Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay reconsiders the political stakes of William Wordsworth’s 1803 sonnet, “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” by reading its representation of the legacy of the imprisoned Haitian military leader, Toussaint Louverture, through a Spinozist conception of the affections. Focusing on sound as a material force, the essay takes inspiration from the Canadian poet Jordan Scott’s Guantánamo project in order to frame its argument in terms of the question, “how is it possible to listen in places of trauma?” Like many of Wordsworth’s poems, the sonnet abstracts and subsumes its subject into the dynamics of the natural world, which here becomes a revolutionary power that continues beyond Louverture’s death. Rather than treating Wordsworth’s effusions as empty bombast, this essay demonstrates that his account of Louverture’s transition from man to force of feeling admits the melancholy possibility that political reinvention’s best hope might be that even those who fail to listen cannot help but be moved.
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