Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life by Amanda Jo Goldstein (review)

While the subtitle of Amanda Jo Goldstein’s Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life emphasizes the “new” concepts of life that emerge in Romantic literature and science, an important part of the book’s argument is that these “new logics” owe much to Romantic writers’ repurposing of the past. Specifically, the book argues that William Blake, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Percy Shelley return to Lucretius, and the atomistic materialism of De Rerum Natura, as a consciously anachronistic tactic to disrupt and unsettle the scientific discourses of the day. Goldstein’s own turn to Lucretius might be framed in a similar way. She argues that shifting Romanticism’s focus from Spinoza to Lucretius can unseat dominant critical terms like pantheism, vitalism, and organicism, and instead highlight atomistic, contingent, fragile accounts of living form. In that respect, Sweet Science joins Robert Mitchell’s Experimental Life (2015) as a challenge to organicism as the dominant Romantic paradigm for life. Yet, where Mitchell’s book made “experimental vitalism” a broad term for many different, rival formulations of life, Goldstein tells a more connected, linear story about Romantic Lucretianism. The cohesiveness of the book is helped by its streamlined focus on three authors, who—partly because of their canonical status, but also partly in spite of it—become our guides to a neglected countertradition.

The book emphasizes that it is reading against the grain by opening with a surprising moment from Blake’s writings: an out-of-character moment from The Four Zoas, where he advocates for science rather than aligning it with the “Tree of Death.” As Goldstein notes in the introduction, when Blake imagines a more salubrious age of “sweet science,” he is closely adapting a passage from De Rerum Natura. As a result, he makes Lucretian materialism the template for a poetical science, one that need not be conceived as art’s antagonist. As Goldstein frames it, Lucretian atomism, far from simply being a vulgar materialism or naïve empiricism, pictured matter itself as being figural in nature. Since Lucretius sees the material world as defined, at base, by formal processes like assemblage, shaping, and figuration, Goldstein argues, Lucretian materialism places inert matter, living systems, ideologies, and poems on equal footing.

The analogy between poems and living systems is a hallmark of organicist theory, too. Differentiating the two approaches is the project of chapter one, “Blake’s Mundane Egg: Epigenesis and Milieux.” Unlike the Kantian or Coleridgean privileging of autonomous, self-regulating organisms, Lucretius emphasizes the “acute circumstantial dependency” of living systems (40). In the eighteenth century, Goldstein argues, an early version of that argument plays out in the context of the preformation/epigenesis debates. Blake’s relation to that debate in embryology has been well established, though his intellectual affiliations are characteristically hard to pin down. Ultimately, Goldstein suggests, epigenesist ideas offer Blake an opportunity to make intellectual “mischief,” and his works are contrarian experiments that prod at ongoing tensions—not just about whether an embryo is “preformed” or undergoes structural changes during gestation; but whether such structural changes derive from inner, organic processes, or from the external and contingent play of environmental forces (50).

The book then offers two chapters apiece on Goethe and Shelley. Chapter two, “Equivocal Life: Goethe’s Journals on Morphology,” widens the book’s argument beyond British Romanticism. In German studies “around 1800,” too, organicism was not as monolithic or inevitable a logic as it has sometimes seemed. Drawing on the recent wealth of work on Romanticera botany by Theresa Kelley and others, Goldstein argues that Goethe was interested in moving beyond botany’s focus on “generation” and the formative drive; and instead sought a broader taxonomy of non-generative acts, from pollination (glossed here as “going to dust”) to processes associated with death and decay (93). The chapter presents a clear case study of botany beyond organicism. Moreover, by glossing pollination and...