From Passion to Affection: The Art of the Philosophical in Eighteenth-CenturyPoetics

Louise Joy

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 37, Number 1, April 2013, pp. 72-87(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/phl.2013.0003

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Philosophy and Literature, 2013, 37: 72–87. © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Louise Joy

From Passion To aFFecTion: THe arT oF THe PHiLosoPHicaL in eigHTeenTH-cenTUry PoeTics

Abstract. in much eighteenth-century British literary criticism, passion distinguishes poetry from philosophy, whose ideas are too abstract to evoke emotion. at the end of the century, however, William Wordsworth radically refuses this distinction between poetry and philosophy, rejecting the centrality of passion for poetry. instead, developing ideas latent in the work of James Beattie, he places affection at the heart of his poetic theory. This essay uncovers “the affections” as a major site of meaning for Wordsworth: calm, rationalized emotions, they yoke together the philosophical and the poetical, enabling poetry not merely to stimulate emotion but moreover to think through it.

a s Thomas Dixon has persuasively shown, prior to the invention in the nineteenth century of the secular and all-encompassing

category of “the emotions,” affective vocabulary tended to be more variegated. eighteenth-century discussions of what today we would call emotions often referred to the “passions and affections of the mind,” grouping together violent, unruly passions with their calmer, less spontaneous cousins, the affections—a more muted form of emotion refracted through the lens of reflection and consequently less capable of wreaking havoc.1 Like reason, affections are deliberately chosen, and therefore resemble thoughts; but like passions, they take intentional objects, and are therefore conceived as emotions. eighteenth-century moral philosophers who grapple with the perennial question of how to reconcile the warring factions of thought and emotion (including anthony ashley cooper, the third earl of shaftesbury; Francis Hutcheson;

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and isaac Watts) frequently identify, even recommend, the affections as the optimal compromise—as forms of emotions consistent, rather than in tension, with moral rectitude.2 as the theologian and philosopher Thomas cogan explains: “The word passion is appropriated by the evil propensities which are uniformly operative. Thus we do not say the affection of pride, or of avarice, but the passion. The term affection on the other hand is appropriated by the virtuous propensities; as the social, friendly, parental, filial affections.”3

given the perceived desirability of calm, enduring affections over wayward, fleeting passions in eighteenth-century moral philosophical treatises, it is curious to observe that in literary theoretical treatises of the same period, we find that the virtues of passion are loudly extolled, but that there is a notable indifference to, even silence about, affection. indeed, the term barely features at all in writing about literature of the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. However, in the last few decades of the century, initially in the work of the poet and moral philosopher James Beattie, and then more significantly in the work of William Wordsworth, the category of the affections begins to surface as a major site of meaning. This essay seeks to chart the shift that occurs in eighteenth-century literary criticism away from an aggressive valorization of passion toward a quieter recognition of the potential advantages of affection. it explores what is at stake in this shift, proposing that analy-sis of the category of the affections provides us with a more nuanced understanding of how Wordsworth’s early poetics reconceive poetry by renegotiating the boundaries between literature and philosophy.

For John Dennis, the eighteenth-century dramatist and essayist, and author of two of the period’s most seminal works of literary theory, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), passion is such an integral element of poetry that a poem’s perceived capacity to manifest or produce it is a key deter-miner of its aesthetic merit. “great passion, only is the adequate language of the greater poetry,” he writes in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, “so the greater poetry, is only the adequate language of religion; and that therefore the greatest passion, is the language of [divine] poetry; because that sort of poetry is the worthiest language of religion.”4 The forceful effect of the metaphorical “is” in this sequence conveys the sense that for Dennis, passion is not merely contiguous with, or similar to, but is even coterminous with, poetic language. This alignment of the poetic with the passionate is reinforced by Dennis’s use of the term “prosaick” to imply that a literary work lacks emotional conviction, and not that

