“The History and Science of Feeling”: Wordsworth’s Affective Poetics, Then and Now

Abstract

This chapter revisits the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads and related materials in order to (re)assess Wordsworth’s affective poetics in terms both of its own literary-historical moment and of our cognitive-neuroscientific one. Drawing upon research in psychology, narratology, and empirical aesthetics, the discussion elaborates the history and science behind a set of related hypotheses, recently proposed by Keith Oatley et al., concerning “the communication of emotion in art”: (1) “emotions often are unclear”; (2) “emotions inspire creative expression”; (3) “artistic expression should often take on the form of emotion [or] have the dynamic and thematic properties of an emotion”; and (4) “readers or spectators of art should readily perceive the emotion communicated.”