@article{THESIS,
      recid = {1736},
      author = {Hansen, Michael},
      title = {Sensation Poetry and Social Imagination},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2016-12},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {187},
      abstract = {“Sensation Poetry and Social Imagination” unearths a vital  but forgotten chapter in the history of British aesthetics,  through neglected writings of four major figures: William  Hazlitt, John Keats, Arthur Hallam, and Alfred Tennyson.  Claims in modern criticism for the social value of  aesthetics, like the claim that aesthetics is an ideology  enabling exploitation, tend to rely on terms that have  evolved from 1890s Aestheticism. This dissertation joins  other recent attempts to recover a more textured account of  Romanticism’s many and competing ideals of the beautiful in  nature and art. It tracks the development of  eighteenth-century moral philosophy into early physiology,  and reveals surprising motivations behind certain “extreme”  or “immature” Romantic experiments with the resources of  verse history.

Arthur Hallam coined the phrase “sensation  poetry” in his famous 1831 Tennyson review to describe  poems by Hunt, Keats, Shelley, and the young Tennyson that  use novel formal design to emphasize the sensorial effects  of reading. From Yeats to Isobel Armstrong, this review has  been held up as an anticipation of art-for-art’s-sake  ideals, but I contend that Hallam’s theory engages ethical  debates that extend back through Hazlitt, Adam Smith,  Hartley, Hume, and Shaftesbury. As the belief in innate  moral sense became widely challenged in the later decades  of the eighteenth century, moral philosophy’s oldest and  most vexing question returned with renewed urgency: how can  self-interest and benevolence be reconciled? In writing a  poetry that, in Keats’s words, must be “proved on the  pulses,” sensation poets attempt to show that we are bound  together by something more basic than selfhood: the nervous  system, and immersion in a shared social world. 

Hazlitt  claimed that our capacity for action—the imagination of  future pleasure or pain—also makes it natural to empathize  with others in the present. This argument not only  contributed to Keats’s theories of poetic imagination, in  which the mind is “continually informing and filling some  other body,” but also licensed his most radical formal  improvisations. My first two chapters show how Keats  developed these theories, testing them through thought  experiments on dream skepticism, in which the mind cannot  distinguish sense from sense-simulation, and through  innovations of Augustan couplet style in his longest and  most important dream poem, Endymion (1818). My third  chapter uses Hallam’s lesser-known writings to show that  his famous advocacy of sensation poetry is part of a broad  Christian materialism and history of rhyme, which he was  developing at the time of his premature death. In Chapter 4  I examine Tennyson’s early imitations of Anacreon, the  Greek poet of wine and love. These imitations transpose  Italian rhyme contours against eighteenth-century norms for  English Anacreontics as a way of affirming Hallam’s belief  that enriched English must draw on the sensuous “sources of  Southern phraseology” exemplified by Tuscan poets. 

By  placing sensation poetry in a revised history of moral  philosophy, and by specifying the resources of verse  history this poetry attempted to recover and sustain, my  project challenges longstanding assumptions about Romantic  aesthetics and the Victorian Aestheticism it inspired. The  conceptions of poetry and art I highlight in Hazlitt and  Hallam, and in the practices of Keats and Tennyson, return  us to a moment before Aestheticism simplified the terms of  artistic judgment and moral feeling, and separated art from  social life. They represent roads not taken that can help  us forge a more sensitive and historically discriminating  criticism today.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1736},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1736},
}