The poetics of charity and relief: The problem of poverty and aid to the poor in the development of the early romantic lyric

This dissertation argues that the development of the early romantic lyric is shaped by an engagement with the statutory changes in the English welfare system. Relating a diverse body of scholarship on social, political, and economic history to the formative poetry of Blake and Wordsworth, my central claim is that the poets' opposition to Malthus's and Bentham's arguments for the reform of the Poor Laws is not merely coincident with the emergence of the lyric as the dominant romantic genre, but rather that the lyric mediation of poverty and aid to the poor as an emotional experience functions as an epistemological critique of the economic sanction for charity and relief in the laws of the market.;Chapter one traces the increasing predominance of the lyric in the eighteenth-century to the formation of the disciplinary division between the arts and sciences so as to establish the discursive grounds for the romantic opposition to economic thought. Chapter two situates the poetic development of Blake in relation to this opposition to show how he formulates a radical critique of institutional charity as self-interested pity through the shift from the satiric representation of the poor law functionary in An Island in the Moon to the symbolic expression of philanthropy in Songs of Innocence and of Experience . Chapter three investigates a similar development in the poetry of Wordsworth to demonstrate how he posits an affective model of relief against the parish system of assistance through the shift from the loco-descriptive treatment of the itinerant beggar figure in An Evening Walk and Salisbury Plain to the lyric characterization of the rural poor in Lyrical Ballads. The conclusion ends by reflecting on the manner in which placing the development of the romantic lyric in relation to the socioeconomic context of the Poor Laws serves as a novel reframing of historical scholarship on romanticism, so that rather than viewing the aesthetic representation of emotional experience as a disillusioned rejection of the political efficacy of poetry or as an ideological displacement of political concerns, early romantic lyricism may be seen as a politically engaged poetics of charity and relief.