On a recent car trip to the Boston area for an academic conference, I stopped off at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire, a visit I had been meaning to make for a long time, since moving to Frost’s “other” New England home state of Vermont. At one point early in the tour, our small group was standing in the kitchen of the home, in which Frost and his young family had lived from 1900-1911. We saw the striking red wallpaper (which Rob “romantically” thought perfect for Christmas, our tour guide said); the handsome large stove worth a local shoe factory worker’s year’s pay; the soapstone farmhouse sink that had been improbably salvaged from the back pasture after it was converted to the “Frosty Acres” automobile junkyard in the 1950s and ’60s, and only authenticated because Elinor Frost’s knives had been sharpened on the front apron; and then we were directed toward the far wall with a telephone. Though the chronology suggests a time too early for a phone in regular domestic use, our guide informed the group that Frost’s daughter Lesley, as a consultant to the heritage site, had told a story about the poet that dictated there should be one. The phone was part of his vocation. Robert Frost apparently often listened in secretly to the telephone conversations of neighbors on the party line around Derry. When exhorted by his wife or daughter to stop eavesdropping, he is claimed to have replied: “Don’t bother me, I’m working.”

But for my aims in the context of this short essay, the thrust of the anecdote should be directed straight to its analytical purchase on a long Romantic and modern trajectory of lyric poetry’s interpretive creation. Virginia Jackson characterizes this history as one of enabling confusion in her entry on “LYRIC” for the (2012) fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: ‘A persistent confusion—among verse genres, between historical genres and natural ‘forms,’ between adjective and noun, between cognitive and affective registers, between grammar and rhet. [rhetoric], between privacy and publicity, and among various ideas about poetry—may be the best way to define our current sense of the lyric. It is a confusion that has proven enormously generative for both poets and critics. (826) ’ One reason why it remains vitally important to debate and teach the theory of Romanticism, even in these widely proclaimed post-theoretical days in the humanities, is due to the surreptitious depth of a circular corroboration between interpretive “criticism” and poetic making. For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in The Literary Absolute, the post-Kantian Romantic enterprise of critique/creation reflects an “inauguration of the theoretical project in literature” (2); and “the theoretical Romanticism of Jena characterized itself as the critical question of literature” (5). The interposition of “theory” between the literary object and hermeneutics comprises the inaugural moment of Literature according to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy—thus scrambling the notions of “literary object” and interpretive “hermeneutics” as stable entities and prior operations in themselves, in the name of the radically mixed project of Romanticism. Especially when we think that creation and explication form a complete pair requiring no subtractive third, theory will be as urgently needed as it is resisted.

Hence it was not only pedagogically approachable, but theoretically telling, for Jonathan Culler to recruit a short lyric by Frost (“Spring Pools”) as the occasion of his 2008 PMLA Roundtable essay on how “it is deadly for poetry to try to compete with narrative” once “narrative has become the norm of literature.”

Frost’s repertoire performs Culler’s definitional sense of lyric extravagance—involving the genre’s signature moves of apostrophe, ghostly deictic gestures, allusions, ritualistic repetitions, etc.—while at the same time his inclusion in such a venture implicitly widens the domain of theory into the territory of perhaps the poet least hospitable to theoretical intonation.

In her 2005 book Dickinson’s Misery, Virginia Jackson in effect shows how closely the “negative” labor of theoretical scrutiny can resemble an anti-theory, à la Stanley Fish or Walter Benn Michaels.

Jackson recasts this construction of the dual, mutually subtending categories of the poem and poet as an obfuscating history of “lyric reading” practices dependent on the rise of institutional print culture. Like pop stars, post-Romantic poets are almost universally seen as figures whose pretension to that identity precedes its real achievement; so it is fascinating and fruitfully problematic to consider examples of major poets such as Dickinson who may never exactly have willed to be thought poets on the given terms, or their writings “poems.” My Frost story would appear to bear Virginia Jackson’s thesis out that “from the mid-nineteenth through the beginning of the twenty-first century, to be lyric is to be read as lyric” in an arc toward increasing generic abstraction.

