In their essay ‘Queer Poetics: Deviant Swerves, in Three’, Ren Ellis Neyra takes Lucretius’s principle of the clinamen in De rerum natura – the idea that all matter is created through the deviating movements and collisions of atoms – for a meditation on ‘the swerve at the heart of the encounter’ in queer poetics (The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, ed. Siobhan Somerville). Queer desire moves like Lucretius says atoms move: in stochastic relation, proliferating possibility against the chance that it might never happen. Rather than an ontological basis for all passional attachments, this persistent image of the aleatory interactions of bodies is queered in the cultural afterlife of the atom, used both to define queer desire against the order of things and to free its momentum from normative constraints. The labouring-class poet Ann Yearsley (1753–1806) wrote several poems featuring atoms, including ‘Night. To Stella’, ‘A Fragment’ (both 1785), ‘A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade’ (1788), and ‘Soliloquy’ (1796). In my paper I argue that Yearsley uses the figure of the atom to represent the swerves of queer desire in poems which spotlight the erotics of materialism in specifically gendered and queer-coded terms.

 

Earlier readings of Yearsley’s atom poems have explored the poet’s sense of the movement of time and the development of knowledge, the conventional parameters of which are challenged through figural reorientations which take their impetus from atomic motion. Building on these claims, I examine Yearsley’s use of the clinamen to inform a poetics in which ideas, images, and bodies oscillate and converge in precarious relation which nonetheless tilts our impression of the world as we know it. Crucially, the collisions of Yearsley’s atom poems – always uncertain and on the cusp of possibility – constellate queer relations as the desiring bodies of women come into fleeting, bracing contact. Their encounters, facilitated by the atom’s free movement, trespass boundaries of class and education; and, taking up the provocation of the atom’s underpinning of all material life, they incorporate nonhuman collateral from the surrounding world of objects. As Amanda Jo Goldstein writes, the atom is both a scandalous philosophical proposition and a source of figural impropriety in literature, contouring the movements of physical and poetic bodies (Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life). Yearsley’s atom poems illuminate the queer potential of this deviant interanimation for reinventing the human, finding expressive energies in the swerves of desire.