[0]riginal expression was consecrated by the Romantic cult of the individual genius.
—Paul K. Saint-Amour, The Copywrights
For years now, I have been planning to write a book titled Romantic Betrayal. This will not be an autobiography, but an exposé in the true sense: an attempt to reveal the ways in which…. we still contend with the legacy of the Romantics’ efforts to codify the past…. This self-centered literary history leads not only to anachronistic errors… but also to blindness.
—David A. Boruchoff, “The Poetry of History”
Throughout the course of this study, I have argued that writers of the British Romantic period were invested deeply in models of appropriation, assimilation, and narrative or lyric mastery over the text of another, despite their conventional critical association with the values of autogenous originality and with what Paul K. Saint-Amour calls, in a typical formulation, “the Romantic cult of the individual genius” (6). My approach has been to read the history of plagiarism in the late eighteenth and, especially, early nineteenth centuries for what it tells us about how these authors engaged with the processes of literary borrowing and how they described the particular elements that constituted illegitimate appropriation and, by extension, aesthetic failure. As we have seen, those elements are historically distinct. Plagiarism in the Romantic period focused on questions of style, tone, voice, and improvement and involved a series of complex negotiations that centered on the processes of interpretive judgment. The contemporary controversies surrounding the subject often were motivated by competitive claims among writers who were vying to articulate the standards of the “new” poetics of the early nineteenth century, standards that did not define “originality” as an exclusive function of the solitary genius working in isolation from other writers or from print culture.
The rhetoric of plagiarism offers what is essentially a negative articulation of the aesthetic values central to Romanticism—an account of where and why particular texts fail to meet the minimum standards necessary to be considered “literary” or the more rigorous standards sufficient to merit the highest critical judgment of “originality.” From this cultural model for coming to judgment, we can also infer, albeit somewhat speculatively, a positive account of the particular textual strategies that were central to the creation of a successful literary production. Perhaps above all, what the historical record suggests is that these writers valued poems and novels that “improved” upon their textual and historical resources by borrowing correctly, at a moment in time when the possible models for legitimate appropriation were quite distinct from what either came before or after. For, as we have seen, in the earlier part of the eighteenth century and in the latter part of the nineteenth century, plagiarism focused intently on what Richard Terry has called “phraseological” parallels, while the Romantic writers were far more invested in exploring the ownership of style, something that their immediate predecessors also recognized as an element of literary property. For writers and critics in the early part of the eighteenth century, however, the appropriation of style was not alone sufficient to merit charges of plagiarism. For writers and critics after the second half of the nineteenth century, when the precedents for current international copyright law were being set, the property an author had in his or her text increasingly excluded style as a protected element at all. For the Romantics, however, style was central. Where an author controlled and developed a unique textual subjectivity that dominated his or her borrowed materials, extensive unacknowledged appropriations, even verbatim, were permitted. It was, as Coleridge famously observed, an “age of personality,” perhaps especially when it came to questions of plagiarism.
The difficulty, of course, is in defining the elements of style. It is challenging even to offer a contemporary account of what precisely constitutes authorial voice, and the historical and cultural difference of two hundred years, more or less, makes articulating how Romantic-era writers understood the production of lyric or narrative subjectivity a complex undertaking and one that merits an extended study of its own. However, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several terms and textual elements were consistently used to describe style and its relationship to literary property. I have suggested that writers in the Romantic period were apparently at liberty to borrow, extensively and verbatim, from the works of other authors so long as they dominated their appropriated materials. This domination—the central element in a judgment of improvement—was understood as a matter of controlling what they called “spirit,” a term that Coleridge specifically identified with “genius” in the Biographia Literaria and that is associated throughout the period with numerous sublinguistic elements of a literary work, including “style,” “voice,” “tone,” and what Mary Shelley called the “individual feeling of the author” (NMS 2:130). The notion, likely indebted to the trope of the genii loci, was that the “genius” or “spirit” of a work needed to be both appropriate to the textual place that it inhabited and interfused throughout the materials, thus functioning as its primary unifying structure. Texts that achieved both appropriateness and unity of “spirit” met the highest standard of aesthetic judgment in the period (i.e., they were “original” poems), regardless of the extent of an author’s textual obligations. This “spirit,” insofar as it was identified with authorial personality (his or her unique poetic “voice,” his or her textual “persona”), could be rhetorically coterminous with the historical author (Wordsworth and his perceived matter-of-factness) or fictional (the poet-narrator of Don Juan as a Byronic figure but not as Byron), but appropriateness seems to have depended largely on meeting a certain threshold of realism that was primarily psychological. Meeting this threshold often represented a particular obstacle to writers of satire, who were also disadvantaged by the extent to which satirical genres depended on alienation through participation—on speaking in a voice or style recognizable as simultaneously belonging and not belonging to the author being imitated, thus forestalling the possibility of complete textual mastery.
