Shelleyan Love

In this chapter, I show that Percy Shelley picks up on the waning of intellectual love in Wordsworth, continuing to develop this Romantic tradition after Wordsworth moves on to a more religious sensibility. The chapter outlines the development of Percy Shelley’s treatment of love over the entire course of his career. I examine five ‘clusters’ of writings that reveal his adoption, adaption, and revision of Wordsworthian, Godwinian, and Classical notions of love: (1) his essay ‘On Love’ (1819) and its related texts; (2) Queen Mab (1813) and the Alastorvolume (1815); (3) a sequence of lyrics from 1816-1818; (4) the Prometheus Unbound volume (1820); and (5) Epipsychidion (1821) and later poems. Shelleyan love has received the most scholarly attention in studies of Romanticism, yet it is almost always within the contexts of sex, sexuality, and metaphor; instead, I argue that Shelleyan love can also be understood as an aesthetic model of interconnectedness proposing a nascent negative dialectics, a concept developed by Theodor Adorno that both defers and affirms the reconciliation of subject and object at the heart of critical theory and love.

John Clare and Ecological Love

This chapter traces Clare’s development of a more fully ecological love in contradistinction to the poetry of Wordsworth. Clare often appears more Wordsworthian than Wordsworth himself, and he follows the trail of ecological thought and its companion love to their necessary conclusions: the erasure of human subjectivity. While Wordsworth insists on the necessity of subjectivity, Clare shows that love of nature eclipses the human self through detail-oriented, ecocentric poems in which subjectivity vanishes. I focus specifically on Clare’s poetry of the middle and later periods, with an emphasis on his sonnets, manuscript fragments, and shorter lyrics. These works offer formal embodiments of the affective movement that informs ecological love in Clare’s work, and they shed new light on the continuities between the middle and later periods, which often draw a stark division in the study of Clare. By attending closely to Clare’s ecological love across his range of work, we can begin not only to recover the philosophical, political, and formal elements of intellectual love in Clare’s writing, but also to rethink the Romantics’ love of nature as a deeply material, ecological enterprise.

Tennyson, Arnold, and the Victorians The Legacy of Romantic Love

This final chapter examines the immediate afterlife of Romantic love. Victorian poets such as Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold were both intrigued by and skeptical of love as a concept distinct from sexuality and ideology. Between 1830 and 1853, these poets experimented with, but eventually abandoned, the Romantics’ notion of love as a manifestation of idealism. While Romantic love continued to influence poets well into the nineteenth century, it became increasingly characterized as idealist and thus escapist: love eventually became divided from its critical and aesthetic valences, leading to a marginalization of love in discussions of Romanticism. The early poetry of Tennyson and Arnold illustrates the Victorian link between the preeminence of intellectual love in Romantic poetry and its critique and eventual dismissal in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Felicia Hemans and the Affections

Chapter four analyzes Hemans’s emphasis on love, gender, and ‘the affections’ throughout her career. The chapter begins by outlining the discourses of ‘the affections’ in eighteenth-century moral philosophy, showing how Hemans engages those discourses through her concurrent embrace and critique of the Romantic models of affect and emotion developed by Wordsworth and Shelley. Hemans moves from a hesitant embrace and celebration of earthly, domestic, and Christian love in her early poetry to a more radical, Romantic acknowledgement of an otherworldly, idealizing love in her later work. Yet unlike the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Clare, Hemans’s treatment of intellectual love is dominated by loss and melancholy. Her particular treatment of love and the affections sheds new light on the importance of gender in Romantic-era theories of affect. In contrast to her male counterparts, Hemans remains deeply skeptical about the social and political potentials of intellectual love. As she carries on the Romantic poetic tradition throughout the 1820s, Hemans serves as a catalyst for Victorian responses to intellectual love, to which I turn in the final chapter of the book.

Wordsworthian Love

This chapter establishes the seminal foundation of Romantic intellectual love in the early poetry of William Wordsworth. I take as a starting point Wordsworth’s emphasis on ‘intellectual love’ as well as his claim that ‘Love of Nature lead[s] to love of Mankind’, arguing that he develops a kind of critical-ecological thinking that leads to a love that ‘rolls through all things’. In particular, I trace the influence of Erasmus Darwin on the evolution of Wordsworth’s theory of love, revealing that the ideological illusion often attributed to Wordsworth’s love of nature has more to do with science than transcendent idealism. Together, Darwin and Wordsworth construct an incipient form of what we now call affective neuroscience with intellectual love at its core. Although there are instances in his writing where Wordsworth turns to sentimentalism, self-love, or idealism, I demonstrate how the interconnectedness of the natural world provides Wordsworth with an aesthetic model for envisioning intellectual love.

Introduction

The introduction traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics,through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a British Romantic tradition. While most scholarly work treats Romantic-era theories of love as idealized and illusory, I show how this distinct tradition of intellectual love was integral to broader debates about the nature of life, the biology of the human body, the sociology of human relationships, the philosophy of nature, and the disclosure of being. I situate this history of intellectual love within the contemporary context of ‘the affective turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, as well as recent work in aesthetic theory associated with the Frankfurt School.