Sentiment, Sociability and the Construction of a Poetic Circle

Abstract

It seems that no matter how rural the situation of a literary network, collective attempts at creativity and critical conversation in the Romantic period were rarely confined to one particular social class or intellectual discipline, particularly at the latter end of what is known as the ‘sentimental era’. In his proposal of the Öffentlichkeit, the bourgeois public sphere, Jürgen Habermas drew attention to the homosocial fraternal paradigm of sociability, and since then several works have sought to explore the continuity of Enlightenment sociability and sentiment in a wider variety of settings.¹ These include the book club and the literary salon as well as a ‘counter’ public sphere which included radical political societies. Such alternative settings also enabled the inclusion of minorities: women, ‘labouring-class’ groups, and Dissenters. Jon Mee’s Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention and Community 1762 to 1830 (2011) develops the idea of ‘hazardous conversation’, whereby a number of diverse and competing views might collide within the same circle, producing intense intellectual debate and creativity. More recently, John Goodridge has revised the often underestimated creative relationships between ‘labouring-class’ poets and their contemporaries, particularly the ‘fleeting but intense’ interaction of poets John Clare (1793–1864) and John Keats (1795–1821) (see Goodridge, 2013, p. 61).