Transatlantic Vividness: Imagining at a Distance in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Abstract

"Transatlantic Vividness: Imagining at a Distance in Nineteenth-Century Poetry" explores “the vivid” as a vernacular aesthetic category central to transatlantic Anglo-American poetics in the long nineteenth century. Grounded in Hume’s theory of vivacity, vividness is a peculiar kind of realism that accounts for readers ascribing the same force and reality to descriptions as they do to objects in the phenomenal world. To describe a poem as vivid is to claim that the distance between the world and its representation has been undone. In poetry that circulated widely on both sides of the Atlantic, we see how the heightened, unrealistic description of geographically distant places allegorized the distance between the reader and the page so as to turn that deficit into an asset. Often dismissed as idealized, these poetic descriptive styles in fact make visible a nineteenth-century desire: to imagine being affected, as if physically, by a poem.

Each chapter focuses on a distinct form of vividness, traced within a set of once-popular poems and their reception histories: Gertrude of Wyoming (1809) by Thomas Campbell, Zóphiël; or, the Bride of Seven (1833) by Maria Gowen Brooks, American responses to poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Poems of Places (c.1876-1879) collected by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Imagined at a distance and set in exotic locations (“the East,” the Caribbean islands, colonial North America, the U. S. South), these poems produce verisimilar effects without a commitment to realistic description. Reading the poems and nineteenth-century readings of the poems, the dissertation fashions a fourfold system for analyzing vividness as inaccuracy, as amplified temporality, as luminosity, and as reference. Both the introduction and epilogue feature poems by Lucy Larcom in order to reflect on past and future possibilities of “vivid” reading. The dissertation draws on a range of methods—primarily historical poetics, aesthetics, and transatlantic studies, but also reception studies, book history, affect theory and phenomenology—in order to explore the aesthetic and extra-aesthetic implications of vividness as a historical concept and theoretical category.