This chapter explores some understudied affinities between the essay and psychoanalysis as practices of living and writing. Pointing to a shared commitment to living a more ‘real’, or more vivid life, and the developmental task of coming to face reality for oneself, the chapter focuses on the way the ‘middle group’ of psychoanalysts in twentieth-century Britain – which included D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and Masud Khan – drew on the resources of the essay form, and the literary culture of Romanticism, in order to develop a particularly essayistic mode of psychoanalytic writing and practice. The chapter makes the case that the essay is particularly suited to exploring just what is distinctive about psychoanalytic therapeutic experience. It concludes with a more extended study of the career of Milner in the context of the development of the British welfare state, as she transitioned from essay writing to clinical practice.

Like Europe, the Mediterranean is a British imaginary and a geographical reality. The term ’Mediterranean’ signifies the narrative of cultural origin and the history of maritime trade, militarism, and diplomacy. The chapter begins with an account of a neoclassical rotunda in Ickworth House, Suffolk, which exemplifies the interfused, recursive narratives and traditions which constitute Greco-Roman antiquity, before tracing those traditions across the medieval Troy narrative and the Romantic response to the Elgin Marbles. The theme tying the cases together, as a means of traversing the immense distances between the Homeric epics and the ongoing debate over the Parthenon sculptures, is the metonymic relationship between totality and fragmentation, which Keats calls ‘the shadow of a magnitude’. The fragment triggers the imaginative reconstruction of the whole, and, by claim of cultural heritage, informs the ambition to possess the whole. The emphasis on the dialectic of unity/fragmentation confirms the narrative of a shared, antique, Mediterranean monoculture to be riven with competing, contested or colonial histories – as expressed by the cultural patchwork of the Ickworth rotunda.

New resources have led to new insights into the history of English vocabulary. The appearance of machine-readable corpora has made it possible to contextualise particular idiolectal usages much more comprehensively than was possible until recently. Such developments have allowed, through the harnessing of the large bodies of data to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary and other resources, a much better understanding of intertextual engagement: what might be called authorial invention, the focus of this chapter. The chapter focuses on authorial invention during the Romantic period, with reference to three writers whose imaginative outputs drew profoundly on their understanding of medicine: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Mary Shelley (1797–1851), and John Keats (1795–1821). As Richard Holmes has argued, Romanticism drew profoundly on its scientific inheritance, in the cases analysed here derived from direct or indirect encounters with thinkers such as Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808), Astley Cooper (1768–1841), William Cullen (1710–1790), and Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). However, they transformed this inheritance through what Holmes terms ‘imaginative intensity’.

Prior to shaping literary depictions of a nature classed both wondrous and terrible, sublime discourse addressed uplifting, transporting encounters with the written word. Nicolas Boileau’s influential French translation of Longinus’ ancient treatise On the Sublime (ca. first century CE) restyled the branch of sublime discourse dedicated to discourse itself, suggesting that sublime literature is not elevated simply because it is complex or because it is marked by a high or lofty style. Rather sublime works of verbal art carry a peculiar charge, a charge or spark relayed to audiences taking in sublime textual encounters. This emphasis on a charged sublime encounter would underwrite prominent philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sublime nature penned by Kant, Wordsworth, Burke, and Keats. Such literary representations of sublime nature are famously ambivalent, with aesthetic renderings of earthquakes, fires, or floods bearing out fraught questions of agency. Kantian and Wordsworthian models of sublime nature suggest human agencies of mind transcend vast powers of nature. Burkean and Keatsian accounts of dread nature or astounding material sublimities ultimately humble humankind.

Since antiquity, poets have described their experience of versification as one of constraint. The introduction examines examples of this trope, and introduces the book’s central claim: that voluntary submission to formal constraints effaces the poetries and experiences of those who are actually in bondage. It discusses the way poets and critics have aligned the imposition or radical overthrow of formal constraints with conservative or revolutionary politics, and offers some working definitions of lyric. Close readings of a sonnet by Keats, and a discussion of J. S. Mill’s essay ‘What is Poetry’, establish the book’s historicist perspective on the ‘liberal lyric’ in relation to the histories of slavery. The introduction also explains the methodology, and situates my own critical practice in relation to whiteness as a kind of enclosure.

This essay argues that the traditional (and not just Romantic) association of Shakespeare with nature and passion ties his work to a non-doctrinaire politics and morals. As ‘the poet of nature’, in Dr Johnson’s phrase, Shakespeare is linked to an anti-systematic, open, essentially tolerant worldview. The essay brings this point into sharper focus by recounting how one of the poet’s strangest and most ardent admirers, the twentieth-century French-Rumanian writer E.M. Cioran, understood Shakespeare as an artist fundamentally hostile to philosophy and even to reason itself. For Cioran, Shakespeare, along with kindred authors such as Dostoievsky and Nietzsche, exploded systems and the pretensions of thought. It was Shakespeare’s commitment to the passions and experience, his basic irrationalism, that made his work such a powerful antidote to the murderous and programmatic utopianism that, Cioran believed, had blighted so much of human existence, not least in the twentieth century.

The Romantic Revolution in Taste entailed a radical revision of the category of art and a toppling of the traditional hierarchy of the senses. In the wake of the French Revolution, Parisian gastronomers emerged as necessary adjuncts to the phenomenon of the restaurant, guiding the public in the formerly exclusive practice of food connoisseurship and applying the aesthetic art of judgment to products of culinary artistry. This chapter examines the response of British literary writers and critics to the cultural upheaval the age of gastronomy represented. It surveys the different “schools” of thought that emerged at this time – in the language of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Leg of Mutton School, the Cookery School, the Soda-Water School – in addition to the more well-known Cockney and Lake Schools – and considers the role of William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, William Kitchiner, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron in the Romantic Revolution in taste.