Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation

Abstract

This book tracks the complex meanings of the word ‘enthusiasm’ through the eighteenth century and Romantic periods. For most of the eighteenth century, it was used to describe excessive religious feeling, but ‘enthusiasm’ became increasingly used to describe the unregulated and infectious urgings of the crowd more generally. At the same time, it had always had an association developed from classical literature with poetic inspiration. Out of a confluence of these two traditions developed an association with the idea of enthusiasm as a form of therapeutic influx of feeling in an increasingly commodified world, especially associated with the power of poetry. By the Romantic period, enthusiasm was regarded as a necessary condition of any great poetry, but rarely a sufficient one. Unregulated enthusiasm might simply reproduce the empty spasming of the crowd. This book shows how the inherited discourse on enthusiasm structured ideas of poetry in the Romantic version, providing an idea of transcendence, an affirmation of the value of the poetry, but also the frightening possibility of the loss of a proper subjectivity in the old virus of misplaced religious desire degenerating into sensuality. As a result writers like Coleridge and Wordsworth strove to show that the depth of their enthusiasm always brought with it a proper ideas of limit. Rarely were poets as willing as Blake to declare enthusiasm ‘the All in All’.

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