In Frost’s case, that abstraction governs the shift from an “actual” material circuit of telephone communications (the “sender” and “receiver” lend their roles to modern linguistic theory as its paradigmatic example of language as a communicational act), to the figural “music” conjured off a printed page. Jackson’s book on Emily Dickinson thus presents a challenging, painstaking brief concerning the widespread disciplinary “lyricization” that over time has reduced the many richly addressed sub-genres of literary and non-literary writing into a single, abstract, and overwhelmingly poetic “literariness”; and her core contention about the discursive framing of “lyric” or “poetic” ontology has basic, if also complex, implications for our teaching the theory of Romanticism. If the Jena Circle’s project of Romanticism carries within it an inaugural and ineradicable theoretical investment, the classificatory model most often bestowed upon British Romantic poets has leveled social, historical and artistic differences to the point of nearly erasing the conceptual issues at stake.

From one point of view, “Romanticism” in such an account has essentially a schematic function. As opposed to the Keatsian nightingale and Shelley’s skylark, Dickinson’s “homely American ‘bobolink’” and her letter-poem enclosure of a whole dead cricket (Jackson 199, 91) manifestly show the difference of her archive from the shared, interpretive-cum-creative, norms of post-Romantic era publication culture.

Insofar as these comprise signature effects of Romantic discourse, the framing conventions of metaphorical lyric reference and the yearning for disembodiment come in for brilliant restructuring at the hands of Dickinson (as opposed to the hands of a series of editors and readers who then render her straight through their conventional praise). Yet the argument of Dickinson’s Misery is held firmly in place by insisting that we deal exclusively with the worn normative stereotypes of Romantic idealization: the pressure is kept squarely on a (very real) disciplinary and popular mainstream, in an effective though repetitive fashion. Jackson’s many allusions to Keats are all equally—and almost as problematically—subject to the miserable ease of pre-interpretation as holds in the case of Emily Dickinson lyrics.

British Romanticism gives the control group and makes for the inert argumentative scarecrow of Jackson’s book in this sense; and neither the concept of Romanticism nor any of the relevant poems themselves are let free to join the rest of the book’s exhilarating lines of flight.

But if the fundamental question of Dickinson’s Misery asks how we have come to receive truly outsider textual productions as canonical poems always to be read by a certain light, given the posthumous conditions of poetic fame and the disciplinary professionalization of literature, then Jackson’s study bears down powerfully on Romantic coordinates. In his 1979 essay “Shelley Disfigured,” Paul de Man began by noting the resistance of the Romantic fragment to such monumentalization, while at the same time he acknowledged up front that “Shelley’s last poem, is, as is well known, a fragment that has been unearthed, edited, reconstructed and much discussed”: i.e., it has served as the occasion of such a monumentalizing impulse nevertheless, and (short of the text’s total loss) could hardly have eventuated in anything else. Romanticism is thus the name for both a bracing contestatory failure and that other kind of failure in which, as Barbara Johnson once remarked with wryness and wisdom of deconstruction, “nothing fails like success”; Romanticism is associated with that inevitable aftermath known as “interpretive labor.”

At moments toward the end, Dickinson’s Misery too emerges in a form of what I judge to be quietist Romanticism, despite the book’s tone of scholarly outrage, with Jackson’s courageously indigestible assertion she does not want to be heard as saying that Dickinson’s posthumous career should have unfolded much differently (204 ff).

The set of linked inquiries to follow from her study might well break down some of our fundamental teaching goals (like seeing meaning as a matter of thematic reference: the song of the bird), while fostering others (like the specificity of material index: the cricket).

What kinds of blinkers do we put on for students simply in running (Romantic) poetry classes—insofar as the object of study is thereby already constructed? What kinds of critical acts do communities of readers perform to condition what counts as possible meaning, before our interpretation (a “reading”) even starts? What individual cases besides Dickinson’s present an unclassifiable archive as the heuristic prompt? Can we sustain the mission of a “poetics” classroom (i.e., an enterprise whose descriptive methodology is not supposed to be configured around a “hermeneutic” relation to meaning) that is not constantly dragged back into interpretation? In other words: can poetics be responsibly taught and pursued as a field all to itself; or is its role essentially to produce a little saving distance in view of the inevitable imperative that we interpret (we are interpreting, “always already”) by some model? And if the latter, which of the stages in the process of interpretive self-recognition as a class or a course unfolds is the appropriately theoretical moment? Finally, are there Romantic poets who don’t aspire, exactly, to be poets or to write poems but who have been made to—in the same way that all contestants definitely aspire to be pop stars on American Idol, just by showing up and opening their mouths?