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its form is unversified. “Poetry is poetry,” he writes in The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, “because it is more passionate and sensual than prose. Passion . . . is the characteristical mark of poetry, and, consequently, must be every where: for where-ever a discourse is not pathetick, there it is prosaick.”5 in Dennis’s work, then, passion is the ingredient that elevates imaginative writing from the pedestrian to the exceptional. “The nature of poetry consists in passion,” he asserts, “and that of the greater poetry in great passion” (GC, n.p.).6

in taking passion to be that which qualifies a text as literary, Dennis reiterates a theory so commonplace in eighteenth-century writing on the fine arts that it is practically a cliché. Passion is the element that defines poetry as such: the passionate is poetic, and therefore the poetic must be passionate.7 This grandiose and cryptically totalizing equation is elucidated by Dennis’s celebrated statement in The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry that the “chief thing in poetry, is passion: but here the reader is desir’d to observe, that by poetry, we mean poetry in general, and the body of poetry; for as for the form or soul of particular poems, that is allow’d by all to be a fable. But passion is the chief thing in the body of poetry; as spirit is in the human body. For without spirit the body languishes, and the soul is impotent: now every thing that pleases, and consequently, moves, in the poetical diction, is passion, whether it be ordinary or enthusiastic” (AR, pp. 26–27). Through the use of the word “thing,” repeated three times in the passage, Dennis reifies “passion,” investing the abstract noun with the tangibility and perceptibility of a material substance. He effectively fashions this ephemeral quality into something that can be readily and, it is implied, universally, identified. in this way he transfigures passion into a self-contained (and hence detachable) constituent that can be ranked alongside the other component parts of poetry to enable us to ascertain the relative importance of each.

earlier in the same work Dennis provides an account of the interrela-tion between passion and poetry that helps to explain his elision of the terms in the passage above by suggesting that the device employed in his use of “is” is not in fact metaphor but metonymy—that the relationship Dennis envisages between passion and poetry is one of contiguity, not similarity: the “proper means for poetry, to attain both its subordinate and final end, is by exciting passion. First, the subordinate end of poetry, which is to please, is attained by exciting passion. . . . secondly, poetry attains its final end, which is reforming the minds of men, by the exciting of passion” (GC, pp. 10–11). strictly speaking, then, in Dennis’s scheme

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passion is not a constituent but a consequence of poetic language. The verb “excit[e]” indicates that the passion envisaged resides (already) in the reader and not in the text. Passion is implicated in poetry to the extent that the poem is the stimulus that prompts the arousal of the reader’s emotions. it does this not as an end in itself but in order to secure its two-tier aristotelian objective: instruction through enjoyment.

Dennis’s association between passion and poetry is thus not an endorsement of the disorderliness of passion per se. on the contrary, his account is quick to insert passion into a model of orderliness and efficiency. He calls attention to the moral and social legitimacy of the stimulation of emotion through poetry by labeling it “proper,” and carefully underlines its utility by explaining the process via enumerated points, a gesture that corroborates his suggestion that the value of poetic passion is quantifiable. He thus represents passion as a functional product to be manufactured by poets in order to secure the religious and moral consequence of the poem and hence to confirm its aesthetic appeal.

This sense of passion as a commodity is reinforced by the division Dennis posits between “ordinary” (elsewhere termed “vulgar”) and “enthusiastick” passion. “The vulgar is preferable,” he writes in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, “because all men are capable of being moved by the vulgar, and a poet writes to all: but the enthusiastick are more subtle, and thousands have no feeling and no notion of them” (p. 18).8 Favoring the pragmatic scenario to the ideal, he calculates that a greater number of readers will benefit from the edifying effects of poetry if poetry engenders passion that is universally accessible (“vulgar”) rather than obscure and elitist (“enthusiastick”). The type of passion Dennis recommends for poetry is divested of the hallmark connotations of exclusivity, rarity, individuality, and authenticity it acquires a century later in Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1800), which embraces a model of emotion that more closely resembles Dennis’s notion of “enthusiastick” passion. With mercantile expediency, Dennis custom-izes for poetry a form of emotion that is easy to produce and easy to consume—easy to replicate on the poetic production line.

yet at the same time, the simile Dennis employs to explain the role passion plays in poetic writing compares poetry to “the human body” and passion to its “spirit.” again, through this analogy, Dennis endows an abstract notion, the idea of “poetry” (he is insistent that he has in mind here poetry as a species and not the poem as an instance9) with corporeal form. significantly, this second analogy makes poetry animate. in Dennis’s hands, poetry becomes, not merely a material entity, but

