Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art by Willard Spiegelman (review)

Once, sloth was a sin: how did indolence—for aesthetes and artists, at least—become a duty and an ideal—the "majestic indolence" of Wordsworth's recommendation in The Prelude? Spiegelman locates the turn in the Kantian emphasis on the freedom of the imagination and describes its appearance in Romanticism through the work of Wordsworth (play), Coleridge (the anxiety of torpor), Keats (receptivity), and Shelley (utopian pastoral), with an epilogue on Whitman, Frost, Bishop, and Merrill. It is interesting to see the ''contamination" of Spiegelman's criticism by the hostile attacks recently made against poetry (as oppressive, hermetic, antipopulist, mystificatory). I doubt that it is either necessary or useful to "answer" such attacks in asides; the asides will not convince the attackers, and they distract from Spiegelman's central interest in the impulses of both guilt and delight attached to "wise passiveness." The book gives many famous poems a new life by bringing them within the sphere of "indolence": but are we enlightened by being told—by Spiegelman in New Historicist mode—that Wordsworth's "golden daffodils" are "the equivalent of money in the bank," as Wordsworth "reaps the rewards of his capital investment … later, when the accumulated interest of his capital returns to him in a flash?"