reach you. The danger is that you be walled in with it. —­Thoreau, Journal , 26 June 1840 I am glad to hear . . . that you sometimes see the light through me, that I am here & there windows & not all dead wall. —­Thoreau, Let ter to Harrison Blake, 21 January 185 4

From Emerson I turn to the use of etymology in Thoreau’s Walden, though one could also start with Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” which begins with a famously false etymology drawn from an English linguist of sorts, Richard Trench, about pilgrims sauntering toward Saint-­Terre. “Walking” does the footwork of transcending by sinking deeper into the ordinary and the wild, with that strange Thoreauvian physico-­spiritual mobility. A more sedentary work, Walden—­with its Germanic sense of “in the woods” recalling what Emerson called “wood-­thoughts”—­is a book whose house-­ bound geographical radius of half a day’s walk serves to remind us that Thoreau spent ninety-­odd percent of his forty-­four years in and around his native Concord, Massachusetts. In “Walking,” Thoreau writes, “When a

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traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, ‘Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.’” (Thoreau read Wordsworth’s Prelude, shortly after it was first published, in 1850, while working on Walden; Coleridge’s influence within the American education system during the era of Thoreau’s attendance at Harvard was pervasive.) The anecdote suggests Thoreau’s affinity with the Lake Poets; but it is safe to assume on his behalf not only a continuity with, but also certain reservations toward, European romanticism. In Walden, this feeling is summarized perfectly as a revision of the landscape when he writes, in the chapter “The Ponds,” “This is my lake country,” editing down those sublime vistas to the ponds of New England, with that self-­fashioned modesty which is one of American transcendentalism’s characteristic conceits. What is etymology’s role in the context of Walden—­the book and its title, the pond and its name? How does Thoreau use this linguistic technology of origins-­thinking, halfway between archaizing rhetorical trope and cutting-­edge philological trick, to inform and comment on his own linguistic presuppositions and practices? As Michael West has amply demonstrated, Thoreau makes extensive use of etymological works that pose linguistic roots in originary proximity to natural phenomena, by largely forgotten linguistic naturalists in the Cratylist tradition, such as Antoine Court de Gébelin, Walter Whiter, and Charles Kraitsir (to whom I return below).48 More proximately he draws on Coleridge and Emerson, in seeing language rooted in both the material and spiritual realms. But, branching off from these lineages, Thoreau’s etymological rhetoric materializes language’s capacity for change in diverse and particular contexts, carrying out the transformation of etymology Coleridge and Emerson both instigated. What his friend Ellery Channing called the “philological side” of his work tends to be misread as an effort at “recovering the primeval significance of language.”49 It is far more important to Thoreau that language alters and conceals its past as nature does, that it is transformable; while there are also hints that the possibility of linguistic improvement might differentiate, in Thoreau’s mind, his own activation of tropes from the “unaltered” language of the Native Americans he hears in Maine. In Walden, which answers in prose Emerson’s advertisement for the position of American poet, Thoreau sets out to recover, not lost

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meanings, but rather a lost attentiveness to meaning-­change and a desire to produce different ways of meaning that stray from habitual usage. For his own purposes, the residual wildness in language resists the tendency to domesticate, to house neatly behind walls and closed doors: it flows. This is why Thoreau’s use of etymology never coheres into the simplifying derivations one would otherwise expect from the practice of locating organic roots through Cratylist etymologies. Instead, he is intent on reconstructing or replanting the field of tropes (most famously in the chapter “The Bean-­Field”). In this endeavor, he focuses in one sense on a shorter timeframe, a primarily social timescale in which human ideas and institutions metamorphose, building particular figurative vocabularies that exclude and suppress others.50 Yet at the same time, Thoreau opposes this shorter human linguistic timeframe to vast natural ones, where meaning and form move very differently. Thoreau is attuned to the variation of time’s effects in nature, and any attempt through human language to grasp a final truth, or reach a proper “origin,” is bound to oversimplify. For Thoreau, these mixed durations, and the difficulty of containing their disparities, caution against the desire to imagine simple, positive relations of likeness between language and natural phenomena; as in Wordsworth, language may be both a source of harm within a given culture, and a feature of “the harmed environment.”51 In recent, revelatory studies, Juliana Chow and Sarah Dimick have both shown how the project of integrating scalar extremes and mixed durations, everything from the momentary hiatus in the observer’s attention to the longest lapse of geological perspective, is vital to Thoreau’s poetics of matter. Chow argues that over “multifaceted” scales, for Thoreau “time is not conceived only along one timeline or stratification”; the times that overlap in durations of decay bond observer with surroundings, and the literary figures of caesura in Thoreau’s writing foreground new ways to understand disparateness and discontinuity as relation.52 For Dimick, the “phenological beats and accents” of seasonal time in Thoreau’s writing, with its “rounding” action echoing Emerson’s secular, “patient periods” but now to revise the observer’s life, which Thoreau likened to a poem, reveals how seasonal adjustments mingle “environmental time and literary form” for Thoreau.53 Forms of patient time, of course, would also be im-

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portant to how Thoreau both repeated and adjusted tropes of primitivism, progress, and nation-­building. “Mythic time,” notes John Kucich, “is a category that became increasingly important to Thoreau as his career developed,” yet while his use of variations on primeval or deep time could be “anti-­nationalist” (as Wai Chee Dimock suggests), Kucich reminds us that such long perspectives can “cut different ways,” and in particular they were also useful to the “architects of savagism”: “deep time was, all too often, the handmaiden of Indian removal and other projects of U. S. imperialism.”54 Nature’s changes loom significantly in the background as Thoreau establishes a relationship between minute and tremendous timescales by playing down their difference, cryptically suggesting their complicity in shaping “man’s body”: “in the course of ages the rivers wriggle in their beds until it feels comfortable under them. Time is cheap and rather insignificant. It matters not whether it is a river which changes from side to side in a geological period, or an eel that wriggles past in an instant. A man’s body must be rasped down exactly to a shaving.”55 Ecologist David Foster has suggested that, after reading the natural history of his contemporaries (including Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Louis Agassiz, each also involved at different removes in the nineteenth century’s discourses of racial taxonomy), Thoreau was “eager to integrate geological time scales and long-­term processes into his understanding of . . . the appearance of a landscape.”56 Superimposing human and natural timescales, Thoreau assumes that language is part of the landscape. How did his studies in natural history imprint his linguistics? If, as Foster notes, he “seemed to take the magnitude of nature’s dynamics easily in stride,” how did Thoreau bring his linguistic speculations in step with nature’s “grand style”?57 If etymology’s narrative intentions often instill the pomp of natural truth as originary source, this is precisely not what Thoreau wants: he wants occasions for observing language’s mobility. We can see this in three well-­k nown passages from Walden, in which Thoreau uses etymology to “rephrase” his culture. The name “Walden” itself, in fact, exposes the complications of rhetorical or narrative etymology. In the chapter “The Ponds,” Thoreau recounts various myths of origin for the names and distinctive features of Walden and its surrounding ponds. He moves

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through several possible sources for the pond of his title: a Native woman called Walden who long ago survived the sudden geological event that created the pond, according to a local tradition—­which implies that this sinkhole was divine justice against “profanity,” though Thoreau remarks that “this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty”; “some English locality,” such as Saffron Walden; or, Thoreau suggests, explaining the mysteriously regular natural paving along the shore, perhaps the piles of stones gathered by the railroad have slid into the water, in which case “one might suppose that it was called originally Walled-­in Pond.”58 None of these three derivations is explicitly preferred; rather, the origin myths in this paragraph seem more or less an elaborate setup for a throwaway pun. One possible origin for the pun itself is tucked in an early journal entry, in a list of aphorisms, which adds weight to this otherwise feeble punchline: “stand outside the wall, and no harm can reach you. The danger is that you be walled in with it.”59 How does this phrasing expand Thoreau’s etymology? One thing “The Ponds,” and Walden more generally, does is to give shape, and especially shape over time, to the landscape: in the middle of the paragraph described above, Thoreau writes simply, “It is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one.” Part of a landscape’s shape accretes through its name’s past, and in this paragraph we are given three pasts for “Walden”: an “Indian fable” (a myth of “lasting,” with its sole Native survivor), an English namesake (the most rationally respectable theory), and a bad joke. The pun is pointedly derived from materials closest to hand: its word history matches an accident of land formation to an accident of speech. “Walden/walled in” invents an empirically justified derivation, the least persuasive but most memorable. Comparing possible paths of meaning, without arriving at one he calls true, Thoreau shows that it is not the application of words to the natural landscape that Walden traces, but new analogies created in thought. His attachment to existing etymologies (rather like his attachment to the British romantics) is characterized by both reverence and impatience. With his origin myths, Thoreau recognizes the appropriative instinct inherent in repeated metaphors that help us apprehend or take possession of nature, whether to explain it or ourselves. The narrative it proposes is humorous or serious, but whatever it does is done in passing.

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Yet if we allow its meaningful reverberations to widen through our reading of Walden, the apparently trivial homophone offers a concise paradox: how does the (white, male, settler) American inhabit a wilderness out of doors yet still carry walls around with him? Over the last several decades, Thoreau scholarship has increasingly taken note of the ambiguity and playfulness in his language. While Michael West and Philip Gura have collected and analyzed Thoreau’s philological sources, rhetorically inclined criticism renews Walden’s central question, by trying to ask it more nearly as Thoreau begs it: what is the purpose of moving out of town and into the woods? Why make oneself bewaldet, why “enforest” oneself? Three of Thoreau’s great rhetorical critics—­Stanley Cavell, Sharon Cameron, and Barbara Johnson—­give quite different answers, but each begins with the conviction that Thoreau was a writer before all else, and that the decision to live in the woods was a rhetorical decision, or a linguistic act. Cavell suggests that Thoreau’s move serves as material to gather knowledge in isolation, for the sake of returning this knowledge to his “neighbors” as the book Walden.60 Cameron argues to the contrary that his move is an attempt not to renovate society, but to register the wildness by putting himself in nature’s place (hence her preference for the methodical yet digressive, undomesticated note-­ taking of the Journal).61 Johnson proposes simply that Thoreau’s moving to the woods inserts him bodily into the symbolic process language makes use of, literalizing and adapting “dead metaphors” by inhabiting them.62 Walden thus reemerged as a scene in which dead metaphors are the dead wood of society, and the author’s move is itself a figure conveying the urgent need to stimulate new growth. Withdrawing into the woods is an act not of closing off but of opening outward, becoming permeable. Thoreau’s renovation of language is accomplished through means simultaneously linguistic and physical. Superficially at odds, Cavell, Cameron, and Johnson together provide the means to show how viscerally and actively philology infiltrates the natural and social worlds in Thoreau’s writing. When Thoreau writes, “most words in the English language do not mean for me what they do for my neighbors,” he is hinting that his linguistic project is partly interventionist, that is, an effort to reawaken or activate language change.63

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In what sense is this activation part of an etymological inheritance? Both Coleridge and Emerson inverted the empiricist sense that a deeper knowledge of language could reveal direct, forgotten relationships between abstract terms and long-­lost encounters with the material world; and this inversion, which questioned the logical priority between matter and spirit, enabled disruptions to the enlightenment’s linear histories of language formation. Thoreau’s version of this inversion is wilder or less orderly, in part because his concept of nature is more particularized and messier. The chapter titled “The Bean-­Field” is a perennial resource for Thoreau’s rhetorical critics, because of the suggestion that his bean-­farming is “only for the sake of tropes and expressions, to serve a parable maker some day.” It also offers a Thoreauvian version of Coleridge’s etymology: These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica, obsoletely speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum, from gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail?64

Rather like Coleridge’s appropriation of Tooke’s empiricist methods for spiritual purposes, Thoreau’s etymology here (re)generates the abstract terms “hope” and “bearing” from the organic materials of the ear and kernel of wheat, tracing them as it were in reverse. Both etymologies, linking organic matter “back” to abstract qualities, exemplify language’s figurative mobility, infusing it with an alterability and futurity even as it receives what should be an origin, a more fundamental meaning. We are not tracing “hope” and “bearing” as metaphorically transposed meanings back to their seed-­forms, symbols of fecundity from which abstract ideas have sprung, but the direct inverse. Thoreau opens hardened symbols or received ideas into both past and potential meaning. The robust question, “How, then, can our harvest fail?” (and it is still possible to take it literally) suggests that a metaphysical labor is being performed alongside the physical, and that a semantic harvest can make the most of both. The addition of a partial allowance toward the woodchucks’ own “harvest,” though it simply broadcasts semantic abundance, is also generous to the nonhuman.

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These etymologies are drawn, as we learn from the Journal, from the first century BCE Roman scholar and speculative philologist Marcus Terentius Varro, whose works Thoreau was apparently reading closely the winter he was revising Walden (Varro passages excerpted during these weeks also wound up in the essay “Walking”). Varro, known as a source both on etymology and on agriculture, probably left a stronger mark on this chapter than is generally recognized. The explicit etymologies for “spica” and “granum” deserve some special notice, not because there aren’t more etymologies in the course of Walden, but because there is so much etymological play in Walden that lies, in the Emersonian style, just below the surface. But here, etymology is revealed and made accessible to the reader, as though its presence will not interrupt the text’s surface or the surface has, at this point precisely, required an interruption: as though the terms “ear of wheat” and “grain,” even as they are uttered, cannot contain themselves but must burst open to display their spiritual or rhetorical insides. We seem to be given a telling glimpse into the linguistic philosophy behind Thoreau’s punning tendency to reclaim disregarded uses of ordinary words in alternative contexts: it looks idle by any ordinary calculation, mere semantics, but it sets out to change what the landscape says. The passage, acknowledging its reach toward parable, challenges the sower of wheat, as grower of hope and bearing, not to count on failure, since the benefits of cultivation are dispersed and accrue outside the market, indeed beyond the human: “these beans have results which are not harvested by me.” And there is also the ambivalent sense of walls built by cultivation, as though the plot of Walden is walled in by human terms, and in that sense determined by language: Thoreau seems especially conscious of the arbitrary imposition of weeding, correcting his plot’s diction, when he “mak[es] the earth say beans instead of grass.” This is, once again, to take the thought of “rephrasing” and metaphorically, with vivid consciousness of its effects, apply it to an environment under provisional human custody. The linguistic element that separates Thoreau’s plot from the nature that surrounds him is emphatically present in the last etymological passage I want to dwell on. The most dramatic example from Walden of Thoreau’s reading in etymology comes without a doubt from the chapter “Spring,” embedded in a famous sequence, the lengthy passage describing

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the thawing sandbank by the railroad track near his cabin. Written late in the composition of the whole, the passage is an intense and prolonged extreme of the typical imaginative leaps that carry Thoreau into raptures over the odd and alien.65 It introduces an explicitly linguistic dimension into the landscape, one that at first appears to fall under the spell of a desire to find an anchoring root for a network of terms drawn from variations on the attractively simple, suggestively literary word “leaf” (which, as Christina Root shows, signals his debts to Goethe).66 Moreover, it enables what seems to be an elaborate exposition of the interior or viscera of Walden, merging human and natural domains, through an extended observation of what Thoreau calls “this sand foliage,” “the forms which thawing sand and clay assume” as they begin to melt. The leaf shapes accommodate human symbolism, as they are likened to primitive human ornamentation (“imitated in bronze”), but they are more abundantly akin to body parts, vegetation, lichen, and coral (not to mention “excrements of all kinds”). The sand foliage is testament to the “living earth”: it becomes the vitals, or internal organs, of humans and animals, the lungs, brains, bowels, liver, and so on, in a series of ingenious transpositions through means figurative, imagistic, and etymological in the narrow sense. I’ll cite only a short excerpt, from the leaf’s-­eye-­view, beginning, “the overhanging leaf sees here its prototype”: Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (leibo, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; lobos, globos, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); externally, a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single-­lobed, or B, double-­lobed), with the liquid l behind it and pressing forward . . . The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils.67

Here Thoreau tests the limits of analogy in the understanding of nature, and by intriguing extension, of society. The leaf, shape-­shifting metaphorically through a series of unlike objects (lungs, tree, rivers), seems to dominate

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any imaginable form in its path. Yet there is such momentum that it is hard to think that Thoreau means for these analogies to stick; he writes and observes, as Root puts it, by “wearing his metaphors lightly.”68 In this passage, it is as though the analogies themselves are thawing and changing shape, “lapsing” from one to the next. Thoreau’s faith in words, and his attachment of language to the world around him, is no more than a provisional solution in the search for bonds allying language and its formal resources with the world’s surrounding, seasonally inflected, organic and inorganic processes. This is everywhere evident in “Spring,” where he so thoroughly pictures nature as shifting ground. Thoreau gives us a reminder of our bodily co-­ institution with what we do not understand; his use of etymological “data” is one among other techniques of refusing any absolute grounding for human knowledge, even of a positive grounding against an unknown fundament. While using roots and rooting, Thoreau refuses anything that would lead to the illusion of dogmatic invariance or simple objectivity. Channing refers, in his chapter on Thoreau’s final years and declining health, to a dream of Thoreau’s that throws retrospective light on the visceral intensity of the sandbank passage’s metaphorical transformations: Thoreau had dreamed “of being a railroad cut, where they were digging through and laying down the rails,—­the place being in his lungs.”69 All that he recorded in this passage later seemed to take place in his own body, as he drew closer himself to being “mere” matter. It is easy to imagine that in composing and expanding the “leaf” metaphor, confronted by a wall of shifting ground, a cross-­section of flowing primeval ooze, Thoreau allows himself to get carried away, in feeling that permeability or “consanguinity” with nature that Emerson had described. He runs this analogy—­“fancifully,” as he puts it—­into the human form, showing how “the lip labium, from labor (?)—­laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth,” and projects his own lungs onto the earth.70 He then moves further into the social world, from “what is man but a mass of thawing clay?” to “not only [this molten earth], but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.”71 The world’s leafiness merges with its susceptibility to change, echoed in the changes of language itself. This is not quite the etymological lesson of what has been recognized as Thoreau’s most direct source for the passage.72 Charles Kraitsir, a

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European-­born philologist who lectured in Boston in the 1840s, supposed that there was a residual semantic content encoded in the “germs” and radicals of all languages that could be rediscovered through philological study. Influenced by transcendentalism, Kraitsir’s wide knowledge of European languages also offered philological support for simpler interpretations of Emerson’s Nature, particularly in his work Glossology: Being a Treatise on the Nature of Language and on the Language of Nature (1852). To get a proper sense of his linguistic methods, we can compare part of an entry from Glossology with Thoreau’s passage above: Field belongs, as participle, to flow, L. plu-­o; pla-­n-­us, fla-­t . . . A field is a plain, over which water can flood or flow. Water . . . is the image of fullness, because it flows and fills; L. plen-­us, plus, etc. Again; p or f, b, as labials denote horizontality; so do the linguals l and r mark the horizontality (level) that is perpendicular to the former. Hence pl, pr, fl, fr, bl, br, vl, mark at one and the same time, just those phenomena which are connected in nature, viz: movement, flow, plenty, flat-­ness, level, etc. . . . It will suffice to throw together such words of several languages, as denote objects with one, or two, or several of the said qualities; fly, volo, will, vellus, fleece, fall, fallo, folium, leaf (inverted), free, liber, libella, libro, partum, prairy, volvo, pull, pli-­co, fol-­d, flam-­ma, fla-­g, fla-­ke, flo-­g, fla-­ il, etc. Inverted they mean the same phenomena.73

Fascinating as this profusion is, what in Thoreau moves and changes, in Kraitsir is meant to reach a point of rest. Whereas Thoreau’s labials take on lives of their own—­“b” is a sodden version of “f” or “v,” and has in turn lobes that it seems to grow before our eyes—­K raitsir’s labials merely “denote horizontality.” He obeys the dictionary impulse to gather instances under a single semantic umbrella, even in discussing a collection of terms relating semantically to what flows; indeed (as with Tooke) while simultaneously modeling a kind of formal plasticity or mobility, he winds up leveling this welter of activity into a flat sameness: even “inverted,” the words “mean the same phenomena.” In fact, it has been relatively easy for critics to read passages from Walden, like the famous one above, as a similar Cratylist ecstasy, a fantasy

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of organic correspondence between word and thing rendered discoverable through his etymological enthusiasm. One might justly imagine that Philip Gura has this passage in mind when he writes: “in Walden [Thoreau] often wrung from words the primal meaning that burned at their very core.”74 But though this aptly captures Thoreau’s thoroughness, it caricatures his picture of language; this regenerative thaw does not exist to retrieve primal meanings. Even Kraitsir’s broader premises were in keeping at least this far with Thoreau’s, since he took up Emerson’s dissatisfaction with the sterility of rational grammars, writing that “we are strange beings, we, in whom harmony is not a mere fact, but a faculty also of perceiving harmony out of us; we wonder that there is order in creation!”75 But for Thoreau, to find “order” or its equivalent need not be to find unity; even order is wild. Kraitsir wrote against an accumulation of atomizing grammars, a tradition that reified categorical divisions in language, particularly parts of speech. With this project Thoreau was surely in general agreement, but he was not writing, like Kraitsir, with the goal of changing how the science of language was taught; he was writing with the goal of teaching how the world, and language as one of its parts, changes. We might say that there is an etymological aspect to Thoreau’s reshaped landscape, since it bears the marks of the provisional or fleeting, the latent and future mobility of what appears solid. It also insists upon the variable frames—­of time and temper, intellectual and physiological composition—­through which the world makes different kinds of sense. This is the lesson of “Spring,” that anything that goes by the name of “nature,” or that seems hard and solid, is not only prone to adjustments, but defined at its presumable “core” by wild life, by impermanence and variation. The sense of origin as formation-­in-­the-­present is expressed viscerally, almost violently: “what makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly.”76 It is a legible formation akin to Emerson’s fossil poetry, but expressed as an abrupt but ongoing process. “Foliage” connotes not just the greenery of leaves, but a continuous Latinate leaving, imaginable in the deep time of the future: “as it flows,” the foliage, iterated in Thoreau’s innumerable comparisons, is “destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists.”77 To call the future perfect of this fossil-­in-­solution a “puzzle” is not to despair of feeling a kinship with it; Thoreau likes a puzzle. It is only to

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feel that, though there may be a strong collusion between the vicissitudes of the shapes, sounds, and imprints of words (right down to the shape of the letter B) and the forms found in nature, neither the one nor the other, nor even the string of associations that attaches them, remains immobile or invariant. Is it the words, or the natural wildness even in the artificial form of the “cut,” that is meant to anchor each stretched relationship of similarity? For Thoreau, the process of comparison itself, of trope-­making, is under scrutiny. Derivations are stories of encounter. He is staging what we might call rituals of naturalization, not proposing a universalizing master-­metaphor—­as in substituting leaves for roots—­for creation. This staging is like the cultivation ritual that occurs in “The Bean-­Field,” yet this relation must be analyzed with language, a tool that can only “break in pieces.” Thoreau’s language is always paradoxically at odds with its objects, though it may strain against this difference by ostentatiously cultivating nature or naturalizing itself. Simpler naturalisms that fix too firmly are transformed by Thoreau’s pen into expressions of that paradox. But with terms like wildness, encounter, and cultivation, we are circling back around toward the ins and outs of civilization, a category inevitably organizing Thoreau’s language. L ASTING WORDS

The same list of journal aphorisms where we find Thoreau’s comment on the dangers of being enclosed within walls also reads, “Truth is always paradoxical.” Several months earlier he had written, “The most positive life that history notices has been a constant retiring out of life”: the paradox of a seclusion that would turn him out all the more into the world, a published display of withdrawal to the woods, is clearly taking shape. Thoreau’s throwaway pun on Walden helps explain his relationship to nature, and gives, despite the organicism sometimes attributed to his linguistic naturalism, a sense of the necessary complexity in the ways humans and nature are differentiated. While we emphatically bear a fundamental relationship to our environment, Thoreau suggests that some part of language is also complicit with what keeps us at a distance from nature. Calling Walden originally “walled-­in” expresses the contradiction of being simultaneously internal and external to one’s experience. Thoreau seems to have taken to heart Emerson’s proposal from “Nominalist and Realist”: “no

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sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie.”78 Thoreau practices a return to wilderness, wishing to stretch his own terms or outsides, addressing the “need to witness our own limits transgressed.”79 The paradox in the exultation, “I have a room all to myself; it is nature,” what he calls in Walden his “withdrawing room,” captures the same expansion accomplished in the homophonic oscillation in the playful etymology of “Walden” itself.80 Yet, even as it inverts its trajectory inward, “all to myself” aligns this interior expansion rhetorically with expansionism, and nature—­in language as elsewhere—­expresses racialized forms of social belonging. The astonishing heterogeneity and self-­estrangement that exquisite readers from Sharon Cameron to Branka Arsić have found modeled in Thoreau’s “wilderness” don’t adequately acknowledge the tension between alterity and purity in Thoreau’s settler fantasies, his desire to occupy the wild.81 Thoreau leaves many hints to help us understand his notion of the interplay between outsides and insides. According to Thoreau, “we” (settler Americans) have to beware of that sort of “breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility.”82 We must beware of that cultivation that insulates us from the wild, where we have long ago come from, an origin so old that the barrier is a part of our being. Nevertheless, this barrier can and must be relaxed, and for Thoreau it may be the “New English” who are best equipped to pursue this goal (or are most in danger of failing at it). Otherwise, they are headed for the “speedy limit” toward which the English are racing: hence his directive to “open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons. Miasma and infection are from within, not without  .  .  . Why nature is but another name for health.”83 This bodily health through emphasis on permeability, on venturing outside one’s established walls, bounds, or terms, is clearly reiterated in the distinction between town and surrounding woodland: “let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness.”84 Into whose wilderness? Language itself is a determination comparable with those human institutions that intrude on nature, and it, too, requires a kind of stretching. “I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of

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his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails . . . If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me.”85 Writing of Thoreau’s unorthodox religious beliefs, Channing proposes that “out-­of-­doors, which can serve for the title of much of his writing, is his creed.”86 This reminds us—­ again—­ that “Walden” itself means “forested” or “out-­ of-­ doors.” There is no doubt that Thoreau is taking up some of Emerson’s wilder claims, when we remember that Emerson’s poet, “speak[ing] adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly,” recognizes his personality as simultaneously impersonal: “beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him.”87 However, instead of his words becoming “universally intelligible as the plants and animals,” as Emerson exuberantly puts it—­instead of declaring that this figure’s “speech is thunder”—­Thoreau’s poet is a quiet and particular scientist: he is listening and observing. Yet even in the note-­taking of the naturalist, Thoreau’s poet opens outward, externalizing himself as nature both cultivated and wild: “a writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing.”88 For Thoreau, there is a risk inherent in winding up behind closed doors, a danger that, cut off from the wilderness, you may forget the ability to recalibrate your view and alter your determining timescale in order to see the clayey consistency of things. He frames this health risk in terms of a body, a culture, a nation, or a species, and suggests ways that language may form part of the structure of doors and walls. To meet this dilemma, one may use the tropic movement of etymology to see that language, like any institution, may feel solid like rock, but will also act like thawing clay in spring. Linguistic mobility elucidates the flexibility of our terms, exposes exchanges between knower and known, not through the roots it uncovers, but through the sense of alterability it instills. Regarding etymology as tropic movement depends on seeing nature as a temporalized event, and language as composite with its environment. Language has a history and in that sense is “rooted,” like all other aspects of a “humanized landscape,” to a position with contingent features that share alterability

