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.