As recently as the early 1980s, the definition of Romantic poetry would have been fairly clear and mostly non-controversial. Students explored Romanticism through the work of six major poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats - with primary attention being given to their lyric poetry or to the lyric qualities of their attempts at, say, epic. Yet a Romanticism defined by the “Big Six” male writers is very much a mid-twentieth- century creation contrasted with, for example, Thomas Humphry Ward's English Poets of 1880, which included the favored six (Blake, largely invisible during the Romantic period, had been recovered by his Victorian admirers) alongside “secondary” Romantic poets such as Thomas Love Peacock, “Barry Cornwall,” and Leigh Hunt, popular writers of the period such as Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Moore, and Samuel Rogers, and women poets such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, and Felicia Hemans; George Benjamin Woods's 1916 English Poetry and Prose of the Romantic Period (still being reprinted in 1950) has a similar gathering of poets. Ernest Bernbaum's 1949 edition of his Guide Through the Romantic Movement continued to recognize sixteen major Romantic writers, though they are all male; but the path being taken by scholarship on Romanticism was signaled in the 1950 MLA publication The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research, which included only five male poets, with Blake's absence corrected in later versions of this work. The most important anthology of the 1970s and 1980s, David Perkins's English Romantic Writers (1967), gives almost all of its pages to the core group, though it does sample other male poets.

It was, most immediately, the work of his own contemporaries that prompted Percy Shelley to proclaim, at the close of his Defence of Poetry (1821), that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The authority of those poets in the age we have come to call “Romantic,” Shelley explained, derived not from their opinions, with which he often disagreed, but from their capacity to tap into a certain spirit - what he called “the spirit of their age.” Shelley figured this with a metaphor taken from recent developments in the natural sciences: it is impossible to read these contemporaries, he wrote, without being struck by “the electric life that burns in their words.” “Electricity,” for Shelley, is at once a modern scientific discovery and a theme that hearkens back to the ancient myth of Prometheus, the thief of divine fire. The prototypical writer of his age - the “Romantic poet” - thus became on Shelley's account a kind of modern Prometheus, a poet of the electric life of words. This view would not go unchallenged. Indeed, even before it was written down in the Defence of Poetry, Mary Shelley had published Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), a fable of “electric life” and monstrous ambition with more than casual application to her husband's grand schemes. In spite of such challenges, or because of them, a sense of verbal electricity in Romantic poetry has persisted through generations of readers and assured these writings a special place in British literature ever since.

The herald, companion, and follower of an “affective revolution” as significant to modernity as its accompanying political revolutions, Romanticism is deeply concerned with questions of sexuality and gender. In its lyric intensity, introspection, powerful emotions, and luxuriant language, Romantic poetry has played a critical role in our enduring notions of poetry as expressive of a deep self. Sexuality, and the self-knowledge and liberation that sexuality seems to promise, are central to this expressive hypothesis associated with Romantic poetry. We are familiar with readings of canonical Romantics that emphasize their celebrations of politicized sexual liberty; building on this work, I would like to broaden the spectrum of poets considered, and most importantly, to engage with the emerging consensus in the history of sexualities. Approaching the question of Romantic poetry's relationship to sexuality and gender in more historically charged ways allows us to consider how categories of sexuality and gender operate through both content and form - as significant to the intellectual and aesthetic work of the poetry as to the material and commercial properties of poetic production.

The revolutionary fervor of late eighteenth-century Europe destabilized both gender and sexual roles in unprecedented ways, unleashing at once widespread demands for greater social and gender mobility and a reactionary backlash that sought to reinforce hierarchies. Domestic and sexual roles were of particular concern to reactionary British moralists, as it was through such seemingly private channels that dangerous political temptations could corrupt the body politic.

Having agreed that this volume should include a chapter on a single Romantic poem, and that I would write it, I chose the lyric that came to bear the unwieldy title “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” first published in 1807. Wordsworth composed this poem over two intensive periods of work in 1802 and 1804, the heart of his great decade of creativity. The two-year gap after the composition of the Ode's first four stanzas can perhaps be taken as a measure of the challenge it posed to him. The result of his labors, in any case, is arguably the most important lyric poem of an age known for its lyric poetry. Furthermore, it forms a crucial link in several canonical chains of English poetry that run through the period. For later lyric poets in the nineteenth century, Wordsworth's “second selves,” as he once called them, the Ode loomed as large as anything he ever wrote, including the more professedly experimental poems of Lyrical Ballads and the longer, more ambitious works such as The Excursion and his posthumously published autobiographical poem, The Prelude. In seminal lyrics by Keats, Shelley, and Browning, the Ode set the very terms of poetic engagement with Wordsworth and what he came to stand for. At the same time, the Ode also connected allusively to some important poems of the century before, including to lyrics written in the post-Augustan genre known as the “progress poem.” This latter point, about the progress poem, has not been much addressed in modern critical commentary on the Ode, and I want to suggest that it is crucial for understanding how the Ode establishes its exemplary role in British Romantic poetry and its own place in the history of the lyric, both retroactively and proactively.

