Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention<\/em><\/a>, \u201cthe first documentation of the disorder we now call Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder\u201d is found in \u201ca medical text published in London in 1798.\u201d Scottish physician Alexander Crichton described the \u201cmorbid alterations to which attention is subject\u201d and highlighted patients who exhibited an \u201cincapacity of attending with a necessary degree of constancy to any one subject\u201d as well as \u201can unnatural or morbid sensibility of the nerves, by which means this faculty is incessantly withdraw from one impression to another.\u201d Such people were in the grip of what Crichton called \u201cthe fidgets\u201d (17).<\/p>\nCrichton disagreed with Thomas Reid\u2019s claim that attention is a purely voluntary act. He discovered that (in Gurton-Wachter\u2019s words) \u201cattention is often involuntary and that to believe otherwise would be considered, by the 1790s, quite \u2018unphilosophical\u2019\u201d (17).<\/p>\n
Gurton-Wachter thinks it significant that Crichton\u2019s treatise was published in the same year as Lyrical Ballads<\/em>. The connection is explicit in Wordsworth\u2019s \u201cPreface\u201d to the volume, published in 1800: Wordsworth complained \u201cabout a degradation of attention among British readers more pervasive and general than Crichton described. Wordsworth\u2019s famous diagnosis of the \u2018state of almost savage torpor\u2019 in the minds of British readers\u2014minds altered by the speed and pace of reading daily newspapers and frantic novels\u2014is a complaint about attention, and an explicit indictment of his own readers\u2019 \u2018organs of attention,\u2019 or lack thereof\u201d (18).<\/p>\nThe press was partly to blame. Political events also affected British minds: \u201cThe fact that Wordsworth blames this communal attention deficit disorder on the \u2018great national events which are daily taking place\u2019 and the \u2018increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies,\u2019 suggests not just that poetry and newspapers competed for readers\u2019 attentions. Rather, Wordsworth\u2019s point is that the political and social transformations of the period, in conjunction with the new media that documented them, altered how<\/em> people paid attention altogether\u201d (18).<\/p>\nThe momentous events were mainly emanating from France\u2014first the Terror and threat of invasion, then Napoleon. One clue to the links between war and attention is the use of \u201cAttention!\u201d as a military command, first attested in a 1792 field manual of the British War Office. Gurton-Wachter claims that \u201cthe Romantic period marked a newly explicit attempt to describe, regulate, and standardize attention for military purposes\u201d (23), not only in the army but throughout British society. <\/p>\n
The Romantic poets aimed, she claims, \u201cto derail that process and reappropriate a mode of attention\u201d that was being lost. Wordsworth hoped that poetry\u2014and his poetry especially\u2014would \u201ccorrect and counter the effects of newspapers, urban life, and politics and how readers pay attention.\u201d Romantic poets traded in the contrast of news-reel A.D.D. and the contemplative attentiveness required by poetry, but Gurton-Wachter describes \u201ca Romantic poetics of attention that, moving beyond a blanket demand for heightened readerly absorption, uses verse form to explore attention\u2019s conditions and its limits, its forcefulness and its finitude.\u201d They experimented \u201cwith the rhythms of reading and thus with the media and conditions of receptivity\u201d and encouraged \u201cmodes of divided, doubled, and multiplied attention, in which it finds not a liability but a strength,\u201d working out \u201ca rhythm in verse between attention and its relaxation, between watchfulness and its withdrawal\u201d (26). <\/p>\n
In this regard, the Romantics do not emerge as thoroughgoing anti-moderns, but as modern poets writing poetry that would be therapeutic to national A.D.D.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to Lily Gurton-Wachter\u2019s Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention, \u201cthe first documentation of the disorder we now call Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder\u201d is found in \u201ca medical text published in London in 1798.\u201d Scottish physician Alexander Crichton described the \u201cmorbid alterations to which attention is subject\u201d and highlighted patients who exhibited an \u201cincapacity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1601,1208],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-attention","category-romanticism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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