Yet all of all possessing! (154–57)
Indeed, the period might be characterized by this central irony: the British “self, spreading still” and “all of all possessing,” springs to life in some Romantic writing at the exact time that the slave self, suicidal and destroyed, haunts other Romantic writing. For instance, John Gorton’s 1797 poem “The Negro Suicide” ends with an enslaved African plunging “this pointed steel” into his heart.5 In 1802, a poem printed by Hannah More called The Sorrows of Yamba; or, The Negro Woman’s Lamentation speaks of another method of suicide: during the middle passage, many Africans, “sick and sad,” died refusing to eat the “Nauseous horse-beans” otherwise forced down their throats.6 Mary Robinson’s “The Negro Girl” of 1800 ends with yet another form of self-destruction: the slave girl Zelma throws herself “in a wat’ry grave.”7 Perhaps the strangest example of all is in James Montgomery’s 1809 poem The West Indies, where he records how slaves die “by the slow pangs of solitary care, the earth-devouring anguish of despair.” “The Negroes,” explains Montgomery in a footnote, “in deep and irrecoverable melancholy, waste themselves away, by secretly swallowing large quantities of earth.”8
Clearly, many writers who were fascinated with their own vibrant identities were the same ones who were quick to watch slave identities drown in the Atlantic or waste away from a diet of dirt. Yet to say that the literature of the period portrays confident, expanding British selves at the expense of slave selves who submissively disappear is not entirely correct. For there also exists, among some writers, an unstoppable desire to see this expansive British self become not-self in the face of the other. In fact, the loss of self recorded with such dramatic intensity by abolitionist poets was integral to the poetic theory of many Romantic writers. In 1819 (to return to the example this book begins with), the same year in which Tommy complained about the analytic distance which was used to dehumanize him, John Keats targeted the concept of aesthetic distance in one of his compelling letters on the imagination. Writing to George and Georgiana Keats on 19 March 1819, Keats mused, “Very few men have ever arrived at a complete disinterestedness of Mind: very few have been influenced by a pure desire of the benefit of others…. I perceive how far I am from any humble standard of disinterestedness” (my emphasis, KL, 2:79). In using the term “disinterestedness,” Keats means a freedom from self-interest. For Keats, disinterestedness implies a feeling for the suffering of others that is so intimate it can only happen by divesting the self of its own interest.
In his letter, Keats is so taken with the subject that he cannot let it drop. He writes a little later, “Wordsworth says, ‘we have all one human heart’—there is an ellectric fire in human nature tending to purify—so that among these human creature[s] there is continu[a]lly some birth of new heroism—The pity is that we must wonder at it: as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish—I have no doubt that thousands of people never heard of have had hearts comp[l]etely disinterested: I can remember but two—Socrates and Jesus” (KL, 2:80). As Keats sees it, the imaginative mind produced the self distanced from its own ego. In a letter to Richard Woodhouse of October 1818, Keats had called Wordsworthian imagination the “egotistical sublime,” a quality he wanted nothing to do with: “As to the poetic Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; …) it is not itself—it has no self” (KL, 1:386–87). But a year later, he seems to have clarified his notion of imaginative distance and could even see in Wordsworth an aspect of the imagination that felt compelled to divest itself of egotism. Certainly, this idea does occupy a place in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802). The poet, writes Wordsworth, must “bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time, perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs” (W Prose, 1:138).9
The imaginative idea of self-loss was not limited to any single Romantic writer.10 In 1802, Coleridge wrote, “It is easy to cloathe Imaginary Beings with our own Thoughts and Feelings; but to think ourselves in to the Thoughts and Feelings of Beings in circumstances wholly & strangely different from our own … who has atchieved it?” (CL, 2:810). This same idea gripped Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1821, when he wrote the Defence of Poetry, his strangely ethereal poetic treatise, which carefully links the imaginative mind and the distanced heart. “The great secret of morals is Love, or going out of our own nature,” says Shelley, with great emotional flourish. This means, in no uncertain terms, “an identification” with a “thought, action, or person not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause” (SP, 487–88). The “creative faculty,” he declares, in a statement that is fundamental to his philosophy, is what compels artists to produce poems, novels, and paintings. But like Keats, Shelley views this imaginative faculty, and the products of its labor, as self-distanced in the sense of being divested of ego. The imagination, not taken up with itself, has a special power that enables the self to escape the tediousness of its own interests. It implies sympathy, a “going out of our own natures,” but also empathy, the ability to identify with and feel for another human being.
One way to think about this distinction between self-interest and disinterestedness, between the expansive self and the loss of self, is through the aesthetic/philosophic categories of intimacy and distance, which were, as Chapter 1 details, also geographic categories. The power of what I am calling the distanced imagination comes from a definition of self as for the other. Although literary theorists have not spent much time analyzing the concept of the distanced imagination, its legacy is stubbornly present in modern discussions among poets, critics, historians, and philosophers. The present-day American poet Eleanor Wilner defines distance in two different senses: analytic distance and aesthetic distance. In the case of analytic detachment, writes Wilner, “distance separates and frees a person from feeling for what he observes. But what aesthetic distance separates us from is not the emotions but the ego. With poetic imagination, it is precisely this distance from the ego that enables the emotional connectedness we call empathy—and because it is remote from ego-threat, as we enter imaginatively what is actually at a remove from us, we are given both vision and connection.”11 In theory, and in some of their best practical moments, Keats, Shelley, and the other Romantic writers viewed the imagination in this way.12 But more importantly, it was the African and slave presence in Britain that forced them to articulate the possibilities of the distanced imagination in their creative work.
II
The distanced imagination—a creative faculty at once expansive and self-sacrificing—has its roots in the change in moral consciousness that took place in the eighteenth century.13 Because this change can be traced both politically (as Chapter 1 argues) and theoretically, the two strands must have developed dialectically. In the realm of theory, the Romantics were fundamentally influenced by the astounding number of eighteenth-century texts that celebrated the imagination’s expansive capabilities, works such as Joseph Addison’s “The Pleasures of Imagination” (1712), Zachary Mayne’s Two Dissertations Concerning Sense and the Imagination (1728), Archibald Campbell’s Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue (1728), John Gilbert Cooper’s Letters Concerning Taste (1757), Alexander Gerard’s An Essay on Taste (1759), and Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759). These were just a few of the theorists to anticipate Adam Smith’s immensely popular Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), a text that explicitly outlined the relationship between imagination and sympathy, a precursor to the Romantic idea of self-sacrifice.14
Some of the first important publications on imagination in Britain were Joseph Addison’s essays in the Spectator titled “The Pleasures of Imagination.”