Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics by Tobias Menely (review)

Reviewed by: Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics by Tobias Menely Sophie Fordham Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics. By Tobias Menely. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2021. vii+ 269 pp. $27.50. ISBN 978–0–226–77628–6. Energized by Fredric Jameson's coinage in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), Tobias Menely's Climate and the Making of Worlds astutely locates the misty gradations of the 'climatological unconscious' in a sample of poems scattered across 140 years of fluctuating atmospheric conditions. Starting with John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) and closing with Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head (1807), this interdisciplinary and multidimensional critical text yearns to make visible the covert ways in which climate has shaped poetics, by tracing the vicissitudes of both and evidencing why the connection between them is not incidental but generative. It traces the development of poetic mode—from the allegorical, to the descriptive, to the lyrical—across a century-and-a-half of intense energy transition, where meaningful reliance upon a system of solar energy conditioned by the flux of sunlight, wind, and water is phased out by an emerging planetary system and mode of production fuelled by fossil energy. This intertwined poetic and planetary genealogy is sketched out in great detail, through meticulous interdisciplinary research over a decade in the making—and yet the text remains relevant, rehearsing a renewed critical approach to unconsciously climatological poetry that has the potential to transform and better connect the nexus of fields it contributes to. The first chapter leans on an understanding of Paradise Lost as allegory, in order to perform a geohistorical reading of its 'mimetic strata' (p. 48). A significant portion of the chapter is devoted to justifying the allegorical nature of Milton's epic, both responding to and pre-empting further critical resistance to characterizing the poem in a way that is often understood to insufficiently capture the sensitivities to mimetic relation and representation Milton was so consciously attuned to. Menely gets around this somewhat by framing allegory as an unstable and multivalent term in itself, the 'name' for Paradise Lost's 'refusal to offer the reader an interpretive code' (p. 47). The second chapter examines James Thomson's The Seasons (1730), a text which uses description to witness the workings of a natural world circumscribed by seasonal and diurnal patterns, rather than to express a sentimental attachment or [End Page 610] psychological relation to it. The third chapter looks at four industrial georgics which evidence the crisis of description that arose in the late 1700s, as new modes of industrial production—whether in mines, factories, or plantations—were in the process of decoupling from the temporal and geographic realities of an economy controlled by solar energy. The final and most convincing chapter examines the lyricization of poetic form, demonstrating in part how the natural world became a source of psychological and spiritual relief precisely because of its division from spaces of labour and production. The stratigraphic density of the selected primary material is replicated in Menely's own writing, which makes for a book tightly packed with matter that is itself strongly interwebbed with other readings, theoretical and geohistorical—far more than can be accounted for here. The richest moments arise when the multidimensional arguments of the text are rearticulated in the light of each of its successive readings, when those layers of closely read concrete evidence are then dematerialized so that the motion and spirit which impel the project 'towards' a geohistorical poetics might be more fully illuminated. Triumphantly illustrating that poetry is not laid in amber, Menely suggests that the changing climatological conditions of successive readers will significantly influence the ways in which they interact with these past poetic projects. The implication here is that currently unthinkable ways of reading, as well as writing, will emerge as (or if) our earth system evolves out of its current reliance on fossil energy. Sophie Fordham Queen Mary University of London Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association