Poetic meter is a pattern of marked linguistic features and their absence that shapes a poetic line. In English these features are most often stresses, and the pattern that emerges between marked and unmarked stresses eventually becomes the overall form that is the poem itself. Although meter is measurable, and to some degree predictable, once it has been established through a series of repetitions, the actual rhythm of a poem converges and departs from this pattern of meter, lending it texture and interest.

As early as Aristotle, such dynamic emergence, or entelechy, of form has been contrasted to structures, or finite shapes, and when we speak of poetic meters and the larger structures that are poetic forms, we must acknowledge their living dimension as well as the fixed repertoire of kinds of poems that we have inherited from literary history. Even in the two dominant forms of meter in English - accentual and accentual-syllabic verse - we find this tension between expected and emerging form. Accentual meter, which measures pure stresses alone, historically is associated with vernacular verse and song traditions, including British nursery rhymes, game chants, and ballads. Because English is isochronous, that is, it tends to have the same intervals of time between stressed syllables no matter how many unstressed syllables are between them, accentual meters follow the natural stresses of spoken language. The varying syllables of such meter, following the Anglo-Saxon line, often are characterized by four beats and a strong medial caesura. Accentual syllabic meters, however, unfold by means of an ideal pattern constituted by the relation between the number of feet, or groups of syllables, in a line and the number of stresses; in any given poem, the actual line may not supply that relation in the expected way, but the reader or listener will bear the ideal pattern in mind.

In “The Four Ages of Poetry” (1820), Thomas Love Peacock archly complained that contemporary poetry was absurdly derivative of ancient models of inspiration and composition: “While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws [toys] and rattles for the grown babies of the age.” He castigates Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Moore, and Campbell for their cannibalistic and anachronistic efforts, which he sees as no more than patching together “disjointed relics of tradition and fragments of second-hand observation” to produce “a modern-antique compound of frippery and barbarism.” It was indeed confidently believed that ancient societies, whether British, Greek, or Roman, shared virtues of originality and genius, and that modern poets should mine these seams. Southey's preparation before writing his epic Madoc was to “study three works . . . the Bible, Homer, and Ossian,” and Hazlitt argued that the four prototypes of poetry were, similarly, the Bible, Homer, Ossian, and Dante.

There is of course nothing new in Peacock's attack: The Dunciad Variorum (1729) and the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741) set the tone in the eighteenth century for satirizing the enervated taste of antiquarians and connoisseurs, and this mockery was carried through into the engravings of Hogarth and Gillray. But there is something new in Peacock's criticism of the ubiquity of the antique and the arcane.

Readers interested in the relationship between poetry and the novel in the Romantic period have long been charmed by the scene of the autumnal walk in Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818). Keeping each other begrudging yet compulsive company, the extended family circle at Uppercross sets out on a “long walk,” and Anne Elliot must once again witness at close hand the flirtations of her beloved Captain Wentworth and the Musgrove sisters. Finding pleasure in this walk requires a deliberate effort on Anne's part: she thus turns to the mental discipline of “repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.” But while Anne occupies her mind “as much as possible in such like musings and quotations,” she cannot help, when “within reach of Captain Wentworth's conversation,” but try to hear it. And so the scene unfolds as a drama of what Anne overhears when unable to “fall into a quotation.”

With its retrospective structure and its attention to feeling and subjectivity, Persuasion is often called the most “Romantic” of Austen's novels. This particular scene is beloved for its “lyric” qualities and structure, and its interest in subjectivity, landscape, colloquy, and voiced and unvoiced emotion, justifies such comparisons. Barbara Hardy once described the episode as resembling an “Ode to Autumn in three stanzas,” and, for Romanticists, Keats's as yet unwritten ode lends an uncanny charge to Austen's evocation of autumn's poetry.

I use the term 'philosophy of nature' in a broad sense, to include most of the topics which would have belonged in the Hellenistic category of physics; because, although Galen was a physician rather than a physicist, he was far from being merely a doctor. Indeed, he considered it to be impossible to be a successful doctor without a thorough grounding in all of the then canonical branches of philosophy, namely logic, physics and ethics (see The Best Doctor is also a Philosopher [Opt.Med.] 1 53-63, = SM 2, 1-8). And this was no mere genuflection towards philosophy: this commitment is repeated, and its genuineness exemplified, on countless occasions throughout his works.

