Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Cosmologies of the Human traces how lyric personification and anthropomorphic poetics--often regarded as benign or humanizing--have underwritten violent projects of planetary world-building whose consequences persist well into the present day. Through readings of poets and theorists of poetry such as William Wordsworth, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Phillis Wheatley--and of writings on the intersections of race and environment by the Comte de Buffon, Charles Lyell, Robert Knox, and Immanuel Kant--Devin M. Garofalo excavates a Romantic and Victorian verse tradition that renders Earth in the likeness of a purportedly universal but fundamentally white colonial subject.This anthropomorphized Earth, Garofalo argues, finds its aesthetic foundation in nineteenth-century “lyric manscapes”: poetic worlds that fuse ecological feeling with racialized ideas of human difference. Far from opposing environmental harm, these forms often reproduce the very racial logics that animate ecocide itself, even when poets appear to lament environmental loss. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter's work on race, nature, and power, Garofalo complicates simplified narratives of the Anthropocene by demonstrating how human domination is sometimes asserted through, rather than against, the Earth.Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Cosmologies of the Human ultimately calls for direct confrontation with the racialized assumptions embedded in standard practices of reading Romantic and Victorian poetry. In alignment with Wheatley's densely allusive and heterocosmic lyrics, Garofalo advances an unsentimental mode of salvage criticism, testing ambivalence as a readerly disposition attuned to Earth's pluriversal scales and to an interhuman reimagining of nineteenth-century literary studies.
