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Immortality, Romanticism, and the Limit of the Liberal Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jamison Kantor
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Abstract

At Margaret Thatcher's funeral, in 2013, attendees received a program with William Wordsworth's Immortality Ode printed on the back. This was unsurprising. The ode has always been popular with figures who champion liberal capitalist democracy as the most efective form of governance, one that delivers reform through incremental change and pragmatic policies rather than revolutionary idealism. Framed by the current unrest in Western civic life, this essay paints a darker picture of this reigning political order. Considering readings of the ode by John Stuart Mill, Cleanth Brooks, and Lionel Trilling, I suggest that the poem allowed liberal intellectuals to romanticize reformist politics. For these readers, Wordsworth reveals a core of sublime possibility within systems built on routinized order. However, idealizing a gradualist approach to reform allows progress to be pushed into the future indeinitely. Tracing the commitment to practical sublimity may reveal an emergent theory of liberal technocracy, in which citizens are compelled to operate under a vast, incomprehensible array of protocols that never quite deliver meaningful social change.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 133 , Issue 3 , May 2018 , pp. 508 - 525
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2018

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