The Politics of Romantic Poetry in Search of the Pure Commonwealth
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Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories General Editors: Marilyn Gaull, Professor of English, Temple University/New York University; Stephen Prickett, Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Glasgow This series aims to offer a fresh assessment of Romanticism by looking at it from a wide variety of perspectives. Both comparative and interdisciplinary, it will bring together cognate themes from architecture, art history, landscape garden- ing, linguistics, literature, philosophy, politics, science, social and political his- tory and theology to deal with original, contentious or as yet unexplored aspects of Romanticism as a Europe-wide phenomenon. Titles include: Toby R. Benis ROMANTICISM ON THE ROAD The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth’s Homeless Richard Cronin (editor) 1798: THE YEAR OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS Péter Dávidházi THE ROMANTIC CULT OF SHAKESPEARE Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective Charles Donelan ROMANTICISM AND MALE FANTASY IN BYRON’S DON JUAN A Marketable Vice Tim Fulford ROMANTICISM AND MASCULINITY Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt David Jasper THE SACRED AND SECULAR CANON IN ROMANTICISM Preserving the Sacred Truths Malcolm Kelsall JEFFERSON AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM Folk, Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation Mark S. Lussier ROMANTIC DYNAMICS The Poetics of Physicality Andrew McCann CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE 1790s Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere Ashton Nichols THE REVOLUTIONARY ‘I’ Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation Jeffrey C. Robinson RECEPTION AND POETICS IN KEATS ‘My Ended Poet’ Anya Taylor BACCHUS IN ROMANTIC ENGLAND Writers and Drink, 1780–1830 Michael Wiley ROMANTIC GEOGRAPHY Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces Eric Wilson EMERSON’S SUBLIME SCIENCE John Wyatt WORDSWORTH’S POEMS OF TRAVEL, 1819–42 ‘Such Sweet Wayfaring’ Romanticism in Perspective Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71490–3 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England The Politics of Romantic Poetry In Search of the Pure Commonwealth Richard Cronin Reader in English Literature University of Glasgow First published in Great Britain 2000 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-41423-9 ISBN 978-0-230-28705-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230287051 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-1-349-41423-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cronin, Richard. The politics of romantic poetry : in search of the pure commonwealth / Richard Cronin. p. cm. — (Romanticism in perspective) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-1-349-41423-9 (cloth) 1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History—18th century. 4. English poetry—18th century—History and criticism. 5. Political poetry, English—History and criticism. 6. France– –History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Influence. 7. Romanticism—Great Britain. 8. State, The, in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR585.H5C76 1999 821'.709358—dc21 99–36364 CIP © Richard Cronin 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000 978-0-333-76106-9 No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10987654321 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 To Dorothy and John This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 Part One: The Revolutionary Years 19 Introduction – Religious Musings 21 1 Erasmus Darwin: from the Bastille to Birmingham 29 2 William Blake and Revolutionary Prophecy 48 3 The English Jacobins 61 Part Two: The War against Napoleon 83 Introduction – The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo 85 4 Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy 92 5 Wordsworth at War 110 6 Mapping Childe Harold I and II 128 Part Three: England in 1819 145 Introduction – Peter Bell the Third 147 7 Asleep in Italy: Byron and Shelley in 1819 156 8 Leigh Hunt, Keats and the Politics of Cockney Poetry 181 Notes 200 Index 221 vii Acknowledgements Versions of parts of this book have appeared as articles in The Byron Journal, ELH, Essays and Studies, The Keats-Shelley Review, Review of English Studies, and SEL, and I am grateful to the editors of these journals for permission to reuse the material. I am grateful to the many Romantic scholars with whom I have discussed this material over the years, espe- cially to Jack Donovan, Marilyn Gaull, Michael O’Neill, Clifford Siskin and Timothy Webb. I have the great good fortune to be a member of a Department in which it is both a pleasure and an education to work. Amongst my colleagues I am, as always, particularly indebted to Dorothy McMillan and to Robert Cummings. I am also fortunate in having as my colleagues so many who share my interest in Romanticism. I have learnt much from all of them, and I would like to record here not only my debt to but my admiration for Drummond Bone, David Jasper, Alice Jenkins, Seamus Perry, Stephen Prickett, Nicola Trott and Duncan Wu. I have also learnt much from those who have been stu- dents at Glasgow both as undergraduates and postgraduates. Amongst many I would mention Alison Chapman, Thomas Docherty, Chankil Park, Jane Stabler and Ya-Feng Wu. Finally, I would like to record my debt to three colleagues who, by making the administrative burdens placed on me in recent years so much easier to bear, have greatly assisted me in completing this book; Pat Devlin, Anna MacMillan and Ingrid Swanson. viii Introduction This is a book on the politics of English Romantic poetry. It is a well established field. Carl Woodring’s Politics in English Romantic Poetry gave in 1970 a commanding survey of the topic that was already able to draw on a large number of more specialized studies; Todd on Wordsworth’s politics, K. N. Cameron on Shelley’s, Erdman’s work on Blake and Byron.1 There has been much more since: an extraordinary outpouring of books on Wordsworth;2 Kelvin Everest and Nigel Leask on Coleridge; Malcolm Kelsall and Jerome Christensen on Byron; Dawson, and Scrivener on Shelley,3 and a more recent interest in Keats’s politics, initiated by Jerome McGann and developed by critics such as Daniel Watkins, Marjorie Levinson, and Nicholas Roe.4 There is little evidence that interest in this kind of approach to the literature of the period is slackening. In 1998 there were important contributions to the field by James Chandler, Kenneth Johnston and Clifford Siskin.5 It has all been part of a more general critical movement, of course, most easily explained as a reaction against the ‘new criticism’ of the 1950s and 60s, which has been thought to prize poetry precisely inso- far as it escapes the partiality of merely political commitment by occu- pying an aesthetic realm in which the ideological quarrels that beset less elevated kingdoms no longer obtain. In the narrower field of Romantic studies the principal target of attack has been not Cleanth Brooks but M. H. Abrams, who is widely represented as the last of a long critical tradition that described the great Romantics as winning their poetic maturity by surrendering the political commitments that marked their youth in favour of a more dignified commitment to the life of the imagination. But this, one might think, is a point that has been made often enough. It might seem more timely to attempt a reha- bilitation of Brooks and Abrams of the kind so elegantly undertaken by 1 2 Introduction Susan Wolfson in her recent Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism than to repeat objections to their work that have by now been so well aired. Anyone offering yet another book on the poli- tics of Romantic poetry might reasonably be asked to present a fairly convincing excuse. It is a field, then, that is in some danger of being overworked, but it remains a divided field. Malcolm Kelsall, to take a single example, con- tinues Woodring’s project. The task he sets himself is to elucidate Byron’s poems by mapping the political context within which they were produced and that they addressed. Kelsall assumes distinctions between text and context, between literary fiction and historical fact, between poetic power and critical knowledge. The century and a half that separates him from Byron allows him to see clearly the differences between the world as Byron described it and the world as it was, and allows him to survey the political conflicts of Byron’s day and to place Byron within them with a disinterested detachment that is akin to objectivity.