The repercussions of the French Revolution included erosion of many previously held certainties in Britain, as in the rest of Europe. Even the authority of language as a cornerstone of knowledge was called into question and the founding principles of intellectual disciplines challenged, as Romantic writers developed new ways of expressing their philosophy of the imagination and the human heart. This 2009 book traces the impact of revolution on language, from William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, to William Hazlitt, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. A leading scholar in Romantic literature and theology, John Beer offers a persuasive new account of post-revolutionary continuities between the major Romantic writers and their Victorian successors.

The authors in this collection join an animated debate on the persistence of Romanticism. Even as dominant twentieth-century cultural movements have contested Romantic ""myths"" of redemptive Nature, individualism, perfectibility, the transcendence of art, and the heart's affections, the Romantic legacy survives as a point of tension and of inspiration for modern writers. Rejecting the Bloomian notion of anxious revisionism, ""The Monstrous Debt"" argues that various kinds of influences, inheritances, and indebtedness exist between well-known twentieth-century authors and canonical Romantic writers. Among the questions asked by this volume are: How does Blake's graphic mythology submit to ""redemptive translations"" in the work of Dylan Thomas? How might Ted Hughes' strong readings of a ""snaky"" Coleridge illuminate the ""mercurial"" poetic identity of Sylvia Plath? How does Shelley ""sustain"" the work of W. B. Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop with supplies of ""imaginative oxygen""? In what ways does Keats enable Bob Dylan to embrace influence? How does Keats prove inadequate for Tony Harrison as he confronts contemporary violence? How does ""cockney"" Romanticism succeed in shocking John Betjeman's poetry out of kitsch into something new and strange? ""The Monstrous Debt"" seeks to broaden our sense of what ""influence"" is by defining the complex of relations that contribute to the making of the modern literary text. Scholars and students of the Romantic era will enjoy this informative volume.

Agricultural systems are no longer evaluated solely on the basis of the food they provide, but also on their capacity to limit impacts on the environment, such as soil conservation, water quality and biodiversity conservation, as well as their contribution to mitigating and adapting to climate change. In order to cope with these multiple service functions, they must internalize the costs and benefits of their environmental impact. Payments for ecosystem services are hoped to encourage and promote sustainable practices via financial incentives. The authors show that while the principle is straightforward, the practice is much more complicated. Whereas scenic beauty and protection of water sources provide benefits to the local population, carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation can be considered international public goods, rendering potential payment schemes more complex. Few examples exist where national or international bodies have been able to set up viable mechanisms that compensate agricultural systems for the environmental services they provide. However this book provides several examples of successful programs, and aims to transfer them to other regions of the world. The authors show that a product can be sold if it is clearly quantified, there exists a means to determine the service's values, and there is a willing buyer. The first two sections of the book present methodological issues related to the quantification and marketing of ecosystem services from agriculture, including agroforestry. The third and final section presents case studies of practical payments for ecosystem services and experiences in Central and South America, and draws some lessons learnt for effective and sustainable development of ecosystem services compensation mechanisms.

Agricultural systems are no longer evaluated solely on the basis of the food they provide, but also on their capacity to limit impacts on the environment, such as soil conservation, water quality and biodiversity conservation, as well as their contribution to mitigating and adapting to climate change. In order to cope with these multiple service functions, they must internalize the costs and benefits of their environmental impact. Payments for ecosystem services are hoped to encourage and promote sustainable practices via financial incentives.

The authors show that while the principle is straightforward, the practice is much more complicated. Whereas scenic beauty and protection of water sources provide benefits to the local population, carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation can be considered international public goods, rendering potential payment schemes more complex. Few examples exist where national or international bodies have been able to set up viable mechanisms that compensate agricultural systems for the environmental services they provide. However this book provides several examples of successful programs, and aims to transfer them to other regions of the world. The authors show that a product can be sold if it is clearly quantified, there exists a means to determine the service's values, and there is a willing buyer.

The first two sections of the book present methodological issues related to the quantification and marketing of ecosystem services from agriculture, including agroforestry. The third and final section presents case studies of practical payments for ecosystem services and experiences in Central and South America, and draws some lessons learnt for effective and sustainable development of ecosystem services compensation mechanisms.