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as a common premise.89 Thoreau’s language theory finds in etymology a means to describe how the impermanence and uncertainty of roots can be recognized, even by the rooted body. Walden contains and creates these romantic etymologies as lineages verbal and material, personal and public; he allows us more plainly to understand Emerson’s work of imagining etymologies operating with respect to words and landscapes, to symbols, facts, actions, and relations. One wonders—­to return to the dream in which Thoreau’s own body, ravaged by tuberculosis, became the site of a railroad cut—­whether that excavation of his lungs felt more like an incursion or an excursion. In one sense, it seems to have been a way to let the air in. The mysterious terms on which Thoreau withdrew from society for good, according to Channing, were “moose” and “Indians.” Groping around for a way to tidy up his mentor’s last words, Channing writes oddly that the pairing merely suggests “how fixed in his mind was that relation,” presumably based on his experiences watching Joseph Attean and others hunting moose in Maine.90 In what sense, “fixed”? The open space between them seems at least as suggestive. Yet in differentiating ways of accommodating to wilderness, Thoreau may indeed have fixed these together as expressions of a wilderness temporality, as when he writes of certain “wild” apples of the Northeast that like them he has “strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock” and there, in his transient way, taken root.91 The new Eden where these wild apples are found may be very different from the old, but Thoreau’s sensibility, while encouraging a sense of language as part accident, is not innocent; the playfulness with his own origins leaves intact a certain attachment to the category of a fixed wildness, which allows him to preserve in linguistic temporalities aspects of those settler ideologies of “firsting” and “lasting.” Herder’s language origin myth in the Treatise on the Origin of Language described a scene between a sheep and a sort of proto-­human consciousness. “Language is discovered,” he says, when, at the sheep’s bleat, the mind recognizes a repeated sound, and associates the sound with an object as it involuntarily fashions a sign: “the sheep bleats, and the soul recognizes it. And it feels inside, ‘Yes, you are the one who bleats.’”92 The choice of a sheep feels wonderfully arbitrary, and—­like the wild apple

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tree—­draws on associations with origin and primitive sociality, this time evoking the pastoral shepherd whose rustic language of song is nearest to nature. Herder’s semiotic encounter has an accidental philological footnote in a journal entry written after Walden’s publication, where Thoreau casually hints at another diversification of linguistic temporalities via a phonological detail drawn from the Roman philologist Varro: “I am amused to see that Varro tells us that the Latin e represents the vowel sound in the bleat of a sheep (Bee). If he had said in any word pronounced by the Romans we should be not the wiser, but we do not doubt that sheep bleat to-­day as they did then.”93 Being recorded through artificial media, that is, converted into writing (the alphabetic symbol “e”), is an analogue for this seeming permanence. Varro’s attaching a Latin sound to a noise heard in nature has a preservative effect. Thoreau’s amusement presumably springs from the accident of history that captured this philological detail: as though in a recording, we see it spelled out and imagine Varro bleating. He does not doubt that Latin pronunciation would have left us “not the wiser” because it changes at the speed of civilization, while nonhuman voices do not. Perhaps the superposition of timescales reminds us of Thoreau’s comparison of the riverbed with the wriggling eel. To say, as he does then, that “time is cheap and rather insignificant” oversimplifies the effects of temporality that easily distort views of nature, and of ourselves. Because the sound in the Latin of Varro’s era was described with a natural correlate, we can “hear” it today anytime we hear a sheep bleating: Varro’s analogy allows Thoreau to hear a fragment of a dead language by visiting a Massachusetts pasture. It is worth noting that Thoreau’s passing observation is not charmed by rootedness, but rather amused that a nonhuman association renders a historical linguistic fact accidentally accessible. Gura reminds us that Thoreau “wanted sentences constructed so truly that they were ‘as free and natural as a lamb’s bleat’”; but their freedom is the result not of the essence or permanence associated with naturalness, but rather of being something that escapes without thought, the product of a lapse.94 Thoreau wanted his sentences to detach themselves involuntarily, for the patterned changes that mark different consistencies in nature are also found in the dynamic properties of language. Within these consistencies

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moves a multiform conception of how time passes, and a sense that the many times that lie outside thresholds of perception are partly linguistic. These times accumulate in our actions: Consent to be wise through your race . . . There is always some accident in the best things, whether thoughts or expressions or deeds. The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours. The thought came to us because we were in a fit mood; also we were unconscious and did not know that we had said or done a good thing . . . What we do best or most perfectly is what we most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice as a leaf from a tree. It is the last time we shall do it,—­our unconscious leavings.”95

In this passage are both troubling accents and remarkable insights. In its attachment to perfectibility, the passage bears out that “Herderian” faith in the involuntary collective wisdom of a people or race (oversimplified though this reading of Herder may be), as well as Emerson’s optimistic philosophy of impersonal participation in tendencies that run against the grain of society. But what kind of naturalism is imagined in the organic image of Thoreau’s tree? Its emphasis falls strongly on linguistic naturalism as learned accident. Nature here looks like a way of theorizing individual acts as first social, taking place under the auspices of invisible patterns of relation. “Learned by the longest practice” blurs temporal scope in the same way that the human body is “rasped down to a shaving”: these verbs picture acts of patient artifice, elongated to cultural or evolutionary histories. We then proceed “unconscious[ly],” behaving according to a “fit mood,” making sense despite ourselves or “without our notice”: so language is a shared work and a product made and eventually spontaneously relinquished like a “leaf from a tree.” Thoreau’s writing puts into practice a theory of spontaneous origins constantly issuing from current usage, not a temporality of return to archaic roots. At the same time, the thought that the bleating of sheep has not changed reminds us of Thoreau’s fixation in The Maine Woods on the “unaltered” sound of Wabanaki languages, like the “barking of a chickaree,”

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a linguistic marker that reveals limits on the category of the human. In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon influentially proposed that the idea of wilderness that emerged in the United States in the nineteenth century firmly linked the European discourse of the sublime with the settler’s “frontier” imaginary, demonstrating how ideas about race and nature shaped one another. Thoreau’s participation in the romance of untouched nature, while often explicitly anti-­expansionist, erases even as it fixates on the land’s dispossessed natives. His naturalism may be distantly linked to the pastoral imaginary of Herder’s origin myth, where the sheep’s bleat meets the shepherd’s ear; but in its participatory unconsciousness, Thoreau’s linguistic mythography may be less about involuntary receptiveness, according to the rules of the ear, because its theory of language seems oriented toward writing (the writer, again, is “the scribe of all nature”). And the unheard hardness in his own New England attitude, which deploys clichés drawn from the arsenal of “temporalities of race,” sometimes divides up humanity (“Who can doubt this essential and innate difference between man and man, when he considers a whole race, like the Indian, inevitably and resignedly passing away”), at other times pursues what is held in common (“wild men, so much more like ourselves than they are unlike”).96 The latter instinct toward bridging the commonplace of civilizational distance, sparked partly by his acquaintance with two Penobscot leaders in the 1850s, Joseph Attean and Joseph Polis, nevertheless maintains the distance of the observer, the historian, the ethnographer, holding out a “they” against a we, “ourselves.” The impulse to “consent to be wise through your race” can focus the accident of expression in something encompassing, something unifying: “it is the spirit of humanity, that which animates both so-­called savages and civilized nations, working through a man, and not the man expressing himself, that interests us most. The thought of a so-­called savage tribe is generally far more just than that of a single civilized man.”97 But the categories “civilized” and “savage” structure Thoreau’s thought, and it should not come as a surprise that sometimes the temporalities of race they invoke will settle his thought against its own most interesting movements.

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WE PHILOLOGISTS

In the passage from which my final epigraph at the start of this chapter is excerpted—­“the ear has also its rules”—­Du Ponceau, drawing directly on Humboldt’s writings, discusses the rules governing morphemic alternation in native North American languages (which Du Ponceau believed belonged to a single family): The process consists in putting together portions of different words, so as to awaken at the same time in the mind of the hearer the various ideas which they separately express. There are probably principles or rules pointing out the particular parts that are to be selected in order to form the compound locution . . . to discover those rules would require a great proficiency in the language . . . perhaps also the ear, an Indian ear, is the guide which is generally followed; but the ear has also its rules, to which the mind imperceptibly conforms: however it may be, this is an interesting fact in the natural history of human language, justly entitled to the attention of philologists.98

Du Ponceau has traded this term “Indian ear” back and forth with one of his sources for linguistic data, a Moravian missionary named John Heckewelder. In an 1816 letter from Heckewelder to Du Ponceau, the former seethes with frustration about “European representations of Indian life” and language. Not only do “alphabetical signs” always fall short of “the true expression of the sounds”; fundamentally, these authors “want an Indian ear to distinguish them.”99 Heckewelder lived with a young family among the Delaware in various settlements in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio, in 1771–­86 and 1801–­10, writing a famous account of Delaware history and customs. He was, among other things, an amateur philologist, and his History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited the Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States (1818) provided other continental transplants who would take up philology in early America, like the French Du Ponceau and the Swiss Albert Gallatin, with some of the firmest early evidence to contradict the idea that Indigenous American languages had no regular grammar (though this notion would persist through the century).100 Rachel Wheeler notes that Moravian missionaries

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were themselves “colonial outsiders,” and while practically they still made way for European settlement, their status “militated against the equation of European culture with the true Christian life.”101 This “internal” distinction among groups of European settlers is meaningful when we turn to thinking about the hardening of concepts of race in the first half of the nineteenth century, when as Robert Dale Parker memorably puts it, “the middle ground was closing down” during a longer trajectory toward “a world of Indian removal and racial polarization.”102 I have mentioned Thoreau’s “extensive reading” on Native American affairs, and Heckewelder’s work was part of this archive. Surprisingly, given the range of his interests, in a letter responding to an 1853 invitation to join the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Thoreau said nothing about his studies in the natural sciences, but instead recorded his area of special interest as “the Manners & Customs of the Indians of the Algonquian Group previous to contact with civilized man.”103 The sheer volume of Thoreau’s Indian Notebooks, today held at New York’s Morgan Library, makes a similar claim on our attention if we are used to reading Thoreau outside of this context. When he died, Thoreau left eleven notebooks totaling nearly three thousand pages or well over half a million words—­that is, roughly one-­quarter the length of his legendarily voluminous Journals—­filled almost exclusively with extracts from his reading on Native American histories and ethnologies, from the earliest encounters recorded by Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to contemporary publications and newspaper clippings. There is almost nothing by way of original content in them, scarcely any indication of what Thoreau himself thought about his extracts: they are a vast repository of myths (in every sense) which he has carefully copied, along with partial bibliographies and reading lists. Few excerpts of this “sprawling undigested mass” have been published, as may be imagined, and apart from ignoring them completely, Thoreau criticism has variously held them up either as testimony to his dedication to glimpsing pre-­contact America, and to the study if not the cause of its Indigenous inhabitants, or else as evidence of his reliance on the prevalent racializing tropes of his day.104 A widely circulated passage from Heckewelder’s work holds an interesting place in these notebooks. The account records a narrative from

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­ elaware tradition, collected around 1760, describing a “first encounter” D with a Dutch ship that landed on Manhattan, in some not-­too-­distant, but still mythic past. That tradition is fascinating enough, but in looking through the journals I was even more struck by Thoreau’s clear interest in how it is told, since he was revealingly curious about its mediation. Over the eleven notebook pages he fills with the account, he has meticulously recorded the discrepancies between two versions of the same account, an earlier and a later one, in order—­he imagines—­to capture some Native cadence: while “altered and perhaps improved in its phraseology,” the later version is “not so true probably to the Indian style.” Thoreau seems to have copied out the first version (1801), then some years later, on finding an edition of the later version (1819), returned to painstakingly record each deviation, using superscriptions and symbols. (Reading closely, we can see that he has written in pencil: “NB the alterations of 1819 interlined.”) Oddly, it is the first version he copied out that was closer or “truer” to what he imagines to be the “Indian style,” the second he so carefully adds later was the one “altered” and “improved.” Why go to the trouble? Thoreau fixates on textual discrepancy as an index of what neither version does more than hint at—­the language of an imagined “original.” Every deviation between the later and the earlier becomes a possible sign of an even earlier version, the one told by the Delaware themselves. Caught in a bind between a desire for authenticity (both historical and stylistic) and a hall of mirrors of mediated forms, Thoreau’s dedicated precision in preserving both versions in this tracked-­changes format gives expression to his usual commitment to fine-­grained local variation—­this time, not in the natural world, but in a textual one—­while at the same time elevating an idea of recoverable origins, that “Indian style” projected onto the passage’s content, which details colonial encounter from a theoretically “pre-­contact” view. Richard Bauman has written insightfully about the textual practices of Thoreau’s contemporary Henry Schoolcraft, an early ethnologist whose works Thoreau read perhaps more than those of any other author, and these make an instructive contrast. For Bauman, Schoolcraft is something like an American Grimm Brother, publishing oral literature collected mostly from the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) people in the Michigan Territory

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(and largely made accessible to him through his métis wife, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and her family, whose matriarch was Ojibwe).105 In keeping with early folkloric practice, Henry Schoolcraft downplays his editorial interventions, suggesting, for example, that the stories are extracted, as he puts it, from “the aboriginal mind” via “the lips of Indians,” while also reassuring his readers that he has expurgated and refined the material, eliminating “tediousness,” “triviality,” and “vulgarities.”106 Bauman details the complex semiotic process of minimizing intertextual gaps to smooth down translation, transcription, selection, sometimes (when “necessary”) completely rewriting source material. This allows us to contrast what Thoreau is doing, with his superimposed versions: in these notes, Thoreau is maximizing intertextual gaps, drawing attention to linguistic differences, apparently in order to extrapolate backward from those gaps toward an imaginary past. But Schoolcraft is more pointedly relevant here.107 Thoreau’s Indian Notebooks work across the spectrum of settler attitudes toward Native American tribes. If Heckewelder fits the bill of what was called the “friend of the Indian,” Schoolcraft’s position in this spectrum is very different. In Heckewelder’s Account, the chapter that follows the recollection of first contact at Manhattan is a record of historical suffering at the hands of colonists as told to him by his Native neighbors. Here Heckewelder utters a sentiment expressing a relation to whiteness one does not associate with Thoreau: “I felt ashamed of being a white man.”108 Heckewelder’s History and the colonial philology it enabled, well into the nineteenth century, would become a flashpoint of contention in the years leading up to the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and its aftermath. The work was the particular target in print of the governor of the Michigan Territory, Lewis Cass, who helped draft and implement the Removal Act as secretary of war under Andrew Jackson. And it was Cass who appointed Schoolcraft to his post as Indian Agent for the territory. If Schoolcraft’s ethnologic work aligns in predictable ways with a removalist political agenda—­unchangeable minds, stagnant culture, inevitable disappearance—­Heckewelder’s Account is mediated instead by Du Ponceau, whose revised edition of Heckewelder’s chapter in the 1819 proceedings of the American Philosophical Society had prompted Thoreau to return to the passage. If we imagine Thoreau

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carefully ­transcribing this text, once around 1851, then again around 1857, in some way we must take this entire history with it—­literary, political, ethnological, philological—­borne along as its indexical baggage.109 It is a record of the conflicting ideas about language in the images of linguistic phenomena Thoreau both repeats and adjusts. At age eighteen Du Ponceau, recently relocated from France into the midst of the Revolutionary War, met a colonel of the revolution, an Abenaki French-­Canadian Catholic baptized as “Louis” but introducing himself as Niman-­rigounant (which he explained meant a kind of magpie), in the woods around Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in 1778. It was a meeting that took place, strikingly, first by ear, then by sight. In his own account of this meeting, first he heard through the woods a “French fashionable opera song,” sung “in a voice melodious and in perfect good taste,” then he came face to face with the singer, “a tall Indian figure in American regimentals.”110 Clearly, it remained more likely in the generations before Thoreau to forestall what Brooks calls the “obsession with cultural purity” or Murray, “the myth of a totally pristine encounter with the other,” to which Thoreau was undeniably attached; in Thoreau’s New England, the “middle ground” had indeed closed down.111 For though Du Ponceau is remembered as a gifted gentleman scholar whose philological endeavors, in the eighteenth-­century manner, did not rely on firsthand fieldwork, it seems that personal experience mitigated the sense of racial difference in which Thoreau’s writing on Native Americans is steeped. Contrast Du Ponceau’s forest encounter, in which a “supernatural” voice becomes pleasantly banal, with Thoreau’s disappointment in Attean, his companion in “Chesuncook,” when he starts whistling “Oh Susanna” in their canoe in Maine, in 1853. The mismatch between the Natives he read about and imagined, and those he actually met, caused a disillusionment left undigested in Thoreau’s work. “He missed his opportunity to tell us what manner of man this was,” wrote Eckstorm, because “all the cardinal virtues without aboriginality would not have sufficed Mr. Thoreau for a text.”112 It’s hard to escape the suspicion that those “Indians” he referred to, in his final audible words, were more closely attached to his reading, to his thousands of pages of copied-­out text, than to his own personal acquaintances.

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Relative fixedness or unfixedness in language—­whether spoken or written—­is a powerful figure, a marker not of race, but of racialization. Thoreau’s excited observations about Wabanaki language spoken in his presence recall the invented linguistic attribute “capacity for change [Veränderungsfähigkeit]” used by continental philologists like Ernest Renan and August Schleicher to distinguish between different languages, sustaining hierarchies of racial difference. As we have seen, this capacity for change is a crucial category for the emergence, over the nineteenth century, of the distinction between “Aryan” and “Semitic” language groups, the former often imagined as capable of growth and change (organic), the latter figured as stuck or stagnant (inorganic). More research remains to be done on the literary effects of racializing tropes exchanged between philologists of Indo-­European languages, early observers of Indigenous New World languages, and other global colonial projects of linguistic extraction. American languages (and perhaps, to a certain extent, all languages taken as “oral”) were both affixed to the past by the notion of “unchangeableness,” and somehow at the same time might be understood to be without structure: haphazard, mechanical, unfixed. This violent contradiction reinforced the confounding colonial logics by which Indigenous speakers could themselves be rendered by their language opaque, static, obsolete, or vanishing. Such speakers can be lasted, observed and defined as relics of the past whose cultures, in the midst of “disappearance,” might demand preservation (philological or archaeological conversion into removable artifacts) even as its living members were obscured. It is in this spirit that Thoreau’s Wabanaki word-­collecting in the forests of Maine extends his youthful project of collecting arrowheads in the fields of Concord: words, to him, like stones. Du Ponceau had insisted (against Wilhelm von Humboldt) that American languages were structured according to their own “genius” or “system,” through linguistic rules hard to hear without a willingness to cultivate a requisite receptivity.113 At the far end of the nineteenth century, we see this logic confronted again by Franz Boas, whose famous essay “On Alternating Sounds” (1889) was a broadside against the racist conventional wisdom that Native languages of America consisted of unfixed or shifting sounds.114 The essay corrects this ethnocentric commonplace in order

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to point out that the problem is in the ear of the observer. We hear not only thanks to vibrations in the air but “by means of similar sounds . . . heard before”; in the “fieldnotes of philologists, who reduce to writing a language which they hear for the first time,” despite knowing nothing of its meaning or structure, the misspellings themselves are “instructive,” since the analyst “apperceives the unknown sounds by the means of the sounds of his own language.”115 The phenomenon of “alternating sounds” is in reality “alternating apperceptions of one and the same sound,” and is therefore “in no way a sign of primitiveness of the speech in which they are said to occur.”116 This, of course, is only news coming from a white source, in this scientific idiom: even in print, looking back several years to 1884, we find Abenaki (Odanak) linguist Joseph Laurent adding to a long tradition of saying the same: It would perhaps be well to mention that all these names, either in Abenakis, Cree or other tribal languages, which now designate so many localities, mountains, rivers, etc., have been so much disfigured by the Whites, who not understanding these words, pronounced them in the best way they could and spelled them accordingly, but, in most cases, with such incorrectness that they have rendered many of them altogether incomprehensible, and thereby impossible to discover their true signification.117

When Thoreau writes of Wabanaki language as a “purely wild and primitive American sound,” the failure is less in his inability to “understand a syllable of it,” and more in forgetting the Goethean lesson of taking his own role in this observational scene seriously, in forgetting to analyze his own ears. All that work in Walden of expressing a shared dynamic consistency, a common vulnerability and alterability, in language and nature—­the world’s slow seasons and sudden changes of state, and the time-­consuming linguistic labor of self-­relinquishment, of linguistic ex-­ foliation, of “our leavings”—­hardens again in stark moments when language sticks in one way to “us,” in another way to “them.”

Conclusion Deracination

Death quickly the tree destroys, steals [it]; the remains disappear slowly. —­“A Mende Song”

romantic linguistic imaginary differently, in light of a history of its reception, rejection, and reinterpretation through the Euro-­A merican sciences of man, up to the modern origins of linguistics? This is a question of learning again—­and again, and again—­how to unlearn origins-­thinking, how to vary historical thinking, how to think in many times at once. These were in part the aims of Ferdinand de Saussure’s epochal lectures on “general linguistics” (1907), framed as the ongoing rejection of “language as an organic thing with its own law of evolution.” Saussure’s first work, thirty years earlier, had been a treatise on—­as its title declares—­the “primitive vowel system in Indo-­European languages.” Without oversimplifying his career path, as the Indo-­European model for comparative philology amply revealed its uglier sides, grounded by “bad naturalisms” (as I called them in my introduction), it is plain that Saussure’s sociocentric turn toward language as “system” was partly conceived to help those naturalisms fall from fashion. At the same time, a more insidious organicism survived: to cite again the last passage of Saussure’s published lectures, “we continue, without suspecting it, to try to make language organic in another sense by assuming that the ‘genius’ of a race or ethnic group tends constantly to lead lanH O W M I G H T W E U N D E R S TA N D T H E

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guage along certain fixed routes.”1 One can deny plainly that language is a living thing by calling it an “institution” or social system, but this may not mitigate the naturalism that popularly determines racial identity according to linguistic properties. For Saussure, building on earlier figures like William Dwight Whitney and Michel Bréal, to leave behind certain varieties of linguistic naturalism was in part to stem the tide of racializing determinism in the emergent discipline of linguistics. Writing of the generation of Indo-­Europeanists that preceded Saussure, Edward Said argued in Orientalism that by mid-­ century, philology had already legitimated “the reduction of language to its roots,” making it possible to “connect those linguistic roots  .  .  . to race, mind, character and temperament.”2 And organic roots, as we know, were not the limit of this deterministic naturalism: inorganic and mixed metaphors could do similar work. Saussure’s own mentor, Adolphe Pictet, had invented what he called “linguistic paleontology,” with the claim that “words last as long as bones,” helping to manufacture the notion of European ancestors “destined from the first to conquer”: “this fertile race forged itself a powerful tool, a language admirable for its richness, vigor, harmony, and perfection of form; a language that spontaneously reflected all the race’s impressions.”3 The ongoing political effects of racialized language were part of the background against which Saussure’s semiotics took shape: his own brother Léopold was a colonial agent in Indochina who marshaled linguistic evidence to help shape French policy in North Africa.4 Discourses of philology across the nineteenth century worked in constant interchange with new and old archives of data collected from colonial frontiers, alongside “native philology” and nation-­building projects, often distantly inspired by European romantic thought.5 The last chapter closed by noting the explicit antiracist reaction in the linguistic thought of Franz Boas, as he and his students began systematically to apply philological methods developed for Indo-­European languages to new objects, among them, of course, the Indigenous languages of the Americas, as well as the linguistic cultures of the African diaspora. These new “objects” were still inevitably shaped by the extractive linguistics of the uprooted word, but they also reflected linguistic anthropology’s attention to different kinds of time, and indeed to gray

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romanticism. The same year Saussure began his lectures, in 1907, Boas’s student Edward Sapir published an article in Modern Philology reevaluating Herder, understood as an important theorist of linguistic “genius,” but by then long since discredited for most scientific purposes. Despite Herder’s weaknesses, Sapir appreciates his shift toward a “sounder” treatment of language’s “psychological and historical elements.”6 By “psychological” and “historical,” Sapir grasps varying timelines of romantic thought, and specifically that disposition between subjective and objective stances toward language—­which Sapir could articulate in newly developed terms of “subconscious” will—­that yielded a repertoire of images for temporal multiplicity. According to Sapir, despite Herder’s eccentricities, “we are largely indebted to Herder” not only for “doing away with the conception of divine interference” in speculations about language origin, but also for introducing “the idea of slow, but gradual and necessary, development” in place of origins-­thinking.7 In these latter terms we can clearly recognize the impulse of linguistic actualism, stretching and contracting the linguistic timeline toward new horizons, while refusing divine recourse to solve the dead end of origins-­thinking. Over time, Boas and Sapir have attracted critical scrutiny for methods in their own production of linguistic knowledge, for adherence to the declensionist discourse of Indigenous disappearance, and for their role in perpetuating ideas about everything from relativism to essentialism to the plasticity of race through the “culture concept.”8 But oriented by ethnography, their antiracist linguistics was more explicit than Saussure’s, while a similar linguistic “system” or structure is discernible in the ways they describe how language moves and changes. Both Saussurean and Boasian thought move away not only from the “fixed routes” of racial determinism, but also from the fixed roots of linguistic history, or language reduced to roots, period. A poet himself, Sapir contributed to the natural imaginary of linguistic actualism by coining several celebrated metaphors emphasizing language’s liquidity: grammars “leak,” or experience internal differentiation by being spoken; as greater tide-­like bodies, languages undergo “drift.”9 In his Herder essay, Sapir differentiates the “eighteenth-­century philosopher” from the “attitude of a modern linguist” by pointing out, as Herder had, that the very idea of “invention” misrepresents language’s

