“Contagious Air[s]”: Wordsworth's Poetics and Politics of Immunity

Abstract

This article explores how Wordsworth routinely borrows ideas and concepts from Romantic-period medicine in order to define both his politics and his poetic theory. In particular, Wordsworth advocates a kind of immunity designed to curb the diffusion of radical affects and to craft the proper biopolitical subject. Importantly, according to Wordsworth, political and affective excess can be prevented through the act of reading poetry. The success of Wordsworth's poetics depends upon an implicit inoculation of “powerful feelings” into the reader's body that prevents the kinds of “jacobinal infatuations” that he fears in later works. The poet promotes a form of biopolitical immunity in his prose and poetry that reflects Romantic-era medical practice, especially the controversial innovations of vaccination. Finally, this essay tracks how Wordsworth's use of the term “immunity” – always pluralized into “immunities” – shows how the term's meaning was slowing changing from a strictly legal or political attribution to a biopolitical one during the early nineteenth century. At stake in this shift in meaning is the way in which literature, and especially Romantic literature, aided the total absorption of the body into politics that is characteristic of modern biopolitics.