'Accidents of Size': The Scalar Poetics of Coleridge, Blake, and Clare

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My research will elucidate how the notion of scale operates in the poetics of Coleridge, Blake, and Clare. Specifically, Iwill seek to articulate precisely how Romantic-era developments in science, technology, and natural history provided thepoets in question with the basis of an aesthetic strategy and a perceptual mode which moved within, yet was deeplyresistant to, instrumental-rationalist strains of European Enlightenment thought. Working across class and geographicaldivisions, I argue that each poet developed, with relative independence, a peculiar figuration and a way of using scalethat destabilises the notion of singular perspective, advancing instead a multiplicity of vantage points, and therebycreating a means of transcending those same divides which separated their literary practices. Emphasising the way inwhich the imagination is historically contingent, the dissertation will chart the relationship between the historicalconditions in which the poets were immersed, and the productive practices by which they wrote. In particular, I will stressthe ways in which their thinking-through of scale was made possible by particular objects and perspectives, such as themicroscopic lens in Coleridge's 'Apologia Pro Vita Sua' (1800), or the entomological field of vision in Clare's 'The InsectWorld' (1827-35). Exploring Romantic scalar discourse in this way will help, I believe, to historically situate our currentexigencies concerning the question of human scale.