Alarmism, Public-Sphere Performatives, and the Lyric Turn: Or, What Is "Fears in Solitude" Afraid of?

[P]reparations . . . are now carried on . . . in the ports of France, Flanders, and Holland, with the avowed design of attempting the invasion of his majesty's dominions . . . encouraged by the correspondence and communication of traitorous and disaffected persons and societies of these kingdoms.

. . . there is very little chance of serious Invasion of this Country.

Both of the statements above are dated 20 April 1798, the date that Samuel Taylor Coleridge ordinarily assigned to "Fears in Solitude: Written in April 1798, During the Alarm of an Invasion." ¹ The poem is usually read as its subtitle appears to direct, as a "topical" poem responding to a moment of genuine national peril. ² Taken as such, it is a gem in a mediocre kind—distinguished especially by its morally imaginative reluctance to chauvinize and by the lyric departures from its central theme. In the larger scheme, such a reading still leaves it, in many judgments, "a poem of moderate merit." ³ The decisive formal complaint corresponding to the invasion reading is that a promising lyric has been spoiled by an eruption of political speechifying in its middle. ⁴

A far-reaching reevaluation may be suggested by reading Coleridge's subtitle with emphasis on "the Alarm of an Invasion." To what extent Coleridge in 1798 shared in the widespread fear of French invaders might be debated. But the central concern of "Fears in Solitude" is, I would argue, alarmism—an emergent abuse of the public sphere that has proven far less ephemeral than the threat of Napoleon's flat-bottomed boats. The rise of alarmism in the 1790s (by which I mean the rise not only in its incidence and consequence but also in the popular awareness and suspicion of it) symptomizes a certain stage of development of the public sphere and constitutes a more significant condition of literary modernity than is generally recognized. Among other things, it initiates the widespread modern interest in the performative powers of speech and—especially in mass formations such as "confidence," "despondency," and "alarm"—of mere opinion. Modern scholarly discussion has generally individualized and idealized the speech-act, but the instances that first excited general attention were public-sphere performatives, or utterances that seemed capable of doing things in and through the public sphere. The anxiety of such powers also spawned countervailing strategies that changed the grounds of literary representation. "Fears in Solitude" responds, in short, to the emergence of a condition whose continuing importance needs no emphasizing now, in the wake of September 11. But in recalling the predominant reference of Coleridge's "Fears" to the public sphere, my hope is to emphasize not only its present relevance but also its achievement as poetry. My first two sections discuss the cultural context, the history and theory of alarmism; the next two consider the poem within this context.

1. Public-Sphere Performatives and "Self-Realizing Alarms"

Alarmism was not new in Coleridge's day, but it was news, made notorious by flagrant political uses on the one hand and political denunciations on the other. The term alarmism does not appear until the mid-nineteenth century, but alarmist emerges, chiefly as a term of abuse, in the 1790s. ⁵ The first record is, appropriately, a letter of 1793 between the notorious partners in alarmism, Edmund Burke and William Windham. Justifying measures already taken against "the English branch of the Jacobin family," Burke insists: "We must continue to be vigorous alarmists." ⁶ His italics suggest that he is co-opting a term already in use against him. ⁷ And that oppositional usage, still influential today, is well documented in political definitions of the mid-1790s:

Alarm,—the tocsin of delusion; plunging Englishmen into all the calamities of war, under the falsest pretence of their liberties being endangered, to cover the real designs of hatred, jealousy, despotism, and revenge...