Resonance: Poetry and the Education of t

That modern life has been shaped by forces of commercial, technological, and social acceleration since the Industrial Revolution is by now a commonplace.  Such forces have disrupted and transformed natural and traditional communal rhythms all around the world.  Already in England in 1800, the Romantic poet William Wordsworth was cognizant of such processes.  He wrote of “the multitude of causes acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind,” among them “the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.”  Over 200 years later, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa has analysed the escalatory pace of capitalist modernity and the dependence of our techno-commercial global system on constant change for, paradoxically, its very stability.  “If acceleration is the problem,” he diagnoses, “then resonance may well be the solution.”

            In this course, we turn to poetry for lessons in resonance. As an art of repetition, poetry is  at heart an art of resonance.  As an art of memory that relies on techniques of repetition in formal patterning, poetry may awaken readers and listeners to their own resonant interiority, to structures of continuity and events of discontinuity in the experience of time, meaning, and meaningfulness.  Poetry may open up and refine our capacity to resonate with others, be they familiars or strangers, with suppleness, tact, and complexity.  Putting the sociologist’s hypothesis to the test of poetry, we will investigate how poetry may teach us by aesthetic means how to get in sync with ourselves and others in a world that often feels radically out of sync.

            In this investigation, we will turn to texts of British and European Romanticism as points of departure, studying how the very status of poetry and poetic language underwent radical redefinition in the knowledge system of late eighteenth-century Europe, with repercussions in a complex, shared global history.  We will pay especial attention to the oeuvre of William Wordsworth, which repeatedly features scenes of listening and allegorizes effects of resonance with autobiographi