29 Jan 2013

Assignment: William Wordsworth as a Poet of Nature

Assignment: William Wordsworth as a Poet of Nature

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ASSIGNMENT: P B Shelley as a Revolutionary Romantic Poet

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P B Shelley as a Revolutionary Romantic Poet

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Tautology and Imaginative Vision in Wordsworth

Who is the drowned man of Esthwaite? Where does he come from, and where does he take us? That enigmatic figure may be found at the centre of the first of the Prelude spots of time, which describes an incident dating from Wordsworth's first week at Hawkshead, in May 1779.
     
Ere I had seen
Eight summers - and 'twas in the very week
When I was first transplanted to thy vale,
Beloved Hawkshead; when thy paths, thy shores
And brooks, were like a dream of novelty
To my half-infant mind - I chanced to cross
One of those open fields which, shaped like ears,
Make green peninsulas on Esthwaite's lake.
Twilight was coming on, yet through the gloom
I saw distinctly on the opposite shore,
Beneath a tree and close by the lake side,
A heap of garments, as if left by one
Who there was bathing. Half an hour I watched
And no one owned them; meanwhile the calm lake
Grew dark with all the shadows on its breast,
And now and then a leaping fish disturbed
The breathless stillness. The succeeding day
There came a company, and in their boat
Sounded with iron hooks and with long poles.
At length the dead man, mid that beauteous scene
Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright
Rose with his ghastly face

(The Two-Part Prelude i 258-79)

It may be that the drowned man of Esthwaite never exists as a 'living being' - at least within the poem - but it is hard to avoid the feeling that he resurfaces as something other than what once he was. He is, in a way, a paradox. That 'ghastly face' distinguishes him from the living, while affirming his likeness to us. All the while we know, as well as the poet, that he is no longer human.

Full fadom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are the pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange

At first glance the drowned man and the subject of Shakespeare's song have much in common. Both enjoy a kind of immortality, undergoing not the expected disintegration but instead a magical translation into 'something rich and strange'. There is an added dimension to Wordsworth's drowned man, however. He is part of an experience beyond time. When Wordsworth tells us that the 'breast' of the calm lake darkens as the young poet waits for the owner of the 'heap of garments' to return, he is doing more than merely filling in the narrative; in fact, he is not telling a story but sabotaging it. The young poet's interminable wait does not advance the 'drama' at all. In those terms, it is an irrelevance - because the story (if there is one) is not dependent on event.

Twilight was coming on, yet through the gloom
I saw distinctly on the opposite shore,
Beneath a tree and close by the lake side,
A heap of garments, as if left by one
Who there was bathing. Half an hour I watched
And no one owned them; meanwhile the calm lake
Grew dark with all the shadows on its breast,
And now and then a leaping fish disturbed
The breathless stillness.

The use of the word 'breast' in describing the lake may prompt us to ask why the water should be so humanized. One possible answer lies in the observation that it anticipates the infant babe in Part II of the poem, who 'sleeps / Upon his mother's breast' (Two-Part Prelude ii 270-1). That resonance might lead us to wonder whether the infant's mother - effectively that of the poet - is somehow present in the Esthwaite landscape, perhaps in the underworld beneath the water's surface; or perhaps the 'calm lake', as it darkens, brings the watching boy closer to her, affirming the primal bond forged when he was an infant. If the recollected landscape manages to admit Wordsworth to the underworld, it does so through the stillness that characterizes the no man's land on the borders of life and death - a state that describes not so much the landscape but the mood of the young boy as recollected by the mature poet.

So far the experience as it is, imbued with emotion, has been spatial. But the drowned man is part of a psychological complex: the 'breast' of the lake, and its 'breathless stillness', indicate that in some obscure sense he has come to pervade the scene. And that persistent sense of his dissipated continuation is only compounded by Wordsworth's casual reference to the passing of time: 'Half an hour I watched . . .' Who are the 'company' that floats out into the lake with hooks and poles? The fact is, Wordsworth is not concerned with the trivia of narrative; he is right to leave such things to the annotator, randy, to use Larkin's phrase, for antique. And yet, contrived by someone so shamelessly indifferent to the mechanics of linear narrative, the recollection climaxes, surprisingly, with a denouement that seems to satisfy the quest for a corpse:

At length the dead man, mid that beauteous scene
Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright
Rose with his ghastly face.

The discovery itself is treated with the same contempt meted out to the mechanicals responsible for it, dispatched in two and a half lines. What counts is the manner of the man's appearance, 'bolt upright', as if, despite being dead, he were coarsely parodying the ways of the living. It is shocking not because it is sensational, but because, in spite of his apparent vitality, he has been so ruthlessly stripped of life and humanity. 'Bolt upright', he may mimic the hungry generations of which he was once part, but he is also horribly reminiscent of the hooks and poles that have fetched him from the deep. His face is 'ghastly', and therefore drained of colour amidst the 'trees and hills and water'; it is also, by a shift of vowel, 'ghostly'. His fate has been to suffer translation into an object; he is the inhabitant not of the vale of Esthwaite, but of the underworld into which Wordsworth's mother had passed years before.
     
All of which may be said to have taken place in May 1779. The reason why such particulars, so important to the harmless drudge, are nonetheless so insignificant to Wordsworth (he himself miscalculates his age at the time, telling us that he was seven when in fact he was nine), is that the entire episode is re-enacted not in realistic terms, but in the heightened world of his adult imagination. Matters of fact have been filtered out so as to highlight the spirit of the event, infinitely susceptible to the abstracting powers of the poet's mind. Which is why the episode takes place beyond time, in an Esthwaite that exists more intensely and vividly in the imagination than its real-life counterpart ever could. Everything has undergone change. The energies once contained in the drowned man have passed into the landscape into which he has mysteriously disappeared. Why? Because redemption is integral to Wordsworth's vision. Death does not result in nothingness; it triggers an imaginative response in the living, anxious to affirm the survival of those who are gone. If indeed this is redemption, it is pagan. Wordsworth wants it here and now, mediated through the human mind, rather than through an afterlife. That emphasis on the mind explains why the drowned man episode - like the other spots of time - is not merely about, but contained by, an act of perception. We might say that the real, if not very helpful, answer to the enquiring detective, asking who might be the victim and who the culprit - is Wordsworth himself.
     
There are in our existence spots of time, and it is in their nature that what was lost will be retrieved. This is true also in the second of this group of recollections, where Wordsworth's younger self becomes separated from his grandparents' servant, 'honest James', who was escorting him home from school.
     I remember well
('Tis of an early season that I speak,
The twilight of rememberable life),
While I was yet an urchin, one who scarce
Could hold a bridle, with ambitious hopes
I mounted, and we rode towards the hills.
We were a pair of horsemen: honest James
Was with me, my encourager and guide.
We had not travelled long ere some mischance
Disjoined me from my comrade, and, through fear
Dismounting, down the rough and stony moor
I led my horse, and stumbling on, at length
Came to a bottom where in former times
A man, the murderer of his wife, was hung
In irons. Mouldered was the gibbet-mast;
The bones were gone, the iron and the wood;
Only a long green ridge of turf remained
Whose shape was like a grave. I left the spot,
And reascending the bare slope I saw
A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
The beacon on the summit, and more near
A girl who bore a pitcher on her head
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind. It was in truth
An ordinary sight, but I should need
Colours and words that are unknown to man
To paint the visionary dreariness
Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,
Did at that time invest the naked pool,
The beacon on the lonely eminence,
The woman and her garments vexed and tossed
By the strong wind.

(Two-Part Prelude i 296-327)

As Wordsworth recalls his descent 'down the rough and stony moor', he conducts us into the landscape of the mind. His passage downwards parallels that of the drowned man beneath the surface of the lake, and, rather pertinently, echoes that of Orpheus. But what marks Wordsworth out as a genius is that nothing he writes is predictable - and if we were half expecting him to find his Eurydice, we are disappointed. So, oddly enough, is the boy:

Mouldered was the gibbet-mast;
The bones were gone, the iron and the wood;
Only a long green ridge of turf remained
Whose shape was like a grave.

The turf is merely like a grave - which is not to say that it was one. The gibbet, bones, and iron have vanished too - but were they ever there? One approach would be simply to say that the child's frightened imagination was summoning ghosts out of air. And we know from Goody Blake and Harry Gill that Wordsworth was fascinated by the ability to generate alternative realities. But that explanation does not go quite far enough. The 'rough and stony moor' closely parallels the 'heap of garments' in the preceding episode. In themselves, mundane enough, they are extrapolated into evidence of the thing by which the boy's mind is most preoccupied at that time: death. It is in the belief that he has seen a grave (as opposed to an innocent ridge of turf) that he staggers back out of the bottom to see nothing out of the ordinary - a girl with a pitcher, the Penrith beacon, a pool of water - all infused with an intensity that does not desert him. It is emphatically not the objects themselves that are in any way peculiar ('It was in truth / An ordinary sight'), but the way in which they are perceived - and, later, described.

. . . I should need
Colours and words that are unknown to man
To paint the visionary dreariness
Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,
Did at that time invest the naked pool,
The beacon on the lonely eminence,
The woman and her garments vexed and tossed
By the strong wind.

