‘Disturbed Imagination’: The French Revolution

Abstract

Just how central is the French Terror to the development of British literary Romanticism? Put crudely, was the guillotined head the inspiration for The Prelude? Here is one familiar thesis: If the excessive violence of the French revolution had not taken place there would be no British Romanticism. A profound disillusionment with the Jacobin regime of Terror led the first generation of Romantic poets to abandon radical politics and to seek salvation in nature, the literary imagination and the exploration of subjectivity. Romanticism, therefore, was a sublimation, displacement or exorcism of the unbearable violence of history. The personal replaced the public; poetic idealism replaced political idealism.