37. Abolitionist motifs and mottoes
Texts and Abbreviations
Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are taken from the following editions:
William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–86).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912, 1957).
John Keats, Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Written by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
Percy Bysse Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977).
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (The 1818 Text), ed. James Reiger (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940–49).
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979).
Other frequently cited texts appear in parentheses by the following abbreviations:
| B | Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. John Shawcross, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902). |
| CC | Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series 75 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge, 1969–). |
| CL | Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71). |
| CM | Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, 5 vols. (1980–). CC 12. |
| CN | Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols., Bollingen Series 50 (London: Routledge; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957–). |
| KL | John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–21, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958). |
| Lects 1795 | Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795, on Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (1971). CC 1. |
| SL | Percy Bysse Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). |
| SP | Percy Bysse Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977). |
| SWF | Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (1995). CC 11. |
| TT | Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols. (1990). CC 14. |
| Watchman | Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton (1970). CC 2. |
| W Prose | William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). |
As to the poetical Character itself, it is not itself—it has no self.
—John Keats
The only absolute value is the human possibility of giving the other priority over oneself.
—Emmanuel Levinas
Introduction
I
I have always been fascinated by the idea that the Romantic imagination can reveal things hidden to the naked eye. So when I began this study I wondered what the imagination revealed about slavery, which was not hidden in the culture but seemed to be missing from the era’s most powerful poetry. Since slavery was the great moral question of the age and Romanticism the great aesthetic development, it seemed logical to set these two movements side by side. But I soon became acutely aware of the violence in doing so. What did women forced into rooms that smelled of rape and men burned alive after frenzied revolts have to do with Romantic writers’ long hours of peaceful reflection and protected moments of rural retreat? Even when I thought of the Romantic imagination as a purely political construct, the fact that its politics were often contained in poems about Grecian urns or ruined cottages or magical lands like Xanadu made me wonder just what imagination could say about slavery. To put the Romantic imagination in close proximity to the horrifying details of slavery seemed plain wrong.
Still, the more I read from the period’s discourses on slavery in parliamentary papers, travel narratives, medical tracts, abolitionist poetry, and slave narratives, the more I began to see signs of slavery in imaginative works. This was especially true of works that had come to be thought of as direct products of the Romantic imagination because they were in some way about the imagination, works such as the Lyrical Ballads, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Lamia, “The Witch of Atlas,” and Frankenstein. How, I wondered, would someone characterize these works about imagination as being also works about slavery?
Fortunately, because other scholars were asking similar questions, a shared critical language began to emerge, with some of the most exciting work coming from Srinivas Aravamudan, Alan Bewell, Elizabeth Bohls, Laura Brown, David Dabydeen, Markman Ellis, Moira Ferguson, Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, Nigel Leask, Saree Makdisi, Javed Majeed, Timothy Morton, Felicity Nussbaum, Mary Louise Pratt, and Alan Richardson.1 These scholars, and others like them, take their critical language from both history and current postcolonial theory, and it adeptly accounts for the various responses eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British writers had to the growing empire. These responses seem to fall into one of the following categories: complicity, resistance, or anxiety.
Felicity Nussbaum’s 1995 book Torrid Zones, for instance, tries to make “the ideological workings of empire and of Englishwomen’s complicity within it more legible.”2 Complicity is also the critical lens for Alison Hickey, in a 1998 essay called “Dark Characters, Native Grounds: Wordsworth’s Imagination of Imperialism.” No matter what critical viewpoint a reader takes, says Hickey, “some sort of imperialism is implicitly ascribed” to the Wordsworthian imagination because it champions “the incorporation of otherness, the forging of unity from difference.” She goes on to say that the imagination’s prerogative is “triumph,” but triumph, in this case, always means “the appropriation” of another person or place and the “suppression of its potentially threatening aspect.”3 Likewise, Saree Makdisi, in his 1999 Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity, asserts that, though Romantics criticized imperialism, they were