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23 1 Change Your Lakes for Ocean Matthew Arnold wrote that “the world-river of poetry” consoles and affirms “the spirit of our race” with a “criticism of life.”1 Word by word, the terms of Arnold’s claim have been disavowed. But while “race,” “spirit,” and for that matter “poetry” no longer signify as they once did in critical discourse, the Romantic notion that poetry ministers to a common spirit lingers in other terms, and chiefly in terms of what is still called “culture.” Evanescent like a spirit, “culture” can also, notoriously, be thought singular and substantive, as a race was supposed to be. It can be “a culture.” Controlled by intellectual practice, the idea of culture is a critical idea. Yet this idea retains the connotations of earthy process that associate “culture” with everyday life organized through time down lines of descent. Meanwhile , “culture” in the further sense of “the media” has grown into the public space that the medium of poetry once sought to organize. Hence the concept’s current circularity: culture is now the criticism of culture, through which culture can be shaped and known. Given this keyword’s scope and ambiguity, it is no wonder that the project of cultural studies has seemed to lack focus. Almost fifty years ago Raymond Williams sought to distinguish between these senses of culture as medium, life, and spirit with the labels “documentary,” “social,” and “ideal.” “Culture” in all of these senses together constituted the “structure of feeling” generated by the “relationships between elements in a whole way of life.”2 But because, absent the analytical tact of a Williams, it has become so hard to maintain the distinctions among these moments, let alone a feeling for how they cohere, such elaborate redefinitions have come to seem like little more than attempts to save the phenomenon. To gain new purchase on this dominant yet problematic contemporary idea of culture, this chapter, like this book as a whole, returns to the Romantic era to reexamine how culture emerged as a governing idea. Arnold, it suggests, states the formula in such passages as that just cited (even if he had little understanding of the historical force of his figure). The idea of “culture” emerged when the Romantics assembled ideas of “poetry,” “criticism,” and “life” together with that of the “world-river”—of 24 Oceanic Fables of Culture the maritime world as the British Empire sought to organize it and lend it historical direction. This book thus follows strands of sea imagery to trace a genealogy of culture back into the British Romantic poetry that informed the outlook on life of Victorian scholar-poets like Arnold, as well as of Victorian anthropologists like E. B. Tylor. Sketching an overview of this genealogy, this chapter diverts into the field of poetry a critical history of life shaped by recent philosophical currents.3 The category of life is intrinsic to the manifold idea of culture, whether one considers culture in its natural or in its social aspect, and whether one defines it as a whole way of life, as a local set of practices, as the endeavor to live in the best way, or as the dead shell of convention by which human life is protected and constricted. So it is no surprise that life was a main concern for the Romantic poets who, as will be shown, first developed the idea of culture. These poets mused on the notions of the “One Life” suggested by animism, vitalism, pantheism, necessitarianism, and Unitarianism . They brooded over how to rank or otherwise distinguish among human ways of life in the wake of the advent of commercial modernity and political economy. And—what is more of a surprise—when they thought about the totality and immensity of life, about what lies beyond life, or about what encompasses and mediates life’s different forms, they invoked that ultimate “world-river,” the ocean, with a striking frequency and intensity. In a lecture series published over a half-century ago, W. H. Auden explored this same Romantic nexus of poetry, life, culture, and the ocean in an “attempt to understand the nature of Romanticism through an examination of its treatment of a single theme, the sea.”4 Auden declared that the Romantics found in the sea a timeless “symbol of primitive potential power as contrasted with the desert of actualised triviality, of living barbarism versus lifeless decadence” (19). For Auden, the Romantic ocean is a sea of life. As Auden...

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