At the borders of humanity: Sympathy and animals in William Cowper's, William Wordsworth's and John Clare's poems

The purpose of this dissertation, “At the Borders of Humanity: Sympathy and Animals in William Cowper's, William Wordsworth's and John Clare's Poems,” is to investigate the ways in which animals are recognized in the emergent poetic discourses from the long eighteenth century in Britain. During this time, sympathy was thematized by David Hume and Adam Smith, among others, as one of the major vehicles to construct humans relative to animals. The sympathy brought back the animals from the cultural margins, by decentering the humans from their privileged place as the transcendental signifier to which all other differences are referred for meaning. This decentering of the self is not a recentering or replacing of the human subject with “Nature.” Against the anthropocentric attempt to maintain the illusion of human identity, centrality, and superiority, decentering of the anthropocentric human subject through sympathy opens up a valuable conceptual space. Instead of the transcendent, stable, Cartesian subject, there is a relational self formed in the sympathetic discourses. William Cowper, William Wordsworth, and John Clare undertake a romantic quest to transcend the solipsistic bounds of self toward the community of sensibility with others. The poetic discourses of William Cowper, William Wordsworth and John Clare show that the poets' attempt to overcome the anthropocentric hubris becomes possible through sympathy. Indicated in their poetic discourses is the effectiveness of the effort to go beyond the boundary of our species. Instead of assuming the voices of animals or the collective voice of the natural world, Cowper, Wordsworth and Clare, though different in degrees, initiate a poethical approach to ecological awareness by incorporating their understanding of the animal's behavior and emotions.