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formation. Then, things get interesting: casting about for a figure to evoke the “activity” in linguistic actualism, he recalls the character Topsy, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), to express the professional view of the modern linguist in a comfortable vernacular: “‘language was not invented in any true sense at all’; or as Topsy would put it: ‘It wasn’t born, it growed.’”10 Onto the fictional person of Topsy, now reanimated as folk philologist, is here inscribed the romantic century’s impulse toward linguistic actualism, that desire to reimagine origins by thinking in different kinds of time. Variations on the phrase “to grow like Topsy”—­used to describe anything formed without design—­had by then long since entered idiomatic English; perhaps reference to the abolitionist work, tasking Topsy with voicing modern philological consensus, signals Sapir’s liberality on questions of race. What interests me is the way the cliché’s use in this context unreflectingly maps the question of language origin onto an imaginary enslaved Black orphan, to repurpose her specific nonknowledge of her own origins. In Stowe’s novel, Topsy answers the civilizing questions of her new white mistress, the domestic “missionary” Miss Ophelia: “Have you ever heard anything about God, Topsy?” “Do you know who made you?” To which Topsy famously replies, “Never was born . . . I ’spect I grow’d.” For Sapir, Topsy usefully encapsulates linguistic actualism: in its gradualist focus on process, Topsy’s famous line “I grow’d” precisely defers divine “interference” in place of a different kind of origin story (like Hutton’s “no vestige of a beginning,” or Herder’s “what I am, I have become”). But imagine Topsy launching into Wordsworth’s “How shall I trace the history, where seek / The origin of what I then have felt”; no, because no backstory or interiority is wanted. Topsy’s orphaned rootlessness is rhetorically convenient for representing uprootedness as a generalized human condition of alienation from imagined origins. Overlooked—­not so much by Sapir, as by the cliché itself—­is the sense in which Stowe’s character is made to represent a historically specific objectification, a categorical and violent dislocation, and an embodied form of alienation. Sapir borrows her character as a fictional emblem placed in the role of the linguistic observer, and in a certain sense, of naturalized language itself. In the sentimental economy of Stowe’s novel, Topsy’s past is ob-

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scure because she is not yet supposed to be quite human, but is rather a “specimen,” “that thing.” The semantic history of “to grow like Topsy” brings into focus the questions about “growth” raised in the philological discourse of language’s erosion and sedimentation: it connotes growth not confined by the harmonious design of an organism; it is the activity of inanimate matter, uncontrolled and unplanned growth, chaotic and unpredictable mechanical movement. Upon her arrival, Topsy is ordered by St. Clare, the man who purchases her, to perform for her new mistress, an order she follows exactly like a wind-­up toy: The black, glassy eyes glittered with a kind of wicked drollery, and the thing struck up, in a clear shrill voice, an odd negro melody, to which she kept time with her hands and feet, spinning round, clapping her hands, knocking her knees together, in a wild, fantastic sort of time, and producing in her throat all those odd guttural sounds which distinguish the native music of her race; and finally, turning a summerset or two, and giving a prolonged closing note, as odd and unearthly as that of a steam-­ whistle, she came suddenly down on the carpet, and stood with her hands folded.11

As the “summersets” she turns show, this active, blurred “image” condenses material contingency—­her name itself half of “topsy-­turvy”—­with the mechanical randomness of a wind-­up doll whose “black, glassy eyes” are both inhuman and calculating. This inhumanness applies especially to her language, to the sounds she makes. Her “clear shrill voice” is “as odd and unearthly as a steam-­whistle”; the “odd negro melody” requires both a “wild, fantastic sort of time” and “those odd guttural sounds which distinguish the native music of her race.” Her insistent oddness is the mark of alterity in a litany of dimensions—­physically racialized, uncannily emptied of interiority, audibly out of place, culturally out of time. Offering an unexpected encounter with the history of knowledge production that differentiated languages and used these differences to help invent and graph racial distinction hierarchically on a timeline of civilization, Stowe’s scene unwittingly suggests how the value-­scale of the observer produces variations in human being: untrained ears translate unfamiliar

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sounds as an inability to speak. In this scene, the “guttural” is a quality that invades the speaker, remaking a living creature as inorganic matter. What relieves Topsy, rhetorically, of organic teleology—­and what makes the phrase “to grow like Topsy” useful to Sapir—­is also what has robbed her of a story of her own. In fact, she will only get a narrative beyond her unrepentant amoral stasis at the very end of the novel, after her conversion and dramatic transformation into a “missionary to one of the stations in Africa,” where the inertia of aimless motion acquires a purpose: “the same activity and ingenuity which, when a child, made her so multiform and restless in her developments, is now employed, in a safer and wholesomer manner, in teaching the children of her own country.”12 As though in answer to Phillis Wheatley’s refusal to join the “colonization” movement, the novel tames Topsy’s dangerous energy by dispatching her “back” to “her own country,” reimposing a kind of organic rootedness through a “discourse of origins lost.”13 Beyond reducing this character to the idea of erratic growth for which her name almost immediately became idiomatic, what is taking place when the voice in Stowe’s sentimental appeal can be taken up, between “I grow’d” and “it growed,” as the linguistic observer no longer attached to roots? That is, what happens when this voice is not also remembered as the sound-­image of an inhuman thing, written precisely to be humanized? I have been careful to note that I do not mean, by entertaining the notion of the “uprooted word,” to confuse words and bodies; and part of the reason is that liberal writers like Stowe and Sapir both still allow this confusion, rhetorically, to take place. In Topsy, we catch something about how ideas of growth mediate between organic and inorganic association, and how the observer attaches language to bodies; we glimpse how the notion of change as a kind of “growth” channels nature, in the extended nineteenth-­century moment before linguistics was rewritten as a social science. Retrieving the texture of this scene, and the backdrop of ideas of language, nature, gender, and race against which it was comprehensible, we can still counteract the washing out or semantic bleaching performed in Topsy’s transformation into rhetorical device. This is a way of reassessing the place of romanticism in the history of linguistics, because what we call romanticism is a crucial sourcebook for the lines drawn between

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organic and inorganic, the “natural” and the “arbitrary” in linguistic form. Historicizing the rhetorical coordinates of naturalness in language during the romantic century begins to reveal where these lines map over other lines, lines that delimit the differences used to define the subject of history, locating bodies as primitive or modern, distributing interiority and exteriority. Against the gray areas I have been tracking through this book, these differences become more and more sharply defined, as “middle ground” disappears. In the later nineteenth century’s tightening net of association between language, nature, and race, naturalization became a way to help philologists craft racialized subjects of history through primitivist and evolutionary schemes. In cutting ties with presumptively romantic naturalism, Saussure built on the work of figures like Bréal and Whitney. However, historian of linguistics John Joseph points out that this continuity of purpose is not without ambivalence: It was partly in order to distance himself from the language-­race link that Whitney characterized languages as human “institutions” [rather than as natural organisms]. But as Saussure wrote in his notes of 1894, Whitney’s conception, although basically right, produced a further problem by seeming to suggest that languages are rational inventions . . . Although Whitney believed that languages are accidentally produced institutions, his wording did not always make this clear, probably because the view he was contesting was the powerful racist one, not the almost forgotten Enlightenment notion of languages as deliberate logical creations.14

While this concise characterization of the merging of race and language as a veiled concern shared between these two generations insightfully links Whitney’s mid-­nineteenth-­century to Saussure’s late-­nineteenth-­century moment, in itself it also underestimates the power of the enlightenment ideal for language as a kind of logic. I have suggested here that the “powerful racist” view that developed in the wake of the nineteenth century’s philological revolution can actually be closely linked to earlier “enlightenment” views that articulated racial difference by allocating bounded populations (tribes, nations, cultures) to phases on a single arc of History.

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These allotments were made precisely according to their ability to use such capacities as “logic” in cultural practices like language. Language as “deliberate logical creation” helps civilized language look more and more like the dividing line between primitive bodies and modern minds. The enlightenment model of transparent reason may be “forgotten,” but precisely that forgetting may make its lingering presence all the more powerful. In spite of gray romanticism’s piecemeal efforts to interrupt that singular History with a more complex temporal imaginary, romantic naturalisms provide the background for understanding the merging of language with race. Whenever it is told, the story of how a scientific discourse of linguistics took institutional shape around the turn of the twentieth century depends fundamentally on disengaging language from nature. Scholars have shown how, in the wake of romantic-­era figures from Jones to Humboldt, the nineteenth century saw the institutional ordination of comparative philology (alongside a constellation of related disciplines): university professorships established, chairs named, journals and societies founded, and an international Euro-­A merican dialogue sustained on how best to frame its scientific ambit.15 Whitney is remembered today as one of the preeminent figures before Saussure to emphasize the essential distinction between the studies of natural history and language history, and Saussure cites him as the firmest voice of common sense against those who proposed that linguistic study be pursued as a natural rather than a human science.16 That movement away from naturalism in the study of human societies can be more broadly associated with reactions to racial prejudice and race science. As Britt Rusert notes, a migration “from the natural sciences to the social sciences” is also the trajectory of what she calls fugitive science, or an experimental practice extensively pursued by Black writers and thinkers against US race science, across the nineteenth century—­a lthough writers like Hurston and Du Bois found plenty of use for romantic ideas.17 But even for white antiracism in Euro-­A merican linguistics in this later moment of racialized nature, disengaging language from naturalization was a conflicted process. Sebastiano Timpanaro identifies this turn toward linguistics as a social science, this extended moment of self-­mythologized progress in the professional formalization of linguistics, for all its vaunted

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clarity, as an overcorrection or “narrowing of horizon.”18 The exaggerated “romantic” naturalization of linguistic determinacy offered by a figure like August Schleicher, who tried to graft evolution into the study of how language “organisms” expand or die out, spurs the positivist derision in Whitney’s responses to continental metaphysics, sharpened against the linking of language and race: for instance, Whitney makes light of the “view of language as an infallible test of race” in Schleicher’s claim that a European “will never speak naturally a negro language”: To exhibit the preposterousness of this claim, we have only to invert it, and say that it may well enough happen now and then that a person of African blood should rival in complexion, hair, and Caucasion cast of features a descendant of purest Puritan stock or of the first families of Virginia, while nevertheless he will never, never speak as his mother tongue the English language! I fancy that some of us have chanced upon facts not entirely consistent with that statement. I should like to see some adherent of Schleicher’s opinions going around in our American community with an English grammar and dictionary, determining by the evidence of language to what race its various constituents belong.19

Certainly, this complicated passage demonstrates the terms with which a liberal linguist at this historical moment had to wrestle, in the effort to disentangle (using the positivist’s plain logic and common sense) a still tightening bond between language and race. For Whitney, disproof is premised on empirical “facts” on display, thanks to the linguistic evidence provided by continuous centuries of a domestic slave economy—­recently ended, when this passage was written. Whitney’s labors to decouple the natural bond between language and race mix easily with racist discourse, and in a real sense, it is the aftermath of American chattel slavery, the starkest form of racial capitalism, that enables Whitney’s antiracist linguistics. If I read him correctly, his ridicule of Schleicher is couched partly in the absurdity of thinking that “a person of African blood” might be mistaken for “a descendant of purest Puritan stock or of the first families of Virginia” (though I take it his in-­bred alliteration in “purest Puritan” and “first families” is also mocking organicist terms like “stock”).20 The

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passage’s unintended ironies culminate in the inclusive phrase “our American community”: Whitney’s evidence against a natural bond between language and race depends on a linguistic world the German Schleicher has presumably not experienced, that of America in the wake of the Civil War. Saussure claims Whitney as the great innovator in establishing language as an interactional social product, as a collection of essentially arbitrary signs.21 At its best, linguistic naturalism was for Whitney an obstacle to scientific progress, as dilettantism, sentimentalism, mysticism; at its worst, it espoused a biological determinism fitted to racist ideologies. Similarly, Saussure’s reanalysis of linguistic temporality was a radical attempt to neutralize racializing primitivisms plaguing linguistic theory. The problem, as Voloshinov almost immediately pointed out, was that Saussure’s langue, a system putatively separated from temporal conditions, has no life in its signs: its formal world is more uprooted than ever. Saussure stripped natural history from linguistic study, only to embalm language’s body as what Voloshinov called a “cadaver,” a scientific object, deeply grounded in ethnocentric textualist bias.22 The Bakhtin circle would try to perform a dialectical synthesis of “abstract objectivism” (the rationalism that aligns Saussure with the enlightenment) and its antithesis “individualistic subjectivism” (Voloshinov’s shorthand for the linguistic legacy of romanticism). Both trends suffer by ignoring the sociality of individual utterance. What I have tried to show, throughout the chapters in this book, is that what Voloshinov caricatures as idealism among the “romanticists,” while certainly anchored by the inner standpoint, was also materialist in its own way. The linguistic actualism of gray romanticism maintained a balance between individual utterance and socially objective patterns in language; natural metaphors mediate the contradictions between linguistic individual and linguistic commons. Natural metaphors—­in their mixed durations and phenomenological reciprocity, as well as in their racializing effects—­are rhetorical resources, evaluations, descriptions. As distinct uses of inorganicism to represent involuntarism show, images are almost infinitely elastic: whereas I describe Blake’s language in deep time as an attack on the developmental timeline of civilization embedded in imperial self-­justifications, for Wordsworth,

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a turn to deep time retains a philosophical radicalism while putting off politics. And whereas Wheatley dramatizes the slip between person and silenced object by creatively adapting Niobe’s petrification, Thoreau associates spoken Wabanaki languages with stone artifacts. And each writer’s own catalogue of images is filled with contradictions. Images serve as collective resources for sculpting into particular shapes ideas about communicability and belonging; they may capture or delimit cultural desires and fears about emergence and absorption, persistence or loss. Inorganicism—­as I have been trying to show, in certain instances of gray romantic naturalism—­is sometimes a realization of uniformitarian principles, both the slow time of language change and the actualism or continuous creation this temporal attenuation implies. But the example of African American speech, and the linguistic mindset needed to understand its historical significance, might assist with a linguistic naturalism capable of not only observing but feeling and hearing deracination in the situated historical and material relations that remake speakers as philological examples. In the activist feat of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Topsy’s personhood still remains inextricable from a kind of inorganicism, an obstacle to hearing any meaning beyond “the native music of her race.” Let us set aside Topsy’s song and return to “A Mende Song,” and to Lorenzo Dow Turner, the literary scholar and linguist who recorded Amelia Dawley singing it. Rusert concludes her account of fugitive science with the early twentieth-­century redeployment of “anthropological theories and ethnographic methods” adapted from Boasian cultural anthropology, which intellectuals like Turner used in order to examine “the transformations of racial identity in modernity.”23 Turner in fact studied with Edward Sapir, and his project emerges out of the same Boas-­inspired American School of anthropological fieldwork pursued by Hurston and others across the African diaspora.24 As Turner frames it, a predictably bad naturalism had guided earlier studies of Gullah, the distinctive creole spoken in Georgia and South Carolina: its forms were viewed as debased English, the result of a mixture of seventeenth-­century British dialect survivals and “baby talk” used to communicate with newly arrived Africans by slaveholding whites and English-­speaking domestic and indentured laborers.25 That Gullah speakers were the descendants of enslaved speakers

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of a variety of West African languages was not considered of linguistic interest. Early publications on Gullah language and folklore proposed that African arrivals—­“plastic as they are by nature”—­quickly lost all trace of their native languages, so that “not a single detail” could “be proved to have any other than an English origin.”26 Its authors crudely biologized language by repackaging racial stereotypes as linguistic data.27 In Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949) Turner showed conclusively how Gullah, a “creolized form of English,” was saturated with names, sounds, syntax, and what he called “intonations” following patterns from West African languages. Africanisms is a crucial document in the intellectual movement to establish New World “African retentions,” documenting cultural continuities across the Middle Passage by tracing what Turner, Herskovits, and others called “survivals.” It was important as a concentrated study representing the origins and formation of a particular mixed linguistic culture produced through and in the wake of the Atlantic slave trade. Turner’s publication was one of a series of studies he hoped to write, based on decades of ethnographic and linguistic study that took him from the Sea Islands off South Carolina and Georgia to New Orleans, Haiti, Brazil, Sierra Leone, Paris, and London, linking the creative agencies represented by Gullah to oral traditions in Brazil, the Caribbean, and West Africa.28 It dismissed the idea that the deracinated speakers of Gullah were detached from their own history, or from history, period. The mostly white transatlantic archive of this book has been periodically punctuated and situated by the presence of nonwhite writers, and by the idea of discrepant modernities. The results of Turner’s research represent one such picture of transformative discrepancy. In the decades conventionally ascribed to British romanticism, what Turner titled “A Mende Song” was likely being sung in Georgia; but, being displaced from its roots, it would not have been audible or accessible in an earlier moment of European vernacular archive fever, that romantic-­era fascination for oral traditions. As Lee Baker shows, African American culture was scarcely recognized as an ethnographic object of study until practically the twentieth century.29 Baker also shows that this path to ethnographic recognition leads through variations on romantic thought by way of the Boasian concept of culture, and more specifically by way of the ethnographic

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treatment of Native Americans, who, as we have seen, have remained unrecognized interlocutors in the formation of Western linguistic imaginaries, from Locke on down.30 Hurston captures the oddness of these mediations in a 1927 letter to Boas, in which she writes: “the Negro is not living his lore to the extent of the Indian. He is not on a reservation being kept pure. His negroness is being rubbed off by close contact with white culture.”31 The essentialism of what Gauri Viswanathan calls Hurston’s “anthropological eye” (here, addressed directly to her powerful mentor) resignifies once more the idea of linguistic “polish,” now a romanticized loss of knowledge or “lore” in a racialized process of erosion.32 Turner’s pursuit of Africanisms shares with Hurston some of that romanticism, but both also model another romantic tendency in, as Viswanathan puts it, “reshaping language” through an attention to “startling” vernacularisms; in seeing “what language is as opposed to what language is supposed to be”; and in tracing “accents and inflections” that attest to the active changes of ongoing linguistic encounter.33 We could say “A Mende Song” can be felt along romanticism’s heart, delayed yet still carried in the wake of the circumatlantic world of its time. The song even resonates, in Turner’s translation, with a certain reading of the early Wordsworth, in its slow, disintegrative, nondualist view of life’s durations—­“the remains disappear slowly”—­across different times. Yet of course to read it in comparison with Wordsworth irons flat the texture of obdurate differences from Wordsworth’s world, embodied in the text’s itinerary, flattening instead of fattening its history. As though to try to bridge the “daffodil gap” described in studies of Wordsworth’s postcolonial reception, the move might risk imposing sameness over incommensurability by assuming the universality of its natural imagery, its “slow decay.”34 Instead of assimilating the song to an existing romanticism, one might try to hear resonances that enable romanticism’s multiplication: what Fred Moten calls the “multidirectional times and the manifold social layers” of its discrepancy, of its alternative “understanding of development,” different again from the mixed durations of the writers surveyed here.35 With Dykes’s and Turner’s literary studies of the romantic century close by, “A Mende Song” assumes the lyricized look of a great poem on the metaphorics of material passage; but more elusively, it holds

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the lyricism Moten conjures through oblique reference to Wordsworth (via C. L.  R. James): a different kind of “tranquility required to recollect historical emotion,” that tunes into the “noise” of that emotion.36 In this book, I have highlighted lapsed alternatives to historical thinking in gray romanticism, and in particular to the organic basis of the “tree” that dominates linguistic history, through images of filiation and descent. For, as Blanchot writes, “the ‘root’ of a term, far from being its first sense, its proper meaning, only comes to language through a play of interdependent little signs,” each of them “bent, inflected, exteriorized, denied, or repeated.”37 Language “leaves,” rarefies, falls apart, dissolves, haphazardly converges, accretes. It survives, too, in strange configurations that are difficult to recognize. In Turner’s translation, a tree is dead, while the abruptness of death and the slowness of its effects converge, as literal decomposition and as forms of memory and survival: “Death quickly the tree destroys, steals [it]; the remains disappear slowly.”38 The awkward interlinear phrasing of “be at rest, heart, continually” seems to urge a kind of patient strength between “quickly” and “slowly,” so that the temporalities that shape the tree’s—­and the song’s—­remains will not overwhelm the mourner. In its transcribed and printed form, on the cusp of the US civil rights era, the song seems retroactively to encompass, memorialize, and carry forward stolen life and afterlife (“death . . . steals”), while the ghostly phrase “from afar a voice speaks” picks up a new sense in that what it grieves is in part a “disavowed geography.”39 In the far-­flung paths of speakers and social histories collapsed or occluded by the familiar phrases from the history of linguistics—­ “language origin,” “comparative philology,” “historical method”—­poetry and song offer something else. Voices, recordings, transcriptions catch and carry a “singular thread of the collective utterance.”40 In meaning, context, and itinerary this song is made up of overlapping timelines that press against one another, tug at one another’s self-­sufficiency. The surprise in the noise of historical emotion has another personal inflection, in that long after I started thinking about the textual form of “A Mende Song,” I finally heard the scratchy recording Turner made in Harris Neck, Georgia, on 31 July 1933—­part of a collection held at Indiana University, Bloomington, and currently easily accessible online—­only to find in Dawley’s voice no funereal sadness at all, but instead the sound of

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life, upbeat, in motion.41 And when I watched the film The Language You Cry In (1998), which traces the recovery of a version of the song in a remote corner of Sierra Leone, more surprises were in store. A subsequent translation of the song gives it far less of the romanticism I realized I was looking for; strangely, the tree is gone, along with the idea of disintegration. Now, it is a graveside work song: Amelia’s Song Ah wakuh muh monuh kambay yah lee luh lay tambay Ah wakuh muh monuh kambay yah lee luh lay kah. Ha suh wileego seehai yuh gbangah lilly Ha suh wileego dwelin duh kwen Ha suh wileego seehi uh kwendaiyah. Everyone come together, let us work hard; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be perfectly at peace. Everyone come together, let us work hard: the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be at peace at once. Sudden death commands everyone’s attention, like a firing gun. Sudden death commands everyone’s attention, oh elders, oh heads of family Sudden death commands everyone’s attention, like a distant drum beat.42 Different temporalities still converge—­ the grave in process of being dug, the gunfire or distant drum that signify “sudden death”—­but these changes have shifted the song in new directions with new resonances. At the same time its more familiar name, “Amelia’s Song,” changes Turner’s emphasis from “Africanisms” to American utterance, turns the song from an ethnographic object or “survival” into a different kind of transatlantic literature. Linguistic exchange influences the shapes that not only literature but ethnography takes. Making his case against those who argued that Gullah

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was no more than poor English, Turner noted that these listeners were simply not prepared to challenge a racist premise: “the thought that the answer . . . might be found in the West African languages did not impress them.”43 Of course, it needed the ear of a speaker of Mende, and the years Turner himself spent studying African languages, to put the pieces together; but first it needed a determination to think the problem in new terms, and with different players. For even if white linguists had had a mind to pursue Turner’s hypotheses about Gullah in the 1920s and 1930s, they would have run into a more intimate social problem, beyond any objective desire for knowledge gathering: the Gullah speakers Turner interviewed simply did not use the same language around white visitors that they used with each other. In recounting his fieldwork, Turner cites American linguist Leonard Bloomfield’s comments on the interviewee’s “diffidence” with the ethnographer, in communicative encounter slanted by the scientific desire for data: by introducing that feeling into patterns of communicability, “an observer may . . . record a language entirely unrelated to the one he is looking for.” That diffidence, however, is at least in part euphemistic for another obstacle: I wanted to see whether the impression Dr. Lowman [a white colleague] got of the Gullah sounds, many of which were clearly not English, was similar to my own . . . [but] Dr. Lowman unintentionally used a tone of voice which the informant resented. Instantly the interview ended. Apologies were of no avail. The informant refused to utter another word . . . On my return to the Sea Islands several weeks later, I was confronted on every hand with this question, mek una fa brin di bukra? meaning, “Why did you bring the white man?”44

With no more than a tone of voice, this Dr. Lowman could easily have prevented Amelia Dawley’s song from being heard. Yes, the song’s survival is a miracle—­its reconfigured changes in lyric, rhythm, social uses, and cultural meaning in different phases of arrested form indicative of the obstacles it met, and the various needs its singers and hearers have faced in the daily work of getting by. Gullah, like many Indigenous languages

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of North America and around the globe which we call “endangered,” has been returned to public awareness as a linguistic formation in need of “revitalization,” and “Amelia’s Song”—­though it is in no literal sense part of the “creole” dialect—­is somehow one of its vital signs. A miracle, a twist of fate, an emblem of the strength of social ingenuity. Yet the linguistic formations that follow from resourcefulness, survival, elasticity, surprise—­ aren’t these, too, the most natural thing?

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Notes

Introduction: Pulling Roots Epigraphs to this introduction are drawn from Herder, Philosophical Writings, 212–­13; and Walker, “Address,” 78. 1. Humboldt, Basque Writings, 171. 2. Herder, Philosophical Writings, 214. 3. Stewart, “Address,” 99. 4. Apess, “Looking-­Glass,” 160. 5. Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, 11. 6. Blanchot, Disaster, 86. 7. Blanchot, Disaster, 97. 8. Silva, “Reading the Dead,” 43. 9. Blanchot, Disaster, 20. 10. In The Age of Phillis, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers offers a compelling argument for referring to Wheatley by her full, married name, Phillis Wheatley Peters. While I have begun to follow this suggestion in describing the book, I have kept “Wheatley” in the text itself, for clarity’s sake. 11. Sandler, Black Romantic, 5. 12. Chander, Brown Romantics, 2; Hessell, Sensitive, 11. 13. Gikandi, Slavery, x. 14. Allan and Viswanathan, “Heterodox Philology,” 246. 15. See Sayre, Thoreau, 115 (though I have amended slightly, based on consulting the notebooks themselves). What Jones actually wrote—­in the “Eighth Anniversary Discourse” (delivered in Bengal in 1791)—­was this: “It is very remarkable . . . that the Greeks gave the appellation of Indians both to the southern nations of Africk and to the people, among we now live [sic]; nor is it less 237

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observable, that, according to EPHORUS quoted by STRABO, they called all the southern nations in the world Ethiopians, thus using Indian and Ethiop as convertible terms” (168, Works Vol III). See Vasunia, “Ethiopia and India,” for critical treatment of this confusion. 16. Crania Americana was a source-­text for various disciplines in formation preceding scientific theories of race ascendant in the mid-­nineteenth century, including what is usually called the “American school” (as in Josiah Nott’s Types of Mankind, indebted to Morton’s work), but also a wider transatlantic sphere: see Poskett, “National Types,” 265. 17. Morton explains that “Ethiopian” has historically been “applied to any country whose inhabitants were of a very dark complexion” (86). 18. Francis, “Penobscot”; Thoreau, Journal, 5 March 1858. Chapter One: Giving Language Time The epigraphs to this chapter are drawn from Herder, Philosophical Writings, 361 (translation modified); and Brand, A Map, 30. 1. Adam, Time and Social Theory, 42. 2. Galperin, Missed Opportunities, 157; Lowe, Intimacies, 175. 3. Silva, “Reading the Dead,” 48. 4. For a succinct account of the concept of “lyricization,” see Jackson and Prins, “General Introduction.” For a more recent expression of the idea, see Jackson, “Response.” 5. Bell, “Rice, Resistance,” 158. 6. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 28. 7. Walcott, “Diaspora,” 355. See Wade-­Lewis, “Impact”; and Koroma et al., The Language You Cry In. 8. For reservations on broad applications of “creolization,” see Palmié, “Creolization.” See Mufwene, “Pidgin and Creole Languages,” for “substrate” theory in creole linguistics; see Dillard, Black English, for accounts updating and expanding on Turner’s work. 9. Massey, For Space, 64. 10. Turner and Dykes coedited a 1931 anthology of Black writers designed as a teaching edition with another early Black literature PhD (Yale), Otelia Cromwell. 11. Price and Price, The Root of Roots, 77–­78; Baker, From Savage, 177. 12. I borrow the term “subject of history” from Trouillot, but its usage by other writers in postcolonial studies from Chatterjee to Harding to Silva further informs my own uses here. 13. These variations on the “Black romantic subject” come into view in new ways for African American writers and intellectuals in the post-­Reconstruction, pre–­civil rights era. For two recent studies that each develop this subject from

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different angles, see Posmentier, “Lyric Reading”; and Jackson, “Specters of the Ballad.” 14. Burke, Counter-­Statement, 105. 15. Daut argues that to formulate “a transnational African American literary geography” will require “a reconsideration of received historical, national, linguistic, and temporal literary boundaries” (Daut, “Before Harlem,” 390). For a philosophically rich account of the complexities of that geography, see Wright, Physics of Blackness. 16. Hartman, Wayward, 346. 17. Chakrabarty, Provincializing, 249. 18. Lowe, Intimacies, 175. 19. Foucault, Order, 281–­82; Said, Orientalism, 135. 20. See, among others, Ahmed, Archaeology, 3–­4, 15–­16. 21. On the “irony” of the process that produced language as a historical object in the nineteenth century at the expense of its active temporalities, see Morpurgo-­Davies, History of Linguistics. 22. Williams, Marxism, 21–­4 4; see especially 21–­22 and 24. 23. Williams, Marxism, 24. 24. Rossi, Dark Abyss, 116; compare Rudwick, Bursting. 25. Williams, Marxism, 26. 26. For background, see Christy, Uniformitarianism; Silverstein, “Whitney.” For a more recent intervention, see Kaplan, Language Science, which guides Christy’s argument toward “broader social and political contexts” by incorporating (late nineteenth-­century) German orientalism (116). 27. For the transition from a fixation on origins to the thought of immeasurable temporal extent within which language change represents neither improvement nor “fall,” see Leavitt, Linguistic Relativities. Rudwick (Bursting) and Heringman (Romantic Rocks) suggest we look for a shift toward imagining the world’s transformations over a “deep” temporality already in the early romantic period. 28. Fioretos, Gray Book, 5. 29. Humboldt, Schriften zur Sprache, 15 (my translation). 30. Riley, Impersonal Passion, 2. 31. See Butler, Senses of the Subject, 7. 32. Wolff, “Romantic Stone Speech.” 33. Rancière, Mute Speech, 173. 34. Blake’s, of course, is a literal image, since the text composes part of an etched and illustrated print. 35. See Plank, “What Friedrich Schlegel,” for the proposal that Schlegel’s articulation of linguistic typology in 1808 was indebted, by way of his teacher Hamilton, to the language theory of Adam Smith.