ELEMENTS, QUALITIES AND BODIES

Galen attributes the notion that proper medical practice requires serious physical knowledge to Hippocrates:

To describe the fortunes of Galen over the centuries is almost to write the history of medicine since his death. Not only did his ideas constitute the basis of formal medicine in Europe at least until the seventeenth century, and arguably until the nineteenth, but as Yunani medicine (i.e. Greek medicine as consolidated and developed by Ibn Sina [Avicenna], d. 1037), they constitute a major medical tradition in the modern Muslim world. Galen's holistic approach can also be found among modern practitioners of complementary medicine, as well as in one branch of Tibetan medicine. Galen's conception of Hippocrates and Hippocratic medicine not only dominated until recently historians' approaches to their medical past but, more subtly, continues to influence modern perceptions of what medicine is and how it should be practised. Galen's ideal of the learned, thinking practitioner still directs our preconceptions of what a doctor should be like, even if his demands for constant training in philosophy and in dissection can be fulfilled only with difficulty. Historians' knowledge of Galen continues to increase, not only because his writings have been studied more closely in the last thirty years than at any time since the seventeenth century, but also because there has been a steady accession of new discoveries, albeit principally in medieval translations rather than in his original Greek. Indeed, modern scholars are more familiar with Galen's works than were their predecessors in Byzantium and all but a handful of experts in the Islamic world.

INTRODUCTION

For all Galen's many faces – medical scientist, public dissector and demonstrator, psychologist and moral philosopher, logician, linguist, commentator, lexicographer and literary critic, pharmacologist, historian of thought and story-teller – we should not forget that he regarded himself primarily as an iatros, a healer of patients and a restorer and preserver of health. Indeed, the principal job (ergon) or aim (skopos) of the medical art, he repeatedly says, is the treatment of disease and the preservation of health; and it is his primary responsibility as a doctor to carry out that job in an indefinite number of particular cases. For while most other areas of Galen's activity are of a theoretical nature and aimed at attaining knowledge and understanding of universal truths, healing is by definition a practical activity concerned with individual patients constituting particular cases of illness.

Yet in spite of its fundamental importance, Galen's therapeutics has, as far as I am aware, never received anything remotely aspiring to a comprehensive scholarly treatment. The reason for this is not difficult to see. Therapeutics is, in a way, the summa of all of Galen's other activities: it both presupposes them and is their culmination.

In his biobibliographical treatise, On My Own Books (Lib.Prop.), Galen categorizes a significant segment of his vast written array according to the past authority (or authorities) with whose works, or wider thought, they are engaged. The names of Hippocrates, Erasistratus, Asclepiades (of Bithynia), Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus, as well as the collectivities of the Empiricists, Methodists and Stoics, all appear in chapter headings as having attracted Galen's dedicated literary attention. Not all appear in the same light, however. Some – Erasistratus, the Empiricists, Methodists and Stoics – are critically identified, with Galen writing to differentiate himself from them; while the rest are referred to more neutrally, as having been written on, or about. The number, and type, of texts that come under each heading also varies considerably, and there are several cross-references to other categories in which the same treatise could (and sometimes does) also feature.

There is still more unevenness in terms of the survival of these texts, so that a distinctly (though revealingly) unrepresentative sample remains available for further study. It is worth, therefore, attempting to replace the extant portion of Galen's exegetical efforts within the wider patterns of his literary engagements with the works of others, before subjecting it to more detailed analysis; trying to get a sense of his interpretative project as a whole before focusing on its most historically successful products.

WORKS OF GALEN CONCERNING LOGIC (LOST UNLESS OTHERWISE INDICATED)

Under the heading 'books useful for demonstrations' (On My Own Books [Lib.Prop.] XIX 39):

If there's one thing that Galen thinks he knows, it is that human beings are capable of knowing things. Indeed, if they are intelligent, industrious and uncorrupted by base physical desires, then they are capable of knowing quite a lot. On the other hand, there are inherent limitations to what human beings can know; and speculative philosophy has tended to over-estimate its ability to discover truth, or even plausibility, in its more abstruse reaches. Galen, then, is no sceptic; indeed, his contempt for scepticism is boundless. But nor is he a hopeless epistemological optimist either. If human knowledge has its scope, it also has its limits. But those limits are broad enough to allow the diligent doctor room to discover, and establish, all that he needs to know.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE

It was not always so, however. Galen benefited from a varied education with a variety of teachers, both philosophical and medical. As a result, he was early introduced to the ubiquity and the virulence of the disputes between both doctors and philosophers, disputes which seemed to hold out no hope of rational, non-partisan resolution.