Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s Sonnets of the Wingless Hours: Baudelaire, Neurasthenia, and Poetic Recovery

Abstract

This essay examines Eugene Lee-Hamilton's Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1894) in the context of Charles Baudelaire's influence on the late-nineteenth-century English autobiographical sonnet sequence. Reading the sequence in the context of disability studies, we see that the poetics of illness that characterize Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) shaped Lee-Hamilton's poetic account of his neurasthenic paralysis. Neurasthenia enabled Lee-Hamilton's transition from failed diplomat to successful literary figure, but the recovery that was taking place as he constructed Sonnets of the Wingless Hours also signaled the end of his poetic inspiration. This tension between the ailing body and the creative spirit sheds light not only on the psychology of the neurasthenic poet but also on the ways in which societal assumptions about the body affect both poetic production and reader response.