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36. Ahmed, Archaeology, 3. 37. Woolard, “Language Ideology,” 24. For an influential articulation of this idea, see Gates, Signifying Monkey. For more on temporal affinity as a way to think about the affirmation or denial of “coevalness,” influenced by Fred Moten’s and Mark Rifkin’s critiques of Fabian, see Wolff, “Being Several,” 557–­61, 577n. For the role of a poetics of knowledge in the formation of enlightenment habits of thought that emerge in nineteenth-­century positivism, defined by its disavowals of metaphor and mysticism, see Cassirer, “Naturalistic and Humanistic”; Olender, Languages; Terada, “Racial Grammar.” 38. Humboldt, “Letter,” 308 (my translation). 39. Boudinot, “An Address to the Whites.” 40. O’Brien, Firsting, 105. 41. Rifkin, Beyond. Boudinot was later executed for treason under Cherokee law after signing the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, ceding Cherokee territory to the United States. See Warrior, The People, xvii. 42. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 93. 43. Agnani, Hating Empire, 186. 44. Sorenson, Grammar, 19. 45. Blanchot, Writing the Disaster, 107. 46. Trautmann, Languages and Nations, shows how biblical genealogy underlies the tree model of linguistic growth and transformation, tracing William Jones’s habit of using this model back to Leibniz. 47. Ahmed, Archaeology, 4. 48. Derrida illustrates the term and concept of “etymologism” in “White Mythologies,” a text whose insights are deeply woven into this book. 49. As intellectual historians from Arthur Lovejoy to Williams to Lorraine Daston have argued, what is called “natural” toward the end of the eighteenth century is no longer anchored by its earlier dominant sense of essential, stable, or unchanging. Nature in its new, modern phase increasingly accommodates the contingent, erratic, or dynamic: “all depends upon whether ‘Nature’ is regarded as a fixed state or as a dynamic process,” Basil Willey wrote, in 1940, of the changing senses of nature in eighteenth-­century poetry (Willey, Background, 206). Lovejoy notes a palpable shift from the former to the latter: among the semantic innovations “relatively novel in the eighteenth century” altering the senses of neoclassical natural order were emphases on diversity and fluidity of form and a new and valued wildness. It is within the context of such new meanings—­“diversification” against “unification,” a common “intimacy” varying by milieu against “the universal and immutable”—­that the emphasis of “nature” on pleasurable transformation and self-­estrangement intensifies within romantic thought (Lovejoy, Essays, 77).

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50. De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 16; Hartman, Beyond Formalism, 300–­301. 51. For key influences on the notion of “gray romanticism,” see Goodman, Georgic Modernity; Fry, Wordsworth. 52. For the classic discussion of the “green language” of Wordsworth and Clare, see Williams, The Country and the City, 127–­4 1. 53. Latour, Politics, 245. 54. Blake, Complete Poetry, 205. 55. Among other excellent recent examples, see Jacobus, Romantic Things; Makdisi, William Blake; Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist; Galperin, Missed Opportunities; Sachs, Poetics of Decline; Lupton, Reading; Khalip, Last Things; and forthcoming work by Anne-­Lise François and Michael Nicholson. 56. Farrar, Essay, 216. Farrar’s book is an exegesis of Renan’s 1848 De l’origine du langage. 57. See Yusoff, A Billion; Moore, Capitalism; Povinelli, Geontologies. 58. Taylor, “Importance of Herder,” 83. 59. Williams, Marxism, 25. 60. Hymes, “Introduction,” 13; McLane, “Tuning,” 300. 61. Voloshinov, Marxism; Medvedev, Formal Method, 14. For a crucial account of linguistic rooting and uprooting, see also Glissant, Poetics of Relation. 62. Indeed, historians of the humanities from Sylvia Wynter to Siraj Ahmed have indicated how deeply the disciplinary consolidation that resulted in comparative philology’s historicism relied on European colonial foundations. See most recently, Brennan, Borrowed Light, and Ahmed, Archeology of Babel; but key reference points for this project are works by Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Walter Mignolo, and Sylvia Wynter. 63. Sachs, Poetics of Decline; Bergson, Matter and Memory, 207. I also discuss “mixed durations” in Wolff, “Being Several.” 64. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 207; Benjamin, “On the Concept of History.” 65. For discussion of the “temporal regime” and “rival times,” see Mills, “Chronopolitics,” 308, 310. The postcolonial discourse describing temporal (especially historical) multiplicity has appeared in various combinations with Indigenous, queer, ecological, and critical race studies. For “alternative modernities,” see Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities”; for “minority modernity,” see Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology; for “discrepant modernities,” see Walcott, “Diaspora.” 66. Garcia, Signs, 90. 67. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 162–­63. 68. Povinelli, Geontologies, 75. The idea of an encroaching universal time in the industrial age of European enlightenment has also led to a proliferation of schol-

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arship that examines how modern forms of time-­telling and temporal experience are refracted through images in literary and philosophical writing. Benjamin’s phrase, for example, is discussed in Hunt, Measuring Time; Makdisi, William Blake; Chandler, England in 1819; and Sachs, Poetics of Decline. For a handful of writings whose elaborations on the shaping force of time on political imaginaries have influenced me here, see Scott, Conscripts; Lowe, Intimacies; Stoler, Durabilities; Hartman, “The Time of Slavery”; Rifkin, Beyond. For temporalities in “language ideology,” see Parmentier, “It’s About Time”; and Irvine, “Say When.” 69. Mills, “Chronopolitics,” 312. 70. Povinelli and DiFruscia, “Conversation,” 85. 71. Wynter and McKittrick, “Conversation.” See also Irvine, “Say When.” 72. The logical movement that rhetorically assumes analogy or identity between a language and a group of speakers—­a socially practical metonymic displacement with unimaginably far-­reaching consequences—­is theorized by Susan Gal and Judith Irvine as one form of what they call “iconization.” 73. See, for example, Povinelli, Geontologies; Yusoff, Billion; Jackson, Becoming Human. 74. Sachs proposes that this feeling emerges in the historically specific consciousness of a fast, mediatized time regulated by congealing forms of public sphere and print communication, and a slow time of geological change in a secularized natural history accompanying the discoveries and interest in antiquity. Sachs, Poetics of Decline, 1–­32. Compare the historical mediations of natural imagery explored by Kevis Goodman and, more recently, Eric Gidal and Tobias Menely. 75. Mufti, Forget English! 61. 76. Voloshinov, Marxism, 83. Although little more than a quick sketch in his overall work, the “alien word” that for Voloshinov determines the orthodox genealogy of linguistics stands for a symptom of formalist habits of thought that separate instances or units of language from “actual life,” that is, from the processes and relations fleetingly embodied in interactive utterances. Voloshinov uses “alien” to refer to the grammar and lexicon of “dead” languages, or, more broadly, to refer to language as philology externalizes it in textualized forms: “At the basis of the modes of linguistic thought that lead to the postulation of language as a system of normatively identical forms lies a practical and theoretical focus of attention on the study of defunct, alien languages preserved in written monuments” (71, original emphasis). 77. Schleicher, Deutsche Sprache, 118–­19 (my translation). 78. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 98. 79. Adorno, “Natural History,” 123. Adorno describes one way we secure our cultural ideas of truth, or “undialectical myths,” in the “static foundation” of the archaic, by simply relocating them as origins.

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80. Kenneth Burke, On Human Nature, 164; Yusoff, Billion, 65. For two accounts of race in the history of philology, see Harpham, “Roots, Races”; Golumbia, “Deconstruction.” 81. Bréal, Beginnings, 53. 82. Schlegel, Über die Sprache, 442. 83. Wedgwood, “Grimm’s,” 175 (cited in Turley, Politics of Language, 161–­62). 84. Schleicher, Deutsche Sprache, 34. See also Schlegel, Über die Sprache, xlvii. 85. Whitney, “Indo-­European Philology,” 218. 86. Humboldt, Diversity, 90; Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 53. 87. “The philosophers would only have to dissolve [aufzulösen] their language into the ordinary language from which it is abstracted, to recognize it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realize that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life” (German Ideology, 118). The translation intriguingly recalls Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, which imagines a “distorted language” likewise “differing materially from the real language of men in any situation.” 88. Voloshinov, Marxism, 83. 89. Momma, “A Man on the Cusp,” 166. 90. Diaby, “Feeling Black,” 121 91. Makdisi, Making England, 97. 92. Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, 35, 31. 93. Silverstein, “The Uses and Utility of Ideology,” 311. 94. Davis, “Resisting Rhetorics,” 40. 95. Keach explores, in Arbitrary Language, the surprising continued influence of “arbitrary language” on canonical British romantic poets. 96. Bauman and Briggs, Voices, 32. 97. Williams, Marxism, 25. 98. Burke, Languages and Communities, 25–­26. 99. Trautmann, Languages and Nations; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6; Errington, Linguistics, 48. 100. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: “The comparative vocabulary is not a neutral enterprise but an abstraction from living languages that freezes and organizes certain aspects of them for a certain purpose” (22). 101. See Mudimbe, Invention of Africa: “missionary speech is always predetermined, preregulated, let us say colonized ” (47). Errington, Linguistics, includes many vivid examples of this practice. 102. Brennan, Borrowed Light, 68. 103. See especially Mignolo, Darker Side; Gunn, Ethnology and Empire; Garcia, Signs. 104. Davis, “Resisting Rhetorics,” 40; Byrd, Transit, 144. Errington shows concrete examples of “reduction” as the processes whereby missionaries and

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others “extracted legible linguistic sameness from exotic human sharedness” (Linguistics, 9). 105. Errington, Linguistics, 49. 106. Fabian, Language and Colonial Power, 2. 107. Müller-­ Vollmer, “Wilhelm von Humboldt,” 271, 268. Humboldt’s brother Alexander, the celebrity scientist and colonial adventurer, was a constant source of these materials. For the connection to Crawfurd, see Humboldt, Kawi-­ Sprache, ix. 108. For Ahmed this proximity between colonial government and philology’s formation renders philology itself indelibly tainted by its genealogy. 109. Timpanaro, “Friedrich Schlegel,” xvii. This is the story told, among other places, in Aarsleff, Study of Language. 110. Williams, Marxism, 26. 111. Rivett, Unscripted America, 58. Again, for precise examples, see Errington, Linguistics. 112. Cited in Morpurgo-­Davies, History of Linguistics, 87. 113. One hears a certain finickiness regarding the metaphorics of language change already in the 1830s and 1840s. See, for instance, Renan: “Languages should be compared, not to the crystal that forms through accretion, but to the germ which develops out of its own intimate force” (De l’origine, 101; my translation). 114. On “ideologies of temporality” in the history of linguistic study, see Irvine, who describes how languages are made to seem “somehow inherently old or new, ‘traditional’ or ‘modern,’ static or changing, reiterative or emergent, replicating or innovating” (Irvine, “Say When,” 108). 115. Olender, Languages, 50. 116. Said calls this outcome of the Foucauldian epistemic break a “dramatic subsidence of interest in the problem of the origins of language” (Said, Orientalism, 135). 117. Bréal, Beginnings, 52; Morpurgo-­Davies, History of Linguistics, 87. 118. Saussure, Course, 4. 119. See also Trautmann, Languages and Nations, who points out yet another contradiction—­that the architects of raciology in French and British ethnographic circles of the 1850s and 1860s were also intent on distinguishing language from nation, in order to make clear that sharing a language or a language family never bridges the ostensibly essential difference of skin color. 120. Saussure, Course, 232. 121. Baker, From Savage, especially 143–­57. 122. Silverstein, “Linguistic Theory,” 362. 123. Among more recent treatments, ranging from passing references to

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book-­length studies, see, for example, Muthu, Enlightenment; Sikka, Herder on Humanity; Sethi, Politics of Postcolonialism; Eze, Race and the Enlightenment; Brennan, Borrowed Light; Noyes, Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism. 124. Herder, Philosophical Writings, 339. 125. Woolard, “Language Ideology,” 16. 126. Woolard, “Language Ideology,” 17. See Hymes for an influential articulation of this same “outlook” of bounded linguistic nationalism, “which I have labeled Herderian” (“Linguistic Problems,” 9). Trautman’s recent suggestion that we look further back to Leibniz for the origin of modern scientific linguistic nationalism has not been widely adopted. 127. See Said on Herder’s historicism, enabled by the eighteenth-­century belief “that all cultures were organically and internally coherent, bound together by a spirit, genius, Klima, or national idea” (Said, Orientalism, 118). 128. Mufti, Forget English! 129. Bauman and Briggs, Voices, 170. 130. See Sikka, Herder on Humanity, 130. 131. Mufti, Forget English! 61, 221. 132. Omi and Winant, “Theoretical Status,” 9. 133. Mufti, Forget English! 62. 134. Silva, Toward a Global, 68. 135. Silva, Toward a Global, 67, 66. 136. Silva, Toward a Global, 67. 137. Here I draw from Robert Leventhal’s reading of Marion Heinz on Herder’s “dynamization of Spinozan substance monism” (Leventhal, “Eins und Alles,” 75). For an account of how Herder transforms Spinozan substance into process philosophy by spontaneous force derived from Leibniz, see Zammito, Kant, Herder, 317. I am very persuaded by the work of scholars like Zammito, Leventhal, and Heinz on the changing but decisive influence of Spinoza’s philosophy in the course of Herder’s career, hence also in the formation of romantic thought. Compare Levinson, Thinking, 105–­39. 138. Herder, Philosophical Writings, 55. 139. Herder, Philosophical Writings, 55. 140. There is a strong sense in which this kind of “naturalism” inherits an Epicurean tradition. Lucretius, for example, dispenses with an agentive, willed origin tersely: “to suppose that someone then dispersed names amongst things, and that from him men learnt their first words, is folly” (l. 459). See Formigari, A History, for a summary of different kinds of linguistic naturalism. 141. Noyes, Herder, 93. 142. Noyes, Herder, 80, 93. 143. Williams, Marxism, 24.

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144. Lukács, Young Hegel, 7. Not unlike Jonathan Israel’s account of the radical Spinozan enlightenment, Lukács also described Herderian philosophy in its time as both disavowed and “in the air.” 145. Lukács, Young Hegel, 7. 146. Lukács, Goethe, 14, 166. 147. Spinoza, Ethics, 134. 148. Spinoza, Ethics, 134. 149. Leventhal, “Eins und Alles,” 88. Leventhal argues that it now seems likely Herder was reading the Ethics with some interest as early as 1771, “as Herder engaged more and more intensively with Spinoza’s writings” (71), and that it is “unquestionable” that Herder played a “decisive role in the Spinoza-­transmission of the late eighteenth-­century” (72). See also Heinz, “Menschliche”; and Gaier, “Stellenkommentar,” in Herder, Werke: Band 3, 1482. 150. Herder, Philosophical Writings, 51. Herder highlights subjective and receptive experience, as when “incorrectly perceived objects became bizarre forms” in the mixed histories of languages (51). 151. In my view the vision of involuntary invention proclaimed above, with such obvious enthusiasm, remains the key to Herder’s disobedient answer to the question of language origin in his famous Treatise on the Origin of Language. See Wolff, “Arbitrary, Natural, Other.” 152. Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation, 36. 153. See Robinette, “World Laid Waste.” The naturalism I want to describe thus coincides, up to a point, with what Hacking calls “public language,” in his brief account of its early emergence in the German counter-­enlightenment, which contradicts the assumption that language is essentially private. The dispersed will of Herderian naturalism locates language’s emergence relationally, among agents, recipients, and surroundings, mediating between its social and individual formations. In Noyes’s terms, this marks Herder’s “sociological quest for an alternative to the split between public and private language” (Noyes, Herder, 69). 154. Herder, Philosophical Writings, 106. 155. Humboldt, Diversity, 24. “Sie bedienen sich ihrer, ohne zu wissen, wie sie dieselbe gebildet haben” (Verschiedenheit, 303). 156. Compare Marx, writing some thirty years later (1867) of the process whereby “men” bestow value upon products of labor: “They do this without being aware of it” (Capital, 167). Marx is describing a way of life established within a form of thought to which its participants, even though they are the ones “doing” it, have no immediate access. (It is at this precise point in Capital that Marx himself compares this manufactured “objectivity” to language: “for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men’s social

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product as is their language” [167]). The Selbstätigkeit, or autonomy, of Humboldt’s conception of language is like this “socially valid” objectivity (Marx), or its “social effectivity” as ideology (Žižek): “Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be ‘a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-­k nowledge on the part of the subject’” (Žižek, Sublime Object, 21). 157. Herder, Philosophical Writings, 131–­32. 158. Whitehead, Modes, 146; Herder, Werke: Band 7, 757 (cited in Noyes, Herder, 269). 159. Herder, Werke: Band 3, 827–­28 (my translation). 160. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 293. 161. Spinoza, Ethics, 71. 162. Hill and Montag, Other Adam Smith, 138, 139. 163. Gaier writes that the poem was written in “vehement opposition to Fichte’s subjective idealism” (Herder, Werke: Band 3, 1481). 164. Böschenstein, “Das Ich”; Balibar, Spinoza. 165. Herder, Werke: Band 3, 829; Herder, Against Pure Reason, 61. 166. Herder, Against Pure Reason, 59. 167. Herder, Against Pure Reason, 60. 168. This sensibility also shows signs of an effort not to prioritize speech over writing, but rather to take these as aspects of the same object, and to think of the artificially clear distinction between them as something that has always been in part metaphorical. In its Derridean form, this polemic has an anticolonial charge, since it targets primitivism as the basis for capturing people in racial time. For an illuminating exploration of a similar problematic in British romanticism, see McLane and Langan, “The Medium.” Chapter Two: The Transported Word The epigraphs to this chapter are drawn from Fanon, Black Skin, 2; and Wheatley, Collected Works, 184 (letter to John Thornton, 30 October 1774). 1. Sandler, Black Romantic, 7. 2. For example, Herder is the very type of the “cosmopolitan” thinker whose interest in native philology “emphasized the local,” but as Mufti shows, it is by fusing his non-­Western philological interests with his historicism that he lays “the ground of Romantic thought” (Mufti, Forget English! 75). 3. Sparks, “Peopling.” See also Sparks, Where the Negroes. 4. Agnani, Hating Empire, 109. Agnani argues that “consideration of colonial spaces of the Enlightenment” allows us “to heed the creative appropriations of [universalist] discourses” (109). 5. On Wheatley’s “philology as subversion,” see Herron, “Philology,” 63.

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6. On the “racialization of print,” see Rezek, “Racialization.” 7. Wheatley, Works, 16, 117. 8. Walcott, “Diaspora,” 345; Bhabha, Location, 186. Wheatley takes advantage of what Walcott describes as “the creative conditions of a Black discrepant modernity produced in the Americas from the myriad encounters of worldviews brutally cohering together in contradiction and mutuality” (“Diaspora,” 347). In “Articulating the Archaic,” Bhabha pinpoints how the bad fit of linguistic disjunction becomes an oddly generative moment in the “inarticulate cry” of European modernist novels like Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India. In “the disturbing, uncertain time of the colonial intervention,” “the perpetual generation of a past-­present” is materialized in the colonial observer’s perception of linguistic archaism (186). 9. Collins, Black Feminist, 290. 10. Carby, Reconstructing, 17. 11. Wheatley, Works, 115. Compare “An Hymn to the Morning,” with its “abortive song” (57), or the chilly injunction at the close of “On Imagination,” to “cease the unequal lay” (68). 12. Erkkila, “Wheatley,” 170. 13. Johnson, Feminist Difference, 99–­100. 14. I borrow the term “submerged voice” from Barbara Smith, The Truth, xi. 15. Sancho, Letters, 165. 16. See, for example, Landry, “Slavery”; Brooks, “Our Phillis”; Spigner, “Niobean Poetics.” 17. See Chiles, “Becoming Colored,” 1407. As Chiles writes, Wheatley and Samson Occom both “attribute human difference to changes wrought by the environment” (1403) so as to reconceive “how human difference is used to cohere an ontological identity category” (1408). “[Wheatley’s] Poems characterizes race not as bodily truth but as a potentially dangerous process of transformation” (1412). 18. Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology, 4. For an excellent summary linking this tradition to Wordsworth as “environmental historicist,” see Bewell, Wordsworth, 240. 19. Goudie, Creole America, 209. On the “identitarian” tendencies of recent ecological thinking, see also Rusert, “Black Nature,” 161. 20. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 13. See also Jordan, “Difficult Miracle.” 21. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 148 (emphasis added). 22. Jordan, “Difficult Miracle,” 180. 23. Jordan, “Difficult Miracle,” 177. 24. Jeffers, Age of Phillis. 25. Gates, Signifying, 140. 26. Gates, Signifying, 144. 27. Gates, Signifying, 142.

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28. Silverman, “New Letters,” 263. 29. Jefferson, Notes, 147. 30. For more on Wheatley’s religious background, see Coviello, “Agonizing Affection.” 31. Silverman, “New Letters,” 261. 32. Fanon, Black Skin, 2. 33. Kazanjian, Colonizing Trick, 124–­26. 34. Wheatley, Works, 6, 7. 35. Massey, For Space, 64. 36. See also Gunn on “philologies of race” in the early nineteenth-­century study of Native North American languages, Ethnology and Empire, 17–­51. 37. On Wheatley’s “creolizing” voice, see Goudie, Creole America; Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology. For two views on contemporary uses of “creolization,” see Palmié, “Creolization”; and Spivak, “World Systems.” 38. Goudie, Creolizing, 208. 39. Berry, “Adam Smith’s Considerations,” 132. 40. Berry, “Adam Smith’s Considerations,” 133. 41. Smith, “Considerations,” 407. 42. Smith, “Considerations,” 408, 409, 410. 43. Smith, “Considerations,” 408. 44. For an influential account of the ambivalence toward the civilized shared by enlightenment and romantic thinkers, see Marylin Butler, Romantics, Rebels. Comparing languages’ proposed simplification over time to the improvement of machines—­“fewer wheels,” and so on—­Smith explains such progress simultaneously as a loss: “this simplification of the rudiments of languages renders them more and more imperfect, and less proper for many of the purposes of language” (Smith, “Considerations,” 429). The “loss” of inflection makes later languages more “prolix,” less “sweet,” and more constrained by grammatical position (“It ties down many words to a particular situation” [430]). Here Smith ironically reproduces the anxiety about a language whose terms are less “free” of their surroundings, now in a textual rather than a physical environment. 45. On Smith’s review, see Berry, “Adam Smith’s Considerations,” 131. On Smith’s early lectures on language, see Otteson, “Adam Smith’s First Market,” which reports on student lecture notes from the early 1750s (82n). For reasons of space, I set aside Derrida’s complex (and much discussed) deconstructions of Condillac’s semiotic “liaison” (in Archaeology of the Frivolous and “Signature Event Context”) and of Rousseau’s conflicting accounts of origin (in Of Grammatology). 46. Locke, Essay, 3.3.6. 47. Bauman and Briggs, Voices, 37; 36.

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48. I am thinking here both of Ashis Nandy’s readings of the “homology between primitivism and infantility,” and Sylvia Wynter’s “Man1,” that category of distinction used by early modern and enlightenment thinkers to delimit personhood and agency in a globally expanding colonial discourse preoccupied with the analysis of comparative humanity. See Nandy, Intimate, 13; Wynter, “Unsettling”; and Wynter and McKittrick, “Conversation.” 49. For accounts of “stadial” thinking, see Meek, Social Science; Stocking, Race, Culture. 50. Rivett, Unscripted America, 55, 86–­88. I will return to “language mysticism [Logosmystik]” in the chapters to come. For longer histories of linguistic or semiotic “arbitrariness” and its variants from Aristotle to Hobbes, see Formigari, History; Coseriu, Der Physei-­Thesei-­Streit; Joseph, “Linguistic Sign.” For a recent intervention in this history for romantic studies, see Keach, Arbitrary Power, which traces the tricky semantic history of this term as it confuses linguistic and political meanings. 51. Rivett, Unscripted America, 86. 52. Rivett, Unscripted America, 87, 291n. 53. For one list of Smith’s “ethnographic sources,” see Marouby, “Adam Smith,” 100–­102. Wolff and Cipolloni’s The Anthropology of the Enlightenment is a useful resource for tracking the movements of enlightenment colonial knowledge. 54. Mignolo, Darker Side, 47, 121. 55. Woolard, “Language Ideology,” 25. 56. Humboldt, On Language, 218, 220. 57. Aarsleff, “Introduction,” lxiii. See Aarsleff at length for more on Humboldt’s “crypto-­racism” in the context of his epistolary exchanges with the settler American linguists Du Ponceau and Pickering, both vocal opponents of the notion of deficiency in the “organization” of American languages. 58. Buschmann, “Introduction,” iv. 59. Humboldt, Kawi-­Sprache, ix. 60. Crawfurd, Indian Archipelago, 294. 61. Naoroji, “Observations,” 149, 143. Naoroji’s and Crawfurd’s essays were published in the same 1866 volume of the Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London. 62. Humboldt, On Language, 217. 63. Humboldt, “Letter to K. F. Becker” (my translation). 64. This dialectical movement was too subtle for most of his subsequent admirers. One later philologist’s positivist response in 1864 is typical: “One fault alone weakens the great merits of [Humboldt’s] writings: a certain taint of mysticism or simply metaphysical obscurity, which sometimes causes him to mistake . . . metaphors for reasons” (Baudry, De la science, 13).

