Nervous Fluid: Romantic Physiology and Wordsworth’s Blood-Based Mind

Existing readings of Wordsworth's physiological aesthetics do little to explicate the agency that is attached to the blood and its role in Wordsworth's conception of the mind and its creative processes. This essay introduces the medico-historical contexts of emerging physiological knowledge as well as long-held paradigms of health and disease to demonstrate how blood participates in the workings of the mind and reveals a more distinctly corporeal process of creative development and production in Wordsworth's poetry and prose. I argue that Wordsworth's mental system is a blood-based mind: one that is attuned to the fluid connections between the vascular and nervous systems that were of special importance to physiologists of the eighteenth century. In his poetry and prose, Wordsworth figures blood as a substance of mind that assimilates impressions from the natural world and serves as a raw material of mind that must be refined and regulated for the sake of the poet's creative health.