"The Fretful Stir": The Romantic Poets, Ireland, and the 1798 Rebellion

The repudiation of radicalism in Wordsworth and Coleridge's disavowal of politics in the years 1797–98 is often attributed to generalized fears of a French invasion, or a recoil from "remembered terror" years earlier. This essay contends that the terror was both closer to home, and to the present, in the form of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland, a threat to empire which precipitated a renewed English nationalism. Faced with violence within, Romantic flights of transcendence are best conceived as exercises in imaginative mastery screening off the source of terror, negotiating "a conflict of sensations without name" (Wordsworth) through a poetics of indirection and displacement.