While acknowledging that voice, style, and tone are notoriously difficult terms to define, it also seems clear that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, style (creating tone, conveyed through voice) clearly included the use of distinctive metrical patterns or innovations, as well as characteristic diction, attitude toward a subject (e.g., what Keats identified as Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime,” Byron’s caricature of sincerity and pose of disaffected cosmopolitanism), and, presumably, the particular deployment of identifiable syntactical structures and verse forms (e.g., Clare’s imitation of Byron’s use of the Spenserian stanza, Wordsworth’s prosaic use of blank verse). The successful assimilation of borrowed materials meant achieving a form of poetic individualism based on the projection of a unified authorial subjectivity and was predicated upon an author’s ability to re-voice persuasively any passages—verbatim or otherwise—with their historical “origins” in another textual source. However, the absence of such seamless integration represented, to borrow a phrase from Henry Taylor, a “negation of improvement,” and the resulting text was described as alternatively “patchwork,” “monstrous,” or merely an instance of “servile” imitation. As I have argued throughout the course of this study, these terms were synonymous with a judgment of literary failure. Scientific, documentary, and historical texts that performed a rhetorical erasure of voice, like oral or traditional texts that could not be attributed to the personality or identity of any individual author, often were not considered “literary” genres at all and were, therefore, particularly easy to appropriate successfully. Thus, in the context of Romantic-period literary and print culture, the rhetoric of plagiarism represented a means of articulating and encapsulating a set of aesthetic judgments that praised particular works as “original” but that did not depend upon an absence of borrowing or on the necessity of ex nihilo invention. Quite the contrary, it assumed a collaborative and even competitive relationship to other texts and valued strategies of domination, control, and assimilation.
In his essay “Romantic Lyric Voice: What Shall We Call the ‘I’?,” David Perkins offers a particularly nuanced discussion of how the production of subjectivity operates not only in the Romantic-period lyric but also in what he calls the Romantic “theory” of reading lyric poetry, as distinguished from Symbolist, Modernist, Structuralist, and Deconstructive constructions of authorial subjectivity.1 Reading William Wordsworth’s own interpretive account of his “failed” sonnet “With Ships the sea was sprinkled far and wide” (1807), along with critical commentaries on the River Duddon sonnet cycle published in The British Critic in 1822, Perkins teases out some of the central Romantic-period attitudes toward voice and persona. The “poetic self,” he demonstrates, was understood as a “dramatic personage” (231) and functioned to create an impression of authorial subjectivity that invited readers to “reconstruct the sensory, psychological, emotional quality of the moment…. [and to] intuit meaning by sympathy, by participating imaginatively in an experience, an experience the textual signs cannot completely render” (232). What is critical in this reading is the emphasis on the extent to which sophisticated Romantic-period readers understood voice as an effect of language and as a function of stylistic and formal devices. As Perkins observes, “The concept of artistic illusion is central to the Romantic reading of lyric” (231, my emphasis).
