English 610 —British Romanticism

Professor
J. Jennifer Jones

Poet as Landscape Architect:
Confining and Defining Language presented in Paul de Man’s “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image”

To say that Romantic poets intentionally structured language to render a specific image requires that one first agree that language is in every instance of usage a conscious act of decision. Literary theory has historically posited that humans are incapable of communicating in the realm of ideas (Ideas), but are relegated to using words as symbols (particular representations) of those ideas they wish to relate. Paul de Man, in his “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” begins, after establishing the importance of the imagination in the history of poetics, by asserting that, “In everyday use words are exchanges and put to a variety of tasks, but they are not supposed to originate anew” (66). Words are merely tools to express ideas that reside within us, or, as de Man explains, “are used as established signs to confirm that something is recognized as being the same as before” (66). Without a common acknowledgment concerning which words signify what, language would be a useless chaotic mess of sounds and scribbling. Poets in particular who rely on figurative language defy our common agreement and present a newly “re-cognized” world. Thus having grounded his argument linguistically, de Man launches an examination of the Romantic poetic image that is in itself a version of the natural landscape that ultimately differs from the real tangible one of the poets’ surroundings.

In structuring his claim, de Man takes up the traditional theory that “The metaphor [can be used] as starting point for an investigation of literature in general” (66) and does so by leaning heavily on a specific Holderlin metaphor that can be read two different ways. What becomes apparent in de Man’s delicately balanced argumentative study is that literature is that which is ultimately and literally false; a metaphor works by saying one thing is another, which it is not really. Image, then, is a dimension of poetic language that can be traced and understood by way of the changing structure of the metaphor. From this, de Man moves on to what he sees as the most important explication of the Holderlin excerpt: “The [words springing up like flowers simile] is not a combination of two entities or experiences more or less deliberately linked together, but one single and particular experience: that of origination” (67). All this is to say that in the Romantic era, investment in figurative language is revered since it “restores to the language” an eminence that was arguably lost in the allegorization of the late 17 th century (66). De Man’s argument is that Romantics (such as Wordsworth) were tiring of a lofty, inaccessible language of symbolism (like that of Pope) and wanted rather a precise and meaningful language exercise that, like the Holderlin poem asserts, could “like flowers, leap alive.” The image, then, according to de Man “comes to be considered...the most prominent dimension of the style” (66). Imagination (the act of creating images in one’s head and on paper) begins to differ from the natural world and presents a separate representational reality (that of poetry) that can somehow be endowed with ontological authority just like tangible reality (that of nature). Herein lies what de Man calls the “fundamental ambiguity that characterizes the poetics of romanticism” (66): that poets want language to imitate life and originate like nature, all along, though, realizing that it cannot. Poems and their descriptions are innately mimetic and can never transcend the fact that they are purely representational. Though there exists “abundant imagery coinciding with an equally abundant quantity of natural objects” (66), poetry will never replace or stand as ontologically independent like the nature it is trying to represent.

With his argument thus framed, de Man enters into dialogue with Plato and Saussure to argue that Romanticism was a quest to move language from the terrestrial plane to the celestial one through the intentional structure of the image, through deliberate language choice: “Poets know of the act of naming—as implying a return to the source, to the pure motion of experience at its beginning” (67). By “naming” or writing about objects and experiences, poets in affect create new objects and new landscapes, thereby pushing the mimetic representation toward ontological ascendancy after which “we could infer, then, that the fundamental intent of the poetic word is to originate in the same manner as what Holderlin here calls ‘flowers’” (67). Manner of origination is important: flowers are natural and poets want poetic description to be natural, too—to not only describe the landscape, but imitate it to the extent that the act of writing poetry is in itself a natural tendency, one that exists independently of the landscape it both strives to imitate and relies on for its own existence. To de Man, Romantic poetry tried to establish its own ontological essence: “It would follow then, since the intent of the poetic word is to originate like the flower, that it strives to banish all metaphor, to become entirely literal” (68). Embedded deeply in the desires of poetry was the want to create, to rise above Plato’s particulars to reside among the forms. Poetry is always relegated to the particulars since it uses figurative language, a fact with which the Romantics must grapple and be defeated by, an endeavor de Man will call “the adventure of failure” (70). Image is then, in Saussure’s words, the signifier, while the actual landscape is the signified. Connotation and denotation, however, play heavily in the way we interpret language, and in this case, imagination and the representation of the signified landscape both alter our understanding of the world. Utterances transmit cultural associations and literal semantic meanings alike, just as there are items of inherent importance that are expressed in representations that simple facts of nature cannot relate. To create a “new” landscape, then, one of pure imagination, Romantic poets have disobeyed and attempted to “seduce” the reader, but in doing so, add something original and beautiful to the previous purely natural Ideas of the flower, or stone, or river.

Having anchored his argument to Holderlin, de Man finally draws the curtain on his central argument that was alluded to as the “latent tension” present in Romantic thought: “‘Wie Blumen entstehn’ is in fact a paradox, since origination is inconceivable on the ontological level” (69). Mentioning the idea that “epiphany” discovers itself as admitting the presence of a form and a particular, de Man demands that by wanting the literate landscape to “spring up like flowers,” Romantics are admitting that theirs is a description that can never be ontological. “The ease with which we nevertheless accept [this paradox] is indicative of our desire to forget” and Romantic thought is thereby “made possible only by a deliberate forgetting of the transcendental nature of the source” (69). In order to raise poetic description to the ontological level and benefit from its theoretical offerings, we must forget its innate restrictions, creating an ever-present dichotomy: “[The words] that will arise as if they were natural objects, and, as such, they remain essentially distinct from natural entities” (69).