Few if any of the British Romantic poets incite questions, like Dickinson, on a level as disarmingly basic as whether they in fact composed and published “poems.” But the critical urgency and utility of asking questions about generic rather than artistically personal intent does register powerfully in a variety of teaching contexts for almost any British Romantic Poetry course: Coleridge’s verse published in newspapers; William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s shared manuscript spaces (such as Dove Cottage MS 19);

Byron’s “Fare Thee Well” verses, coded to circulate in at least three ways (as an intimate private confession to Lady Byron; as a privately circulated account that tries to shape an emotional and legal narrative around the “Separation Controversy”; as a published lyric that addressed everyone and no one at once);

John Clare’s “unpublished” and editorially entitled poem, “[The Lament of Swordy Well],” about historical dispossession and voicelessness.

At The University of Vermont I regularly teach a course titled “Theory of the Lyric” in our English M.A. Program, and in the first meeting of the class I begin seminar discussion by pointing out how there is a striking resonance of this intriguing prosodic theory of Frost’s to John Stuart Mill’s enormously influential characterization of something like the “primal scene” of lyric as a modern genre. We all know the gist of Mill’s 1833 “What is Poetry?” essay, of course, where he evokes a stereotypically “Romantic” idea of poetry more as a spirit than as a genre, a spirit found in the “overheard” expression of “utterance of feeling,” against the “heard” address of persuasive eloquence.

If it wasn’t done at first in a self-consciously allusive manner, Frost’s verbal, vocational, and fundamentally retrospective (i.e., interpretive) attitude toward his own eavesdropping surely exists with reference to Mill. Frost, devilishly, would know that it was he who had been actively and secretly overhearing. Reversing Mill’s poles of the (notional) writer and (literalized) audience, Frost was at liberty to listen in, as the poet. His prosaic Derry neighbors were rather the ones “unconscious of a listener,” in Mill’s terms.

And—skylarks and nightingales aside— isn’t this savvier posture, with its more impersonal and (potentially) self-critical construction of the relation of immediacy to reception and analysis, largely the frame of “voice” and listening that Romantic Poets exhibit?

Wordsworth’s solitary reaper inherits his strangely powerful commitment in the 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads toward a “real substantial freedom and power” in the suffering of those outside the first-person representational agency accorded to lyric poetry.

Julian and Maddalo (though not “lyric”) not only distances the biographical personae of Byron and Shelley himself from their known enthusiasms, but positions another character entirely at the center of the poem, allowing for the ultimate illegibility of such a figure in epistemological and ethical terms, as if in canny advance of Mill and his therapeutic investment. The Romantic and Victorian “Poetess” figure, richly explored and exploited by Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.), and others, does indeed make much of the criterion of sentimental authenticity, but pointedly shows how Mill’s carefully orchestrated placement of poetic expression offers a phantom purity.

In contrasting the “radical authority” of the discursive function of “Lyric Interiority” in Romanticism to what she calls the “elaborated authority” of “Editorial Exteriority”— these two functions of Romanticism in “more or less simultaneous emergence and convergence”—Maureen McLane theorizes Romantic Poetry through media studies and offers a heuristic model with seven “modes of authorization within and around Romantic poems” (184). The first of these is the authority of inspiration; but there is also the authority of anonymity, imitative authorship, authoritative translation, editorial, ethnographic, and experiential authority (McLane 2008, 184-96).

To put my own Romanticist’s spin on what the Derry tour guide said, Robert Frost, at least the young Frost of these striving apprentice years before North of Boston, both despised and emulated the “language really used by men” that lay behind Wordsworth’s experiment in Lyrical Ballads. The recurrently despondent young Frost was not sure yet if he resembled Wordsworth the mature poet or his marginal subjects, if he was the witness to representation or the person who gazed with suicidal thoughts into small pools of water and mused whether they were deep enough to drown in. If in his poetry Frost sought to produce the effect of an immediate but non-specifiable “oversound,”

the living anthropological archive behind his lyric feat was made of addressed communications, comprised of everyday intimacies that “the poet” had gained access to and seems to have fecklessly violated. But Frost’s approach, as most poetic theories do, has a multiplicity and layering of functionalities that complicate any progressive linear narrative available to analytical demystification. He sublimates the real content of those overheard daily exchanges, to make from these materials a dynamic frictional prosody that “breaks” sentence sound across the units of meter and line. He exploits class privilege not only to record the slowly disintegrating culture of failing New England farmers and itinerant country laborers, but also to reinvigorate the quotidian life force of Anglo-American poetry. Aligned broadly with Yeats and early Poundian Imagism’s disapproval of mere poetic ornament, Frost’s commitment to the “sound of sense” pushes back against the perception of an idealizing, ersatz (i.e., “nonsense”) musicality of many late Victorian poets he grew up admiring. Frost thus (just) saves the classic poetic tropes of “voice” and “music” by exposing them to the contemporary truth of their over-elaboration.