The 'vision' is distinguished by the manner in which external objects acquire human qualities: the pool is 'naked'; the eminence 'lonely'. If their vulnerability reminds us of the boy's desperation in being separated from honest James, it is worth bearing in mind that the poet states that it was not him but James who was lost: 'while I looked all round for my lost guide'. Although alienated from his surroundings, the boy has arrived in a landscape that is oddly familiar, full of features that seem to mirror his state of mind. They are, in a sense, produced by it. It is nearly the landscape of dream, but is nonetheless connected to a reality that never loses its concreteness, its 'dreariness'. What this adds up to is that even though Wordsworth has climbed out of the bottom, he remains the inhabitant of a psychological underworld. By which time all hope of a conclusion to the narrative is wrecked; he does not bother to tell us how he was reunited with honest James, got home, etc. Story matters less than our own translation into an experience necessarily mythologised by its re-enactment in the poet's mind – and by implication, in our own.
    
These patterns, familiar to readers of this poet, are foreshadowed in the poetry of his early youth. At the age of 16 Wordsworth composed a poem entitled The Dog: An Idyllium, ostensibly an elegy composed in the manner of Lycidas for the dog belonging to his landlady at Hawkshead, Ann Tyson.

Where were ye nymphs, when the remorseless deep
Clos'd o'er your little favourite's hapless head?
For neither did ye mark, with solemn dread
In Derwent's rocky woods, the white Moon's beam
Pace like a Druid o'er the haunted steep,
Nor in Winander's stream;
Then did ye swim with sportive smile
From fairy-templ'd isle to isle,
Which hear her far-off ditty sweet
Yet feel not ev'n the milkmaid's feet.
What tho' he still was by my side
When lurking near I there have seen
Your faces white, your tresses green,
Like water lillies floating on the tide?
He saw not, bark'd not, he was still
As the soft moonbeam sleeping on the hill,
Or when, ah! cruel maids, ye stretch'd him stiff and chill!
If, while I gazed (to Nature blind)
On the calm Ocean of my mind,
Some new-created Image rose
In full-grown beauty at its birth,
Lovely as Venus from the sea;
Then, while my glad hand sprung to thee,
We were the happiest pair on earth!
                                                                                    
The extended meditation directed at the water-nymphs of Windermere - a product of the neoclassicism which permeated much contemporary literature, in most of which the young Wordsworth was well-versed - gives way in the final paragraph to something original and unexpected. Moving from the exterior reality - the 'remorseless deep' into which the dog has disappeared - he takes us into 'the calm Ocean of my mind', out of which the 'new-created Image' of his four-legged friend rises up, 'Lovely as Venus from the sea'. In terms of the mature poetry, it is an imaginative act. It is in the first place meditative, and is thus similar in kind to the mystic trance of Tintern Abbey , where we are told that the 'beauteous forms' of the Wye valley were responsible for 'sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart'. What is so extraordinary about 'The Dog' is that the imaginative process leads directly to the animal's resurrection:

Then, while my glad hand sprung to thee,
We were the happiest pair on earth!

In other words, the final paragraph of The Dog: An Idyllium describes a spot of time, twelve years prior to the composition of those in The Prelude . Its teenage author countenances the dog's demise only so that he may redeem him through an imaginative act. As in the Prelude spots of time, retrieval occurs in this world, through an emphatically human, rather than divine, agency.

The psychological and emotional patterns embedded in the Prelude originate in Wordsworth's early verse. Their template is to be found in his translations from Virgil's Georgics , composed during his first year at St John's College, Cambridge. He was still only 18. It can be no surprise that the section on which he spent most time was the Orpheus and Eurydice episode from Book IV. As it is little known, I would like to present my text of the translation here, edited from the manuscripts in the Wordsworth Library. The earliest extant part begins after Eurydice has died after being bitten by a water-snake, and describes how Orpheus descends the underworld to retrieve her.

He, wandering far along the lonely main,
Sooth'd with the hollow shell his sickly pain:
'Thee, thee, dear wife', he sung forlorn
From morn to eve, and 'thee', from eve to morn.
He pierced the grove where death-like darkness flings
A cold black horror from his [dusky] wings,
To where hell's King in griesly state appears,
And round him hearts unmov'd by hum[an] tears.
On as he pass'd and struck the plaintive shell,
Ambrosial music fill'd the ear of hell;
[Arising] from the lowest bound
Of Erebus the shadows flock'd around
As birds unnumber'd seek their leafy bow'r
Driv'n by the twilight dark, or mountain shower -
Boys, men, and matrons old, the tender maid
And mighty heroes' more majestic shade.

Significantly, Orpheus' descent is accompanied by his lament for Eurydice, the passage into the underworld being essentially part of an imaginative act: '"Thee, thee, dear wife", he sung forlorn / From morn to eve, and "thee", from eve to morn.' His grief at her passing is no less passionate for his repetitions. The editions of Virgil from which Wordsworth was translating commended the technique, but the mature poet is known for his own distinctive use of it; as he points out in his 1800 note to The Thorn : 'now every man must know that an attempt is rarely made to communicate impassioned feelings without something of an accompanying consciousness of the inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of language. During such efforts there will be a craving in the mind, and as long as it is unsatisfied the Speaker will cling to the same words, or words of the same character' He pinpoints with characteristic shrewdness the psychological hinge on which the spots of time turn: in each there is at some profound level an unsatisfied craving in the mind - a yearning for what has been taken away. And so it is at this early moment in the translation from Virgil. Driven by his passion for Eurydice, Orpheus finds himself, in the throes of grief, unable to move beyond that one syllable - thee. There is a correlative to the act of repetition in the later poetry - again one that springs directly out of Wordsworth's flawless grasp of human psychology. When he began work on The Ruined Cottage in 1797, he started not at the opening of the poem, but with its conclusion, where the Pedlar describes Margaret's increasing depression at the disappearance of her husband and the deaths of her children:

I have heard, my friend,
That in that broken arbour she would sit
The idle length of half a sabbath day -
There, where you see the toadstool's lazy head -
And when a dog passed by she still would quit
The shade and look abroad. On this old bench
For hours she sate, and evermore her eye
Was busy in the distance, shaping things
Which made her heart beat quick.

Like Orpheus, Margaret is engaged in an imaginative act, as her mind shapes what she sees in the far distance in the hope that it might be her long-lost husband. The solecism is deliberate and effective. Although her eye has not detached itself from the rest of her body in order to travel to the far horizon, it might have done so, so intense is her unsatisfied craving for what she has lost. That act of perception is foreshadowed by the 'calm ocean of the mind' into which the 16 year old poet had 'gazed' in the hope of seeing his dog; it also looks forward to the drowned man episode, where he remembers staring across Esthwaite for half an hour into the lake's 'breathless stillness'. The act of staring for a long time into the middle distance, searching for what has been lost, is, I would suggest, precisely analogous both in psychological and poetic terms to the use of tautology. Both lead to imaginative retrieval: Orpheus indeed takes possession, though for a short time, of Eurydice, just as young Wordsworth extends his hand to retrieve his dog. In each case, Wordsworth is, to use the expression given resonance by Seamus Heaney, seeing things: not merely a matter of observing, but of responding to the overpowering compulsions that betray the traumas of the past. The act of seeing, in other words, is inextricably connected with psychological need. That said, Wordsworth's consistency in this respect should not confuse our reading of each work. Whatever is shaped in the distance, Margaret is not reunited with Robert, although the young Wordsworth does find the dog: The Ruined Cottage is about loss; The Dog is about recovery. The point is that in thinking as she does - in allowing her imagination free play with the shapes seen dimly on the horizon - Margaret engages with the possibility of Robert's redemption, if not its actuality. That redemptive possibility lies at the centre of Wordsworth's comments to De Quincey on the road between Grasmere and Keswick:

Just now, my ear was placed upon the stretch, in order to catch any sound of wheels that might come down upon the Lake of Wythburn from the Keswick road; at the very instant when I raised my head from the ground, in final abandonment of hope for this night, at the very instant when the organs of attention were all once relaxing from their tension, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy blackness, fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of the Infinite, that would not have arrested me under other circumstances

De Quincey uses Wordsworth's remarks to interpret There was a boy (though, as W. J. B. Owen has pointed out, the intervening moment of relaxation mentioned by the poet plays no part in the poem) What I want to note here is that the placing of the senses `on the stretch' is a physical and mental enactment of the emotional need that underlies the poetry. In the Dunmail Raise episode the need is comparatively trivial - the two men are waiting for the mailcoach to bring Southey's copies of The Courier from Keswick - though it could be argued that, despite that, the intensity with which the poet listens is itself evidence of what psychologists call displacement.
    
Margaret's deepest impulse is to retrieve her lost husband; in The Dog , the young poet wants to reclaim his drowned pet; Orpheus pines repeatedly for his deceased lover - but what does the protagonist of the spots of time want? The oddity of the Prelude spots of time is that the question of the poet's underlying compulsions is elided. Admittedly, loss is alluded to in both: in the first a man drowns, and in the second the boy is separated from his encourager and guide. But they contain no emotional relation of the kind posited in The Dog, the Orpheus translation, or The Ruined Cottage . That reluctance to reveal his hand breaks down in the third of the spots of time, which takes us back to December 1783, when the young poet waited for horses to take him and his brothers from Hawkshead Grammar School to Cockermouth.
   
  'Twas a day
Stormy, and rough, and wild, and on the grass
I sate half sheltered by a naked wall.
Upon my right hand was a single sheep.
A whistling hawthorn on my left, and there,
Those two companions at my side, I watched
With eyes intensely straining, as the mist
Gave intermitting prospects of the wood
And plain beneath. Ere I to school returned
That dreary time, ere I had been ten days
A dweller in my father's house, he died,
And I and my two brothers, orphans then,
Followed his body to the grave.

