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

Amanda Jo Goldstein's first book, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life, is published by Chicago accompanied by some serious accolades offered on its cover by some of the most eminent Romantic scholars today. It was the 2018 recipient of the Kenshur Prize, awarded by the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University for the year's "outstanding monograph." It does not disappoint expectations. This is a timely, innovative, and fascinating study of the neo-Lucretian tradition in Romantic-period literature, which concentrates on Blake, Goethe, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

What Blake perhaps surprisingly described as "sweet Science" in The Four Zoas is recognized by Goldstein as a "strategic redeployment of Lucretius's poetic materialism, unfolding the unrecognized presence and unfamiliar implications of that classical poetic physics within famously Romantic concerns: the problem of living form, the experience of history, and the increasingly strained relations between 'the Poet' and 'the Man of Science'" (2). Lucretius's claim that the universe began as atoms that swerved to collide and, in so doing, produced the world as we know it proved incredibly fruitful for the Romantics. There are ironies involved in these ideas: life is immortal but not for individual selves. Atoms create life but are not, themselves, alive. The world we know by means of our senses was created by "physically figural means" (6). This last idea is particularly pertinent to literature because Lucretian materialism grants "substance to tropes and tropic activity to nonverbal things" (7).

Moving beyond many now well-worn debates about the similarities and differences between poetry and scientific writing, Goldstein is keen to offer something new. It is, she states, "no longer news" that Blake et al. engaged with what we now call biology (38). Her original contribution is to focus on the "antivitalist counterpoint that worked to uncouple professionalizing aesthetics and biology from their shared rhetoric of autonomy, impartiality, and power" (22). In the texts that considers, she is determined to "pursue the once-palpable stakes—an experimental ethics and a biology of transience, a rival image of the body politic, an alternative organization of knowledge, a fresh analysis of state violence and record of the historical present" (23). Shelley and Goethe are the primary examples of this so-called "biopoetic" perspective that Goldstein brings to bear (23). She uses, among others, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, and various theorists of new materialism to develop her case. In doing so, the book's approach enacts the Lucretian "lesson in ineluctable openness, in the physical permeability of a self dependent for its life on constant interchange with other things" (29). Goldstein takes up what she finds useful and moves easily among ideas and theoretical approaches.

In the chapter on Blake, Goldstein shows that epigenesis need not be equated with organicism. In Milton and Jerusalem, she finds evidence to argue that life is an "ongoing social construction site" (46), continually being built and perpetuating itself through time. According to Goldstein, Blake and Kant think of living beings as innately part of existing social structures and contexts. As the focus on epigenesis suggests, she is happy to bring what might be called anachronistic scientific theories into "long-distance agreement" with Romantic writers (56).

Goldstein finds that Goethe's often neglected journal project On Morphology exemplifies "the way Lucretian materialism provided an alternative, minoritarian license for the period's prolific indistinction between science and literature" (73). Goethe's neo-Lucretian perspective enables him to take a view of life as "nonvitalist" (74). Life is not defined against inert matter for Goethe but also refuses "to take organic autonomy as its ideal" (74). Indeed, the likeness between Goethe and Lucretius is really persuasive. In the first issue of On Morphology (1817), Goethe describes how "[e]very living thing is not singular, but rather a plurality." Even while beings may seem to us to be individual, they are in...