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65. Mignolo, Darker Side, 43. 66. Silva, “Reading the Dead,” 43. 67. Walcott, “Diaspora,” 352. 68. This “language,” as I’ve implied throughout, is really many languages: English and Latin; the languages of evangelism, sentiment, enlightenment science, and revolutionary freedom; the King James Bible; the blank verse of Milton’s cosmic visions, the iambic couplets of Pope’s Homer, the natural imagery of Thomson’s Seasons, and the “graveyard” reflections of Gray’s “Elegy”; and so on. 69. Wheatley, Works, 9. 70. Wheatley, Works, 12 (“On the Death of a Young Lady . . .”); 53 (“To a Clergyman on the Death of his Lady”); 85 (“To a Gentleman and Lady on the Death . . .”); 94 (“On the Death of J. C. an Infant”); 117 (“To His Honor . . . on the Death of his Lady”). 71. Wheatley, Works, 118, 85. 72. Wheatley, Works, 133 (“On Messrs Hussey and Coffin”); 10 (“To Maecenas”). 73. Gal, “Multiplicity,” 324. 74. Alter, William Dwight Whitney, 130; Andresen, Linguistics, 30–­39. 75. Pollock, Language of the Gods, 501. 76. Gal and Irvine, “Language Ideology,” 73. 77. Koerner, Practicing Linguistic Historiography, 237. 78. Morpurgo-­Davies, History of Linguistics, 88. 79. Fabian, Time and the Other, 16. 80. For background on metaphors of language in the era, see Weaver, “Victorian Philology”; Wolff, “Romantic Stone Speech.” 81. Foucault, Order, 281, 296. 82. What Dowling, following Foucault, analyzes in Language and Decadence as a looming specter of autonomous language suggestively links the literature of the late nineteenth century back to this epistemic break. See also Turley, Politics of Language, who follows Dowling with an account of Tennyson’s reception of romantic anxiety toward language in geologic time. 83. Gal and Woolard, “Constructing Languages,” 8. 84. Blake, Complete Poetry, 258. 85. See Hill and Montag, The Other Adam Smith, 139, on the tensions in the eighteenth century between Smith’s model of sociality and Spinozan strands of thought. “Collectivism” is, of course, by no means necessarily a radical posture. 86. In that romantic-­era “particularist collectivism” (Carhart, Science of Culture) that resists agency imagined as individuated invention, we can perhaps sense a radical enlightenment rejection of origins-­thinking and teleology, prefiguring later Spinozan interpreters who would declare that “there is no point of

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departure” (Althusser, cited in Massey, For Space, 67) or who would oppose the “finalist illusion” (Macherey, Hegel, 49). However, particularist collectivism and “possessive individualism” (Macpherson, Political Theory) may not always be in tension. 87. See Silva, “Notes for a Critique,” 146. Silva suggests that “universality” is a useless concept for imagining freedom, “because it is mapped by raciality”; for similar reasons, we should give up “self-­determination”: “for if difference—­as the descriptor of our material conditions of existence—­is to be taken seriously, then heteronomous determination should necessarily become an acceptable ontological descriptor.” 88. Compare Stoler, Race and the Education. 89. Said, Orientalism, 143. Said and Olender are the classics of this genre, but the linguistic anthropological literature on “language ideology” shows where and how these ideas were concretely practiced in colonial spaces around the world. 90. Wolf, Europe and the People; Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 99. 91. Jackson, Becoming, 23. 92. See Wynter, “Unsettling.” 93. See Yusoff, Billion. For literatures of the “plantation zone,” see Posmentier, Cultivation; Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology. For “extractive zone,” see Gomez-­Barris, Extractive Zone. 94. Cervenak, Black Gathering, 12. Justin Mann’s forthcoming work on geology, “black tectonics,” and dirt is revelatory for this ethos. 95. See Ruffin (Black on Earth, 25–­55) and Posmentier (Cultivation, 27–­127), on the ways Black poetry theorizes environmental relation in the aftermath of the agricultural labor of the plantation zone. 96. Ruffin, Black on Earth, 30. 97. Wheatley, Works, 9–­10. 98. Wheatley, Works, 79. 99. Wheatley, Works, 112. Neither Ovid’s original nor, for example, Samuel Garth’s 1717 multiauthored eighteenth-­century edition of Ovid, includes this echo: “.  .  .  quam toto corpore mater, / tota veste tegens ‘unam minimamque relinque! / de multis minimam posco’ clamavit ‘et unam.’ / dumque rogat, pro qua rogat, occidit” (Metamorphoses 6:298–­301); “Only for this, this youngest, I implore, / Grant me this one request, I ask no more; / O grant me this! she passionately cries: / But while she speaks, the destin’d virgin dies” (Garth, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 6:431–­34). 100. Hurston, “Characteristics,” 28. 101. L’ histoire des deux Indes, attributed to the Abbé Raynal but in fact collectively authored with, among others, Denis Diderot. On “conscription,” see David Scott’s reading of Talal Asad in Conscripts of Modernity, and Sunil Agnani’s dis-

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cussion of it (Hating Empire, xvii). I’m indebted to Agnani’s work on the “internal critiques of empire” in European thought (177). 102. Reed, Freedom Time, 91. 103. Wheatley, Poems, 68. 104. The literature on geology in the romantic era is by now enormous, but one should mention at least several categories: early classics on a geological discourse of the sublime (Nicolson, Mountain Gloom); works focused on the direct influence of geology on canonical poets (Wyatt, Wordsworth; Heringman, Romantic Rocks); investigations of agriculture, ruins, and geology as figures for historical mediation (Goodman, Georgic Modernity; Sachs, Poetics of Decline; Gidal, Ossianic Unconformities; Menely, Climate); and phenomenologies of reading and the poetics of stone (Jacobus, Romantic Things; Favret, “Slow Reading”; Groves, Geological Unconscious). 105. Darwin, Origin, 136; see Beer, “Darwin,” 109. 106. Wynter’s critique of the biologization of “Man2” under Darwin’s influence reminds us that the very idea of “selection” imposes a concomitant notion of dysselection on bodies and cultures not favored by evolution (as in Schleicher’s linguistic “capacity for change”). Wynter, “Conversation.” 107. Bréal, Beginnings, 105. 108. Bréal, Beginnings, 110. 109. In this I only extend Spigner’s metatextual linking of Niobe’s children to Wheatley’s poems, always at risk of being taken. In Spigner’s reading, Wheatley is rewriting her own fate by rewriting the classical tradition. 110. Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology, 117. 111. Wheatley’s “neoclassicism” is a subject Spigner teaches us not to take lightly: its radical nature depends not only on Wheatley’s demonstration of fluency in the outward forms and cadences of an elite European literary canon, but also on strategic and subtle manipulations of that canon’s values, through the reorientations of subject position her reader undergoes. 112. Lloyd, “From the Critique,” 120: “This unfree subject of heteronomy, always subjected already to the implicitly coercive force of nature or necessity.” 113. Thanks to Justin Mann for prompting me to think with this phrasing. Chapter Three: Voices of the Ground The chapter epigraph is drawn from Blake, Complete Poetry, 30. 1. Blake, Complete Poetry, 1. 2. Blake, Complete Poetry, 1. For readings of Blake’s picture of radical coevalness against racializing primitivism, see discussions of his engravings for Stedman’s Journey, in Lee, Slavery; Bohls, Romantic Literature; Makdisi, William Blake.

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3. Bryant, New System, 3:600. See Makdisi, William Blake, 245–­59, especially 249, 257. 4. Blake, Complete Poetry, 543–­4 4. 5. Blake, Complete Poetry, 544. 6. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art, 127; Makdisi, William Blake, 6. 7. Wilkins, Bhagvat-­Geeta, 75. 8. Blake, Complete Poetry, 548. 9. Barlow, “Aryan Blake,” 281. 10. Blake, Complete Poetry, 275. 11. Momma, “Man on the Cusp,” 164. 12. Barlow, “Aryan Blake,” 280. 13. Barlow, “Aryan Blake,” 289; Blake, Complete Poetry, 534. 14. Enlarging on Marlon Ross, Bakary Diaby has written on the phenomenon of such contact not through Pratt’s influential formulation of the “zone,” but rather in terms of the meaning-­making encounters that constitute race as a historical mood, an emergent emotional sense of self and other, through which with hindsight we can see “cross-­racial contact as the condition of possibility for racial belonging” (“Feeling Black,” 123). 15. Mufti, Forget English! 110–­11. 16. Bindman, Blake as an Artist, 161. 17. Ahmed, Archaeology, 38, 39. Ahmed draws on Bernard Cohn, Ranajit Guha, and others to develop a focused polemic about the long shadow cast by Jones’s adept conversion of linguistic and literary study into the mechanisms of state control, through the utilitarian politics of colonial knowledge production (or “destruction” of “native experience”): “Legal codes enabled the colonial state to overwrite the ungovernable babble of the newly conquered with ‘the language of the law’” (38). 18. In Flaxman’s tribute, it is possible to see the seated scholars as needing Jones to preserve their knowledge. In some of the sketches for the carving, all are seated on the ground together; but here, in the final carved scene, the distinction in position aligns Jones’s physical stature with civilizational status, as he gives language order. 19. Scott, Common Wind, 107. 20. Goldstein, Sweet Science, 62. 21. John Leyden, of the East India Company, cited in Trautmann, Language and Nation, 40. 22. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” 18. 23. Wilkins, Bhagvat-­Geeta, 13. 24. Makdisi, Making England, 11. 25. Wilkins, Bhagvat-­Geeta, 15.

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26. Wilkins, Bhagvat-­Geeta, 23. 27. Wilkins, Bhagvat-­Geeta, 90, 96. 28. Blake, Complete Poetry, 702 (letter to Rev. Dr. Trusler, 23 August 1799). 29. See Makdisi, William Blake, 269. Here and often throughout this chapter, I am indebted to Makdisi’s Blake. 30. De Man, Rhetoric, 6. 31. On stuffing nature into words, see Cavell, In Quest, 60. Reading Coleridge’s “Rime,” Cavell suggests that the Mariner’s unexplained shooting of the albatross may be read as the poet’s misguided effort to force a natural relation: he has “murdered to connect, to stuff nature into his words.” If skepticism names the drive “to deny [an] internal, or natural, connection with others,” this murder is a forced overcorrection. 32. Ferguson, “Shelley’s Mont Blanc”; Heringman, Romantic Rocks, 68. 33. See Goldstein, Sweet Science; Goldstein’s animated conversation was a vital prompt in the early stages of this project. 34. “Vom Gefühl der Pflanze wissen wir nichts, und vom Phänomenon des Triebes der Bewegung im Steine noch minder” (Vom Erkennen und Empfinden [1778], 547). The thought points us not only toward Herder’s reading of Spinoza, but also toward his appropriation of Böhme’s “language of Nature,” resonant in Blake as well. 35. Hutton, Investigation. Vol. 2, sec. 9, entitled “Concerning the apparent Inactivity commonly, but erroneously, attributed to Material Things,” usefully works through Hutton’s proof of this principle: “a body, for example, of stone or metal, is said to be matter, without any other thing besides form; and it is from the examination of such bodies, that the nature of matter . . . has been esteemed passive” (366); “inactivity, and the idea of rest, which is founded on the apparent immutability of perceived things, are, like equalities of things, only a supposition, and not reality” (373); “[it may be proved that] every part of every material thing, is in motion in relation to all the rest . . . that not only no principle of inactivity appears, but, on the contrary, that there is action or activity wherever there is material or perceived things . . . [the mistaken system] founded upon that apparent inactivity, conceived from the apparent immutability and equality of perceived things . . . must be corrected by . . . attending more minutely to the inequalities and changes of things, which are not barely apparent, but are real” (382). 36. This is one reason none of these features makes stone, despite its indifference, undesirable: as Wordsworth puts it, the “heart luxuriates” in “indifferent things”—­“stocks and stones” included (“Nutting”). 37. Fanon, Wretched, 15. 38. Leavitt, Linguistic Relativities, 101 (citation omitted).

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39. Playfair, James Hutton, 73. 40. Playfair, James Hutton, 89. 41. Playfair, James Hutton, 69. 42. Playfair, James Hutton, 96. 43. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 76. The “paradox of the soil” was the problem, as Gould coins and defines it, that Hutton set out to solve, which boiled down to a paradox in final cause: namely, the fact that though soil is a regenerative support for life, it is most obviously also a product of destructive forces. Thus, Hutton posited a “restorative force” that for him resolved the apparent contingency of deep time, restoring a teleological cause to nature, that is, the provision of soil fertility for the purpose of the human species’ survival. See Rudwick, Bursting, for a summary of late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century estimates of the earth’s lifespan (115–­31). 44. Spinoza, Ethics: “The propositions we have advanced hitherto have been entirely general, applying not more to men than to other individual things, all of which, though in different degrees, are animated” (89). 45. Curley, Spinoza Reader, 267–­68. Also discussed in Sharp, “Force of Ideas,” 740. 46. Diderot, “D’Alembert’s Dream,” 92–­93. 47. See Yolton, Thinking Matter. Was it, then, a materialist response, when Johnson famously ‘refuted’ Berkeley’s idealism for Boswell, by kicking a big stone “till he rebounded from it”? See Boswell’s Life of Johnson (as well as Cavell, Philosophy, and Morton, Ecology, both of whom expand on this moment). Despite the world of difference between kicking and listening to a stone, the pain of Johnson’s “proof” feels like a familiar, even a proper, stage of reaction to theories that blame our ignorance of the world on its inaccessibility, or alternatively paint human finitude as human negligibility. 48. Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, cited in Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 360. 49. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, 841. 50. Emerson, Selected Writings, 155. 51. “Deference” to the inanimate the better to “represent” it is elaborated in Tamen, Friends, 130–­43. 52. Goethe, Scientific Studies, 308. Like Goethe, Kenneth Burke considers our encounters with apparently external objects as shaping our mode of inquiry: developing the question as Goethe’s aphorism poses it into a conversation, Burke writes, paraphrasing the thought of pragmatist George Herbert Mead: “in studying the nature of the object, we can in effect speak for it; and in adjusting our conduct to its nature as revealed in the light of our interests, we in effect modify our own assertion in reply to its assertion” (Grammar, 237).

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53. Emerson, Selected Writings, 412. Tennyson, writing contemporaneously of human things “Foreshorten’d in the tract of time” (In Memoriam, 53) against “the secular abyss” (In Memoriam, 52) can help us see the semantic involutions of Emerson’s secularity. 54. Playfair, James Hutton, 89. 55. Goethe, Scientific Studies, 132. 56. Playfair, James Hutton, 54. 57. “Dream time and deep time, modern anthropology and geology, together weave a spell of natural imagery in the poetry of the romantic era” (Mitchell, “Romanticism,” 183–­84). 58. Arendt, Human Condition, 136–­39. 59. Mel Chen argues that the “animacy hierarchies” built into grammatical active and passive markers (of widely divergent languages) serve to structure and reinforce hierarchical frameworks of social organization: “While . . . I have certainly seen prolific examples of stones as ‘bad’ verbal subjects, I will insist in this book that stones and other inanimates definitively occupy a scalar position (near zero) on the animacy hierarchy” (Chen, Animacies, 5). 60. Blake, Complete Poetry, 258. 61. Wilkins, Baghvat-­Geeta, 48. 62. In the resonant word “according,” we might catch the Latin word for “heart,” defining a linguistic pulse, as when in Milton the period or “Pulsation of the Artery” measures the speed at which the “poet’s work” is done. For a cursory but representative sample of similar images across European romanticism, see Starobinski, Dead Worlds. For a far more engaged encounter with Blake’s use of the circulatory rhythm of pulsation, see Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation. 63. The language philosophy presupposed by Blake’s poetics has rarely been considered at length; see Esterhammer, “Blake and Language,” for a review of existing critical literature. Studies of Blake’s attitude toward language proceed by reasoning through his disorienting yet repetitive vocabulary (in conjunction with his mythological “system”); a syntax clearly designed to throw the reader off balance and add texture to lexical ambiguity; or distinctive elaborations at either of these levels (as in the daunting resources of Blake’s wordplay, in Hilton). In addition, Blake’s best readers inevitably confront his rhetorical slipperiness (for example, the interrogative mode, or the ironic tone of his citational diction, as it frames sentimentality or piety). Two exemplary studies of Blake’s linguistics are Essick, William Blake, and Esterhammer, Creating States. Essick explicitly sets out to sketch Blake’s theory of language as a roughly phenomenological linguistics, programmatically seeking to subvert signification and its preservation in communication. Esterhammer, in Creating States, looks at aspects of the Miltonic influence on Blake through a performative poetics, itself reinterpreting the linguistic power of Genesis.

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64. Esterhammer, “Blake and Language,” 80. 65. See also Essick, William Blake, for another account of Böhme’s relevance to Blake. 66. Böhme, De signatura rerum, 518–­19 (1635): “ein jedes ding hat seinen Mund zur offenbarung / vnd das ist die Naturspraache / darauß jedes ding auß seiner eigenschafft redet.” 67. Böhme, De signatura rerum, 622: “. . . man das an allen lebendigen Creaturen an gestalt deß Leibes / vnd an Sitten vnd Gebaehrden sihet: Jtem am Halle / Stimmen vnd Spraachen / so wol an Baeumen vnd Kraeutern / an Steinen vnd Metallen / als wie das ringen in der krafft deß Geistes ist.” Blake, Complete Poetry, 258. 68. Wilkins, Bhagvad-­Geeta, 78. 69. Blake, Complete Poetry, 4. 70. Blake compromises the Cloud’s Böhmean “signature” by introducing the mediations of interpretive perspective or phenomenological process. For Blake, an object’s form and voice depend on when, how, by whom, in what mood the object becomes visible—­and the subject and object work reciprocally on each other: sometimes it seems the latter is shaped by the former (“What is Man? The sun’s light when he unfolds it / Depends on the organ that beholds it”), other times the reverse logic holds (“they became what they beheld”). 71. Levinson, “Book of Thel,” 296. 72. Levinson, “Book of Thel,” 294. 73. Here, as Levinson puts it, Thel is “rewarded with a visit to Experience,” which she links to the Motto: “that is, the Mole has gained awareness of the Sky world’s existence and is given the opportunity to survey his Pit from that altitude” (Levinson, “Book of Thel,” 295). Of course Thel is less a Mole in the Sky than an Eagle in the Pit. 74. Blake, Complete Poetry, 3. 75. Blake, Complete Poetry, 5. 76. Blake, Complete Poetry, 6. 77. Blake, Complete Poetry, 6. 78. O’Rourke, “Comparison,” 12. 79. See Moten, Black and Blur (viii, 6, 23, 26, and so on). 80. Blake, Complete Poetry, 6. 81. A major topic in Butler, Giving an Account. Blake’s staging of this complaint interprets the constitutive tension characteristic of human finitude famously expressed by Kant, in the first Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason: “Human reason has this peculiar fate that . . . it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.” Yet, as Thel shows, how

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we orient ourselves to this ignorance is crucial. As Cavell writes of Kant’s phrase, “the reason we cannot say what the thing is in itself is not that there is something we do not in fact know, but that we have deprived ourselves of the conditions for saying anything in particular” (Cavell, Claim, 239). The decontextualization of the particular is, for Cavell, a self-­inflicted deprivation. 82. Marvelous nuance to this inversion may be found in Johnson, Persons and Things; Cameron, Impersonality; Arsic, Bird Relics. Compare Mitchell, describing Marx on the fetish: “the ‘horror’ of fetishism was not just that it involved an illusory, figurative act of treating material objects as if they were people, but that this transfer of consciousness to ‘stocks and stones’ seemed to drain the humanity out of the idolater” (Iconologies, 191). Or take de Man describing “the latent threat that inhabits prosopopoeia”: “that by making the dead speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death” (Rhetoric, 78). 83. Frye, Fearful, 72–­73. When George Eliot chose a selective citation as the epigraph to a single chapter in Middlemarch (1871–­72), she implies it is a dialogue on love, contrasting optimistic and pessimistic caricatures of the moods of love’s possible drives. See Greer, “No earthly parents.” 84. Heringman, Romantic Rocks, 96. For Heringman, as for Frye, “solidity” is understood here in a negative light. But tropes of solidity also do important work in Blake’s poetry, showing how shared cultural forms become naturalized over time. 85. Cassirer, “Naturalistic,” 12. 86. Blake, Complete Poetry, 45. 87. Spinoza, Ethics, 71. 88. Blake, Complete Poetry, 83. 89. Blake, Complete Poetry, 71. 90. Blake, Complete Poetry, 72. 91. Blake, Complete Poetry, 83. 92. Blake, Complete Poetry, 82. 93. Herder, Werke: Band 3, 830, 832 (my translation). 94. Blake, Complete Poetry, 82. 95. Here I am building on Makdisi’s compelling reading, which places the formation and “consolidation” of bourgeois individualism as a crucial aspect of both romantic accounts of subjectivity and imperialist discourses of otherness: “romanticism may, in effect, be thought of as the discourse emerging from and articulating both encounters [the orientalist experience of the East and the more specifically individual experience of the sublime] at once” (Makdisi, William Blake, 212); “the articulation, through the 1790s, of the discourse of self-­ determination, was often an explicitly imperialist discourse” (213).

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96. Butler, Psychic Life, 101. 97. Butler, Senses, 8. 98. Butler, Senses, 67. 99. Butler, Senses, 80; Butler, Psychic Life, 9. 100. De Man, “Epistemology,” 44–­45. 101. Locke, Essay, 3.5.10–­11. 102. Levinson, Thinking, 94. Levinson evokes alternative conceptions of nature incipiently present in romanticism. “Nature,” she writes, “is no longer that substantial resistance invoked by Kant in his preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, lacking which the dove of thought could not take flight” (98). Chapter Four: Radical Diversions 1. See Koselleck, Crisis and Critique; Lacoue-­Labarthes and Nancy, Literary Absolute; Silva, Global Idea; Makdisi, Making England; Daut, Baron de Vastey; Doyle, Freedom’s Empire; Williams, Country and City; Bewell, Natures in Translation; Moore, Capitalism. 2. Mufti, Forget English! 97–­98. It would be interesting to pursue the possible relations between oriental textual “extraction” and the early ethnographic impulse of literary antiquarianism in Anglo-­Scottish ballad collection, described in McLane, Balladeering. 3. Garnett, Philological Essays, 6. The analogy is reused in Müller, Stratification (1868). 4. Trautmann, Languages and Nations, 219; Arsleff, Study of Language. 5. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 234; Doyle, Freedom’s Empire, 12. Both are major critical interventions that draw attention to transatlantic contexts of racial and cultural nationalism. Also important here is Sorenson’s work in The Grammar of Empire. 6. See Tooke, Diversions of Purley, 403, 638. 7. Tooke’s copy is held at the Newberry Library, Chicago. 8. Verstegan, Restitution, 4. 9. See Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism and Making England Western. 10. Mee, “Language,” 373. 11. Sorenson, Grammar, 63. 12. Mee, “Language,” 376. 13. Godwin, Caleb Williams, 294. 14. See Smith, Politics; and Esterhammer, Romantic Performative. In fact Godwin’s novel was published on 12 May to coincide with the suspension of habeas corpus, in the wake of revolutionary events in Paris; four days later, on 16 May 1794, Tooke was arrested for radical activities, but this time, successfully defended himself, deploying philological evidence in court.

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15. Godwin, Caleb Williams, 1. 16. Sorenson, Grammar, 102. 17. Bewell, Natures, 251; see also Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment. 18. See especially McLane, Balladeering; Makdisi, Making England. 19. Fuller, Summer, 79. 20. McLane, Balladeering, 168. 21. Locke, Essay, 1.2.64. For a brief account, including the complexities of defining “literacy” in the era, see Mee, “Language,” 370–­71. 22. Bewell, Wordsworth, 58. 23. I am thinking of Debbie Lee’s 1999 review of Richardson and Hofkosh, eds., Romanticism, Race, and Colonialism, in which she expresses reservations about the interpretive frame of nativist or imperial complicity attributed to Wordsworth’s aesthetics of self-­making. Lee encourages romanticists to read “in terms other than guilt and blame, complicity and contradiction” (Lee, “Review,” n.p.). 24. De Man, Rhetoric, 90. Compare the Herderian view, which places the individual in the “chain of development of the whole human race”: “wherever and as whoever you were born . . . Life and peace dwell for you only in the interconnection of this chain, in what you both actively receive and actively impart” (Herder, Against Pure Reason, 53). 25. McLane, Balladeering, 164. 26. Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 13. 27. Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 105. 28. Blanchot views etymology as complicit with this “ancient prejudice” of nominalism: “etymology fixes the attention upon the word as the seminal cell of language,” turning language into a “nomenclature” (Blanchot, Writing, 96). James Harris, an important foil for Tooke, expresses the contract myth of language origin when he writes, of the articulate yet residually “animal” sounds of human speech, that “the Meaning of those Animal Sounds is derived, not from Nature, but from Compact” (Harris, Hermes, 314). 29. Galperin, History of Missed, 60. 30. Herder, Philosophical Writings, 212. 31. Ferguson, Wordsworth, 14. 32. On Clare’s difference from Wordsworth, see Williams, Country, 139–­40. For Williams, they share a form of “human separation” that pulls the subject apart, because it is “mediated by a projection of personal feeling into a subjectively particularized and objectively generalized Nature” (134). 33. Compare Bewell’s consideration of Wordsworth’s revolutionary-­era geological catastrophism, or “how Wordsworth learned to read social revolution in terms of the language of geology” (Bewell, Wordsworth, 248).

