Romantic Turbulence

Book excerpt: Eric Wilson reveals a neglected yet powerful current in several major Romantic figures: the affirmation of - not escape from - turbulence. Romantic Turbulence unearths the chaotic undercurrents of European Romanticism found in Goethe s science and Schelling s philosophy, and demonstrates how these tendencies agitate the texts of Emerson, Fuller, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman. These writers see the universe not as a reflection of transcendent harmony or a system of predictable laws but rather as a convergence of chaos and order, a polarized field. Detailing this undulatory cosmos, Wilson shows how these American Romantics participate in its unsettling rhythms by practicing an ecological poetics, translating the energies of their habitat into living compositions.