Date of Award
Fall 12-20-2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Alan Vardy
Second Advisor
Kelvin Black
Academic Program Adviser
Janet Neary
Abstract
Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism in philosophy and the arts prefigures Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and William Wordsworth’s Romantic recovery of a subject’s empirical relationship to nature and the phenomenal world. Coleridge and Wordsworth respond to philosophical precedents that emphasize rationalism and the autonomy of a subject while introducing empiricism and sensation as primary components of the speaker’s experience. The poets delineate a fluid shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism through an interchangeable reliance on Kantian and Burkean philosophical methods. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant follows the Cartesian cogito toward a similar end of reducing human experience to circumstance bereft of empirical influence or evidence. This thesis explores the interactions and contradictions of the interplay of affective power, psychology, and vacillating Burkean and Kantian aesthetic moments in a selection of poems and other writing by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.
Recommended Citation
Cotter, Mary K., "Roots and Repercussions of Romantic Feeling: Sensation and Affect in the Poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth" (2016). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/117