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one that “moves,” the importance of which can be gauged from the fact that the verb marks the rhetorical climax of his definition of poetry.10 Passion, then, is the instrument by which poetry achieves its objectives of pleasure and edification; it breathes life into the “impotent” and “languishing” (dead) corporeal shell of “poetical diction,” and puts poetry in touch with the divine. By casting passion as the “spirit” that galvanizes the poetic corpse, Dennis projects onto poetry the inexpli-cability of, and wonderment evoked by, the fact of sentient life. While it is packaged as a banal and functional commodity, it is figured as the very animus of poetry.

as such, for Dennis, the presence of passion distinguishes the literary from the nonliterary not merely in terms of the quality of the writing (the lofty as opposed to the mundane) but also in terms of the species to which the writing belongs. The kind of writing which for Dennis most closely resembles poetry is philosophy, since poetry and philoso-phy share a common aim: to “instruct and reform” the morals of the reader. But poetry’s capacity to kindle the reader’s emotions marks the key difference between the two forms of writing, and indeed indicates poetry’s advantage over philosophy: poetry “instructs and reforms more powerfully than philosophy can do, because it moves more powerfully [while] philosophy can instruct but hardly, because it moves but gen-tly” (GC, p. 11). He elaborates: “For the violent passions not finding their account in those faint emotions, begin to rebel and fly to their old objects, whereas poetry . . . makes the very violence of the passions contribute to our reformation. . . . Whereas philosophy pretends to correct human passions by human reason, that is, things that are strong and ungovernable, by something that is feeble and weak, poetry by the force of the passions, instructs and reforms the reason; which is the design of the true religion” (pp. 12–13).

Philosophical writing can “instruct and reform” the reader’s emotions by issuing guidance on how to police them. Poetry, however, is concerned not with regulating emotions, but with employing them. Thus while poetry arouses the passions with “violence,” philosophy barely arouses them at all. again, Dennis’s explanation hinges on the metaphor of animation (“moves”). Through the close conjunction of terms revolving around the twin notions of movement and power, he suggests a causal relationship between the two: the kinetic energy of passion intensifies the authority of poetry over the reader, and consequently strengthens its sway over the reader’s moral education. assuming that this is the primary objective of all writing, Dennis deduces that the type that most

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effectively achieves this end must be the most favorable. This premise enables him to sever the customary connections, seen, for example, in the works of his contemporary, anthony ashley cooper, the third earl of shaftesbury, between gentleness of emotion and moral virtue on the one hand, and violence and moral failing on the other.11 Divorcing the forcefulness of “violence” from its morally reprehensible connotations of uncontrollability and devastation, he transmogrifies the term into an emblem for intensity, vibrancy, efficiency, strength, and authenticity. He thus corrals “violence” onto the side of moral virtue, staking a claim for its vital role as that which distinguishes superior poetry from its inferior cousin, philosophy.

By way of contrast, Dennis aligns “gentle[ness]” with tediousness (“driest”), insipidness (“faint”), ineptness (“but hardly”), and, to cap it all, complacency and self-delusion: “philosophy pretends to correct human passions by human reason.” Bracketing all “the moral philoso-phers” together, the definite article conveying his contempt for them, he insists that “feeble” reason can never overpower “strong” passion. echoing the popular belief that passions are autonomous and hence uncontrollable,12 he anthropomorphizes them, casting them as subjects of the verbs “finding,” “rebel,” and “fly.” But his attitude toward their perceived willfulness resolutely departs from the moral philosophical convention, which views this perceived self-determination as ominous.

By claiming that, when left to their own devices, the passions inevitably propel themselves toward “their old objects,” he insists that this process is inexorable—not because passions are wild and wayward but because they intuitively apprehend their rightful destinations. Through his use of the possessive “their” (which stresses the aptness of the perceived ties between passions and their objects) and the adjective “old” (which stresses their entrenchment), he legitimates the connection. in this way he converts passion’s inevitability into a symptom not of unruliness but of purposiveness. The quality that prompts wariness toward the passions in moral philosophy—their unstoppable violence—is thus, for Dennis, the source of their value in poetry. Patently, a theory of poetry founded on the conviction that violence of movement is the medium’s most prized weapon can have little use for the conceptual possibilities of a category of emotions characterized by their gentleness and orderliness (the viability of which Dennis at any rate flatly denies).