(Two-Part Prelude i 341-53)

As in the drowned man episode, hints are offered by the vitality of the boy's surroundings: the stone wall that shelters him is 'naked'; the hawthorn 'whistles'. Once again, his own vulnerability is mirrored in the things he perceives - and it is in the act of perception that Wordsworth invests his attention: 'I watched / With eyes intensely straining'. That undeviating focus is precisely analogous with Orpheus' lament, the correlative of tautology. Tautology is integral to the spots of time; it is what makes them so valuable to the poet. Their distinguishing characteristic is that they are spectacles and sounds to which

I often would repair, and thence would drink
As at a fountain.
(Two-Part Prelude i 368-70)

They are not merely sources of inspiration - though they certainly do serve that function - they are the means whereby the central emotional drama of the poet's life may be reiterated. This is paralleled in a very literal way by the evolution of the waiting for the horses episode. It occurs in its earliest form in Wordsworth's The Vale of Esthwaite, composed in 1787 - three and a half years after the event it describes. Although it has often been the focus of critical attention no one has yet, to the best of my knowledge, observed that it contains, in even more explicit form, the psychological configurations traceable in the Prelude . It begins with an observation - that certain places, or, to use the poet's word, 'spots', in the landscape, are inextricably related to intense emotional experiences. Such claims seem unexceptional to those familiar with Wordsworth, but it is necessary to remember that these lines were composed by a 17 year old, at a time when the highly ornamented couplet manner associated with Pope was in vogue, and poetry was expected to deal only with the comparatively superficial emotions related to the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility.

No spot but claims the tender tear
By joy or grief to memory dear:
One Evening, when the wintery blast
Through the sharp Hawthorn whistling pass'd;
And the poor flocks, all pinch'd with cold,
Sad-drooping sought the mountain-fold;
Long, Long, upon yon steepy rock,
Alone I bore the bitter shock;
Long, Long, my swimming eyes did roam
For little Horse to bear me home,
To bear me (what avails my tear?)
To sorrow o'er a Father's bier.
Flow on - in vain thou hast not flow'd,
But eas'd me of an heavy load,
For much it gives my soul relief
To pay the mighty debt of Grief.

The similarities between this and the Prelude are so numerous as to suggest that it was before the poet as he composed the later poem. But I would like to offer another explanation: that by the time he composed the Prelude Wordsworth had retraced his steps so many times in his head that he had memorized the features described in the earlier passage. Whatever the case, the most significant feature of the early lines seems to me to be that which has so far been neglected: that, even at the age of seventeen, he is aware that his interminable straining to discern the horses in the mist may be embodied in verbal repetition. In other words, rhetorical style - tautology in this case - is capable of describing the operations of the mind at their deepest level:

Long, Long, upon yon steepy rock,
Alone I bore the bitter shock;
Long, Long, my swimming eyes did roam
For little Horse to bear me home,
To bear me (what avails my tear?)
To sorrow o'er a Father's bier.

It could be argued that the repetition of the word 'long' is purely emphatic - that Wordsworth is saying only that he waited for a long time. But the deliberate use of repetition in the Orpheus translation less than a year later indicates that he was by then aware that it could be an indicator of intense passion. In the Prelude the boy's eyes 'strain'; here they 'swim' - anticipating the tears that will express grief at his father's death. And Wordsworth's treatment of the experience submerges the exterior narrative in precisely the same way as in the Prelude, so that mourning is understood to be the inevitable result of the wait for the horses. In short, the teenage poet understands that the act of perception is the result of intense trauma.
   
It is commonly supposed that the Lucy poems, composed at the same moment as the spots of time, are concerned only with love. But at least one of them is really concerned with perception - and precisely the kind of perception found in the Prelude . Like the spots of time it comprehends the act of seeing as a tautology, and reaches beyond it as a means of coming to terms with the possibility of loss.

Strange fits of passion I have known,
And I will dare to tell,
But in the lover's ear alone,
What once to me befel.
When she I lov'd, was strong and gay
And like a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath the evening moon.

     Upon the moon I fix'd my eye,
All over the wide lea;
My horse trudg'd on, and we drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.

     And now we reach'd the orchard-plot,
And, as we climb'd the hill,
Towards the roof of Lucy's cot
The moon descended still.

     In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And, all the while, my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.

     My horse mov'd on; hoof after hoof
He rais'd and never stopp'd:
When down behind the cottage roof
At once the planet dropp'd.

     What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head -
'Oh mercy!' to myself I cried,
'If Lucy should be dead!'

The remarks made by the poet of the Dunmail Raise episode fit the poem well; the relaxation of the sense organs is covered by the speaker's daydream at lines 17-20 - a daydream that does not interrupt the concentration with which he `fixes' his eye on the moon. That fixation is evidence of a passionate longing only hinted at by such phrases as `Those paths so dear to me' - and, as such, it is essentially repetitive in its nature. The fond and wayward thought of the final stanza reiterates that feeling, though in an unexpected manner. Although it is the unpredictability, the eccentricity of its expression that interests the poet, it is a repetition nonetheless - a repetition signalled by the trudging of the horses hooves (lines 11, 21) and the `bending' of the speaker's way (line 7). But what is it that is repeated? Everything that has already passed through his head in the course of the poem - all the emotions of love, which contains the power to surprise by the strangeness of its 'fits'.

The crisis in Blake’s spiritual development


The next work, the manuscript originally called Vala, belongs to two distinct periods of Blake’s development. The earlier portion, dated 1797, extends and elaborates the symbolism of The Book of Urizen, with certain modifications, of which the most important is that man is conceived, ideally, as a harmony of four spiritual powers, Urizen, Luvah, Urthona—apparent in time as Los—and Tharmas. It may be that these, later known as the Zoas, have a psychological significance as the symbols of reason, emotion, energy and instinct or desire; but the indications are too vague and contradictory to admit of assured interpretation. Further difficulties arise with the four females joined with the male quaternion. But this elaborate symbolism, like most of Blake’s attempts in this kind, soon falls through, and may safely be ignored. As before, the real basis is a dualism of liberty and law. The first “Nights” of Vala repeat, under a bewildering variety of imagery, the now familiar criticism of the ethical spirit as a disruptive force, destructive of the ideal unity in man, and the cause of the difficulty and darkness of mortality, through the illusions of materialism and morality. The remaining sections develop the antithesis of authority and anarchy in Urizen and Orc, and, though the former triumphs at first, its manifold tyrannies are ultimately consumed beneath the cleansing fires of Orc’s rebel spirit of passion, so that, after the final “harvest and vintage of the Nations,” man reascends to his primal unity in a state of perfect liberty.                                       

            The arid symbolism and uncouth style of the later Lambeth books mark a zeal that has overridden inspiration, till the creative spirit flags beneath the continual stimulus of whip and spur, and almost founders in barren wastes of mere storm and splutter; and though, by sheer strength, Blake occasionally compels his stubborn matter into striking forms, the general effect is repellent in the extreme. Then came his visit to Felpham, at the invitation of William Hayley, and the three years (1800–1803) passed there influenced him most deeply, as his letters and later “prophecies” clearly show. Perhaps the shock of transition from the cramped London life to the comparative freedom of his new surroundings awakened him to consciousness of the extent of his divergence from the sounder and more human faith of his early manhood. But, whatever the cause, his old attitude changed, coming nearer to that of Songs of Innocence, as he himself writes to captain Butts:

And now let me finish with assuring you that, though I have been very unhappy, I am so no longer. I am again emerged into the light of day; I still and shall to eternity embrace Christianity, and adore Him who is the express image of God. 

The Romantic Movement




The last quarter of the 18th century was a time of social and political turbulence, with revolutions in the United States, France, Ireland and elsewhere. In Great Britain, movement for social change and a more inclusive sharing of power was also growing. This was the backdrop against which the Romantic movement in English poetry emerged.

The main poets of this movement were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats. The birth of English Romanticism is often dated to the publication in 1798 of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. However, Blake had been publishing since the early 1780s. However, much of the focus on Blake only came about during the last century when Northrap Frye discussed his work in his book "The Anatomy of Criticism."
In poetry, the Romantic movement emphasised the creative expression of the individual and the need to find and formulate new forms of expression. The Romantics, with the partial exception of Byron, rejected the poetic ideals of the eighteenth century, and each of them returned to Milton for inspiration, though each drew something different from Milton. They also put a good deal of stress on their own originality. To the Romantics, the moment of creation was the most important in poetic expression and could not be repeated once it passed. Because of this new emphasis, poems that were not complete were nonetheless included in a poet's body of work (such as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel").
Additionally, the Romantic movement marked a shift in the use of language. Attempting to express the "language of the common man", Wordsworth and his fellow Romantic poets focused on employing poetic language for a wider audience, countering the mimetic, tightly constrained Neo-Classic poems (although it's important to note that the poet wrote first and foremost for his own creative, expression). In Shelley's "Defense of Poetry", he contends that poets are the "creators of language" and that the poet's job is to refresh language for their society.
The Romantics were not the only poets of note at this time. In the work of John Clare the late Augustan voice is blended with a peasant's first-hand knowledge to produce arguably some of the finest nature poetry in the English language. Another contemporary poet who does not fit into the Romantic group was Walter Savage Landor. Landor was a classicist whose poetry forms a link between the Augustans and Robert Browning, who much admired it.

