Speakable and Unspeakable Passions in English Neoclassical and Romantic Poetry

Abstract

“The elemental passions of the soul” were the subject of enormous interest and serious inquiry in England throughout the eighteenth century: they figured prominently not only in literature but also in such disparate cultural manifestations as medical dissertations, anatomical drawings, history paintings, political tracts, elocution lectures, acting handbooks, rhetoric textbooks, and psychological treatises. The popularity of the passions as a subject of discourse can be well documented: Edward Young, for example, plaintively confesses in the preface to a 1728 sermon, “Being sensible how difficult it is to gain Attention for Works of Divinity, I have insisted more on the Passions, than any other Head of the following discourse; in hopes of a more welcome reception”.¹ Even a cursory examination of the eighteenth-century discourse on the passions reveals a remarkably heterogeneous and heterodox body of material, as diverse in opinions and evaluations of the passions as in disciplinary approach. Some, for instance, thought passion to be literally beastly; others believed that passion was what separated us from the lower animals. Passion was a hindrance to some, a useful tool for others; the enemy and master of reason or conversely its willing and manageable slave.