7 - After-Affects and Second Thoughts: Wordsworth, Eliot, and the Forms of Emotional Thinking

Summary

Sudden excitations and strange fits of passion are not unusual in Romantic poetry; indeed, we might credit Romanticism for instructing us to notice how bursts of spontaneous reaction disrupt the ongoing flow of experience – so frequently as to destabilize the distinction between the momentous and the mundane. Dilation of spontaneity is made possible by the temporal distentions and cumulative parataxes of lyric description. Typically, a single, and singular, instance of heightened response extends through successive figurations, deepened with memory or regret, amplified by expectation or anxiety. It is as if lyric time sus-pends the difference between reaction and reflection. Recent years have seen an intense and often selective interest in the reactive immediacy of feeling, in what Wordsworth termed the ‘pressure of the passions’ and characterized as the ‘animal sensations, and the causes which excite’ them (598). Memorably articulated by the Romantic poet, the task of capturing the ‘spontaneous overflow’ of visceral affects is evidently also an undertaking of the literary and cultural theory of our time. That said, it takes only the most glancing of second readings to recall that by ‘animal sensations’ Wordsworth does not mean purely physical or unthinking modes of being, and to be reminded that the ‘powerful feelings’ he associates with poetry are, at once and without contradiction, spur-of-the-moment and reflective: ‘All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but,’ Wordsworth qualifies, ‘Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced’ except by one who ‘had also thought long and deeply’ (598). With the ‘but’ that introduces a crucial additional specification to the definition of ‘good poetry,’ Wordsworth links affective spontaneity to the practice of long and deep thought, joining terms that would ordinarily be set in opposition. Such generative complications are so ubiquitous in the ‘Preface’ as to count as a deliberate procedure or mode of argument, whereby every evocation of the passions as primal, immediate, and bodily also involves a transfiguring qualification of those terms. The interdependence of formal aspirations, rhetorical complexity and affective expression in the ‘Preface’ will be addressed more fully near the end of this chapter; here it will suffice to note that even as certain familiar features of Romanticism, especially the incitements and provocations of Romantic lyric, seem to cohere with contemporary interest in the visceral energies of affect, first impressions are misleading.