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.