The implications of this argument are important: the Romantic lyric is not, then, the spontaneous emotional self-expression of a unified consciousness. It is a series of rhetorical effects and poetic invitations and evasions intended to invite (and perhaps even to compel) the reader to call an imagined consciousness into being. Early nineteenth-century readers presumably praised as “original” those poems that most effectively engaged their imaginative sympathies—those poems that imposed their psychological effects most strongly and transformed the reader’s consciousness into the site of poetic ventriloquism. Perkins suggests that it is because of the emphasis in the Romantic lyric on “psychological verisimilitude” that Wordsworth saw textual allusions and borrowings as “simply … irrelevant” (236) and that Coleridge saw them as illustrations of the individuality of the speaking persona. This distinction rather neatly summarizes the range of attitudes that Romantic-period writers had toward the appropriation of literary materials. However, Perkins is finally mistaken to suggest that Romantic readers “assume that intertextuality dissolves the individuality of the ‘I’” (236). As I have argued throughout this study, there was a constitutive relationship between deficiencies in authorial subjectivity and charges of plagiarism. However, plagiarism was an evaluative judgment of the extent to which an author had unified his or her lyric “spirit” and had mastered his or her materials. It was the fragmentation of the “I” that created plagiarism and not the other way around. In fact, it was precisely the condition that we typically designate “intertextuality”—a determined co-presence of textual traces and voiced authorial effects—that constituted aesthetic plagiarism in the Romantic period. The risk in the Romantic lyric was not in borrowing but in borrowing badly, in a fashion where the speaking subject and the imaginative invitation to the reader that the necessarily incomplete “I” represented were not sufficient to create the impression of controlling and unifying the textual and rhetorical origins of a poem.
The picture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century verse that emerges is one that emphasizes the importance of a participatory readership and the aesthetic value of collaboration, assimilation, projection, and absorption. However, despite what I think is a reasonably articulate historical record on this subject, current analyses of intellectual property and plagiarism, in contexts ranging from postmodern literary theory to considerations of classroom practice, locate in the Romantic period the origins of a conservative cultural inheritance that defines authorship as solitary self-generation and solipsistic expressivism. There is, again in the words of Saint-Amour, a “near-invulnerable glamour of the self-generated, self-legislating Romantic artifact… [d]isserved not only from the more collective sources and modes of its own production but from the hypothetical nature of its originality” (8). Certainly, the self-representations of particular early nineteenth-century writers contributed to the articulation of the natural genius as an isolated and visionary figure. Far more frequently, however, their contests with each other and their reflections on those controversies reflect an active engagement in both collaborative and competitive textual interpenetration. Quite simply, the critical legacy of “Romantic” authorship does not square with what writers living in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did or with how they characterized their relationship to other writers and other texts.
In historicist criticism, this is familiar territory. In Jerome McGann’s influential formulation, for example, part of the problem with “rethinking romanticism” in the 1990s was a critical reluctance to draw the “distinction between ‘the romantic period’ (that is, a particular historical epoch) and ‘romanticism’ (that is, a set of cultural/ideological formations that came to prominence during the romantic period).”2 However, the historical difficulties are, in fact, even more complex than this: what is called Romanticism increasingly reflects a set of cultural/ideological formations that came to prominence after the Romantic period but have been ascribed to coming to prominence during it. Put another way, I have come to believe that the term Romanticism largely denotes in its conventional modern usage (and especially in discussions of contemporary American poetry and in current pedagogical theory) an aesthetic fantasy, the efficacy of which is affirmed by a determinedly nostalgic posture that posits its origins in the (distant, inescapable) history of the early nineteenth century—a history that often appears astonishingly similar to our own cultural horizons.3 David Boruchoff’s sense of Romanticism as a “betrayal” is emblematic of our present historical moment and of our relationship to the inheritance Romanticism represents, but this relationship is not a dialectical one. The dismay and even antagonism that Romanticism seems able to generate in our collective moment is less about history than it is about ourselves and our desire to construct a version of the past that never was what we want it to be but which we are invested in the impossible effort of renouncing all the same. By granting such cultural power to the distant, historical, and self-generated bogeyman that the “Romantic cult of the individual genius” represents, we fail to recognize that we are fighting our own demons, resisting and repressing our own commitments to ideas of American individualism, the autonomy of the self, genius, capitalism, the impossible ideals of autogenous originality, and the ownership of intellectual property. In the classroom, we hold our undergraduate students to higher standards of ex nihilo originality than those to which the Romantics ever held each other and attribute our own investments to the inescapable legacy of Romantic authorship. As I said at the outset of this book, our insistence on Romanticism as a model of autogenous originality tells us more about ourselves than it tells us about the specific aesthetic contests and objectives of writers working during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain—writers who were often engaged in an aesthetic project that was far less solipsistic and far more interesting than we sometimes imagine.