Shaun Irlam. Elations: the Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. 284. $51.00.

Much mid-eighteenth-century English poetry--after Pope, before Wordsworth, unlike both--challenges postmodern readers to the point of frustration. Gray's Elegy and Collins' odes hold enough in common with their romantic successors to make them still legible, but long, miscellaneous poems like James Thomson's The Seasons (1726-1746) and Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742-1745) operate on baffling premises and create baffling effects. Even sophisticated and conscientious readers often tacitly declare them not worth the trouble.

The consequent critical neglect of such writers as Young and Thomson has now been at least in part remedied by Shaun Irlam's ambitious study, which sets out both to read and to account for Thomson and Young in up-to-date critical terms. Irlam brings an imaginative historical perspective to bear on his subjects, contextualizing their achievement through detailed examination of contemporaneous critical and philosophic discourse. He not only provides ways to take seriously these largely forgotten poets; he also adumbrates certain pleasures of reading them.

As his title suggests, Irlam's purposes extend well beyond the reading of two poets. He wishes to illuminate the history of "enthusiasm," a term originally designating religious fervor, but secularized in the eighteenth century (although religious enthusiasts of course remained). The early chapters of Elations trace this history: how the idea of enthusiasm as religious extremity and potential political danger transforms itself into a notion of poetic energy and imagination. The story of enthusiasm involves the elevation of the passions as sources of conceptual and linguistic strength. It implicates conversion narratives, modes of recording man's relation to God, and an implicit model for many eighteenth-century poets. Attitudes toward literary language are entwined with conceptions of enthusiasm: thus Hobbes's attack on enthusiasm includes denunciation of the figurative diction he associates with it. Irlam remarks the "triple link among epistemic, linguistic, and political stability" that Hobbes emphatically demonstrates (45), and he shows similar linkages in the commentary of other seventeenth-century thinkers.

The subject of enthusiasm connects with issues of periodization. Suspicious of the traditional distinction between the "rationalism" of the early eighteenth century and the "sensibility" that succeeds, Irlam wants, rather, to trace continuities. He does so through careful examination of critical pronouncements by such figures as John Dennis, Joseph Addison, and Richard Blackmore, who attempted to articulate rationales for a language of feeling that supplies Irlam's strongest unifying concept, as he investigates its justification and its instantiation in the poetry of Young and Thomson.

The reading of Thomson supported by the preliminary history of enthusiasm is thorough, imaginative, and innovative. Irlam both treats The Seasons in detail as a finished poem (oddly, though, with no analysis of its concluding Hymn) and provides provocative suggestions about the meaning of its original order of composition. Winter appeared first, in abbreviated form, followed the next year by Summer. In the final version, the order of the individual poems corresponds to that of the literal seasons, beginning with Spring. Irlam suggests, persuasively, that Thomson felt the need finally to obscure his first emphasis on destructive nature. The critic notes the "coherent theoretical argument" implied by the trajectory of Winter, a movement through solitude to abstraction and otherworldliness, "an act of imagination as an act of retreat" (134). Different forms of "otherworldliness" abound in the completed poem, which argues for the possibility of discerning "the truths of religion revealed in a nature properly read" (164). Thomson implicitly argues, though, for a social as well as a theological program, according to Irlam. He imagines the ideal, activist citizen who employs the solitude celebrated by The Seasons as a precursor to social engagement, isolation providing the necessary precondition for virtuous society. The poet's purposes, then, are simultaneously religious, aesthetic, and social.

Such a summary makes Thomson's poem sound far more coherent and orderly than it is in the reading or in Irlam's account of it. A signal virtue of Elations is that it never simplifies (on occasion, indeed, it over-complicates) or tries to reduce the sheer strangeness of Thomson's poem or Young's. Although not every reader will be convinced that these works aim as high as Irlam claims, it would be difficult for anyone who has read this study to find them simply dull--as students who slide over the surfaces of this dense verse have often done. To demonstrate the density of The Seasons is itself an achievement. Boswell reports that Johnson once won a listener's assent to the poem's greatness after reading aloud from it; then he confessed that he had read only every other line. Irlam shows that every other line won't do.

Although he asserts, rightly, that Night Thoughts presents more difficulties to the reader than does The Seasons, Irlam treats it more economically. He sees it as a poem centered on humanity, exploring the problem of the divided ego. As he summarizes, succinctly if not altogether lucidly: "the entire movement of Night-Thoughts takes place under the sign of a self-estrangement operating in the service of a transcendental self-identity against a perpetual, narcissistically tenacious self-alienation that perversely insists on admiring itself as self-identity and mistakenly congratulating itself on a bogus immortality" (203). "Enthusiasm" functions in the poem as a healing force, by means of the pathos generated at the deathbed; it in effect marks the possibility of salvation for the self-estranged self.

Finally, the importance of enthusiasm, from Irlam's point of view, lies in its association with the effort to develop an appropriate idiom for the representation of sentiment, something only achieved, Irlam believes, by the romantics. Because enthusiasm derives from and marks certain kinds of feeling, this critic often equates it with "sensibility." In his careful exploration of enthusiasm's history, he has indeed contributed to the complex history of sensibility--but perhaps not so definitively as he supposes. The terms often linked with enthusiasm here are mania and fanaticism; the more personal, plangent notes of sensibility do not sound. Shaftesbury plays a small part in the narrative of enthusiasm, a large one in the story of sensibility, which draws vitally on the rhetoric and theory of sympathy. Enthusiasm is not the whole story.

It is, to be sure, an important part. In investigating its ramifications, particularly in confronting the immense difficulties of two challenging long poems, Shaun Irlam, despite his indulgence in teeth-breaking diction (to appropriate a term from Walpole), has added bricks to the foundation for literary study of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS is Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the current Vice President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has written extensively on eighteenth-century literature as well as on such varied topics as boredom and gossip.