Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s philosophy in the 1810s and beyond is generally characterized by its dynamic and organic system of thought that transcends the limited scope of the eighteenth-century materialism. His chief source of inspiration is German natural philosophy and idealism, particularly in his attempts to establish the dialectical mode of thought that simultaneously allows for analytical understanding and holistic intuition. However, when it comes to the procedure of argumentation, Coleridge makes a consistent claim for the importance of “desynonymization,” a method for distinguishing the meanings of two words that have been used confusingly or ambiguously, thereby facilitating appropriate dialectical thought.

  While “desynonymization” is considered to be a linguistic version of idealistic thought apparent in his later career, Coleridge’s early notebooks reveal that it actually has its roots in his philological interests dating back to the early 1800s. It’s worth noting that these interests were closely intertwined with another contemporary discourse of science: chemistry. The engagement of Lavoisier and other chemists in reforming chemical nomenclature since 1790s, particularly their discussion of the debatable “caloric” within the newly defined concept of an “element,” provides Coleridge with linguistic materials for considering how to establish a philosophical system of language by “desynonymizing” the ambiguous vocabulary of common language.

  This paper examines how the chemical discourse of the time influenced Coleridge’s “desynonymization.” First, it investigates how, from around 1804 to 1810, he consciously engaged in distinguishing a phenomenon and its cause (like heat and caloric) based on a Lavoisierian “operational” concept of elements, often drawing on chemical imagery including Humphry Davy’s experiments in electrolysis. Next, the paper discusses how after the late 1810s Coleridge shifts his focus away from operational definitions of elements toward exploring them as some fundamental principles of phenomena and reinterpreting them as Platonic ideas. In this context, his reflections on “caloric” serve as an indicator of how the chemical discourse contributed to the development of Coleridge’s linguistic practice into his later idealistic dialectics.

In his classic book The Sister Arts (1958), Jean H. Hagstrum conceives of poetry and painting as the sister arts immersed in the distinctly neoclassical styles of the eighteenth-century tradition. However, he does not extend his renowned thesis into the Romantic period. Assertion of the close relationship between literature and the visual arts—ut pictura poesis— from its early ancient Roman reference by Horace, and on through the Renaissance, diminished after the mid-eighteenth century, when Lessing published Laocoön arguing the limits of painting and poetry, and Burke emphasized the sublime effect of obscurity in poetry rather than the clarity and immediacy of painting. Yet, the association of the two forms was re-established in and beyond the Romantic period, in which John Keats’s poetry had a profound effect on the Pre-Raphaelite artists. The Romantic poet and the Victorian artists, respectively, declared their disinheritance from eighteenth-century neoclassicism and the dogmas of the Royal Academy, both of which prominently embraced the tradition of classical art theory.

  This paper will recentralize the period’s interrelation of literature and visual art in a comparison of Keats’s adaptation of Boccaccio’s Decameron in “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil” (1818) and John Everett Millais’s Isabella (1848–49). I will focus on the medievalism and the prominent visual details in both works, highlighting in Keats the radical indictment of Isabella’s two brothers in their exploitation and repression of contemporary laborers by examining the extraordinary visual image in the compound phrase “many once proud-quiver’d loins.” Keats’s poetic hostility to growing financial dominance is analogous to Millais’s antipathy in his representation of Isabella’s family, where the themes of commercial greed, self-absorbed lovesickness and feigned politeness are rendered in intense and actual detail to fully repudiate the dominant academic tradition in painting. Therefore, the close relationship between Keats’s and Millais’s works lies most significantly in the intensity of immediate details against the neoclassical claim of ideal wholeness integrated by parts.

Dorothy Wordsworth’s “Floating Island” (1832) has widely been read as the text that expresses her concept of the self. In the poem, as Anne K. Mellor mentions in Romanticism and Gender, Dorothy regards a self as “composed of organic fragments” and tries to understand it within its relationships with others in the community. This image of organic and relational self in nature invokes the image of dust in crystallization in John Ruskin’s The Ethics of the Dust (1866), where he urges the reader to apprehend the larger universal harmony by observing various types of crystallization as a small universe.

  Although Dorothy and Ruskin have scarcely been discussed together, this paper argues that it is ecological sensibility that connected Romantic Dorothy and Victorian Ruskin and that enabled them to envisage a harmonious world. Ecological sensibility is considered to be developed through the literary tradition from James Thomson to William Collins, Thomas Gray, and William Cowper, along with the critical heritage of fellow-feeling in philosophy. Both Dorothy and Ruskin were in line with this long tradition, and their sensibility was also cultivated in religious and natural surroundings. A close reading of “Floating Island” and The Ethics of the Dust leads us to understand that their eyes were turned even to the smallest existence of the universe and that they believed in its reciprocal role in the harmonious whole. The paper also pays attention to some gendered aspects of their works to highlight how they saw the image of dust in relation to the natural world. By doing so, the paper demonstrates how ecological sensibility was inherited and revised with the times from the Romantic to the Victorian Age when social changes for improvement were cried out with more intensity.

This essay examines the influence of the Romantic poets, in particular of P. B. Shelley, found in Wilfred Owen’s war poems, discussing their inherent conflict between aesthetic temptation and their criticism of violence, in conjunction with the representation of Medusa and the concept of Romantic modernity. Santanu Das’s close reading of “Dulce et Decorum Est” (c. 1918), one of the most famous anti-war poems by Owen, explicates that the poet, who criticises the aestheticisation of war and its violence, is both unwittingly and ironically indulging in the aesthetic jouissance of poetic language (“linga”). Das’s interpretation reminds us of Shelley’s ekphrasis “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, in the Florentine Gallery” (1819), which involves the same kind of aesthetic entanglement of violence (terror) and art (beauty) as seen in Owen’s “gas-poem” about those dying soldiers on the battlefield, since both ekphrastic poems portray the scenes of death through jouissance. The dynamism that the two ekphrastic poems demonstrate epitomises Romantic modernity and its derivative concept of aesthetic ideology in a de Manian sense. Because of this, Shelley’s ekphrasis not merely fears and mourns Medusa’s death as a victim of violence, but also figurates (aestheticises) this capitulated (or dis-figurated) head into an aesthetic object—in other words, the poet is petrified in his poetic transgression, a lapse from his faith of non-violence. Likewise, Owen, under Shelley’s influence, employs the motif of Medusa, together with his self-reflective irony. His Gorgonian motif is necessarily associated with shellshock caused by the terror of war as the petrifaction of fright. As a variation of Gorgon’s petrification, Owen’s “Insensibility” (c. 1918) insinuates the heartlessness of war agitators drawing on Shelley’s Defense of Poetry (1821). “A Terrre” (c. 1918) is also depicted as Owen’s ironic elegy and pity towards his comrades in arms and himself, through such an image as returning to earth, taken from Shelley’s Adonais (1821). The modernity of Owen’s war poetry thus lies in the coexistence of longing for aestheticisation (aesthetic ideology) and its refusal and renunciation, glimpsed ironically through his war criticism and his pity. This kind of double bind should be what was inherited—whether directly or not—from Shelley’s poetic mind, as a literary mode of Romantic modernity in relation to poetry and self-consciousness.