The Legitimacy of State Violence and the Death Penalty in Wordsworth's Poetry

Abstract

This paper explores the continuity and discontinuity of Wordsworth’s thinking regarding the penal reform and its ramifications. Despite the notorious conservatism in his late poetry, Wordsworth has been consistent in his attack upon the arbitrary power of legal violence from a Jacobean poet to a Tory one. Central to his poetics are passions and emotion, which Wordsworth utilizes to reform injustices of the legal code, in particular, partial laws and unproportioned penalties that hinge upon the death penalty. Hence, Wordsworth upholds a convict’s subjective judgment through his conscience as a determinant of the legitimacy of capital punishment in both Guilt and Sorrow and Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death. The final revision of the Salisbury Plain Poems bears witness to a significant progress of the penal reform that evolves from the Bloody Code to the drastic reduction of capital offenses. Yet, it is crucial to note that Wordsworth opposes the abolition of the death penalty for murder and treason in the sonnet sequence because capital punishment is integral to maintaining proportional justice and yet the very vehicle for the abolition. Nonetheless, Wordsworth’s recourse to the divine will in his defense of the death penalty testifies to the limits of law and points to the possibility of justice as the deconstruction of law. We conclude the paper by arguing that Wordsworth’s protest to the abolition of capital punishment is part of his endeavor to advocate the monarchy through theologico-political logic and thus, fundamentally constitutive of his attempt to restore a sense of community through poetic mediation in legal violence rather than judging his politics as conflict between radicalism and conservatism.