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34. Fry, Wordsworth, 74. 35. Foucault, Order, 282. 36. Foucault, Order, 285. Said’s Orientalism, of course, addresses this shortcoming. 37. Fanon, Black Skin, 1–­2. 38. The passage retells Tooke’s version of the famous trial that led to his serving a year’s time in the King’s Bench Prison, where he represented himself. See Olivia Smith, Politics. 39. For the best-­k nown account of Tooke’s place in the history of linguistics, see Aarsleff, Study of Language. Foucault’s The Order of Things, which mentions Tooke by name only once in a footnote (258), also suggests that he was a threshold figure, which Hazlitt confirms: “Mr. Horne Tooke was one of those who may be considered as connecting links between a former period and the existing generation” (Hazlitt, Spirit, 147). 40. Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 259. The aim of tracing particles back to nouns or verbs is generally understood as a result of Tooke’s indebtedness to empiricist materialism, to Locke in particular, and especially to the idea that language derives originally from sensory impressions. But Tooke goes far beyond Locke in this pursuit. Locke famously wrote: “I doubt not but, if we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all languages, the names which stand for things that fall not under our senses to have had their first rise from sensible ideas. By which we may give some kind of guess what kind of notions they were, and whence derived, which filled their minds who were the first beginners of languages, and how nature, even in the naming of things, unawares suggested to men the originals and principles of all their knowledge” (Locke, Essay, 3.5). As Aarsleff, From Locke; Land, Philosophy; and Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics have each pointed out, this passage inspired many of the eighteenth century’s speculations about the origins of language, even if for Locke, this was not the beginning, but the end of the question. Tooke claims Locke as his guiding light, but the allegiance is more politically convenient than philosophically consistent: thus, for the empiricist’s “ideas,” Tooke suggests we substitute “terms,” throughout the Essay, so that language is understood to comprehend all aspects of thought (Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 19). 41. Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 102. 42. Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 42. Olivia Smith writes that Tooke “intended to situate abstract terms within a temporal rather than an idealist context” (Politics, 144), effectively historicizing them by attending to pronunciation and usage. But this way of giving language time, despite illustrating the plasticity of word-­forms, leaves their individual meanings single and permanent. 43. Turley makes the same point in a reading of Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee,”

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in which the poet’s narrator assists an old man he comes across to remove a tree: “with a single blow / The tangled root I sever’d.” In Turley’s account, the poem represents a “highly self-­reflexive” commentary on philology (Turley, Politics, 47). 44. For summaries of his critical reception, see Smith, Politics; Bewley and Bewley, Gentleman Radical. 45. To grasp this pun’s complication, we can recognize four semantic colorations: the political, the linguistic, the chemical, and the organic. The last, as we know, becomes increasingly divisive among linguists in the nineteenth century, and Coleridge is fond of botanical metaphors for language—­for instance, see in this chapter reference to “the Plant” as organic model for associations. According to the OED, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries introduce the application of radical to language, meaning “original” or “native,” applied especially to “uninflected” lexical elements or symbols. From here it enters chemistry as an element that can’t be broken down or “analyzed” further. The most common sense of radical seems to have remained “thorough,” from the bottom up. The political meaning emerges in the late eighteenth century, precisely during Tooke’s career, when what initially meant “thorough” is turned to the sense of extreme, advanced, democratic, or liberal. (By the 1820s the adjectival noun could be used to describe a particular white hat worn by some radicals.) 46. Smith, Politics, 115. Olivia Smith’s indispensable account of Tooke is an essential complement to Aarsleff’s, in that it crucially reveals Tooke’s primary targets as politically conservative philosophical grammars. Not only did Tooke’s individual derivations attack conservative pieties about church and state, but the Anglo-­Saxon emphasis (over classical grammars) suggests the work’s democratizing intent. He thus set himself against a tradition represented by Harris, whose grammar followed Latin and Greek syntactic taxonomies (Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 698, 709). This casts light on Coleridge’s conversations with Wordsworth on the ill effects for English poetry of “public school” classical education; through “the custom of writing Latin verses,” minds were habituated to highly artificial language. A revitalized native poetry would help recalibrate “the heart with the head” (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 11–­13). Smith brilliantly outlines Tooke’s relationship to the Lyrical Ballads’ “experiments”; for further accounts of the political dimension of Tooke’s linguistics, see also Turley, Politics; Manly, Language; and Tomalin, Romanticism. 47. Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 38. 48. Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 38. 49. Harris, Hermes, 325. 50. On this image, and what it concretely reveals about the lack of a progressive dimension to the eighteenth-­century concept of universal grammar, see Harris, The Language-­Makers; and Sorenson, Grammar, 12.

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51. The caption is borrowed from Horace’s Ars poetica, ll. 25–­26, only with the addition of the initial adverb, dum. It is offered by Horace in a list of caveats to the would-­be writer; interestingly, it precedes the section describing the fortunes of individual words due to the regulating laws of “usage.” 52. Harris, Hermes, 293. 53. Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 8, 6. 54. Hazlitt, Spirit, 151; Bewley and Bewley, Gentleman Radical, 242. 55. “Technical terms are not invariably abused to cover the ignorance only of those who employ them,” writes Tooke. “In matters of law, politicks, and Government, they are more frequently abused in attempting to impose upon the ignorance of others; and to cover the injustice and knavery of those who employ them” (Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 57). Book 2 is devoted to tracing abstract terms to more homely sources, as in wrong from “Wrung, or Wrested from the Right” (366); law from Anglo-­Saxon “Laegh,” meaning “Laid down—­as a rule of conduct” (306); or think from thing, on the analogy of Latin reor from res (608–­9). As McKusick explains, for Tooke, the derivation of “think” from “thing” collapsed the immaterial verb to a material noun, but for Coleridge it implied precisely the reverse: “Coleridge’s application of this particular etymology is for purposes diametrically opposed to Tooke’s; Coleridge seeks to support the idealist position that things are generated by thought” (McKusick, “Coleridge,” 106). 56. Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 399. 57. Stewart, Collected Works, 180. 58. Hazlitt, Collected Works: II, 390 (Preface to his 1810 New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue). 59. Stewart, Collected Works, 181. 60. Hazlitt, Spirit, 154–­56. 61. Land, From Signs, 116. The relationship between Tooke’s theory of “imposture” and Bentham’s theory of “fictions” remains, so far as I know, understudied, but Bentham’s views on the abbreviations of language change surely have Tooke in the background, as one of Bentham’s late acolytes, C. K. Ogden, seems to confirm: “words may be considered as the result of a sort of analysis” or “chemico-­ logical process” (Ogden, Bentham’s Theory, 68). 62. Hazlitt, Spirit, 154, 155. 63. What Voloshinov called romanticism’s “native philology” enables Foucault’s claim that comparative philology leveled the languages of the world by relativist means. The Preface architects are ostensibly refusing to see divisions in the social world, contingent on class markers in language, as “natural,” just as such distinctions are dissolved in Tooke’s grammar. 64. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 290. 65. Smith, Politics, 215.

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66. Hence the complaints by critics that attempts in the Preface to level language to a common plane merely wind up as condescending or reactionary. See Keach, Arbitrary Language; McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy; and Manly, Language. 67. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 289–­90. 68. Ferguson frames this as one of the Preface’s distinctive moves, which has perhaps still not received proper attention in the context of the “natural” language here theorized. As she puts it, there is “a form of primitivism” in the sentiments expressed by the Preface’s authors, yet because its fetishization of the language of rural country-­dwellers moves the “origin” from the distant past to the present, it “deviates from those conjectural histories primarily in collapsing their comprehensive time schemes . . . Wordsworth found a paradigmatic emblem of passionate language ‘here, now, and in England’” (Ferguson, Wordsworth, 18). 69. Barbara Johnson, for instance, shows how the Preface really tells two stories of language origin: one is framed by a conjectural or anthropological history of culture, the other “takes place in a temporality of the self” (Johnson, World, 94). Comparably, Paul de Man poses narratives of historical “restoration” in individual poems against greater narratives of decay and dissolution, dramatizing contrasts “in which the two temporalities are structurally interrelated”; Wordsworth thus develops “a nature that has been darkened and deepened” by its plural temporal narratives (de Man, “Time and History,” 13). 70. Smith, Politics, 213. 71. Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 712. 72. Coleridge, Letters (Letter to Godwin, 22 September 1800). 73. “Tooke believed that he had shown the stable and unchangeable nature of words. Coleridge fell with delight upon his ‘proof’ and rapidly deduced the opposite: the flux and constant change of language” (Prickett, Words, 136). Several critics have combed through Coleridge’s works, from early lectures to the Logic, as well as letters, notes, and manuscripts, discovering an abundance of instances where Tooke or etymology appear. Both the extent of Tooke’s influence, and that of Coleridge’s ambivalence, emerge through contrast between Coleridge’s dynamic with Tooke’s atomistic method. See especially Jackson, “Coleridge, Etymology.” 74. Coleridge, Biographia, 50. 75. This description recalls James Harris’s analogy for conjunctions, which he compares to “Zoophytes in Nature; a kind of middle Beings, of amphibious character, which by sharing the Attributes of the higher and the lower, conduce to link the Whole together” (Harris, Hermes, 259). Tooke takes exception to precisely this analogy in Harris in his effort to reevaluate conjunctions (Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, 57–­59). Coleridge’s linguistic animalcule unexpectedly generalizes Harris’s zoophyte, leveling the “higher” and “lower” life-­forms.

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76. Coleridge, Biographia, 167. 77. As Coleridge reminds us, though published under Wordsworth’s name, the volume was conceived in mutual conversation, when the two were closest. His disavowal begins as an effort to stamp out or control the rampant fires of controversy over poetic language: “to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long continued controversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction: and at the same time to define with the utmost impartiality the real poetic character of the poet, by whose writings this controversy was first kindled, and has been since fuelled and fanned” (Coleridge, Biographia, 5). 78. Coleridge, Biographia, 78, 80. 79. Coleridge’s editors (Engell and Bate) note Thelwall’s jotting by one conspicuous passage that anyone familiar with Tooke’s Diversions “will not fail to discover that the fountain of all this reasoning is in that book” (Coleridge, Biographia, 83). For a lively background to Coleridge’s retrospective political equivocation, with further citations from Thelwall’s marginalia, see Thompson, Romantics, 108–­32, especially 127. 80. Coleridge, Biographia, 53. 81. Coleridge, Biographia, 50. 82. Coleridge, Biographia, 52. 83. Coleridge, Biographia, 50. 84. See McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy. 85. Coleridge, Biographia, 52. 86. See the Preface to Wordsworth’s 1815 Poems, itself a response to Coleridge’s definition of fancy from his and Southey’s Omniana (1811). 87. See Shields, Phillis Wheatley, 97–­113. Shields is persuasive on the wide impact of Wheatley’s romantic aesthetics of liberation, demanding that we reconsider her centrality to early British romanticism; and while reiterating his claims for direct influence is not my goal here, his account is entirely congenial with my less fine-­grained argument. 88. Wordsworth, Selected Prose, 377. 89. Coleridge, Biographia, 52. 90. Coleridge, Biographia, 52. 91. Coleridge, Biographia, 169, 48–­49. 92. Wheatley, Works, 66–­67; see Shields, Phillis Wheatley, 104–­5. 93. Coleridge, Biographia, 167. 94. Ferguson, Wordsworth, 3. 95. Wordsworth, Prose, 361. 96. Bewell, Natures, 234. 97. Ferguson, Wordsworth, 18; Turley, Politics, 45. 98. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 300. 99. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 310, 303. Note also the “conjunctions” be-

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tween the imagination and its objects, in the passage from the 1815 Preface alluded to above (Wordsworth, Prose, 379–­80). 100. Wordsworth, Prelude, 9. 101. The alternative naturalism that I tend to associate with Spinozan thinking is described differently in Gensini’s account of Leibniz and Vico, for whom linguistic naturalism can be historical because “nature is not a static entity” (Gensini, “Criticisms,” 7). For other approaches to the subject of Wordsworth, “arbitrary signs,” and enlightenment precursors, see McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy, 110–­18; and Aarsleff, From Locke, 372–­81. 102. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 171. 103. For Makdisi, this is a question of how Wordsworth gradually helps make some British denizens into Western subjects, deploying radical occidentalism against the backdrop of the Lake District, effectively “colonizing . . . consciousness” (Makdisi, Making England, 129, 87–­130). For Bewell, Wordsworth writes a “colonial environmental history” in England of successive displacements, modeled after the American naturalism of texts like Bartram’s Travels (1791), which blended colonial ecology with ethnography in the American South (Bewell, Natures, 255, 226–­69). And for McLane, Wordsworth’s self-­conscious handling of the ballad form reworks the poetic genre that had become a proto-­ethnographic mechanism for turning speech and song into encounters with the archaic (McLane, Balladeering, 160–­68). 104. “The poem can thus be said to reflect on the disappearance not only of a feudal aristocratic hunting culture but also of the red deer or stag and the stories associated with it” (Bewell, Natures, 260). 105. McLane, Balladeering, 112. See also Sorenson, Grammar. 106. McLane, Human Sciences, 78. 107. Wordsworth, Prelude, 12 (ll. 419–­20). What might it mean, not just for things to speak, but for any agency to speak “things”? Those “indisputable shapes,” those “words that are unknown to man” exemplify an obscure talk, intimate, indistinct, yet indisputable, a language felt rather than known. See also Jacobus, Romantic Things. 108. McLane, Human Sciences, 79; McLane, Balladeering, 168; Ferguson, Wordsworth, 18. 109. McLane, Human Sciences, 79. 110. Morning Post, 2 February 1803 (first printed version). 111. Scott, Conscripts, 61–­62; Mathes, “Listening,” 319. For views closer to Scott’s, see also Mahlis, “Signifying Toussaint”; Kaplan, “Black Heroes”; Persyn, “Sublime Turn.” 112. Kaplan, “Black Heroes.” 113. Hartman, Scenes, 3. See also Diaby, “Feeling Black.” 114. Morning Post, 2 February 1803. The longer passage reads: “On this subject

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two opinions are held. All those who are not West India Proprietors disapprove of assisting the French in regaining St. Domingo; all those who are Proprietors zealously contend for giving them every aid.—­They wish to live under the British Government rather than the French, but they would prefer the French to the dominion of the Blacks. This may be good argument in Jamaica, but it is most pernicious reasoning in London. If once our Colonial subjects are allowed to calculate the prudence of their allegiance, there is an end of our Colonial Empire.” 115. Bergren, Global, 12. 116. Garraway has drawn out a linguistic dimension of the politics of address negotiated particularly by Baron de Vastey: “The ultimate insult for Vastey, and the ultimate denial of the equality of speaking subjects, is to suffer the condition of being covertly addressed at the same time as one is publicly ignored” (Garraway, “Print,” 90). The blistering rhetoric of the Baron de Vastey, whose pivotal role in the early Black Atlantic Marlene Daut outlines, is an outstanding example of Haitian radicalism in print that puts Wordsworth’s in perspective: “In the first part of the nineteenth century, Vastey was, undoubtedly, the most familiar Haitian intellectual to the reading public on both sides of the Atlantic” (Daut, Baron de Vastey, 145). 117. Kadish and Jenson, Haitian Independence, 264–­65. 118. Kadish and Jenson, Haitian Independence, 264–­65. 119. Reprinted in Martineau, The Hour and the Man, 369. Chapter Five: The Primitive Today The epigraphs to this chapter are drawn from Goethe, Werke II.10, 75 (my translation); Emerson, Selected Writings, 320; and Du Ponceau, “Translator’s Preface,” 83. 1. Du Ponceau, “Translator’s Preface,” 83. 2. Wheatley, Works, 177. 3. Thoreau, Maine Woods, 696–­97. 4. Brooks, Common Pot, 247. 5. In Thoreau’s fantasy of encounter in The Maine Woods, qualities or features attributed to a language are transferred to the speakers themselves: a language being spoken in the observer’s presence is described as “unaltered”; it is strenuously affixed to a past Thoreau repeatedly situates at that distant remove called “the primitive”; and this very idea of changelessness (unchangeability) paradoxically ensures “the impossibility of Indian futures” (O’Brien, Firsting, 106), since “change and deterioriation” means abandoning the monolithic “Indianness” Thoreau deduces from this conversation. 6. O’Brien, Firsting, 110. For a longer reading of Thoreau’s participation in this project, see Bellin, “Savagists.”

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7. Eckstorm, Penobscot, 117, 67. Attean’s name has several spellings; here I follow the one used by Penobscot historians. See Penobscot Nation, “Historic Preservation” (“Tribal Chiefs Timeline”). 8. Alcoff, “Towards,” 22. 9. Kucich, “Lost,” 43. 10. Murray, Forked Tongues, 8. 11. Murray, Forked Tongues, 7–­8. 12. Thoreau, Maine Woods, 699, 700. 13. Rivett, Unscripted, 277. 14. Emerson, Selected Writings, 334. 15. For an account of “temporalities of race” see O’Brien, Firsting, 105–­7; for a useful historical survey of how these temporalities play out in the elaboration of American colonial and expansionist policies, see Harvey, Native Tongues, especially 145–­81. 16. Emerson, Selected Writings, 407. 17. Emerson, Selected Writings, 412. 18. Cadava, “Guano,” 113, 105. 19. I mean here the received impression of these theories; a more thorough reading of Vico, Rousseau, or Herder would show how each develops complex theories of language change designed less around representational mimicry than around phenomenologies of the formation of figures. 20. Emerson, Selected Writings, 14. 21. See Greenham, Emerson’s Transatlantic, 103, on Emerson and Locke. 22. Emerson, Selected Writings, 16. 23. Emerson’s adaptation of Locke’s empirical link imports, within the relations forged through language, a material opacity into the lucidity of linguistic expression, rendering it “partial”: “A man can only speak so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst he utters it” (Emerson, Selected Writings, 417). 24. Emerson, Selected Writings, 329 (my emphasis). 25. Emerson, Selected Writings, 327. 26. Emerson, Selected Writings, 3. 27. Emerson, “Uses,” 17. 28. Emerson, Selected Writings, 25. 29. Emerson, Selected Writings, 18, 327. 30. Emerson, Selected Writings, 322. 31. Emerson, Selected Writings, 328. Compare the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, who occasionally refers to Emerson’s poetry: “The symbol may, with Emerson’s sphinx, say ‘of thine eye I am eyebeam’” (Philosophical Writings, 115). 32. Emerson, Selected Writings, 15, 20. Emerson and Thoreau envision such re-

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newal through processes of figuration, but these processes also adapt an embodied “analogy” traceable to Herder (to whose ideas Emerson had access through English translations, like the American Coleridgean James Marsh’s 1833 edition of Herder’s On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, as well as his continental sources—­ not, in other words, Carlyle, who favored the Romantiker over the German enlightenment, but figures like Goethe, de Stäel, Alexander von Humboldt, and Victor Cousin). 33. Emerson, Selected Writings, 42. 34. Emerson, Selected Writings, 31. 35. Emerson, Selected Writings, 27. 36. Greenham notes the passage may be read as a rewriting of the romantic trope of dissolution into nature. The Wordsworthian notion that “the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him” (Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 333) is reiterated throughout Nature and “The Poet.” 37. Emerson, Selected Writings, 39. Cf. Van Cromphout, Emerson’s Modernity, which reads Emerson’s embodied naturalism through Goethe; and Greenham, Emerson’s Transatlantic, which argues that Emerson’s sensuousness engages materialism by passing through skeptical empiricism. See also scholarship on Emerson’s materialism in Arsic and Wolfe, The Other Emerson; Arsic, On Leaving. 38. Emerson, Selected Writings, 338, 31, 35. 39. Emerson, Journals, 9 June 1822 (cited in Greenham, Emerson’s Transatlantic, 81). 40. Emerson, Selected Writings, 29. 41. Emerson, Selected Writings, 328. 42. Emerson, Selected Writings, 336. 43. Emerson, Selected Writings, 336. 44. Emerson, Selected Writings, 329. 45. Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental, 3. 46. Emerson, Selected Writings, 329. 47. See Balaam for a lovely reading of the relation between deep time and mourning in Emerson, citing Emerson’s interest in geology, as well as Lyell. Balaam acutely recognizes Emerson’s writing as “an attempt to represent in language the instability and change at the core of reality”; and where change is understood explicitly as loss rather than renovation (as in “Experience”), Balaam suggests that we can read his work as an “experiment predicated on the perpetual loss of form and authority” (Balaam, Misery’s Mathematics, 21). 48. See West, Transcendental Wordplay. 49. Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading, 77. See also West’s numerous articles on Thoreau and language (edited for the work I cite here, Transcendental Wordplay).

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West generally avoids drawing broad conclusions from his research, but he does suggest a view congenial to the one I sketch here: “while playful philology suggests an original language of nature, a form beneath the flux . . . [in Thoreau] [w]hat we take to be things are revealed as events” (West, Transcendental Wordplay, 468). Gura instructively endorses Channing, on Thoreau: “in much that Mr. Thoreau wrote, there was a philological side,—­this needs to be thoughtfully considered” (Gura, Wisdom, 109). But he takes Thoreau as attached to unchanging essence in nature: “[Thoreau] demonstrated language was not an arbitrary imposition of sound upon object but stemmed organically from the very core of the empirical objects themselves, thus offering men profound clues to the organization of the universe” (110). In my view, Thoreau’s naturalism aims not at the “core of the empirical objects,” but at the seasonal processes his language seems, like natural objects, to undergo. 50. An obvious example for Thoreau are the economic metaphors of property and American capitalism that saturate the values implicit in everyday language, whose evil culminates in their application to the slave economy: see Cavell, Senses. 51. The wonderful phrase is Geoffrey Hartman’s. In a discussion of Raymond Williams’s metaphor of “rephrasing” culture, he notes that the metaphor helps us see Williams’s conviction that language itself is “part of the harmed environment” (Hartman, “Question,” 63). 52. Chow, “Partial Readings,” 121–­22. 53. Dimick, “Disordered,” 701. 54. Kucich, “Lost,” 27. 55. Channing, Thoreau, 314–­15. 56. Foster, Thoreau’s Country, 185. See also Walls, Henry David Thoreau. 57. Foster, Thoreau’s Country, 192. 58. Thoreau, Walden, 468. 59. Thoreau, Journal, 26 June 1840. 60. Cavell, Senses of Walden. 61. Cameron, Writing Nature. 62. Johnson, “Obscurity in Walden,” in A World of Difference. 63. Thoreau, Journal, October 18 1856 (cited in Channing, Thoreau, 68–­69). 64. Thoreau, Walden, 137. 65. A journal entry may be used as a reference point: “On the 2d I saw the sand foliage in the Cut; pretty good. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is spring” (Thoreau, Journal, 8 February 1854). 66. See Root, “Proteus Within,” for an excellent reading of the influence of Goethe’s morphological writings on Thoreau. 67. Thoreau, Walden, 288. 68. Root, “Proteus Within,” 245.

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69. Channing, Thoreau, 322. 70. Thoreau, Walden, 289. 71. Thoreau, Walden, 289, 290. 72. The source is widely acknowledged; see West, Transcendental Wordplay, 183–­89. 73. Kraitsir, Glossology, 153. 74. Gura, Wisdom, 131. 75. Kraitsir, Glossology, 170. 76. Thoreau, Walden, 287. 77. Thoreau, Walden, 286. 78. Emerson, Selected Writings, 446. 79. Thoreau, Walden, 298. 80. Thoreau, Journals, 20 October 1852; Thoreau, Walden, 133. 81. Cameron, Writing Nature; Arsić, Bird Relics. 82. Thoreau, Essays, 248. 83. Thoreau, Essays, 501. 84. Thoreau, Essays, 234 85. Thoreau, Journal, 3 January 1853. 86. Channing, Thoreau, 77. 87. Emerson, Selected Writings, 332. 88. Cited in Channing, Thoreau, 72–­73. 89. Foster, Thoreau’s Country, 13. As Foster demonstrates, Thoreau’s techniques of reading the landscape show a balance of attention to wilderness and to “humanized landscape,” so that, along with a sharp sense of loss, Thoreau also felt as keenly an “exhilaration” at “living in a cultural landscape in which people and the environment together generated diverse patterns in nature that changed with every walk and each succeeding day” (13). 90. Channing, Thoreau, 319. 91. Thoreau, Essays, 452. 92. Herder, Philosophical Writings, 117. 93. Thoreau, Journal, 25 October 1857. 94. Gura, Wisdom, 123. 95. Cited in Channing, Thoreau, 314–­15. The joining of the first phrase with the latter paragraph is Channing’s innovation; both are from Thoreau’s Journals, but separated by nearly a decade (11 September 1850 and 11 March 1859). 96. O’Brien, Firsting, 105; Thoreau, Journal, 23 January 1858, 3 February 1859. 97. Thoreau, Journal, 3 February 1859. 98. Du Ponceau, “Translator’s Preface,” 83. 99. Cited in Andresen, Linguistics, 95. 100. What Schoolcraft called the “unchangeable character of the Indian

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mind” conforms with a logic of Native disappearance in a statement like William Rawle’s in 1826, to the Philadelphia Historical Society, supporting his colleague Du Ponceau’s views on the sophistication of languages gleaned from linguistic data collected with the help of Native speakers: “the tribe whose peculiar and extraordinary dialect rivets the attention of the philologist, moulders into nothing before he becomes master of its language; and the vocabulary laboriously collected, and the grammar scientifically derived from it, in a few years remain the only certain evidence of its former existence” (Rawle, “Vindication,” xxii). Benevolent defense and concern for intellectual pursuit are woven over a texture of emotional distance from what has happened to the speakers of this “peculiar and extraordinary dialect,” “a few years” since their “laboriously collected” words are no longer believed to be in living use. That narrative of Native decline and disappearance works its way into Thoreau’s thought, reflected in relatively infrequent commentary found in his Indian Notebooks, begun around 1845: “They waste, they moulder away, and as Charlevoix says of the Indians of Canada, they disappear” (Notebooks, 2:19, cited in Bellin, “Savagists,” 9). Compare Branka Arsić’s vitalist exploration of Thoreau’s interest in Native burial and mourning practices (Bird Relics). 101. Wheeler, To Live, 87. 102. Parker, The Sound, 43. 103. Bellin, “Savagists,” 10. 104. Bellin, “Savagists,” 2. 105. For the remarkable story of Ojibwe/Anishanaabe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, which I set aside for reasons of space, see Parker, The Sound; and for a meticulous and revelatory approach to the world in which Schoolcraft worked, focused on Jane’s sister Charlotte, see Wisecup, Assembled for Use. 106. Bauman and Briggs, Voices, 248. 107. For a fuller account of Schoolcraft’s administrative and cultural labor, which had a deep and (in O’Brien’s sense) “lasting” impact in shaping and justifying both interior colonial policy and popular ideas about Native life, see Harvey, Native Tongues. For a fuller reading of Thoreau’s reception of Schoolcraft, see again Bellin, “Savagists.” 108. Heckewelder, History, Manners, 76. 109. I derive these rough dates with the help of careful comparisons of Thoreau’s Indian Notebooks with his journals and reading, undertaken in several dissertations: see Rose, “Tracking”; and Bray, “More Perfect.” 110. Smith, “Peter Stephen Du Ponceau,” 144. 111. Brooks, Common Pot, 247; Murray, Forked Tongues, 5. 112. Eckstorm, Penobscot, 68. 113. Swiggers, “American Linguistics,” 37; see also Aarsleff, “Introduction.”

