Introduction

Abstract

In his chapter for Northrop Frye’s Romanticism Reconsidered, published nearly fifty years ago, Lionel Trilling stresses the centrality of pleasure to definitions of Romantic aesthetics, beginning with Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads. According to Trilling, Wordsworth’s aesthetic manifesto is defined not so much by the idea of “emotion recollected in tranquillity” as by the numerous statements concerning what Wordsworth calls “‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure,’” which “constitutes ‘the naked and native dignity of man’ [and] … is the principle by which man ‘knows, and feels, and lives, and moves’” (74). For Wordsworth, “pleasure [is] the defining attribute of life itself and of nature itself,” and “the fallen condition of humanity … is comprised by the circumstance that man alone of natural beings does not experience the pleasure which, Wordsworth believes, moves the living world” (77). Romanticism at large, Trilling suggests, registers the celebration of an embodied pleasure native to humanity and the lamentation for its inevitable loss, its perennial “bidding adieu,” in Keats’s famous phrase.