Shelley and the masks of Romantic anger


When, in A Vision, Yeats wishes to describe a particular movement up
his byzantine Wheel of Faculties, he looks to Blake and Shelley as his
representative men. Blake, “The Positive Man” of Phase 16, “hates that
which opposes desire,” and his hatred “is always close to madness . . .
There is always an element of frenzy, and almost always a delight in a
certain glowing or shining image of concentrated force: in the smith’s
forge; in the heart; in the human form in its most vigorous develop-
ment.”1 Observing Blake’s wrath, Yeats recognizes it as the fiery furnace
that provides Blake with the energy that is his eternal delight. However, as
the Wheel turns to Shelley (“The Daimonic Man”), this creative anger
falls away. In Yeats’s opinion, Shelley works best when he draws his poetry
from the wellsprings of desire, but produces only “monstrous, meaning-
less images” when he resorts to outrage (A Vision 143). Shelley “can never
see anything that opposes him as it really is,” because “He lacked
the Vision of Evil, could not conceive of the world as a continual conflict,
so, though great poet he certainly was, he was not of the greatest kind”
(143–44).
   Once raised, the charge lingers: does Shelley suffer from a kind of
congenital blindness in his dealings with evil and conflict? Does he lack a
vision of anger? In Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea, Gerald McNeice
praises Shelley’s rebellious courage, which he carefully separates from
“Hatred and revenge,” passions with which “true freedom can never
coexist.”2 Donald Reiman has reminded us that Socrates and Jesus were
Shelley’s “ideal figures,” because they “confronted the full power of social
injustice and . . . chose martyrdom over either flight or violent resist-
ance.”3 Challenging this standard image of Shelley as pacifistic humanist,
Steven Jones has argued that, in much of the poetry, “(self ) righteous
anger fueled by personal aggression is often just below the surface” and
that “the basis of Shelley’s satire is in violence rather than laughter.”4 By
approaching Shelley from the vantage of satire, Jones has emphasized asubterranean side of the poet obscured by the assertions of his idealizing
and progressivist imagination. However, only by integrating both of these
aspects of Shelley can we approach the complexities of his artistic and
moral imagination.5 In effect, Shelley was often both angry and deter-
mined not to be so; and this ambivalence can be traced through a large
portion of his work, where it produces a particular trajectory of anger
deployed and retracted. His vision of anger was always double, as he cast a
fierce eye on the object of his rage and a calm one on utopian resolutions
to conflict.
   Always politically minded, Shelley enacts a particularly intense version
of the Romantic struggle with anger. For poets of the period, the trajec-
tory of events in France demonstrated that revolutionary outrage (which
most, to greater or lesser degrees, had imbibed) would not end cycles of
cruelty: anger had promised revolution and revelation, yet had brought
forth reaction and terror instead. As we have seen, negotiations with
anger became central to Romantic conceptions of self and world and
profoundly affected Romantic poetry in ways that I attempt to further
delineate here, in terms of the work of Shelley. The contours of Roman-
ticism emerged also in partial reaction to the bad eminence of eighteenth–
century satire, heightened as it was in this period of English history
(as Habermas has shown) by the emergent importance of public debate
to the political realm.6 Of course, scholarly activity of the last several
decades has gone a long way towards undoing our received story of
verse satire as a genre that disappeared in England after the death of
Pope. I mean to address this question of literary history only partially,
examining the changing fortunes of angry satire, not satire generally, in
Shelley’s imagination. Satire had long been imagined as a weapon
for revelation, and in the apocalyptic dawn of the French Revolution,
anger promised to undermine false structures of power and reveal the
true nature of humanity. Shelley’s poetry has similar promises lying
close to its heart, and he sets about creating a species of anger not
implicated in vengeful cycles of cruelty, a self-consuming rage that does
its work and then burns itself out, making way for the harmonies of the
millennium. He admires anger for its power to unmask figures of decep-
tion and vice and thus far uses anger in a way that resembles satiric
invective in revealing the corruption hiding beneath the mask of virtue.7
Yet angry satire, content with naming and punishing such corruption,
remains only caustic and pessimistic, whereas Shelley’s poetry almost
invariably contravenes its own wrath with more conciliatory and hopeful
imaginings. For Shelley, (satiric) anger always threatens to become another deceptive, or deceived, mask, particularly if indulged too long or
too vehemently.
   As a poet committed to the transformation of the political and social
world, however, Shelley knew that anger was an important tool or
weapon, a needful torch for burning in order that the work of building
utopia might begin. Thus, like Blake, Shelley was attracted to anger
precisely because of its renovating force. Sharing an emphatic desire to
change the world through poetry, Blake and Shelley imagine anger as the
remover of masks and the despoiler of illusions that constitute an un-
acceptable status quo. Masks figure evil’s dependence on disguise, a false
state of affairs foisted on humanity as truth. As Yeats perceived, Shelley
denies any fundamental truth to evil, equating it always with falsity and
error. His poetry therefore presents evil in a series of disguised figures
whose ritualized unmasking prompts the advent of the millennium. Yet
Shelley wants to allow anger only a momentary, functional importance in
his visions of transformation, extinguishing it anxiously with more har-
monious emotions. He presents his displaced outrage as a mask, or
masque, of anger.
   In the spring of 1819, Shelley found himself in Florence, standing before
two statues of Marsyas, the satyr who boasted of his musical virtuosity and
was summarily flayed alive by an enraged Apollo. For Shelley, who
embraced Apollo as an image of the harmonies of the creative imagin-
ation, it was a disturbing moment, emblematic of a larger struggle with
anger. In his notebook, he writes,
This is one of the few abominations of the Greek religion. This is as bad as the
everlasting damnation and hacking and hewing between them of Joshua and
Jehovah. And is it possible that there existed in the same imagination the idea of
that tender and sublime and poetic and life–giving Apollo and of the author
of this deed as the same person?
   Having chosen ancient Greek culture as a refuge from the cruel-
ties he saw in orthodox Christianity, Shelley is brought up short by the
specter of Marsyas suffering under the hand of the Apollonian “author of
this deed.”9 Confronted with an imagination capable of containing
poetic creativity and vengeful rage within the same persona, he implicitly
wonders about the place of anger in his own mind and work: what
does it mean for a poet to put aside his lyre and pick up a knife or a
scourge?
   Figuratively, it means to turn from song to satire, and specifically to a
tradition of invective that aims to anatomize and punish its target.
For example, in his First Satire, Horace remembers the satirist Lucilius, who
“from conscious Villains tore the mask away, / And stripped them naked
to the Glare of Day.”10 Such violent disclosure of hypocrisy remains one
of the cherished powers of angry satire, through Jonson and Pope to
Shelley.11 In a letter to Leigh Hunt written in 1822, Shelley declares,
“I began once a Satire upon Satire, which I meant to be very severe, – it
was full of small knives in the use of which practice would have soon made
me very expert.”12 Apparently, Shelley meant to use these “knives” on
satire itself. However, a glance at the unfinished poem reveals an image of
satiric violence directed at a more human target: “If Satire’s [scourge]
[could wake the slumbering hounds / Of Conscience]”,

At the center of many of Shelley’s narratives is a ritual of unmasking,
usually accomplished by means of defiance and aggression: Prometheus
curses Jupiter, Shelley curses the reviewer of Endymion, the disguised
figures in The Mask of Anarchy are routed, Iona Taurina compels her
enemies to assume their true shapes in Swellfoot the Tyrant. These
moments cannot be fully assimilated to the satiric tradition, however,
because of Shelley’s own palpable ambivalence about his anger. In fact,
scenes of unmasking are not the unique province of satire. The romance
tradition, particularly as read through Spenser and Milton, surely pro-
vided Shelley with another approach to evil disguised.16 Spenser, in the
stripping of the witch Duessa in Book i of The Faerie Queene, and Milton,
in the revelation of the toad as Satan in Book i v of Paradise Lost,
emphasize the inevitability of falsehood’s spectacular revelation when
confronted by truth. In The Faerie Queene, Una (or Truth) directs the
Red Crosse Knight and Arthur to strip Duessa (or Falsehood) naked, “and
let her fly.”17 Once they have revealed Duessa’s deformity and ugliness,
Una proclaims, “Such is the face of falshood, such the sight / Of fowle
Duessa, when her borrowed light / Is laid away, and counterfesaunce
knowne” (i.8.49). Similarly, in Paradise Lost, an angelic patrol finds Satan,
“Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve,” in amphibious form that
prefigures his later transformation: “Him thus intent Ithuriel with his
spear / Touched lightly; for no falsehood can endure / Touch of celestial
temper, but returns / Of force to its own likeness: up he starts / Dis-
covered and surprised . . . So started up in his own shape the fiend.”18
These moments encapsulate the Shelleyan project, particularly in their
rejection of vengeance. Una tells her knights to spare Duessa’s life, and
Ithuriel touches the toad lightly, sparing what presumably he could have
speared. The “celestial temper” of Ithuriel’s weapon matches the angelic
forbearance of its owner, providing a model for Shelley’s own poetic
encounters with evil.

