Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons^™

The Ethics Of Perception In Transatlantic Romantic Poetry, Charles W. Rowe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Ethics of Perception in Transatlantic Romantic Poetry is a report on the ethical significance of British and American Romantic poetry composed between 1785 and 1865. This study focuses on the poems of William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. Its central claim is that these poets composed a body of work that sought to show readers how their sustained attention to everyday perceptual experience could lead them towards a more empathic way of being.

The first chapter argues that the late-eighteenth century poet William Cowper is the initiator of the ethically-oriented poetry of perception that Wordsworth, …