“The soul that dreams it shares the power it feels so well”: The Politics of Sympathy in the Abolitionist Verse of Williams and Yearsley
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Identifying abolitionist poetry as an important site for investigating rhetorical transformations and innovations in late eighteenth century women’s poetry, this essay shows how poetic language generates sympathy. In reading women’s poetry in general, and abolitionist poetry in particular, we too often presume that they worked under the assumption that all readers would identify directly with representations of suffering. While William Cowper, writing before Helen Maria Williams and Ann Yearsley, opens up the problematic that all forms of sympathy might be mere narcissistic self-indulgence, Yearsley and Williams provide a model for and effectively limit such reflexive sympathy. For them, the process of sympathizing with an Other begins with the act of taking him or her into one’s own imaginative “domos.” But by actively embracing this narcissistic process, Williams and Yearsley are able to regulate such domestications of the slave’s pain. Williams controls whose identities merge, ensuring that the reader identifies with reformer rather than slaver. In contrast, Yearsley encourages wider-ranging imaginative acts of identification – one can identify with the “crafty merchant” of her “Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade” – but ensures through various poetic devices that such an act will reveal the disjunction between family and capital. By drawing out various theories of the working of sentiment, this essay makes visible sentimental poetry’s theoretical power: slavery poems by Williams and Yearsley operate as sophisticated theories of sympathetic identification.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".