Shelley tests the limits of this generic structure most overtly in The
Mask of Anarchy, inspired by the poet’s openly satiric outrage over the
Peterloo Massacre and by his attempts to transcend that outrage by way of
the masque. A good deal of critical ink has been devoted to the strange
intersection of satire and masque found in The Mask of Anarchy. Most
notably, Stuart Curran, Lisa Vargo, and Steven Jones have all discussed its
various maskings and unmaskings, and all three critics seem quite pre-
pared to read The Mask of Anarchy as following the generic trajectory I
have described: from satiric anger and its unmasking imperative to
millennial, masque-like hope as the end of satire.37 At a relatively high
level, The Mask of Anarchy does conform to this structure. The masked,
allegorical figures of evil are dispersed by a spirit of freedom and the voice
of the earth, thus restoring “Hope” (line 128). However, because the
“indignant earth” gets the last word – and there repeats her first, most
militant advice – we may feel that anger remains dominant at the poem’s
conclusion. Shelley is explicitly concerned here with breaking cycles of
violence and revenge, yet he is unwilling to relinquish the outrage that he
continually defers. He claims to have felt a “torrent of indignation” in
response to Peterloo, but he begins The Mask of Anarchy not as a raging
poet, but as a dreaming one. The poem opens on a cinematic vision that
combines Biblical iconography and English politics with the logic of
nightmare. As a poetic spectacle or masque of evil (Shelley calls it a
“ghastly masquerade” in line 27), the first twenty-five stanzas of the poem
are grim and disturbing, but their tone can hardly be called angry. As
Morton Paley puts it, the speaker “does not seem to comprehend
the meaning of what he relates: extraordinary events are recounted
in a flat, quotidian tone, much as in Blake’s ‘The Mental Traveller’”
(“Apocapolitics,” 94).

Towards Romantic anger in English Literature



The French Revolutionaries did not invent anger, nor did English writers
of the Romantic period develop their conceptions of that emotion in
isolation from its literary and philosophical past. When Blake writes of
“wrath” or Byron of “vengeance,” their language takes as a point of
departure its pretexts, from the classical and Biblical periods through to
their own. History may well have sculpted anger’s articulation for the
Romantics, but the clay itself was dug from the accumulated layers of
thinking and writing in the Western tradition since Homer– with the
eighteenth century and its particular attitudes uppermost. Thus, in order
to understand the unique transformations that the events and exchanges
of the period enjoined upon anger, we must first glance backward to
gather the horizon of possibility within which these took place. Further-
more, if Romanticism is to be more than an historical descriptor roughly
equivalent with the revolutionary spirit of the age, we have to attend to
the aesthetic concerns that occupied writers even amidst, and sometimes
athwart, their political interests and ends.

    Romanticism is generally acknowledged to have emerged out of two
parallel aesthetic movements or ideologies of the second half of the
eighteenth century, both of which center on issues of emotional affect
and transmission: sensibility and the sublime. Grief and terror were their
foundational emotions, and in this chapter, I want to show how this
meant that the Romantics inherited a tradition of thinking about (and
writing in) anger that led to a seeming aesthetic paradox: how can a poet
be filled with fury yet pleasingly terrified, enraged yet in control, angry yet
a figure of sympathy to an audience? These dilemmas formed the unstable
ground upon which the Romantics found themselves, newly pressurized
by the discourse of the Revolution and the Terror.

    In Restraining Rage, William Harris has surveyed the numerous and
varied attitudes towards anger and its control in classical antiquity, tracing
the long tradition of concern over that emotion.1 It turns out that, like
most struggles, the debate over the value of anger has always been
concerned with issues of boundaries and thresholds. Plato explicitly
compares the spirited element of the soul (thumos) to the guardians of a
city, who use anger to avenge injuries from without while limiting or
moderating incursions of anger from within.2 For both Plato and Aristotle,
moderate anger in response to a perceived injustice can be a natural, even
a rational and requisite, means of correction. In the Nicomachean Ethics,
Aristotle sums up the classical ideal of emotional moderation: “Now
we praise a man who feels anger on the right grounds and against
the right persons, and also in the right manner and at the right moment
for the right length of time.”3 Anger, kept within its proper bounds by
reason and the will, delimited by multiple considerations of rightfulness
and kept beneath the level of irrational overflow, helps define and defend
the self.

   Plato’s banishment of poets from the ideal republic and Aristotle’s
subsequent defense of them in the Poetics both arise from a commitment
to the control of potentially destructive human emotions. More specifi-
cally, both philosophers are concerned with the relationship of poetic texts
to the overflow or eruption of immoderate emotion. Both name Homer
the first of tragedians, thereby emphasizing the importance of poetic
representations of anger to their debate.4 Menin, the first word of the
Iliad, means “wrath,” and Homer’s epic devotes itself to marking the
evolution of this emotion in Achilles. In The Republic, Plato holds that,
because the poet naturally imitates the extremes of emotion, “he stimu-
lates and fosters this element in the soul, and by strengthening it tends to
destroy the rational part” (ii .10.7). Poetry, dealing in vehemence, encour-
ages the growth and expression of strong emotion by example. For
Aristotle, however, observation of poetic emotion provides for harmless
release, or catharsis, of potentially violent passions. As W. Hamilton Fyfe
summarizes Aristotle’s position in the Poetics, “pent-up emotion is apt to
explode inconveniently. What the citizens need is an outlet such as
dramatic poetry conveniently supplied.”5 Both Plato and Aristotle see
the individual and the populace as emotional pressure-cookers; Plato
advises turning down the heat, while Aristotle is in favor of blowing off
steam.6 The role of poetry, particularly dramatic poetry enacted before a
large audience, is central to both conceptions, which have been shaped by
fears of an uncontrollable angry mob. As we will see in the chapters that
follow, this prescriptive disagreement persists and acquires fresh urgency
in the Romantic era in England.

The classical tradition of writing against anger culminates in Seneca’s
De Ira (c. 40–50 ad ), perhaps the most influential treatise on the subject.
For Seneca, anger is a sickness, “the most hideous and frenzied of
emotions, ” always to be eliminated.7 Such is the path of the Stoic:
The man who does not get angry stands firm, unshaken by injury; he who gets
angry is overthrown . . . [The Stoic] will say, “Do what you will, you are too
puny to disturb my serenity. Reason, to whom I have committed the guidance of
my life, forbids it. My anger is likely to do me more harm than your wrong. And
why not more? The limit of the injury is fixed, but how far the anger will sweep
me no man knows.” (3.25.2)
    Yielding to one’s feelings of anger amounts to transgression, a willful
crossing of a line that involves one in an episode of expression with a logic
of its own. Seneca condemns comprehensively here, but behind his
diatribe against anger lies a terrified and seemingly exaggerated perception
of its power: “There is no passion of any kind over which anger does not
hold mastery” (2.36.6). Because of its “unbridled . . . ungovernable” (1.9.3)
nature, anger once indulged threatens to engulf the self, leading to
madness: “Never will the wise man cease to be angry if once he starts”
(2.9.1). Faced with the perversity of the world around him, the wise man,
the vir bonus or vir sapiens of satiric tradition, must respond with uninter-
rupted rage unless he continually checks his rising feelings and controls
his tongue. The alternative, as Seneca sees it, amounts to an insane loss of
control, an unlimited trajectory of anger.

ANGER, REVOLUTION, AND ROMANTICISM



ANGER, REVOLUTION, AND ROMANTICISM
Introduction: fits of rage

The men who grow angry with corruption, and impatient at
injustice, and through those sentiments favour the abettor of
revolution, have an obvious apology to palliate their error; theirs is
the excess of a virtuous feeling. At the same time, however amiable
may be the source of their error, the error itself is probably fraught
with consequences pernicious to mankind.

        Godwin, “On Revolutions,”

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.

        Blake, “The Argument,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1789

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, two closely related develop-
ments in Europe changed utterly the functions and forms of anger in
public discourse. First, the French Revolution inspired intense debate over
anger’s role in, and in creating, new forms of civil society. From its
beginnings, the Revolution was centered in an assertion that the anger
of the people deserved respect, and had a legitimacy of its own. Yet as they
democratized anger, the Revolution and the Terror demonstrated the
dangers of unbounded public rage, leaving conflict an ambiguous inherit-
ance for English writers.1 Second, the periodical press began a phase of
rapid expansion that transformed the substance, style, and reach of the
public voice. Printing technologies allowed for the dissemination of angry
rhetoric across lines of class and nation, and helped establish the right of
an outraged people to redress. The democratization of anger meant that
learning to marshal the emotions of the populace took on new urgency,
and the press was there to step into the breach. By way of anger, the
newly emergent media discovered its demagogic powers; and the fight in
England over the French Revolution became simultaneously a fight over
the place of angry words and deeds in the modern liberal state.


