Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Between the neglected poetic theory of John Dennis in 1701 and the celebrated poetic theory and practice of Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798, the paths of enthusiasm and poetry often intersect. Enthusiasm has recently become critically significant to our understanding of the relationship of Romantic to eighteenth-century literature, Augustan to midcentury poetry, and to many puzzles of how subjectivity, society, emotion, divinity, and language all function (Hawes 1996; Irlam 1999; Morillo 2001). In short, enthusiasm—literally “the god within,” from the Greek entbeos—stood for a belief that people could be immediately connected to the divine, and could use this connection as a source of inspiration and power in speaking, writing, and acting. As the concept of enthusiasm enters the eighteenth century, however, it trails inglorious clouds of religious fanaticism and schism that are never wholly dispelled. Enthusiasm works as a discourse, a language through which any culture articulates fears and desires about itself and the world. As such, enthusiasm within and without poetry is best understood through its always vexed, often productive relations with other discourses, including religion, class, gender, medicine, and philosophy. Enthusiasm frequently engenders more modern kinds of social and political, often class, conflict, and is marked by ideology in its contradictions, by being ... log in or subscribe to read full text