Later in the period, Joseph Priestley, author of a number of widely read critical, theological, and scientific works, identifies another factor as significant in determining how poetry and philosophy differently

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“affec[t] the passions, judgment, and imagination.” in lecture 12 of A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1762) he writes that, since “general terms do not, without an effort of the imagination, suggest those determinate ideas which alone have the power of exciting the passions . . . it is proper that the writer, who would thoroughly affect and interest his reader, should avoi[d] general and abstract terms. . . . one reason why philosophers seldom succeed in poetry, may be, that abstract ideas are too familiar to their minds. Philosophers are perpetually employed in reducing particular to general propositions, a turn of thinking very unfavourable to poetry.”13

Like Dennis, Priestley takes the moving (“exciting”) of passion to be the central concern of poetry. alert to the point expressed in alexander gerard’s stipulation that “a passion in strict propriety means only such an emotion as is produced by some one particular cause, and directed to some one determinate object,”14 Priestley insists that abstract ideas have no place in poetry. abstract ideas, he argues, interfere with the immediacy of the production of passion. it is not that indeterminate ideas cannot generate passion in the reader, but that generalized terms require the intervention of an intermediary stage—“an effort of the imagination”—to fix the ideas, if emotion is to be raised. This involves work on the part of the reader, which detracts from the pleasure of reading poetry and consequently diminishes its capacity to instruct. The strength of Priestley’s aversion toward abstractions in poetry can be detected in his counterintuitive selection of the word “reduc[e]” to describe this reaching out to abstractions, an attitude that is reinforced by the reproach contained in the judgment “too familiar.” Later in the same lecture, he expresses his aversion more overtly when he claims that “an attention to rules tends to deaden and dissipate the fire of imagina-tion” (CL, p. 88). With alliterative forcefulness, which accentuates the dreadfulness of the vision he raises, he warns: abstractions kill poetry.

Priestley’s repudiation of rules (which he takes to be necessary by-products of “abstract terms”) is not a rejection of control over poetry. in fact, it is a call precisely for tighter control over the medium.15 The order he seeks to establish, however, is one that assimilates passion’s immediacy. The unruliness of the passions is a known quantity, he argues, that can be accommodated within the poetic order. His rejection of “rules” in poetry is thus a statement of the rule that passion’s spontaneity must be protected by the elimination of indeterminate ideas from poetry. in contrast, determinate ideas are integral to the medium, he implies, both to fulfill demands of structural cohesion and to satisfy conventions

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of taste (as the dual senses of ownership and decency couched in the word “proper” suggest).

To impose the onus of active participation on the reader by intro-ducing abstract ideas into poetry is a breach of the standards not just expected, but required, of poetic writing. Passions, which are identified by way of their perceived particularity, are therefore entirely consistent with Priestley’s view of poetic protocol. Because they pertain to determi-nate objects, they raise ideas with immediacy, which spares the efforts of the reader. affections, on the other hand, are mediated by the process of reflection, and therefore operate at a remove from their original objects (and are often so abstracted that they appear not to pertain to particular objects at all). if poetic ideas must be immediate—indeed, if general ideas that involve labor on the part of the reader are actively prohibited—then affections must stay in the realm of the philosophic. The exertions they require destroy poetry.

Priestley’s conviction that abstractions should be kept out of the bounds of poetry is not shared by critics across the board during the period. indeed, the revival of the popularity of aristotelian poetics dur-ing the eighteenth century prompts an interest among certain critics in the possibility precisely for poetry to be more philosophical.16 Writing in scotland in 1778, Beattie contends:

The more poetry improves nature, by copying after general ideas collected from extensive observation, the more it partakes (according to aristotle) of the nature of philosophy; the greater stretch of fancy and of observa-tion it requires in the artist, and the better chance it has to be universally agreeable. . . . [The] poet or painter, who means to adapt himself to the general taste, should copy after general ideas collected from extensive observation of nature. For the most part, the peculiarities of individuals are agreeable only to individuals. . . . yet mere portraits are useful and agree-able: and poetry, even when it falls short of this philosophical perfection, may have great merit as an instrument of both instruction and pleasure.17

