Abstract
This chapter examines the politicised early reception of William Wordsworth’s poetry in a series of articles that John Wilson published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1817 to 1822, focusing on their treatment of ‘the passions’ and arguing that the Blackwood’s version of Wordsworth can be seen as a conservative appropriation and interrogation of the Wordsworthian narrative of the growth, loss, and recovery of deep ‘human affections’ (BEM 4: 257). Coexisting with that narrative, I suggest, are deceptively radical glimpses of the possibility of nonhuman feeling associated with ancient Indian poetry. The Blackwood’s articles thus not only pay (somewhat satirical) homage to Wordsworth’s insight into (English) human emotion, but also tap into the ‘Braminical’ serenity of the nonhuman in terms that invite post-colonial and ecological interpretation.
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Works Cited
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Wheatley, K. (2019). Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Politics of Wordsworthian Feeling. In: Macleod, J., Christie, W., Denney, P. (eds) Politics and Emotions in Romantic Periodicals. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32467-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32467-4_8
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