Wordsworth, Fox, and a Poet’s Public Spirit

Abstract

Abstract Wordsworth’s major poetry—Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800, 1802), The Prelude [1805], and Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)—has a rich critical heritage of political readings. This essay concerns itself with a similar but different theme: Wordsworth’s attitude towards a politician, and politicians generally, during his writing prime. From 1801 to 1806 Wordsworth corresponded with, met, and wrote poetry about the Whig statesman Charles James Fox, and in the same period he developed a civic sense of his own vocation. I argue that this engagement with Fox is an underappreciated source of what T. S. Eliot calls Wordsworth’s ‘public spirit’, a spirit which grew in conflict with the tendency of politicians in Britain and France to judge ‘men in bodies, and in classes, and accordingly to contemplate them in that relation’. The essay begins with an analysis of Wordsworth’s 1801 letter to Fox, before moving to consider Fox’s lukewarm reply and its basis in unpublished correspondence. It then explores the confident Miltonic poet who emerges in Wordsworth’s ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’, before finally considering accounts of the two men meeting in 1806, and the elegy Wordsworth wrote on Fox’s death in the same year. Attention to Wordsworth’s relationship with Fox allows focus to move away from how and why the poet’s politics changed in these five years, and on to his consistently held, revolutionary, and influential notion that poetry could provide an alternative means of animating politics.