Among the great popular stories that followed Percy Shelley, or “Mad Shelley” as he came to be called after being expelled from Oxford for writing theNecessity of Atheism, was that while travelling with Byron in Switzerland, he would sometimes sign the hotel ledger under the name “Percy Shelley, democrat, great lover of mankind, atheist.” Less fantastical than the tale about Edward Trelawny pulling Shelley’s intact heart from his funeral pyre, it nonetheless conveys a familiar nexus of Romantic themes that connect immediately to the problem of politics. With the exception of the last descriptor—atheist—Shelley’s signature could be...

Blake’s poetry is seemingly so esoteric that it might be deemed an unusual place to begin an argument about the contemporary valence of Romantic theories of the political imagination. The difficulty of his poetry has sometimes led to his dismissal as a mere eccentric. Coming from an inherited antinomian enthusiasm,¹ his work seems like an anachronism in relation to his own time, much less a continued resource for our own. Saree Makdisi’s recent landmark study² has challenged this prevailing view of Blake, showing how Blake questioned many of the dominant orthodoxies of his time, including the tradition of radical liberalism...

Although the term “political imagination” has come to designate a variety of phenomena, in the case of Coleridge’s theory of the imagination it could very well be considered a tautology. R. F. Storch’s claim several decades ago that the “political function of the imagination precedes its literary function”¹ has yet to be fully developed in its consequences for understanding the interrelation between Coleridge’s political theory and his aesthetics. Perhaps one of the reasons this articulation has not been developed is the fact that Coleridge’s primary elaboration of the imagination takes place in theBiographia Literaria, a work that situates it...

Wordsworth’sPreludehas been something of a bellwether for debates in Romantic studies for the last half-century. One or another school of interpretation has found itself reflected in it or has read it to uncover the critical errors of its interpretive predecessors. From the visionary and transcendentalist readings of Harold Bloom and Meyer Abrams in the 1960s and ’70s, to the deconstructive critique of the transcendental or apocalyptic Wordsworth, to the more recent historicist turn, thePreludehas been made to emblematize Romanticism itself, or at least to put on display what are considered some of the movement’s or period’s...

Like Coleridge, Percy Shelley authored a number of longer political treatises and participated in what today might be called “direct actions,” lending his writing talents to campaigns for Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the 1801 Act of Union in Ireland. One would expect that such attention to the direct mobilizing power of the word might translate into a politics of confrontation that privileges the efficacy of interventions meant to have force in the here and now. Yet, recent work has gradually come to the conclusion that Shelley’s politics privileges thefutureand the promise of radical change.¹ Shelley clearly...

In his commentary on Paul Celan’s Meridian Address,¹ Jacques Derrida argues that a specific gesture or strategy is at work in Celan’s attempt to distinguish the sovereignty of poetics from political sovereignty. This happens, according to Derrida, through Celan’s claims about the “majesty” of poetry. Analyzing Georg Büchner’sDanton’s Death, Celan argues that Lucile’s cry “Long live the King!” as she goes to her death on the scaffold in the course of the French Revolution constitutes, paradoxically, an “act of freedom” and an example of the “majesty” of poetry. As Derrida contends, in order to show that this cry is...