Abstract
This chapter examines the extent of Shaftesbury’s influence on Wordsworth, with particular reference to the poet’s concurrence with the philosopher’s view that feeling must be regulated through self-division and polite sociability. A number of commentators have emphasised Wordsworth’s acceptance of Shaftesbury’s Whig civic humanist strictures against strong feeling. Jon Mee, for instance, has persuasively argued that while Wordsworth agrees with Shaftesbury’s insistence on the regulation of the passions, the poet admits enthusiasm into his work in order to discipline it and thereby exhibit his command over emotion. The ‘combustible matter [of feeling] … seems to remain in excess of its disciplinary plot’: in short, enthusiasm fuels Wordsworth’s Shaftesburean poetics.1
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Notes
Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford UP 2003), p. 256.
See Paul Fry’s comment ‘that Wordsworth was never radically politicized (although at least in 1793 he was without a doubt politically radical)’ (Paul Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are [New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2008], p. 4).
Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds, The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), p. 1.
Ibid., p. 2.
Duncan Wu claims that Wordsworth had read Shaftesbury ‘whilst still a schoolboy, by 1785’ (Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993], p. 36). In ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’, Wordsworth refers to Shaftesbury as ‘an author at present unjustly depreciated’ (PrW 3, 72).
Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth Century England, p. 59; Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799, p. 137. See also R. L. Brett, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory, pp. 160–1 and Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics, pp. 52–63 for the influence of Shaftesbury on Thomson and Akenside, respectively. Jacobus discusses the presence of the same poets in Wordsworth (Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) [Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1976], pp. 38–58) and Rader finds allusions to Shaftesbury in Wordsworth’s mature work (Melvin Rader, Wordsworth: A Philosophical Approach [Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1967], pp. 54–5.)
S. T. C. Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols [Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1956–71], 1. 279.
Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1795–1798 (Brighton: Harvester Press 1979), pp. 191–2.
Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1999), p. 47.
Discussing Shaftesbury’s advice to authors that they ‘retire to solitary places, “Woods and Riverbanks,” to test their work against themselves so that the “fancy” may evaporate and the “vehemence” of the “Spirit and Voice” may be reduced (C 1: 107–08)’, Jon Mee suggests that ‘Already … we can see the outlines of a Wordsworthian definition of poetry as “emotion, recollected in tranquillity”’ (Jon Mee, ‘Mopping Up Spilt Religion: The Problem of Enthusiasm’, Romanticism on the Net 25 (2002): §5.
The Prelude’s ‘spots of time’ are, of course, Wordsworth’s most ambitious expression of this view. See Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford UP 2003), p. 239.
Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1990), p. 32.
Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994), p. 126.
John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson 1983), p. 22. My italics.
Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (London: Macmillan 1992), p. 64.
Donald Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1996), pp. 4–5.
Shaun Irlam, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999), p. 19.
J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press 1985), p. 210.
Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth Century England (New Hampshire: Croom Helm 1986), pp. 10, 22. See Anne Janowitz’s discussion of how in the Monthly Magazine of the early 1800s ‘Literature shifts from being the vehicle of principles to being the principle of liberality itself’ (Anne Janowitz, ‘Memoirs of a dutiful niece: Lucy Aikin and literary reputation’ in Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton, eds., Repossessingthe Romantic Past [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006], p. 89).
See Anne Janowitz’s discussion of how in the Monthly Magazine of the early 1800s ‘Literature shifts from being the vehicle of principles to being the principle of liberality itself’ (Anne Janowitz, ‘Memoirs of a dutiful niece: Lucy Aikin and literary reputation’ in Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton, eds., Repossessingthe Romantic Past [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006], p. 89)
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1994), p. 32.
Ibid., p. 34.
G. J Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1992), p. 119.
See William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, Vol. 1, ed. Mark L. Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1991), 10. 848. All references are to this edition, unless stated otherwise.
Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge 1993), p. 197.
William Wordsworth, An Evening Walk by William Wordsworth, ed. James Averill (Cornell: Cornell University Press 1984), 119–32.
Basil Willey, The Eighteenth-Century Background (London: Routledge 1986), p. 70.
R. L. Brett, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (New York: Hutchinson’s University Library 1951), p. 74.
John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London: 1757), p. 154.
For a fine reading of the relationship between money, speculation and fantasy in the period, see Thomas Laqueur, ‘Sexual Desire and the Market Economy during the Industrial Revolution’ in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Michigan: University of Michigan Press 1992). See also Laqueur’s ‘Masturbation, Credit and the Novel during the Long Eighteenth Century’, Qui Parle, 8 (1995): 1–19.
Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1996), p. 79.
Ibid., p. 121.
Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of the Imagination. To which is prefixed a critical essay on the poem, by Mrs. Barbauld (London 1794), p. 124. All references are to Mrs Barbauld’s 1794 edition of The Pleasures of the Imagination, which Dorothy Wordsworth received in 1795 (Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, p. 2).
Akenside, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 1. 116–32.
Meehan, Liberty and Poetics, p. 42; William Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985), 8. 729.
In the twentieth century, the idea that energy must, of necessity, be released in order to maintain good health was developed by Georges Bataille: ‘… solar energy is the source of life’s exuberant development. The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy — wealth — without any return. The sun gives without ever receiving’ (Georges Bataille, The Bataille Reader, eds Fred Botting and Scott Wilson [Oxford: Blackwell 1997], p. 189).
Jason Frank writes that ‘Shaftesbury believed in the necessary persistence of enthusiasm as a crucial part of the sociability he pursued … Enthusiasm marked a space of persistent enchantment in a world that seemed to Shaft-esbury bent on ridding itself of its enchantments’ (Jason Frank, ‘“Besides Our Selves”: An Essay on Enthusiastic Politics and Civil Subjectivity’, Public Culture 17. 3 (2005): 389.
William Wordsworth, The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Cornell: Cornell University Press 1975), 102–3.
On the poem’s anti-Whig aspect, Tom Duggett writes: ‘Salisbury Plain’s nightmare of relapse into Druidical sacrifice is apparently a deliberate challenge to the Whig model of English history whereby, in the words of James Thomson’s Liberty (1735–6), the successive invasions of the “Gothic nations” of Saxons, Danes and Normans had woken Britain “from Celtic night/To present grandeur” (IV, 624–5)’ (Tom Dugget, ‘Celtic Night and Gothic Grandeur: Politics and Antiquarianism in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain’, Romanticism 13. 2 [2007]: 168.
For Neil Saccamano, ‘Shaftesbury’s understanding of moral self-regulation … is premised on a natural economy of affections in which individual happiness is coordinated with “the strictest society and rule of common good”, and “the most unnatural of all affections are those which separate from this community”’ (Neil Saccamano, ‘Inheriting Enlightenment, or Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 40. 3 [2007]: 414.
William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1992), 15–16.
Richard Gravil notes that Wordsworth here constructs Hazlitt as a Burkean: ‘Five years earlier Wordsworth had rebuked Burke’s piety to the dead as “a refinement in cruelty superior to that which in the East yokes the living to the dead” [PrW, 1: 48]’. In doing so, Wordsworth signals that he is ‘of Paine’s party’ (Richard Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2003], p. 100).
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1984), p. 6. 61. Shaftesbury argues that one of the ways taste regulates enthusiasm is by directing it towards the neatly circumscribed domain of the arts, such as ‘Architecture, Painting, Musick’ (C 2. 104). Although still concerned with the totality of affective experience, Shaftesbury here anticipates the future focus of aesthetics on artworks.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, trans. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press 1993), p. 112.
Clifford Siskin notes that ‘the expansion of print in general leads to the formation of a mass market and the emergent behaviour of “culture”, including commodification into “high” and “low” forms’ (Clifford Siskin, ‘More is different: literary change in the mid and late eighteenth century’ in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1610–1780 810, ed. John Richetti [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005], p. 822). From this follows ‘the notion of a “national tradition”, the apotheosis of key genres and the professional and academic enterprise of “criticism”’ (p. 822).
Bourdieu contends that Those ‘inventions’ of Romanticism — the representation of culture as a kind of superior reality, irreducible to the vulgar demands of economics, and the ideology of free, disinterested ‘creation’ founded on the spontaneity of innate inspiration — appear to be just so many reactions to the pressures of an anonymous market (The Field of Cultural Production, p. 114). See Siskin’s similar argument that in the later eighteenth century ‘More of “literature” became “Literature”, a difference that marks the advent of what we now call Romanticism’ (Clifford Siskin, ‘More is different, p. 822). Jon Mee remarks that from 1775 Coleridge ‘is concerned to respect a distinction between poetry and prophecy’ (Jon Mee, ‘Anxieties of Enthusiasm: Coleridge, Prophecy, and Popular Politics in the 1790s’, Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature 60 [1998]: 195). Coleridge fears the democratic possibilities of enthusiastic inspiration: the passion it arouses robs individuals of their autonomy and sense, and thus threatens the social order. The civic humanist Coleridge, therefore, distances himself from ‘the enthusiasm of the crowd’ and aligns himself with the discipline of poetry and poets — ‘the disinterested band of the elect’ (200). According to Mee, Coleridge came to believe that Wordsworth had flouted the distinction between poetry and prophecy, or enthusiasm.
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© 2010 Stuart Allen
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Allen, S. (2010). Shaftesbury, Wordsworth and Affective Critique. In: Wordsworth and the Passions of Critical Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283343_1
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