Romantics

Having just read a Big Book by Harold Bloom, I am thinking about Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats and Byron, and maybe even about Goethe. Bloom argues (and English professors would know more than me) that poetry changed dramatically with Wordsworth, between roughly 1796 and 1806. The topics of poetry shifted from external affairs to internal feelings. How did this shift affect perceptions of internal states? I went to Project Gutenberg , and searched these poets for the words `emotion' and 'passion'. Wordsworth and Keats used passion, but rarely (if ever) emotion. Byron, in Childe Harold, uses passion but not emotion; in Don Juan he uses emotion occasionally and passion often. In `To Caroline' of 1805, he has:

Mistake not, sweet sceptic, the cause of emotion,

No doubt can the mind of your lover invade;

He worships each look with such faithful devotion,

A smile can enchant, or a tear can dissuade.


Shelley uses emotion quite a lot; his `Revolt of Islam' of 1817 uses the word at least four times. If you search through his Collected Poems at Project Gutenberg, you'll see it come up.

I looked up Goethe; Google told me the German for `emotion' is `Emotion' and the German for `passion' is `Leidenschaft'. Goethe uses `Leidenschaft' quite a lot, but never `Emotion', which makes me wonder if we miss something in Goethe when `Leidenschaft' is translated as `emotion'. Longfellow uses both `emotion' and `passion' quite a bit; does that make him a Christian or not a Christian? And finally, in the Complete Works of Alexander Pope I found emotion once, and passions a whole bunch.

So I wonder about the role of Romanticism and poets in the transition from `passion' to `emotion'. Why did poets like Shelley and Byron start using the word `emotion'? Did it capture something that the old language couldn't say? Were they rebelling against something? How influential were these poets? Did their use of language spill over into the rest of the English-speaking culture?