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114. See Stocking, “The Boas Plan.” Compare Simpson, “Why White People”; and Baker, From Savage, 156–­219. 115. Boas, “Alternating Sounds,” 48, 51. 116. Boas, “Alternating Sounds,” 52. 117. Laurent, New Familiar, 205. Conclusion: Deracination The epigraph to the conclusion is drawn from Turner, Africanisms, 256. 1. Saussure, Course, 232. 2. Said, Orientalism, 150. 3. Cited in Olender, Languages of Paradise, 96. For background, see Joseph, “Pictet’s Du Beau.” 4. Young, “Race and Language”; Joseph, “Language and ‘Psychological Race.’” 5. See Voloshinov, Marxism, on “native philology.” See Gal and Irvine, Signs of Difference, for concrete examples. 6. Sapir, “Herder’s Ursprung,” 32. 7. Sapir, “Herder’s Ursprung,” 2. 8. See Simpson, “Why White People.” For accounts of the later course of racial “plasticity” in liberal discourse and ecological and material forms, see Thakkar, “Reeducation,” and Huang, “Ecologies,” respectively. 9. “Were a language ever completely ‘grammatical’ it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak” (Sapir, Language, 39). “The drift of a language is constituted by the unconscious selection on the part of its speakers of those individual variations that are cumulative in some special direction . . . They themselves are random phenomena (not ultimately random, of course, only relatively so), like the waves of the sea . . . only those individual variations embody it or carry it which move in a certain direction” (Sapir, Language, 155). 10. Sapir, “Herder’s Ursprung,” 1–­2. 11. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 352. 12. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 612. 13. Walcott, “Diaspora,” 355. 14. Joseph, “Linguistic Sign,” 69. 15. See Gal and Irvine, Signs; Aarsleff, From Locke; Morpurgo-­Davies, History of Linguistics; Andreson, Linguistics; Sampson, Schools; Alter, Whitney, 53–­ 65; Dowling, Language and Decadence; Beer, “Darwin”; and Jakobson, “World Response.” 16. See Silverstein, “Whitney on Language,” x–­x xiii. 17. Rusert, Fugitive, 220.

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18. Timpanaro, “Friedrich Schlegel,” xii. For Timpanaro, this overcorrection persisted in orthodox linguistics up to the 1970s. 19. Whitney, Essays, 326. 20. Whitney’s very usage—­exaggerated for rhetorical effect?—­reinforces the virulent racial reason inherited in the organicism underwritten by the terms “blood” and “stock,” while the facts of routinized sexual violence under plantation slavery, and the related history of racial passing, go unnoted. 21. The nature of the voluntarism of arbitrariness is complicated. Charles Darwin quotes a relevant passage in the chapter from Descent of Man that deals with language: “[Whitney] observes that the desire of communication between man is the living force, which, in the development of language, ‘works both consciously and unconsciously; consciously as regards the immediate end to be attained; unconsciously as regards the further consequences of the act’” (108). While Whitney insisted on linguistic arbitrariness, its precise meaning has been differently interpreted; compare Coseriu, Der Physei-­Thesei-­Streit, 23–­24; and Silverstein, “Whitney on Language,” 12. 22. Voloshinov uses the metaphor of language in the form of a dead body to characterize the rationalist tradition and classically trained cultural formations responsible for producing nineteenth-­ century philology. Such “philologism” gives rise to the “stable,” “self-­equivalent” structures imagined by Saussure, unaffected by individual utterances: “European linguistic thought formed and matured over concern with the cadavers of written languages; almost all its basic categories, its basic approaches and techniques were worked out in the process of reviving these cadavers” (Voloshinov, Marxism, 71)—­as though, as Wordsworth put it, we first “murder to dissect” and then, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, try to reanimate it. 23. Rusert, Fugitive, 220. 24. Somewhere along the dizzying path of his lifelong studies, across four continents and touching numerous African languages and New World creoles, Turner found time to study descriptive linguistics with Sapir while a research fellow at Yale, in 1938–­39. See Wade-­Lewis, “Turner/Herskovits,” 396. 25. See Mufwene on the racializing premises of some “substratist” theories of creole formation, which assumed that, for example, “African languages [were] ‘primitive,’ ‘instinctive,’ in ‘natural’ state, and simpler than the ‘cultivated’ European languages with which they came in contact” (Mufwene, “Pidgin and Creole Languages”). 26. Cited in Turner, Africanisms, 8, 6. 27. Ambrose Gonzalez proposed that “slovenly” speakers of the creole were unable to articulate English properly because of “clumsy tongues,” “flat noses,” and “thick lips” (cited in Turner, Africanisms, 8).

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28. See Wade-­Lewis, “Turner/Herskovits.” 29. Baker, From Savage. 30. See Baker, Anthropology, which deals extensively with some of the complexities emerging from this transferral of visibility. 31. Cited in Baker, Anthropology, 25. 32. Allan and Viswanathan, “Heterodox Philology,” 249. 33. Allan and Viswanathan, “Heterodox Philology,” 249. 34. For a wonderful account that assembles numerous references to this “daffodil gap”—­and that practices an innovative historicism by dislodging Wordsworth from his fixed position at the heart of the romantic period—­see Bergren, Global Wordsworth. 35. Moten, Black and Blur, 15. 36. Moten, Black and Blur, 11. 37. Blanchot, Disaster, 93. 38. For a more thorough linguistic examination of the song, comparing it to contemporary Mende, see Sengova, “Recollections,” 182. 39. Hartman, “Time of Slavery”; Hartman, Wayward Lives, 347. 40. Hartman, Wayward Lives, 345. Hartman models in her recent critical practice a way of reading the durable objects of the past slowly, as still moving through the present. I am reminded of Cedric Robinson’s comment that “the encounter between African and European had been abrupt, not so much in historical terms as in philosophical ones” (308). 41. Dawley, “A Mende Song.” 42. Koroma, Benya, and Opala, “Amelia’s Song.” 43. Turner, Africanisms, 13. 44. Turner, Africanisms, 12.

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Wolff, Tristram. “Romantic Stone Speech and the Appeal of the Inorganic.” English Literary History 84, no. 3 (2017): 617–­48. Wolfson, Susan, and William Galperin. “The Romantic Century.” In Selected Papers, Presentations and Other Materials from NASSR 1996 and 1997: “Romanticism” in Crisis. Romantic Circles. http:​/​​/​romantic​-circles​.org​/​. Woolard, Kathryn. “Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry.” In Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds., Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. Wordsworth, William. Selected Prose. Ed. John O. Hayden. London: Penguin, 1988. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel T. Coleridge. Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads. Ed. R. L. Brett and Alun R. Jones. London: Routledge, 2005.  Wright, Michelle M. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Wyatt, John. Wordsworth and the Geologists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.  Wynter, Sylvia. “1492, a New World View.” In Vera L. Hyatt and Rex M. Nettleford, eds., Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, 5–­57. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Wynter, Sylvia. “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” in Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century 1, no. 1 (1994): 42–­73. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—­an Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–­337. Wynter, Silvia, and Kathryn McKittrick. “Conversation.” In Kathryn McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human As Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Yolton, John W.  Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-­Century Britain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Young, Robert. “Race and Language in the Two Saussures.” In Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford, eds., Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity, 63–­78. New York: Continuum Books, 2002. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990. Youngquist, Paul, ed. Race, Romanticism and the Atlantic. New York: Routledge, 2016. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Zammito, John. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.

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Index

Aarsleff, Hans, 10, 139, 263n46, 273n113 Abenaki (language), 183, 186, 218 abstraction, as linguistic path toward civilization, viii, 43, 74, 81; Tooke and, 154; unfitness for, 186 acculturation, 28–29; colonial mastery and, 107 actualism, linguistic, 24, 25, 55, 63, 86–87, 187, 188–89, 221–22, 228; different kinds of time and, 118; and geological time, 129; gray romanticism and, 93, 139; as historical sensibility, 93; and lyric or poetic expression, 23, 93; Wheatley and, 55, 91, 92 Adam, Barbara, 17 Adorno, Theodor W., 38, 39 affectability (Silva), 50, 88 African diaspora, 20–22, 61, 64, 220. See also slavery; Wheatley, Phillis African retentions, 22, 47, 230 afterlife, 82, 125; in The Book of Thel, 123; language’s, 83–84. See also death; Wheatley, Phillis Agassiz, Louis, 196 agency, 26–27, 28, 50; compromised, 82; debates about, 94–95; dispersal of, 49, 92–93; and homo faber, 118;

Humboldt’s understanding of, 79; in language change, 88; in linguistic production, 31; suppressing, 86; Wheatley and, 65–66, 82, 84, 90, 98. See also will; involuntarism Agnani, Sunil, 29, 61, 91 Ahmed, Siraj, 7, 27, 30, 45, 104 Alcoff, Linda Martín, 184 alien word (Voloshinov), 34, 37, 38, 43, 111; diasporic claim to, 65; romanticism’s reaction to, 82; turned into uprooted word, 45–46; uprooting of, 76; Wheatley’s reaction to, 82 alienation: forms of linguistic, 8, 19, 42, 59, 65, 188; Marx and Engels on, 40; social, 7, 35, 222 Allewaert, Monique, 66, 96 allochronism (Fabian), 36, 37, 62 alternating sounds, phenomenon of (Boas), 218 American Philosophical Society, 215–16 Anamaboe/Anomobu, 61–62, 68, 98, 136 Anderson, Benedict, 35, 49, 57 Anglo-Saxonism, 13, 139–42, 157–58, 263n46 Apess, William, 3, 37 Arabic (language), 79, 107, 139 307

308

Index

Aravamudan, Srinivas, 140 arbitrariness, 52, 160, 275n21; Keach on, 87 Arsić, Branka, 14, 205 Aryan (language group), 39, 41; and Semitic (language group), 37, 46, 217. See also Indo-European Atlantic passage, 19. See also slavery attachments (linguistic), 56, 120, 134, 160 Attean, Joseph, 184–85, 208, 211, 216 audibility: of African American culture, 230; and “condition of being heard” (Collins), 63; and the ear’s “rules,” 182, 212; and ethnography, 218, 234; and primitivism, 184; and racialization (Topsy), 223; in Wheatley, 63, 66, 69, 83, 89 Austronesian (language group), 42, 78. See also Kawi (Old Javanese) autonomy, 4, 42, 55, 98, 126, 129, 133; versus heteronomy, 88, 92, 95, 252n87, 253n112. See also will Baker, Lee, 230–31 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 57; and concept of addressivity, 121 Bakhtin circle, 34, 40 Balaam, Peter, 270n47 ballad collection, 142, 260n2. See also “Lyrical Ballads”; “A Mende Song” Barlow, Paul, 102, 103 Basque (language), 44 Bauman, Richard, 41, 75, 214, 215 Beauvoir, Simone de, 3 Beer, Gillian, 94 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 34–35 Bergren, Katherine, 179 Bergson, Henri, 34

Bewell, Alan, 13, 142, 143, 144, 168, 175, 248n18, 267n103 Bhabha, Homi, 62 “Bhagavad Gita,” translated Bhagvat-Geeta (Wilkins), 12, 101, 102, 103, 106–8, 109, 120, 122, 136 Bible: age of earth and, 112; David and Goliath story, 95–96, 97; Genesis, 127, 130; and biblical chronology, 116 Bindman, David, 103 Black romantic, 5, 22, 61, 69. See also romanticism; Wheatley, Phillis Blake, William, 4, 5, 12–13, 15, 26, 27–28, 31, 32, 87, 105, 115, 116, 191, 228; All Religions Are One, 100; The Book of Thel, 12, 110, 118, 121–27, 128, 130, 131, 136, 137; The Book of Urizen, 12, 47, 104, 105–6, 108, 110, 116, 118, 127, 128, 129–33, 134, 136, 137; The Bramins, 102–3, 104, 106, 136; “The Clod and the Pebble,” 12, 26, 99, 108, 118, 119, 121, 127, 128; creation and, 101; deep time and, 119, 142; dependency and, 133–34; direct references to language, 119; geo-imaginary of, 109; geology and, 113; gray romanticism of, 110, 136; imperative against imperial modes of knowledge, 118–19; Jerusalem, 119–20; language and, 108, 127; Laocoon, 102; linguistic subject, 12–13; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 130; material world and, 132; materialism and, 100, 108, 135, 136–37; naturalism and, 100, 121, 128–29; nature and, 13, 135; and Orientalism, 106–8; on Poetic Genius, 100–101; senses in, 109; Songs of Experience, 111,

Index

127; Songs of Innocence, 127; Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 26; South Asian literature/cosmology and, 102; stony images of, 111; supposed antimaterialism of, 113; theory of language, 99, 108, 120; “To Tirzah,” 111, 125, 126, 136 Blanchot, Maurice, 3, 23, 232 Bloomfield, Leonard, 234 Boas, Franz, 14, 22, 47, 217–18, 220–21 Böhme, Jakob, 120–21 Boston Mission Society, 44 Boudinot, Elias, 28 Brand, Dionne, 17 Bréal, Michel, 39, 46, 85, 94, 220, 225 Brennan, Timothy, 7, 43 Briggs, Charles, 41, 75 Britain: Anglo-Saxon feeling and, 140; empire of, 106–8, 129, 179; possessiveness over literary property of colonies, 12, 106; sense of Westernness, 140, 143. See also colonial knowledge production; colonialism Brooks, Joanna, 83 Brooks, Lisa, 14, 184, 216 Bryant, Jacob, 101, 102 Buffon, Comte de, 66 Burke, Kenneth, 38–39, 239n14, 256n52 Buschmann, J. C. Edward, 77–78, 80 Butler, Judith, 26, 134, 258n81 Butler, Marylin, 249n44 Byrd, Jodi, 43–44 Cadava, Eduardo, 188–89 Cameron, Sharon, 14, 198, 205 Carby, Hazel, 63 Cass, Lewis, 215 Cassirer, Ernst, 128

309

catastrophism (geological), 24 Cavell, Stanley, 193, 198, 258–59n81, 255n31, 271n50 Celtic (language), 44. See also Indo-European Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 22 Chander, Manu, 6, 7 Channing, Ellery, 194, 202, 207, 208, 270–71n49 Chen, Mel, 118 Cherokee (language), 28 Cherokee Phoenix (newspaper), 28 Chiles, Katy L., 97 Chinese (language), 77, 79 Chow, Juliana, 195 chronopolitics, 7; in Herder, 34, 52; Mills on, 241n65; romantic, 10, 15; of textualism as linguistic ideology, 38 civilization: as everyday process, 82; hierarchy of, 4, 149; language as measure of, 28–29, 46, 74 (see also Smith, Adam); mixed durations and, 159; stadial histories of, 11, 41 Clark, T. J., 135 Clarkson, Thomas, 164 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 13, 86, 102, 191, 194, 198, 199; Biographia Literaria, 147, 161, 163, 164; disavowal of Lyrical Ballads, 161; dissolving/ melting and, 168; “The Dungeon,” 166–67, 179; “The Eolian Harp,” 146; etymological thought of, 146, 154; experiments in form, 143; “Fears in Solitude,” 163; on imagination, 147, 165; language change and, 162–63; language growth and, 160–61, 168, 170, 172; mixed durations and, 159; neologisms, 163; “The Nightingale,” 165–66, 174;

310

Index

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (cont.) sign production and, 147; Tooke and, 154, 156, 157, 162, 170; use of “arbitrary,” 87; Wheatley and, 163–64, 165; Wordsworth and, 147, 164–65, 176. See also Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge) Collins, Patricia Hill, 63 colonial knowledge production, 75–76, 88; agents of, 27, 78. See also indigenous languages; Native American languages colonialism, 8, 42, 53, 76, 115; comparative philology and, 139; Herder’s criticism of, 48; linguistic data and, 42–43, 44; obligation of benevolence, 107; Wordsworth and, 173, 175. See also Haiti Comhaire-Sylvain, Suzanne, 22 comparative grammar, 45, 46, 76, 85 Comte, Auguste, 85 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 41, 74, 134 contact zone multilingualism, 44, 185, 234 Cratylist theory, 33, 121, 194, 203–4 Crawfurd, John, 45, 78–79 creole/creolization, 21, 81, 229–30, 249n37, 275n24, 275n25. See also Gullah criticism: anachronistic situation of, 9; as “disintegrating act” (Burke), 22; eclecticism as method of, 10; rhetorical, 32, 198, 265n69; “stone-colored” (Fry), 32, 148 Cronon, William, 211 cultivation, lyric experiment with (Posmentier), 89 cultural relativism, 37, 149, 221 culture: and “culture concept,” 221;

Herder’s thinking on, 47; rephrasing, 271n51; study of African American, 230. See also civilization daffodil gap (Wordsworth), 231 Darwin, Charles, 46, 94, 116, 196 data, linguistic, 19, 42–43, 44, 234 Daut, Marlene, 239n15, 268n116 David and Goliath story, 95–96, 97 Davis, Jenny, 41, 43 Dawley, Amelia, 18, 20, 229, 232–33 de Man, Paul, 31, 109, 265n69, 259n82 death: anxiety over, 118; in The Book of Thel, 121–27; as petrification, 97; return to Africa in, 64; vulnerability to, 96. See also afterlife Declaration of Independence, US, 2 Declaration of the Independence of the Blacks of St Domingo, 180 deep time, 100, 108, 109, 112, 116, 119, 130, 136, 142, 196. See also geology, history of; stone Delaware (language), 77, 212 democratization of language, 155. See also Tooke, John Horne dependency, 56, 129, 133–34; “freedom” from, 42 deracination, 8, 14, 19, 21, 92, 219–35 Derrida, Jacques, 30, 240n48, 249n45 desynonymy, 162–63, 164 detachability: individual, 41, 74; as “freedom,” 74–76, 81; sonic, 90, 209 determination, outer (Silva), 52 determinism: biological, 228; environmental, 66; racial, 4, 51, 220–21 Diaby, Bakary, 40 Dictionary (Johnson), 141–42 Diderot, Denis, 12, 112, 114–15, 128 Dimick, Sarah, 195

Index

disposition: linguistic, 6, 23, 29, 62, 63, 80, 83; mixed, 7, 72, 221; relativized, 37; subjective, 144 Doyle, Laura, 140 Du Bois, W. E. B., 20, 22, 47, 107, 226 Du Ponceau, Peter, 14, 182, 212, 215, 216, 217, 272–73n100; encounter with Abenaki Colonel “Louis” (Niman-rigounant), 216 Dupré, Antoine, 13, 179, 187 Durand, Oswald, 180 Dykes, Eva Beatrice, 21, 22, 231–32 dysselection (Wynter), 35, 94 East India Company, 107 echo (Wheatley), 90–91, 95 Eckstorm, Fanny Hardy, 184, 216 education, access to, 153–54 elegies, 82–84. See also Wheatley, Phillis Eliot, George, 127 Eliot’s Bible, 183 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13, 31, 102, 116, 182–83, 190, 210, 269n23, 270n47; claims about language, 189; fossil poetry, 189, 204; idealism, 192; inversion of language, 199; linguistic actualism and, 188; Nature, 190, 192, 203; nature and, 202; “The Poet,” 186, 190, 192; on speech as thunder, 207; on tropes, 187; “The Uses of Natural History,” 191 empire: Blake against, 12, 108, 129; British, 79, 175, 179, 267–68n114; European, 50, 55; Herder against, 48; grammar of (Sorenson), 29. See also colonialism Encyclopédie, 110 Engels, Friedrich, 40

311

English (language): as “civilizing” language (Fanon), 68; Coleridge’s coinages, 163; Gullah as creolized form of, 230; Johnson’s Dictionary and, 141–42; Joseph Attean and, 185–86; Thoreau’s “English language,” 198; and Anglo-Saxon etymology, 150; under threat from decay, 141; Wheatley’s acquisition of, 71–72; Wheatley’s translation of Ovid into, 90; Whitney on race and, 227 enlightenment: Black, 69–70; civilizing, 28, 48, 61, 98, 142, 149; in colonial spaces, 28, 29, 54, 247n4; as discourse of freedom, 65; disintegrating tendencies of (Lukacs), 53; French, 180; internal plurality of (Agnani), 61, 144; models of the subject, 32; radical, 12, 14, 28, 42, 52, 91, 114; Scottish, 84, 110; Wheatley’s relation to, 62, 72, 92 environmental criticism, 7, 9, 89, 148, 195–96 Epea Pteroenta (Tooke). See Tooke, John Horne Epicurus, 51 Erkkila, Betsy, 65 Errington, Joseph, 43, 243n101, 243–44n104 Esterhammer, Angela, 120, 257n63 eternity, 124–25. See also afterlife etymologism (Derrida), 30 etymology, 146, 161, 194–208 Eurocentrism, Herder on, 48, 52, 53–54 Examiner, 154 extraction, linguistic: 43, 44, 107, 217, 260n2; Davis’s definition of, 41; as discourse “lifted” from context

312

Index

extraction, linguistic (cont.) of utterance, 1, 19; in Flaxman’s frieze, 103–4. See also alienation; alien word; uprooted word Fabian, Johannes, 36, 85 Fanon, Frantz, 60, 65, 70, 111, 136 Fante (language), 61 Fauset, Arthur, 22 Ferguson, Frances, 148, 159, 167, 169 figuration, 189, 269–70n32 Fioretos, Aris, 25 Flaxman, John, 103–4, 105, 106, 108, 136 folk concept, 47, 49. See also primitivism; nativism; vernacularization Foster, David, 196, 272n89 Foucault, Michel (Order of Things), 10, 23, 40, 45, 86, 88, 134, 139, 149 Francis, James E., Sr., 16 freedom, 6, 92; contradictions of, 65; language and, 79; racialization of, 140; of subject, 2; unripeness for, 98; Wheatley’s, 71. See also liberty; unfreedom; Wheatley, Phillis French Caribbean, 29, 106. See also Haiti Freud, Sigmund, 116 Fry, Paul, 32, 148 Frye, Northrop, 127 Fuller, Margaret, 143 Gaier, Ulrich, 57 Gal, Susan, 86–87 Gallatin, Albert, 212 Galperin, William, 18, 148 Garcia, Edgar, 35 Garraway, Doris, 179 Gates, Henry Louis, 69 Gébelin, Antoine Court de, 194 Genesis, 127, 130

geology, history of, 93, 100, 110–11, 115, 119, 124, 128; and deep time, 100, 112, 116; and geological change (Lyell), 24; and legibility of geologic record, 129; and race, 33, 89. See also Hutton, James; stone Gikandi, Simon, 7 Glissant, Édouard, 29, 35, 38, 88, 89 Gobineau, Arthur de, 41 Godwin, William, 141, 142, 160, 170 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 12, 13, 112, 115, 182, 201, 218; “On Granite,” 117; on human heart, 117, 124; materialism of, 128; on stones, 115–16 Goldsmith, Steven, 257n62 Goldstein, Amanda Jo, 106 Goodman, Kevis, 32, 168 Gothic (language), 44. See also Indo-European Goudie, Sean X., 67, 72 Gould, Stephen Jay, 113 gradualism, 24, 25, 87, 148 grammars, 43, 78, 274n9; of empire, 29; leaky (Sapir), 221; philosophical, 150, 263n46; racializing, 27; sterility of, 204 gray romanticism, 10–11, 25–37, 48, 67, 92, 93, 186–87; actualism and, 93, 139; Blake’s, 110, 136; giving language different kinds of time and, 35, 36, 82; grayness of, 33; linguistic politics of, 10; naturalism of, 35, 39; resistance to objectifying tendencies, 36; as resistive mode of thinking, 32; stoniness of, 148; Wheatley’s variation on, 93 Gray, Thomas, 83 grayness, 25, 126. See also gray romanticism

Index

Greek (language), 44. See also Indo-European Greenham, David, 270n36 Greer, Germaine, 127 Gullah (creole), 15, 21, 229–30, 233–35. See also “Mende Song, A” Gunn, Robert Lawrence, 72 Gura, Philip, 198, 204, 270–71n49 Hacking, Ian, 246n153 Haiti, 13, 14, 54, 91, 178, 179. See also Dupré, Antoine; L’Ouverture, Toussaint Hamilton, Alexander (Orientalist), 27 Hansberry, Lorraine, 20 Harris, James, 150, 152, 153, 156 Hartman, Geoffrey, 31–32, 271n51 Hartman, Saidiya, 22, 178 Hastings, Warren, 106–7 Hazlitt, William, 151, 154, 155, 156 Hebrew (language), 77 Heckewelder, John, 14, 212, 213–14, 215. See also missionary Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 51 Herder, J. G., 1–3, 9, 23, 37, 82, 108, 115, 134, 187–88, 189, 208–9, 210, 211, 215, 221, 222; agency and, 49, 88, 92–93; on alienating language from speech, 51; arbitrary language and, 52, 55; cultural relativism of, 37; on culture, 47; ecological language theory, 59, 148; on Eurocentrism, 48, 53–54; folk tradition and, 49; historicism of, 37, 49–50; in history of racial thought, 48; “The I: A Fragment,” 56–57, 133; interiorizing of poesis, 52; on language as genius of people, 48–49; on linguistic origins, 54; monism and, 50–51, 58; naturalism of, 48,

313

52–53, 56; Noyes on, 52; otherness, relation to, 2–3; primitivism of, 49–50; private-property language of, 57; “Self: A Fragment,” 133; Spinozism of, 53; on stone, 110; on thought-images, 17, 34; translation of Wilkins’s Bhagvat-Geeta, 102; Treatise on the Origin of Language, 208–9; will and, 51, 52, 54, 57 “Herderian,” 36–37, 49, 50, 52, 210, 245n46 Heringman, Noah, 113, 128, 239n27, 259n84 Hermes (Harris), 150, 152–53, 156 Herron, Carolivia, 62 Herskovits, Frances and Melville, 22 Herva, Lorenzo, 45 Hessell, Nikki, 6, 7, 29 heterochrony (Sachs), 34, 36 historical method, 23, 45, 85, 232 historicism: critical, 10; ethnocentric, 48; Herder’s, 37, 49–50, 245n127; Mufti’s critique of, 37, 50; romantic, 18; universalizing, 35 historicity, 40, 41, 149; as against ahistoricity, 88; as a measure of civilization, 46. See also racialization History: language’s acquisition of, 23; linear, 101; progressive, 4, 6, 10; racialization of, 50. See also civilization History of the Two Indies, The (Raynal et al), 91 history of linguistics: and the collective subject, 84–86; and geology, 24–25; as social science, 220–21, 224–28; Turner in, 18 Hobbes, Thomas, 74 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 109 Hopkins, Pauline, 21