The hierarchy Beattie presents is an inversion of that propounded by Priestley. For Beattie, the more closely poetry approximates philosophy, the more effectively it will attain its ultimate goals, which Beattie iden-tifies, as do Dennis and Priestley, as “instruction and pleasure.” What Beattie chiefly has in mind here is that the scope of poetry should be as “extensive” and “universally” relevant as possible; that it should veer away from particularities, which are (so Beattie implies) merely exceptions to the “general” rules, and thus of limited interest to the reader. as the

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repeated use of the verb “copy” accentuates, Beattie believes that poetry exists—or at least should exist—in an essentially mimetic relationship with philosophy. He thus deduces that the greatest poet is the one who most closely imitates the methods and interests of the philosopher. in this way the words “philosophical” and “perfection” are conjoined to encapsulate Beattie’s notion of the poetic ideal as that which addresses the general and speaks to those truths held to be universal.18

Unusual for literary criticism of the period, Beattie’s essays counte-nance the possibility that the category of the affections might play a role in discussions about poetry. although the regularity with which Beattie refers to affection does not challenge the dominance of passion in lit-erary theory of the period, Beattie’s writing is atypical in its use of the term at all. While he perpetuates the conventional affiliation between poetry and passion in his claim that “all true poetry” is “addressed to the heart, and intended to give pleasure by raising or soothing the passions” (p. 47), the term “affection” surfaces when he alludes more specifically to the moral benefits to be derived from the cultivation of emotions through poetry. For example, he writes: “if in any part the author has endeavoured to interest our kind affections in opposition to conscience, his poetry will there be found to be equally unpleasing and uninstructive” (p. 24).

replicating the practice prevalent in eighteenth-century moral philosophical writing on the emotions, Beattie allies the category of the affections with the adjective “kind,” thus implying the naturalness (and by extension, the moral virtue) of this type of emotion, in contrast with the more questionable moral status of the passions. Furthermore, the verb associated with the affections is not “move,” “raise,” or “excite”—the verbs recurrently used in connection with the passions—but “interest.” This indicates that the types of emotion that Beattie conceives as philo-sophical involve the participation of cognitive faculties (“reflection”). By proposing that poetry seeks to “interest” the “affections,” and not merely to “move” the “passions,” as Dennis so forcefully argues, Beattie gestures toward an altered model of the literary. such a model seeks to fulfill the objectives of instruction and reform by engaging with, rather than veering away from, the thoughts prompted by philosophical abstractions.

it is important not to overstate the use that Beattie makes of the category of the affections; he neither deploys the term “affection” with consistency nor does he appear to have in mind a stable field of mean-ing. nevertheless, his writing posits a crucial, albeit nascent, connection between an investment in the potential of poetry to deal in the kinds of

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generalized, abstracted, indeterminate ideas more routinely associated in the eighteenth century with philosophical writing, and receptiveness to the potential offered by the category of the affections as an alterna-tive mode of emotions that might legitimately come into play in or through literature. it is this potential that William Wordsworth, writing just two decades after Beattie, identifies and seeks to harness through his own attempts to theorize the interrelationships between poetry and emotion. While Beattie tangentially, seemingly inadvertently, lights upon the possibilities of the category of the affections for poetry, Wordsworth decisively and radically takes up and places this category of meaning at the heart of his poetic theory. Through his introduction of the cat-egory of affections into poetic writing, he forges a new way for poetry to negotiate relationships between the real and the ideal, the particular and the general, and the poetical and the philosophical.

in Wordsworth’s work the category of the affections comes to the fore in the body of writing that exhibits what Frances Ferguson calls his “epitaphic” mode19—which is to say, the three “essays upon epitaphs” (1809–10), as well as the numerous poems that implicitly function as epitaphs. The epitaph, as Wordsworth explains, is a form of writing characterized by the need to achieve balance: to represent “the joint offspring of the worth of the dead and the affections of the living.”20 in “essays upon epitaphs,” the terms “passion” and “emotion,” which recur with frequency elsewhere in Wordsworth’s work, are pushed to the margins, and the category of the affections takes center stage. He writes:

