Amorous Aesthetics: the Concept of Love in British Romantic Poetry and Poetics
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AMOROUS AESTHETICS: THE CONCEPT OF LOVE IN BRITISH ROMANTIC POETRY AND POETICS Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Seth Thomas Reno, M.A. Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2011 Dissertation Committee: David G. Riede, Advisor Amanpal Garcha Marlene Longenecker Clare Simmons Copyright by Seth Thomas Reno 2011 Abstract This dissertation argues that love is the central concept through which to think about and understand British poetry of the Romantic period. Scholars have typically treated love in terms of romantic relationships or adoptions of Platonic eros, but love has not been understood to be as significant as other major Romantic concepts such as nature, imagination, and ideology. This study establishes love as central to Romanticism. The Introduction outlines the various philosophical, scientific, and poetic conceptions of love available in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as well as defines the conception of love at work in Romantic poetry. The rest of the dissertation demonstrates through formalist-historicist readings how this conception of love works in various primary texts of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and Matthew Arnold. The critical discourses with which this dissertation engages include Romantic New Historicisms and New Formalisms, Ecocriticism, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, affect theory, and work on form, aesthetics, ethics, and poetics. ii Dedication Dedicated to Ashley, my love and life iii Acknowledgements I could not have completed this study without the constant support and encouragement of my dissertation committee: David Riede, who taught me how to read poetry as an undergraduate, and who provided me with invaluable feedback over the past four years; Marlene Longenecker, who taught me to love Wordsworth and Romanticism, and whose presence shaped this study in innumerable ways; Clare Simmons, who has advised me since my undergraduate honors thesis on Romantic versions of Prometheus; and Amanpal Garcha, whose incisive criticism helped me to sharpen and rethink my arguments. I would like to thank James Phelan, Chadwick Allen, David Ruderman, Ethan Knapp, Stephen Behrendt, and Amy Shuman, who provided feedback and suggestions on earlier versions of this dissertation. I am indebted to the National Endowment of the Humanities for its generous grant so that I could attend a 2010 Summer Seminar for University and College Teachers, ―The Aesthetics of British Romanticism, Then and Today.‖ I am also indebted to my seminar colleagues, whose ongoing support, conversations, and friendships have influenced my research in ways of which they are not even aware. The Department of English at The Ohio State University provided me with a dissertation fellowship during Spring Quarter 2011 which allowed me to complete this study. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Ashley, for tolerating long nights in the office, a collection of books amounting to a small library in our living room, several meltdowns, and several more existential crises. Ashley, it‘s finally done! iv Vita 2001……………………………………………Washington Senior High 2005……………………………………………B.A. English, The Ohio State University 2007……………………………………………M.A. English, The Ohio State University 2009……………………………………………Graduate Research Small Grant, College of Humanities, The Ohio State University 2010……………………………………………Grant for Summer Seminar, National Endowment for the Humanities 2011……………………………………………Dissertation Fellowship, Department of of English, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: English Specializations: Nineteenth-Century British Literature, British Romanticism, Poetry and Poetics, Critical Theory, Ecocriticism v Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………….ii Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………iii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………...iv Vita………………………………………………………………………………………....v INTRODUCTION: AMOROUS AESTHETICS…………………………………………1 1. Historicizing Romantic Love and Sexuality………………………………………5 2. Poetry, Theory, Utopia…………………………………………………………13 3. The Chapters…………………………………………………………………...28 PART ONE: WORDSWORTHIAN LOVE Introduction………………………………………………………………………32 Chapter One: ―A sympathetic twilight‖: Love and the Sentimental Turn in the Early Poems………………………………………………………...42 1. An Evening Walk (1788-9, 1793)………………………………...42 2. Salisbury Plain (1793-4)…………………………………………..55 Chapter Two: ―The sentiment of being‖: The Ruined Cottage and the Development of Wordsworthian Love…………………………………………………...64 1. Love in The Ruined Cottage (1797-9)……………………………...69 2. The Pedlar (1798-1804)…………………………………………..82 vi Chapter Three: ―Something far more deeply interfused‖: Love in and after Lyrical Ballads……………………………………………………………...88 1. ―Tintern Abbey‖ (1798)………………………………………...90 2. ―Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind‖: Love in The Prelude (1805)………………………………………...105 PART TWO: SHELLEYAN LOVE Introduction……………………………………………………………………..117 Chapter Four: ―Strange Symphony‖: Love and Desire in Queen Mab and ―Alastor‖………………………………………………………….....129 1. Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem (1813)…………………………132 2. ―Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude‖ (1816)……………………152 Chapter Five: ―Love‘s rare Universe‖ in the Later Works: Prometheus Unbound and Epipsychidion………………………………………………………….173 1. Shelley and England in 1819…………………………………...178 2. Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts (1820)………..198 3. Epipsychidion (1821)…………………………………………….218 CONCLUSION: HEMANS AND THE VICTORIANS………………………………..229 1. The Other Bright Star: Felicia Hemans………………………………………...231 2. Romantic Love and the Victorians…………………………………………….258 References……………………………………………………………………………….277 vii He who aspires to love rightly…would turn towards the wide ocean of intellectual beauty. – Plato, The Symposium, translated by Percy Shelley We have all of us one human heart. – William Wordsworth, ―The Old Cumberland Beggar‖ Love is a desire of the whole being to be united to some thing, or some being, felt necessary to its completeness. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks Love is…the sole law which should govern the moral world. – Percy Shelley, Preface to Laon and Cyntha Love makes all things equal. – Percy Shelley, Epipsychidion viii INTRODUCTION: AMOROUS AESTHETICS When I tell my friends, family, and colleagues that my dissertation is about ―Love in Romanticism,‖ they often smirk, display a concerned or confused look, and even occasionally chuckle. When I ask the more honest people why, they respond that ―love‖ is such a vague word that it can mean almost anything. Even though some of us have been lucky enough to experience the feeling, even though we know and feel its importance, its meaning is highly multivalent, often ambiguous, and historically-dependent. While Deconstructionists might say this is true of all words, even the average person on the street knows that love is particularly tricky. So, why would I write a dissertation about a term I can‘t define concretely in the first place? My response is always the same: that it is those very qualities of love as a concept— its ability to oscillate between and fuse together multiple meanings—that make it is such an important term for the Romantics. Amorous Aesthetics argues that love is the central concept through which to think about and understand poetry and poetics of the Romantic period. At its core, love refers to affectionate relationships between people, but Romantic poets often move from affection to a cosmic scope: love of humanity, love of nature, love of the universe. Love then takes on abstract, philosophical, and immaterial qualities. Yet poets still refer to and think of their feelings of transcendence and their thoughts of unity and interconnectedness as ―love.‖ Love is distinct from the concepts of soul, intuition, and 1 imagination precisely because the poets retain its social and relational aspects. Romantic poets ground love of nature and of the universe in sociality and in the political, social, and moral qualities ideally inherent to human relationships. This tension between an individual feeling and a universalizing aesthetics runs through much of Romantic poetry. Whether it is William Wordsworth‘s claim in The Prelude for the preeminence of ―intellectual love,‖ Percy Shelley‘s revelation in A Defence of Poetry that love is the ―great secret of morals‖ (517), or Felicia Hemans‘s consistent emphasis on the affections, love as both a feeling and a concept proves to be a defining feature of Romantic poetry and of Romanticism itself. As such, I argue that love is more important than imagination, nature, and ideology in the Romantic ethos. The five quotations that serve as epigraphs for this study demonstrate the depth, breadth, and complexity of love in Romantic poetry. Shelley (translating Plato) links love to the pursuit of the beautiful, the just, and the good. Wordsworth understands love as a social force that binds humans together through affection, compassion, and sympathy. Coleridge, fusing eros and agape, defines love as a desire for unity and wholeness. Shelley identifies love as the moral and political basis for equality, democracy, and ―a brighter morn‖ (Queen Mab V 251). Each of these poets finds in the concept of love a source of and inspiration for their poetry, politics, and aesthetics; in effect, love as a way of reimagining human relationships and reshaping the world in which we live. Scholars typically treat Romantic love in terms