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.
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