Suffering and Sensation in The Ruined Cottage

Abstract

Recently, Jerome McGann has criticized The Ruined Cottage's fostering of “the grand illusion” of Romanticism, “the idea that poetry, or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and culture.” But to characterize Wordsworth's poem in this way is to overlook its direct engagement with one social field, the literary marketplace; as an experiment with genre the poem sharply confronts a public taste for sensational literature. This confrontation is also a form of collusion, for the technical innovations that distinguish Wordsworth's poetry of suffering from popular sensational literature deploy the tactics and create the effects of that literature. The Ruined Cottage at once entices and reproves the public taste. Intended to appeal to a public of feminized readers, it also creates the readers-to-be of high Romantic poetry—an audience whose pleasure it is to distance itself from the captivated feminine heart.