it is to be remembered, that to raise a monument is a sober and a reflective act; that the inscription which it bears is intended to be permanent, and for universal perusal; and that, for this reason, the thoughts and feelings expressed should be permanent also—liberated from that weakness and anguish of sorrow which is in nature transitory, and which with instinc-tive decency returns from notice. The passions should be subdued, the emotions controlled; strong, indeed, but nothing ungovernable or wholly involuntary. . . . This shadowy interposition . . . harmoniously unites the two worlds of the living and the dead by their appropriate affections. (p. 60)

out of respect for the occasion that gives rise to this form of writing, it is necessary, Wordsworth declares, that the “appropriate” category of emotions be engaged. The transience, disorderliness, and violence of the “passions” render them incompatible with the permanence toward which the epitaph aspires. it is therefore necessary that such emotions be “subdued” in favor of more solemn and reverential “affections.”

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Flouting the eighteenth-century convention that the types of emotions that poetic language is best fit to deliver are particular, determinate passions, Wordsworth provocatively insists that poetry can—and indeed must—strive to communicate universal, indeterminate affections. He raises the possibility that in so doing, poetic language can achieve permanence. His implementation of the category of the affections in poetry thus enables him to ensure not merely his own immortality but also the immortality of poetry itself: the enduring relevance of poetic emotions. critics have often noted that Wordsworth aspires for every written articulation of language to meet the standards of the epitaph; that, like aristotle, he seeks for poetry to represent “truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative.”21 But it has never before been fully recognized that it is through his entrenchment of the category of the affections in his poetic repertoire that he implements this aspiration; that he reconfigures poetic language so that it pushes beyond the mere expression of particular, mortal passions. Believing (in stark contrast to Priestley) that “poetry is the most philosophic of all writing,” he attempts to use the category of the affections to speak to “general” “truth.” James averill has described Wordsworth as a “would-be philosophical poet.”22 But Wordsworth does not so much strive for poetry to be philosophical as import the philosophical into poetry, and explore how philosophical structures might reorder poetry; or, as simon Jarvis puts it, he makes verse “a kind of cognition, with its own resistances and difficulties.”23

Wordsworth thus carves out a prominent space for the category of the affections at the very heart of his poetic project. as he announces in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”:

it appears to me that the most calamitous effect, which has followed the measures which have lately been pursued in this country, is a rapid decay of the domestic affections among the lower orders of society. . . . in the two poems, “The Brothers” and “michael,” i have attempted to draw a picture of the domestic affections as i know they exist amongst a class of men who are now almost confined to the north of england. . . . The domestic affections will always be strong amongst men who live in a country not crowded with population, if these men are placed above poverty. But if they are proprietors of small estates, which have descended to them from their ancestors, the power which these affections will acquire amongst such men is inconceivable by those who have only had an opportunity of observing hired labourers, farmers, and the manufacturing poor. Their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written, which makes

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them objects of memory in a thousand instances when they would oth-erwise be forgotten. it is a fountain fitted to the nature of social man from which supplies of affection, as pure as his heart was intended for, are daily drawn. This class of men is rapidly disappearing.24

This passage can be read as Wordsworth’s manifesto of his attempt to instantiate the category of the affections in poetry. His rationale for this project (at least, as he presents it here) is his perception that the affec-tions are in decline: that the emblem of permanence that represents all that is noble about human existence is currently in decay. His outrage at this perceived dissolution is registered in his uncharacteristic use of hyperbole (“calamitous,” “rapid,” “inconceivable”): it is a violation of the natural order that the affections, which epitomize endurance, should cease to endure.25 angrily, he attributes this travesty to indus-trialization, which he argues disrupts man’s relationship with the land. His aggressive introduction of contemporary references (“railways,” “soup-kitchens”) into the realm of poetic theory reenacts the jarring dissonance that industrial change brings about, highlighting the rupture he perceives it to create. By insisting on the contemporariness of the affections, he makes the importation of this philosophical category into poetry entirely consonant with his aim to represent the real emotions of ordinary people.26

emphasizing that the affections are externally viable, Wordsworth refers to their delineation in poetry as a “picture” that the poet “draw[s].” This characterization highlights the role played by the faculty of sight in their transmission. it also casts the poet-figure in the role of romantic dreamer: the poet makes accessible his private field of vision for the delectation of others. His reliance on visual imagery to convey this pro-cess suggests that the affections require a witness, someone to observe them and testify to their existence.

