Confirmed Tranquility: The Stoic Impulse in Transatlantic Romanticism

Spontaneous feeling has been a cornerstone of Romantic aesthetics since Wordsworth wrote his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. This dissertation unsettles the link between Romantic poetry and the overflow of emotion by arguing that writers from Wordsworth to Emerson persistently turned to Stoicism in reconsidering the role of the passions in both literature and the conduct of life. Drawing on poetry and a broad range of journals, letters, and intellectual prose, I argue that the Romantics were attuned to the way diffuse Stoic attitudes informed the politics and moral psychology of their age. More than a prompt for resignation or acquiescence, Stoicism was a radical and controversial term in a revolutionary age; philosophers like Kant, Spinoza, and Godwin drew on Stoic accounts of the passions in articulating their new ethical systems. In chapters on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Emerson, I argue that the period most polemically invested in emotion as the mainspring of art was also captivated by the idea that aesthetic and ethical judgment demanded a transcendence of emotion. In their poetic search for "confirmed tranquillity," the writers in my transatlantic study transformed Stoicism's austerities as they confronted the limitations of sympathy and redefined their own relations to a cosmopolitan and war-torn world.;An overlooked connection between Godwin's "Stoical Morality" and Wordsworth's moderated Stoicism in The Excursion foregrounds the ideological complexity of Romantic Stoicism, even in Wordsworth's supposedly "acquiescent" later work. Coleridge's sustained engagement with Stoicism---visible in his poetry and intellectual prose---reflected both his desire for tranquility and his sense of its incompatibility with corporeal existence. Byron's reflections on Stoic regulation were coterminous with his celebrity, running from the first canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage through to the final, unfinished canto of Don Juan. On the other side of the Atlantic, Emerson expounded a central Romantic insight: for all of the sympathy it could produce, affect was ultimately incommensurate with ethical action. In acknowledging his own Stoic proclivities, Emerson---like the other writers in this project---formulated a deep but complex justification for an ethical self-culture that could lead to social reform.