Waste in the Nineteenth-Century Lyric

Abstract

ABSTRACT Lingering with waste might seem antithetical for an issue all about newness, but although waste demonstrates persistence, it also indicates change: a body wasting away, an environment becoming a wasteland, a person wasting opportunities or good will. In this essay I argue that the nineteenth-century lyric helps us to think about the accumulation of unusable products, dead ends, waste, as central to intimacy. Percy Shelley’s “The Sensitive-Plant” operates as my case study, a lyric fundamentally troubled by the disposability of the human in contrast to the garden’s continual disturbing survival, and a poem obsessed with the erotic potential of rot and decomposition.