Romantic Dynamics, or Towards a Physical Criticism

Abstract

In Romantic studies and in wider spheres of critical theory, a dynamic approach to the interpretation of poetic events has emerged in the last decade (what I term ‘physical criticism’), and this critical mode manifested itself in the interpretive communities of several canonical Romantic authors, especially Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Shelleys. In part, this examination of Romantic poetics mapped direct connections between various writers, including poets and natural philosophers, and explored the ways in which Romantic poetical practices engage, even undermine, Enlightenment thinking and its mechanical by-products, the industrial progeny of Newton and Descartes. Physical criticism, to my mind, developed from the energetic exchange between two broadly cast categories, literature and science, and, fortunately, this interdisciplinary interchange unfolds on both sides of the dividing conjunction (‘and’), although some claim otherwise. Most recently, physical criticism has explored the rhythmic and imaginative resonances between thought experiments crafted by Romantic poets and the full range of contemporary physical theory.

Buddhist thinkers … find it extremely beneficial to incorporate into their thinking the insights of various scientific fields, such as quantum mechanics and neurobiology, where there are also equally strong elements of uncertainty and essencelessness.

(The Dalai Lama MindScience 26)¹