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This thesis offers the first critical examination of the sound of laughter in Romantic poetry. Part one locates laughter in the history of ideas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and explores the interplay between laughter and key intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, and social issues in the Romantic period. I chart a development in thinking about laughter from its primary association with ridicule and the passions up to the early decades of the eighteenth century, to its emerging symbiosis with politeness and aesthetic judgement, before a reassertion of laughter's signification of passion and naturalness by the end of the eighteenth century. Laughter provides an innovative means of mapping cultural markers, and I argue that it highlights shifts in standards and questions of taste. Informed by this analysis, part two offers a series of historically aware close readings of Romantic poetry that identify both an indebtedness to, and refutation of, earlier and contemporaneous ideas about laughter. Rather than having humour or comedy as its central concerns, this thesis identifies the pervasive and capricious influence of the sound of the laugh in the writing of Robert Burns, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. I detect the heterogeneous representations of laughter in their work that runs across a diverse range of genres, poetic forms, themes, and contexts. As such, I argue against the serious versus the humorous binary which prevails in literary criticism of Romanticism, and suggest that laughter articulates the interplay between the elegiac and the comic, the sublime and the ridiculous, the solitary and the communal. Moreover, I detect a double-naturedness to the sound of laughter in Romantic poetry that registers the subject's capacity to signify both consensus and dispute. This inherent polarity creates a tension in the poems as laughter ironically challenges what it also affirms. Never singularly fixed, the sound of laughter reveals the protean nature of Romantic verse.

Souvent perçu comme le poète de la « nature » par excellence, William Wordsworth serait bien plutôt celui qui a donné définitivement congé à une riche tradition descriptive, puisque les évocations du paysage sont chez lui bien plus rares que chez tous ses prédécesseurs du XVIIIe siècle. Le présent travail se propose de prêter attention à cette raréfaction, qu’on peut également voir, sur le plan de l’histoire esthétique, comme le moment d’émergence d ’une modernité abstraite. La poésie wordsworthienne, qui a pour ambition de refonder le langage et les formes poétiques par un retour à l’authenticité de la nature, apparaît indissociablement comme une rupture avec un mode essentiel de la première modernité anglaise, celui des Géorgiques. Elle prend ainsi acte de la crise de la représentation qui affecte l’optimisme du XVIIIe siècle et qui empêche désormais de voir dans le paysage la manifestation d’ un ordre providentiel. Le « romantisme » anglais est ce qui surgit au défaut de la cosmologie, pour témoigner d’une fondamentale absence au monde. Cette évolution est ici étudiée en deux temps. On s’attachera d’abord à retracer, dans son détail, la trajectoire de la poésie de jeunesse de Wordsworth et de Coleridge, pour montrer que le moment refondateur de Lyrical Ballads intervient au terme d’un épuisement des formes et de la topique qui garantissaient traditionnellement l’intelligibilité du cosmos. Et l’on abordera ensuite trois moments distincts de la maturité poétique de Wordsworth [1798, 1802, 1807], qui suggèrent que le retour de l’idéologie dans son œuvre répond intimement à l’ébranlement radical dans lequel elle trouve son inspiration. / It is remarkable that Wordsworth should still be seen as the quintessential nature poet, when his poetry actually marks the demise of a well-established descriptive tradition in 18th-century English literature: depictions of landscape are much shorter and much less frequent in Wordsworth than in any of his predecessors. The present dissertation explores this paradox, a paradox which in historical and aesthetic terms could be read as heralding a « modern » shift towards abstraction. Wordsworth’s attempt to regenerate the forms and language of poetry through a recovery of « natural » authenticity amounts to a break with the Georgic mode crucial to English early modernity. It stems from the crisis in representation which attended the darkening of 18th-century optimism and meant that landscape could no longer be perceived as evidence of an immanent world-order. Romanticism in Wordsworth registers the default of cosmological discourse. I have tried to analyse this break in a twofold manner. The first part of this dissertation attempts to retrace, through close readings of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s early poetry, the gradual exhaustion of shared or conventional forms and meanings which led to the foundational moment of Lyrical Ballads. The second part, on the other hand, is concerned with Wordsworth’s subsequent evolution and attempts to chart it from three distinct moments [1798, 1802, 1807], suggesting that the poet’s increasing reliance on a conservative ideology is intimately bound up with the earlier, more radical aspects of his work.