Noel Jackson. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. ISBN: 9780521869379. Price: CDN$90

Despite its title, Noel Jackson’s Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry is less a book about Romantic-era “science” in any historically or disciplinarily specific sense than it is a book about how “sensation”—a category capacious enough, Jackson demonstrates, to subsume his title’s first half—enables canonical Romantic poetry’s visions of political change, of historical being, and of aesthetic receptivity. To implicate “sensation” in Romanticism’s overlapping articulations of these three entities is also, as Jackson does, to refute “new historicist” (81) characterizations of Romantic poetry as “ahistorical, and hence most deeply ideological” (3) as a function of that poetry’s interest in human interiority or, more precisely, its interest in the status of external objects as ineluctably perceived. Jackson’s book reads most strongly as a defense of sensation not as a scientific but as a critical faculty, whose force resides in what Jackson designates “the embodied basis of Romantic thought” (3). It is the “embodied character of aesthetic response” (6) or “embodied aesthetic experience” (7) that, for Jackson, repudiates any reflexive alignment of Romantic interiority and history’s sublimation into ideology; as Jackson writes in a trenchant rebuttal of the latter premise, “what is most obviously overlooked in the identification of inwardness with historical occlusion is an understanding of the historicity of inwardness itself” (104 – 105). While Jackson’s book contains brief, fascinating accounts of the resonance of electricity as a figure for political contagion, or of Keats’s interest in the distinction between motor and sensory nerves, it is Jackson’s broader qualification of Romantic sensation as “embodied” that propels his argument for its critical deployment in poetry. His book’s first chapter argues for the trope of “suggestion” (26)—a trope, Jackson shows, mutually embroiled in the discourses of empiricist cognition and political excitement—as “a model for the capacity of the individual mind or of the artwork to register, give form to, and modify the sensible impressions of history” (27). Jackson links “history”—and, more to the point, history’s susceptibility to “modif[ication]”—to a regime of sensory “impression” whose materiality distills rather than dissimulates the influence of the social, a linkage that gains most traction in his second chapter, which claims that both Wordsworth and Blake theorize “affective history” (64) through worldly history’s mutually sensational and ideational revivification in poetry. Jackson’s proposition that “Blake regards historical transformation as dependent at least in part upon a correspondent transformation in the senses” (93) constitutes his most unassailable defense of a logic of political causality that, for Blake, is directly attributable to the organization of a citizen-reader’s perceptual apparatus. But Jackson’s reading of Wordsworth’s effort, in places like The Prelude’s Book 2, to replace bare-boned empiricism like Condillac’s with “an account more richly sensitive to the influences of habit and feeling” (73) offers an equally suggestive and persuasive argument for Wordsworth’s own “understanding of the self as historical from its inception” (75). Jackson argues that the discourse of Romantic sensation entails “an account of how we have come to feel and to know in the way we do, and how, with the aid of poetry itself, these states too might change” (99). But how does Wordsworth’s—or, insofar as Wordsworth stands in for “the normative claims often associated with canonical Romantic poetry” (16), how does canonical Romanticism’s—alignment of embodied perception with an historical self define that self’s capacity to effect “change?” Or, differently put, what kind of change does such a self effect? Jackson’s third chapter offers a nuanced defense of Coleridge’s immersion in a practice of interiorizing self-experiment that, elaborated by philosophers like Thomas Reid as an extension of Lockean empiricism from the field of epistemology into that of moral …