By the same measure through which he assumes the shared risk of bad faith ambitions to wrest common speech into the domain of his own poetic voice, Frost also carries forward the Wordsworthian project of everyday talking and thinking (in) verse.

A scan over my own syllabi serves merely as a personal reminder of the larger realization that Romantic Poetry isn’t obviously at the forefront of current literary theory. The field’s very centrality to twentieth century methodological change—and to the twenty to thirty years of rapid metabolization dating from the first translations of structuralism/ post-structuralism to America, the period known most narrowly as the heady days of “theory”—is in part the cause of Romanticism’s current positioning, on balance more reflective than experimental. The philosophical side of our field especially has a dauntingly large buy-in cost of past learning for aspiring young scholars. Romantic poetic theory played a covertly key role in New Critical formalism; (positively, from these critics’ point of view) it sponsored the organic element of thinking about poetic structure, and (negatively) its sublime, or catachrestic, aspect set off the limits of taste and a regulative sense of decorum. It was hot and cool at once to study Romantic Poetry in the heyday of deconstruction;

and the field continued its high visibility and importance as the target of New Historicist critique—only matched in vigor by Shakespeare Studies.

Where are we now? The “inclusion” of race, class, and gender concerns by this point should be such a perennial feature across the spectra of teaching and research production, that these interests cannot always be captured by theoretical headings.

Ecological literary theory, animal studies, cognitive literary studies, evolutionary approaches to narrative and lyric, theories of trauma and testimony, and the continental philosophical debates around biopower and political theology have all tangled with major Romantic concepts and offered exemplary readings; and the energetic absorption of much of this work is visible in scholarship carried out in the last decade by dozens if not hundreds of Romanticists. Even that old literary-historical chestnut, the French Revolution, has recharged a project of politics and aesthetics on the left—somewhere between vibrant and violent—in the writings of thinkers like Zizek, Badiou, and Rancière.

This secularly transcendent idea of “the people” is not to be equated with the historical event of liberal democracy, and has unspent power. The imbrications of Romantic-era culture and writing with the rise of our modern finance economy comprise a rich and urgent topic.

An entirely different—though not inconsistent—way to talk about the eclectic standing of current Romantic Studies in relation to Theory would stress the reminder that critical “theory” is itself of Romantic invention, not just a creature of 1917 or 1968 that has been unhurriedly dying since 1989. In the coda to his 2011 book Romantic Sobriety, Orrin Wang persuasively maintains that Romanticism’s extravagant way of foregrounding the spectral character of literary values and non-values appears now as the widespread “embarrassment” of the humanities in broader institutional context. Yet, methodologically and imaginatively if not in administrative terms, that very untimeliness continues to give our field its edge: “The discursive operations of [Romanticism] thus provide a tropological resource for understanding literature’s present predicament during the global reorganization of knowledge in and beyond the humanities. [. . .] If Romanticism has always been structured by its own legitimation crisis, so has literature, a predicament whose present form we know today mostly because of the meta-commentary of, and on, Romanticism.”

However in this essay I have shared some of my introductory approaches to the practice of teaching “literary” or “poetic” ontology. I think it’s important that we try to teach aspects of such a concept, and its associated theoretical concerns, even though the terminology may sound daunting. Because lyric poems are short and non-narrative, students going back to those trained to do so by The Well-Wrought Urn have had a difficult time not making a microcosm of poetic form (which need not be “closed” rather than open)

and treating a poem as a certain kind of organic or architectural thing: an urn, a tree (and so treating its interpretation implicitly). The New Critical move, in which the poem’s subject matter or metaphorical tactics are handled as a blueprint for reading the poetry, is too neat a student exercise when it works and is deeply corrosive of the shared critical project when it is done unconsciously.

We still need Paul de Man’s reminder (worth a few dramatic bangs on the table in class, or what I call a principled “stupid” insistence from my point of view as the teacher) that you can’t grow grapes by the light of the word “day.”

Especially after we’ve gotten through reading the “Among School Children” chapter of The Well-Wrought Urn, which is a prototype of symbolic form and the conflation of the logic of the poetical symbol with that of critical practice, de Man’s remarks on the literal urgency of Yeats’s so-called rhetorical question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?,” ought to have something like the analytical urgency and (near-) despair of Shelley’s “Then what is life?” The categories of nature and history are too poor and too lavish alike to answer such questions.