engleski

Wordsworth, Shelley and the Fear of the Masses

This paper will take into consideration the new historicist readings of Wordsworth and Shelley to focus on the sublime power of money and the way it affected their writings. In this sense, Wordsworth’s potential for democratization will be questioned along the lines of his experience of the sublime in The Prelude and his agrarian humanism in The Excursion while Shelley’s fictional radicalism is going to be tested against his views on political economy as expounded in A Philosophical View of Reform and his hope for a peaceful revolution in The Mask of Anarchy and Prometheus Unbound. Read against the raising culture of radical oratory with William Cobbett and Henry Hunt in focus, their experiences and true involvement in helping the labouring poor, the two poets’ ideas on the condition of England would prove to be riven with reactionary rather than radical potential. Thus, Wordsworth would prove to be Shelley’s teacher in the aesthetic experience of the sublime, a cultivated taste that is class- related and as such seeks to preserve the social status-quo rather than embrace the dangers of true radicalism and the consequences of helping the poor. The political economy of the day will be viewed as ‘an invisible hand’ influencing the two poet’s involvement in socio-political reality - the invisible force visible in its effects.

romantic aesthetics, spiritual capitalism

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