The Hidden Language of Emotion: Cognitive Romanticism in Wordsworth and Shelley

A question central to mind studies that literature provides insight into has been (and perhaps always will be) whether the complexities of human emotion can be captured and conveyed to other people – and, if they can, how to achieve this through language. We typically do not consider background textual elements like pronouns or prepositions as carriers of emotion, but close readings of poetics informed by the conclusions from recent brain imaging studies suggest that not all emotional labor in a text is explicit. The orientating work that deixis does can subtly guide readers’ evaluative judgments in a given context, with the ultimate effect of immersing that reader in the text itself. On the other hand, metaphor relies on shared judgment of subjects and objects in the external world between speaker and reader to communicate value. Though they function differently in the English language, these two parts of speech each rely on a reader’s perception of emotional content in a poetic text and therefore affect how they might interact with the poet’s intended message. This dissertation argues that without investing a reader in a poem’s prescribed value system, there is no true understanding of poetic content. In other words: emotion truly is at the heart of comprehension. To test this theory, I read closely the work of two British Romantic poets, a group whose poetics shifted from previous literary movements to champion emotion as the primary arbiter of experience. The first poet, William Wordsworth, composed for his collection Lyrical Ballads (1798) in response to the social mobilization he witnessed in revolutionary France, contrasted against a more capitalist and individualistic English monarchy. In these poems, deixis – perhaps unintentionally – functions to quite literally point to the perceived boundaries of English community, indicating who we do and do not consider as part of our cultural circle. Though initially inspired by Wordsworth’s earlier and more radical work, Percy Bysshe Shelley would grow to resent his aging conservativism. 20 years later, Shelley would collect nine poems to be featured in his 1820 collection of Prometheus Unbound, with Other Poems, responding to the mounting Spanish revolution. In Shelley’s poems, metaphor serves to broaden our ideas of what is possible in the universe. However, Shelley sabotages his goals in expanding the English mind by failing to consider how metaphor is actually processed, and what kinds of minds might be excluded from these culturally-dependent “in-jokes.” A neurodiverse perspective will help us to critically examine the unconscious assumptions that underlie social communication, especially when it comes to emotion.With revisions to the concept of emotion itself, this thesis thus brings together three distinct fields of inquiry – literary criticism, cognitive poetics, and neuroscience – to make larger claims about where meaning comes from in a text and how we might conceptualize the process of reading from multiple mental perspectives. All three fields serve to support, inform, and clarify one another to advance a theory of reading that relies foremost on judgment, value, and feeling.