The repercussions of the French Revolution included erosion of many previously held certainties in Britain, as in the rest of Europe. Even the authority of language as a cornerstone of knowledge was called into question and the founding principles of intellectual disciplines challenged, as Romantic writers developed new ways of expressing their philosophy of the imagination and the human heart. This book traces the impact of revolution on language, from William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, to William Hazlitt, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. A leading scholar in Romantic literature and theology, John Beer offers a persuasive new account of post-revolutionary continuities between the major Romantic writers and their Victorian successors.

Since the rise of scientific thinking in the seventeenth century the role of the imagination in literature has been a matter for debate. Is it an essential resource, as maintained by some Romantic writers, or a treacherous purveyor of illusions? In this lecture Professor Beer suggests that one result of this uncertainty has been to set up a division (which continues to pervade literary enterprises) between imaginative flights on the one hand and the 'weighing of words' on the other. His examples are drawn from a wide range of writers, including Johnson and Dickens, Hopkins and Woolf. The lecture concludes with an examination of two poems by Wordsworth, who is seen as having faced these problems in an unusually intricate and subtle manner.

Eminent Coleridgean scholar John Beer presents a series of biographical investigations exploring Coleridge's life, stage by stage, and reconsidering the intellectual quality of his thinking and poetry through an emphasis on the notion of 'play'. Beginning and ending with brief accounts of the poet's childhood and last years, the book's seventeen chapters each take a passage of Coleridge's life and characterise the nature and function of an abiding playful element in his consciousness. In combination they form a detailed, full, and humane treatment of Coleridge's life, focusing on topics such as his interest in psychology, his poetry, his literary collaboration with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, his hopeless love for William's sister-in-law, his literary criticism, including a new approach to Shakespeare, and his work towards a refreshing of contemporary religious beliefs and practices.

The studies in Providence and Love find a common theme in the loss of a sense of Providence in the nineteenth century and the attempt to see Romantic love as a substitute. John Beer uses previously unpublished manuscript material to explore a number of unresolved literary questions, such as the possibility of identifying the subject of Wordsworth's `Lucy' poems. This new material includes some recently discovered letters which cast new light on George Eliot's involvement with Cambridge.

"One of the great original voices of our times--a pilgrim in search of beautiful innocence."--Jack Kerouac

"Robert Lax's poems prove] yet again that the gift to be simple is the gift to be free, that less is more, and that least may sometimes be most."--John Ashbery

"Poems (1962-1997)" gathers thirty-five years of Robert Lax's work, rarely published and largely composed in solitude on the island of Patmos. Compiled and edited by the poet's former assistant John Beer, this selection reflects--through meditative sequences in striking vertical columns--Lax's rigorous attention to the world around him and his relentless aspiration to new ways of writing.

"love &
death"

"are blood
& bone"

"love &
death"

"are bread
& stone"

"love &
death
are rose
& thorn"

"(love &
death"

"are sheep
& shorn)"

Robert Lax (1915-2000) published dozens of volumes of poetry and prose with small presses and worked as an editor for the "New Yorker," "Jubilee," and "PAX." From 1962 to the end of his life, he made his home in the Greek islands.

John Beer is the author of "The Waste Land and Other Poems" (Canarium, 2010), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. For two years in the late 1990s, he served as literary assistant to Robert Lax. He currently lives and teaches in Oregon.

This handbook is a both a description of the current practice at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and a compilation of the theory and lore of gauge block calibration. Most of the chapters are nearly self-contained so that the interested reader can, for example, get information on the cleaning and handling of gauge blocks without having to read the chapters on measurement schemes or process control, etc. This partitioning of the material has led to some unavoidable repetition of material between chapters. The basic structure of the handbook is from the theoretical to the practical. Chapter 1: basic concepts and definitions of length and units; Chapter 2: history of gauge blocks, appropriate definitions and a discussion of pertinent national and international standards; Chapter 3: physical characteristics of gauge blocks, including thermal, mechanical and optical properties; Chapter 4: a description of statistical process control (SPC) and measurement assurance (MA) concepts; and Chapters 5 and 6: details of the mechanical comparisons and interferometric techniques used for gauge block calibrations. Full discussions of the related uncertainties and corrections are included. Finally, the appendices cover in more detail some important topics in metrology and gauge block calibration.