ABSTRACT
‘Infinite passion and the pain / Of finite hearts that yearn’: Robert Browning’s conclusion to ‘Two in the Campagna’ serves as a deft summary of and response to Percy Shelley’s vision of ‘Infinite passion’ in his Epipsychidion. Passion’s frustration opens up new emotional and cognitive channels. The poet’s own yearning upward, and the ‘passion’ suspended in the surrounding Campagna, find themselves taking on a generalised status. Emily Bronte uses echoes of Romantic poetry as a point of departure for her visionary explorations and, in so doing, experiments with dramatised voices. Wordsworth, it might be argued, discovers the existence of postlapsarian passions–the elegiac feelings produced by the awareness that ‘there hath passed away a glory from the earth’–in the process of describing feelings of loss. Algernon Charles Swinburne may praise Coleridge in terms derived from the Romantic poet’s own glorification of the ‘imaginative’; but his approving glance towards the ‘passionate’ suggests the Victorian poet-critic’s own agenda.