   I direct my attention to three intertwined categories of influence with
regard to Romantic anger: political history, literary history, and an aggre-
gate of discipline-specific conceptions and rhetorics under the heading of
the history of ideas. First, the French Revolution and its English reception
produced a politically supercharged conception of the angry passions.
Second, as Romanticism developed in the wake of Augustan satire, the
sensibility tradition, and the cult of the sublime, it mandated certain
formal and imaginative transvaluations of anger in literature – and thus
of literature itself. Finally, changing attitudes in legal, medical, and moral-
philosophical contexts not only registered political pressures, but also
contributed to the culture of wrath that was the Romantics’ inheritance.
Viewing these many influences, we may fairly say that the Romantic
articulation of anger was an overdetermined affair, one that reveals much
about the wrenching transition of these years that witnessed the birth of
modernity. The literary work of the period becomes the conduit leading
from the eighteenth-century imagination of anger to our own.
   In political terms, the Romantic movement in England has been
perpetually associated with the French Revolution and its Napoleonic
aftermath. In addition to citing such topical works as Wordsworth’s
Prelude and Blake’s The French Revolution, readers have often felt a larger
“spirit of the age” animating Romantic literature, and visible as a dialogue
between forces of rebellion and reaction: Orc and Urizen, Prometheus
and Jupiter, Cain and Jehovah. In recent decades, historically minded
critics have elucidated the ways that this dialogue was variously inflected
by its specific cultural and discursive contexts, particularly in regard to
English radicalism and the periodical press. Indeed, the last two decades of Romanticist scholarship have witnessed a remarkable outpouring of
commentary and information regarding the 1790s, particularly in regard
to English political culture and the public sphere.12 In part, this book
continues this line of investigation, examining certain structures of lan-
guage visible in the Revolution debates and beyond. As we will see, these
structures had far-reaching implications for the Romantic articulation of
anger. Not only was the Revolution itself all but constituted, and certainly
punctuated, by spectacular displays of rage, but the argument in England
was also conducted in tones of increasing acrimony as the decade wore on.
What’s more, anger itself was pointedly at issue in a debate that began
with Edmund Burke’s outraged Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790), and halted only with the passage of laws forbidding further public
dissent.13 The conceptual and political positions emergent from this
cacophonous argument became the most influential legacies of the French
Revolution to writers of the Romantic era.
   Put another way, the 1790s in England witnessed a large-scale redefini-
tion of anger in public consciousness, due primarily to the influence of the
Revolution and the ways it was discussed. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this
book illustrate various aspects of this process, by which anger was gener-
ally demonized as irrational, destructive rage – as an all-but-uncontrol-
lable passion visited upon its victims. In the political, medical, and legal
discourse of the period, we find a remarkable alignment of changing
attitudes towards rage in the wake of the Revolution, as if the fear of
popular anger washed over the entire culture and altered the landscape of
the mind. It begins in the Revolution debates, in a rhetorical struggle over
indignation: both sides want to claim this position by ascribing ferocious
rage to their opponents. As a result, indignation becomes a moral stance
detached from the emotion of anger as such, which is firmly identified as a
dangerous loss of self-control. This outcome is mirrored, at the level of
metaphor, in a change in post-Revolutionary medical theory and practice:
raging inflammations (or “angry” swellings) are reconceived as destructive
diseases rather than purgative symptoms. Bleeding thus comes briefly
back into fashion as a treatment for fevers, given the newly perceived
need to suppress displays of rage. Analogies between the physical body
and the body politic mark this conceptual shift. Finally, we see a similar
alteration in legal discourse during the period, whereby provocation law
defines angry outbursts as transports of rage during which the rational
self is abandoned. This meant defendants bore less responsibility for
crimes of passion, since (it was assumed) anger no longer involved rational
judgment or implied forethought. Thus in a number of discursive communities during this period, anger was thought of as, or as verging
closely upon, uncontrollable rage.
   My primary aim, while delineating the history of this redefinition of
anger, is to show its impact on the work of Romantic-period authors. In
the wake of Augustan satire, the Romantic poets developed their ambiva-
lent attitudes towards angry art in concert with or in the immediate wake
of the multitude of outraged voices in the periodical press.14 Romanticism
in England can thus be seen as a chorus of responses to the crisis that was
brought about by anger’s prominence in public discourse. Godwin,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and others provide important
evidence of the various political and aesthetic pressures on anger for the
post-Revolutionary author in England. However, it is Blake, Shelley, and
Byron who stand closest to the heart of this book, because the imaginative
and poetic programs of each are founded, however uneasily, on a particular
species of anger. These three writers attempt to work beyond the limiting
sense of anger they inherit from the English reception of the French
Revolution. That is, they reject anger as something experienced passively
as a visitation upon the self, and articulate angry emotions as positive and
decisive enactments of the self upon the world. In so doing, they provide
new ways of imagining the value of anger to a culture that has lost faith in
that emotion. The literary work produced out of this commitment is
characterized by generic experimentation as well, as these poets develop
methods of presenting this essentially spectacular emotion in written form.
   The question of anger’s genre provokes first an attention to the history
of satiric writing. Between the Augustans and the Romantics, Thomas
Lockwood finds a widening split between satire and poetry: it is not that
satire was not being written, but that critical canons were changing,
dismissing wit, reason, and politics as components alien to “pure” poetry.
Primarily under Rousseau’s influence, English poetry came to be governed
by an aesthetic ideology of (authorial) sincerity and (readerly) sympathy
that prohibited the essential theatricality and confrontational implications
of angry satire. As the voice of poetry became more disembodied and
more isolated in order to avoid imputations of theatricality, anger – a
violent passion that relies on tone, gesture, and facial expression for its
communication to others – necessarily grew problematic for Romantic
lyric poets, whose work assumes soliloquy and apostrophe as its ground.
How does one perform anger without a body, a voice, or an established
dramatic context? One answer is to write very strongly worded impreca-
tions and curses; yet such an unlyrical strategy invites charges of overreac-
tion and overacting, or madness and insincerity. The Romantic aesthetic ideology made the composition of angry poetry a difficult and risky
proposition.
   Yet, like irony, anger often acts as an instrument of truth, pointing out
injustices, betrayals, and false states of affairs, and seeking to even scores.
So for the Romantic poets, angry satire was a highly rhetorical art and
also a test of sincerity, a theatrical performance aimed at stripping away
masks, an antithetical charade in the service of truth. It was by way of such
contradictions that some Romantics found a place for anger in their
imaginations of the literary. Scholarly activity of the past several decades
has asserted the importance of satire to the Romantic period.15 Steven
Jones has declared that “satire can no longer be excluded from our
representations of the period,” and that “satire offers an important antith-
esis operating within Romanticism . . . it does not simply go away.”16 For
one thing, amidst the political upheaval of the period, the popular press
teemed with satiric poetry in the form of propaganda. In addition, we
have always known that Byron and Shelley both wrote satires, and that
Blake was driven by a satiric urge. Yet less clear have been the relations
between anger and satire in the Romantic imagination.
   One might begin to understand the Romantics’ conflicted inheritance
by looking to Juvenal, who in his First Satire implies that angry verse
depends upon a split between the poet and the natural order of the
world:
quem patitur dormire nurus corruptor avarae,
quem sponsae turpes et praetextatus adulter?
si natura negat, facit indignatio versum,
qualemcunque potest . . .
[Who can sleep when a daughter-in-law is seduced for money, / When brides-to-
be are corrupt, and schoolboys practise adultery? / If nature fails, then
indignation generates verse, / Doing the best it can . . . ]

   The conditional “si natura negat” prefaces anger’s creation of verse,
“qualemcunque potest,” as best it can. That is, anger serves as an inspiring
force for the satirist despite, or rather because of, a perversion of natural
creative principles exemplified by the “sponsae turpes, et praetextatus
adulter” of the previous line. In other words, unnatural times call for
unnatural measures, of which angry poetry is one. Because Juvenal’s
declaration here is recognizable as a rhetorician’s claim to unskilled sincer-
ity, some translators render “natura” as “talent” or “wit,” emphasizing the
close ties between nature and reason in classical thought. Anger makes verse
when nature, or the reasonable order of operations, fails in both the poet
and society. Thus, even as it asserts its emotional sincerity, Juvenalian satire `repudiates organicism, and becomes the cursed spite that proves the world
is out of joint.
   However, for the Romantic poets, the denial of nature that Juvenalian
verse requires took on a new and unsettling dimension. Surveying Juve-
nal’s reputation, Wiesen writes, “From late antiquity, when the satires
first became popular reading matter, until the early nineteenth century,
general opinion agreed that Juvenal’s attack on the faults of contemporary
society was prompted by a fiercely sincere hatred of . . . moral laxity.”18
This view came under attack as the Romantic cult of sincerity grew; also
writing on Juvenal’s reputation, E. J. Kenney observes, “With the Ro-
mantic movement came a concomitant distrust of rhetoric” and a perva-
sive “assumption that rhetoric connotes insincerity.”19 Thus Wiesen finds
that “the reaction against Juvenal . . . was a perverse outgrowth of the
nineteenth-century Romantic search for striking originality” (“Juvenal’s
Moral Character,” 451) and William Kupersmith concurs: “Juvenal the
insincere, hyperbolic rhetorician . . . is an invention of nineteenth-century
criticism.”20 Juvenal’s satiric anger came to be seen as anti-natural because
conventionally rhetorical; and indeed, the satiric tradition generally fell
under similar critique. Kenney maintains, “It is no doubt not accidental
that the decline of Juvenal’s fortunes in England was roughly synchronous
with the virtual disappearance of formal verse satire” (“Juvenal: Satirist or
Rhetorician?,” 705). For the Romantics, the angry satirist was primarily a
conventional and theatrical figure incapable of lyric sincerity.
   Alvin Kernan demonstrates that the satiric tradition is one “not of
Romantic self-expression but of self-conscious art, of traditions, conven-
tions.”21 He cites John Marston as a satiric poet who “specifically disavows
the lyric tradition” in a passage from The Scourge of Villanie (1599) clearly
indebted to Juvenal:
I invocate no Delian Deitie,
Nor sacred of-spring of Mnemosyne:
I pray in ayde of no Castalian Muse,
No Nimph, no femall Angell to infuse
A sprightly wit to raise my flagging wings,
And teach me tune these harsh discordant strings;
I crave no Syrens of our Halcion times,
To grace the accents of my rough-hew’d rimes;
But grim Reproofe, a stearne Hate of villany,
Inspire and guide a Satyres poesie.22
  Embracing his own anger, Marston rejects the natural and the super-
natural as sources of poetry, a comprehensively anti-Romantic gesture
duplicated by John Cleveland (1613–58) in his “On the Pouder Plot”:

