Eric Reid Lindstrom. Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry.

McGrath, Brian

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 communicates a desire to let be what is. Eric Lindstrom's Romantic Fiat: Demystification 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 language 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 everyday, to the world as it is and things as they are. "Let (there) be" constructions produce what Lindstrom calls a language of "allowing" that neither 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 of inquiry, Lindstrom presents competing versions of Romanticism, ranging from Coleridge's belief in the power of the poet to posit a world to Wordsworth's command to his "dearest friend" in "Tintern Abbey" to allow nature to do what it is already 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 allowance, 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) be" statements in romantic writing after Lindstrom's book. From discussions of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and "The Old Cumberland Beggar" to Shelley's Peter Bell and Byron's Don Juan, the book accomplishes something that is all too rare in scholarship (deceptively simple for not being simple at all): the book changes what one notices in a poetry that has become all too familiar. For this reason alone the book deserves immense praise.

The two readings of fiat that Lindstrom so persuasively outlines in Romantic Fiat not only offer competing versions of Romanticism but also competing methods for literary study. For better and for worse, literary study is still focused on producing new interpretations and so still privileges hermeneutics over poetics. Too often new interpretations can seem the result of the critic's forced eccentricities. For hermeneutics to have a chance, though, there must first be an observation, and it has become too common among scholars to pretend that making observations is simple, as if seeing what is there is the simplest thing in the world. As Lindstrom shows, the difference between "let there be" and "let be" readings of fiat is not unlike the difference between critical interpretation, which always risks seeming dissatisfied with the text that is, and observation, which merely "lets be" what is present in the text. Moving between interpretation and observation, Romantic Fiat itself discovers a method not dissimilar to the "creative allowance" Lindstrom traces through romantic poetry. In this way Romantic Fiat questions the single-minded preoccupation with interpretation in literary study. Lindstrom is unwilling to choose interpretation (let there be!) over observation (let be); instead, he finds within romantic writing a tension between creation (which also includes, through negation, demystification) and allowance (an enchantment with what is).

Romantic Fiat is divided into three sections in which Lindstrom covers a vast ground with scholarly ambition and wit. The project moves with tremendous intellectual agility from Wordsworth through Hume and Coleridge to Shelley, Goethe, and Byron. Unwilling merely to catalogue "let" constructions in Romantic poetry, Lindstrom ties fiat to larger historical, conceptual, and mainly economic concerns with the rise of paper money, as the final chapter "Paper Money Poets" and the coda "Nature Poets and Fiat Money" demonstrate. A less ambitious book might have stayed with the development of fiat as a rhetorical device in lyric, but Lindstrom also explores how lyrical fiat is taken up by second-generation romantic poets and linked to economics. More specifically, Lindstrom shows how capitalism privileges one reading of "let (there) be" constructions--the power to create a new economic system divorced from the world that is. In this way, history and in particular the history of capitalism can be seen as a response to lyric fiat that silences the double reading Lindstrom shows romantic poets struggling to articulate.

The book's final chapter, "Paper Money Poets," acts as what Lindstrom describes as a "second introduction," reframing the questions about fiat and lyric poetry with reference to "modern fiat developments in economics, technology, and warfare" (197). This reframing allows Lindstrom to extend his discussions about lyric poetry forward into history and so demonstrate the efficacy of poetic thinking for providing new perspectives on issues that might seem at first non-literary. Through analysis of Goethe's Faust and Byron's Don Juan, Lindstrom shows how the historical turn from the gold standard to paper money is accomplished through something like fiat--a new monetary system is founded by decree, making it possible to print ever increasing amounts of money and so create it, so to speak, from thin air. As a result, developments in economics are subject to the struggles romantic poets have already been shown to explore in the early chapters of Romantic Fiat, and these developments, Lindstrom argues, privilege "let there be" over "let be" with often devastating consequences.

Romantic Fiat offers a chance to rethink the Romantic celebration of creativity and the accompanying drive toward demystification as an engagement with capitalism's imperative to recreate the world and leave nothing as it is. The move to paper money in the book's concluding pages helps Lindstrom argue that Shelley, Goethe, and Byron worry that a reductive reading of lyric fiat has become too much the model for capitalism's single-minded drive to recreate the world in human terms. Letting the world be increasingly becomes the most difficult thing to do. What begins as a study of a particular poetic construction in romantic lyric poetry thus opens on to the same concerns shared by twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory, from Jacques Derrida's work on debt and forgiveness to Mark C. Taylor's studies of economics and theology.

Unwilling to celebrate one reading of fiat over another, Lindstrom's Romantic Fiat fingers instead with the difficulties introduced by "let there be" constructions and shows, once again, the sophistication with which Romantic writing anticipates and so questions the dominant interpretations of Romanticism that inevitably follow in its wake. The now conventional equation of Romanticism with individual creativity is, after reading Romantic Fiat, yet another example of our unwillingness to read the actual language of the poems we purport to value. The preoccupation within Romantic poetry with "let (there) be" constructions demonstrates both its celebration of and resistance to modes of creativity dissatisfied with "what is." As a less careful reader than Lindstrom--one less willing to linger as long on the double reading of fiat he so carefully explores--I conclude with an injunction: "do not let this book be," by which I mean, read this book.

Brian McGrath

Clemson University