Chapter 5. A Natural History of Violence

This chapter puts the book’s valorization of “sweet” and “tender” poetic science to the test of state violence of material exploitation. It asks why Shelley’s “wholly political” poem, The Mask of Anarchy – a lightening rod for critical debates about politics and aesthetics in lyric poetry – treats the Peterloo Massacre as an event of natural history. Yet from “naturalizing” the damage, the chapter argues, natural historical discourse enables The Mask to navigate between affective communication and structural analysis. Sketching a history of related moments in eighteenth-century neo-Lucretian poetry, the chapter tracks the proto-Marxian and proto-Foucauldian features of Shelley’s poem as affordances of its genre. For the notoriously “lyrical” Mask needs to be repositioned in a didactic tradition that speaks polemically for long-traveled, bloodstained materials as they enter the material recombinatory of the earth’s cycles of water and weather. As didactic, moreover, the poem’s attempted politics are those of radical pedagogy, rather than lyric performance. Such didactic materialist passions, neither subjective nor divine, motivated significant blowback in early nineteenth-century poetic theory (Mill, De Quincey). Shelley, however, puts this tradition to use in a call to assembly that capitalizes on the difference between embodied power and parliamentary freedoms of speech.

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