I neede not call thee from thy miterd hill
Apollo, anger will inspire my quill.
If nature should deny, rage would infuse
Virtue as mutch as could supply a muse.
   Amplifying Juvenal, Marston and Cleveland both make an exaggerated
turn to their own anger as inspiration. These Renaissance satirists engage
in rhetorical posturing, energetically unconcerned with questions of sin-
cerity. Jonas Barish claims that Renaissance culture evinces a “frank
delight” in “outward splendor” and spectacle, a “pervasive pleasure in
the twin roles of actor and spectator.”24 Indeed, Cleveland emphasizes the
link between rollicking exertion and rage, and presents himself as an
angry, clownish performer. In “The Rebell Scot,” he exclaims,
Ring the bells backward; I am all on fire.
Not all the buckets in a Countrey quire
Shall quench my rage. A poet should be fear’d
When angry, like a Comet’s flaming beard. (Poems, p. 72, lines 5–8)
   He further claims that, “Before a Scot can properly be curst, / I must
(like Hocus) swallow daggers first” (lines 25–6). In these examples,
Cleveland exaggerates his own theatricality, going so far as to relate
himself to “Hocus,” a conjurer or juggler, whose chosen mode of enter-
tainment is his own anger. To be sure, Cleveland’s poems express political
convictions in no uncertain terms, but they reveal nothing so much as an
obvious relish of performing his invective.
   The anger in Cleveland, Marston, and other Renaissance satirists
demonstrates the slippage towards theater common in poetic representa-
tions of anger. Having reached over the Augustans to claim their precur-
sors in the Renaissance, the Romantics found they still had to respond to
satire’s challenges. The Romantics shouldered a burden of self-expression
that included abiding anxiety over the sincerity of emotional communi-
cation in poetry. For them, angry satire embodied an anti-lyrical impulse
grounded in mock sincerity, and thus had to be abandoned or trans-
formed. Blake, Shelley, and Byron discovered ways to reshape their satiric
inheritance as they struggled to incarnate the disembodied voice, and
to convey the alienated perspective, of anger. However uneasily, they
held onto their rage because they were convinced of the dialogic re-
lation between anger and truth. Certainly satire had long been imagined
as a weapon against deception and corruption. Furthermore, in the
apocalyptic dawn of the French Revolution, anger promised to under-
mine false structures of power and reveal the true nature of humanity. In the chapters that follow, I show that similar promises lie close to the heart
of these poets’ work.
   Wordsworth, on the other hand, constitutes the absent center of this
book. It may well be that the almost-complete lack of anger in his poetry,
combined with his emergence as the representative Romantic poet, con-
stitutes the strongest evidence of the anxieties surrounding that emotion
in the Romantic period, as well as the cultural legacies of those concerns.
In his recent study, The Vehement Passions, Philip Fisher sees Wordsworth
as embodying the emotional tenor and allegiances of Romanticism: “In
Wordsworth we can readily see the division of art between a poetry of
elegiac loss, only in part recovered in memory, and a poetry of the
sublime, with its center in experiences of fear. Wordsworth would, I
think, stand here for romanticism as a whole. Its elegiac and sublime
aspects locked in place a configuration of the passions around fear and
mourning” (The Vehement Passions, 150). According to Fisher, a concep-
tion of the passions with fear as its representative case has held sway in
Western thought ever since Wordsworthian Romanticism, displacing a
former model in which anger was the template. Moreoever, he asserts that
“Fear and anger sponsor opposite accounts” of the passions as a whole:
anger “makes clear the relation of the passions to spiritedness . . . to
motion, to confidence, and to self-expression in the world”; but
when fear, rather than anger, is taken to be the template for inner life . . .
Accounts of the passions . . . are preliminary to the therapeutic description of how
the passions might be minimized or eliminated from experience . . . When fear is
used as the template, as it was in Stoicism, the passions are taken as disturbances
of the self . . . passive and opposed to action. (The Vehement Passions 14–15)
In Romantic-period culture, the aesthetic priorities of Wordsworthian
Romanticism dovetailed with the demonization of anger in the political
sphere to confirm this transition to fear as the representative passion. And,
as Fisher demonstrates, we have only begun to consider the implications
of this historical narrative for our understanding of the modern subject
and the place of anger in post-Romantic culture.
  In the 1805 Prelude, Wordsworth describes France in July of 1793 in
language that reveals an essentially negative, though ultimately ambivalent,
attitude towards anger:
The goaded land waxed mad; the crimes of few
Spread into madness of the many; blasts
From hell came sanctified like airs from heaven.
The sternness of the Just, the faith of those

Who doubted not that Providence had times
Of anger and of vengeance, theirs who throned
The human understanding paramount
And made of that their god, the hopes of those
Who were content to barter short-lived pangs
For a paradise of angels, the blind rage
Of insolent tempers . . .
And all the accidents of life, were pressed
Into one service, busy with one work.25
   That “work” is the work of the guillotine: here Wordsworth presents
Robespierre’s Paris as a city of madness, infected by “blasts from hell.”
“Sternness,” “anger,” “vengeance,” and “blind rage” are prime movers of
the guillotine’s blade, like the “blast” of wind that makes the child’s
pinwheel “whirl the faster” as he runs (Prelude, 10:344–5). The allusion
to Hamlet’s words to the ghost – “Bring with thee airs from heaven or
blasts from hell” (1.4.21) – evokes the spirit of vengeance abroad in France
and Wordsworth’s own ambivalence regarding it, even as it associates
winds with both pestilence and song (“airs” and “blasts”). These “blasts
from hell” produce the feverish rage of the Terror and also recall the “loud
prophetic blast of harmony / An ode in passion uttered, which foretold /
Destruction to the children of the earth / By deluge yet at hand” in
Wordsworth’s dream of the Arab (5.96–99). In other words, the passage
presents a complex amalgam of human and divine wrathfulness, trans-
posed rhetorically onto nature: the winds and the “goaded land.” Alan Liu
has made the case that Wordsworth turned to nature as “a blind or screen”
after confronting acts of Revolutionary rage, in order to return “the facts
of historical violence to the status of the ghostly” (Wordsworth: The Sense
of History, 166). This insight has wider application to Wordsworth’s
processing of anger, an emotion that haunts his poetry by its absence.
   In later, more directly political poetry, Wordsworth has little use for
anger, particularly that of “the people.” For example, in a poem called
“The Warning,” written in 1833, he laments over those agitating for the
passage of the Reform Bill:
Lost people, trained to theoretic feud!
Lost above all, ye labouring multitude!
Bewildered whether ye, by slanderous tongues
Deceived, mistake calamities for wrongs;
And over fancied usurpations brood,
Oft snapping at revenge in sullen mood;
Or, from long stress of real injuries fly

Introduction: fits of rage
To desperation for a remedy;
In burst of outrage spread your judgements wide,
And to your wrath cry out, “Be thou our guide.”26

   For Wordsworth, the tygers of wrath are clearly not wiser than the
horses of instruction; and when the people allow themselves to be guided
by anger, they become bewildered, deceived, mistaken, desperate, and
lost. Such an attitude towards public wrath owes a great deal to his
experience of the French Revolution and the Terror, and also to his
disapproval of the angry rhetoric of the popular press, that “theoretic
feud” of “scandalous tongues” leading the citizens astray. As Wordsworth
wrote in response to what he saw as Carlyle’s overly enthusiastic account
of the French Revolution, “Hath it not long been said the wrath of Man /
Works not the righteousness of God?”27 The agitation surrounding the
Reform Bill was England’s version of the Revolutionary conflicts in
France, and Wordsworth saw in both only a blind outrage dangerous to
the people and the nation. For many writers of the Romantic period, his
attitudes towards anger became the nation’s common stock.
   The basic (and indeed, perennial) question that haunts these decades is
this: what is the relationship of anger to authenticity and justice? For the
eighteenth-century moral philosophers of sensibility (i.e., Locke, Hume,
Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Ferguson, and Kames), human
emotions were the very groundwork of the moral sentiments; and the
Romantics grew out of this tradition of thinking. William Reddy has
argued in The Navigation of Feeling that the late-eighteenth century
sentimentalist answer was grounded in a firm belief in the rightness of
one’s personal feelings. One can see this operating, for example, in Emile
(1762), wherein Rousseau presents a revealing tableau of a child being
beaten, and gives a sentimental reading of the scene:
I shall never forget seeing one of these troublesome crying children thus beaten
by his nurse. He was silent at once. I thought he was frightened, and said to
myself, “This will be a servile being from whom nothing can be got but by
harshness.” I was wrong, the poor wretch was choking with rage, he could not
breathe, he was black in the face. A moment later there were bitter cries, every
sign of the anger, rage, and despair of this age was in his tones. I thought he
would die. Had I doubted the innate sense of justice and injustice in man’s heart,
this one instance would have convinced me.28
   For Rousseau, the child’s rage signifies an “innate sense of justice,” a
reading that equates natural emotions with virtue in a way Reddy sees as
typical in eighteenth-century France until the fall of Robespierre. The
onset of the Terror, to the accompaniment of sentimentalist rhetoric
of the natural moral sense and the passionate human heart, caused
this discourse of emotion to collapse, making way for a Romantic-era
world in which “virtue was regarded as an outgrowth of the exercise of the
will, guided by reason, aimed at disciplining passions” rather than en-
couraging them (The Navigation of Feeling, 216). Reddy writes of this
sudden alteration, “For a few decades, emotions were deemed to be as
important as reason in the foundation of states and the conduct of
politics. After 1794, not only was this idea rejected, even its memory
was extinguished” (143).

