This book argues that the concept of “attention” became particularly unhinged at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain, oscillating widely between disciplines—from theology to pedagogy, from philosophy to science, and most forcefully, from poetics to the rhetoric and practices of war. Reading Romanticism as a poetics of attention brings into view the way that Romantic poetry experiments with the rhythms of attention and its lapse, and reveals a Romantic understanding of the experience of reading as fundamentally shaped by the claims made on attention by pedagogy, medicine, science, eth ... More

This book argues that the concept of “attention” became particularly unhinged at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain, oscillating widely between disciplines—from theology to pedagogy, from philosophy to science, and most forcefully, from poetics to the rhetoric and practices of war. Reading Romanticism as a poetics of attention brings into view the way that Romantic poetry experiments with the rhythms of attention and its lapse, and reveals a Romantic understanding of the experience of reading as fundamentally shaped by the claims made on attention by pedagogy, medicine, science, ethics, aesthetics, theology, and the military. Through close readings of the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, Charlotte Smith, and Wordsworth, Watchwords uncovers a strain of poetics especially concerned with the militarization of attention, a poetics that defines itself and its reader’s attention as a resistance to, and reconfiguration of, the vigilance demanded by war. The book traces the ethical, affective, political, and literary contours of attention at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain to find the interdisciplinary stakes of a literature of mere looking, a poetics of the simple act of noticing what is overlooked. The minimal posture of looking away, or looking differently, emerges as a response to a political crisis in attention precipitated by the pervasive demands on both soldiers and civilians to keep watch for a French invasion. While Romantic poetry criticizes this political watchfulness, it also maintains unexpected debts to the forms of apprehension and vulnerability prompted by war.