Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry by Eric Reid Lindstrom (review)

624 BOOK REVIEWS the Roman state and thereby “question the role of the people during crises of state” (226). Evaluating “the potential of the stage to shape contempo­ rary debate” on such issues as “the nature of participatory republican gov­ ernment, the threat of popular uprising, [and| the role of the people in po­ litical decision making” (225), Sachs concludes in stark terms that “none of these plays is sanguine about the role of the populace in the political pro­ cess” (270). In his reading of the ruins of Rome in Canto iv of Childe Harold’s Pil­ grimage, Sachs observes that “we cannot understand the Romantic without thinking more carefully about the place of Rome within it” (141). Indeed. In Romantic Antiquity, Jonathan Sachs has thought long and productively about the many roles that Rome plays for Romantic literature, politics, and its sense ofits own history. Integral to this thinking is a vigorous debate not only about the role of Rome for the Romantics but also about the abiding significance of the Romantics for us, both as a specific field of literary ref­ erence and as a particular mode of historical understanding. Romantic Antiq­ uity significantly enhances our understanding of Romanticism’s Romeantic past at the same time as it refines our thinking about Romantic historicism. Charles Mahoney University of Connecticut Eric Reid Lindstrom. Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 266. $85. The very language in which a divine command like fiat lux (“let there be light”) is uttered, as the English translation makes legible, always also com­ municates a desire to let be what is. Eric Lindstrom’s Romantic Fiat: Demys­ tification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry turns on this double reading of “let (there) be” constructions in Romantic-era writing, thus complicating the conventional understanding of Romantic creativity as a secularized version of divine fiat. As Lindstrom shows, Romantic poets borrow the divine power to bring into being that which did not exist before, but do so in a lan­ guage that negates its own creative potential: “repeatedly weighing a dual poetics of‘let there be’ and ‘let be,’ ‘fiat’ is at once more rhetorically accurate and mysterious than ‘creation’” (29). Revisiting our most common thinking about Romantic notions of creativity, this conceptually daring and closely argued study produces a new understanding of Romanticism. Romantic Fiat attends both to lyric poetry’s exploration of the positing power of language and its simultaneous commitment to the ordinary and SiR, 51 (Winter 2012) BOOK REVIEWS 625 everyday, to the world as it is and things as they are. “Let (there) be” con­ structions produce what Lindstrom calls a language of “allowing” that nei­ ther renounces nor secures poetry’s claims to self-fulfillment. The goal of Romantic Fiat is thus not to harmonize these competing theories of poetry but rather to trace a rhetorical effect that has not yet received sustained critical attention. Through a method that brings together close reading and philosophical, theoretical, and historical modes ofinquiry, Lindstrom pres­ ents competing versions of Romanticism, ranging from Coleridge’s belief in the power ofthe poet to posit a world to Wordsworth’s command to his “dearest friend” in “Tintern Abbey” to allow nature to do what it is al­ ready doing (“Therefore let the moon / Shine on thee”). For Lindstrom, fiat evinces a paradoxical impulse to think Romanticism’s simultaneous commitment to demystification—the poet’s refusal to accept what is given—and enchantment—the poet’s celebration, pitched in ethical terms, of all that is given. The “in-between” of poetry, its power to make both everything and nothing happen, leads to the sort of utterance Lindstrom calls a “useless fiat.” “I demonstrate,” he writes, “how jussive commands strikingly characterize romantic poetic activity as a mode of creative allow­ ance, or ‘letting’” (3). In the course of the volume, Lindstrom gathers an impressive number of “let be” statements. In much the same way that one cannot help but notice the number of apostrophes in Romantic writing after reading Jonathan Culler’s rightly famous essay on apostrophe, my sense is that readers will find a similar difficulty not noticing “let (there...