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...the period's privileged aesthetic objects because its aesthetic discourse negotiates the place of consciousness in the physical environment increasingly understood in geological terms" (xv). Such an argument represents a logical extension of the position taken by John Wyatt in Wordsworth and the Geologists (1995). Having established Wordsworth's thoroughgoing acquaintance with the practices and practitioners of geology, Wyatt limited himself to discussing the impact of that science on Wordsworth's poetry. Unlike Heringman, he did not undertake to explain in detail the interest that geology held for the poets by linking both poetry and geology to a third term, nor did he attempt to see both as partaking of a symbolic economy that addresses what Frances Yates, writing in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, terms "that intimate connection of the mens with the world" (455).
While he deals with three major Romantic poets--Blake, Wordsworth, and, to a lesser extent, Shelley--in less depth and less broadly than Wyatt does with Wordsworth alone, Heringman situates his discussion in a matrix that partakes of the ongoing discussion of the sublime as that discussion evolved in England during the eighteenth century, and an English tradition of loco-descriptive poetry that reaches back to Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1613). Although he makes use of continental scientists, philosophers, and poets such as Cuvier, Kant, and Novalis, Heringman is unwavering in his focus on the interactions of British poetry and British geology. As he observes, "poetry and geology in later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain are mutually constitutive through the common idiom of landscape aesthetics" (1).
A particular strength of the book, arising out of the decision to treat the literary-scientific interactions under discussion as arising out of a symbolic economy rather than as a matter of cause and effect, is the way in which it is organized. Heringman, in his introductory chapter, establishes the operative presence and durability of a "culture of landscape" and the "aesthetic materialism" to which that culture gives rise. As Heringman notes, such "aesthetic materialism [is] often at odds with...
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