To an extent, this gesture is defensive. He asserts the possibility of a particular relationship between poetry and emotion that he knows will be received with skepticism. But by stressing the veracity of his case (“as i know they exist”) and by figuring himself as an impartial bystander—an outsider whose authority rests on his detachment from the scene he observes—he underscores the objective value of his project. His case is credible precisely because his perspective is not tainted by the affections he memorializes. indeed, by demarcating so clearly the parameters of the mode of life he has in mind, a style of existence now “confined to the north of england,” he stresses the unlikelihood that he could have

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experienced firsthand the idealized emotions he portrays. His use of precise geographical detail bolsters his case for the exclusivity of the model, an exclusivity accentuated by the word “confined,” which attests to the impenetrability of this community for those outside it. in this way, Wordsworth underlines the fact that affections are experienced by other people. They are a species of emotion so remote and so rare that for most of us they can be accessed only vicariously, through their representation in poetry.

The source of affections, then, is the land. While people come and go, the land is permanent, handed down through the generations. it is the land, and not its dwellers, that sources the timelessness that Wordsworth’s poetry celebrates. The endurance of the land generates “supplies” of enduring affections. Those who remain in close proximity to the land live in the permanent presence of permanence. The legacy of affections is therefore tied to the legacy of the patrimonial estate. This means that not only can the land be used as a figure to represent the immortality of the affections but the affections can be used as a figure to represent the immortality of the land. By tying the affections to the land, Wordsworth discovers a means of writing the affections into poetic language:

. . . i sate down, and there,in memory of affections old and true,i chiselled out in those rude charactersJoanna’s name upon the living stone.27

reading the land enables us to read the affections. Writing (on) it enables us to write (on) them.

as his letter to Fox emphasizes, Wordsworth carves out a space for the category of the affections in poetic language at precisely the point in time when he perceives them to be at risk. His act of conservation is therefore at the same time an act of inauguration: an act that trans-forms the possibilities for the transmission of emotions in language at the very moment at which the age-old transmission of emotions via the familial home is seen to be in a state of disintegration. “There is,” he writes, “a meditative, as well as a human, pathos; an enthusiastic, as well as an ordinary, sorrow; a sadness that has its seat in the depths of reason, to which the mind cannot sink gently of itself—but to which it must descend by treading the steps of thought.”28 Wordsworth explores the extent to which poetic language, in mounting this descent, can

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retrieve—re-collect—those calm, enduring affections that intimate an original correspondence between reason and passion. His poetic theory countenances the possibility that the affections can—that they must—lie at the heart of poetry; for without their immortalization in poetry, we might lose hold of them altogether.

Homerton college, University of cambridge

1. see Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2003), especially pp. 62–98.

2. anthony ashley cooper, Third earl of shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols. (London, 1711); Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections. With Illustrations on the Moral Sense (London, 1728); isaac Watts, The Doctrine of the Passions Explained and Improved, rev. ed. (coventry, [1794?]).

3. Thomas cogan, A Philosophical Treatise on the Passions, 2nd ed. (London, 1802), pp. 2–3.

4. John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, Contain’d in Some New Discoveries Never Made Before, Requisite for the Writing and Judging of Poems Surely (London, 1704), p. 23; hereafter abbreviated GC.

5. John Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry. A Critical Discourse. In Two Parts (London, 1701), pp. 24–25; hereafter abbreviated AR.

6. For further commentary on the importance of passion in poetic theories of the period, see adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (stanford: stanford University Press, 1996) and John D. morillo, Uneasy Feelings: Literature, The Passions, and Class from Neoclassicism to Romanticism (new york: ams Press, 2001).

