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The Maritime Georgic and the Lake Poet Empire of Culture

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/elh.0.0012

1080-6547

Samuel Baker,

Maritime and Coastal Archaeology

The Maritime Georgic and the Lake Poet Empire of Culture Samuel Baker A simple question needs to be addressed by any genealogy of the culture idea.1 How did a concept so rooted in the objective world of earth, tools, and crops become a concept of individual and social subjectivity? How did it change from a concrete idea to a universal, abstract, and absolute one? When Cicero formulated his idea of cultura animi, or when Francis Bacon wrote of “the culture of the mind”—reiterating with that phrase his more famous one, “the georgics of the mind”—they crafted metaphors based in work on the land.2 The eighteenth-century rhetoric of cultivation remained primarily metaphorical, transferring to mental work the kind of labor we now call agricultural. By the time of Matthew Arnold, however, the term “culture” had come to directly denote work on the spirit or mind of the individual, and thereby of the group, especially the nation. The genitives and adjectives integral to such metaphorical constructions as “culture of the mind” and “intellectual culture” dropped away. Raymond Williams helpfully suggests that this displacement and abstraction came about, over centuries, through “a degree of habituation to the metaphor.”3 A change in degree led to a change in kind, and like an addiction that reorganizes its host to its own ends, the habitual use of the culture metaphor eventually brought about a new conception of the social body. Yet the needs and desires that drove this process remain obscure. In this essay, I suggest that British writers reconceived the idea of culture as they came to grips with how the material work of cultivating growth had become less a matter of working the land than of extending commercial, industrial, and military efforts across land and sea. Such efforts depended on processes of abstraction.4 As the teachings of Adam Smith took hold at the end of the eighteenth century, the British elite mobilized the Physiocratic idea of the productive essence of wealth and extended it from agriculture to all sectors.5 With work becoming more regimented, commodities came to be tacitly valued in terms of the abstract labor time needed to produce and distribute them.6 Such measurement was made with reference to the grid of empty homogeneous time and space that had been articulated ever more [End Page 531] absolutely in the course of developing the technologies requisite for conquering the ocean.7 The romantics articulated an absolute idea of culture consonant with such totalizing abstraction and imagined across its regular spaces—thereby adumbrating what might be considered the original “realist floor-plan” for modern representation.8 Yet they also sought to ground culture in concrete particularities, identifying the cultural absolute with the vital nature of individuals, regions, and nations. Now resisting, now supplementing the new science of political economy, they characterized literary work as in its own right a national tradition of production, one that evoked the land all the more ardently because it spanned the seas.9 Conveying an intensified, second-order vision of British cultivation or culture, they created works in a mode here termed the maritime georgic. The georgic is the didactic genre of poetry concerned with agriculture, with animal husbandry, and with industriousness generally. Considered as a mode or an ethos, the georgic involves a disposition toward the earth, care for growing things, and, more broadly, usefulness, disciplined work, labor, production, progress, and wealth, or at least plenitude. While Virgil’s Georgics is a highly allusive text loosely modeled on the works of Hesiod and other Greek authors, it departs so far from such precedents that it essentially founds its genre in a way that neither the Eclogues nor the Aeneid do for the pastoral or the epic.10 Lacking alternative classical models, latter-day georgics tend to closely approximate the pattern set by Virgil when he intersperses instruction in agriculture and husbandry with patriotic vistas of Roman Italy in the troubled years when Octavian was becoming Caesar Augustus. Yet while a superficially straightforward poem, the Georgics is, as a synthetic and yet novel creation, also intensely self-referential and modernistic.11 Many British poems in its mode elaborate the dramatic tension...