314

Index

Humboldt, Alexander von, 44, 115, 196, 212, 226 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 2, 25–28, 31, 33–34, 40, 42, 45, 47, 72, 79; “Baskenfragment,” 25; “Bhagavad-Gita” and, 102; concession to nonknowledge, 55; on freedom, 80–81; historicist objectivity of, 81; On the Kawi Language of the Island of Java (Kawi-Werk), 42, 77–81; on language as fashioned organism, 40; language change and, 25, 26–27; laws of formation, 80; linguistic freedom and, 82; response to uprooted word, 34; Sanskritist phase, 102; on social subject, 51; sources of, 44, 78–79 Hunt, Leigh, 154 Hurston, Zora Neale, 22, 47, 91, 226; and the “anthropological eye,” 231 Hutton, James, 12, 110, 112–13, 117–18, 119, 128, 222, 255n35, 256n43 hylozoism, 115 Hymes, Dell, 34, 245n126 imagination, 6, 135, 147, 164, 165, 167. See also Wheatley, Phillis Imlay, Gilbert, 164 India, as literary property of England, 106 “Indian ear,” 212 Indian Removal Act of 1830, 215 “Indian timelessness,” 28–29 Indigenous languages (New World), 45, 182; reduction of into Latin, 76 Indo-European (language group), 44, 46, 217; considered superior, 79; as mythic origin, 86; as organic, 88; power of as origins, 94. See also Aryan; comparative grammar; history of linguistics

inorganicism, 39, 92 involuntarism, 23–24, 31, 41, 52, 56, 60, 61, 87, 166–67, 133, 209–11. See also will; receptivity Israel, Jonathan, 246n144 James, C. L. R., 22 Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne, 69, 91 Jefferson, Thomas, 70 Johnson, Barbara, 66, 198, 265n69, 259n82 Johnson, Samuel, 141–42 Jones, William, 15, 16, 27, 44, 45, 102, 104, 226; “Anniversary Discourses,” 16; Flaxman’s relief carving of, 103–4, 105, 106, 108, 136 Jordan, June, 67, 68, 70 Joseph, John, 225, 274n3, 274n4 juridical identity, 134 Kaplan, Cora, 178 Kawi (Old Javanese) (language), 42, 77–81. See also Humboldt, Wilhelm von Kazanjian, David, 71 Keach, William, 87, 250n50 knots, as image of attachment, 132–35 Kraitsir, Charles, 194, 202–4 Kucich, John, 196 Lake Poets, 161, 162, 194 language: arbitrary, 55; in The Book of Thel, 126–27; as common property, 154; as constitutive activity, 23, 24 (See also actualism); as deliberate logical creation, 226; democratization of, 155 (See also Tooke, John Horne); despotism of, 141; developmental continuity of, 56; ecology of, 11, 51, 59; familiarity and, 53; felt, 144–45, 176; fixedness or unfixed-

Index

ness of, 217; giving geological features to, 109, 111 (See also stone); giving time to, 23–24, 25–26, 29–30, 35, 36, 37, 40, 82, 86, 121, 143, 146; gray, 148; green, 32, 148; as historical object, 23, 94; historicization of, 41; living, 7–8; material change in, 154; in motion, 11, 119, 136; nation and, 84; natural history of, 38; nature and, 10, 24, 31, 116; organic growth and, 109; as partial, 269n23; polished vs. unpolished, 27; race and, 11, 15, 38, 41, 46, 47, 60, 72, 77, 141, 227–28; as root, 38; softer, 47, 62, 66, 86, 87, 166; as solid, 7, 93, 158; as soluble, 7, 93, 156, 157, 158; stone compared to, 109, 111, 116; as writing, 30. See also philology language change, 8, 23, 25, 47, 92–93, 270n47; Coleridge and, 161–63, 166; Herderian model of, 51; Humboldt and, 26–27; laws and, 79, 85, 160; metaphors permissible for, 46, 244n113; organic images for, 30; racializing capacity for, 46, 217; time-lapse views of, 147; Tooke and, 159–60, 166; Wordsworth and, 166. See also creole/creolization; “Indian” timelessness language labor (Robinette), 55 language study: colonial knowledge production and, 88; shift in, 45, 47, 139 (See also comparative grammar) Language You Cry In, The (film), 233 Laocoon, 102, 104 Latin (language), 44, 140. See also Indo-European Latour, Bruno, 32 Laurent, Joseph, 14, 218 Le Clercq, Chrestien, 75, 76. See also missionary

315

leaf’s-eye-view, 201–2 Leavitt, John, 112 Levinson, Marjorie, 32, 123, 127, 135 linguistic paleontology, 220 linguistic reduction: by abbreviation, 156, 161; nominalist, 38; to roots, 220; of speech to writing, 43, 44, 76, 243n104; Urizenic, 108, 133 Locke, Alain, 21, 47 Locke, John, 41, 42, 57, 160, 189, 190, 231; arbitrariness and, 52, 80, 87; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 41; on freedom of detachment, 74–75; on independent linguistic agent, 84; individualist voluntarism of, 41–42; linguistic ideologies, 49; material force of language, 134–35; model of historical agency, 51; Rivett on, 75–76; on signification, 55; sources of, 42, 75–76; Tooke and, 150; Wordsworth and, 144 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 91, 146–47, 177–79. See also Haiti Lowe, Lisa, 18, 23 Lukács, Georg, 53 Lyell, Charles, 24, 112, 270n47. See also geology, history of Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge), 13, 47, 138, 140, 146, 149, 167, 169, 175; Coleridge’s disavowal of, 161; encounter in, 143; etymology in, 161, 171; historical moment of, 138–39, 141; linguistic disposition of, 142, 144; on naming of places, 168; “The Nightingale,” 165–66; Preface to, 157, 159, 161, 168–69; Tooke’s influence and, 139. See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Wordsworth, William

316

Index

lyricization (Jackson and Prins), 19, 231, 238n4 Makdisi, Saree, 12, 13, 40, 101, 107, 140, 143, 144, 259n95, 267n103 Mars, Jean Price, 22 Marx, Karl, 40, 87, 246–47n156 Marxian thought, 23, 34, 40, 57, 79, 87 Massey, Doreen, 21 materialism, 8, 109–110; and alienness of matter, 111, 115; Blake and, 100, 108, 132, 135, 136–37; Diderot’s, 128; Goethe’s, 128; material imaginary in, 37–38. See also quasi-material sense of language Mathes, Carmen Faye, 177 McLane, Maureen, 13, 34, 143–44, 175, 176, 247n168, 267n103 Mee, John, 141 Mende (language), 18, 20, 234 “Mende Song, A,” 10, 17, 18–23, 219, 229, 230, 231–33; retranslated as “Amelia’s Song,” 233–35 metaphors, natural, 25, 73, 228 Methodism, 70, 84 Mignolo, Walter, 76, 80 Mi’kmaq (language), 42, 75, 76 Mills, Charles, 35, 241n65 missionary: and the alien word, 43; domestic (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), 222; Jesuit, 45, 75, 186; and linguistics, 43–45, 75–76, 78; and “missionary speech” (Mudimbe), 243n101; Moravian, 212–13; Topsy as (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), 224; Wheatley’s refusal to become, 70–71 Mitchell, W. J. T., 101, 118, 257n57, 259n82 modernity: accepted speaking-space of, 21; as age of Haiti, 91; “Eu-

ro-chronometric,” 21; primitivist timeline of, 81; standardization of time and, 34; uprootedness and, 3 Momma, Haruko, 40 monism, 11, 58; dynamized, 50–51, 52–53, 245n137; as nondualism, 32, 76, 81, 191; Spinozan, 8, 26, 110, 128 monolingual prejudice (Glissant), 38 Montesquieu, Baron de, 66 Moorhead, Scipio, 63 Morning Post, 177, 178, 181 Morpurgo-Davies, Anna, 46, 239n21 mortality, 118, 121–27, 148. See also afterlife; death Morton, Samuel, 15, 16, 186, 232 Moten, Fred, 125, 231–32, 240n37 Mufti, Aamir, 37, 49, 50, 106, 139, 247n2 Murray, David, 185, 216 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 78–79, 81 Native American languages: Abenaki, 183, 186, 218; Cherokee, 28; Delaware, 77; European theories of language and, 75–76; Mi’kmaq, 75; Penobscot, 14, 16; Wabanaki, 14, 16, 184, 188, 210–11, 217. See also Indigenous languages Native decline, narrative of, 215, 221, 272–73n100 nativism, 11, 29, 131, 139; anticlassical, 142; philological, 140 naturalism, linguistic, and “naturalization,” 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 30, 32, 33, 41, 56, 60, 68, 77, 187, 205, 210, 220, 228, 229; Blake and, 100, 121, 128–29; Böhme’s, 121; gray romantic, 35, 39; Herder’s, 48; Kraitsir’s, 230; naturalizing imagery, 25, 38, 177–78, 228–29; resistant forms of, 31; Spinozan, 51; Wheatley’s

Index

diasporic, 61; Wordsworth’s, 144, 147, 148 nature: animism of, 117; apparent passivity of, 118 (see also stone); as benevolent unfreedom (Herder), 54–55; as compulsion (Blake), 13, 135; differences of scale, 137; distinction from human, 9; language and, 10, 24, 31, 116; racializing, 33 nature imagery, 6, 28, 34, 37–38, 228–29 Nesbitt, Nick, 54 neutrality, scientific, 77 New Philology, 45. See also Philological Revolution nominalism, 38, 73, 147, 261n28 nonknowledge, 2, 55, 129, 183, 222 Novalis, 115 Noyes, John, 52, 246n153 objectivism, abstract (Voloshinov), 43, 228 O’Brien, Jean, 14, 29, 184 Occom, Samson, 183 Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) people, 214–15 Olender, Maurice, 37, 46, 240n37, 252n89 one-world thinking, 49, 106 opacity, linguistic, vii, 22, 23, 76, 89–91, 100, 124, 182 “oral” cultures and orality, 14, 43, 49, 144 organicism, 9, 23, 39–40, 45, 148 organism, grammatical, 46, 79 origins: colonial knowledge production and, 75–76; desire for, 145; essays concerning, 74 (See also Smith, Adam); experience of speech in present and, 158; fixation on, 3, 24–25, 141; Herder on, 54; legitimating myth of, 38–39; location of, 54. See also roots

317

origins-thinking, 31, 36, 127, 130, 219, 251n86 Ortiz Fernandez, Fernando, 22 Ovid, 12, 68, 90, 91, 95. See also Wheatley, Phillis Paine, Thomas, 141 Parker, Robert Dale, 213 Parsons, Elsie Clews, 22 patience, 67–68, 177 Paugus (Pequawket chief), 183 Penobscot (language), 14, 16, 185. See also Native American languages Persian (language), 44, 107, 139. See also Indo-European perspectivism, 37 Philadelphia Historical Society, 272–73n100 Phillis, Age of (Jeffers), 69, 91–92, 98. See also Wheatley, Phillis Philological Revolution, 23, 45 philology, 186, 275n22; colonial logics of, 10–11; comparative, 46–47, 112, 139, 149; decolonization of, 8; English, 139; fixation on origins, 24–25; native or “folk,” 49, 142, 220; race science and, 46, 60; radical, 139 (See also Tooke, John Horne); spatializing time and, 88. See also language Pickering, John, 44–45 Pictet, Adolphe, 220 Piggott, Charles, 141 Playfair, John, 112–13, 114, 117 poesis, interiorizing of (Silva), 52 poetic “genius”: in Herderian sense of language as “genius of a people,” 47, 49, 217, 219; Blake and, 100–101; Wheatley and, 70, 90; Wordsworth and, 168, 180 Polis, Joseph, 211

318

Index

polish as civilizational “progress,” 25, 27, 28, 29, 35, 82, 231 positivism, 72, 94, 227; Comte and, 85; and disavowal of metaphor, 240n37, 250n64; and historicism, 35, 38, 47; and impulse to measure, 16; and linguistic roots, 5, 30 Posmentier, Sonya, 238–89n13, 252n93 postcolonial studies, 7, 35, 48, 231, 238n12. See also colonialism Pott, August, 46 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 35 primitivism, 9, 16, 23, 49, 101, 158; convergence with allochronism, 37; counteracting, 36, 143, 265n68; Emerson’s, 189; Herder’s, 49–50; and “lasting,” 210–11; linking race to theories of language, 141; Mignolo on, 80; silencing power of pastness imposed by, 98, 177; in Adam Smith, 73; Thoreau’s, 184–87, 268n5 quasi-material language: in the romantic century, 7, 83; durability of, 9, 55; melting or dissolving, 167–68, 180; and metaphor of chemical solutions (Tooke), 156; as simultaneously solid and soluble, 7, 26, 59, 93, 147, 157; and softer language (Wheatley), 83; and solvent images, viii; and thawing (Thoreau), 201–2, 207 racialization, 7, 22, 41, 88, 217; and civilizational hierarchy, 37, 66, 217; of freedom, 140; History and, 88; language and, 11, 15, 38, 41, 46, 47, 60, 72, 77, 141, 149, 227–28; and natural metaphor, 228; and racial

capital, 8, 115, 136, 227; in romantic era, 40–41 racial determinism, 4, 51 racial time, 30, 97–98; emergence of, 50; “social tense” and, 35; white mythology and, 30, 187 “radical,” 151–52 Rancière, Jacques, 26, 42 Rawle, William, 272–73n100 Ray, John, 140 receptivity, 31, 82, 108, 166, 171, 177, 217–18. See also involuntarism Reed, Anthony, 91 Renan, Ernest, 37, 45, 217 Rezek, Joseph, 69 Rifkin, Mark, 29 Riley, Denise, 26 Rivett, Sarah, 45, 75–76, 186 romanticism, 9, 11, 40, 194; Black, 5, 22, 61, 69 (see also Wheatley, Phillis); conventional periodizations of, 10; enlightenment thought and, 11; Europe’s encounters with non-European worlds and, 6–7, 61, 103–104; green, 10, 31; historicity and, 40; participatory poetics of, 67; recomposition of, 17–18, 22–23, 231–32; temporal ambivalence in, 35. See also gray romanticism Root, Christina, 201, 202 roots, 3–4, 78, 124, 135, 164, 194; African, 20; Britain’s vernacular, 140; codification of, 30, 186, 220; comparable to inorganic images, 39; fixation on, vii, 23, 25, 38, 94, 141; impermanence of, 208; positivism’s image of, 30; reconstructing, 11, 46; relocated to the present, 36, 164–65, 210; turn away from, 5, 221.

Index

See also origins; uprooted word; uprootedness Rossi, Paolo, 24 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 41, 74, 189, 249n45 Ruffin, Kimberly, 89 Rusert, Britt, 226, 229 Sachs, Jonathan, 34, 36 Said, Edward, 10, 23, 36, 45, 60, 88, 106, 220, 244n116, 245n127, 262n36 Saint-Domingue, 106, 180. See also Haiti Sancho, Ignatius, 66 Sandler, Matt, 5, 61 Sanskrit (language), 39, 44, 77, 78, 107, 139. See also Indo-European Sapir, Edward, 14–15, 220–21, 222–23, 229, 274n9 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 46–47, 219, 221, 225, 228 Saussure, Léopold de, 220–21 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 27 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 27, 39, 47 Schleicher, August, 4–5, 37, 38, 39, 46, 47, 217, 227, 228 Schomburg, Arturo, 22 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 184, 214–15, 273n105 Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston, 214–15 science: comparative grammar as, 85, 94; fugitive (Rusert), 226, 239; hierarchizing of languages and, 37, 149; linguistics as, vii, 78, 85, 139; and neutrality, 77; racial, 37, 51, 79, 226. See also Humboldt, Wilhelm von; social science Scott, David, 91, 177 Scott, Julius, 106

319

Scottish East India Company, 45. See also Crawfurd, John Sea Islands, 20, 230, 234. See also Gullah; “Mende Song, A” Semitic (language group), 37, 46, 88, 217 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 87, 189 Shields, John, 163, 165 Sierra Leone, 20. See also Africa; “Mende Song, A” signs, 41, 126, 145, 147, 150, 170, 189, 232; arbitrary, 75, 87, 160–61, 228, 267n101 Silva, Denise Ferreira da, 4, 7, 18, 37, 50, 51, 52, 88, 252n87 Silverman, Kenneth, 70 Silverstein, Michael, 41, 48 slave trade, 8, 61–62, 136, 179. See also Wheatley, Phillis; Anamoboe slavery, 20, 92, 96, 179. See also Wheatley, Phillis Smith, Adam, 42, 57, 72, 85, 87, 89, 186, 189; “Considerations on the First Formation of Languages,”12, 42, 72–75, 77; on linguistic progress, 139; Theory of Moral Sentiments, 72 Smith, Olivia, 13, 139, 141, 157, 158, 159 social science, vii, 47, 85, 224, 226 Sorenson, Janet, 29, 141 Sparks, Randy, 61 speech: alienating language from, 51; in The Book of Thel, 123, 126; racialized on scientific grounds, 60; reduction of to writing, 43, 44 Spigner, Nicole, 96, 253n109 Spinoza, Baruch, 12, 53, 57, 112; critique of sovereign subject, 87; Ethics, 110; Herder’s interpretation of, 11; and naturalized relations of

320

Index

Spinoza, Baruch (cont.) involuntary dependency, 129; and self-preservation, 134; on stone’s animacy, 114 Spinozism, 26; in Coleridge, 146–47; in Herder, 52–54, 133; idea of unfreedom in, 54; liberal thinkers in tension with, 57; linked with romantic poetry, 32; naturalism of, 51; and radical enlightenment, 8; in Wordsworth, 177 Spivak, Gayatri, 30, 249n37 Stedman, John Gabriel, 164, 175 Stewart, Dugald, 155 Stewart, Maria, 3 stone, 93, 95, 96–97, 98, 100, 108, 110, 111, 114, 118, 137; animacy of, 114, 136; Goethe on, 115–16; language and, 109, 111, 116; legibility of, 113; lifespan of, 109; eighteenth-century philosophical discourse on, 112–15; as poetic figure, 110–11; as primitive matter, 113; time and, 117; unknowable liveliness of, 110. See also geology; time, deep Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 14, 222–25, 229 subject: Black romantic, 22, 69; diasporic, 98; freedom of, 2; linguistic, viii, 25, 34, 58, 134, 148, 182; sense of self-possession, 2; social, 51; Spinoza on, 87; universal, 50, 54 subject of history, 22, 37, 50, 68, 115, 225, 238n12 subject formation, 63, 110, 134 supremacist theories of linguistic difference, 149. See also racialization Taylor, Charles, 33, 52 Taylor, William, 163, 164 temporal finitude, 122. See also death

Terada, Rei, 302n37 textualism, 38, 104, 247n168 Thelwall, John, 162 Thoreau, Henry David, 4, 5, 13–14, 15, 29, 102, 182–219, 268n5, 270–71n49; “The Bean-Field,” 195, 199, 205; “Chesuncook,” 182–83, 216; Foster on, 272n89; Indian Notebooks, 14, 15–16, 213, 215; Journal, 14; The Maine Woods, 14, 183, 210–11, 268n5; “The Ponds,” 194, 196–97; racializing primitivism of, 14, 48, 186, 196; Wabanaki languages and, 16; Walden, 14, 47, 189, 193, 194–95, 196–97, 198, 199, 200–201, 202–4, 205–6, 210; “Walking,” 193–94. See also gray romanticism Thornton, John, 70–71 thought-images, 17, 34, 38 time: experience of, 34; geologic, 100, 116; giving to language, 23–24, 25–26, 29–30, 35, 36, 37, 40, 82, 86, 121, 143, 146; lyric “now,” 93, 143; kinds of, 20, 118; racial, 30, 35, 50, 97–98; settler, 29; social, 17; spatializing of, 88; scales of, 93, 100 (Blake), 117 (Goethe), 159 (Wordsworth and Coleridge), 209–10 (Thoreau); speculative future (Wheatley), 63, 98; standardization of, 34; unrecorded (Wordsworth), 142. See also deep time timelessness: in The Book of Thel, 124– 25; and fixedness or stagnation, 217; “Indian,” 28–29; as ideology of temporality, 46 Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 226–27 Tooke, John Horne, 139, 141, 145–46, 149–56, 162, 172, 174, 189, 199; on abbreviations, 140, 154, 160, 161,

Index

170; contradictions of method, 154–55; criticism of Johnson’s Dictionary, 141–42; critics of, 155; The Diversions of Purley, 13, 150, 153, 154, 156, 157–58; etymology of, 150, 176; Hazlitt on, 151, 154, 156; influence of, 141, 157, 170; language change and, 159–60; Letter to John Dunning, 151; reductiveness of, 150, 154, 156; reformism in language theory, 152 Topsy (fictional character), 222–25 transport, 62, 63, 92, 95. See also Wheatley, Phillis Trautmann, Thomas, 42, 240n46, 243n100, 244n119 Trench, Richard, 193 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 9, 22 Turley, Richard, 169 Turner, Lorenzo Dow, 10, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 229, 230, 231–32, 233, 234; Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, 21, 22, 230; Anti-Slavery Sentiment in American Literature prior to 1865, 21. See also “A Mende Song” unfreedom, 54, 60, 62, 82, 92, 97, 133, 179. See also Wheatley, Phillis uniformitarianism (geological), 24, 112, 119 uprooted word, 4, 8, 38; alien word turned into, 45–46; counteracting, 143; as formal convention of transatlantic language study, 60; Wheatley and, 92 uprootedness: diasporic experience and, 98; formation of romanticism and, 30; as human condition, 3, 4; meanings of, 8; modernity and, 3

321

Varro, Marcus Terentius, 200, 210 vernacular, 65, 67, 142; creolizing, 67; nativism and, 142, 144; Wheatley and, 68; Wordsworth and, 13 vernacularization, 21, 65, 139, 180 Verstegan, Richard, 140 Vico, Giambattista, 189 Viswanathan, Gauri, 8, 231 Voloshinov, V. N., 37, 40, 43, 45, 49, 60, 142, 228, 275n22; on abstract objectivism, 43, 228; on the alien word, 34, 37, 242n46; on subjective individualism, 228 voluntarism, 41–42, 60, 73, 84; in relation to arbitrariness, 275n21. See also will; involuntarism Wabanaki (language group), 14, 16, 184, 188, 210–11, 217. See also Native American languages Walcott, Rinaldo, 81 Walker, David, 2, 182–83 Webster, Noah, 141 West, Michael, 194, 198, 270–71n49 Wheatley, Phillis, 4, 5, 14, 15, 41, 60, 70, 76–77, 81, 89, 97, 101, 108, 110, 119, 149, 167, 183, 186, 224, 229; actualism and, 55, 91, 92; afterlife and, 11, 82; agency and, 65–66, 82, 84; alien word and, 82; Anamaboe and, 61–62; audibility and, 63, 66, 83, 89; “barbarity” of, 12, 61, 72; Coleridge and, 163–64, 165; “conscription” into Western literacy, 91; “the Cry for Liberty,” 183; cultivation in, 80; as diasporic linguistic subject, 62; diasporic naturalization of, 89; elegies, 82, 83–84; epyllia, 95–96; on formation of language, 68; freedom and, 11, 69, 71; “Goliath of Gath,” 97;

322

Index

Wheatley, Phillis (cont.) “On Imagination,” 93, 163–64, 165; importance of intervention of, 73; impossible demands on Black writing and, 69–70; as interrupter of “Euro-chronometric” modernity, 21; irony and, 71, 72, 89; Jordan on, 68–69; “To a LADY on her coming to North-America with her Son, for the Recovery of her Health,” 90; linguistic position of, 63; “To Maecenas,” 83, 84, 89–90; on mobile and transformative qualities of language, 66–67; “Niobe in Distress for her Children,” 12, 64, 68, 82, 89–91, 95, 96–98, 136; opacity and, 89–91; originality and, 90, 91, 95; partiality and, 63, 88; passivity and, 95; patrons of, 70; Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, 11, 47, 63, 71, 95, 97, 98; poetic project of, 80, 86; position of self-difference, 67; questioning of divine law, 96; rebellion and, 95–96; refusal to return to Africa, 64–65, 70–73; relation to Enlightenment knowledges, 72; resistance to alien universals, 92; resistance to unfreedom, 97; as resource unacknowledged by European romanticism, 61, 163–64; “To S. M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works,” 5, 63–64, 82–83, 98; self-identification of, 54, 61; self-mythologization of, 81; self-representations of, 66; softer language and, 11, 47, 62, 66, 86, 87, 166; as speaking subject, 70; transports, 95; unfreedom of, 82, 92; up-

rootedness redefined as mobility, 81; variation on gray romanticism, 93. See also disposition, linguistic Wheeler, Rachel, 212–13 Whewell, William, 24 Whitehead, Alfred North, 56, 137 whiteness, 3, 37, 68, 97, 183, 185, 215, 218, 226–27, 234; and nonwhiteness, 15, 65, 144, 230; occidental, 140; “culture” of (Hurston), 231; and the space of print, 62, 68 Whiter, Walter, 194 Whitney, William Dwight, 220, 225, 226, 227, 228, 275n21 Wigginton, Caroline, 83 Wilkins, Charles, 12, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106–8, 109, 120, 122, 136 will, 129; arbitrary, 80; dispersal of, 51, 52, 54; elasticity of, 2; freedom of, 52; individualized, 42; language formation and, 79; mitigated, 56. See also involuntarism Williams, Raymond, 23, 33, 42, 52–53, 60, 149, 271n51 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 27, 100 Woolard, Kathryn, 28, 48–49, 76, 77, 78, 86–87 wordlists, as philological data, 43, 44, 45, 243n100 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 146 Wordsworth, William, 4, 5, 15, 29, 31, 32, 82, 86, 125, 187–88, 189, 193–94, 222, 228–29, 231, 232, 270n36; Coleridge and, 147, 164–65, 177; colonialism and, 173, 175; common human nature in, 169; dissolving/ melting and, 168, 180; enlightenment impulses, 144; “Essay upon Epitaphs,” 147; etymology and, 146, 154; experiments in form,

Index

143; “Expostulation and Reply,” 148; feeling of transition, 138; on felt language, 144–45, 176; gray language of, 148; gray romanticism of, 67, 126, 144; green language of, 13, 148; “Hart-Leap Well,” 143, 147, 148, 168, 171–75, 176; linguistic naturalism of, 144; Locke and, 144; “Michael,” 142; mixed durations and, 159, 174–75; as nature poet, 148; Poems in Two Volumes, 177; “Poems on the Naming of Places,” 168; on Poetic Genius, 180; poetics of humanization, 145; “A Poet’s Epitaph,” 176; Prelude, 144, 146, 176, 179, 194; and linguistic tendency, 167–71; psychological etymology of, 148; racializing objectification in, 48; reservations about etymology, 164; self-analysis, 145; sign

323

production, 147; “The Solitary Reaper,” 175–76, 178; Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty, 177, 179; subject and, 134; Tooke and, 154, 156, 157; “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” 13, 146–47, 177–79; on unrecorded time, 142; use of “arbitrary,” 87; vernacular and, 13, 142; and “wise passiveness,” 12, 67, 83, 88. See also Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge); gray romanticism writing, 30, 38, 43, 44; and Black enlightenment, 69–70 Wynter, Sylvia, 35, 89, 241n62, 250n48, 253n106 Young, Robert, 30 Yusoff, Kathryn, 33, 39, 89 Zeitgeist, 17

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