Chapter 2 - Internal Impressions

Summary

Chapter Two contributes to the discussion of nineteenth-century poetry’s relationship to the body a more explicit engagement with theories of sympathy—a central aesthetic concept in much recent work on the nineteenth century, and an important term in this book as well. This chapter redraws a crucial moment in the history of thinking about sympathy by attending to the oddly neglected idea of “self-sympathy.” In the 1830s, poetic theorists grappling with changes in science, technology, and society sought to define a new, modern poetry to fit the times. For such critics as William Hazlitt, William Johnson Fox, and Arthur Henry Hallam, the body became a crucial location for defining modern poetry: these writers treat the poet’s relationship to his subject as a material encounter within the body. And the materiality imagined here requires the poet to perform involuntary acts of sympathetic action and reaction within his own body—to sympathize, that is, with himself. Long before Arnold’s formulation of Victorian poetry as “the dialogue of the mind with itself,” we find critics in the 1830s suggesting that, in fact, poetry might be better termed “the dialogue of the body with itself.”