ABSTRACT
Various claims about the political and historical engagements of English Romantic poetry pivot upon the writing of the final years of the 1790s, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth began their turn away from political radicalism. Neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth would have been cowed in his presence. As Nicholas Roe emphasizes, Coleridge's political career resembled Thelwall's. In 1795, both were independent lecturers, advocating reform and an end to the war with France. If Coleridge reconceives of retirement, he still keeps intact a fairly familiar sense of a radical public sphere. In contrast, given the charged circumstances of his public life, Thelwall had a much more vexed relation to the question of radical action. By exposing the self-destructive dimensions of radical activism at the same time as he decides to persevere, Thelwall suggests that he is implicated in a violent public sphere as long as he remains politically active.