7. see, for example, Joseph Trapp, Lectures on Poetry Read in the Schools of Natural Philosophy at Oxford (London, 1742), p. 17; anonymous, The Art of Poetry on a New Plan, Illustrated with a Great Variety of Examples from the Best English Poets; and of Translations from the Ancients: Together with Such Reflections and Critical Remarks as May Tend to Form in our Youth an Elegant Taste, and Render the Study of this Part of the Belles Lettres More Rational and Pleasing (London, 1762), vol. 1, p. 41; alexander gerard, An Essay on Genius (London, 1774), p. 87; James Beattie, Essays: on Poetry and Music, as they Affect the Mind; on Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition; on the Usefulness of Classical Learning, 3rd ed. (London, 1779), p. 47; Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 3rd ed. (London, 1787), vol. 3, p. 85; and William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800,” in The Prose Works, ed. W. J. B. owen and Jane smyser, 3 vols. (oxford: clarendon Press, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 124–26; hereafter abbreviated PW.

8. For a study of enthusiastic passions in the period, see Jon mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (oxford: oxford University Press, 2003).

86 Philosophy and Literature

9. see Karl morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. x–xi.

10. The notion of movement occurs at the climax of definitions of poetry throughout critical writing of the period. For example, the anonymous author of The Art of Poetry on a New Plan asserts that “the poet’s design is principally to please, to move the passions, and to inspire the soul with noble and sublime sentiments.” see anonymous, The Art of Poetry, vol. 1, p. 41. edward gibbon claims that “to charm, to move, to elevate the soul, are the great objects of poetry.” edward gibbon, An Essay on the Study of Literature (London, 1764), p. 65. similarly, Hugh Blair affirms that “the primary aim of a poet is to please, and to move.” Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, vol. 2, p. 85. Variants of the verb “moves,” including “excites,” “arouses,” “raises,” and “stimulates,” also occur with frequency in eighteenth-century critical discussions of poetic passions.

11. see shaftesbury, Characteristicks, pp. 103–27. as the theologian and moral phi-losopher abraham Tucker explains, “Violence and turbulence constitute the essence of passion: the same emotions of the soul when too gentle to deserve that name, are styled affections.” abraham Tucker, The Light of Nature Pursued (London, 1768), vol. 2, p. 90.

12. shaftesbury, for example, writes that when “once any of [the passions] are let loose, when once they have broken their boundaries and forced a passage, what ravage and destruction are sure to follow? and what must it cost ere all be calm again within?” “Philosophical regimen,” in The Life, Unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin rand (London: routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1992), p. 151.

13. Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London, 1777), pp. 84–88; hereafter abbreviated CL.

14. gerard, An Essay on Genius, p. 147.

15. as is well known, eighteenth-century literary criticism holds that poetry should be subject to strict measures of control. For further discussion of this, see rené Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950 (London: Jonathan cape, 1955), vol. 1, pp. 13–14.

16. For an account of the extensive influence of aristotle on eighteenth-century theories of poetry, see Patrick Parrinder, Authors and Authority: A Study of English Literary Criticism and Its Relation to Culture, 1750–1900 (London: routledge, 1977).

17. James Beattie, Essays: on Poetry and Music, as they Affect the Mind; on Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition; on the Usefulness of Classical Learning, 3rd ed. (London, 1779), pp. 105–7.

18. For two useful discussions of the status of the universal in criticism and philosophy of the period, see Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946) and Blakey Vermeule, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

19. see Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (new Haven: yale University Press, 1977).

20. “essays upon epitaphs, i,” in PW, vol. 2, p. 60.

87Louise Joy

21. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1850,” in PW, vol. 1, p. 139.

22. James averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering (London: cornell University Press, 1980), p. 279.

23. simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 4.

24. William Wordsworth to charles James Fox, grasmere, January 14th, 1801, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years (1787–1805), ed. ernest de selincourt (oxford: clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 313–15.

25. David Bromwich writes: “Wordsworth . . . was always interested in people who con-tinue to be themselves, who insist upon themselves, weirdly or helplessly, whatever the cost to utility and convention.” David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (London: University of chicago Press, 1998), p. 172.

26. of course, the relationship that Wordsworth forges between “poetic” language and “real” language is itself highly complicated, since for Wordsworth “poetic” language “must often, in liveliness and truth, fall short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions.” “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1850,” in PW, vol. 1, p. 138.

27. William Wordsworth, “To Joanna,” lines 80–83 in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. ernest de selincourt (London: oxford University Press, 1936).

28. Wordsworth, “essay supplementary to the Preface,” in PW, vol. 3, p. 82.