Images of landscape and the landscape itself will forever be disparate, but that fact is trivialized when we agree that there exists a difference between the common consciousness one has of the natural, tangible world and the consciousness that can be met through the Romantic image presented in poetry. In wanting to make poetry “natural,” romanticism pulled the keystone from an impressive arch that had hitherto existed: that of the divine, or the supremely created. What is in effect being admitted is that Romantic poets have filled the void of the divine with their own ontological creations. Poets are not merely landscape architects, but gods, in essence, able to invest in their images, their imaginations, “ontological priority.” Though the objects in the two natures may look similar, they are indeed essentially different: “There can be flowers that ‘are’ and poetic words that ‘originate,’ but no poetic words that ‘originate’ as if they ‘were’” (70). This movement, according to de Man, is “condemned in advance to failure” (70), but this failure, he is careful to assert, is beautiful and at the same time worthy of admiration for having been attempted at all because within the imagination, connections can be made between nature and the human condition that would otherwise be unavailable for contemplation. Life and the experience of ineffable emotions are, besides, more than the scientific sum of nature’s parts. The Romantic poet realizes that to best present reality it is necessary to transcend the natural landscape by way of the image of description, although the act is an ontological contradiction.

Further exploring the tendencies of romantic thought to present their landscapes as the actual landscapes, de Man explains that “At times, romantic thought and romantic poetry seem to come so close to giving in completely to the nostalgia for the object that it becomes difficult to distinguish between object and image, between imagination and perception, between an expressive or constitutive and mimetic or literal language” (70). Readers are left in the dark as to whether they are reading an accurate perception, or a rather fuzzy interpretation of the landscape, clouded (“fogged,” if you will, like so many Romantic paintings) by the poet’s own interpretation. In this way, “vision almost seems to become a real landscape” (70), which could not be more evident than in the early works of Wordsworth like “Salisbury Plain” or “An Evening Walk” in which the poet gazes out over a space and paints in words how he observes it: latent violence beneath the beauty.

Herein lies the crux of de Man’s entire matter. Romantics have not created landscape, but in trying to imitate it have created a unique vision that exists as certainly as the real thing, albeit always in opposition to it. The adventure of the failure lied in the “[fusing of] matter and imagination by amalgamating perception and reverie, sacrificing, in fact, the demands of consciousness to the realities of the object” (70). Take Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” as an example in which the poet not only reminisces about times he has romped with his friends through the forest, but in fact sits alone and imagines what they are doing there on the landscape without him. De Man’s idea that “the poet’s loyalty towards his own language appears so strongly that the object nearly vanishes under the impact of his words” (70) plays out here impeccably.

Expounding further, de Man relies on the juxtaposition of three examples whose “common characteristic...becomes apparent in the mixed, transitional type of landscape [italics the author’s] from which the three poets start out” (75). What de Man wants to make apparent in the excerpts of Holderlin, Rousseau, and Wordsworth is “the ascending movement recorded in each of the texts, the movement by means of which the poetic imagination tears itself away, as it were, from a terrestrial nature and moves towards this ‘other nature’...associated with the diaphanous, limpid, and immaterial quality of a light that dwells nearer to the skies” (76). Poets, in asserting their imagination, have extracted their descriptions from the landscape itself and posited them as ontological entities of themselves: “Their language has itself become a celestial entity, an inhabitant of the sky” (76). De Man’s most complex idea thus surfaces.

“The ontological priority, housed at first in the earthly and pastoral 'flower,' has been transposed into an entity that could still, if one wishes, be called 'natural,' but could no longer be equated with matter, objects, earth, stones, or flowers. The nostalgia for the object has become a nostalgia for an entity that could never, by its very nature, become a particularized presence” (76).

So what is the intentional structure of the romantic image? Similar to a landscape architect who takes organic organisms and gives order to them to create a beautiful physical locale (their choices and placements are infused with intention: trees for shade; bushes for aesthetic framing; grass for practical ground cover; etc.), Romantics predicated that mimesis and poetic representation could, in fact, both contain nature and reveal a level of thought ontologically equal to it:

“This 'imagination' has little in common with the faculty that produces natural images born 'as flowers originate.' It marks instead a possibility for consciousness to exist entirely by and for itself, independently of all relationship with the outside world, without being moved by an intent aimed at a part of this world.”

Evan P. Schneider
University of Rhode Island
October 18, 2005

Office & Office Hours

Flagg Road 124
TH 11-noon; 2-3pm

Required Texts
John Milton. Paradise Lost (Norton)

Marilyn Butler, ed. Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge)

William Godwin. Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (Penguin)

Stephen Gill, ed. William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford)

William Wordsworth. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 (Norton)

H. J. Jackson, ed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford)

Donald H. Reiman, ed. Shelley's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton)

Jerome McGann, ed. Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford)

Edward Hirsch, ed. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (Random House)

Harold Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness (Norton)

Course Packet (Rhode Island Book Company)

NOTE: With the exceptions of Caleb Williams and the Course Packet, all materials are available through Reserve at the URI library.

Class Participation (15%)
Seminar Paper (70%)
Class Opening (15%