Introduction: Sibylline Leaves

This special issue takes its title from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetry collection Sibylline Leaves (1817), which was first intended as a companion for Biographia Literaria (also 1817), a project that William Hazlitt considered no more significant than the "soiled and fashionable leaves of the Morning Post."¹ In 1820 Coleridge extended his metaphor, juxtaposing the composition of his "GREAT WORK" with transcription from "so many scraps and sibylline leaves, including the Margins of Books & blank Pages."² The wry title Sibylline Leaves ennobles Coleridge's "fragmentary and widely scattered" poems with an allusion to the Cumaean Sibyl and the sometime hieratic and tightly controlled, sometime mendacious and miscellaneous form of the sibylline books.³ But it also focuses readers' attention on the realities of the contemporary moment: many poems were published in and subsequently excavated from the flying leaves of cheap, ephemeral newspapers.

From the prophetic to the everyday, this special issue explores the play of papers between proliferating snips, scraps, and scattered leaves, and their prospective and retrospective relationship with the "great work," the complete edition, or the philosophical system. The "leaf in flight" serves as a guiding metaphor that is rooted in shifting bibliographic materialities, disciplinary conventions, and domains of practice. Using the title of Coleridge's collection as a starting point, this special issue traces some of the ways in which individual and institutional collecting practices engage with the dynamic tradition of sibylline leaves, and assimilate and contain loose papers, detached pieces, and flighty scraps. The archives we explore are sites of destruction as much as conservation; under the imperative of preservation, individual items are sometimes reconstituted in their singularity, retrospectively disbound and thus detached from their bibliographic history. These materials redirect Romanticism's interest in fragments and the relationship between parts and wholes by taking on the metaphor of the leaf in flight and exploring its material and conceptual scope. Sibylline Leaves encourages us to rethink the intuitive teleology from manuscript to complete work, examining the ways in which the fugitive logic of the scrap is inscribed in codex forms.

The classic articulation of the Sibyl's flying leaves can be found in the third book of Virgil's Aeneid. When Aeneas encounters the Cumaean Sibyl outside her cave, she writes the fates upon leaves and lays them out before the entrance, but if "a blast of wind" or vapor lift them in the air,

She resumes no more her Museful Care:Nor gathers from the Rocks her scatter'd Verse;Nor sets in order what the Winds disperse.⁴

Virgil's use of anaphora emphasizes the Sibyl's recalcitrance. As Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass point out, the word "gathering" in Dryden's translation presents the Sibyl's flying leaves through the bibliographic encoding of the codex.⁵ In the monumental folio edition of Dryden's translation of Virgil, these words emphasize the tension between two different models of textual production and dissemination. The unpredictability of the Sibyl's flying leaves can be contrasted to Virgil's imperial mission to justify and celebrate the Roman reign of Augustus, as much as to the Sibylline books as a means of state power. The Sibyl's recalcitrance suggests alternative paper trails—a dynamic, reversible, and diverse corpus, whose textual condition challenges the stability of the codex.

For Shaftesbury, the disbound leaves of the Sibyl were part of a deliberate strategy of obfuscation. In the Miscellanies he noted the Sibyl's wisdom in "writing her Prophetick Warnings and pretended Inspirations upon Joint-Leaves; which, immediately after their elaborate Superscription, were torn in pieces, and scatter'd by the Wind."⁶ This ephemeral and fragmented textual condition protects the Sibyl from public scrutiny:

T'was impossible to disprove the divinity of such Writings¸ whilst they cou'd be perus'd only in Fragments. Had the Sister-Priestess of Delphos, who deliver'd herself in audible plain Metre, been found at any time to have transgress'd the Rule of Verse, it wou'd have been difficult in those days to father the lame Poetry upon Apollo himself. But where the Invention of the...