Romantic Survival: Disaster Beyond Repair in Lyrical Ballads

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores representations of disaster and survival in the 1798 edition of the Lyrical Ballads. It starts with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” a poem exemplary of the survival narrative, a poetic articulation of disaster fraught with fragmentation, repetition, and stagnation, in form and content. The article then reads the survival narrative in William Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and “The Last of the Flock,” arguing that, in Wordsworth’s poems, what has been affected by disaster can exist beyond repair. I focus on disastrous thinking, considering it another aspect of disaster that penetrates thought. Disastrous thinking appears in Wordsworth’s poems but also in our critical tradition, from New Criticism to more recent post-critical readings. It attempts to ameliorate catastrophe even when disaster has eliminated the historical and philosophical causes that make it comprehensible. The article finally re-turns to Coleridge’s poem to highlight the presence of active passivity, a mode of being that resists productivity and marketability while it emphasizes political thought over thoughtless action. Active passivity constitutes a form of arresting resistance that bears the potential for radical world change through the practice of patience, another name for constant laboring without quantifiable results.