This essay examines the cognitive underpinnings of affect circulation in the poetry of Coleridge and Keats, poets who sought to shape the reading experiences of their contemporary and future audiences. Both poets utilized the automaticity inherent in reading popular genres like the Gothic and Romance, as they immerse their readers in a flood of sensation. Yet, interruptions to the narrative flow complicate moments of composition and reading, ultimately highlighting a complex cognitive and affective work happening through passive reading. While such sensational forms of reading were often disparaged during the Romantic period, modern cognitive psychology shows these “passive” or “immersive” forms are actually complex in their affective work. By structurally regulating the sensory experience, controlling the affective overflow, and calling attention to the cognitive and cultural processes at work underneath the fiction, these authors ensure we will not be caught in a dream world for long without awaking more enlightened.

William Blake’s perpetually protean Marriage of Heaven and Hell has proven somewhat elusive for those seeking to articulate “what” the work means. Given its unusual form/s (organized along both verbal and visual axes), its visionary commitments (evoked through its apocalyptic imagery), and its intertextual engagements (from Aristotle and Jesus through Milton to Swedenborg [Blake’s primary focus]), one cannot arrive at a singular textual meaning. However, when one asks a different question—“How does the text make its meaning?”—the dynamic aims of the work do emerge. The fusion of these and other elements creates an art object with an overt gaze woven through affective textualities, and this dynamic and interactive presence strives to transform the very subjectivities of those readers who enter its entangled zones of semiotic operations. Thus, affect forms the boundary conception of such a textual condition, and its apprehension transforms them into subjective effects.