   I mean to offer a number of windows on the English history of this
transition, focusing on the ways anger was expressed and discussed in the
Romantic period and presenting a composite picture of angry discourse
as a contextual field for Romantic poetry. By way of background, the
book’s first chapter conducts a survey of the literary-historical field of
anger as it tends towards the work of the Romantic poets. I take Seneca
and Juvenal as representative of two opposing traditions of anger (briefly,
madness versus justice), and examine the issue of angry rhetoric with
regard to the aesthetics of the sublime, beginning with Seneca, whose
denunciations of anger in De Ira are matched in vehemence only by the
angry soliloquies of his tragic characters such as Medea. Reading Seneca
by way of Longinus (which is what English writers on anger began to do
in the eighteenth-century), we can see the beginnings of angry speech
as sublime performance and empowering transgression, an aesthetic that
Juvenal comes to embody. Here also we find questions of sincerity and
calculation that surround the classical idea of anger inherited by the
Augustans, and ultimately confronted by the Romantics. However, when
Burke and Kant replace Longinus as theorists of the sublime in the
mid-eighteenth century, the role of anger in poetry begins to change.
Instead of Pope’s acerbic and enlarging outrage, sincere terror, experi-
enced in response to some external angry figure, becomes the favored
emotional pathway to sublimity. The wrathful Jehovah of the Old
Testament focuses the displacement of anger, as seen in the writings of
Dennis, Warton, and others. Furthermore, the poetry of sensibility –
Collins, Gray, Cowper – also enacts this transition from anger to fear.
The Romantics thus inherited an aesthetic that demanded distance from
one’s anger, even as it seemed to require sensibility, true feeling. This
paradox determined their engagements with anger as a poetic mode, and
set the stage for the influence of the French Revolution and the Terror on
their work.

   Chapter 2 begins by examining the ways in which the fight in England
over the meanings of the French Revolution was simultaneously a fight
over the place of public anger in the modern liberal state. Ultimately, in a
period intensely interested in the causes and consequences of anger, just
indignation is firmly separated from anger per se, which is made equiva-
lent with irrational rage. This choice resonates with the Juvenalian–
Senecan distinction of the first chapter, and points to similar divisions
determining anger in the Romantic imagination. After showing how this
process of reconceptualization resonates strongly through the writings of
Burke and his respondents in the Revolution debates, I turn to the work
of Coleridge, whose conception of anger is intimately related to his
culture’s experience of revolution and war. On the one hand, he writes
of anger as an invasive force that thwarts the will, a mad passion that
operates like a violent storm or an attack of indigestion. In this sense,
Coleridgean anger resembles the fearful, neo-Stoic attitude that grew out
of the Revolution debates: anger as irrational rage, something like a
disease. And like his fellow contributors to the debates, Coleridge envi-
sions an aggressive engagement with error that would be productive and
healthy for the political body, and avoid the dangers associated with the
      ´enrages. On the other hand, as a poet, Coleridge finds himself in states of
inspired rage, or poetic frenzy, and thus has reason to court the energies, if
not the polarities, of anger in his creative work. The “crash of onset” that
the poet dreads in “Fears in Solitude” (Poetical Works, 471, line 38)30 in
fact dovetails with the “Rushing of an Host in rout” from “Dejection: An
Ode,” the former a figure for a sudden attack of violence, the latter an
image created by a “mighty Poet, e’en to Frenzy bold!” (Poetical Works,
701, lines 109–11). Coleridge’s writing is marked by this paradox of the
Romantic era, when rage comes to be thought of simultaneously as
invading enemy (a real concern during the Napoleonic years) and invited
guest, whose welcome visitations are near the source of poetry.
   In the book’s third chapter, I look at inflammation as a conceptual and
discursive category, and trace connections between political, medical,
and literary uses of the term. In Romantic-era political discussions (by
Coleridge, Thelwall, and many others), anger is almost invariably treated
as if it were a disease or disorder, and the recommended therapeutic
programs involve a conception of anger as inflammation or raging fever.
Moreover, a split in the handling of this metaphor develops along political
lines. Writers sympathetic to the Revolution interpret inflammation (i.e.,
popular rage) as a salutary symptom of a deeper imbalance, where-
as counterrevolutionaries see such inflammation as itself a debilitating

disease of the national body. This split mirrors a contemporary medical
debate over the pathology of inflammation: is it a healing effect (that
should be encouraged to take its course) or a dangerous cause (in which
case bloodletting becomes the order of the day)? The chapter then turns
to the work of William Blake in order to show the way his poetry is
influenced by these conceptions of anger and inflammation. I read Blake’s
work (e.g., The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, America, and Jerusalem) in
the context of this discourse of inflammation, particularly as revealing
his attitude towards revolutionary anger. Reading his work via inflamma-
tory pathology illuminates thus the ways that wrath and revolution are
enmeshed in the structure of the Romantic imagination.
   Chapter 4 begins by reading Godwin’s Caleb Williams in the context of
the Revolution debates and legal history, showing how the novel bodies
forth current attitudes towards provocation and crimes of violence com-
mitted in a rage. With particular attention to the novel’s allusions to
Alexander the Great, I show how Godwin imagined a common plot of
anger determining the novel-as-narrative and the political scene of the
1790s. Caleb’s allusion to the story of Alexander and Clitus invokes a kind
of inexorable logic of provocation, eruption, and regret that Godwin
evokes in his political writings as well. Yet the gothic allegiances of Caleb
Williams betray the lingering fascination of Romantic-period authors with
the spectacle of anger in the wake of the French Revolution. The chapter
concludes with a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a postwar
sequel to these concerns. The discussion focuses on the issues of sympathy
and vengeance that structure the novel, with particular reference to The
Sufferings of Young Werther and the Romantic imagination of anger after
Waterloo.
   In chapter 5, I examine Percy Shelley’s ambivalent representations of
wrath as a satiric tool to unmask corruption, a tool which itself must be
rejected as incompatible with his utopian imaginings. I relate this dynamic
to a masque/anti-masque dialectic that determines the movements of works
such as Prometheus Unbound and The Mask of Anarchy. In the face of
injustice and falsehood, Shelley feels both anger and a revulsion at that
emotion; the resulting poetry – and it comprises much of his work—
involves pageants of rage and its retraction. Haunted by the degeneration
of the French Revolution into a theater of cruelty, and yet prone to
aggression in response to tyrannies, he works to find a use for anger that
will not involve giving way to cyclical patterns of revenge. Shelleyean anger
draws on a satiric tradition of revelation and abuse, and finds its strength in
the act of unmasking—since evil, for Shelley, is almost invariably founded
in deception, disguise, and hypocrisy. But Shelley forces his poetry to move

beyond the rough justice of satire towards a state of expectation and
amelioration. He negates his poetry’s angry outbursts, but only after they
have cleared the air. These rituals of revelation have a corollary in the
masques of Jonson and Milton, who use grotesque anti-masque material as
contrast for harmonious visions of reconciliation. Thus Shelley portrays
anger as both anti-masque and anti-mask: it is a violent stage that reveals
hidden corruption and is then dispersed to make way for a millennial
political vision wherein aggression has no place.
   In the final chapter, I examine Byron’s poetry and letters to illustrate
the poet’s sense of angry writing as a theater of revenge, which replaces
readerly sympathy with a curious fascination. Unlike Godwin and the
Shelleys, who present the tragic consequences of revengefulness, Byron
turns to meditated hatred as a determining influence on his poetry. For
the lyric speaker whose art depends upon a sincere and sympathetic voice,
anger invites the encroachment of the dramatic and the juridical, and thus
threatens to break down lines of imagined communion between poet and
reader; Byron’s poetry of anger performs a high-wire act on such lines. He
typically pronounces his anger as a curse, and thus simultaneously per-
forms and postpones vengeance in scenes of writing. As in the case of
Wordsworth, the memory of loss shapes Byron’s imagination, but rather
than finding recompense within, Byron remains engaged with the past,
never forgiving or forgetting those he holds responsible for his suffering.
I argue that, paradoxically, the charges of theatricality that have clung to
Byron’s work arise from the sincerity of his rage, which disables both
irony and sympathetic connections (and thus the appearance of sincerity)
for his Romantic-era audiences.
   In a very literal sense, Western culture begins with anger: the first word
of Homer’s Iliad names that emotion as primarily worthy of historical
memory and epic attention. This book addresses a crucial moment in the
history of anger, involving the advent of discursive practices and attitudes
towards the passions that have shaped the modern world. At this angry
nexus, the English Romantic poets labor to accommodate the aggressive
passions to the demands of the creative imagination. An explication of
this process necessarily raises larger questions: how are politics and the
media bound up with our emotional lives? In what ways does art bear the
scars of larger cultural struggles regarding its affective content? What place
does anger have in the civilized precincts of polis and poetry? Coleridge
once noted, “It is most true: we are all Children of Wrath.”31 Focused on
Coleridge’s era, the pages that follow explore the cultural inheritance
attendant upon that powerfully vexing genealogy.